Uncle Dynamite (17 page)

‘You’re
coming to the house?’ he gasped.

‘I go
into residence this evening. And, by the way,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘another
small point. I nearly forgot to mention it. My name during my visit will be Brabazon-Plank.
Major Brabazon-Plank, the well-known Brazilian explorer. Don’t forget it, will
you.’

From
between Pongo’s hands, which he had clasped on either side of his head, as if
to prevent it dividing itself into two neat halves like a plaster bust, there
proceeded a low moaning sound. Lord Ickenham regarded him sympathetically and,
in an endeavour to relieve the situation of some of its tenseness, began to
chant in a pleasant baritone an old song hit of his youth. And he was
interested some moments later to find that this, starting as a solo, seemed
suddenly to have turned into a duet. Glancing over his shoulder, he perceived
the reason. Constable Potter was riding up on his bicycle, shouting ‘Hoy!’

Lord Ickenham was always
the soul of courtesy. You had only to shout ‘Hoy!’ at him from a bicycle to
have him drop everything and give you his immediate attention.

‘Ah,
officer,’ he said. ‘You crave an audience?’

Constable
Potter dismounted, and stood for a space bent over the handle-bars, puffing.
His sharp ride, taken at a moment when he was loaded down above the Plimsoll mark
with eggs, bread, tea and kippered herrings, had left him short of breath. Lord
Ickenham, in his considerate way, begged him to take his time.

Presently
the puffing ceased, and Harold Potter spoke.

‘Ho!’
he said.

‘Ho to
you,’ replied Lord Ickenham civilly. ‘Have a cigar?’

With an
austere gesture Constable Potter declined the cigar. A conscientious policeman
does not accept gifts at the hands of the dregs of the criminal world, and such
he now knew this man before him to be.

Ever
since that odd episode in the garden, the reader of this record, the chronicler
is aware, has been in a fever of impatience to learn what it was that sent this
splendid upholder of law and order shooting into his cottage with such curious
abruptness. This can now be revealed. The social lapse which had caused Mrs
Bella Stubbs to purse her lips and comment acidly on his lack of manners had
been occasioned by the fact that he had got the goods on Lord Ickenham. He had
remembered where he had seen him before, and he had hurried indoors to consult
his scrap album and ascertain his name. Having ascertained his name, he had
mounted his bicycle and ridden off to confront and denounce him.

He
fixed Lord Ickenham with a gimlet-like eye.

‘Brabazon-Plank!’
he said.

‘Why,’
asked Lord Ickenham, ‘do you say “Brabazon-Plank” in that strange tone, as if
it were some kind of expletive?’

‘Ho!’

‘Now
we’re back where we started. This is where we came in.

Constable
Potter decided that the time had come to explode his bombshell. On his face was
that hard, keen look which comes into the faces of policemen when they intend
to do their duty pitilessly and crush a criminal like a snake beneath the heel.
It was the look which Constable Potter’s face wore when he was waiting beneath
a tree to apprehend a small boy who was up in its branches stealing apples,
the merciless expression that turned it to flint when he called at a house to
serve a summons on somebody for moving pigs without a permit.

‘Brabazon-Plank,
eh? You call yourself Brabazon-Plank, do you? Ho! You look to me more like
George Robinson of
14 Nasturtium Road, East
Dulwich.’

Lord
Ickenham stared. He removed the cigar from his mouth and stared again.

‘Don’t
tell me you’re the cop who pinched me that day at the Dog Races!’

‘Yus, I
am.’

A
bubbling cry like that of some strong swimmer in his agony proceeded from
Pongo’s lips. He glared wildly at the helmeted figure of doom. Lord Ickenham,
in sharp contra-distinction, merely beamed, like one of a pair of lovers who
have met at journey’s end.

‘Well,
I’ll be dashed,’ he said cordially. ‘What a really remarkable thing. Fancy running
into you again like this. I’d never have known you. You’ve grown a moustache
since then, or something. My dear fellow, this is delightful. What are you
doing in these parts?’

There
was no answering cordiality in Harold Potter’s manner as he intensified the
gimlet quality of his gaze. He was taut and alert, as became an officer who,
after a jog-trot existence of Saturday drunks and failures to abate smoky
chimneys, finds himself faced for the first time with crime on a colossal
scale.

For
that this was the real big stuff he had no doubt whatsoever. All the evidence
went, as he himself would have said, to establish it. On the previous afternoon
that shambling miscreant, Edwin Smith, had insinuated himself into Ashenden
Manor under the alias of Twistleton. This evening along came his sinister
associate, George Robinson, under the alias of Brabazon-Plank. And here they
were together by the roadside, plotting. If you could not call this the Muster
of the Vultures, it would be interesting, Harold Potter felt, to know what set
of circumstances did qualify for that description.

‘What
are
you
doing in these parts, is more like it,’ he retorted. ‘You and
your pal Edwin Smith there.’

‘So
you’ve recognized him, too? You have an extraordinary memory for faces. Like
the royal family. What are we doing in these parts, you ask? Just paying a
country-house visit.’

‘Oh,
yes?’

‘I
assure you.’

‘You
think you are,’ corrected Constable Potter. ‘But a fat lot of country-house
visiting you’re going to do.’

Lord
Ickenham raised his eyebrows.

‘Pongo.’

‘Guk?’

‘I
think the gentleman intends to unmask us.’

‘Guk.’

‘Do you
intend to unmask us, Mr Potter?’

‘Yus.’

‘I
wouldn’t.’

‘Ho!’

There
was infinite kindliness in Lord Ickenham’s voice as he went on to explain
himself. You could see that he felt the deepest sympathy for Constable Potter.

‘No,
honestly I wouldn’t. Consider what will happen. I shall be ejected —‘

‘You’re
right, you’ll be ejected!’

‘— And
my place as judge of the Bonny Babies contest taken by another judge, less
prejudiced in favour of your sister’s little Basil. The child will finish among
the also-rans, and in this event will not your sister make enquiries? And
having made them and ascertained that it was through your agency that I was
disqualified, will she not have a word or two to say to you on the subject?
Think it over, my dear chap, and I fancy you will agree with me that the
conditions for unmasking are none too good.’

It
sometimes happens to a policeman that he is sharply censured by a bench of
magistrates. When this occurs, he feels as if he had been kicked in the stomach
by a mule and the world becomes black. The effect of these words on Constable
Potter was to give him the illusion that he had been censured by half a dozen
benches of magistrates, all speaking at once. His jaw drooped like a lily, and
in a low voice, indistinct with emotion, he uttered the word ‘Coo!’

‘You
may well say “Coo!”‘ agreed Lord Ickenham. ‘I know Mrs Stubbs only slightly, of
course, but she struck me as a woman of high spirit, the last person to mince
her words to the man instrumental in robbing her child of the coveted trophy.
Potter, I would think twice.’

Constable
Potter only needed to think once. For a long instant there was a silence, one
of those heavy silences which seem to be made of glue. Then, still without
speaking, he mounted his bicycle and rode off.

Lord
Ickenham was a fighter who could always be generous to a beaten foe. ‘Amazingly
fine stuff there is in our policemen,’ he said. ‘You crush them to earth, and
they rise again. You think you’ve baffled them, and up they pop, their helmets
still in the ring. However, this time I fancy the trick has been done. There,
in my opinion, pedalled a policeman whose lips are sealed.’

Pongo,
always prone to the gloomy view, demurred.

‘How do
you know? He was heading for the house. He’s probably gone off to tell old
Bostock the whole story.’

‘You
say that because you do not know his sister. No, no. Sealed lips, my dear Pongo,
sealed lips. You have now nothing whatever to worry about.’

Pongo
uttered a mirthless laugh of a quality which would have extorted the admiration
of Bill Oakshott, a specialist in that line.

‘Nothing
to worry about? Ha! With you coming to stay with Hermione’s people under a —
what’s the word —‘

‘Pseudonym?’

‘Pseudonym.
And planning to prowl about busting open cupboards!’

‘Don’t
let that trivial matter give you the slightest anxiety, my dear boy. I shall
attend to that tonight, and then we can all settle down and enjoy ourselves.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes. I
phoned Sally from the inn, and everything is arranged. She will drive over in
my car and be waiting in the garden outside the collection room at one ack
emma. I shall secure the bust and hand it to her, and she will drive off with
it. As simple as that.’

‘Simple!’

‘What
can go wrong?’

‘A
million things. Suppose you’re caught.’

‘I am
never caught. They know me in the Underworld as The Shadow. I wish I could cure
you of this extraordinary tendency of yours always to look on the dark side.’

‘Well,
what other sides are there?’ said Pongo.

The dinner hour was
approaching. In her room, Lady Bostock had finished dressing and was regarding
herself in the mirror, wishing, not for the first time, that she looked less
like a horse. It was not that she had anything specific against horses; she
just wished she did not look like one.

Footsteps
sounded outside the door. Sir Aylmer entered. There was a heavy frown on his
face, and it was plain that something had occurred to disturb his always easily
disturbed equanimity.

‘Emily!’

‘Yes,
dear?’

‘I’ve
just been talking to Potter.’

‘Yes,
dear?’

‘Dam’
fool!’

‘Why,
dear?’

Sir
Aylmer picked up a hairbrush, and swished it. There was a wealth of irritation
in the movement.

‘Do you
remember,’ he asked, ‘the time I played Dick Deadeye in Pinafore at that
amateur performance in aid of the Lower Barnatoland Widows and Orphans?’

‘Yes,
dear. You were splendid.’

‘Do you
remember the scene where Dick Deadeye goes to the captain to warn him his daughter
is going to elope, and won’t come out with anything definite?’

‘Yes,
dear. You were wonderful in that scene.’

‘Well,
Potter was like that. Mystic.’

‘Mystic?’

‘It’s
the only word. Kept hinting that I must be on my guard, but wouldn’t say why. I
tried to pin him down, but it was no use. It was as if his lips had been
sealed. All I could get out of him was that he thought danger threatened us,
probably tonight. What are you wriggling like that for?’

Lady
Bostock had not wriggled, she had shuddered.

‘Danger?’
she faltered. ‘What did he mean?’

‘How
the dickens should I know what he meant, when every time he started to say
anything he stopped as if somebody had clapped a hand over his mouth? I believe
the man’s half-witted. But he did go so far as to advise me to be on the alert,
and said that he was going to lurk in the garden and watch the house
carefully.’

‘
Aylmer
!’

‘I wish
you wouldn’t bellow “
Aylmer
”
like that. You’ve made me bite my tongue.’

‘But,
Aylmer
—‘

‘Thinking
it over, I have come to the conclusion that he must have found out something
further about this impostor who calls himself Twistleton, but why he couldn’t
say so is more than I can imagine. Well, if this so-called Twistleton is
planning to make any sort of move tonight, I shall be ready for him.’

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘What
are you going to do?’

‘Never
mind,’ said Sir Aylmer, rather inconsistently for one who had reproached
Constable Potter for being mystic. ‘My plans are all perfected. I shall be
ready.’

8

The quiet home evening to
which Lord Ickenham had so looked forward had drawn to a close. Curfews had
tolled the knell of parting day, lowing herds wound slowly o’er the lea. Now
slept the crimson petal and the white, and in the silent garden of Ashenden
Manor nothing stirred save shy creatures of the night such as owls, mice, rats,
gnats, bats and Constable Potter. Down in the village the clock on the church
tower, which a quarter of an hour ago had struck twelve, chimed a single chime,
informing Pongo, pacing the floor of his bedroom overlooking the terrace, that
in just forty-five minutes the balloon was due to go up.