The Secret Vanguard Read Free Page A

its narrow compass with all the intelligent deliberation of the authentic minor artist. For there was plenty of major art about, and one had the sense that he was on terms with it. There was a refectory table with a local detective-sergeant making notes at one end – and at the other was a Purgatorio open at the thirtieth canto, with Vernon’s commentary beside it. A gramophone – one of those great horned things – was in a corner. He had been playing Opus 131 .’
    ‘Ah,’ said Hetherton.
    ‘You will feel nothing out of the way in that sort of life – but it’s an unusual setting for violence. There is something moving and mysterious – if you’ll believe me – about a half-smoked cigarette lying beside a murdered tart. When its place is taken by the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio –’
    ‘Quite so.’
    ‘I lingered in that room. It tempted to rather futile guessing. Reading Dante and writing a sort of higher dairymaid poetry…one seemed to see the man as one who knew the nature of strength – and who never risked the disillusion of finding himself without it. I prowled the room and tried to build him up further. It was possible to fancy a faintly silly streak – or more strictly perhaps the affectation of it. In an extreme I could imagine a dilettante giggle deliberately assumed – defensive mechanisms of that sort. Certainly not a rash or even a resolute man. One would guess that if he kept a diary–’
    ‘Did he keep a diary?’
    Appleby looked at Hetherton’s seriously inquiring face and smiled. ‘You should be an assistant-commissioner; it’s their business to stop gabble in just that way. And the question is pertinent. Unfortunately the answer is unknown. Ploss may have kept a diary and it may – as you shall hear – have been destroyed… But I see that you are all impatience to be conducted to the corpse.’
    Rather as if he took this proposal literally, Hetherton sat abruptly back. The little restaurant had emptied and in place of a babel of talk and the clatter of knives and forks there was only the rumble of traffic outside. ‘Really, my dear Appleby, you have drawn me into very unfamiliar territory – very unfamiliar territory indeed. But I shall certainly not boggle at the body. Indeed, I am inclined to charge you with deftly withholding it in order to whet my interest.’ Hetherton shook his head with a mock solemnity which was intended to make it quite clear that the accusation was facetious. And then his solemnity became genuine. ‘Dear me! I hardly know that I ought to speak of this unfortunate man in such a way.’
    ‘Then let me be thoroughly serious. I mentioned a tower. Actually it proved to be a gazebo at the top of the garden – a large affair, with a sort of sun-room from which there is a magnificent view. Ploss seems to have spent a good deal of his time there. Books were littered about – eighteenth-century memoirs mostly, with slips of paper stuck in them as if he was up to a job of work. I expected Ploss’ brains to be littered about, too. But the thing had been neatly done. I looked at him and it didn’t occur to me that he was dead.’
    Appleby paused. He had embarked on an account of the Ploss affair almost idly, but an odd urgency had been growing on him as he talked. He wanted to recreate at least some shadow of the thing; to share it in some degree with this vague, intelligent scholar who would presently disappear within the recesses of Barry’s portico. It was not often that a case so got on his mind as to need purging in this way.
    ‘I took him for a relation, a lawyer – lord knows what. For he had been shot as he sat. He had been shot directly in the middle of the forehead and a lock of his hair – long, untidy hair – had fallen by some strange chance directly over the wound. That made it uncanny enough. But there was more. I have seen plenty of bodies to which death has come instantaneously, but never one in which there has been visible neither