‘The Memorial Service’ 
MICHAEL INNES

OFFICER: Commissioner Sir John Appleby 
FORCE: Metropolitan Police, London 
TIME: 1975

CASES: ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, (1936), ‘The Weight of Evidence’, (1943) ‘The Long Farewell’, (1958), ‘The Bloody Wood’, (1966) ‘Appleby’s Other Story’, (1974) etc.

PROFILE: Sir John Appleby is undoubtedly the most erudite detective in mystery fiction. He is a well-read officer, patient and good natured, with an empathy towards his job that makes him an ideal role model for anyone following in his footsteps in the Met. Appleby came to the Force with a liberal education, and has risen from Inspector to Detective Inspector and, finally, Commissioner, thanks to his sense of curiosity, his irony, and his dedication to duty. He is noted for his ability to handle sensitive cases involving prominent people in society and government, and this characteristic has undoubtedly impressed his superiors and been instrumental in the steady upward path of his career. Whether looking into cases of fugitives from justice, chicanery in the art world, crime in university life or investigating whimsical village mysteries-four familiar themes in the thirty books and numerous short stories about Appleby-he can be relied upon to exercise discretion and good judgment and to get his man. Even when hard pressed, Appleby still comes up with an apt literary quotation to fit the moment-and there is no one better at spotting obscure literary allusions in which may lie the solution to a crime.

CREATOR: Michael Innes was the pen name of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (1906-95) and there is much in the cases of the Commissioner that reflects the author’s own life and career. An Oxford scholar and professor of English, Stewart was often referred to as ‘the donniest of the donnish school of detective story writing’ and he derived enormous pleasure from his dual role of academic and creator of murder and mystery. A lover of detective fiction from his childhood, he produced his first Appleby story, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, in 1936 by spending two hours each morning before his day’s lectures writing the tale of a murder mystery among the senior dons at a fictional English college. In the next forty years, he progressed his contemplative policeman up the various echelons of the Met, providing him with a happy marriage to a sculptress wife, and ultimately a knighthood for his services to the Force. Even in retirement, Appleby and crime proved inseparable, as ‘The Memorial Service’, written in 1975, demonstrates. It is a typical example of the man and his method-similar methods of detection, in fact, to those which have been evident throughout these pages, from the enquiries of a humble PC right through to the man at the very top of the police hierarchy.

THE STORY:

In the fashionable church of St Boniface in the Fields (mysteriously so named, since it was in the heart of London) a large and distinguished congregation was assembled to give thanks for the life of the late Christopher Brockbank QC. The two newspaper reporters at the door, discreetly clad in unjournalistic black, had been busy receiving and recording all sorts of weighty names. It was the sort of occasion upon which sundry persons explain themselves as ‘representing’ sundry other persons even more august than themselves; or sundry institutions, corporations, charities and learned bodies with which the deceased important individual has been associated.
Legal luminaries predominated. An acute observer (and there was at least one such present) might have remarked that a number of these did not settle in their pews, kneel, and bury their noses devoutly in their cupped hands without an exchange of glances in which a hint of whimsical humour fleetingly flickered. All this for Chris Brockbank! they appeared to be telling each other. Just what would he have made of it?
Sir John Appleby (our acute observer) was representing his successor as Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. For Brockbank long ago, and before he had transformed himself from a leading silk into a vigorous and somewhat eccentric legal reformer, had owned his connections with Scotland Yard, and this fact had to be duly acknowledged today. Appleby possessed only a vague memory of the man, so that a certain artificiality perhaps attended his presence at the service. It hadn’t seemed decent, however, to decline a request which was unlikely to occupy him for much more than twenty minutes-nor thirty-five if one counted the time spent in scrambling into uniform and out again.
It would have been hard to tell that it wasn’t something quite different-even a wedding-that was about to transact itself. Gravity now and then there had to be, but on the whole a cheerful demeanour is held not improper on such occasions. The good fight has been fought, and nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast. Six weeks had passed, moreover, since Christopher Brockbank’s death, and anybody much stunned by grief had thus had a substantial period in which to recover. Whether there had been many such appeared doubtful. Brockbank had been unmarried, and now the front pew reserved for relations was occupied only by two elderly women, habited in old-fashioned and no doubt frequently exhibited mourning, whom somebody had identified for Appleby in a whisper as cousins of the dead man. If anything, they appeared rather to be enjoying their role. It was to be conjectured that they owned some quite obscure, although genteel, situation in society. Nobody had ever heard of any Brockbanks until Christopher QC had come along. In some corner of the globe, Appleby vaguely understood, there was a brother, Adrian Brockbank, who had also distinguished himself-it seemed as a lone yachtsman. But the wandering Adrian had not, it seemed, hoisted himself into a jet for the occasion.
The congregation had got to its feet, and was listening to the singing of a psalm. It was well worth listening to, since the words were striking in themselves and the choir of St Boniface’s justly celebrated. The congregation was, of course, in the expectation of playing a somewhat passive part. At such services it is understood that there is to be comparatively little scope for what, in another context, would be called audience participation.
Appleby looked about him. It was impressive that the Lord Chief Justice had turned up, and that he was flanked by two Ministers of the Crown. There were also two or three socially prominent dowagers, who were perhaps recalling passages with Christopher when he had been young as well as gay: these glanced from time to time in benevolent amusement at the two old creatures in the front pew. Among the clergy, and wearing a very plain but very golden pectoral cross, was a bishop who would presently ascend the pulpit and deliver a brief address. In the nave two elderly clubmen (as they ought probably to be called) of subdued raffish appearance were putting their heads together in muttered colloquy. These must liaise with yet another aspect of the dead man’s dead life. They were presumably laying a wager with one another on just how many minutes the address would occupy.
The service proceeded with unflawed decorum. An anthem was sung. The bishop, ceremoniously conducted to his elevated perch, began his address. He lost no time in launching upon a character analysis of the late Queen’s Counsel; it would have been possible to imagine an hourglass of the diminutive sort used for nicely timing the boiling of eggs as being perched on the pulpit’s edge beside him. The analysis, although touching lightly once or twice upon endearing foible, was highly favourable in the main. The dead man, disposed in his private life to charity, humility, gentleness, and the study of English madrigals, had in his professional character been dedicated, stern, courageous, and passionately devoted to upholding, clarifying, reforming his country’s laws.
It was now that something slightly untoward occurred. A late arrival entered the church. An elderly man with a finely trimmed grey moustache, he was dressed with the exactest propriety for the occasion; that he was accustomed to such appearances was evident in the mere manner in which he contrived to carry a black silk hat, an umbrella, and a pair of grey kid gloves dextrously in his left hand while receiving from the hovering verger the printed service sheet. Not many of those present thought it becoming to turn their heads to see what was happening. But nobody, in fact, was cheated of a sight of the newcomer for long. He might have been expected (however accustomed to some position of prominence) to slip modestly into a pew near the west door. But this he did not do. He walked with quiet deliberation up the central aisle-very much (Appleby thought) as if he were an integral and expected part of the ritual which he was in fact indecorously troubling. He walked right up to the front pew, and sat down beside Christopher Brockbank’s female relatives.
There could be only one explanation. Here was the missing Adrian, brother of the dead man-to whom, indeed, Appleby’s recollection sufficed to recognise that he bore a strong family likeness. Perhaps the plane from Singapore or the Bahamas or wherever had been delayed; perhaps fog had caused it to be diverted from Heathrow to a more distant airport; thus rendered unavoidably tardy in his appearance, this much-travelled Brockbank had decided that he must afford a general indication of his presence, and move to the support of the ladies of the family, even at the cost of rendering an effect of considerable disturbance. It must have been-Appleby thought sympathetically-a difficult decision to make.
The address went on. The new arrival listened with close attention to what must now be the tail end of it. And everybody else ought to have been doing the same thing.
But this was not so. The Lord Chief Justice had hastily removed one pair of spectacles, donned another, and directed upon the fraternal appearance in the front pew the kind of gaze which for many years he had been accustomed to bring to bear upon occupants of the dock at the Central Criminal Court. One of the Cabinet Ministers was looking frightened-which is something no Cabinet Minister should ever do. Two of the dowagers were talking to one another in agitated and semi-audible whispers. A third appeared to be on the verge of hysterics. As for the bishop, he was so upset that he let the typescript of his carefully prepared allocution flutter to the floor below, with the result that he was promptly reduced to a peroration in terms of embarrassed improvisation.
But before even this was concluded, the brother-whether, veritable or suppositions-of the late Christopher Brockbank behaved very strangely. He stood up, moved into the aisle, and bowed. He bowed, not towards the altar (which would have been very proper in itself), but at the bishop in his pulpit (and this wasn’t proper at all). He then turned, and retreated as he had come. Only, whereas on arriving he had kept his eyes decently directed upon the floor, on departing he bowed to right and left as he walked-much like a monarch withdrawing from an audience chamber through a double file of respectful courtiers. He paused only once, and that was beside the uniformed Appleby, upon whom he directed a keen but momentary glance, before politely handing him his service sheet. Then he resumed his stately progress down the aisle until he reached the church door and vanished.

Somebody would possibly have followed a man so patently deranged, and therefore conceivably a danger to himself or others, had not the Rector of St Boniface’s thought it expedient to come to the rescue of the flustered bishop by promptly embarking upon the prayers which, together with a hymn, were to conclude the service. These prayers (which are full of tremendous things) it would have been indecent to disturb. But a hymn is only a hymn, and it was quite plain that numerous members of the congregation were giving utterance not to the somewhat jejune sentiments this one proposed to them, but to various expressions, delivered more or less sotto voce, of indignation and stupefaction. The Lord Chief Justice, moreover, was gesturing. He was gesturing at Appleby in a positively threatening way which Appleby perfectly understood. If Appleby bolted from this untoward and unseemly incident instead of reacting to it in some policeman-like fashion he would pretty well be treated as in contempt of court. This was why he found himself standing on the pavement outside St Boniface’s a couple of minutes later.
‘Get into this thing,’ the Lord Chief Justice said imperiously, and pointed at his Rolls Royce. ‘You, too,’ he said to the Home Secretary (who was one of the two Ministers who had been giving thanks for the life of the deceased Brockbank). ‘We can’t let such an outrage pass.’
‘An outrage?’ Appleby queried, as he resignedly sat down in the car. ‘Wasn’t it merely that Christopher Brockbank’s brother is mildly dotty-nothing more?’
‘Adrian merely dotty! Damn it, Appleby, didn’t you realise what he was doing? He was impersonating Christopher-nothing less. That moustache, those clothes, his entire bearing: they weren’t remotely Adrian. They were Christopher tout court. Didn’t you remark the reaction of those who knew Christopher well? Both those Brockbank brothers were given to brutal and tasteless practical jokes, but this has been the most brutal and tasteless of the lot.’
They may well have been. In fact, I seem to remember hearing something of the sort about them. But if Adrian has judged it funny to get himself up like Christopher in order to attend Christopher’s memorial service that seems to me entirely his own affair. I shall be surprised, Pomfret, if you can tell me he has broken the law.’ Appleby smiled at the eminent judge. ‘Although, of course, it wouldn’t at all do for me not to believe what you say.’
‘I don’t believe it was Adrian at all. It was Christopher’s ghost.’ The Home Secretary endeavoured to offer this in a whimsical manner. It was he who had been looking patently frightened ten minutes before, and he was endeavouring to carry this off lightly now. ‘Turn up as a ghost for something like one’s own funeral is a joke good enough to gratify any purgatorial spirit, I’d suppose. What we’ve witnessed is the kind of thing those psychic chaps call a veridical phantasm of the dead.’
‘I haven’t set eyes on Christopher Brockbank for thirty years,’ Appleby said, ‘and his wandering brother Adrian I’ve never seen at all. This well-groomed person bowing himself down the aisle in that crazy fashion was very like Christopher?’
‘Very.’
Thoroughly scandalous,’ Lord Pomfret said. ‘Not to be tolerated. Applrby, you must look into it.’
‘My dear Chief Justice, I have no standing in such matters. This uniform is merely ornamental. I’m a retired man, as you know.’
‘Come, come.’ The Home Secretary laid a hand on Appleby’s arm in a manner designed as wholly humorous. ‘Do as you’re told, my boy.’
‘Do you know-perhaps I will? The ghost, or whatever, did a little distinguish me, after all. He stopped and handed me this.’ Appleby was still holding a superfluous service sheet. ‘It was almost as if he was passing me the ball.’

Much in the way of hard fact about Christopher Brockbank turned out not easy to come by. He proved to have been surprisingly wealthy. As the elder of the two brothers he had inherited a substantial fortune, and to this he had added a second fortune earned at the Bar. Uninterested in becoming a judge, he had retired comparatively early, and for the greater part of the year lived in something like seclusion in the South of France. It was understood by his acquaintance that this was in the interest of uninterrupted labour on a work of jurisprudence directed to some system of legal reform. The accident in which he had lost his life had been a large-scale air disaster in the Alpes-Maritimes. He had died intestate, and his affairs were going to take a good deal of clearing up.
It was on the strength of no more than this amount of common knowledge, together with only a modicum of private inquiry, that Appleby eventually called upon a bank manager in the City.
‘I understand from an official source,’ he began blandly, ‘that the late Mr Brockbank kept his private account in this country at your branch.’
‘That is certainly true.’ The bank manager nodded amiably. He had very clear views, Appleby conjectured, on what information was confidential and what was not. ‘He used to spare a few minutes to chat with me upon the occasion of his quite infrequent visits. A delightful man.’
‘No doubt. It has occurred to me that, in addition to keeping both a current and a deposit account with you, he may have been in the habit of lodging documents and so forth for safe keeping.’
‘Ah.’
‘I know that you maintain some sort of strong-room for such purposes, and suppose that your customers can hire strong-boxes of one convenient size or another?’
‘Yes, indeed, Sir John. Should you yourself ever have occasion-‘
‘Thank you. Brockbank did this?’
‘Sir John, may I say that, when inquiries of this sort are judged expedient for one reason or another, a request-and it can scarcely be more than a request-is commonly preferred by one of the Law Officers of the Crown?’ The manager paused, and found that this produced no more than a composed nod. ‘But no doubt there is little point in being sticky in the matter. Let me consult my appropriate file.’ He unlocked a drawer, and rummaged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would appear that Brockbank had such a box.’
‘His executors haven’t yet got round to inquiring about it?’
‘Seemingly not.’
‘I’d like you to open it and let me examine the contents.’
‘My dear Sir John!’ The manager was genuinely scandalised. ‘You can scarcely believe-‘
‘But only in the most superficial way. I have an officer waiting in your outer office who would simply turn over these documents unopened, and apply a very simple test to the envelopes or whatever the outer coverings may prove to be. He will not take, and I shall not take, the slightest interest in what is said.’
For a moment the manager’s hand hovered over his telephone. An appeal to higher authority-perhaps to the awful authority of the General Manager himself-was plainly in his mind. Then he took a deep breath.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I suppose an adequate discretion will be observed?’
‘Oh, most decidedly,’ Appleby said.

‘So that, for a start, is that,’ Appleby murmured to the Lord Chief Justice an hour later.
‘But surely, my dear Appleby, he would scarcely recognise you at a glance? The years have been passing over us, after all.’
‘That is all too true. But the point isn’t material. There I was, dressed up for that formal occasion in the uniform of a high-ranking officer of the Metropolitan Police. He felt he could trust me to tumble to the thing.’
‘And you are quite sure? Absolutely sure? The fingerprints on that service sheet were identical-‘
‘Beyond a shadow of doubt. Christopher Brockbank always deposited or withdrew documents from that strong-box in the presence of an official of the bank who was in a position to identify him beyond question. The man who attended Christopher Brockbank’s memorial service was Christopher Brockbank himself.’
‘And he wanted the fact to be known?’
‘He wanted the fact to be known.’
‘It makes no sense.’
‘What it makes is very good nonsense. And there is one kind of nonsense that Brockbank is on record as having a fondness for: the kind of nonsense one calls a practical joke. And I expect he had money on it.’
‘Money!’ Lord Pomfret was outraged.
‘Say a wager with one of his own kind.’
‘We have been most notoriously abused.’ Something formidable had come into Pomfret’s voice. One could almost imagine that high above his head in the chill London air the scales were trembling in the hand of the blindfolded figure of Justice which crowns the Central Criminal Court.
‘I wouldn’t deny it for a moment. But I come back to a point I’ve more or less made before. You can’t send a man down, Chief Justice, for attending his own memorial service. It just isn’t a crime.’
‘But there must be something very like a crime in the hinterland of this impertinent buffoonery.’ Lord Pomfret had flushed darkly. ‘Steps have been taken to certify as dead a man who isn’t dead at all.’
‘In a foreign country, and in the context of some hideous and, no doubt, vastly confused air crash. Possibly without any actual knowledge of the thing on Brockbank’s own part. Possibly as a consequence of innocent error-error on top of which he has merely piled an audacious joke. And a singularly tasteless joke, perhaps. But not one with gaol at the end of it.’
‘We can get him. We can get him for something.’
‘I don’t know what to make of that from a legal point of view.’ The retired Commissioner of Police made no bones about glancing at the Lord Chief Justice of England in frank amusement. ‘And there will be a good deal of laughter in court, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You’re damn well right.’ Not altogether unexpectedly, Lord Pomfret was suddenly laughing himself. ‘But what the devil is he going to do now? Just how is he proposing to come alive again?’
‘With great respect, m’lud, I suggest your lordship is in some confusion.’ Appleby, watching his august interlocutor dive for a whisky decanter and syphon, was laughing too. ‘Christopher Brockbank is alive. He’s in a position, so to speak, in which no further action is necessary.’
‘Nor from us either? We leave him to it?’
‘Just that I wouldn’t say.’ Appleby was grave again. ‘I confess to being a little uneasy still about the whole affair.’
‘The deuce you do!’ Now on his feet, the Lord Chief Justice held the decanter poised in air. ‘So what? Say when.’
‘Only a finger,’ Appleby said. ‘And I’ll continue to look into the thing.’
‘With discretion, my dear fellow.’ Pomfret was suddenly almost like the bank manager.
‘Oh, most decidedly,’ Appleby said.

Retired Police Commissioners don’t go fossicking in France, and through the courtesy of his successor Appleby received reports in due season. Hard upon the air crash, it transpired, an elderly and distressed English gentleman had appeared upon the scene of the disaster in a chauffeur-driven car. Presenting himself to the chef de gendarmerie who was in control of the rescue operations, he had explained that he was Adrian Brockbank, and that he had motored straight from Nice upon hearing of the accident, since he had only too much reason to suppose that his elder brother, Mr Christopher Brockbank QC, had been on board the ill-fated plane. Could he be given any information about this, either way? It was explained to Mr Adrian Brockbank that much confusion inevitably prevailed; that, as often happened on such sad occasions, there was no certainty that an entirely reliable list of passengers’ names existed; and that certain necessarily painful and distressing attempts at identification were even then going on. Would Mr Adrian Brockbank care...?
The inquirer steeled himself, and cared. Eventually he had been almost irrationally reluctant to admit the sad truth. A ring on the charred finger of one of the grim exhibits he had, indeed, formally to depose as being his brother’s ring. But it seemed so tiny a piece of evidence! Might there not be more? A relevant article of baggage, perhaps, that had in part escaped the heat of the conflagration?
Not-it was explained to Mr Adrian Brockbank-at the moment, hut something of the kind might yet turn up. As so often, debris was probably scattered over a very wide area. There was to be a systematic search at first light. With this information, Mr Adrian Brockbank and his chauffeur had departed to a nearby hotel for the night. And in the morning the sombre expectation had been fulfilled. Christopher hrockbank’s briefcase had been discovered, along with other detritus, in a field nearly a quarter of a mile away; and it contained a number of recent personal papers and his passport. Whereupon Adrian, formally identifying himself through the production of his own passport and the testimony of his chauffeur, satisfied the requirements of French law by making a deposition before a magistrate. After that again, he made decent arrangements for the disposal of anything that could be called his brother’s remains. And then he departed as he had come.
Such had been the highly unsatisfactory death of Christopher Brockbank.
All this, Appleby told himself, didn’t remain exactly obscure once you took a straight look at it. Just as it wasn’t Adrian who had turned up at the memorial service, so it hadn’t been Adrian who had turned up at the grisly aftermath of that aerial holocaust. It had been Christopher on both occasions-and it was impossible to say that throughout the whole affair there had been any positive role played by Adrian at all. This was bizarre-but there was something that was mildly alarming as well. Christopher had waited. Equipped with a passport in the name of his brother, equipped no doubt with a duplicate passport in his own name, equipped with the briefcase which he would eventually toss into an appropriate field-equipped with all this, Christopher had waited for a sufficiently substantial disaster within, say, a couple of hours’ hard motoring-distance of his French residence. He had certainly had to wait for months-and more probably for years. A thoroughly macabre pertinacity had marked the attaining of his practical joke.
And hadn’t the joker overreached himself? Could any place in society remain for a man who, with merely frivolous intent, had deliberately identified an unknown dead body as his own? It seemed not surprising that Christopher hadn’t been heard of again since he had walked down that aisle, graciously bowing to a bewildered congregation. Perhaps he had very justifiably lost his nerve.
But even if Adrian didn’t come into the story at all, where was Adrian? He was almost certainly Christopher’s heir, and yet even Christopher’s English solicitors appeared to know nothing about him. Perhaps they were just being more successfully cagey than that bank manager. Certainly they had, for the moment, nothing to say-except that Mr Adrian Brockbank spent most of his time sailing the seven seas.
Appleby was coming to feel, not very rationally, that time was important. He had told Lord Pomfret that he was uneasy-which had been injudicious, since he couldn’t quite have explained why. Pomfret, however, had refrained from catechising him. And now he had the same feeling still. No Brockbank had died. But two Brockbanks might be described as lying low. There was about this the effect of an ominous lull.
And then Christopher Brockbank turned up.

He turned up on Appleby’s urban doorstep and was shown in-looking precisely the man who had put on the turn in St Boniface’s.
‘My dear Appleby,’ he said, ‘I have ventured to call for the purpose of offering you an apology.’ Brockbank’s address was easy and familiar; he might have been talking to a man he ran into every second week in one club or another.
‘I don’t need an apology. But I could do with an explanation.’
‘Ah, that-yes, indeed. But the apology must come first. For dragging you into the little joke. It started up in my mind like a creation, you know, just as I was walking out of that church. There on the service sheet were my fingerprints, and there were you, who if handed the thing could be trusted to do as I have no doubt you have done. A sublimely simple way of vindicating myself as still in the land of the living.’
‘I am delighted you are with us still.’ Appleby said this on a note of distinguishable irony. ‘And I accept your apology at once. And now, may the explanation of the little joke follow?’
‘The explanation is that it has been designed as rather more than a little joke. My idea has been, in fact, to make a real impact upon the complacency of some who are satisfied with the absurd inadequacy of many of our laws. That old fool Pomfret, for example. I have for long been a legal reformer, after all.’
‘I see.’ Appleby really did see. ‘This exploit has been in the interest of highlighting the fact, or contention, that the law is hazardously lax in point of verifying adequately the identity of deceased persons-that sort of thing?’
‘Precisely that sort of thing. I shall have established-strikingly because by means of an ingenious prank-that in France and England alike-‘
‘Quite so, Mr Brockbank. We need not linger on the worth of your intention. But surely you have reflected of late on the extent to which you are likely to be in trouble, under French legal jurisdiction, if not under English? The deception you carried out upon the occasion of that disaster-‘
‘My dear Appleby, what can you be thinking of? That was my brother Adrian, was it not? This all begins from his proposing to bring off a better joke against me than I ever brought off against him. It is on the record, I suppose, that we have both rather gone in for that sort of thing. He was going to confront me with the pleasant position of being legally dead. Well, I capped his joke by, you may say, concurring. I attended-I hope in a suitably devout manner-my own memorial service. So the laugh is going to be on him.’
‘Mr Brockbank, I have seldom come across so impudent an imposture!’ Appleby suddenly found himself as outraged as the Lord Chief Justice had been. ‘Whether your brother has, or has not, been remotely involved in this freakish and indecent affair I do not know. Hut I do know that, six weeks ago in France, you presented yourself as that brother upon an occasion in which such clowning would have been wholly inconceivable’-Appleby paused, and then took a calculated plunge-‘to anybody bearing the character of a gentleman.’
‘I withdraw my apology.’ Christopher Brockbank had gone extremely pale. ‘As for what you allege: prove it. Or get somebody with a legitimate concern in my affairs to prove it. You have none.’
‘Then I scarcely see why you should be calling on me-except to discover how far I have penetrated to the truth of this nonsense. I am prepared to believe that you had some ghost of serious intention in the way of exposing the weakness of certain legal processes. I accept that notions of what is permissibly funny may differ as between one generation, or one coterie, and another. But your present pack of lies about the conduct of your own brother-lies which I must now suppose you to be intending to make public-is a little too steep for me. Just what are you going to say to your brother when you meet?’
‘I don’t quite know.’ Christopher Brockbank had decided to digest the strong words which had been offered to him. ‘But I must certainly decide, since I am on the point of running down to see him now.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Appleby stared incredulously at his visitor.
‘I said I’m off to see Adrian. I must persuade him I’m not as dead as he has tried to represent me. In a way, he doesn’t know that he has not, so to speak, liquidated me quite successfully. Here is more than six weeks gone by since his little turn over my supposed body, and I haven’t-so far as he knows-given a chirp. That must be puzzling him, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Possibly so. Do I understand that your only public appearance has been at that deplorably mistaken memorial service?’
‘Yes it has. You may simply take it that it has amused me to lie low.’
‘You appear to me to be in love with your own mortality. Now more than ever seems it rich to die: that sort of thing. What if there’s a general feeling, Mr Brockbank, that your decease was a welcome event? You might have quite a task in persuading a malicious world that you are alive; that you are you, in fact, and not some species of Tichborne Claimant.’
‘Ah, that’s where those fingerprints come in. It’s hardly a piece of evidence a conscientious policeman could suppress, eh?’
‘No, it is not.’ Appleby was becoming impatient of this senseless conversation. ‘If your brother Adrian really played that trick at the scene of the disaster-which I do not believe for a moment-he will be gratified to learn that you have taken the consequences of his joke so seriously as pretty well to register your continued existence with the police.’
‘But I shan’t tell him what I did with that service sheet.’ Christopher Brockbank gave a cunning chuckle. ‘Not till I’m sure he hasn’t got some further joke up his sleeve.’ He got to his feet. ‘And now I must be off to my brotherly occasion.’
‘Far be it from me to detain you. But may I ask, Mr Brockbank, where your brother is to be found?’
‘Ah, that will doubtless be becoming public property quite soon. Adrian is a minor celebrity in his way. But, just at the moment, I think I’ll keep him to myself.’

The prediction proved accurate. The very next morning’s papers carried the news that Adrian Brockbank’s yacht had been sighted at anchor off Budleigh Salterton in Devon. It seemed probable that he had arrived unobtrusively in home waters several days earlier.
Appleby endeavoured to absorb this as information of only moderate interest. Christopher Brockbank had had his joke, and it had involved a breach of the law in France if not in England. He had now gone off to join his nautical brother Adrian, and crow over the manner in which he had taken Adrian’s identity upon himself at the inception of the imposture in the Alpes-Maritimes. Something like that must really be what was in Christopher’s mind. And it was all very far from being Appleby’s business; he ought to be indifferent as to whether those two professional jokers (as they appeared to have been) decided to laugh over the thing together or to quarrel about it. Let them fight it out.
But this line of thought didn’t work. Several times in the course of the morning there came back into Appleby’s head one particular statement which Christopher had made. It was a statement which just might be fraught with a consequence not pretty to think of. At noon Appleby got out his car and drove west.
Budleigh Salterton proved not to run to a harbour. A few unimpressive craft were drawn up on a pebbly beach. Far away on the horizon tankers and freighters ploughed up and down the English Channel; the sea was otherwise empty except for a simple yacht riding at anchor rather far out. Binoculars didn’t help to make anything of this. Where one might have been expected to read the vessel’s name a tarpaulin or small sail had been spread as if to dry. Appleby appealed to a bystander.
‘Do you happen to know,’ he asked, ‘whose yacht that is?’
‘I haven’t any idea.’ The man addressed, although he appeared to be a resident of the place, was plainly without nautical interests. ‘It has been here for some days-except that it went out at dusk yesterday evening, and I happened to see it return at dawn this morning. But I did hear somebody say there was a rumour that the fellow was one of those lone yachtsman types.’
‘Do you know where I can hire a rowing-boat?’
‘Just down by that groyne, I believe.’
‘Thank you very much.’

‘May I come on board?’ Appleby called out. Adrian Brockbank was very like his brother-even down to the neat grey moustache.
‘Not if you’re another of those infernal journalists.’
‘I’m not. I’m an infernal policeman. A retired one.’
‘You can come up, if you like.’ And Adrian tossed down a small accommodation ladder. He had appeared only momentarily startled.
‘Thank you.’ Appleby climbed, and settled himself without ceremony on the gunwale. ‘Have you had any other visitors just lately, Mr Brockbank?’
‘I see you know my name. Only a journalist, as I say. That was yesterday evening. But I persuaded him to clear out again.’
‘What about your brother?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Adrian stared.
‘Your brother Christopher.’
‘Good, God, Mr-‘
‘Appleby. Sir John Appleby. Yes?’
‘My brother Christopher was killed six weeks ago in an air crash. Your question is either ignorant or outrageous.’
‘That remains to be proved, sir. And I gather you have been on some extended cruise or other. Just how did you hear this sad news?’
‘Hear it? Heaven and earth, man! It was actually I who identified Christopher’s body. I’d sailed into Nice, and tried to contact him by telephone. They said he was believed to have joined a plane for Paris, and gave some particulars. Then suddenly there was the news of this-‘
‘So you identified the body, made certain decent arrangements about it, and then went to sea again. Is that right?’
‘It is right. But I’m damned if I know what entitles you-‘
‘And then, only a few days ago, there was your brother’s memorial service at St Boniface’s in London. Do you say that you attended it?’
‘Certainly I attended it. But as I’d only just berthed here, and had to get hold of the right clothes, I was a bit late for the occasion.’
‘I see. Then you came straight back here?’
‘Obviously I did. I don’t like fuss. I’ve been lying low.’
‘That’s something that appears to run in your family. And so, very decidedly, does something else.’
‘May I ask what that is?’ Adrian was now eyeing Appleby narrowly.
‘A rash fondness for ingenious but really quite vulnerable lies. Mr Brockbank, your brother Christopher, having somehow got wind of your arrival here at Budleigh, came down yesterday evening and-I don’t doubt-rowed out to see you just as I have done. It was something quite out of the blue. I don’t know where you’ve come from, but you certainly haven’t been receiving English news on the way. And here, suddenly, was your brother, chock-full of the craziest and most discreditable of his practical jokes. He’d resolved to attend his own memorial service, partly for the sheer hell of it, and partly to dramatise what he considered some loophole in the law. He’d plotted the thing ingeniously enough, and it had involved his impersonating you at the scene of an air crash. He told you all this in exuberant detail. You had been made to appear the joke-this was the best part of his joke-and as a result of it he was officially dead until he chose to come alive again.’ Appleby paused. ‘Mr Brockbank,’ he went on quietly, ‘you decided that he never would so choose.’
‘This is the most outrageous-‘
‘Please don’t interrupt. What you said to yourself was this: if Christopher wanted to be dead, let him damned well be dead-and let his large fortune pass to his next of kin, yourself. It was all so simple, was it not? Lie One: you had sworn to what was in fact the true identity of the dead man. Lie Two: you had been just in time for the memorial service. Your story would be simple and plausible. The true story, supposing anybody should tumble to it, would be too fantastic for credence. Have I succeeded in stating the matter with some succinctness?’
‘You have a kind of professional glibness, Sir John.’ Adrian said this perfectly coolly. ‘I suppose that for most of your days you’ve been ingeniously fudging up yarns like this. But it won’t wash, you know. It won’t wash, at all. You are reckoning that, at every step, it will be possible to collect one or another scrap of circumstantial evidence against me, and that these will just add up. But they won’t-not to anything like the total that would persuade a jury of such nonsense. My poor brother met an accidental death in France, and I identified his body, and that’s that.’
‘On the contrary, your brother was murdered by you on this yacht yesterday evening; doubtless sewn up in canvas with as much in the way of miscellaneous metal objects as you could find on board; and sent over the side-far out at sea-last night.’
‘Far out at sea?’ It was ironically that Adrian repeated the words. ‘Awkward, that. A body is rather a useful exhibit, is it not, when a thin case has to be proved?’
‘Mr Brockbank, you entirely mistake the matter. There is absolute proof that your brother Christopher, alive and well, attended his own memorial service. It is a proof which, I know, he proposed to withhold from you for a time-which was perhaps a pity. But the evidence, which I need not particularise, is in my possession.’
‘Dear me!’ Adrian made a casual gesture which somehow didn’t match with a suddenly alert look and a tautened frame. ‘And is it in the possession of anybody else?’
‘Yes, of several people. Otherwise, I’m bound to say I shouldn’t be thus alone with you, Mr Brockbank, in a secluded situation. But it hadn’t, I repeat, been evidence in your possession. For it wasn’t in your brother’s mind to mention its existence to you just at present. He was keeping it up his sleeve. Rather a muzzy notion, perhaps, but understandable when Brockbank is sparring with Brockbank. It is evidence, incidentally, which was entirely and ingeniously devised by your brother himself.’ Appleby paused. ‘I may just say that fingerprints come into it. Irrefutable things.’
There was a long silence, and then Adrian Brockbank, who had also been perched on a gunwale, stood up.
‘If I may just slip below for a moment,’ he said, ‘I think I can turn up something which will put a term to this whole absurd affair.’
‘As you please.’
It was only after a pause that Appleby had spoken. He might have been staring with interest at some small smudge of smoke on the horizon. For a couple of long minutes he continued immobile, sombrely waiting. For a further minute he continued so-even after the revolver shot had made itself heard. Then he rose with a small sigh and sought the late Adrian Brockbank below.