Appleby And Honeybath Read Free

at times. And since this one is a kind of sleeping library itself…’
    ‘It isn’t a joke.’ Honeybath, already agitated, was now annoyed as well. ‘A dead man, I tell you.’
    ‘Who is it?’
    ‘I’ve no idea. Just a middle-aged man. I never saw him before. We must let Grinton know at once. We’d better both go in.’ Honeybath had seized the chance of useful reinforcement. He perhaps dimly felt that to have a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police at one’s elbow is a welcome state of affairs when something slightly unnerving is on hand. ‘That’s the only proper thing.’
    ‘Well, yes.’ Appleby wasn’t in a hurry. ‘But if there’s really a total stranger suddenly dead on the premises this Terence Grinton will create uproar at once. Tally-ho and from a view to a death will be nothing to it. I think you and I had better have a quiet look first. If you can nerve yourself to it, Charles.’
    ‘Certainly I can.’ Honeybath wasn’t pleased at this needless challenge. It hinted a levity inappropriate to the occasion. But then John, he recalled, was one much traded in corpses. He had been dealing with them unceasingly throughout the earlier part of his professional career. In the light of this, a certain tinge of the hard-boiled in his attitude was fair enough. ‘Come along then,’ Honeybath said. ‘And don’t imagine I’ve gone clean off my head.’
    ‘Certainly not.’ Appleby was entirely placid. ‘That’s a most unlikely contingency. Even more unlikely than the appearance of a dead body in the library at Grinton.’
    They made their way in silence to the library. It was quite a step. If the squirearchal Grintons had from time to time turned up men of literary or artistic inclination, so had they also produced every now and then men with an alert eye to every opportunity of augmenting the family fortune. And these money-making Grintons had commonly commemorated their success by additions – always in a contemporary taste – to the fabric of their dwelling. Grinton sprawled and proliferated in half a dozen architectural styles in a manner almost totally obscuring its original character as no more than a substantial manor house. The final result, you could feel, was much what might be achieved by a child possessed of an inordinately wide variety of ‘building sets’ of the sophisticated modern sort. The reckless mélange might conceivably have produced a not unpleasing effect of fantasy. But this hadn’t happened. The place was a bit of a monstrosity. Respectable guidebooks to the county said as much in decently temperate language.
    The library occupied the greater part of the ground floor of a wing of moderate size and sober elegance designed by James Gibbs, an excellent architect although a suspected Jacobite, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Its south front remained much as Gibbs had left it, but that to the north was in part obscured by a confused huddle of domestic offices, now disused and virtually derelict, added by a Victorian Grinton with a mania for maintaining something like a small army of servants whose preservation from a scandalous idleness had required the exercise of much ingenuity on the part of the housekeeper, butler and similar important persons.
    The door of the library stood at the end of, and faced down, a broad corridor. This approach Appleby and Honeybath traversed in a slightly constrained silence. The constraint was undoubtedly Appleby’s creation. Much experience had fostered in him a sceptical stance before one or another extravagant persuasion on the part of agitated citizens. There was going to be a moment or two of mild embarrassment as the man in the library of Grinton Hall woke up.
    Honeybath halted before the door, and brought the key from his pocket. At this Appleby was prompted to speech.
    ‘Good Lord, Charles! Did you lock the place up behind you?’
    ‘Well, yes – I thought it just as well.’ Honeybath offered this confession