Appleby's Answer (22 page)

‘It is for you to say.'

‘Our bizarre comedy – Miss Pringle's nonsense, Bulkington's present mere or near nonsense – becomes
comédie
noire
. Half a mile away from us at this moment there is a thoroughly evil man.' Appleby paused. ‘So again, what follows?'

‘Those young men must be got clear of him, for a start. I ought to have seen that long ago.'

‘I am bound to say I think you should. However, Jenkins, at least, is in sanctuary.'

‘Don't mock me, Appleby.'

‘My dear man, heaven forbid.' Again Appleby paused. ‘And now I am going to walk over and have a word with him.'

‘And with Miss Pringle?'

‘If she is there, yes. She, too, must be got away, if it can be done.'

 

 

That considerable confusion of mind which Appleby had predicated of Miss Pringle could not have been said to be abating in her as she drove through the darkness on her way to ‘Kandahar'. Captain Bulkington, she chiefly felt, had let her down badly. His nerve must have failed him in a craven manner particularly reprehensible and contemptible in one bred to the profession of arms. As a result, she had performed much labour, and suffered much anxiety, wholly in vain. There was going to be no sensation at all – except, perhaps, of a very minor sort calculated to do nothing but bring a certain amount of unkindly ridicule upon herself. Barbara Vanderpump would certainly tell their common friends that dear Priscilla had been most oddly imagining things. The odious man Appleby might make a kind of smoking-room story out of the affair, and retail it to his cronies at his club. But of anything worthy to be called publicity there would be nothing at all. That treacherous policeman Graves, with his disgusting servility towards the local grandees, would simply accept instructions to drop the whole thing. The official line would be that Bulkington had gone so far as to arrange for the commission of a few tasteless practical jokes, but beyond this no evil had been plotted except within the confines of her own imagination. And thus would decorum, repose, and the avoidance of any breath of public scandal be secured in this stupid little part of Wiltshire. The plain fact was that Bulkington had (as she believed her nephew Timothy would express it) made a monkey of her. It was all very mortifying indeed.

These thoughts angered Miss Pringle very much, and it is surely an instance of the largeness of spirit in this noble woman that she saw nothing in them to occasion alarm. Cold prudence would doubtless have suggested that she heed the first sign-post pointing in the direction of Worcestershire; that she should, in fact, cut her losses (which were in the main merely of time and, perhaps, self-conceit), lie low for a month or two, and do her best never to think of Long Canings again. Captain Bulkington had proved in the event, indeed, less lethal than she had hoped, but the record displayed him clearly enough as an eccentric, unreliable, malicious, and perhaps tricky character: somebody to give a wide berth to unless in the interest of some positive benefit to oneself. Such a benefit to Miss Pringle was no longer in question. She was seeking out the Captain now to no better purpose than that of permitting herself the luxury of giving him a piece of her mind. Yes – there can be no doubt whatever that Miss Pringle would have done better to go home.

‘My fair temptress, 'pon my soul!' Captain Bulkington said – and produced a high cackle of a laugh which Miss Pringle did not recall quite to have heard before. He had opened his front door himself. ‘Come to lighten my solitude. Capital thing. Come in.'

‘Your solitude?' Miss Pringle echoed. Instinctive propriety, as ever, was strong in her. ‘But I take it that your housekeeper–?'

‘Sleeps in the village, my dear. And as for those two louts, they're both past history, praise God. Jenkins has absconded, and Waterbird has walked out. There's a difference, you know – what you might call a technical difference. Jenkins slunk off. It upset Waterbird, and he had a word with me. He'd have had
words
with me if I'd given him the chance. As it was, he got in one or two disobliging things. If I'd been thirty years younger, he said, he'd have left me a couple of black eyes to remember him by.' Rather surprisingly, Captain Bulkington chuckled again on a frankly joyous note. ‘Good riddance, eh? And leaves you my only resource, my dear. So come into my sanctum. Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly. Ha, ha!'

It was suddenly borne in upon Miss Pringle that she was now closeted with a near-madman in an empty house in a retired situation. She had rather forgotten the madness of Bulkington. It seemed pretty apparent now. Suddenly too, there was borne in upon her a realisation of the irrationality of her own present position. She had come to denounce Bulkington. But for what? For failing to murder a harmless if tiresome neighbour? Or for failing to allow himself to be detected and apprehended in an attempt at such a murder? The second of these reproaches (if overheard by third parties) would surely sound even dottier than the first. There was, of course, what might be called the formal position: she had provided – all-trustingly – a kind of correspondence course in detective literature, and Bulkington had made perverted use of her ideas by using them to launch at least a minor campaign of terror against Sir Ambrose Pilkington, Bart. But that didn't, somehow, now seem a very promising line. She would really do better simply to hit Bulkington on the head with her umbrella, and go away. Unfortunately she wasn't provided with an umbrella so this course wasn't practicable. So what line was she to take?

The problem proved to be one she didn't have to face, since Captain Bulkington took a brisk initiative himself. He looked Miss Pringle up and down – rather in the manner of a woman expertly deciding where another woman does her shopping, or perhaps of the sort of person who guesses your age or your weight at a fair.

‘£5,000,' Captain Bulkington said.

‘I beg your pardon?' There was perplexity in Miss Pringle's voice. She didn't take this in at all.

‘You can run to it easily.' Captain Bulkington knew what he was talking about. ‘Even if it's not in your current account, the bank will make no bones about protecting your interest by honouring the cheque.'

Miss Pringle was about to say, ‘I think you must be insane'. But a writer dislikes the enunciation of lame half-truths, and she decided to hold her peace.

‘Times change,' Captain Bulkington said comfortably. ‘It was a mere £500 we talked about before. And that trifle was to pass in the other direction – ha-ha!
Tempus fugit, tempus edax
something-or-other.'

‘Do you have the impertinence to suggest that there is some pressing reason why I should pay you a large sum of money?' Miss Pringle spoke boldly, but she was not really feeling very bold. What she
was
feeling might best have been described as the menace of the unknown. Bulkington was extravagantly pleased with himself, and she couldn't at all guess why. Of course the whole situation was extremely awkward and delicate – but then it was surely that for this dreadful man quite as much as for herself. Had he something up his sleeve? She very much feared that this must be the state of the case. ‘If there is any question of compensation,' Miss Pringle continued somewhat wildly, ‘it ought certainly to be the other way round. For several months now, I have been put to much trouble and expense.'

‘Ah! And to what purpose, my dear? Just tell me what you think it has all been in aid of.'

‘I undertook to supply you with the materials for a harmless romance. Greatly to my embarrassment, you have used them – or part of them – for the outrageous purpose of harassing an inoffensive gentleman. A landed gentleman' – Miss Pringle amplified with emphasis – ‘resident in this county.' For a moment it seemed to her that this was quite a hopeful line to take, after all. ‘And I am by no means certain that you might not have gone further still.'

‘I'll bet you're not.' Captain Bulkington produced his spine-chilling chuckle. ‘Just a few red-faced dummies littering the old idiot's park! There wouldn't be much in
that
for you to base your blackguardly blackmail on.'

‘My
what
?'

‘It's what you've been after, isn't it? I saw it in your face, the first time we met. I even saw it in the face of Orlando your cat.' Captain Bulkington found this imbecile and offensive pleasantry so amusing that he roared with laughter. ‘Well, I thought I'd have you on. Lead you a little up the garden path, my dear. See just how far
you
would go. And I'm full of admiration, mind you. You've been most fiendishly clever.'

Miss Pringle, although remaining sufficiently rational to question the justice of this commendation, could not suppress a small glow of gratification. Still, it was beginning to look as if, to escape from this developing nightmare, she would have to be very clever indeed.

‘You've kept your options open,' Captain Bulkington said, ‘and that's always a great thing. Your weakness, if I may say so, has been on the psychological side. I'm a very simple fellow, you know, and at the same time what you might call the very type of the rational man.' As the Captain thus characterised himself he looked – it seemed to Miss Pringle – rather more indisputably mad than he had ever done before. ‘You thought of me as an unbalanced sort of chap, who had developed a senseless hatred of that idiot Pinkerton, and who might be coaxed into the commission of nothing less than
un crime gratuit
.'

‘I don't know what you mean.' Miss Pringle recognised the feebleness of her remark even as she uttered it. She did, of course, know perfectly well what is meant by this French expression, nor ought she to have been surprised that Captain Bulkington (engaged, as he was, in the higher education of the young) commanded it. She
was
surprised, all the same. And she was becoming thoroughly unnerved as well.

‘Your idea was that, if you played your cards cleverly, there would be either the most splendid publicity in the affair or a good round sum in your pocket to induce you to keep me out of the picture. That's what I mean by keeping your options open.'

‘I never for a moment–' Miss Pringle fell silent, baffled. She had never, of course, considered the remote possibility of extracting money from Bulkington. It was only too clear, for one thing, that he hadn't any. But it seemed that her actual intention had been lucid to him almost from the first. And this humiliated Miss Pringle. It was like having a reader tumble to the solution of one of her baffling mysteries not much further on than Chapter Four or Five.

‘What you failed to consider,' Captain Bulkington went on, ‘was that the endeavour to coax me into crime might well be criminal in itself.'

‘The endeavour to coax you–?' It came to Miss Pringle that she had, in fact, done something very like this. Fortunately, it had been on an occasion strictly tête-à-tête. ‘You are talking utter nonsense,' she said coldly.

‘Then let us hear a little of the evidence, my dear.' As he spoke, Captain Bulkington moved across his sanctum and made some small movement of a hand which, for the moment, Miss Pringle was unable to interpret. And, immediately, a third voice was heard in the room. But it wasn't, strictly, a
third
voice. It was Miss Pringle's own voice – unrecognisable except by an effort, as one's own recorded voice commonly is.

‘Kidnapping?'
Miss Pringle heard herself say – unmistakably on a note of disappointment.

‘Kidnapping? I'm afraid that kidnapping wouldn't interest me very much. I'd scarcely consider myself competent to work out anything of the kind, or to give you an effective hand at it. Murder is another matter. I could put you on the rails there.'

‘Ha, ha! We understand each other, wouldn't you say?'

‘I am sure we do. Sir Ambrose is to be your victim. He is going to be killed, and the killer is going to get away with it. But just who – I mean, what sort of person – is going to commit the crime? Have you at all thought, for instance, of somebody rather like yourself?'

‘Ha, ha, ha! Kidnapping and murder! How about that?'

‘Arson could be got in, too.'

‘Arson's quite an idea. Yes, arson attracts me.'

‘Captain Bulkington, have you considered what means we might take to launch this joint enterprise?'

‘Suggest you move in here.'

‘It would be best to proceed differently. I suggest that we correspond, but there is one condition which must be observed. We have been led into talking at times almost as if we were contemplating real crime–'

‘Good Lord! But you're entirely right. Extraordinary thing.'

‘A mere shorthand, of course.'

‘Just that. You express it deuced well.'

‘A façon de parler, in fact.'

‘Quite so, quite so.'

‘My own letters will be strictly about the writing of a book. Your own will observe a similar discretion.'

‘Damned good tip. About the money now. Remember some mention of £500? Would that be about right, if we brought the thing off?'

‘For the mere technical know-how for a single simple murder it would be a most adequate remuneration.'

 

Thus confusedly did there come to Miss Pringle an ingeniously cut version of what had been a rambling and predominantly scatty conversation. Such was her perturbation, she was hearing it only imperfectly, perhaps, in its edited form. But two impressions remained with her. It had been reduced to something more or less businesslike in tone. And her own voice, intermittently at least, was heavy with a coarse conspiratorial irony!