Plum Pie (23 page)

Suavity, Lancelot felt, was what he must strive for. "It's quite all right," he said obsequiously. "I was locked out.”

"Who are you?"

"My name is Lancelot Bingley. I am staying in the house. I am an artist. I am here to paint Colonel Pashley-Drake's portrait. I would not advise waking him now, but if you enquire of him in the morning, he will support my statement."

"Who are you?"

Annoyance began to compete with Lancelot's embarrassment. If voices asked you questions, he felt, they might at least take the trouble to listen to you when you answered them. His manner took on a stiffness.

"I have already informed you in a perfectly frank manner that my name is Lancelot Bingley and that I am staying in the house in order to paint---"

"Have a nut," said the voice, changing the subject.

Lancelot's teeth came together with a sharp click. Few things are more mortifying to a proud man than the discovery that he has been wasting his time being respectful to a parrot, and he burned with resentment and pique. Ignoring the bird's suggestion-in the circumstances illtimed and lacking in taste-that he should scratch its head, he continued groping for the door and eventually found it.

After that everything was simple. Bounding silently up the stairs, he flung open the door of his room and not bothering to turn on the light flung himself on the bed. Or rather not precisely on the bed but on some squashy substance inside it which proved on investigation to be Colonel Pashley-Drake. Pardonably a little overwrought by his recent exchange of ideas with the parrot, he had mistaken the Colonel's room-first to the left along the corridor-for his own, which, he now remembered, was the second on the left along the corridor.

He lost no time in climbing off his host's stomach, on which he rightly supposed he had been nestling, but it was too late. The mischief had been done. The Colonel was plainly emotionally disturbed. He soliloquised for some moments in some native dialect which was strange to Lancelot.

"What the devil?" he enquired at length, dropping into English.

Inspiration descended on Lancelot.

"I came to ask you about the portrait. I was wondering if you wanted it full length or just head and shoulders," he said, prudently omitting to explain why such a speculation was needed.

His room mate quivered like someone doing one of the modern dances.

"You woke me at this time of night to ask me that!”

"I thought it a point that should be settled."

"No reason why you should come jumping on my stomach."

"No, there," Lancelot admitted, "I perhaps went a little too far. I am sorry for that."

"Not half as sorry as I am. I was dreaming of rogue elephants, and I thought one of them had sat down on me. Do you know what I'd have done if you had played a trick like that on me in the old days in West Africa? I'd have shot you like a dog."

"Really?"

"I assure you. It is routine in West Africa."

"Tell me about West Africa," said Lancelot, hoping to mollify.

"To hell with West Africa," said the Colonel. "Get out of here, and consider yourself fortunate that you aren't as full of holes as a colander."

Lancelot left the room feeling somewhat despondent. During dinner and after it he had flattered himself that he had made a good impression on his host, but something seemed to tell him that he had now lost ground.

And what, meanwhile, of Gladys Wetherby? Working on a sonnet next morning, she was conscious of a strange feeling of uneasiness and apprehension which made it hard for her to get the lines the right length. Ever since she had seen Lancelot off on the train she had been a prey to doubts and fears. She adored him with a passion which already had produced six sonnets, a ballade and about half a pound of vers libre, but all engaged girls have the poorest opinion of the intelligence of the men they are engaged to, and she had never wavered in her view that her loved one's I.Q. was about equal to that of a retarded child of seven. If there was a way of bungling everything down at Bittleton, he would, she was convinced, spring to the task, and it was only the fact that there seemed no way in which even he could bungle that had led her to entrust him with the mission which meant so much to them both. All he had to do was paint a portrait and while painting it exercise the charm she knew him to possess, and surely even Lancelot Bingley was capable of that.

Nevertheless she continued ill at ease, and it was with more anguish than surprise that she read the telegram which reached her shortly after lunch. It ran:

Drop everything and come Bittleton immediately. Disaster stares eyeball and your moral support sorely needed. Love and kisses. Lancelot.

For some moments she stood congealed, her worst fears confirmed. Then, going to her bedroom, she packed a few necessaries in a suitcase, and hailed a taxi. Twenty minutes later she was on the train, a ticket to Bittleton in her bag, and an hour and forty-five minutes after that she entered her uncle's garden. The first thing she saw there was Lancelot pacing up and down, his manner indistinguishable from that of a cat on hot bricks. He came tottering towards her.

"Thank heaven you're here," he cried. "I need your woman's, intelligence. Perhaps you can tell me what to do for the best, for the storm clouds are lowering. I seem to remember saying in my telegram that disaster stared me in the eyeball. That in no way overstated it. Let me tell you what's happened."

Gladys was staring at him dumbly. She had been expecting the worst, and this was apparently what she was going to get. If she had had any tan, she would have paled beneath it.

"Here, then, are the facts. I must begin by saying that last night I jumped on your uncle's stomach."

"Jumped on his stomach?" whispered Gladys, finding speech.

"Oh, purely inadvertently, but I could tell by his. Manner that he was annoyed. It was like this," said Lancelot, and he related briefly the events of the previous night. "But that wouldn't have mattered so much," he went on, "if it hadn't been for what happened this morning. I had sauntered out into the garden with my after breakfast cigar---"

He paused. He thought he had heard a stepped-on cat utter a piercing yowl. But it was only Gladys commenting on what he had said. Her eyes, which under the right conditions could be so soft and loving, were shooting flames.

"I told you you were not to smoke! "

"I know, I know, but I thought it would be all right if no one saw me. One must have one's smoke after breakfast, or what are breakfasts for? Well, as I was saying, I sauntered out and lit up, and I hadn't puffed more than a few puffs when I heard voices."

"Oh, heavens! "

"That, or something like it, was what I said, and I dived into the shrubbery. The voices came nearer. Someone was approaching, or rather I should have said that two persons were approaching, for if there had been only one person approaching, he would hardly have been talking to himself. Though, of course, you do get that sort of thing in Shakespeare. Hamlet, to take but one instance, frequently soliloquised."

"Lancelot!"

"My angel?"

"Get on with it."

"Certainly, certainly. Where was I?"

“You were smoking your cigar, which I had expressly forbidden you to do, in the shrubbery."

“No, there you are wrong. I was in the shrubbery, yes, but I was not smoking my cigar, and I'll tell you why. In my natural perturbation at hearing these voices and realizing that two persons were approaching I had dropped it on the lawn."

He paused again. Once more Gladys had uttered that eldrich scream so like in its timbre to that of a domestic cat with a number eleven boot on its tail.

"Lancelot Bingley, you ought to be in a padded cell! "

"Yes, yes, but don't keep interrupting me, darling, or I shall lose the thread. Well, these two approaching persons had now drawn quite close to where I lurked behind a laurel bush, and I was enabled to hear their conversation. One of them was your uncle, the other a globular woman whom I assumed to be the Mrs. Potter of whom I had heard so much, for she was sketching out the menu for tonight's dinner, which I don't mind telling you is going to be a pippin. Your uncle evidently thought so, too, for he kept saying 'Excellent, excellent' and things like that, and my mouth was watering freely when all of a sudden a female shriek or cry rent the air and peeping cautiously round my laurel bush I saw that the Potter female was pointing in an aghast sort of way at something lying on the grass and, to cut a long story short, it was my cigar."

A dull despair weighed Gladys Wetherby down.

"So they caught you?" she said tonelessly.

"No," said Lancelot, "I lurked unseen. And of course they didn't know it was my cigar. I gathered from their remarks that the prime suspects are the chauffeur and the gardener. It naturally didn't occur to your uncle to pin the rap on me, because after dinner last night I had convinced him that I was a total abstainer."

Indignation brought a flush to Gladys's face. No girl likes to be dragged into the depths of the country on a hot afternoon by a telegram from her betrothed saying that disaster stares him in eyeball when apparently disaster has been doing nothing of the sort.

"Then what's all the fuss about?" she demanded. "Why the urgent S.O.S.'s? You're in the clear."

Lancelot corrected her gently.

"No, my loved one. In the soup, yes, but not in the clear."

"I don't understand you."

"You will in about two seconds flat. I am sorry to have to add that on the advice of Mrs. Potter your uncle is having the cigar finger-printed."

"What!"

"Yes. It appears that she has a brother or cousin or something at Scotland Yard, and she said that that was always the first thing they did with a piece of evidence. Taking the dabs, I believe they call it. So your uncle said he would lock it in his desk till it could be examined by the proper experts, and he picked it up carefully with his handkerchief, like they do in books. So now you see why that telegram of mine expressed itself so strongly. My fingerprints must be all over the damn thing, and it won't take those experts five minutes to lay the crime at my door."

An expletive which she had picked up at the Poets Club in Bloomsbury burst from Gladys's lips. She clutched her brow.

"Don't talk," she said. "I want to think."

She stood motionless, her brain plainly working at its maximum speed. A fly settled on her left eyebrow, but she ignored it. Lancelot watched her anxiously.

"Anything stirring?" he asked.

Gladys came out of her reverie.

"Yes," she said, and her voice had lost its dull despondency. "I see what to do. We must sneak down tonight when everyone's in bed and retrieve that cigar. I know where to find a duplicate key to Uncle Francis's desk. I used it a lot in my childhood when he kept chocolates there. Expect me at your bedroom door at about midnight, and we'll get cracking."

“You think we can do it?"

"It'll be as easy as falling off a log," said Gladys.

All artists are nervous, highly strung men, and Lancelot, as he waited for the girl he loved to come and tell him that zero hour had arrived, was not at his most debonair and carefree The thought of the impending expedition had the worst effect on his morale. It so happened that for one reason or another he had never fallen off a log, but he assumed it to be a feat well within the scope of the least gifted, and why Gladys should think it resembled the hideous task that lay before them he could not imagine. He could tot up a dozen things that could go wrong. Suppose, to take an instance at random, the parrot overheard them and roused the house.

But when Gladys did appear, something of confidence returned to him. The mere look of her was encouraging. There is nothing that so heartens a man in a crisis as the feeling that he has a woman of strong executive qualities at his side. Macbeth, it will be remembered, had this experience.

"Sh! " said Gladys, though he had not spoken, and before they set out she had a word of advice on strategy and tactics to impart.

"Now listen, Lancelot," she said. "We want to conduct this operation with a minimum of sound effects. Your impulse, I know, will be to trip over your feet and fall downstairs with a noise like the delivery of a ton of coal, but resist it. Play the scene quietly. Okay? Right. Then let's go."

Nothing marred the success of the expedition from the outset. True, Lancelot tripped over his feet as anticipated, but a quick snatch at the banisters enabled him to avoid giving the impersonation of the delivery of a ton of coals against which she had warned him. In silence they descended the stairs and stole noiselessly into the study. Gladys produced her duplicate; key, and Lancelot was just saying to himself that if he were a bookie he would estimate the odds on the happy ending as at, least four to one, when there occurred one of those unforeseen hitches which cannot be budgeted for. Even as Gladys, key in hand, approached the desk there came from outside the sound of stealthy footsteps, and it was only too evident that their objective was the study in which they were trapped.

It was a moment fraught with embarrassment for the young couple, but each acted with a promptitude deserving of the highest praise. By the time the door opened no evidence of their presence was discernible. Gladys was concealed behind the curtains that draped the french windows, while Lancelot, having cleared the desk with a lissom bound, was crouching behind it, doing his best not to breathe.

The first sound he heard after the opening of the door was the click of key in a lock. It was followed by the scratching of a match, and suddenly there floated to his nostrils the unmistakable scent of cigar smoke. And even as he sought faintly for a solution of this mystery the curtains parted with a rattle and he was able to catch a glimpse of the upper portions of his betrothed. She was staring accusingly down at something beyond his range of vision, and when a sharp exclamation in Swahili broke the silence, he knew that this must be Colonel Pashley-Drake.

"So!" said Gladys.

There are not many good things one can say in answer to the word 'So!', especially if one is called upon to find one at a moment's notice, and the Colonel remained silent for a space. It was only when Gladys had repeated the word that he spoke.