The Girl in Blue (19 page)

As had
happened before, he found the atmosphere of the library oppressive. It stifled
his brain powers, such as they were. In the hope that fresh air and exercise
would once again stimulate his little grey cells he rose and informed Crispin
that he was going for a walk.

But
before he could reach the door it opened, and he saw that Chippendale, the
human homing pigeon, had returned.

2

He received chilly glances
from both Jerry and Crispin. There are times when a nephew and uncle with a
great deal on their minds are glad of the addition to their deliberations of a
weedy little man who looks like a barnyard fowl, but this was not one of them.

What
particularly irked them was the fact that this fowl impersonator was so plainly
in the best of spirits, looking indeed as if he had just bought the world and
paid cash down for it. That was what in their despondent mood they found so
hard to bear. A melancholy Chippendale they could have endured: to a
Chippendale in tears they might have extended a cordial welcome: but a
Chippendale grinning all over his face in the manner popularized by Cheshire
cats affected them like a knife stab in the breast, and they were about to
clothe this sentiment in words, when the intruder spoke.

‘Got a
bit of good news for you, mates,’ he said, and the bizarre idea that in the
world as at present constituted there could be such a thing as good news held
them speechless. Parted lips and bulging eyes showed how keen was their
interest, but no verbal comment emerged. Except for a difference in clothes
they might have been a couple of Trappist monks listening to a playlet of
suspense on the radio.

Unlike
Crispin, who, it will be remembered, had come to the point without delay,
Chippendale preferred the circuitous approach. For a considerable time he might
have been delivering an address to an audience of teenagers on the subject of
how they should comport themselves when they went out into the great world.
Have courage, he said. Never give up, he said. Tell yourself that it is darkest
before the dawn and that though the storm clouds may lower, the sun will
eventually come smiling through, he said.

But, he
added, courage by itself was not enough. It was also essential to have the
ability to think quick. If you couldn’t think quick when disaster was doing its
stuff, you were sunk. He himself had always been a quick thinker, and in this
matter of the ruddy vicar having got hold of the ruddy miniature he had spotted
the course to pursue. And what was that? ‘I’ll tell you, chums,’ said
Chippendale, humanely putting them out of their suspense. ‘We all want the ruddy
miniature, don’t we. Well, I’ve just been to the ruddy vicar and got it.’

He
paused and seemed to be waiting for comment, but his audience appeared unable
to take in what he had said.

‘Got
it?’ said Jerry.

‘But
how is that possible?’ said Crispin.

‘Everything’s
possible, cocky, if you think quick enough.’

‘You
mean the miniature is in your possession?’

‘I’m
glad you asked me that,’ said Chippendale. ‘Yes, my ruddy possession is just
what it’s ruddy well in.’

They
had assimilated it now, and sharp cries, two in number, burst from their lips
simultaneously. They gazed at him adoringly. There was no longer anything in
their aspect to suggest that they held the view that with the possible
exception of animalculae in stagnant ponds he was the lowest form of life which
civilization had yet produced.

Neither
was slow with his applause. Jerry said Chippendale was a marvel. Crispin
endorsed this opinion. A superman, Jerry said, and Crispin said that that was
just the word he had been groping for. He added that he found it difficult to
understand how even one so gifted could have achieved such a triumph.

‘How
did you manage it?’ said Jerry.

‘I went
to him and pitched the tale.’

‘How do
you mean?’

‘Yes,’
said Crispin. “What tale did you — ah — pitch?’

‘Give
you three guesses.’

‘Please!’

‘Well,
all right,’ said Chippendale, relenting. ‘I told him the girl in the picture
was the dead spit of a girl I’d loved and lost owing to her having died in my
arms of what’s the ailment beginning with an l, not leprosy, starts with a leuk.’

‘Leukaemia?’

‘That
was it. I said she had kicked the bucket from an attack of leukaemia and I
wanted the thing to remind me of her, so would he be so kind as to allow me to
buy it before the sale opened and the general purchasing public was let in. I
said it meant everything to me and I was sure he would understand, and he said
Yes, yes, in a very real sense he understood and certainly certainly he would
cough it up. So he did, and I came away with it, wrapped up in a bit of brown
paper. Simple.’

‘Admirable,’
said Crispin, correcting his choice of adjectives. ‘I cannot praise your
ingenuity too highly.’

‘Nor
me,’ said Jerry. ‘It just shows…

He
paused, and Chippendale asked what it just showed.

‘How
right you were about the sun coming smiling through,’ said Jerry. He had been
about to say that it just showed that you can’t judge a man’s brain power by
his looks, because even one who closely resembles the more unpleasant type of
barnyard fowl in appearance can nevertheless possess the mental qualities of a
great general, but he reflected in time that this might give offence. ‘What
have you done with the thing?’

‘I’ve
got it stowed away. I suppose I’d better give it to Mr Scrope to take care of.’

Crispin
agreed that that would be best, and Chippendale said he would attend to it in
due course.

‘But
first there’s one little matter I’d like disposed of. I wonder,’ he said,
addressing Jerry, ‘if you remember me telling you that Constable Simms has
trouble with his feet?’

Jerry
assured him that he had not forgotten. He had been at something of a loss, he
said, to see how the officer’s misfortune, though of medical interest, fitted
in with the scheme of things. The information, he thought, could more appropriately
have been confided to a professional chiropodist than to himself.

‘What’s
wrong with his feet?’

‘During
the morning and early afternoon,’ said Chippendale, ‘nothing, but towards
evening, when he’s done his rounds, they become heated, and this occasions him
considerable discomfort. He didn’t tell me so himself, him and me not being on
those terms, but I had it from the wife of the postman, where he lodges. He
told her, and she told me, that when he’s come to the end of the long long
trail, as the song says, his plates of meat felt as if they was on fire.’

‘Too
bad.’

‘Depends
on how you look at it. I regard it as a bit of luck. Manna in the wilderness,
as you might say.’

“Why
does it strike you like that?’

‘Well,
figure it out for yourself. What’s the first thing a feller does when his
plates of meat are feeling as if they were on fire? He shoves them in cold
water.’

Jerry
conceded this. So did Crispin. But they said they still could not see why this
should be supposed to be of interest to two men who were in no sense intimates
of Constable Simms.

‘Scarcely
know him by sight,’ said Jerry. ‘What have his incandescent plates of meat got
to do with us?’

‘You’ll
find out all in good time,’ said Chippendale. He spoke with the quiet patience
of a teacher in an elementary school who is having a difficulty in explaining
something obvious to two pupils who are slow in the uptake but is determined to
drive it into their thick heads. ‘Do you know the brook?’

Crispin
continued fogged. He said he had a friend of that name, but had not seen him
for years.

The
brook that runs into the lake,’ said Chippendale, losing his patience a little.

‘Yes,
yes, of course I know that brook.’

‘Well,
after he’s done his last round, Simms goes and takes off his boots and sits
beside it and lets the water run over his feet.’

‘His
plates of meat, you mean,’ said Jerry.

‘It’s
the same thing,’ said Chippendale, now openly impatient. ‘One drops into this
habit of talking rhyming slang. The point I’m trying to establish is that
Constable Simms sits there dabbling his extremities in the brook.’

‘So
what?’

‘So
anybody who wanted to could creep up behind him and give him a push and immerse
him.’

Jerry
had no difficulty in following what was in his mind. He remembered what the
speaker had said about lowering Constable Simms’s pride to the dust. Such an
immersion would undoubtedly go far towards accomplishing this. Once again he
was compelled to admire the man’s grasp of strategy and tactics.

‘When
are you going to do it?’ he asked almost with reverence.

The
question plainly surprised Chippendale.

‘Who,
me?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to do it. Why, lord love a duck, I’d be the prime
suspect, my relations with the son of a what-not being so strained, and if I
hadn’t an unbreakable alibi I’d be for it. It’s a job for one of you two. You’d
better toss for it.’

This
seemed reasonable to Jerry. He, Crispin and Chippendale were allies, as closely
linked together as those boys of the Old Brigade who stood steadily shoulder to
shoulder, and he did not consider that it was asking too much of an ally to
suggest that he should push a policeman into a brook. It was just one of those
trifling good turns which allies are entitled to expect of one another. If one
of the three Musketeers had asked the other two Musketeers to push Cardinal
Richelieu into the Seine, the other two Musketeers would have sprung to the
task with their hair in a braid.

Looking
at Crispin and hoping from him a similar endorsement of the plan, he was
astonished to read in his face an unmistakable reluctance to co-operate. It
would not be putting it too strongly to say that Crispin was aghast. When he
spoke, his utterance, though only a monosyllable, showed this.

‘What!’

‘You
heard, cocky.’

‘I
would not dream of doing such a thing.’

‘Well,
you’d better start dreaming, or you won’t get that miniature. I’ll take it up
to London myself and collect the whole two hundred your brother Bill is
offering for it. Treat me right, and you’ll have your cut. Refuse to do the
simplest little thing I ask you to, and not a penny do you get. So let’s hear
from you, chum.’

Jerry
added his weight to the Chippendale cause.

‘I
think you’d better, Uncle Crispin.’

‘You
bet he’d better.’

‘You
might win the toss.’

‘Of
course he might.’

‘And
even if you don’t win, what’s there to worry about? The thing’ll only take you
a minute. Just one good shove.’

‘Easy
as dipping a bit of bread into your gravy.

‘And if
he catches you, you can say you were merely giving him a friendly pat on the
back and your hand slipped.’

To say
that these arguments, sound though they were, convinced Crispin would be an
exaggeration. He continued to feel as if he were playing a stellar role in a
particularly unpleasant nightmare. But Chippendale’s frank statement of what he
intended to do if his wishes were not respected carried more weight than the
natural reluctance to treat an officer of the law as a bit of bread.

‘Very
well,’ he said in a low, husky voice.

‘That’s
the spirit,’ said Jerry, and Chippendale, all sunshine again, agreed that that
was the spirit.

‘Then
away we go,’ he said. ‘I’ll flip, and you call.’

He flipped.

‘Heads,’
muttered Crispin.

‘And
tails it is,’ said Chippendale.

‘Tough
luck,’ said Jerry. ‘Well, I think what I had better do is nip up to London and
acquaint Uncle Bill with the latest developments. He ought to find them not
without a certain interest.’

He left
with the object of looking up trains. Chippendale remained to give that word of
advice which is so essential to a novice in the art of pushing policemen into
brooks.

‘Did
you ever read those stories about a Red Indian chief called Ching something?’
said Chippendale. ‘I forget his name, but the thing I remember about him is
that he never let a twig snap beneath his feet, and that’s what I strongly
advise you to do. Don’t go saying to yourself that anyone as fatheaded as Simms
is bound to be hard of hearing, because I happen to know he’s not. Only the
other day when he was throwing his weight about at the Goose and Gander I
alluded to him, speaking to a friend in a quiet undertone, as an overbearing
piece of cheese, and he overheard and made quite a thing of it. He’ll be right
on the key veeve if you start snapping twigs, so watch your step. Chingachgook,
that was the name of that Indian chief, though I admit it doesn’t seem likely.
Well, I ask you. Imagine if you were having your baby christened at the church
here and when the vicar said “Name this child” you said “Chingachgook”. He’d
send for Constable Simms and have you run in for drunk and disorderly. And now
we’ve got back to the subject of Simms, bear in mind that he tips the scale at
about sixteen stone, so you’ll have to give him a good hard push. Get every
ounce of weight and muscle into it.’