Free Appleby And Honeybath by Michael Innes

sober faith in his craft through several decades of painting Terence Grintons and Dolly Grintons and all their company. So it was tiresome that when just about to start on a serious job there should bob up this distracting issue of a mobile corpse.
    He had left Denver sitting in the library, absorbed in pen-and-ink labours like some conscientious fellow in what they called middle management. Honeybath felt that the man ought to be on the telephone arranging a sort of cordon of roadblocks round Grinton, or out and about in the shrubberies hunting for clues with a magnifying glass. But perhaps his subordinates were now doing that sort of thing. Perhaps Denver was like a spider, alert at the centre of a finely fabricated web of intelligence. He didn’t quite give that impression. But no doubt he was competent enough.
    The broad corridor from the library led to the main hall of the house. This had at some time or other been carved out of several rooms, so that both in its shape and in its proportions it was a little odd. But it was spacious and also lofty, since a couple of upstairs bedrooms had disappeared into it as well. It testified to the consequence of the Grintons; its walls were adorned with trophies of the chase; it had been furnished in a half-hearted way as a place to sit about in.
    Nobody was sitting in it now. But at one end, and beside the door leading to a vestibule, there stood a uniformed policeman. Although he rendered no impression of being aggressively immobile, and although the epithet ‘rigid’ could scarcely be applied to him, he was yet so motionless, so little suggestive of having lately done anything or of being about to do something, that he somehow seemed less a policeman than what is called a police presence. Within a fairly short span of time the entire Grinton family and their guests were almost sure to pass through this hall. Honeybath therefore concluded that the role of this constable (who was ‘stolid’ as all such persons are in fiction) was simply to impress the household at large with the reserve, the lurking, powers of the law.
    The Applebys now appeared – Judith presumably having lately returned in the dusk from a long tramp on the downs. For a moment they didn’t notice Honeybath. Appleby strolled up to the constable just as if he were quite real but also entirely harmless. The constable appreciated this, producing brisk and amiable replies to whatever Appleby was saying to him. Judith began to circle the hall, pausing here and there before masks and brushes as if some interesting individuality attached to one vulpine relic or another. Then she saw Honeybath and came over to him.
    ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘John has just spun me the most extraordinary yarn about high jinks at Grinton. I suppose it’s not one of his tiresome jokes?’
    ‘Definitely not. I’ve no doubt he has told you exactly what has happened – or the very little that we know to have happened, perhaps I’d better say.’
    ‘You didn’t do it, Charles?’
    ‘Judith!’
    ‘I expect it’s what everybody’s going to be asked – if not just in so many words. John says one reading of the thing is murder of someone unknown by someone unknown. One must hope it turns out to be an inside job.’
    ‘I sometimes can’t decide whether you or John is the sillier.’ Honeybath had known Judith from childhood.
    ‘There would be more excitement in an inside job. Haven’t you even been suspected ?’
    ‘Well, I’ve just come from an interview with the top policeman on the scene. Whether he suspects me or not, I haven’t the faintest idea. But it’s his business to suspect everybody, no doubt. Although of precisely what isn’t yet at all clear.’
    ‘John says he’s next after you for interview. Here he is.’
    Appleby, having finished his conversation with the constable, had now joined them.
    ‘Yes, it’s me next,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And do you know? I don’t believe this excellent Denver has a clue