The Silver Ghost (16 page)

Maybe Bill knew his son-in-law better than Lionel Kelling did. Max didn’t say anything.

Bill thrust his hands into the pockets of the tweed jacket he was wearing. “I know there’s a fashion for takeovers just now, but we’re such a puny target, Max. Anyway, takeovers aren’t usually achieved by employees who sabotage the equipment and walk off their steady, well-paid, and not too terribly arduous jobs, are they? They say everybody has his price, but assuming that’s true, which I find hard to swallow, the bribes would have to be far greater than the kind of profit anyone could possibly hope to make out of the stations. Don’t think Tick and I haven’t thrashed this out before. We’re not quite the starry-eyed dreamers some people think we are.”

Max nodded. “I know you’re not, Bill. But damn it, there’s got to be something. This may sound crazy, but have you any enemies? Is there anybody alive who hates your guts enough to want to ruin you?”

“How can I answer that? I could give you a fairly long list of people who think I’m either a crank or a fool or both, but as to actual hatred—a vicious urge to destroy what amounts to my life’s work—Max, I don’t know what to say. We have had a barrage of letters from Ironclad Rockbound, a fundamentalist preacher who finds our little ecumenical homilies dangerously thought-provoking. It’s not idle hands so much as closed minds for which the devil finds work, in my opinion. I beg your pardon, Max. Here I am getting off on my hobbyhorse while you’re wanting to know who’s out to ruin me.”

Nehemiah Billingsgate thought a moment, then shook his head. “Nobody is. I’m not that important. Unless a deranged listener has taken a dislike to me for some unlikely reason that I don’t know about.”

“I don’t think I can buy that, Bill. If it’s a listener, he or she knows far more about your domestic arrangements than seems credible. Okay, let’s drop it for now. Maybe something will come to you. I wonder if they’ve found that tranquilizer gun yet.”

Aside from a brief and unrewarding visit to the elder Tolbathys and Dorks, Max hadn’t been able to accomplish much so far except to eat an excellent lunch of leftovers from the banquet. He was still in what Sarah had officially labeled the poking-around stage, hoping he’d find something useful and know it when he saw it, trying to avoid anything like a confrontation with the police.

Captain Grimpen had shown up in jodhpurs and boots today but without a horse, displaying yet again his keen grasp of the nonessentials. He’d been all set to organize a band of scuba divers to search the pond. Nehemiah Billingsgate had mildly pointed out that the pond was nowhere more than three feet deep and that what they usually employed to clean it out were a couple of long-handled rakes. Bill had then brought out the rakes and offered to teach Chief Grimpen how to use them, to the amusement of everybody except Grimpen.

So far, the rakers had come up with the remains of a toy submarine, a disgruntled mud turtle, several biggish rocks, and a good deal of sodden vegetable matter that Bill had claimed for the compost heap and Grimpen wouldn’t let him have, suspecting some dark machination. When Abigail had come out with a hamper of sandwiches for the policemen and an invitation for Max to join herself, Drusilla Gaheris, and Bill in the dining room, he’d been glad to leave the cops in the copse and go back to the house with the others.

It hadn’t been a lively meal. Bill had got another message of doom from one of his already stricken radio stations. Abigail was depressed at having had to cancel the Sunday School picnic and instead spend part of the morning on the phone to the undertakers, planning Rufus’s funeral. All of them were increasingly worried about the still unheard-from Boadicea Kelling. Mrs. Gaheris had made a few commendable attempts at inconsequential table talk, then let her unanswered comments lie where they fell and finished her cold beef and salad in silence.

Being a houseguest in a situation like this must be a difficult position, but Mrs. Gaheris was doing her diplomatic best to cope. She’d invited Max to her bedroom so he could see for himself exactly how much of a view she had. She’d even put on a red cardigan and yellow head scarf, borrowed from Abigail since her own wardrobe seemed to be all in shades of brown, and impersonated the Morris dancer.

Max had timed her, as she strode briskly across the lawn and slipped into the copse, where her vivid garb did become invisible as soon as the dense green shrubbery closed in behind her. One minute and forty-seven seconds. An agile man unhampered by anything more than a few dags and slitters could no doubt have cut half a minute or more off the middle-aged widow’s time.

Lunch over, Mrs. Gaheris had gone to help Abigail and Cook finish packing up the rest of the leftovers and take them to a soup kitchen in a mill town not far away from the affluent suburb. Max and Bill had wandered out to the terrace. Perhaps it was the empty pavilion and the trampled grass, unhappy reminders of yesterday’s gaiety, that had prompted Bill to open up about the problem that was bothering him far more than the loss of his two cars, perhaps even more than the frightful death of his old retainer. It was near the pavilion that Abigail found the men.

“Max, you just got a phone call from Sarah. She’d like you to give her a ring if you can spare the time. I thought Sarah mentioned that Jem was with her, but my hearing’s not what it used to be and I must have got it wrong. Jem’s yachting with Harry Bellrope’s crowd, isn’t he?”

Without stopping to answer, Max dashed for the house and dialed his own number. “Hi, what’s new?”

As they talked, he scribbled fast in the little black looseleaf notebook that was his indispensable vademecum. “Is that the lot?” he asked her at last.

“For the moment. He may think of something else along the way.”

“What time will you be back?”

“Fiveish, I hope, depending on the traffic. What about you?”

“Hard to say. You’ve done better than I, so far.”

Max would have liked to prolong the conversation, but Sarah had her guest to feed, and he had his own job to do. He’d better get back to Bill.

As it happened, Bill came looking for him. “Max, I heard some shouting just now.”

“I’ll bet the police have found the gun. Come on.”

Sure enough, when they got to the pond, they found Grimpen, still natty in his shiny boots and bulging breeches, Myre living up to his name, and a couple of other policemen also muddied to the eyeballs, all clustered around a silt-covered object on the bank.

“Can you identify this, Mr. Billingsgate?” barked the chief.

“I might be able to if we rinsed the mud off,” Bill told him.

“Myre!”

The man thus roughly addressed took the object by its smaller end and sloshed it around in the murky water, then presented it for Bill’s inspection. He nodded.

“That must be the tranquilizer gun Wouter Tolbathy made.”

“No snap judgments, please,” ordered the chief. “Examine it closely, Mr. Billingsgate.”

“Chief Grimpen,” Bill replied none too gently. “I am not a frivolous-minded man and I do not make snap judgments. As it happens, I was not at the going-away party where the dart gun was introduced so I’ve never actually seen it before. I have no hesitation in making the identification, however, because I know such a gun existed and because I can’t imagine who else than Wouter Tolbathy would have carved the stock in the shape of a crocodile and painted it chartreuse with magenta trimmings.”

Grimpen wouldn’t accept this without being filled in on the details. After he’d got them, which took some time, he said they were irrelevant, which no doubt they were. Finally he demanded with surprising relevance, “Who had the gun last?”

Bill didn’t know. “I should suppose Wouter himself held on to it after the party, but he could have passed it on to somebody else later. It could have been stolen, for that matter. The party took place about five years ago, if my memory serves me. The gun could have changed hands several times since then, for all I know.”

“Or it might have been lying right here at the bottom of this pond the whole time,” Grimpen added with ill concealed scorn. “Before we waste any more valuable time investigating a red herring, we must determine whether this allegedly homemade weapon is still capable of being fired, and specifically of firing the dart that was found, as I predicted, in your late servant’s clothing.”

Nobody asked when he’d made the prediction. Billingsgate glanced at Max, then nodded.

“Whatever you think best, Chief Grimpen. I can’t authorize you to take the gun because it doesn’t belong to me, but I suppose you’re entitled to confiscate it as evidence.”

“Possible evidence,” Grimpen amended. “Come along, men, there’s nothing more to be learned here. This gun must be rushed to the state ballistics laboratory
instanter.
”

“Where do we put the rakes, Mr. Billingsgate?” asked Sergeant Myre.

“Leave them,” ordered Grimpen. “You’re a police officer, Myre, not a hired man.”

Unaware that he’d just uttered the words setting off a chain of events that would by the end of the present calendar year place Sergeant Myre at the head of the local police force and himself On the bottom rung of the ladder in his uncle’s cough drop factory, Chief Grimpen strode manfully from the copse, followed by his oozy minions. Max and his employer exchanged shrugs.

“What now?” asked Bill.

“I know the police have been all over the grounds this morning,” Max replied, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like to look around myself. Sarah raised an interesting question last night. Since nobody’s yet found any evidence that the Silver Ghost was either driven away or taken in a van, she suggested that might be because the car wasn’t taken far enough to notice. She wondered whether you or one of your neighbors might have a disused air raid shelter or something of that sort. Any chance?”

“Good heavens, Max, that’s one possibility that never crossed my mind. Let me think. We have none here, certainly. Our neighbor Eric Hohnser built one years ago when it was rather the going thing to do. The shelter was a sort of underground tank, as I remember it, with something like a submarine’s conning tower on top. There was a heavy steel door that worked on some kind of lever, with a long ladder leading down inside. The whole thing reminded me ludicrously of a gigantic in-the-ground garbage pail. I went down just once and came straight up again. It was a ghastly feeling, like being buried alive. Hohnser’s quite embarrassed about the shelter nowadays, I understand. He’s covered over the opening and planted Peace roses on top, which was surely the more sensible thing to do.”

“How are the roses doing?”

“Beautifully, I’m sure. Hohnser always has magnificent roses. We can drop over and take a look if it will set your mind at rest. I shouldn’t go poking around much, though. Hohnser takes his mulch very seriously, and I’m not his favorite person anyway.”

“It wouldn’t take more than a glance to see whether the ground’s been disturbed recently.”

“But naturally the ground would have been disturbed. Everybody always forks up and fertilizes his flower beds in the spring,” said Bill with the naive confidence of the wealthy landowner who has somebody else to do it for him. “But that porthole wasn’t much more than four feet across, as I recall, and it was a straight drop of about twenty feet to the bottom of the tank.”

“Oh well, it was just a thought,” said Max. “Can you think of a hiding place where the car wouldn’t have to be dismantled and dropped down piece by piece?”

“Not offhand. But if you want to look over the grounds, let’s go in the honeybug. Sometimes I get ideas while I’m driving.”

That seemed as good an idea as any. Max walked with Bill down to the gardener’s shed and climbed aboard the screened-in electric cart. He’d never ridden in one of these things before. It reminded him of the Dodgems at Revere Beach amusement park when he was a kid. How soon would Davy be ready to ride the Dodgems?

A
S THEY TURNED OFF
the main drive into the bee fields, Max said, “Tell me some more about Ufford, Bill. How long have you known him?”

“Versey? Dear me, it must be upward of thirty years by now. Not precisely a boyhood friendship, but certainly a long-standing acquaintance. Why, Max? Surely you don’t suspect poor Versey?”

“I’m curious about him. You may recall that he accosted my wife up on the hill, not far from the car shed. You might also remember he was wearing bright green hose with that otherwise authentic costume, although the ones in the Arnolfini portrait are either black or some very dark color. I checked last night in a book I have at home. The exact shade was hard to make out from the reproduction, but they sure as hell weren’t emerald green.”

“Is that important?”

“It might be, if under that loose surcoat he happened to be wearing a red doublet and had a yellow hood slung down his back.”

“Are you suggesting Vercingetorix Ufford was Drusilla’s wandering Morris dancer?”

“Go ahead, make me a liar.”

Bill sighed and shook his head. “Tick did say something about Versey’s being annoyed because they’d had to change the order of the dances, but surely—”

“Tick said the sets that required fewer dancers were originally scheduled to come first in the program. That could mean somebody in a dancer’s costume strolling around the grounds by himself would be less apt to attract attention, mightn’t it?”

“Unless one were to count the men remaining on the dancing green, find them all present, and wonder where the odd one came from,” Bill replied cautiously. “Then there’s the Betty, who doesn’t always appear. Betty’s a sort of clown, you know, who doesn’t dance with the rest but cavorts around the edges in that absurd farthingale. Not that I’m accusing young Erp, you understand.”

“Erp seems to be clear,” Max assured his employer. “I checked him out with the Dorks and the Tolbathys this morning. He’s hoping to start a Morris dance group of his own at school, and stayed right there every minute of the time to pick up pointers. When he wasn’t doing the Betty, he filled in for one or another of the men who wanted a break.” Hester Tolbathy had commented spontaneously on Erp’s keenness, with a footnote to the effect that she wished her own grandsons would show a similar interest. So far, Monk Abbott was the only other member of the third generation who showed any inclination to follow in his father’s jangly footsteps. Because their Buck was dancing, she and Tom had watched most of the sets and claimed not to have noticed anything untoward.