Carson's Conspiracy (10 page)

‘I haven't decided about that.' Carson failed to say this very robustly. He could see – although, oddly enough, it was a fresh perception – that Pluckworthy need not, it was true, bear any further functional part in the conspiracy. Unfortunately he was coming to rely on the young man, so that the thought of being on his own so early in the affair was disagreeable to him. He also had an obscure notion that it would be prudent to involve Pluckworthy in rather more than the mere peccadillo of having agreed to cross the Atlantic under an assumed name. He ought to be provided with a more substantial reason for keeping his mouth shut.

‘I haven't decided,' he amplified, ‘about the point at which you'll have earned your keep. I may have some further use for you. And, in any case, you'd better be clear about the rest of the plan.'

‘I am – and it can be put in a few sentences. You raise money to ransom your supposed son. The supposed kidnappers supposedly panic or perhaps double-cross you.' Pluckworthy paused for a moment on this. ‘They supposedly double-cross you first, and nobble both you and your cash.
Then
they supposedly panic, and in some never-to-be-disclosed hole there are supposedly two Carson corpses. It's a shade, macabre, is it not? But so is the sequel: Carl Carson living out a furtive and purposeless life somewhere amid a crowd of dagoes. Any comment?'

‘Two comments, Peter.' Carson pulled himself together, and endeavoured to maintain a firm line. ‘The first being simply that I don't like your tone.'

‘As not being what ought to obtain between gentlemen? You make me laugh. And the second?'

‘The second is that I value your advice, my dear Peter.' Carson contrived to suggest a positive warmth of regard as he made this capitulation. ‘Over every stage of the thing. Just continue to give your mind to it, and I'll make the cash half as much again.'

‘Double.'

‘Double.'

‘The fact is, Carl, that you don't really
see
it. The large and nebulous conception, yes. The concrete action, or series of actions, no.'

‘You mean the details. I'll admit there's some truth in what you say.'

‘Good. I said I'd work it all out. And I have.' Pluckworthy paused again, this time to apply himself to a dish the honest name for which was pickled pork. ‘I can go through it in ten minutes. Just listen.'

 

 

JOHN APPLEBY

 

 

 

‘Those people at Garford,' John Appleby said. ‘I suppose we ought to be asking them to lunch or dinner.'

‘I've had it in mind,' Judith Appleby said.

‘A bit out of turn, their inviting us first. But still.'

‘As you say, but still.' Lady Appleby was always amused by her husband's sense of the social punctilios. ‘One must be civil to one's neighbours.'

‘Do you know, Judith, that I don't think I'd call the Carsons neighbours – simply because I can't see their chimneys from the top of the house? What constitutes one's neighbourhood is an expansible and contractible concept.'

‘What a very philosophical idea! As a matter of fact, I encountered Mrs Carson yesterday. It was in Busby's shop in Linger. She was trying to buy linen sheets, and rather creating because they hadn't any.'

‘Quite right. Surely a linen-draper ought to have no end of linen sheets in his shop.'

‘Busby's shop –
linen
?'

‘Well, yes. We sleep between linen sheets, don't we?'

‘Certainly we do. But they're as old as the hills. I cherish them as I cherish the Sèvres. Incidentally, I had the feeling I mentioned to you after the Carsons' party. That the woman is a bit off her head. She had quite a lot to say to me, as well as to Mr Busby, about needing new sheets for her blue room. She kept on about her blue room, and eventually she explained that she was getting it ready for her son.'

‘Robin Carson. I remember about him. They go over and visit him at sweet little Key Biscayne.'

‘That's right – but now Robin has arrived in England. Mum had a telephone call from him at Heathrow a few evenings previously, to say he was hiring a car and would be on his way to Garford. But he didn't turn up, and hadn't turned up yesterday. I suppose his courage had failed him before the prospect of the family hearth. The poor lady was relieved in a way – about the delay, I mean. It gave her an opportunity to go after sheets and things. But she was beginning to be anxious as well. And she said her husband had gone quite tense and jumpy.'

‘Then perhaps we'd better hold our hand about inviting them until the dilatory Robin has been restored to their bosom. Of course we'll have to ask him as well.' Appleby paused on this. ‘I remember her as being quite sensible about their son. But definitely a bit dotty in some other regions of discourse.'

‘You sometimes sound a bit dotty yourself, John. Regions of discourse, indeed! The Carsons struck me as not having a single general idea between them. It would have been a frightfully boring occasion if Humphry and that nice wife of his hadn't been there.'

‘The Lelys undoubtedly saved us. Which reminds me that I saw Humphry the other day, and he said he'd been painting Carson's portrait. What about your getting a commission to do Mrs C in bronze?'

‘It's a thought.' Judith Appleby, who was a sculptor (or sculptress) seemed unenthusiastic before this idea. ‘Have you discovered anything much about Carson himself?'

‘No – and I can't say I've tried. Arthur Watling – who's Carson's neighbour in my modest sense of the term – has mentioned him to me once or twice. Arthur called him a clever little city chap. For Arthur “clever” is quite as dismissive a word as “little”, don't you think? It's my impression that Carson is pretty prosperous in what's possibly a ramshackle way. Share-pushing type. Promotes things.'

‘He belongs, in fact, to the great entrepreneurial class. I wonder whether Robin follows in his footsteps.'

‘You can ask the young man himself, when he finally turns up and is introduced to us.'

‘I suppose he
will
turn up?'

Lady Appleby had produced this question abruptly and as if it rather surprised her. Sir John Appleby, who was about to enter upon his daily half-hour with
The Times,
put the paper down again on the breakfast-table.

‘Ah!' he said.

‘The woman was surely quite right to be worried about the non-appearance of her son. He telephones that he has arrived, and then no more is heard of him. One can think of various explanations, some of them merely undutiful. For instance, he may have suddenly gone off after a promising girl. But if I were the Carsons, I'd be ringing round the hospitals.'

‘Carson may well have done that, without alarming his wife by telling her. She may be a little mad, but he's quite sane and competent. And if he did so and drew a blank, an accident or sudden illness isn't the explanation, since it's almost impossible to imagine anything of the kind that could bring in a casualty there was no means of identifying.'

‘Robin might have been robbed, and stripped of anything carrying his name, and be in a coma.'

‘Good heavens, Judith, what a macabre imagination you have! A hospital with that on its hands – and there's probably not a single such case in all England at this moment – doesn't let any inquirer get away without a come-look-see. It's long odds against the missing Robin being anywhere of the sort.'

‘Then where is he?'

‘It's a good question.' Appleby didn't say this with much enthusiasm. ‘Do you know my bet? He took one look at England in this present year of Grace, and bolted back to the USA.'

‘I don't see that as in the least plausible, John. If Robin Carson is a hypersensitive type, he might certainly back hastily out of England. But it wouldn't be from a deplorable frying-pan into an equally deplorable fire.'

‘Out of the frying-pan of Paynim rites into the fire of Mahometry.' Appleby in retirement passed the time with much miscellaneous reading. ‘He'd probably try Kamchatka or the South Pole.'

 

But later that morning Appleby found himself again thinking about the missing Robin Carson. Just why he did so, he didn't clearly know. Many years before, and when cutting that unusual path for himself through the CID to the surprising elevation of Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, he had been a good deal concerned from time to time with missing persons. Perhaps that was it. But just lately Garford House and its inhabitants had interested him too. Judith had been interested in the gardener, who had worked at Long Dream as a boy. He himself had taken notice of the butler, in whom he recognized a criminal type, hopefully reformed. But the employers of these people had attracted a larger speculation. Carl Carson was somehow rather more than just a scantily educated tycoon. Much in him had been commonplace – as when he had been quick to reveal, or pretend, that he was familiarly acquainted with the Lord Mayor of London, or had – to Judith's quite improper amusement – described as his ‘grounds' certain large stretches of lawn interspersed with rectangular beds overfilled with uninteresting modern roses. But, if elusively, there was a strong dash of enterprise in Carson. Commercial enterprise, no doubt. But also, in sudden far-away looks, a hint of something potentially more freakish in that area. He was the sort of man – Appleby told himself – who might one day notice, say, a fire-balloon drifting overhead, and within a fortnight achieve a corner in the manufacture of the things. Fellows with that sort of facility were likely to amass quite a packet in the bank. They were also liable to come a cropper. To come a cropper and bob up again. Carson wasn't a nice man. Probably he wasn't at all a nice man. But there was a good deal there, all the same.

As for Mrs Carson – so ineptly christened Cynthia – her silliness was of an almost endearing kind. ‘A little mad' was no doubt a fair description of her now, although a mad doctor might describe her as no more than neurotic. It was probable that she would eventually go downhill, so that if she had the misfortune to reach her eighties it would be in a state of senile dementia. Appleby felt he had met such Cynthias in old age before – and commonly amid the sort of family misfortunes that lie on the fringes of crime. The Carsons' son, although for some reason long resident in the USA, could be felt as her mainstay in point of an undistorted sense of reality. So if Robin was currently engaged in more or less ditching his parents – whether in favour of metal more attractive or for any other reason – he was a thoroughly unfilial and blameworthy young man.

Thus did Sir John Appleby, a senior citizen tolerably well-seen in human nature, meditate dispassionately on the Carsons of Garford House. He was, as it happened, still doing so when a Rolls-Royce appeared unexpectedly on the drive. When it drew up before the front door it was Carl Carson who stepped out of it. For some seconds Appleby was far from pleased. He supposed that the awkward chap was paying what he'd dimly think of as a courtesy call. But this, he at once decided, was a false scent. Carson's son had disappeared, and Carson, aware of the eminence from which Appleby had retired, had come to seek his advice. That must be it. It wasn't a development Appleby exactly relished. But he reflected that the man might well be in considerable distress, and he hurried out to be properly welcoming.

 

‘I thought I'd just drop in on you,' Carson said.

‘Very nice of you, my dear Carson. Do sit down. Judith will be delighted.'

This last was an unnecessary, and even slightly excessive assurance. When a man turns up on one, there is no call hastily to declare the enchantment of one's wife. But Carson seemed pleased.

‘Cynthia,' he said with a certain solemnity, ‘had the pleasure of running into Lady Appleby yesterday.'

‘Ah, yes – so Judith has told me. Mrs Carson spoke of your son, and of your expecting a visit from him.'

‘Just so. And we're a little surprised, as a matter of fact, that Robin hasn't yet turned up on us. But there's nothing out of the way about it; nothing out of the way, at all.' Carson offered this information not so much easily as airily. ‘Boys will be boys, wouldn't you say?'

Literally received, this appeared to be a glimpse of the obvious, and its application in a larger sense to Robin Carson's non-appearance at Garford was, at least as yet, not for Appleby to comment upon. So he remained silent.

‘Only, you see, my wife is a little nervous about Robin,' Carson pursued. ‘I don't know whether you noticed the fact, but she's decidedly of a nervous type. Highly strung, as they say. A splendid creature, Appleby, but undeniably highly strung.'

This again was a shade difficult to respond to. It did seem fairly clear to Appleby that about Carson himself there hung a distinctly nervous air. And about this there was something indefinably complex. Was the man in a state of anxiety which for some reason – perhaps a notion of proper manly behaviour – he felt obliged to dissimulate? And was he conceivably off-loading this anxiety on his wife? There was a small puzzle here – but Appleby told himself it was a puzzle he felt no particular impulse to resolve.

‘It's no doubt natural,' he said, ‘that Mrs Carson should be a little worried if your son has failed to turn up on an expected date.'

‘Exactly that. And, of course, it's all nonsense. Young people are so thoroughly independent nowadays, wouldn't you say? Robin will judge a few days to be neither here nor there. He probably has a fish or two of his own to fry in London before coming down to dull old Garford.'

‘It's fortunate that you feel no unreasonable anxiety in the matter yourself, Carson. You must be the better able to reassure your wife.' But as Appleby said this he continued to be aware that Carson's nonchalance was assumed. The man's wife had told Judith that he was tense and jumpy, and so he really was. Yet that didn't quite adequately describe the thing. It was almost as if, despite everything he said, Carson was designing to be detected as beset by apprehensions. And why, if he was really not worried about his son, had he turned up at Long Dream now? It could scarcely be, as Appleby had at first imagined, to seek more or less professional advice on how to track down a missing person. But now Carson himself offered an explanation of this.