mean. Not a common way to die nowadays, not in a civilised country. Funny thing, too â he was exactly the same age as Lord Nelson when he got killed at Trafalgar, and Lawrence of Arabia when he come off that motorbike of his. Forty-seven, all three of âem. Makes you think, donât it?â
âIf you mean, to think twice before you join the Navy or ride high-powered machines you donât know how to control, and to keep away from rotting mill sluices when taking a dip, I couldnât agree more.â
âDying like that, Mr Jurnet!â the other persisted. âAfter all the terrible dangers heâd been through without a hair of his head harmed, to go in what you might call a purely domestic way ââ
âBest thing that could have happened, probably. After hitting the high spots everything that came after had to be downhill all the way. Whom the gods love die young, thatâs what they say, isnât it? Not that forty-seven is as young as all that.â
âMenander, Ancient Greek poet, 324â292 B.C.â Responding with due modesty to the otherâs admiring astonishment: âMollie give me a Dictionary of Quotations for my birthday. Learn a new one every day, she says, and I should get by all right. She reckons if youâre a bugger with a lot of culture to catch up on, like I am, thatâs as good a way as any to go about it.â
âDid you say Percy Toller, B.A.? Percy Toller, Ph. D., more like it!â
âMr Jurnet! Just wait till I tell Mollie what you said!â
Chapter Three
The Appleyard Room had once been a ballroom or a conservatory, or possibly a combination of the two. Tagged on to the north side of Bullen Hall, it was mercifully invisible from the front of the house, whose lovely line betrayed no hint of the absurd glass bustle disfiguring the rear. Within, it looked like a cross between Liverpool Street Station, the Paris Opera, and Harrodâs Food Hall, and, as such, may well have embodied all those elements which the Hungarian countess, whose money had paid for its building, had considered desirable in the way of architecture.
In such surroundings it was asking a lot to expect anyone to take even a hero seriously, and Jurnet did not even try, mindlessly following the prescribed route past cases filled with bric-Ã -brac and faded photographs to which he accorded only the most perfunctory glance. Even had he been a one for heroes, the detective felt pretty sure that the secret of what made them tick was not to be discovered in these reverently salvaged bits and bobs.
Out of the lot only two photographs stayed with him: one of a tow-headed toddler with a black-haired girl-child a couple of years older, who held the younger oneâs hand tightly, and regarded him with great dark eyes full of an anxious love: âLazlo, aged three, with Elena, his sister.â The second showed the same children older, on the verge of adolescence, the fair and the dark, mounted on their ponies. They were dressed alike, in gentrified versions of the loose blouses, baggy trousers, leather aprons and broad-brimmed hats of the horsemen of the Hungarian puszta : and this time, instead of one who watched and one who stood unheeding, the two had turned to each other faces full of a gleeful complicity.
Two immense blow-ups â one of a turreted country house against a background of wooded mountains, the second of a Russian tank mowing down a crowd of students in a Budapest street â next commanded Jurnetâs reluctant attention. Bludgeoned by their very size, he felt compelled to read the captions beneath.
Already, he learned, long before the rising of 1956, the tow-headed toddler, grown to manhood, had made a secret journey to Kasnovar â the great estate which the countess had brought into the Appleyard family â to rescue some cousins who had survived the war only to fall foul of the new Stalinist régime. When, for a brief