Carson's Conspiracy (12 page)

‘You'd have to get together your own tools – including one or two power-tools. Power-tools always impress distressed gentry. Not too difficult, that. And then there's only one further step, and it's no doubt the tricky one. Organize your transport.'

‘A pram, maybe. Sometimes you see a tramp going along with one of them.' William was now being his own power tool as he twisted the nuts tight with the simple implement known as a spider.

‘But you won't be a tramp. You'll be a garden contractor.'

‘Jack down the crate, and another turn on the nuts. If the pressure's right in your spare, you're on the road… I'll say you talk more sense than some.' For the first time, William hesitated a little. ‘You'll be over this way again?'

‘Probably not for quite some time. If you're interested, come to Dream one morning, and we'll have another word about it. But no commitments.'

‘I'll think.' William uttered this as one who makes a handsome concession. He had disengaged the jack, and given a ritual kick at the spare tyre. ‘That's a quid,' he said.

Appleby handed over the quid. To add a second would, he decided, be an act of possibly offensive benevolence. He then realized that his zeal in thinking up a career for William Lockett had caused him to pass over a point of some interest in their discussion.

‘By the way,' he said, ‘why should my suggesting that Mr Carson might take you on full-time strike you as funny? It seems a perfectly reasonable idea to me – particularly as you and your father are used to working together.'

‘What do you know? The man's clean busted – just as much as this bloody service station.'

‘Busted? Who are you talking about?'

‘Carson, of course. That bastard of a butler told my dad there's not a doubt about it. All sudden-like. The Rolls went yesterday. And the day before, Punter says, it was some of the pictures. Carson told him they were going to be cleaned. I ask you! Who ever heard of cleaning pictures – like they might be your best pants? Bankrupt, that's your Carson. Full time, indeed! Like enough, it's what he himself will be doing in clink.'

Appleby considered this surprising communication on its merits. They scarcely seemed substantial merits. Pictures do get cleaned. If of sufficient importance, they are sometimes lent to galleries and exhibitions. Even Rolls-Royces have to be serviced. Or one may be taken away in order that, a few days later, an even grander one may take its place. Carson was probably not very popular with his retainers. Marked prosperity emanating from a mysterious region of intricate financial operations was liable to be suspect alike to sophisticated and unsophisticated intelligences. And so on. William might very well be talking nonsense. But Appleby found himself not very confident about this. And if Carson's peace of mind was simultaneously under threat from two quarters – this of looming business disaster on top of the disappearance of his son – his very evident unease would be amply accounted for.

‘Dad will be all right,' William was saying as he wiped his hands on a cotton rag. ‘If he's as careful as hell, that is. His pension's coming along, and he has a bit put by. But it won't exactly be two at the pub.'

‘All the more reason for thinking about what I've said.' Appleby spoke briskly as he got into his car. ‘And thank you very much for your help.'

 

Driving on, Appleby found himself rather puzzled by his own behaviour. William Lockett was probably a decent enough lad, deserving of the chance of continued employment. But Appleby was not by temperament any sort of travelling philanthropist, so how was his interest in the young man to be explained? The answer proved not hard to find. What was operative in him wasn't an interest in William at all. It was an interest in the Carsons of Garford House, and anything he could hear about them. Almost without being conscious of the fact, he had developed a considerable curiosity in that direction. But there was something more positive to it than that. Obscurely, but insistently, he had a sense of having failed to put two and two together. And that was something that a detective – even in retirement and much taken up with the complexities of local history – ought not to do.

On the remainder of the drive to Dream Appleby pursued these unsatisfactory thoughts. During that final phase of his career in which he had administered the Metropolitan Police his wife had sometimes made fun of what she called his retentive nose for a mystery. It had been fair enough, since he had undeniably devoted a good deal of diplomatic skill to masking a continuing and unseemly interest in mere murder and mayhem. And the impulse was with him still. In the rural seclusion in which he now lived sensational crime was undeniably in short supply. But what might be called puzzles did turn up. Carl Carson was lodging himself in Appleby's head as a puzzle of sorts – and as a result Appleby had taken on at least a small domestic problem. The notion of recruiting William Lockett to back up the horticultural efforts of the aged Hoobin and his nephew Solo was perfectly rational in itself – yet he had to acknowledge that it simply wouldn't have occurred to him if William Lockett hadn't happened to live with his stepfather at Garford. The gardens at Dream weren't what they had been once upon a time; the topiary, for example, had gone; the tennis-court, now seldom in use, had turned bumpy. But quite a lot was in reasonable order, and considerable labour was required to keep it so. He supplied a good deal himself, but nevertheless Hoobin was perhaps entitled to be helped out a little more than he was. Hoobin, however, was himself the small domestic problem. He might take a dark view of young Lockett. Appleby was reflecting on this as he turned the Rover into his drive. Fifty yards on, he had to pull up sharply.

This was because of Solo. Solo was standing in the middle of the drive, his body canted forward in the effort to edge a Dutch hoe through a clump of dandelions. Or that was how it looked. But Solo, of course, was asleep. Falling asleep in unlikely postures and amid abrupted activities was Solo's forte. Hoobin, although expending much energy on loudly dratting the boy when he was awake, stoutly maintained that his nephew's precarious health necessitated the utmost caution on his employers' part when they judged it essential to rouse the youth from his slumbers. Appleby, whose instincts were always humane, at times indulged this view of the matter. So he climbed out of the Rover now, advanced upon the virtually Ephesian sleeper, and laid a cautious hand upon his shoulder.

‘Solo,' he said gently, ‘wake up.'

Rather surprisingly, Solo woke up at once. For some seconds he glanced at Appleby vacantly and without expression. Then – faintly but unmistakably – his features took on a look of malicious glee. (This – Appleby was accustomed to remark – constituted the only reliable evidence that Solo and Hoobin were indeed in some blood-relationship.)

‘Cump'ny', Solo said with relish.

‘What's that?'

‘Cump'ny – up at house.'

‘Oh, I see.' In relation to Long Dream Manor and all its policies both Hoobin and Solo indulged extreme territorial feelings. All visitors were intruders and a disaster – and this view they never doubted was that of their employers too. So Solo now regarded himself as enjoying the satisfaction of conveying ill tidings.

‘Do you know who they are?' Appleby asked. Solo shook his head, and then his eyes appeared about to close again. Appleby gently possessed himself of the hoe, dealt with the dandelions, and carefully restored Solo to an approximately perpendicular posture. ‘Carry on,' he said encouragingly. And he got back into the Rover.

He put the car away in its garage and walked towards the house – wondering, although without the gloom taken for granted by Solo, who had called. Hoobin, as usual, was sitting by the door of his potting shed. The hour having drawn on towards teatime, Hoobin (always, as he liked to describe himself, a perusing man) had advanced far into his diurnal task of consuming the
Daily
Mirror
. Politics, pugilism, the varying fortunes of race horses – all of them topics upon which he was completely ignorant – he had fingered his way through with equal care. So he could afford the diversion of articulate speech.

‘Cump'ny', Hoobin said.

‘So Solo has told me. Do you know who they are?'

‘Furriners.'

For a moment Appleby had the agreeable thought that he was perhaps being visited by
confrères
retired from the
Sûreté nationale
. Then he recalled that, just as Judith regarded as neighbours any persons of substance within half a day's journey of Long Dream Manor, so did Hoobin regard as foreigners the entire human race not actually resident in the tiny hamlet of Long Dream itself. Appleby had never, indeed, heard Hoobin speak, like rustics in Thomas Hardy, of the distant kingdom of Bath. But had he mentioned that he had that day visited both Boxer's Bottom and Sleep's Hill (to say nothing of having passed through Snarl, Sneak, and Little London) Hoobin would indubitably regard it as an expedition as recklessly far-flung as that announced in the opening lines of the
Odyssey
.

‘Do you know any of them?' Appleby asked – perhaps wondering whether the company was one into which he must hasten.

‘Parson.'

‘But you wouldn't call Dr Folliott a foreigner, Hoobin?'

‘All parsons be a bit aside from folk. And there's one o' they from Upton. T'wench, it be. And the artist-creature and his wife that visit times enough.'

‘Mr and Mrs Lely, you mean?' Appleby wondered whether Hoobin ought to be reproved for calling Humphry Lely an artist-creature, but decided that nothing markedly derogatory had been intended.

‘Them it be. And all sitting under the cedar on lawn. A dangerous tree, that cedar's coming to be.' Hoobin offered this information with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Biding their tea, all of them. And parson maybe thinking to wait on for something else.'

‘Well, I must go and join them.' Appleby had again considered the propriety of rebuking Hoobin for this last aspersion, and had concluded that it would be injudicious to do so. Moreover, there was a bull to take by the horns. ‘Hoobin,' he asked, ‘do you know a young man called William Lockett?'

‘Old Lockett be beknown to me – we being colleagues here afore your time, Sir John.' Stray words culled from his perusals occasionally filtered into Hoobin's vocabulary. ‘Along o' Heyhoe.'

‘I knew Heyhoe, Hoobin. Although not for long. And Spot.'

‘Spot? The dratted creature that was for ever casting a shoe.'

‘So he was, Hoobin. Old times, those.' Appleby felt that he had now successfully chatted up his aged gardener, and might proceed to the nub of the matter. ‘William Lockett is old Mr Lockett's stepson.'

‘So he be. But I take no account o' stepsons. Queer cattle, times enough, Sir John. Unholy incest be at the back o' them, often as not.'

‘This young William Lockett has picked up a little gardening at Garford.' Appleby chose to ignore the serious moral issue upon which Hoobin was plainly minded to advance. ‘And now he may be looking for occasional work that way elsewhere. He's probably coming over to talk to me about it.' Appleby paused on this, but the information was received in ominous silence. ‘He might make it easier for Solo.'

‘What that Solo needs is the taking of a switch to him. Not that I han't leathered his arse often enough.' Hoobin produced this perhaps mildly exaggerated statement of his domestic sanctions and sanctities with complete confidence. ‘But the poor weevil creature will keep falling asleep. And then it's dangerous.'

The Applebys having obtained medical opinion discounting this apprehension, Appleby thought it unnecessary to enter upon it now.

‘You can have a word with this William yourself, Hoobin,' he said, ‘and judge whether he seems sober and reliable. You're a man who notices such things.'

‘That I be.' Hoobin was plainly mollified. But then he rallied. ‘Happen he can scythe?' he asked.

‘I didn't ask him. But I'd suppose not. There are few left that have your skill with a scythe, Hoobin. Solo can't scythe.'

‘Give Solo a scythe!' Hoobin was horrified. ‘Afore you looked, he'd have the legs off a centipede – and his own as well. Carting muck in a barrow: that's what I'll set your young Lockett to.'

‘It's something he particularly likes. The stink of the stuff, he says, isn't as bad as the stink of petrol. A part-time job in a garage has packed up on him.'

‘I'll try him, Sir John.' Hoobin was suddenly magnanimous. ‘Things being that bad there at Garford with them unholy Carsons.'

‘Things bad at Garford, Hoobin?' Appleby asked this sharply. ‘Just what do you mean by that?'

‘Every penny gone, they say, and the bailiffs like to move in at any time. It's right enough this lad should be looking to himself.'

‘Have you any evidence for that?' It seemed remarkable to Appleby that here should be the same presage of improbably drastic doom at Garford House as he had received little more than an hour ago from William Lockett himself. But he knew that Hoobin did of an evening frequent the Raven Arms in the village. The gossip of the folk would become quickly known to him.

‘And fair's fair,' Hoobin went on, unheeding. ‘It mayn't be the Carson-body's fault, for all I know. Not with all them crooks and cheats in stock exchanges and such like places. What with it coming all that bad, the lad William deserves his chance. I'll try him, that I will. For I'm an open-minded man, I am. And it's the perusing does it, Sir John.' Upon this elevating thought, Hoobin picked up his
Daily Mirror
again. ‘There do seem to have been a terrible great child-murder in Houndsditch,' he said. ‘There be a whole column on it. I've been reading about it, I have, this half hour and more.'