A Family Affair by Michael Innes

younger sons must be prepared to take their place in the ranks.’
    ‘Has Oswyn chosen a particular rank yet?’
    ‘I’m working on it all the time.’ Lord Oswyn Lyward gave Appleby the ghost of a vulgar wink. ‘I have serious thoughts of the Foreign Service. Hard work, of course. But great scope.’
    ‘Newfangled name for the thing,’ Cockayne said. ‘But goes on much as before. Boy might do worse.’ He watched Appleby take a first sip from his glass. ‘Unassuming stuff, eh? But port is in a confused way, these days – very confused, indeed. Shocking situation at Keynes, I may say. ’55 is thought to be pretty good, though, and should start its drinking life soon. Before I end mine, I hope.’ Lord Cockayne acknowledged his own witticism with an appreciative bark. ‘And now about this picture.’
    ‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby betrayed no astonishment at this abrupt intimation that he had been summoned into Cockayne’s presence for professional purposes. It must be Oswyn’s doing. The young man had clearly taken it into his head that there was amusement to be extracted from stirring up this ancient matter.
    ‘Sorry your son’s not lunching with you,’ Cockayne said – much as if it had occurred to him that his preparatory civilities had been inadequate. ‘Bobby, eh? Been down to us once or twice. Brains. Straight bat as well, I’d say. Good stable-companion for Oswyn here. Always delighted to see him. Regret we haven’t met his mother. My wife knew her family very well.’
    Even as something thus announced politicly in a past tense, this was news to Appleby. He murmured suitably.
    ‘My father thinks,’ Oswyn prompted, ‘that we should have that picture back.’
    ‘Quite right,’ Cockayne nodded approval. ‘Joke’s gone on long enough. Happened some years back.’
    ‘That puts it mildly,’ Appleby said. ‘Wasn’t Lord Oswyn still in his pram?’ He paused on this question – which appeared, however, to produce only perplexity in Lord Oswyn’s father. There was more conducing to the old gentleman’s vagueness, one had to conclude, than a mere injudicious matutinal recourse to port. His wits were far from what they had once been. Appleby wasn’t sure that this rendered altogether agreeable his son Oswyn’s resolve to extract diversion from planting that ancient hoax or fraud once more actively on the carpet. On the other hand Appleby – although the Lywards, father and son, couldn’t be aware of it – was in London precisely for the purpose of poking into the series of mysteries which seemed to begin with their affair. So he couldn’t very well do other than go along with them now.
    ‘Fact is,’ Lord Cockayne was saying, ‘that somebody may have got away with something valuable. Been suggested to me before, you know. Was even suggested to me at the time. Perhaps something in it, eh? Value of things changing. Old Canadine – nice chap I met for the first time lately – telling me the other day of a thing he’d have called a garden ornament. His father – the Canadine there was the scandal about, you know, when some actress poisoned herself – had shoved a pipe through it and made a damned indecent sort of fountain of it. Pissing into a little pool, Appleby, not to put too fine a point on it. All right with statues of small boys, I suppose. Kind of thing the Italians call potties.’
    ‘Putti ,’ Oswyn said.
    ‘But this wasn’t a small boy. Well, one night the thing simply vanished from the middle of its pool. At first Canadine thought very little about it. No great opinion of his father’s taste, I suppose – and, anyway, he thought what the thieves had been after was merely the value of the lead running through the thing. Its urinary system, one might say.’ Lord Cockayne suddenly looked surprisingly hard at Appleby, as if his reception of this harmless joke was to be a test of him as adequately a sahib . ‘But then some guest or other, who’d seen the statue before and