Plum Pie

  "Will you really? That'll be fine."

  "Or perhaps the day after tomorrow. But it's an extraordinary coincidence that you should be selling antique furniture, because---"

  "Yes, it was odd that I should have happened to run into Stout."

  "Stout? You mean my butler?"

  "Your late butler. He gave me to understand that you had sacked him."

  She sneezed grimly.

  "I certainly did. Let me tell you what happened."

  "No, let me tell you what happened," I said, and I related the circumstances of my meeting with Horace, prudently changing the pub to a milk bar. "I had been having an argument with a fellow at the next table," I concluded, "and my eloquence so impressed him that he asked me if I would come down to Rosemary Cottage and sell this antique furniture. He has a brother who recently acquired a lot of it."

  "What!"

  She sat up in bed, her eyes, though watery, flashing with all the old fire. It was plain that she was about to say something of significance, but before she could speak the door opened and the medicine man appeared, and thinking they were best alone I pushed off and got the books and legged it for the great open spaces.

  There was a telephone booth at the end of the road, and I went to it and rang up Percy. These long distance calls run into money, but I felt that he ought to have the good news without delay, no matter what the expense.

  It was Horace who answered the phone, and I slipped him the tidings of great joy.

  "I've just been seeing my aunt," I said.

  "Oh?" he said.

  "She's got a nasty cold," I said.

  "Ah," he said, and I seemed to detect a note of gratification in his voice, as if he was thinking well of Heaven for having given her a sharp lesson which would teach her to be more careful in future how she went about giving good men the sack.

  "But she thinks she'll be all right tomorrow," I said, "and the moment the sniffles have ceased and the temperature has returned to normal she's coming down here to inspect our stock. I don't need to tell you what this means. Next to her novels what she loves most in this world is old furniture. It is to her what catnip is to a cat. Confront her with some chair on which nobody could sit with any comfort, and provided it was made by Chippendale, if I've got the name right, the sky's the limit. She's quite likely to buy everything we've got, paying a prince's ransom for each article. I've been with her to sales and with my own eyes have observed her flinging the cash about like a drunken sailor. I know what you're thinking, of course. You feel that after what has passed between you it will be painful for you to meet her again, but you must clench your teeth and stick it like a man. We're all working for the good of the show, so ... Hullo? Hullo? Are you there?"

  He wasn't. He had hung up. Mysterious, I thought, and most disappointing to one who, like myself, had been expecting paeans of joy. However, I was much too bucked to worry about the peculiar behaviour of butlers, and feeling that the occasion called for something in the nature of a celebration I went to the Foreign Office, gave George Tupper his two quid back and took him out to lunch.

  It wasn't a very animated lunch, because Tuppy hardly said a word. He seemed dazed. I've noticed the same thing before in fellows to whom I've repaid a small loan. They get a sort of stunned look, as if they had passed through some great spiritual experience. Odd. But it took more than a silent Tuppy to damp my jocund mood, and I was feeling on top of my form when an hour or two later I crossed the threshold of Rosemary Cottage.

  "Yoo-hoo!" I cried. "I'm back."

  I expected shouts of welcome—not, of course, from Erb, but certainly from Horace and Percy. Instead of which, complete silence reigned. They might all have gone for a walk, but that didn't seem likely, because while Percy sometimes enjoyed a little exercise Horace and Erb hadn't set a foot outdoors since we'd been there. And it was as I stood puzzling over this that I noticed that except for a single table—piecrust tables the things are called—all the furniture had gone, too. I don't mind telling you, Corky, that it baffled me. I could make nothing of it, and I was still making nothing of it when I had that feeling you get sometimes that you are not alone, and, turning, I saw that I had company. Standing beside me was a policeman.

  There have been times, I will not conceal it from you, when such a spectacle would have chilled me to the marrow, for you never know what may not ensue, once the Force starts popping up, and it just shows how crystal clear my conscience was that I didn't quail but greeted him with a cheery "Good evening, officer".

  "Good evening, sir," he responded courteously. "Is this Rosemary Cottage?"

  "Nothing but. Anything I can do for you?"

  "I've come on behalf of Miss Julia Ukridge."

  It seemed strange to me that Aunt Julia should have dealings with the police, but aunts notoriously do the weirdest things, so I received the information with a polite "Oh, really?", adding that she was linked to me by ties of blood, being indeed the sister of my late father, and he said "Was that so?" and expressed the opinion that it was a small world, a sentiment in which I concurred.

  "She was talking of looking me up here," I said.

  "So I understood, sir. But she was unable to come herself, so she sent her maid with the list. She has a nasty cold."

  "Probably caught it from my aunt."

  "Sir?"

  "You said the maid had a nasty cold."

  "No, sir, it's Miss Ukridge who has the nasty cold."

  "Ah, now we have got it straight. What did she send the maid for?"

  "To bring us the list of the purloined objects."

  I don't know how it is with you, Corky, but the moment anyone starts talking about purloined objects in my presence I get an uneasy feeling. It was with not a little gooseflesh running down my spine that I gazed at the officer.

  "Purloined objects?"

  "A number of valuable pieces of furniture. Antiques they call them."

  "Oh, my aunt!"

  "Yes, sir, they were her property. They were removed from her residence on Wimbledon Common during her absence. She states that she had gone to Brussels to attend one of these conferences where writers assemble, she being a writer, I understand, and she left her butler in charge of the house. When she came back, the valuable pieces of antique furniture weren't there. The butler, questioned, stated that he had taken the afternoon off and gone to the dog races and nobody more surprised than himself when he returned and found the objects had been purloined. He was dismissed, of course, but that didn't help Miss Ukridge's bereavement much. Just locking the stable door after the milk has been spilt, as you might say. And there till this morning the matter rested. But this morning, on information received, the lady was led to suspect that the purloined objects were in this Rosemary Cottage, and she got in touch with the local police, who got in touch with us. She thinks, you see, that the butler did it. Worked in with an accomplice, I mean to say, and the two of them got away with the purloined objects, no doubt in a plain van."

  I believe I once asked you, Corky, if during a political discussion in a pub you had ever suddenly been punched on the nose, and if I remember rightly you replied in the negative. But I have been—twice—and on each occasion I was conscious of feeling dazed and stunned, like George Tupper when I paid him back the two quid he had lent me and took him to lunch. The illusion that the roof had fallen in and landed on top of my head was extraordinarily vivid. Drinking the constable in with a horrified gaze, I seemed to be looking at two constables, both doing the shimmy.

  For his words had removed the scales from my eyes, and I saw Horace and Percy no longer as pleasant business associates but as what they were, a wolf in butler's clothing and a bookie who did not know the difference between right and wrong. Yes, yes, as you say, I have sometimes been compelled by circumstances to pinch an occasional trifle like a clock from my aunt, but there is a sharp line drawn between swiping a clock and getting away with a houseful of assorted antique furniture. No doubt they had done it precisely as the constab
le had said, and it must have been absurdly simple. Nothing to it. No, Corky, you are wrong. I do not wish I had thought of it myself. I would have scorned such an action, even though knowing the stuff was fully insured and my aunt would be far better off without it.

  "The only thing is," the officer was proceeding, "I don't see any antique furniture here. There's that table, but it's not on the list. And if there had been antique furniture here, you'd have noticed it. Looks to me as if they'd sent me to the wrong place," he said, and with a word of regret that I had been troubled he mounted his bicycle and pedaled off.

  He left me, as you can readily imagine, with my mind in a turmoil, and you are probably thinking that what was giving me dark circles under the eyes was the discovery that I had 1 been lured by a specious bookie into selling hot furniture and so rendering myself liable to a sharp sentence as an accessory or whatever they call it, but it wasn't. That was bad enough, but what was worse was the realization that my employer had gone off owing me six weeks salary. You see, when we had made that gentleman's agreement of ours, he had said that if it was all the same to me, he would prefer to pay me in a lump sum at the end of my term of office instead of week by week, and I had seen no objection. Foolish of me, of course. I cannot impress it on you too strongly, Corky old horse, that if anyone comes offering you money, you should grab it at once and not assent to any suggestion of payment at some later date. Only so can you be certain of trousering the stuff.

  So, as I say, I stood there draining the bitter cup, and while I was thus engaged a car stopped in the road outside and a man came up the garden path.

  He was a tall man with grey hair and a funny sort of twist to his mouth, as if he had just swallowed a bad oyster and was wishing he hadn't.

  "I see you advertise antique furniture," he said. "Where do you keep it?"

  I was just about to tell him it had all gone, when he spotted the piecrust table.

  "This looks a nice piece," he said, and as he spoke I saw in his eye the unmistakeable antique-furniture-collector's gleam which I had so often seen in my Aunt Julia's at sales, and I quivered from hair to shoe sole.

  You have often commented on my lightning brain and ready resource, Corky...well, if it wasn't you, it was somebody else...and I don't suppose I've ever thought quicker than I did then. In a sort of blinding flash it came to me that if I could sell Percy's piecrust table for what he owed me, the thing would be a stand-off and my position stabilised.

  "You bet it's a nice piece," I said, and proceeded to give him the works. I was inspired. I doubt if I have ever, not even when pleading with Flossie that credit was the lifeblood of commerce, talked more persuasively. The golden words simply flowed out, and I could see that I had got him going. It seemed but a moment before he had produced his chequebook and was writing me a cheque for sixty pounds.

  "Who shall I make it out to?" he asked, and I said S. F. Ukridge, and he did so and told me where to send the table—somewhere in the Mayfair district of London—and we parted on cordial terms.

  And not ten minutes after he had driven off, who should show up but Percy. Yes, Percy in person, the last bloke I had expected to see. I don't think I described him to you, did I, but his general appearance was that of a cleanshaven Santa Claus, and he was looking now more like Santa Claus than ever. Bubbling over with good will and joie de vivre. He couldn't have been chirpier if he had just seen the heavily backed favourite in the big race stub its toe on a fence and come a purler.

  "Hullo, cocky," he said. "So you got back."

  Well, you might suppose that after what I had heard from the rozzer I would have started right away to reproach him for his criminal activities and to urge him to give his better self a chance to guide him, but I didn't—partly because it's never any use trying to jerk a bookie's better self to the surface, but principally because I wanted to lose no time in putting our financial affairs on a sound basis. First things first has always been my motto.

  "You!" I said. "I thought you had skipped."

  Have you ever seen a bookie cut to the quick? I hadn't till then. He took it big. There's a word my aunt is fond of using in her novels when the hero has said the wrong thing to the heroine and made her hot under the collar. 'She—'—what is it? 'Bridled', that's the word I mean. Percy bridled.

  "Who, me?" he said. "Without paying you your money? What do you think I am—dishonest?"

  I apologised. I said that naturally when I returned and found him gone and all the furniture removed it had started a train of thought.

  "Well, I had to get the stuff away before your aunt arrived, didn't I? How much do I owe you? Sixty quid, isn't it? Here you are," he said, pulling out a wallet the size of an elephant. "What's that you've got there?"

  And I'm blowed if in my emotion at seeing him again I hadn't forgotten all about the twisted lip man's cheque. I endorsed it with a hasty fountain pen and pushed it across. He eyed it with some surprise.

  "What's this?"

  I may have smirked, a bit, for I was not a little proud of my recent triumph of salesmanship.

  "I just sold the piecrust table to a man who came by in a car."

  "Good boy," said Percy. "I knew I hadn't made a mistake in making you vice-president in charge of sales. I've had that table on my hands for months. Took it for a bad debt. How much did you get for it?" He looked at the cheque. "Sixty quid? Splendid. I only got forty."

  "Eh?"

  "From the chap I sold it to this morning."

  "You sold it to somebody this morning?"

  "That's right."

  "Then which of them gets it?"

  "Why, your chap, of course. He paid more. We've got to do the honest thing."

  "And you'll give your chap his money back?"

  "Now don't be silly," said Percy, and would probably have gone on to reproach me further, but at this moment we had another visitor, a gaunt, lean, spectacled popper-in who looked as if he might be a professor or something on that order.

  "I see you advertise antique furniture," he said. "I would like to look at ... Ah," he said, spotting the table. He nuzzled it a good deal and turned it upside down and once or twice looked as if he were going to smell it.

  "Beautiful," he said. "A lovely bit of work."

  "You can have it for eighty quid," said Percy.

  The professor smiled one of those gentle smiles.

  "I fear it is hardly worth that. When I called it beautiful and lovely, I was alluding to Taney's workmanship. Ike Taney, possibly the finest forger of old furniture we have today. At a glance I would say that this was an example of his middle period."

  Percy, blew a few bubbles.

  "You mean it's a fake? But I was told---"

  "Whatever you were told, your informant was mistaken. And may I add that if you persist in this policy of yours of advertising and selling forgeries as genuine antiques, you are liable to come into uncomfortable contact with the Law. It would be wise to remove that notice you have at your gate. Good evening, gentlemen, good evening."

  He left behind him what you might call a strained silence, broken after a moment or so by Percy saying "Cor!".

  "This calls for thought," he said. "We've sold that table."

  "Yes."

  "Twice."

  "Yes."

  "And got the money for it."

  "Yes."

  "And it's a fake."

  "Yes."

  "And we passed it off as genuine."

  "Yes."

  "And it seems there's a law against that."

  "Yes."

  "We'd better go to the pub and talk it over."

  "Yes..."

  "You be walking on. There's something I want to attend to in the kitchen. By the way, got any matches? I've used all mine."

  I gave him a box and strolled on, deep in thought, and presently he joined me, seeming deep in thought, too. We sat on a stile, both of us plunged in meditation, and then he suddenly uttered an exclamation.

  "What a lovely sunset," he said, "and
how peculiar that the sun's setting in the east. I've never known it to do that before. Why, strike me pink, I believe the cottage is on fire."

  And, Corky, he was perfectly accurate. It was.

  Ukridge broke off his narrative, reached for his wallet and laid it on the table preparatory to summoning the waiter to bring the bill. I ventured a question.

  "The cottage was reduced to ashes?"

  "It was."

  "The piecrust table, too?"

  "Yes, I think it must have burned briskly."

  "A bit of luck for you."

  "Very fortunate. Very fortunate."

  "Percy was probably careless with those matches."

  "One feels he must have been. But he certainly brought about the happy ending. Percy's happy. He's made a good thing out of it. I'm happy. I've made a good thing out of it, too. Aunt Julia has the insurance money, so she also is happy, provided of course that her nasty cold has now yielded to treatment. I doubt if the insurance blokes are happy, but we must always remember that the more cash these insurance firms get taken off them, the better it is for them. It makes more spiritual."

  "How about the two owners of the table?"

  "Oh, they've probably forgotten the whole thing by now. Money means nothing to fellows like that. The fellow I sold it to was driving a Rolls Royce. So looking on the episode from the broad viewpoint ... I beg your pardon?"

  "I said 'Good afternoon, Mr. Ukridge'," said the man who had suddenly appeared at our table, and I saw Ukridge's jaw fall like an express lift going down. And I wasn't surprised, for this was a tall man with grey hair and a curiously twisted mouth. His eyes, as they bored into Ukridge, were bleak.

  "I've been looking for you for a long time and hoping to meet you again. I'll trouble you for sixty pounds."

  "I haven't got sixty pounds."

  "Spent some of it, eh? Then let's see what you have got," said the man, turning the contents of the wallet out on the tablecloth arid counting it in an efficient manner. "Fifty-eight pounds, six and threepence. That's near enough."

  "But who's going to pay for my lunch?"

  "Ah, that we shall never know," said the man.