Carson's Conspiracy (20 page)

‘Punter.'

‘Of course – Punter. Would Punter be inclined to think of you as a wealthy woman?'

‘Oh, yes – I think so. Mrs Punter has said things rather suggesting that. But I don't want to talk about Punter. He has been rather funny lately.'

‘Funny?'

‘Yes, nasty. Did I say funny? I meant nasty. As if he had something waiting for me.'

‘Would it be as if he were proposing to get you under his thumb?'

‘Oh, yes – just that.' Mrs Carson gave this assent with alarming and senseless gaiety. ‘How interesting that you should know about Punter!'

‘I think I'd like to know a little more. I'll drop in on him as I go out.'

 

Punter was sitting in his pantry, with a glass of what might have been Madeira in front of him. He had admitted Appleby to the house with his normal comportment, but now he didn't get to his feet. It was as if he had instantly sensed a changed relationship.

‘I intend to ask you some questions,' Appleby said.

‘The hell you do! Who do you think you are? Pretending to be a policeman again?'

This was interesting. Appleby decided that, so far as Garford House went, Punter was on the eve of asking for his cards. Presumably accompanied by his wife, he proposed to leave those proud towers to swift destruction doomed. But, first, he was going to treat himself to a little insolence all round. Appleby took no exception to this. It would make it the easier to get the man off-balance.

‘No,' Appleby said. ‘You may reassure yourself I don't intend to turn policeman again.'

‘Then you've no business here. Clear out, Mr Nosy Parker.'

‘If I clear out, the police move in. They'll be interested in putting you in gaol, my friend. I am not. So you're in luck that it is I who am in this room with you. I'm prepared to treat you as quite unimportant. And that's generous, wouldn't you say? But I do intend to have a little information from you.'

Punter considered these propositions in silence for some seconds. They were having an effect on his complexion. And when he sought to recruit himself from the glass in front of him, his hand wasn't quite steady. Appleby noted these signs with satisfaction.

‘So here goes, Punter. Just why did you contrive to bring that newspaper paragraph to Mrs Carson's attention?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.' Punter was clearly a startled man.

‘Come, come. We mustn't waste time. You were under observation, Punter.' Appleby said this as if an entire crime squad had been lurking round that arbour. ‘But, if you like, I'll start elsewhere. You've only just discovered, haven't you, that Mrs Carson isn't worth a penny?'

‘No more she is, the old bag. Nor Carson either, by now, if you ask me.'

‘That is a most satisfactory reply. I'm pleased with you, Punter. And, now, an important question. You've been operating merely on the side, I take it? Yes or no.'

‘Yes.' Punter's reply, if sulky, had been immediate.

Appleby had employed a technical expression, and the man had automatically responded to it.

‘In some eavesdropping way, you got hold of the notion that Mr Robin Carson has been kidnapped. You decided to panic Mrs Carson into paying out money that would free him – without consulting her husband, and in some fashion that would land it quickly in your own pocket. It's a regular underworld trick, and it comes off surprisingly often. Speed and shock-tactics are, of course, the essence of it.'

‘You seem to know a bloody lot.'

‘Yes, I do. And what you didn't know is that Mrs Carson on her own doesn't command a bean. Right?'

Punter considered this with an incongruous effect of leisure.

‘Yes' he said.

‘In other words, you are an incompetent small-time crook. And that's the whole story. You actually know nothing whatever about what has happened either to Mr Robin Carson or to his father. Right?'

‘Yes – Sir John.'

‘What you will now do is this: you will go to Mrs Carson and, with proper respect, say that you and your wife are obliged to leave her service at once. Without, needless to say, any further payment of wages. You will then pack up and quit – both of you. Incidentally, I am acting very improperly in making this arrangement. It is simply that I am disinclined to have Mrs Carson suffer the disturbing spectacle of policemen huddling her butler in handcuffs into a van. Good morning.'

 

‘So that's Punter,' Appleby said to Judith at lunchtime. ‘An irrelevance, essentially, and not a very agreeable one at that.'

‘And you're just allowing him to fade away?'

‘Just that.'

‘Isn't it rather letting him loose on society at large?'

‘I suppose it might be viewed as that. But I haven't become an accessory after the fact, you know. There
isn't
any fact. One couldn't hope to make any charge stick on the man. It isn't a crime to ensure that a daft woman sees something in a newspaper.'

‘So, in fact, your bullying him into confessing his design and agreeing to quit was just a bluff?'

‘Absolutely so.'

‘You're to be congratulated, John. And now you can get on with it. After the irrelevant, the relevant.'

‘Yes, indeed. I wonder whether I might go over to Upton Grange and have a word with Mary Watling? I've rather hesitated about that. The Lelys brought the girl to tea, but we don't really know the Watlings very well. And I have no real standing in the affair. Colonel Watling is rather a high-metalled old chap, and might consider it a damned impertinence. Perhaps it had better be one of Pride's more tactful people.'

‘I doubt whether the Watlings would much care to have a superior bobby inquiring into their daughter's behaviour. There seems to be a mystery about that, which the elder Watlings may be aware of and not greatly care for.'

‘Precisely my own condition. Robin's mother told you that her son is engaged to the girl – whether formally or informally, we don't know – and that the engagement was his main reason for coming to England. That was the way of it, wasn't it?'

‘I think it was, more or less. But it was only a telephone call, you'll remember. And the woman does talk in a wandering sort of fashion.'

‘She does, indeed. And Mary Watling doesn't seem to talk at all. She said nothing whatever about it when the Lelys brought her here. She seemed not very much to like even a bare reference to Mrs Carson with her milk and superior potatoes, and the moment Robin himself was mentioned, she got up and wandered off into the garden.'

‘I noticed that. It all suggests, John, that she mightn't greatly relish your politely inquisitive call.'

‘I don't think I'd be worried by that. Here are grave matters more or less dumped on my lap, and here is young Miss Watling just possibly able to throw some light on them. Incidentally, if there's any truth whatever in the story of an engagement, or even attachment, she must have heard enough by now to be a very worried child. She might welcome me.'

‘That's true. And you'd be two worried people together.'

Appleby appeared a little startled by this remark. He even got to his feet, walked to the window, and surveyed the garden. Solo was just visible, sitting on a barrow and waving his arms in the air. Did the boy want to be rescued from something? Was he, as in the poem, not waving but drowning? Appleby saw that Solo was merely at war with a wasp, bee, or harmless fly. He turned back to Judith.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I'm more worried than I was. It comes of having a thought or two about what Tommy calls the second kidnap. There's something wrong about it. On the strength of our slight acquaintance with him, would you be inclined to call Carl Carson a guileless character?'

‘Far from it.'

‘Exactly so. Yet here he is, behaving with a kind of imbecile innocence that would do credit to his wife. He piles into a car a small fortune in a highly negotiable form, and drives off with it to keep a lonely rendezvous with some crooks. I ask you.' Appleby paused on this, rather as if surprised at having produced an uncharacteristic colloquialism. ‘And the blood, Judith. The bloody blood!'

‘Blood is bloody, I suppose – except on the stage, when it's a little bag of suitably tinted vinegar, waiting to be pricked by the villain's dagger.'

‘It's that, is it? I've sometimes wondered. But the point about this blood is that it's pretty well unique. Could anything be more pat?'

‘Be what?'

‘P-a-t:
pat
. It's the sort of thing that just doesn't happen. Or not in real life. You might find it in a
roman
policier
. Like that haemophiliac's blood somewhere in Dorothy Sayers.'

For a moment this reduced Lady Appleby to silence. It was the first intimation she had ever received of her husband's having read a detective story. And before she could speak, there was the sound of a telephone bell.

‘That damned instrument's beginning to plague us,' Appleby said irritably. ‘I'll take it.'

 

‘John?'

‘Yes, Tommy.'

‘That cable. They've just traced it. Or, rather they haven't.'

‘Explain.'

‘It's amazing – isn't it – what the boffins can produce for one nowadays? Find a thing for you in no time. Find a non-thing in a matter of days. During the period you specified, Carl Carson received no cable, and no telephone call either, from America. What do you make of that?'

It was only for a second that Appleby had to search for an answer.

‘A lot,' he said.

‘What's that?'

‘I think I make quite a lot of it. Any further development?'

‘Not a thing. They've had a hundred men crawling over that patch of…'

‘Of course they have. But not including Mycroft.'

‘What's that?'

‘No matter, Tommy. I'll be in contact with you again soon. And thank you very much.'

 

 

William Lockett was now installed as Hoobin's second assistant, and he turned up at Long Dream every day. That he bore at least a secondary character as what might be called a secret agent was a fact which had rapidly become barely dissimulated between his new employer and himself.

‘Chaotic,' William reported to Appleby a couple of days after the disturbing discovery about the non-existent cable. ‘That's us at bleeding Garford House. My dad's given his notice to the old girl, and he'll begin to draw his pension next week. We'll be out of the cottage, I reckon, as soon as that Pluckworthy gets his paws on the works and his snout in the trough.'

‘Pluckworthy? Has Mrs Carson sent for him?'

‘Yesterday, she did. She told my dad so. The ruddy Punters have cleared out like the place had been hit by the Black Death, and Mrs C doesn't know how to boil herself an egg. Forgotten about it, I suppose, since she joined the gentry. Born in a back-kitchen, is my dad's notion of Mrs C. And the late C himself, like enough.'

‘Do you mean you think Mr Carson is dead?'

‘It's the general notion, that. Pluckworthy's arriving today. The sorrowing widow says he'll pull things together. More likely he'll pocket the ancestral Carson silver, if you ask me. I've had about six words with him in my life, and I didn't like any of them. One of nature's wide boys is Pluckworthy.'

‘There must be lawyers, William, who have some duty to protect Mrs Carson's interests.'

‘They'll have a hard row to hoe, my dad would say. The woman's that moon-struck a man might be sorry for her.'

‘Yes, I think a man might be that. If there's trouble about the cottage, William, let me know. There may be more law to that than they reckon on.'

‘Sir,' William Lockett said, and went off to join Solo.

 

Peter Pluckworthy had been a good deal on Appleby's mind, and he had been inclined to think it highly desirable to contact him. Now it appeared possible to do so before the day was out. So, after tea, Appleby got in the car and drove over to Garford. It was Pluckworthy himself who answered the bell.

‘Oh, hallo, Sir John,' he said. ‘Do come in.' And he drew the door fully open with what was perhaps designed as a symbolic unreserve. ‘Cynthia's lying down. She's in a sad way, poor soul. I've come over to help her if I can.'

‘Perhaps you can help me too.'

‘I'll be delighted.' Pluckworthy said this with a quick cordiality in which he himself appeared to be conscious of a false note. And he switched at once to something faintly sardonic. ‘Am I to understand, Sir John, that you are what's called helping the police with their inquiries?'

‘After a fashion, yes. They may be asking you to do it, too.'

‘Then do come in.' Pluckworthy's eyes had narrowed. ‘Let me get you a drink, and we'll have a chat.'

They went into the same small room in which Appleby had previously conferred on the perplexities of the Carson affair, and Pluckworthy at once fetched drinks. Appleby accepted this hospitality without demur, since to have declined might have seemed like a declaration of war which could yet prove wholly misconceived.

‘Any police developments,' Pluckworthy asked easily, ‘in this wretched affair?'

‘I can tell you of one development at once. Your employer told a blank lie about Robin's heralding his arrival in England. He told Humphry Lely, the man who painted his portrait, that he'd had a cable from his son. He hadn't.'

‘And that's important?'

‘To my mind, Mr Pluckworthy, it's like the rotating of a kaleidoscope. The whole picture changes. I have concluded that the entire story of kidnap and ransom is moonshine.'

If Sir John Appleby was astonished to hear himself say this (and he was), he had the satisfaction of seeing that Peter Pluckworthy was at least equally startled. Nevertheless, the young man's response was notably prompt.