'– and rummaged in the safe and found a pearl necklace and naturally thought it was yours –'
'– and swiped it. Very decent of you, Bertie, dear, and I appreciate the kind thought. If you had been here this morning, I would have told you that Tom insisted on everybody putting their valuables in the safe, but you had dashed up to London. What took you there, by the way?'
'I went to get the cosh, formerly the property of Aunt Agatha's son, Thos. I have been having trouble of late with Menaces.'
She gazed at me with worshipping eyes, deeply moved.
'Was it you, my heart of gold,' she said brokenly, 'who provided that cosh? I had been putting it down as straight guardian angel stuff. Oh, Bertie, if ever I called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some good lunatic asylum, I take back the words.'
I thanked her briefly.
'But what happens now?'
'I give three rousing cheers and start strewing roses from my hat.'
I frowned with a touch of impatience.
'I am not talking about you, my dear old ancestor, but about your nephew Bertram, the latter being waist-high in the mulligatawny and liable at any moment to sink without trace. Here I am in possession of somebody's pearl necklace –'
'Ma Trotter's. I recognize it now. She wears it in the evenings.'
'Right. So far, so good. The choker belongs, we find, to Ma Trotter. That point established, what do I do for the best?'
'You put it back.'
'In the safe?'
'That's it. You put it back in the safe.'
It struck me as a most admirable idea, and I wondered why I hadn't thought of it myself.
'You've hit it!' I said. 'Yes, I'll put it back in the safe.'
'I'd run along now, if I were you. No time like the present.'
'I will. Oh, by the way, Daphne Dolores Morehead has arrived. She's out in the grounds with Stilton.'
'What did you think of her?'
'A sight for sore eyes, if I may use the expression. I had no idea they were making female novelists like that these days.'
I would have gone on to amplify the favourable impression the young visitor's outer crust had made on me, but at this moment Mrs Trotter loomed up in the doorway. She looked at me as if feeling that I was on the whole pretty superfluous.
'Oh, good evening, Mr Wooster,' she said in a distant sort of way. 'I was hoping to find you alone, Mrs Travers,' she added with the easy tact which had made her the toast of Liverpool.
'I'm just off,' I assured her. 'Nice evening.'
'Very nice.'
'Well, toodle-oo,' I said, and set a course for the hall, feeling pretty bobbish, for at least a portion of my troubles would soon be over. If, of course, the safe was still open.
It was. And I had reached it and was on the point of whipping out the jewel-case and depositing it, when a voice spoke behind me, and, turning like a startled fawn, I perceived L. G. Trotter.
Since my arrival at Brinkley Court I had not fraternized to any great extent with this weasel-faced old buster. He gave me the impression, as he had done at that dinner of mine, of not being too frightfully keen on the society of his juniors. I was surprised that he should be wanting to chat with me now, and wished that he could have selected some more suitable moment. With that necklace on my person, solitude was what I desired.
'Hey,' he said. 'Where's your aunt?'
'She's in her room,' I replied, 'talking to Mrs Trotter.'
'Oh? Well, when you see her, tell her I've gone to bed.'
This surprised me.
'To bed? Surely the night is yet young?'
'I've got one of my dyspeptic attacks. You haven't a digestive pill on you?'
'I'm sorry. I came out without any.'
'Hell!' he said, rubbing the abdomen. 'I'm in agony. I feel as if I'd swallowed a couple of wild cats. Hullo,' he proceeded, changing the subject, 'what's that safe door doing open?'
I threw out the suggestion that somebody must have opened it, and he nodded as if thinking well of the theory.
'Damned carelessness,' he said. 'That's the way things get stolen.'
And before my bulging eyes he stepped across and gave the door a shove. It closed with a clang.
'Oof!' he said, massaging the abdomen once more, and with a curt 'Good night', passed up the stairs, leaving me frozen to the spot. Lot's wife couldn't have been stiffen
Any chance I had of putting things back in the safe had gone with the wind.
CHAPTER 19
I don't know that I have a particularly vivid imagination – possibly not, perhaps – but in circs like those which I have just outlined you don't need a very vivid imagination to enable you to spot the shape of things to come. As plainly as if it had been the top line on an oculist's chart, I could see what the future held for Bertram.
As I stood there gaping at that closed door, a vision rose before my eyes, featuring me and an inspector of police, the latter having in his supporting cast an unusually nasty-looking sergeant.
Are you coming quietly, Wooster?' the inspector was saying.
'Who, me?' I said, quaking in every limb. 'I don't know what you mean.'
'Ha, ha,' laughed the inspector. 'That's good. Eh, Fotheringay?'
'Very rich, sir,'said the sergeant. 'Makes me chuckle, that does.'
'Too late to try anything of that sort, my man,' went on the inspector, becoming grave again. 'The game is up. We have evidence to prove that you went to this safe and from it abstracted a valuable pearl necklace, the property of Mrs L. G. Trotter. If that doesn't mean five years in the jug for you, I miss my bet.'
'But, honestly, I thought it was Aunt Dahlia's.'
'Ha, ha,' laughed the inspector.
'Ha, ha,' chirped the sergeant.
'A pretty story,' said the inspector. 'Tell that to the jury and see what they think of it. Fotheringay, the handcuffs!'
Such was the v. that rose before my e. as I gaped at that c.d., and I wilted like a salted snail. Outside in the garden birds were singing their evensong, and it seemed to me that each individual bird was saying 'Well, boys, Wooster is for it. We shan't see much of Wooster for the next few years. Too bad, too bad. A nice chap till he took to crime.'
A hollow groan escaped my lips, but before another could follow it I was racing for Aunt Dahlia's room. As I reached it, Ma Trotter came out, gave me an austere look and passed on her way, and I went on into the presence. I found the old relative sitting bolt upright in her chair, staring before her with unseeing eyes, and it was plain that once more something had happened to inject a black frost on her sunny mood. The Agatha Christie had fallen unheeded to the floor, displaced from her lap, no doubt, by a shudder of horror.
Normally, I need scarcely say, my policy on finding this sterling old soul looking licked to a splinter would have been to slap her between the shoulder-blades and urge her to keep her tail up, but my personal troubles left me with little leisure for bracing aunts. Whatever the disaster or cataclysm that had come upon her, I felt, it could scarcely claim to rank in the same class as the one that had come upon me.
'I say,' I said. 'The most frightful thing has happened!'
She nodded sombrely. A martyr at the stake would have been cheerier.
'You bet your heliotrope socks it has,' she responded. 'Ma Trotter has thrown off the mask, curse her. She wants Anatole.'
'Who wouldn't?'
It seemed for a moment as if she were about to haul off and let a loved nephew have it on the side of the head, but with a strong effort she calmed herself Well, when I say 'calmed herself, she didn't cease to boil briskly, but she confined her activities to the spoken word.
'Don't you understand, ass? She has come out into the open and stated her terms. She says she won't let Trotter buy the Boudoir unless I give her Anatole.'
It just shows how deeply my predicament had stirred me that my reaction to this frightful speech was practically nil. Informed at any other time that there was even a rem
ote prospect of that superb disher-up handing in his portfolio and going off to waste his sweetness on the desert air of the Trotter home, I should unquestionably have blenched and gasped and tottered but now, as I say, I heard those words virtually unmoved.
'No, really?' I said. 'I say, listen, old flesh and blood. Just as I got to the safe and was about to restore the Trotter pearls, that chump L. G. Trotter most officiously shut the door, foiling my aims and objects and leaving me in the dickens of a jam. I'm trembling like a leaf
'So am I.'
'I don't know what to do.'
'I don't, either.'
'I search in vain for some way out of this what the French call impasse:
'Me, too,' she said, picking up the Agatha Christie and hurling it at a passing vase. When deeply stirred, she is always inclined to kick things and throw things. At Totleigh Towers, during one of our more agitated conferences, she had cleared the mantelpiece in my bedroom of its entire contents, including a terra-cotta elephant and a porcelain statuette of the Infant Samuel in Prayer. 'I don't suppose any woman ever had such a problem to decide. On the one hand, life without Anatole is a thing almost impossible–'
'Here I am, stuck with this valuable pearl necklace, the property of Mrs L. G. Trotter, and when its loss –'
'– to contemplate. On the other –'
'– is discovered, hues and cries will be raised, inspectors and sergeants sent for–'
'– hand, I must sell the Boudoir, or I can't take that necklace of mine out of hock. So –'
'– and I shall be found with what is known as hot ice on my person.'
'Ice!'
And you know as well as I do what happens to people who are caught in possession of hot ice.'
'Ice!' she repeated and sighed dreamily. 'I think of those prawns in iced aspic of his, and I say to myself that I should be made to face a lifetime without Anatole's cooking. That Selle d'Agneau à la Grecque! That Mignonette de Poulet Rôti Petit Duc! Those Nonats de la Mediterrannée au Fenouil! And then I feel I must be practical. I've got to get that necklace back, and if the only way of getting it back is to... Sweet suffering soupspoons!' she vociferated, if that's the word, anguish written on her every feature. 'I wonder what Tom will say when he hears Anatole is leaving!'
And I wonder what he'll say when he hears his nephew is doing a stretch in Dartmoor.'
'Eh?'
'Stretch in Dartmoor.'
'Who's going to do a stretch in Dartmoor?'
'I am.'
'You?'
'Me.'
'Why?'
I gave her a look which I suppose, strictly speaking, no nephew should have given an aunt. But I was sorely exasperated.
'Haven't you been listening?' I demanded.
She came back at me with equal heat.
'Of course I haven't been listening. Do you think that when I am faced with the prospect of losing the finest cook in the Midland counties I have time to pay attention to your vapid conversation? What were you babbling about?'
I drew myself up. The word 'babbling' had wounded me.
'I was merely mentioning that, owing to that ass L. G. Trotter having shut the door of the safe before I could deposit the fatal necklace, I am landed with the thing. I described it as hot ice.'
'Oh, that was what you were saying about ice?'
'That was what. I also hazarded the prediction that in about two shakes of a duck's tail inspectors and sergeants would come scooping me up and taking me off to the chokey'
'What nonsense. Why should anyone think you had anything to do with it?'
I laughed. One of those short, bitter ones.
'You don't think it may arouse their suspicions when they find the ruddy thing in my trouser pocket? At any moment I may be caught with the goods on me, and you don't have to read many thrillers to know what happens to unfortunate slobs who are caught with the goods on them. They get it in the neck.'
I could see she was profoundly moved. In my hours of ease this aunt is sometimes uncertain, coy and hard to please and, when I was younger, not infrequently sloshed me on the earhole if my behaviour seemed to her to call for the gesture, but let real peril threaten Bertram and she is in there swinging every time.
'This isn't so good,' she said, picking up a small footstool and throwing it at a china shepherdess on the mantelpiece.
I endorsed this view, expressing the opinion that it was dashed awful.
'You'll have to –'
'Hist!'
'Eh?'
'Hist!'
'What do you mean, Hist?'
What I had meant by that monosyllable was that I had heard footsteps approaching the door. Before I could explain this, the handle turned sharply and Uncle Tom came in.
My ear told me at once that all was not well with this relative by marriage. When Uncle Tom has anything on his mind, he rattles his keys. He was jingling now like a xylophone. His face had the haggard, careworn look which it wears when he hears that weekend guests are expected.
'It's a judgement!' he said, bursting into speech with a whoosh.
Aunt Dahlia masked her agitation with what I imagine she thought to be a genial smile.
'Hullo, Tom, come and join the party. What's a judgement?'
'This is. On me. For weakly allowing you to invite those infernal Trotters here. I knew something awful would happen. I felt it in my bones. You can't fill the house up with people like that without courting disaster. Stands to reason. He's got a face like a weasel, she's twenty pounds overweight, and that son of hers wears whiskers. It was madness ever to let them across the threshold. Do you know what's happened?'
'No, what?'
'Somebody's pinched her necklace!'
'Good heavens!'
'I thought that would make you sit up,' said Uncle Tom, with gloomy triumph. 'She collared me in the hall just now and said she wanted the thing to wear at dinner tonight, and I took her to the safe and opened it and it wasn't there.'
I told myself that I must keep very cool.
'You mean,' I said, 'that it had gone?'
He gave me rather an unpleasant look.
'You've got a lightning brain!' he said.
Well, I have, of course.
'But how could it have gone?' I asked. 'Was the safe open?'
'No, shut. But I must have left it open. All that fuss of putting that frightful fellow Sidcup to bed distracted my attention.'
I think he was about to say that it just showed what happened when you let people like that into the house, but checked himself on remembering that he was the one who had invited him.
'Well, there it is,' he said. 'Somebody seems to have come along while we were upstairs, seen the safe door open and improved the shining hour. The Trotter woman is raising Cain, and it was only my urgent entreaties that kept her from sending for the police there and then. I told her we could get much better results by making secret enquiries. Didn't want a scandal, I said. But I doubt if I could have persuaded her if it hadn't been that young Gorringe came along and backed me up. Quite an intelligent young fellow, that, though he does wear whiskers.'
I cleared my throat nonchalantly. At least, I tried to do it nonchalantly.
'Then what steps are you taking, Uncle Tom?'
'I'm going to excuse myself during dinner on the plea of a headache – which I've got, I don't mind telling you – and go and search the rooms. Just possible I might dig up something. Meanwhile, I'm off to get a drink. The whole thing has upset me considerably. Will you join me in a quick one, Bertie, me boy?'
'I think I'll stick on here, if you don't mind,' I said. 'Aunt Dahlia and I are talking of this and that.'
He produced a final obbligato on the keys.
'Well, suit yourself, but it seems odd to me in my present frame of mind that anyone can refuse a drink. I wouldn't have thought it possible.'
As the door closed behind him, Aunt Dahlia expelled her breath like a death-rattle.
'Golly!' she said.
It
seemed to me the mot juste.
'What should we do now, do you think?' I queried.
'I know what I'd like to do. I'd like to put the whole thing up to Jeeves, if certain fatheads hadn't let him go off on toots in London just when we need him most.'
'He may be back by now.'
'Ring for Seppings and ask.'
I pressed the bell.
'Oh, Seppings,' I said, as he entered and You-rang-madamed. 'Has Jeeves got back yet?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Then send him here with all speed,' I said.
And a few moments later the man was with us, looking so brainy and intelligent that my heart leaped up as if I had beheld a rainbow in the sky.
'Oh, Jeeves,' I yipped.
'Oh, Jeeves,' yipped Aunt Dahlia, dead-heating with me.
After you,' I said.
'No, go ahead,' she replied, courteously yielding the floor. 'Your predicament is worse than my predicament. Mine can wait.'
I was touched.
'Very handsome of you, old egg,' I said. 'Much appreciated. Jeeves, your close attention, if you please. Certain problems have arisen.'
'Yes, sir?'
'Two in all.'
'Yes, sir?'
'Shall we call them Problem A and Problem B?'
'Certainly, sir, if you wish.'
'Then here is Problem A, the one affecting me.'
I ran through the scenario, putting the facts clearly and well.
'So there you are, Jeeves. Bend the brain to it. If you wish to pace the corridor, by all means do so.'
'It will not be necessary, sir. One sees what must be done.'
I said I would be glad if he could arrange it so that two could.
'You must restore the necklace to Mrs Trotter, sir.'
'Give it back to her, you mean?'
'Precisely, sir.'
'But, Jeeves,' I said, my voice shaking a little, 'isn't she going to wonder how I come to have my hooks on the thing? Will she not probe and question, and having probed and questioned rush to the telephone and put in her order for inspectors and sergeants?'
A muscle at the side of his mouth twitched indulgently.
'The restoration would, of course, have to be accomplished with secrecy, sir. I would advocate placing the piece of jewellery in the lady's bedchamber at a moment when it was unoccupied. Possibly while she was at the dinner table.'