The Ampersand Papers by Michael Innes

Author:Michael Innes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Ampersand Papers
ISBN: 9780755120741
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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12

Lady Ampersand was the last person to run to earth. Appleby didn’t want to leave Treskinnick Castle without making the acquaintance of its chatelaine. Lady Ampersand, after all, wasn’t a Digitt. She might be quite agreeable.

Ludlow, appealed to as he passed through the hall, was confident that there would be no more difficulty in locating her ladyship. It was her jigsaw hour, he explained. This was her invariable pursuit between tea and dressing for dinner, and she invariably prosecuted it in the grey drawing-room. Ludlow made no scruple about immediately conducting Appleby to this apartment. He opened the two leaves of an imposing door, said ‘Sir John Appleby’ in a loud voice which would have been appropriate to carry over the din of a large party, and withdrew.

Lady Ampersand had for a moment the appearance of greeting her caller with a dramatic gesture ambiguously poised between welcome and arrest. But this was merely because she happened to be holding up in air a small and convoluted fragment of plywood, the better to meditate its place in the puzzle on the table in front of her.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘How do you do?’ Although perhaps reluctant to break off from her absorbing task, she was much too well-bred to be other than graciously welcoming. ‘I am so pleased that my daughter Grace thought of you, Sergeant. But when the idea was brought forward I also rang up my sister Agatha, who is a tower of strength when anything disagreeable happens. She was quite clear that you were the person to send for.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not a sergeant,’ Appleby said. ‘I have retired, you see, and am no longer a policeman at all.’

‘I don’t think it makes any difference. In fact I am sure my husband will be delighted to employ you. And I will see to it that he makes a satisfactory arrangement on the financial side. He is sometimes a little absent-minded in such matters. I think it is going to be the giraffe.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In the top right-hand corner. The puzzle, you see, is called “Noah’s Ark”. It arrived from Harrods only this morning.’

‘How very interesting.’ Appleby advanced to the table. ‘Yes, almost certainly the giraffe.’ Lady Verinder in The Moonstone, he was thinking, was surely the last woman in England to propose the private hire of a detective officer from Scotland Yard. ‘Giraffes are creatures readily identifiable by their necks, are they not? But I have always thought their little stumpy horns very characteristic too.’

‘So they are.’ Lady Ampersand appeared now to have become aware that her visitor was not from the order of society which she had supposed. Her error, however, failed to disturb her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am so pleased. My husband, you must understand, would be upset if it were discovered that one of us had done something dreadful to that unfortunate man. Not that he wasn’t rather tiresome at times. When he wasn’t calling Rollo “my lord” he was calling him “your grace”.

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