The Secret Vanguard Read Free Page B

awareness nor effect of death. It was so, however, with Ploss. He wasn’t shot from hiding; the character of the little sun-room makes that impossible. For some fraction of a second at least he must have seen a weapon pointed fatally at his head. But whatever muscular action it was that produced, death had cancelled out. His hands were folded lightly in his lap. His expression perhaps was slightly puzzled – but this, I think, may have been habitual. And then there was his eye…’
    Hetherton shifted on his chair. ‘Do these’ – he hesitated – ‘curious circumstances help you towards – towards a reconstruction of the crime?’
    ‘No.’ Appleby was emphatic. ‘Nothing of that sort. Friend or enemy, stranger or acquaintance: any of these may have stood up before Ploss and fired that revolver. The odd fact of his apparent unawareness tells me nothing in a detective way. It is simply a fortuitous thing that enforces the strangeness of the whole impression. For there he sat with the paraphernalia of his tranquil and secure existence about him, and below lay a countryside utterly at peace in the evening sun. Only up there and with the Chilterns behind us there was a first breath of cold night wind. It blew in like a commentary or a question, and it stirred his hair.’
    There was silence. Hetherton looked thoughtfully at Appleby. ‘And there was something,’ he said presently, ‘about his eye?’
    ‘At a second glance it was, of course, a dead man’s eye. And curiously unfocused. At one moment it would seem as if he were looking at somebody or something across the little glassed-in platform. And the next I would get a very different impression.’ Appleby hesitated. ‘I would see him as looking in that agonal second not at anything on the gazebo, and not at the prospect immediately before it. I would see him’ – Appleby stretched out his hand for the bill – ‘as looking not at that English vista at all; as looking straight over our heads here as we sit and seeing something very far away.’
    Appleby stood up. ‘To which there is only one thing to add. “And this was strange, because it was the middle of the night.” Ploss was shot round midnight on Friday, so these fanciful feelings about his glance are scarcely relevant.’
    Hetherton took a deep breath, rose, produced a florin. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I am quite gripped by the mystery. I wish I could help.’ And, as if at the extravagance of the thought, he smiled his scholar’s smile.

 
     
3:   It Had Something to Do with a Poem
    The little Greek restaurant in Coptic Street had opened a miniature fruit-counter in one of its windows; some way beyond a gentlewoman’s tea-shop had changed curtains and perhaps hands. Our private landmarks alter in a companionable way, thought Appleby, reminding us that we are slipping along ourselves. Only the city in its vastness is unchanging – its growth or decay no affair of ours, like the things that happen in geological time. Or is it not so? Across the street a young soldier in private’s uniform was carefully reading what appeared to be an Italian missal in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. Round the corner a group of American tourists stood before the Thackeray Hotel – and people glanced at them in passing, like ornithologists taking note of a diminishing species. Of course restaurants took to trying to market fruit and gentlewomen sold each other the goodwill of tea-shops. Πáντa ρει – things amble along. But might things not at any time begin to move very fast indeed, as fast as the traffic in Great Russell Street, which seemed likely to be fatal to old Hetherton one day…? Appleby took his friend’s arm and steered him across to the gateway of the Museum.
    The air was filled with mild sunshine; a nondescript sprinkling of people – learned, eccentric, dull – ate belated sandwiches on the steps; above them the pigeons manoeuvred from their bases in the colonnades. And