A Connoisseur's Case Read Free

pity’s sake. That wood’s slimy and treacherous.’
    â€˜Nonsense!’ Judith said. She increased the boldness of her advance.
    â€˜Very well. But if you must fall in, be good enough to do it on the canal side. If you tumble into the lock, it’s not very clear to me how I’m to haul you out. And plunging in to the rescue wouldn’t help much, either. Two bloated bodies, floating face up, is what the next wayfarer might find to entertain him.’
    â€˜Who’d be married to a policeman?’ Judith did now make a rather careful retreat. ‘Your imagination has been shockingly conditioned by your long frequentation of the morgue. I think I’m rather hungry. Let’s push on.’
    They went forward as rapidly as the state of the towpath allowed. It was a still day in early summer, and as the little valley drew in around them they seemed to be cut off from the least murmur of sound. Only once or twice there was a plop! that sent Judith scanning the surface of the canal for the wake of a water rat. Scroop House was now well behind them, and Appleby wondered whether his wife might, by good fortune, forget about it. He had some hopes of the tunnel.
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    And the tunnel – or at least the entrance to it – certainly held a considerable impressiveness. The canal had simply to disappear into a low hill, much as a railway line might do. But the canal had been constructed in the eighteenth century, before such operations took on a merely functional air. The mouth of the tunnel, therefore, was an orifice handsomely framed in a wall of heavily rusticated stone, and even more handsomely embellished with caryatids, herms, cornucopias and a balustrade, while the classical expertness of those responsible for its construction was further attested by a Latin inscription of considerable length and fortunate illegibility.
    â€˜It’s much more ornate than Scroop House,’ Judith said.
    â€˜Much.’ Appleby was disappointed by this train of thought.
    â€˜I expect the owner will tell us about it all.’
    â€˜The owner? Tell us about it?’
    â€˜The man living at Scroop House will tell us about the canal.’
    â€˜He probably knows nothing about it – or about any other local thing. He’ll be a City gent, swathed in Old School ties and bogus rurality. And if you insist on making his acquaintance, he’ll turn up on you inopportunely in London and ruin one of your gayest and cleverest artistic parties.’
    Luckily, perhaps, Judith hadn’t listened to this thrust. She was scrambling nearer to the mouth of the tunnel.
    â€˜But it hasn’t got a towpath!’ she cried. ‘And they didn’t have engines, did they? However did they get the barges through?’
    â€˜Leggers.’
    â€˜Leggers?’
    â€˜Just that. Men who lay on their back on the decks and did the job with their feet. A kind of walking motion on the roof of the tunnel. They must have been pretty flat out by the time they’d done three miles. That’s why there’s a pub at the end of the tunnel. No doubt there’s one at the other end too. By the way, I suppose there’s still a pub? It didn’t shut up shop when the last leggers departed? The idea doesn’t bear thinking of. I need lager badly.’
    But Judith wasn’t alarmed by the possibility of drought. She was now peering into the darkness of the tunnel.
    â€˜I wonder if one can go through?’ she said. ‘You see, they haven’t fenced it off in any way. That means it must be safe, don’t you think?’
    Privately, Appleby thought that it meant just that. But he wasn’t sure that he ought to encourage Judith in thoughts of navigation. Not that there wasn’t a certain enticingness in the idea, since an adventure of this character would surely sink Scroop House for good.
    â€˜I don’t see any craft,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you could wade. I doubt