Appleby and the Ospreys Read Online Free Page B

very small space. The Osprey Collection, as it may be called, is just like that. Oliver simply wheeled it in.’
    ‘Wheeled it in!’
    ‘On a trolley. The kind of affair you see in restaurants for taking round the puddings and cheeses.’
    ‘And you are telling me that, year after year, you have remained ignorant about the collection’s normal place of security?’
    ‘Just that. Or, at least, that’s what I am asserting. But it will only be prudent not necessarily to believe anything I say.’
    ‘You labour the point, Mr Broadwater. Would your sister have known where the coins were kept?’
    ‘I much doubt it. I have never observed her take the slightest interest in the matter.’
    ‘Are you going to claim that you had designs on the Osprey Collection; that you would have made off with it if you could?’
    ‘Oh, most decidedly. And I’d have presented it to the appropriate museum at once.’
    ‘And you ask me to believe that this situation is intimately related to the mystery of your brother-in-law’s death?’
    ‘Not quite that. I am merely outlining circumstances which must prompt you to place me firmly on your list – or on Ringwood’s list – of suspected persons.’
    ‘But does it, in fact, do that? I can see that, at times, Lord Osprey’s secretiveness over his collection may have been extremely irritating to you. But is it in the least likely that, as a consequence of that irritation, you suddenly, and to no practical effect so far as the collection is concerned, stabbed the man to death in his own library?’
    ‘That is very much the question, Sir John, to which I feel your Mr Ringwood should address himself.’
    ‘He is not my Mr Ringwood. He is in a sense, I suppose, your Chief Constable’s Mr Ringwood.’ Appleby paused on this, and saw that, although true, it was disingenuous as well. He must pull up on that insistent distancing himself from what could be called the Clusters Case. But he needn’t pull up on thinking about Marcus Broadwater merely because the man had talked a certain amount of nonsense. Had he offered himself as a promising ‘suspect’ not as the consequence of more or less harmless eccentricity, but with some ulterior motive at present wholly obscure? Asking himself this, Appleby decided that it was time to end the encounter. ‘A most interesting conversation,’ he said. ‘But to continue it further would be to keep you most unwarrantably from the trout. And I undertook to be with your sister nearly half an hour ago. So I must drive on.’
    ‘Then good day to you for the present, Sir John.’ And with some formality Broadwater doffed his deerstalker (at some hazard since it was so thick with dry flies) and, with a slightly ironical bow, picked up his rod and walked away.
    Although he was already late for his appointment, Appleby found himself driving more slowly as Clusters came in view. Ahead of him was a man with his throat cut. And dead. He tried to remember whether just that had ever confronted him before. He had waged a long war against crime – and against the crime of murder often enough. But slit throats had somehow escaped him. Perhaps it was because his bosses had early taped him as the man to despatch when it had seemed a question of recherché crime. He had offered that phrase to Judith, he remembered, only a few days ago.
    In the dictionary there was a singularly unpleasant word. Jugulate . To sever the blood vessels between heart and brain. In former days, when ‘cut-throat’ razors had abounded, suicides occasionally went about their task that way. Earlier still, when soldiers wore armour, the coup de grâce was sometimes delivered in the same manner: you pulled off a helmet and stabbed. Under any circumstances it was bound to be a pretty messy business. And there seemed to be a peculiarly bizarre incongruity in its happening in a library. Not that the library at Clusters was all that distinguished. At that lunch-party the guests had been offered a