Appleby And Honeybath Read Online Free Page A

finger. ‘Cold,’ he said.
    ‘Which at least suggests that a solitary feast wasn’t interrupted no more than five minutes ago. Can we gather anything else from this small spectacle?’
    ‘Well, half the feast is unconsumed. Perhaps the feaster’s eye was bigger than his belly. Or his digestion wasn’t too good.’
    ‘The pills might suggest that.’
    ‘Yes – but perhaps it was something quite different. Perhaps he was suddenly alerted or alarmed.’
    ‘Right enough, Charles. But what about a third possibility? Toasted cheese is rather a perfunctory and uninteresting dish. The mind of this lurking character is elsewhere. Some notion suddenly starts up in his mind so commandingly that he must follow it at once. He shoves his plate aside, hurries back to the library – and never again leaves it alive. So the cheese is important, as you can see.’
    ‘Important?’ It was with a touch of irritation that Honeybath repeated the word. ‘For heaven’s sake, John, don’t start talking to me in Sherlock Holmes riddles. This whole business has upset me very much. It’s quite some time since I stumbled on a dead body.’
    ‘Sorry – and of course it’s all thoroughly conjectural. The plate may very well have been cold from the first. But I do somehow like the idea of his jumping up halfway through his meal, whether because he was somehow alerted to your entering the library and finding the corpse, or because some exciting notion had suddenly got hold of him.
    ‘It may be a woman, not a man.’
    ‘There’s a statistical improbability there. The male sex has the stronger predilection for toasted cheese. Females eat poached eggs.’
    Charles Honeybath compressed his lips. He rather envied his friend this ruthless chauvinism. But he considered it indecorous, all the same.
    ‘John,’ he asked, ‘I take it you believe us to be in the presence of a crime?’
    ‘It’s a working hypothesis. We might be more confident about it if you’d thought to take a better look at that dead man.’
    ‘Yes, of course. I see that.’ Honeybath paused, and it turned out to be in search of a small levity of his own. ‘I’ll try harder next time.’ He paused again, not being at all happy with this. ‘There’s one thing I did notice,’ he said. ‘It was the expression on the dead man’s face. I thought of it as malign glee. Really that. A malicious grin, as if he was pleased about something, or enjoying a nasty joke.’
    ‘Rictus,’ Appleby said – but with more of perplexity than conviction. ‘A big gape often remarked in what you might call sudden corpses. It used to be noticed when they’d hanged people.’
    Honeybath felt that he could have done without this information. He also felt increasingly bewildered, and now expressed the fact.
    ‘I can’t make head or tail of it,’ he said.
    ‘I wouldn’t say that. The head and tail are there, all right – although I admit that, even metaphorically speaking, the body is still to seek. As you are a perfectly reliable witness, my dear Charles, we have this: there in the library was a dead man; you came upon it, and at once proceeded, very properly, to tell our host; you left the library for that purpose, locking the door behind you; some person or persons, with the alternative means of ingress and egress we have discovered, almost at once took alarm and removed the body, the whereabouts of which are now unknown to us. Right?’
    ‘Certainly.’
    ‘This room seems to have been in the more or less temporary occupation of a single person. A single bed, and what you might term catering for one – and pills for one – make that point clear. It doesn’t follow that only one person was involved in the total operation – whatever the total operation may have been. Metaphorically again, it’s the total operation – the teleological aspect of the thing, so to speak – that is the missing body. The why and wherefore entirely elude us at the moment. Right