Appleby at Allington Read Free Page B

The dying man (for Martin Allington was still thought to be that) was a Departmental detail. So, really and truly, would be the whole scandal – whatever it was – if it got into some magistrate’s court and so beyond smothering. Smothering was what Sir John Appleby had been got out of bed for. And what tidying up meant was simply hushing up. The Minister made no bones about that. This particular little bit of detail was bloody well going to be buried.
    Also present (Appleby recalled) had been a man named Colonel Carruthers. It probably wasn’t his real name. He ran the particular side of our national life that had got into trouble that evening. He was in a terrible rage – not so much, it seemed, with young Allington for making a muck of something as with the Minister for butting in. He was accountable only to the PM, he said, and his job would become impossible if any piddling little Cabinet Minister felt entitled to busy around. Appleby had kept out of this piece of protocol. He had quite enough on his hands with the modest demand that he and his officers should compound a felony.
    In the spy stories there are favoured persons who hold licences (granted presumably by the Sovereign in Council) to kill anybody who gets too awkwardly in the way. But in real life (if so fantastic a scene of things can be called that) neat dispositions of this sort do not obtain. There is just a vague recognition that incidents do occasionally happen which have to be kept quiet about, and that as a consequence somebody is usually left at risk – whether in point of his own conscience or of the law. This seemed to be Appleby’s position – or what the Minister proposed as Appleby’s position – now. It had to be coped with. For a start, Appleby tried to collect the facts.
    There was nothing to be got from the wounded man. It was true that, when doctored in some way by the police surgeon, he had swum briefly into consciousness. Unfortunately he had devoted this interval to no better purpose than a certain amount of feeble but venomous cursing. In this, the word which it seemed to give him most satisfaction to articulate was ‘bitch’ – from which it was at least possible to conjecture that there had been a lady in the case. Colonel Carruthers was not communicative. Allington, he remarked grimly, appeared to have been doing a little on the side, and to have bit off more than he could chew. No doubt there had been a lady, but it looked as if there had been rather a tough gentleman as well.
    This was a proposition in which it didn’t take Appleby and his assistants long to concur. Whether accompanied by the bitch or not, the tough gentleman had forced his way into Allington’s flat. There had been a rough house, including a certain amount of shooting. The intruding force had then departed – perhaps in triumph or perhaps in defeat. Allington had then tried to shoot himself, and had made rather a mess of the job. He had been in a panic, one had to suppose.
    At this point the police surgeon had announced, with no particular satisfaction, that the wounded man was going to survive, after all. It was a simplification, and a further simplification followed. Allington appeared to have fired three shots – the last of them being into his own person. Appleby started a hunt for the other two bullets. They were found almost at once, embedded rather high up in one of the walls of the room. It was extremely improbable that they could have done any mischief on their way there, so one didn’t have to worry about the possibility of another wounded man somewhere around London in consequence of this fracas. As a Secret Agent (if that was the formal way to describe him) Martin Allington appeared to be a singularly poor buy.
    And the affair had ended there – shockingly in hugger-mugger, as such things may do. Nobody was brought before a magistrate, and the security of the realm was no doubt vastly fortified as a result. Appleby was not at all