Michael Innes
A Matter  of  Disturbing
Incidents

As a relief from his high-pressure duties at Scotland Yard, Sir
John Appleby tackles what appears to he a. lighthearted little
case involving Aunt Jessica's poltergeist . . . and the happy re-
sult is a fine example of sua.ve and sophisticated 'English
crime-writing...
Detective: SIR JOHN APPLEBY

Aunt Jessica had a poltergeist," Judith Appleby said, as she 
watched her husband pour drinks. Sir John had got home
from Scotland Yard after a hard day. High-powered criminals
were very much abroad in the land, and he had conferred at
length with half a dozen of his senior officers about one large-
scale villainy or another. He deserved to be entertained with a lit-
tle relaxing family gossip.
"In that case your aunt had better keep a sharp eye on the new
kitchen maid." Appleby handed Judith her sherry. "Better ring
her up and tell her so."
"There isn't a new kitchen maid. In fact, kitchen maids are no
longer heard of."
"In the kind of household your Aunt Jessica runs I'll bet they
are, although there may be a new name for them. In any event,
what the old lady must look out for is an adolescent girl, prefera-
bly of worse than indifferent education and necessarily of hysteri-
cal temperament. If poltergeists exist, it's almost invariably when
some such young person is around that they get busy toppling the
furniture and chucking the china about the house. If they don't
exist, one has to conclude that dotty girls can develop surprising
skill  in  putting  on  such turns themselves.  The  subject is  a
perplexing one. Parapsychologists are by no means in agreement
about it."
"Isn't that because there's often such a mixup of straight fraud
and genuinely inexplicable happenings?" Judith felt she was at
least getting John's mind off bank robberies and muggings. "For
instance, a man finds he can make billiard balls roll about the
table simply by glaring at them. Then he is investigated by pro-
fessors and people who turn out to be an unsympathetic crowd.
His powers begin to desert him in these new conditions, and soon
he is doing it with magnets or something hidden up his shirt
sleeves."
"I've never heard of the billiard-balls man."
"No more have 1. I've made him up. But that sort of thing."
"I agree there have been plenty of such cases. The ladies known
as physical mediums are the best documented of them. But it's
more interesting when the thing operates the other way round.
The professional stage illusionist makes a few passes, mutters
some abracadabra, and the pretty girl in the box vanishes. It's
done too often and the girl really vanishes, never to be seen or
heard of again."
"I've never heard of that, John."
"Of course not. I've made it up. And now tell me more about
your poor aunt's predicament. I hope the manifestations are con-
fined to the kitchen."
"They're not. The poltergeist has managed to smash a white
porcelain dish of the Liao dynasty. And that, you know, means a
hundred years before the Norman Conquest."
"Good God!" Appleby was genuinely shocked. "Anything else of
that order?"
"An eight-faceted vase of mei-p'ing shape. Underglaze blue with
dragons in waves."
"That would be Yuanand I think I remember it. This must be
stopped. Has the old lady called in the police?"
"She called in the vicar, and the vicar produced an ecclesiastical
exorcist, specially licensed for the job by the Archbishop of Can-
terbury. There's been bell-book-and-candle stuff all over Anderton
Place. But the poltergeist hasn't been incommoded so far."
"Then the good Lady Parmiter must be persuaded to try the
local constabulary after alland just as a last resort." Appleby,
far from amused, frowned at his untouched sherry. "It's mon-
strous, Judith. A vast great country house absolutely crammed
with treasures waiting to be smashed to bits by some unfortunate
child of disordered mind! And nothing done about it, you say, ex-
cept in terms of clerical mumbo-jumbo? The old dear ought to be
locked up."
"Don't be so cockily rationalistic, John. Of course you're right
about the treasures. Acres and acres of the things. But acres and
acres of utter junk as well. Aunt Jessica's late husband was
enormously wealthy. As a collector he was also as guileless and
tasteless as they come. The result is that Anderton Place must be
unique among the dwellings of men."
"But does your aunt know? What's genuine and what's fake,
and so on?"
"It's impossible to tell, but she certainly likes living with the
old higgledy-piggledy effect perpetrated by my uncle. Loyalty to
the deceased, perhaps. Her trustees must have accurate inven-
tories based on adequate expertises made by museum people and
so forth. The insurance position would-be chaotic without that.
But Anderton Place itself is chaotic, as you've seen for yourself."
"Not so chaotic as it will be when this precious poltergeist is
finished with it."
"That's how it looks, I must say." Judith Appleby glanced at her
husband with caution, and confirmed her view that he had been
working far too hard. There were even dark rings under his eyes.
"Yes," she said. "It ought to be stopped. Why don't you stop it?"
"What's that?"
"Aunt Jessica has a high regard for you"
"Judith, are you suggesting that I take time off to run this
blessed poltergeist to earth? The idea's absurd."
"You said yourself she ought to call in the police. And since
there's a policeman in the family"
"More sherry? It's almost dinner time."
"John, dear, don't be evasive. And think of all that stuff. Sung
and T'ang and heaven knows what. And only poor old Aunt"
"Poor old fiddlesticks! Your precious aunt is as formidable a
dowager as any of her kind in England."
"Don't you feel you could handle her?"
"Of course I could handle her." As he uttered this boast Appleby
caught his wife's eye and grinned. "Oh, very well," he said. And
he reached for the telephone beside him. "I'll cancel things," he
said. "Just for tomorrow, mind you. I can't play truant for longer
than that."
"The poltergeist may not last even that long with you on the
job, darling."
And with this very proper expression of confidence uttered,
Judith Appleby went to see about the dinner.
It is well known that poltergeists, in common with other agents
of the supernatural, frequently sulk when attracting the interest
of persons skeptically inclined. Aunt Jessica's poltergeist may
have regarded the Applebys not as skeptical but merely as
open-minded; certainly it lost no time in showing that it remained
in business.
Appleby hadn't finished his polite inquiries about Lady Parmi-
ter's healthindeed the butler who had announced the visitors
hadn't yet left the drawing roomwhen the unmistakable sound
of breaking china announced the poltergeist's presence. From a
high unglazed shelf crowded with stuff a medium-sized jar had
tumbled to the parquet floor and exploded like a fragmentation
bomb.
Appleby strode over to the resulting small disaster and picked
up a couple of the larger pieces. Although scarcely an expert on
Oriental ceramics, he had no difficulty in identifying what had
been destroyed. The Parmiter Collectionso enormous and so ec-
centrically miscellaneouswas the poorer by one of those nicely
manufactured pots in which one buys preserved ginger at rather
superior shops.
"Sometimes T'ang and sometimes Fortnum and Mason," he said
rather grimly to Aunt Jessica. "Your visitant must certainly be
described as having catholic tastes."
"As my dear husband himself had." Aunt Jessica produced this
odd rejoinder with dignity. She certainly wasn't at all an easy old
lady.
"Yes, of course." Appleby spoke absently. Taking the freedom o.f
a fairly close relative, he had scrambled on a chair and was inves-
tigating the shelf from which the jar had fallen. It stood close to a
high window of which the upper sash was open. Nobody had been
looking that way when the thing happened. Beyond this, there
was nothing to be seen.
He got down, collected a brush and shovel from the fireplace,
composedly swept up the bits and pieces, and deposited them in a
wastepaper basket. Performing this more or less menial action
appeared to put something further in his head. "How many indoor
servants have you got at present?" he asked.
"Fewer, certainly, than some years ago." For a moment Lady
Parmiter seemed to feel that this was as precise a computation as
she could fairly be expected to arrive at. But then she tried
harder. "Seven," she said. "Or eight? No more than that."
"I suppose you can just manage," Judith said without irony. Un-
like  her husband,  she  had been  accustomed to  large  estab-
lishments in youth. "I take it they are all reliable and have been
with you for a good many years?"
"I fear not. The minds of domestic servants, Judith, are undeni-
ably unsettled. I sometimes judge, too, that a nomadic habit is es-
tablishing itself among them. Their faces are frequently unfamil-
iar to me, so I think they must come and go. My housekeeper,
Mrs. Thimble, would tell you about that. I don't, of course, include
Mrs. Thimble in the eight. She is almost a companion to me in
her humble way. Unfortunately she is absent for a few days,
owing to some bereavement in her family."
Appleby had betrayed some impatience during these unhelpful
remarks, and had received a warning glance from Judith. Now he
tried again.
"I know," he said, "that you don't much care for the police. But
you might"
He broke off, having been interrupted by a series of bumps and
shudders, followed by a splintering crash, apparently from just
outside the drawing room. He ran to the door and threw it open.
Anderton Place rejoiced in a very grand marble-sheathed hall and
a correspondingly imposing marble staircase.
The hall was now littered with the debris of an enormous ward-
robe. Minor bits and piecesthe First to detach themselves from
the tumbling monsterlay here and there on the stairs. The
bizarre effect was enhanced by the fact that the wardrobe had ap-
parently contained a large collection of Victorian and Edwardian
clothing. This, too, now lay all over the place.
"I was about to remark," .Appleby said calmly when the startled
ladies had joined him, "that two courses are possible. You might,
Aunt Jessica, call in one of the big security firms. They would
send you a few skilled people, in the guise of accountants or so-
licitors' clerks or indignant clergy deserving a country holiday"
"Quite out of the question." Lady Parmiter made no bones
about this. "I should regard anything of the sort as most objec-
tionable."
"Alternatively, there are highly reputable bodies devoted to the
pursuit of psychical research. Archbishops and Prime Ministers
have been among their active members from time to time. Their
attitude is totally objective and disinterested, just as is that of
any other learned society. They possess great experience alike in
assessing the significance of genuine paranormal phenomena and
in detecting imposture. If you cared"
"I will have nothing to do with anything of the sort, John. Dear
Adolphus would not have approved of it. Judith, is that not so?"
"Yes, Aunt Jessica, I suppose it is. But then Uncle Adolphus
was never up against a peculiarly destructive poltergeist."
"There is the luncheon bell, my dear. Your uncle always liked
an old-fashioned bell. I have had to instruct this new butler
whose name escapes meto refrain from entering and announc-
ing meals. And that reminds me. We shall not discuss these dis-
turbing incidents before the servants. I hope the man has re-
membered the Andron-Blanquet. I recall it, John, as your favor-
ite claret. Malign spirits may be at work, but at least they have
made no attack on the wine cellar."
And Lady Parmiter, a spirited woman, led the way to her din-
ing room.
The meal was uneventful. Spoons and forks didn't tie them-
selves into knots or take to the air and vanish. The only mishap
was a minor one, when a young parlormaid contrived to spill an
uncomfortably hot potato into Judith's lap. Appleby found himself
giving an eye to this girl. If she was a professional, it didn't seem
to be at waiting at table.
And to his trained sense her relationship to the anonymous but-
ler was detectably odd. This might be taken to count against the
view that she was the standard hysterical female of canonical pol-
tergeist literature. Appleby rose from table with a dim theory
stirring in his mind.
Thenagain claiming family statushe took a prowl through
Anderton Place alone. Even more than he remembered, it was a
mad museum from cellars to attics. In the cellars there was
plenty of that sound and modest claret; there was even more
claret that was very rare indeed; there was also a bewildering
amount of wine for which the late Lord Parmiter must have
scoured every fifth-rate wine shop in the country.
  The attics were full of rubbishsome of it honest-to-goodness
rubbish, and some of it fake furniture of the most pretentious
sort. But every now and then one came on something which would
have satisfied the most exacting taste in the age of Louis
Quatorze. The effect was a kind of security nightmare. It cried out
for skilled pillage.
And so with the rest of the house. As the crazy Lord Parmiter
had originally disposed everything, so was everything disposed
now. It would take the entire staff of the British Museum a
month's labor, one felt, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
There were several further "disturbing incidents" (as Aunt Jes-
sica had termed them) while Appleby prowled. At one point a
worthless but lethal bracket clock hurtled past Appleby's ear and
smashed into a cabinet containing some decidedly precious Dres-
den china. The whole affair was clearly mounting to a crisis.
Back in the drawing room Appleby found that Judith had been
trying to persuade her aunt to take drastic emergency action. She
ought to send her entire staff away on board-wages, shut up the
house, and leave merely a thoroughly reliable caretaker in
charge. Appleby didn't think much of this plan. Normore
conclusivelydid Lady Parmiter. If the poltergeist really was a
poltergeist (and on this she, too, professed an open mind) the re-
sult might merely be major disaster. More poltergeists might sim-
ply move in, and the last state ofAnderton be worse than its first.
Appleby agreed, or professed to agree. He had an alternative
suggestion. The most experienced packers in London should be
hastily brought in. Working under Lady Parmiter's direction, they
could crate up everything of the first value for immediate removal
to impregnable strongrooms in the metropolis. Poltergeists were
invariably confined to one stamping ground. They wouldn't be
able to follow.
Lady Parmiter turned this down toobut with a shift of
ground. Such a proceeding would be abhorrent to the shade of
dear Adolphus and was therefore not to be entertained for a mo-
ment. It seemed an impasse. Appleby produced what seemed to
be a final throw.
"But doesn't Anderton run to something like a strongroom of its
own?" he asked. "I seem to remember Judith's uncle speaking of
something of the kind, and being rather proud of it."
"We simply call it the safe, John, but it is in fact a large room
and entirely burglarproof. I always lock my dear mother's Queen
Anne silver away in it when I have occasion to leave Anderton."
"That's very prudent of you." Appleby was wondering if he
could possibly bring this perverse old person to see reason. At
least he mustn't give up without a further attempt. "May I see
it?" he asked. "Your husband was extremely wise to have such a
room constructed. No great house should be without one."
The request, thus framed, was well received. The Anderton
strongroom looked tremendously impressiveand had looked that
way for at least 50 years. Indeed, it might have been some
triumph of metallurgical skill triumphantly displayed at the
Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851. If Appleby was
amused at this outmoded affair he managed not to betray the fact.
"Look," he said, "couldn't we simply put everything that is re-
ally valuable in here? I'm sure Lord Parmiter would have ap-
proved. We have on our hands just the sort of situation he must
have been envisaging when he ordered so spacious an affair. If
what we're up against is simple human vandalism or madness,
then we defeat it in this simple way. If it's something super-
natural, we're at least no worse off than we are at present.
"Of course you're the only person who knows what's what, who
can quickly pick out the really precious things from those which
are to be classed as primarily of sentimental value. I honestly feel
you should do this, Aunt Jessica. It's your duty as the guardian of
all the marvelous things Lord Parmiter gathered together. And it
can all be done this afternoon. You show us what, and the whole
household can help with the stowing."
Perhaps surprisingly, Lady Parmiter agreed to this plan at
once. The undisturbed disposition of things at Anderton was very
dear to her as one of the pieties of widowhood. She was a good
Victorian, after all, and the impulse was the same as that which
had prompted a more famous Widow to preserve intact the ar-
rangements on her deceased Prince Consort's writing table.
On the other hand, she had a shrewd sense of what things were
worth, and no reason to believe that dear Adolphus would have
smiled on the indiscriminate massacre of his wildly heterogeneous
treasures.
The task was accomplished by a late dinnertime, the bewildered
servants having been directed (in the absence of the bereaved
Mrs. Thimble) by the butler without a name. Anderton didn't look
that denuded when the job was finished. All the same, objects
worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds had been segregated
and placed under lock and key. The poltergeist was thwartedor
so it was to be hoped.
The Applebys drove back to London in the dark, but not before
Appleby himself had contrived a short private conversation with
Lady Parmiter.
"Lucky your aunt turned out to know the stuff fairly well," he
said to Judith on the way home.           '
"Yes"
"I doubt whether much that's really first-rate now remains out-
side that strongroom."
"I suppose not."
"You'd agree, Judith, that Aunt Jessica has been persuaded to
do the rational thing?"
"Clearly she hasunless it really is a supernatural agency
that's at work."
"You'd also agree that what she has done is the obvious thing
in the circumstances?"
"Well, yes. But I don't see'
"The predictable thing?" It was almost with anxiety that
Appleby appeared to wait for his wife's acquiescence this time.
"Absolutely."
"Then I think all's well. Yes, I'm pretty sure of it. By the way,
just give a glance at the spare bedroom tomorrow. Your aunt's
coming to stay with us."
"To stay with us!"
"Oh, not for long. Just for two or three days. She's telling that
butler tonight that she's coming to us in the morning."
"How very odd! But at least we can get a good night's sleep
first."
"Very true. Just one telephone call, and I'll be ready for it."
"A telephone call?"
"To the Thames Valley Constabulary, my dear. Anderton is in
their territory, so I must liaise with them, as people now say."
And Appleby laughed softly as he swung the steering wheel. "You
see, I set the trap. But they spring it."
"All caught," Appleby announced a couple of mornings later.
"Butler, phony parlormaid"
"I recall remarking," Lady Parmiter said, "that servants tend to
be rather unreliable nowadays."
"Quite soin fact, two more were in the pay of the gang. All
small fry, of course, the butler included. Fortunately, their bosses
decided to be in at the kill. Our Thames Valley friends nicked the
lot while they were happily treating your strongroom, Aunt Jes-
sica, like a hunk of old cheese."
"We had really done quite a lot of their work for them?" Judith
asked.
"Just that. Exactly the point. They count as top-ranking vil-
lains, but happen not to be all that clued in on the fine-art front.
By themselves they could only have made a purely random haul.
Hence the poltergeist, who made us work like mad doing all the
sifting for themseparating the wheat from the chaff."
"But, John, what about the tumbling jar? That did look like the
real thing."
"Not to me. A little bladder at the end of a long tube passing
through the window. Squeeze a bulb at the other end, and the
trick's accomplished. You just pull the tube out through the win-
dow again, and there you are. Literally a trick. Every kid's con-
juring set includes a miniature version of the same thing."
"I must go upstairs and pack at once." Aunt Jessica announced
this firmly. "It would be the wish of dear Adolphus that the status
quo ante at Anderton be restored forthwith. And Mrs. Thimble
must find me a new butler. His first task, my dear John, will be
to pack up every bottle of Andron-Blanquet I still possess. And I
needn't tell you where it will be dispatched to."