The Long Farewell

Part I

Prologue In Italy

’Tis here but yet confused:

Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.

Othello

Chapter One

‘C ome in!’

The summons was a cordial shout, and Appleby pushed open the door in the long, blank, wisteria-covered wall. It was a handsome pleasure house, now in some decay, and all its windows were on the farther side, looking out westward over the lake. The sun was dropping towards Monte Caplone; Garda had turned from its midday blue to a white sheet of fire against which, for a moment, Appleby could see nothing except in silhouette. Even so, there was no mistaking Lewis Packford’s astonishing bulk as it heaved itself up from a desk—nor the bellow of surprised laughter by which the movement was accompanied.

‘Sir John, God save you!’

Sir John Appleby advanced and shook hands. He was well accustomed to Packford’s greeting him with these Falstaffian allusions. They were entirely inapposite, for in middle age Appleby was still as spare as a sprinter, and it was Packford himself who could fairly be described as a tun of a man.

But Packford’s humour was invariably pointless and boisterous. He knew Shakespeare by heart and had a trick of quoting from him virtually at random. It would never enter your head that he was a man of intellectual capacity. He was vigorous and confident; he might well be clever; noticing that he appeared prosperous, you might suppose that he had somewhere built up a flourishing uncomplicated commercial concern. Actually he was a scholar, and there were people who maintained that he had one of the best brains in his field. Living privately—even rather secretively—and unhampered by such routine duties as fall to professors and their kind, he had achieved notable researches in the hinterland of Elizabethan literature, and time and again brought off some astonishing success. Commonly he contrived to give these a spectacular, even a sensational turn. There were some therefore who were inclined to shake their heads over Lewis Packford. He didn’t really quite securely belong—this wayward elusive man who delighted childishly in showing off, in casting miserably into the shade the labours of colleagues less theatrically endowed, in springing some queer, disconcerting and impregnably documented surprise in the particular little learned world he had chosen as a stamping ground. He ought to be doing something else.

All this made Appleby find Packford interesting and disposed him to renew from time to time a casual acquaintance begun some years before. Appleby was not a scholar but a policeman. He had in fact recovered for Packford some valuable documents which had been made off with by a rather specialised sort of burglar. And Packford had been grateful. He was almost certainly, Appleby supposed, a genuinely warm and generous man. If the two ran into each other in the street, Packford’s large pale expanse of face would light up precisely as it had done now. And when Appleby had come to the top at Scotland Yard, Packford sent him a battered stave once carried—he declared—by that anonymous officer of the law whom the Lord Chief Justice had ordered to carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet.

‘Well, well! And what in faith make you from Wittenberg?’ Packford accompanied this question with a large clumsy gesture not at all suggestive of the cultivated Prince of Denmark.

‘A truant disposition, no doubt.’ Appleby smiled and threw his ancient Panama hat on a chair. ‘I won’t pretend that I left London with any idea of running you to earth.’

‘Didn’t you, now?’ Packford seemed to find this disclaimer oddly amusing. ‘You haven’t brought a warrant, eh—or extradition papers, or whatever they are called?’

‘Nothing of the sort, I’m afraid. And it’s less a matter of running you to earth than of running you to water.’ Appleby had walked over to a window. ‘Good lord, what a view!’

‘Splendid, isn’t it?’ Packford lumbered over to join him and stared out unseeingly. ‘You can just spot Sirmione from the terrace. Sweet Catullus’ all but island olive-silvery Sirmio. My God, Appleby—what a line!’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby wasn’t inclined to dispute this literary judgement. Probably Tennyson had never juggled his vowels and consonants to better effect in his life. But there wasn’t the slightest reason to suppose that Packford possessed an atom of literary taste. That was part of the chap’s fascination. All his investigations were totally ungoverned by the slightest awareness of the actual substance of the stuff he dealt with to such triumphant effect. The lady who enunciated the classic proposition that art is beautiful was own sister to Lewis Packford. In aesthetic matters the man’s great bulk floated on a large full tide of vague enthusiasm. The stuff was by definition tip-top. Waving your arms, you received it with shouts of wonder and joy. And then you got down to a stiff bit of detective investigation next door to it. But even if the detective investigation hadn’t been as good as anything the CID turns up, Appleby couldn’t possibly have felt superior to Packford. The man rejoiced too much in the spirit of life that was in him.

‘I was uncommonly lucky to pick up this place for the summer. You saw the villa?’

Appleby nodded. ‘Your retainer in the kitchen told me you’d be down here. It’s a nice place.’

‘The villa’s modest, of course—very modest. But this summer house affair belongs to another age. It’s rather grand, don’t you think? I like grotteschi on my walls. All these little nudes like amorous shrimps. No vice in them, but lively. And this is the best position on the lake, if you ask me.’

‘I think it well may be.’ Appleby continued to admire the prospect. It was precisely like Packford, he thought, to take his large innocent pride in his casual acquisition for a season.

‘Over there’s no good at all.’ Packford gestured vaguely towards the south-west. ‘A sort of riviera, nowadays. But on this side, you get hardly anybody. Even the road’s the secondary one. German tourists coming over the Brenner tend to take it, of course, if they’re making for Verona. You know Verona?’

‘Yes—and I’m joining my wife there this evening.’ Appleby turned away from the view to glance at Packford. It was second nature to him to catch any shade of significance in the tone of a voice. Had there been a faint enigmatical reverberation in Packford’s as he named the city of the Montagues and Capulets? ‘Do you go there much?’ he asked.

‘To Verona?’ Packford looked extravagantly blank. ‘Oh, no—not at all.’

‘I’m told they filmed Romeo and Juliet largely in Siena. More undisturbed medieval settings than you get in Verona.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Packford again looked blank—but presently proceeded, almost conscientiously, to quotation. ‘Two households, both alike in dignity,’ he declaimed, ‘In fair Verona, where we lay our scene. A wonderful idea, to open with a sonnet. And what a play!’ Packford paused—and suddenly his features seemed to transform themselves and sharpen. ‘But there’s a great puzzle there, you know.’

‘In Romeo and Juliet?’

‘Bang in the sonnet Willy the Shake writes by way of prologue. Last line of the third quatrain.’

‘I don’t remember it.’ To call Shakespeare ‘Willy the Shake’, Appleby was thinking, was the sort of prep school facetiousness that it took a Packford to rejoice in.

‘Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.’ Packford chuckled. ‘Go to the Old Vic or to Stratford, my dear chap, and look at your watch when the curtain goes up. And remember that modern producers still make substantial cuts for performance. When the show’s over, you’ll realise that ‘two hours’ traffic’ takes some explaining.’

‘Poetic licence, perhaps?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s a real puzzle. I’ll get at it one day.’

‘But it’s nothing of that sort you’re at work on now?’ Appleby made a gesture towards a large table piled high with books and papers.

‘At work on?’ Packford’s glance followed Appleby’s to the table, and then he shook his head. ‘Oh, no—dear me, no. Just some dull stuff. But this is a good place for it. Quiet, as I was saying. Gets one away from—well, complications.’ Packford paused on this, and then broke rather hurriedly into speech again. ‘Just that old woman—who’s a good cook by Italian standards—and her grandson to tidy up the garden. I forget the day of the week, and I never look at my watch.’ As he said this, Packford took out his watch and studied it, so that Appleby reflected he was a man with that sort of blessed interior economy that is always joyfully expectant of its next meal. ‘The little vaporetto punctuates the day. There it is, making for Torre del Benaco now. Garda was the Benacus of the Romans. You’ll stop and have a bite? I never see an Englishman from month’s end to month’s end. Nor even an Englishwoman either. But then, as you know, I’m not a ladies’ man.’ At this, Packford suddenly roared with laughter.

Appleby smiled. The invitation hadn’t been very felicitously phrased, but it was entirely cordial. ‘I’ll be very glad to,’ he said. ‘Judith’s coming along the autostrada from Turin. Even if her car doesn’t blow up, she won’t get to Verona till quite late.’

‘Then let’s go up to the villino. The view’s just as good from there, and we can get a drink. I keep none of the insidious stuff down here.’ Packford wandered blunderingly about his summer house, moving sundry objects meaninglessly from one place to another in a sort of ritual tidying-up for the day. ‘What beats me,’ he said, ‘is how you tracked me down here, my dear fellow. There aren’t more than three men in England who know of my having got hold of this little place. I’m in retirement, as they say.’

‘As it happens, I know two of them—so there’s no mystery in the matter.’ Appleby added a word or two making good this claim. ‘And this morning, when I was in Riva, I suddenly remembered what I’d been told. And I decided, of course, to get my dinner off you.’

‘Then, come along. We’ll see what old Giuseppina can do. Perhaps she can serve up her grandson in a collop—eh?’ Packford laughed so unaffectedly at this fatuous witticism that it seemed really funny. ‘Baked Gino pie. A trifling foolish banquet, as somebody somewhere says. But where? My memory’s going, I’m afraid.’

‘Wasn’t it Verona?’ And Appleby looked whimsically at his host. ‘Your mind runs on the place, if you ask me.’

They walked up the long sloping garden through a faint breeze blowing gratefully off the lake. Gino, bare and browned to the waist, made a great business of removing a battered hat and standing respectfully attentive as they went past. Being unconscious of his employer’s late horrific proposals in regard to him, he produced at the same time a dazzling smile. Packford was aware that the boy was entitled to notice; he stopped and in fluent ramshackle Italian gave him what were clearly the first random instructions to come into his head. But within seconds he was entirely absorbed in this occupation. Striding up and down, and pointing now in one direction and now another, he might have been the oldest established of landed proprietors, effecting dispositions that would benefit his remote posterity.

It was impossible—Appleby again thought—not to warm to Packford. And young Gino obviously thought the world of him. There was a similar performance when they reached the house and Gino’s grandmother appeared bobbing on the terrace. Packford’s imbecile brand of humour must go very well into Italian, for when Giuseppina wasn’t being tumultuously indignant over what was presumably the suggestion of sundry culinary impossibilities, she was cackling with laughter. Then the conference turned serious. It was quite beyond Appleby’s linguistic reach, but it went on for so long that one had to suppose a feast of enormous elaboration was being projected. Preparing it and eating it would both take so long that he wouldn’t be in Verona till midnight. He rather regretted the perfectly idle impulse that had made him halt on the road to look up this eccentric man of learning.

Still, it was a lovely evening in a lovely place. They sat on the terrace and sipped, uncontaminated by gin, the sweet commonplace vermouth that draws such subtlety from its native air. But Packford wasn’t built for the Italian climate, Appleby thought—and he didn’t feel surprised when the massive figure opposite him produced a silk handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘My dear Appleby,’ he murmured, ‘how I envy you your well-preserved youth. And O, that this too solid flesh would melt!’

‘I doubt whether that would be very comfortable.’

Packford suddenly sat up. ‘Do you know,’ he demanded, ‘that it’s fashionable nowadays to accept the reading of the Good Quarto?’

Appleby smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘It’s sallied, you see. And they declare that to be a rare form of sullied. Absolute nonsense, believe me.’ Having got well on his hobbyhorse, Packford was animated. ‘Hamlet, after all, is fat and scant of breath.’

‘But haven’t eminent persons—I do seem to remember this—declared that to be fat was merely to be sweaty?’

‘Pitiful twaddle, my dear man. I think I can prove—I’m pretty certain I can prove—that Shakespeare’s original Hamlet, who was of course Richard Burbage, weighed close to eighteen stone. Have you ever considered why Hamlet is so marvellous a play—such tremendous stuff?’

Appleby merely shook his head at this large question.

‘Partly, at least, it’s because Shakespeare had that wonderful inspiration of the delicate suffering soul in the great puffing wheezing body of a sedentary out-of-condition scholar.’ Packford, as he announced his discovery, gently wheezed himself. ‘Think of the effectiveness of it! Think of the effectiveness of the moment when the great man-mountain declares that Yorick used to carry him shoulder-high! Wonderful stuff, Appleby. And then the grave.’

‘Ophelia’s grave?’

‘Exactly. Think of the episode of supreme savage comedy when Hamlet jumps into her grave and gets jammed in it.’ Packford leant forward as he spoke, and his bulk blotted out the long line of tiny lights that had begun to prick the dusk from Salo to Gardone.

Appleby chuckled to himself in the dusk. Oh, matter and impertinency mixed, he said to himself. And Packford, he knew, loved linking a sober discovery to some extravagant hypothesis. When he was able to prove that Burbage was really a very fat man, all this would come out. Meanwhile, Packford relished keeping a discovery up his sleeve for a time. He had his regular technique for surprising the world. First the fool-proof case, painfully elaborated and checked and polished in deep secrecy. Then the leak—so that one interested scholar heard uneasily from another that there was some reason to suppose Lewis Packford was at it again, was nursing this or that monstrously upsetting discovery. Then the swift unmasking of his design—in a long letter to The Times Literary Supplement, or in a small book attractively got up with telling illustrations, instantly commanding the attention of the fashionable metropolitan reviewers. Before the learned journals could lumber into reasoned appraisal, the whole thing had been accepted as gospel by the common reader and become established as a plain fact of literary history.

And almost certainly Packford was up to something of the sort now—although Appleby didn’t really believe that it had much to do with the corpulence or otherwise of Richard Burbage. All this talk was a determined if light-hearted smokescreen put up by Packford to obscure some actual design. And Appleby thought he could take a dim guess at it.

This eminent literary detective wasn’t in Italy for his health. Even if his own gross corpulence made it medically probable that he should drop down dead at any moment, such a calculation wouldn’t make the slightest impact on Packford’s sanguine personality. No—this wasn’t a rest cure. Nor, for all his delight in his situation and his fluent chattering in Italian with his retainers, was it matter of a lover’s retreat into communion with the soil and culture of his passion. Packford’s wanderings, when they happened, were invariably strategic in conception. This villa was a cunningly chosen lurking place. And Packford, as he had virtually admitted, had been very far from advertising it. Mere chance had put Appleby in possession of his whereabouts. And perhaps—despite the cordiality of his welcome—he wasn’t too pleased at being found out.

Not that Appleby felt in the least an intruder. If he now tumbled to some secret of Packford’s, that would be all in the game, and Packford would acknowledge it as such. And indeed Appleby was determined—quite idly, indeed, since the whole matter was without seriousness of any sort—to discover what he could. Detective work of his own wasn’t commonly his notion of a holiday. But detection that is all amid innocence and merely learned guile, that can’t