Carson's Conspiracy (11 page)

‘I've been rather afraid,' he said, ‘that when Cynthia met Lady Appleby yesterday she may have given the impression that there is really some cause for alarm about Robin. But, as I've said, it just isn't so. And I wouldn't like Lady Appleby to feel worried about it. Which is why I've called, you see, to say a reassuring word.'

Appleby was again silent for a moment. It wasn't easy to see how to cope civilly with this absurdity. For an absurdity it was. Judith would have to be a person of quite morbid sensibility were she to be thrown into a state of distress by the non-arrival at his parents' dwelling of a totally strange young man. Carl Carson was no doubt a somewhat egocentric chap, inclined to believe that his affairs made more impact on others than in fact they did. But the notion he had just advanced was rather dotty, all the same. Perhaps he had picked up a streak at least of eccentricity from his wife.

‘I think Judith must be out around the place,' Appleby said. ‘But, of course, I'll tell her what you say. I'm sure she'll be relieved.' Appleby paused on this untruth, and then added another. ‘It has been extremely kind of you to call.'

‘I'm only sorry I must hurry away.' Carson got to his feet as he made this handsome response. ‘As it happens, I have a good deal on hand at the moment. Really a great deal on hand.' This time, the man was openly agitated. ‘It happens in business every now and then, you know. Quite suddenly, there's such pressure on one from this and that that one hardly knows how to find the time for it all.'

‘Then it's the kinder of you to have run over to Dream,' Appleby said with dishonest heartiness. At least the man did seem to be going away.

‘And it's easy to get flurried on such occasions – and find that the more haste the less speed. The feeling that time is running out before things are properly fixed up. But perhaps, Appleby, it hasn't been within your experience – anything, I mean, of that sort. Anyway, I'm off to town. Driving up. Can't spare the time for that damned train.'

This sudden obsession with the
tempus fugit
aspect of things lasted until Carson was actually at the wheel of his car. ‘And I'm driving myself,' he then went on. ‘Punter's a damn sight too slow. My regards to your good lady, Appleby.' And with this no doubt proper expression Carl Carson might be said to have shot suddenly out of sight. Only a slight cloud of dust on the drive of Dream Manor remained as a token of his visit.

Appleby turned to go back into the house, and found Judith at his shoulder.

‘Was that the man Carson?' she asked.

‘Yes, it was.'

‘Asking for your help?'

‘Well, no. Or not exactly. I thought it was going to be that – because of his son's failure to turn up, and the fuss his wife is in as a result. But it didn't seem to be quite that. The fellow had a cock-and-bull story about wanting to relieve your mind of any worry his Cynthia may have caused you by her talk in Busby's shop. Sheer moonshine. And he wasn't, as I say, asking for help. Rather he came to tell me something – or perhaps just to hint at something or set something stirring in my head. The lord knows why, and I almost feel the man's up to no good. Incidentally, I said you'd be delighted to see him.'

‘Did you, indeed!'

‘And he sent you his compliments as he drove off. I said you were probably messing around, and unaware that he was here.'

‘I was on the telephone, as a matter of fact. Answering a call. It was from his wife.'

‘The thing's a persecution! Just what did she want?'

‘She
did
want help. She asked to speak to the Commissionaire, and I said he was engaged – which was true enough.' For many years it had been one of Judith Appleby's tasks to head off importunate demands for her husband's attention.

‘Did she know her husband was over here?'

‘I don't think she did. It was her line that he was worried off his head by Robin's vanishing, but I feel that she herself is really the one most disturbed about it. She said something about Robin's romance making it so certain he'd want to come home. The young man is more or less engaged, she seemed to imply, to the Watlings' girl, Mary.'

‘The people at the Grange? I don't see how this Robin…'

‘He and Mary met in America, it seems. It was all a little obscure and scatty. You remember the poor woman is like that. But she was sure you could help in some way.'

‘I see.' Appleby, although indisposed to view the Carsons in a particularly sympathetic light, received this soberly. ‘So what can be done? Probably nothing much at the moment, except trying to get these people clear in one's head. They themselves seem to be in a bit of a muddle, and it's possible there isn't a normal husband-and-wife relationship of confidence between them.'

‘You'd say that's the normal thing?'

‘I've always assumed so, although perhaps on rather a narrow basis of experience. But stick to the point. The woman's the easier of the two to size up – although one has to allow for the fact that she's a bit mad and may be prone to imagine things. She's in a tizzy because this Robin has gone astray; she sees, or believes, that her husband is in a tizzy too; and she remembers that she has lately made the acquaintance of a kind of great detective or top policeman. She tries to enlist this chap's help. All that's simple enough.'

‘So it is. Particularly the great-detective part.'

‘The man's more difficult. He presents himself here in a most unnecessary way to assure us there's nothing to worry about, and that he himself is quite easy in his mind about the tardiness of friend Robin. But, quite patently, he's in a tizzy as well – just as his wife says he is. In an obscure way, he almost obtrudes the fact. And time is in some equally obscure way an enemy. He's having to rush around, apparently on business occasions having presumably nothing to do with the Robin crisis. That's about it.'

‘I suppose so.' Judith took a moment to weigh this summary. ‘Carson drove over here to create an impression.'

‘Yes.'

‘Why on us? We scarcely know the people. It's the great detective factor again.'

‘Allowing, Judith, for the satirical slant of your mind, that must be about the truth. It's not just that he wants to create an impression. He wants to start a train of thought along what one may call professional lines. It's really uncommonly odd, and I can't say I make much of it.' Appleby said this with a touch of genuine impatience, and Judith could see that he believed himself far from anxious to get absorbed in anything that could be called the Carson mystery.

‘What about the lady's plea for help?' she asked.

‘Well, yes – one oughtn't to ignore such things. But a missing person is very much a matter for the police. They have the machinery – and it's probably not very like the machinery in my time. The problem is a sizeable one, you know. The number of persons who can be described as missing in this country at any one time has to be reckoned by the thousand. It requires evidence of there being crime in the picture to set the machine at all effectively in motion.'

‘And there's nothing of the sort in Robin Carson's picture.'

‘So far as we know, nothing at all. It's my bet that the young man will simply turn up – perhaps leaving something rather discreditable behind him.'

‘So that's that.' Judith Appleby knew that when her husband came out with a rather heavy remark of this sort he was intending to dismiss a topic from his mind. She rather suspected, nevertheless, that he would in fact continue to do some thinking about the tiresome Carsons and their elusive son.

 

 

For some days, however, nothing of the sort happened. Somewhat sporadically at this time, Appleby was writing a book. It wasn't autobiographical, and such sensational crimes as it touched on had occurred for the most part in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Appleby had taken to that investigating and recording of local history which has become prominent as an unassuming pursuit among the elderly and literate classes. When questioned about it, he would say that it served as well as the bees. This was understood to be an allusion to the final phase in the career of Sherlock Holmes.

It was an activity having the advantage of requiring very little equipment. A typewriter, a filing cabinet, a magnifying glass (Sherlockian in suggestion) and plenty of hot water filled the bill: this last because of the decidedly dusty condition of such minor archives as commonly came his way. He might, indeed, have added to the need for plenty of hot water (together with soap and towels) the need for plenty of petrol as well. Appleby drove around the countryside a good deal. He was doing so on the day we resume our acquaintance with him. Having lunched agreeably on bread and cheese with an aged clergyman at Boxer's Bottom, and been by him alerted to the possibility of interesting discovery in the parish registers at Sleep's Hill, he was making his way to the latter rural centre over rather unfrequented roads when he became aware of something amiss with the ancient Appleby Rover. He drew to a halt, and found he had a puncture.

Appleby was displeased. Casual observation had convinced him that punctures, like some of the less important diseases, simply didn't happen to people nowadays. And if the car was old, its tyres were reasonably new.

It was a vexatious situation, but had to be dealt with. Appleby took his jacket off and yanked the tool kit out of the boot. But then, glancing along the deserted road ahead, he became aware of some sort of garage or service station a couple of hundred yards away. What a mechanic could achieve in minutes, he saw no occasion himself to labour at. Standing on his years, he'd hand the job over to a professional. It wasn't exactly an athletic decision, but this didn't perturb him.

Then for a moment it looked as if he were going to draw a blank. In the garage there didn't seem to be much going on, and ominously erected beside it was a large notice saying ‘For Sale'. But the situation turned out to be not so bad as it seemed. Nothing, indeed, that could be called an activity was visible. But a young man in blue dungarees sat perched on an oil-barrel under another notice which read ‘No Smoking'. Perhaps by way of declaring his independence of the moribund establishment employing him, he was puffing at a cigarette. He was presumably willing to sell petrol. He could probably be persuaded to change a wheel.

This proved to be so. The young man clearly expected no more business for his firm that day, and it was presumably as a citizen rather than an employee that he would eventually name a fee for his services to Appleby. He provided himself with the superior sort of jack that trundles along on wheels, and set off for the Rover. He was an alert-seeming young man with an observant eye, but at present so obviously sunk in gloom that Appleby expected no conversation from him.

‘Appleby, isn't it?' the young man asked.

‘Yes, my name's Appleby.' Appleby was unoffended by the egalitarian cast of this question. ‘What's yours?'

‘William.'

‘There doesn't seem to be much doing here, William. You must find it a bit dull.'

‘Dump is closing down at the end of the week. Ever since I've been here, I've felt the undertakers and gravediggers to be raring to get busy on it. And the job's been no more than part-time, anyway. Now I'm out on my bloody ear.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that. By the way, how do you come to know my name's Appleby?'

‘My dad – a step-dad, he is really – worked at Long Dream, come he was a lad. Name of Jim Lockett. I call myself William Lockett, it being easier that way. Dad has pointed you out to me. Your missis, too, who was born in the place, he says.'

‘So she was. Does your dad work somewhere else now?'

‘Gardener at Garford he's been, these thirty years or more. For the old lot there, and now for the new – name of Carson, never known in these parts before. I help out at times around the place. Ruddy moonlighting, really. But I can quite take gardening. Learnt a packet about it, too, from dad. I'd sooner cart muck all day than go messing around with this grease and stinking petrol… Your car looks like it might have come out of Noah's Ark.'

‘Twenty years ago, William, they knew how to make cars to last.' Appleby produced this senior citizen's platitude with confidence. ‘What about Mr Carson at Garford taking you on full-time to help your dad? Wealthy, isn't he? And he could do with an under-gardener, what with all those roses.'

‘You make me laugh.' William Lockett scowled as he said this, and applied himself viciously to the nuts on the peccant wheel. ‘What about Long Dream?' he asked suddenly. ‘You wouldn't have a job going there? I'm not all that bloody useless.'

Appleby, who had just decided that – so strange were the times – a couple of pound coins would be the decent thing to slip to the lad for his fifteen minute's work, realized that this small occasion had taken on a new dimension. A young man with the dole queue dead ahead of him had shown the kind of enterprise of which one ought to approve. It had to be treated with respect and responded to with care.

‘I'm afraid not,' Appleby said at once. ‘You see, we have Mr Hoobin – your father may remember him – and also a lad called Solo. Of course Mr Hoobin is elderly, and Solo is about as useful as a garden gnome. But there they are. I could possibly do you a day a week, and see how you all got on. But you'd want something more than that.'

‘It wouldn't be exactly a living – would it?' With a deft tug, William pulled the wheel from its hub. ‘But thanks for the idea.'

‘Mightn't it start you on something, William? There must be an increasing number of people in these parts with fair-sized gardens, who can't run to help in them for more than a day in the week or the fortnight…'

‘Distressed gentry, like.' The spare wheel was now in place. ‘A quid an hour, and a cup of tea.'