Gay Phoenix (7 page)

He found, oddly enough, that what at present chiefly rankled with him was the disrespectful character of Butter’s parting words half an hour before. If this horrible man was indeed to become his partner – he told himself – he would at least insist that he keep a civil tongue in his head. But was he really going to put up with Butter? That was the question.

The simple course with Butter was to make away with him. There was a great deal to be said for this, and Povey considered the possibilities with no strong sensation of novelty. He had quite often evolved vague plans for murdering somebody (particularly his brother Charles), and if he had never got round to the actual deed this was perhaps because of a distracting plurality of candidates at any one time. As in certain sorts of reprehensible reverie, one victim tended to melt into another as the daydream wandered about. But the present actual situation was quite different from any he had ever been implicated in before. Butter stood in a unique relationship to him, unshared by anybody else in the world. Into the mind of no other living soul whatever had there come so much as a suspicion that Arthur Povey was alive and Charles Povey dead.

Side by side with this perception there must be placed another all-important fact. The annals of fraud no doubt contain the names of impostors and pretenders whose identity had been challenged in one way or another and who had yet successfully maintained their impersonation. Given a little more luck, the celebrated Tichborne Claimant himself might have emerged triumphant from one of the longest trials in English legal history. The vast majority of such hopefuls, however, are virtually done for the moment any responsible person urges a serious doubt about them. Povey was quite clear that he was in this category. Hard as he had worked on the subject, he knew far too little about far too much of Charles’ life to stand the faintest chance with a judge and jury.

It was true that Butter was a person of very slender consideration. Indeed, it wouldn’t at all surprise Povey to learn that the man had a criminal record. Supposing Butter did try to expose the imposture, he wouldn’t at first find it easy to gain a hearing. But he was quite cunning enough to take this into account, and to frame his plans accordingly. He would set the press on the scent. He would probably even make money out of the thing, and be revelling on the strength of it amid fleshpots and harlots while Povey himself was languishing in jail.

This was an intolerable picture, which swung Povey strongly in the direction of ingeniously contrived homicide. And at once a further thought sprang up. If to be done at all, twere well it were done quickly. Povey told himself this with rather more cogency, indeed, than Macbeth did. King Duncan had been, as it were, without beans to spill, whereas it was in Butter’s power to upset a whole sizable applecart at any moment. More than this; Butter might at any moment communicate the information which was at present uniquely his, if not to the police, then to some low crony or confederate of his own. Butter would, in fact, be prudent to do something of the sort pretty quickly – or at least to make some arrangement for the future extreme discomfort of Arthur Povey should anything unfortunate happen to Butter himself. It would not escape a man of Butter’s acuteness that he, Povey, was by now harbouring lethal intentions towards him.

Was it already, perhaps, too late? Povey asked himself this question judicially as he watched the wine waiter replenish his glass with Lafite. Could Butter by now be in a position truthfully to assert that, should ill befall him, the wicked and impudent imposture of Arthur Povey would at once, through some agency impossible to identify or circumvent, be revealed to the yet unknowing world?

On the whole, this seemed improbable. Butter’s calamitous discovery was scarcely an hour old; scarcely a further hour would pass before the renewed encounter at the Cock and Bottle. The interval was surely insufficient for Butter to decide with any deliberation upon his best means of ensuring his own safety; moreover the secret upon which he had stumbled was potentially so valuable that he would be unlikely to share it with anybody in any haste; he would be more likely to think in terms of depositing in safe keeping of some sort a sealed letter to be opened in the event of his disappearance or death. Whether veraciously or not, he would almost certainly intimate the existence of such an arrangement to Povey in the near future. But nothing of the kind could have happened yet, and it would be implausible in Butter to assert that it had. Moreover Butter could scarcely apprehend the slightest danger to attend the forthcoming business meeting in a respectable public house.

Could matters be so contrived, however, that this confidence on Butter’s part would turn out to have been misplaced? Was there some neat and safe way of ensuring that the undertakers would be running their tape measure over an obscure hotel employee before the night was out?

This large question was still with Povey as he drank his third glass. He had some quite wild and desperate thoughts. If in the wretched pub opposite the bandstand he contrived the appearance of a drunken quarrel with Butter and bashed his skull in with a pint pot he would probably get off with a stiff sentence for manslaughter. But would it be any less stiff than what came one’s way for forgery, embezzlement and whatever other crimes and misdemeanours were incidental, in the eyes of the law, to the perfectly rational expedient of taking on the identity of a wealthy elder brother?

Povey tried again. Could he suggest to Butter that a desirable privacy for their discussion could be obtained by taking a late evening stroll along the virtually deserted pier, and then at a suitable opportunity simply topple his victim into the sea? Unfortunately Butter wasn’t a fool, and if he agreed to such an expedition – which was unlikely in itself – he would take damned good care of himself in the course of it. In fact any proposal which involved taking Butter unawares was a dead duck from the start.

Another inferior waiter had wheeled up another trolley. Povey stared in a mild nausea at the sticky or glazed or glutinous concoctions it displayed. Some looked so effectively poisonous that he would have given half his fortune to be able to ram Butter’s snout hard into one or other of them. Gloomily, he waved the thing away, and called for Stilton instead. It was just after this had been scooped out for him that he became aware he was being observed.

Often enough in a large restaurant, of course, you are conscious of something of the kind. Another guest – usually a solitary one – finds himself with nothing better to do than to take a perfectly idle interest in you. He studies your feeding habits, or speculates on your bank balance or your sexual tastes. Perhaps the man a few tables away was doing no more than this. Povey was disturbed, all the same, and in a moment he realized why; here was the same person who had appeared to be taking an unnecessary and covert interest in Butter and himself earlier in the evening.

It was possible that the man’s scrutiny proceeded merely from the fact that he believed himself to have recognized, behind the dark glasses, the elusive and mildly interesting Charles Povey. Although extremely wealthy (far wealthier than Arthur in his most sanguine moments had anticipated), Charles had been in no sense a prominent public figure, and identifying him would scarcely be a matter for major excitement. Still, over the past year or so he
had
been getting increasingly into the press – for the simple reason that, not being Charles but Arthur, he had been obliged rather to play up the elusiveness. It was one of the increasing difficulties of the situation that this reputation for major eccentricity was almost bound to grow. It was already turning up in the gossip columns from time to time. So here was a tolerably familiar and unalarming explanation of why this fellow was intermittently staring at him.

Povey was alarmed, nevertheless. His new and shocking situation
vis-à-vis
the abominable Butter was quite enough to account for this; it was a state of affairs that would render anybody jumpy. But some other and obscure factor was at work, and presently it came to him. That afternoon, and while all-unconscious of what impended over him, Arthur Povey had been feeling not only carefree but positively gay, and he had signalized a state of mind not now very familiar to him by entering a flower shop, buying a rose, and causing the young person who sold it to him to arrange it in his buttonhole. It was a pale lemon-yellow rose, perfect in shape, and the young person had named it as a Sir Henry Segrave. Sir Henry Segraves, she added, were rather hard to come by at the moment.

But now the man at the other table was wearing a Sir Henry Segrave too.

There was surely something positively paranoiac in seeing a threat in this. Povey was suddenly less perturbed about that evening’s awkward turn in his affairs than about the general mental condition which his hazardously maintained deception was building up in him. The bleak fact had to be faced that a law of diminishing returns was beginning to operate. More and more anxiety, less and less pleasingly malicious glee. From the start the glee – the keen satisfaction in being so cunning that he could fool the entire world – had really been more potent with him than the gratifications inherent in his new command of everything that a great deal of money could buy. And now he was tiring; that was the truth of the matter. He needed more in the way of periodic let-up than his present plans and policies allowed for. He would have to rethink his total situation – as soon as the present crisis was surmounted. That was the lesson of this edginess about a man who happened to be wearing a buttonhole identical with his own.

But now the man – he was a florid heavily-built man – had caught his eye. A moment later, the man’s gaze shifted to his own right hand, which he raised lightly clenched and nails-upward in front of him; he then employed his other hand to polish the nails lightly with his table napkin. It was a trivial and unobtrusive act, no doubt slightly lacking in elegance. It was also an unusual one. Povey found that he could interpret it in only one way. He had received a signal.

This intuitive conviction was perhaps remarkable in itself, but even more remarkable was Povey’s response to it. Was it his instinct as a mariner telling him he must not neglect to reply? Or did he act as he did because native to him was a certain adventuresomeness, even rashness, prompting him to hazardous courses? Certainly this last propensity had been a factor in the bizarre plan he had formed on board the
Gay Phoenix
. What happened now, however, had a disinterested quality alien to that former occasion. Nothing was to be gained by taking notice of the other proprietor of a choice Sir Henry Segrave. Nevertheless Povey picked up his table napkin, and briefly polished the fingernails of his right hand. It
was
inelegant; indeed, he had an uncomfortable sense of it as positively uncouth. But at least it produced a spectacular result. The man rose from his table, strolled over to Povey’s, and sat down. Povey didn’t find this a welcome development. But whatever its purport, it would at least take his mind off Butter. He found himself producing a casual nod and smile. The two men might have been guests who had struck up just sufficient acquaintance to warrant this informal post-prandial get-together. Povey decided to play up to this conception.

‘Shall we have coffee?’ he asked. ‘And would you care for a glass of brandy?’

‘I don’t mind if I do.’ Although thus acquiescing in Povey’s proposal, the florid man appeared a shade surprised. It was as if Povey didn’t quite rate in his regard as entitled to take the initiative involved. If this guess was accurate – Arthur Povey saw – then it couldn’t very well be the wealthy Charles Povey whom this stranger was believing himself to have joined. What was happening, in fact, was not the penetrating of what might be called his outer disguise. Encouraged by this, and obeying the same sort of freakish impulse which had landed him with the fellow at all, Povey made a further hospitable offer.

‘And may I,’ he asked, ‘send for the cigars? The Bolivar Coronas aren’t at all bad.’

‘Well, why not?’ This time, the florid man laughed throatily. ‘Good impression on anybody keeping an eye on us, eh? Goes with your role as a leisured gent well in the lolly. Not that any trailing
is
going on, I’d say. What do you think?’

‘Oh, probably not.’ Povey was finding this odder and odder. Just what false position that injudicious exchange of signals was getting him into he couldn’t at all tell. But it was something to get out of quickly, for he had quite enough on his plate as it was. He was about to say boldly ‘But I’m afraid you’ve made some mistake’, when the florid man spoke again.

‘You weren’t expected until tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But I see you’ve wasted no time, and that’s all to the good. We’re up against a dangerous man.’

‘Ah,’ Povey said. It was the only noise that occurred to him.

‘And a treacherous one, eh? That’s what we have to know. Says he has merely left us, of course. But he’s not to be trusted an inch. A sign of a cough from him, and he’s as good as on the slab. Those are the orders, as you know very well. So have you anything to report in the double-crossing line? If you have – then, by God, it’s curtains for Butter.’

It was a moment before the apocalyptic character of these words registered with Povey. When they did so he felt a little giddy. Indeed, it might almost be said, in the common phrase, that his head swam. His nameless companion, although now sipping his brandy with a colourable appearance of civil amenity, had spoken in a tone of quite unnerving ferocity. It was impossible to believe that he had expressed himself in terms even of facetious exaggeration. He had meant precisely what he said. And the only possible inference was that here sat an atrocious criminal, confederate with other atrocious criminals, and intent upon the destruction of Butter, a former associate, were Butter to be indicted of the slightest disposition to treachery. And through some extraordinary stupidity (such as the most hardened and cunning criminals are said sporadically to evince) this shocking scoundrel (who was now lighting his free cigar without even removing its paper band) had taken it into his head that Povey was in on the act.