'Taken any steps about it?' he asked.
'Oh, no, m'lord, I mean Mr I. It wouldn't be proper.'
'This is no time to mess about, being proper,' said Lord Ickenham bluffly 'Can't get anywhere if you don't take steps.'
'What do you advise, Mr I?'
'That's more the tone. I don't suppose there's a man alive better equipped to advise you than I am. I'm a specialist at this sort of thing. The couples I've brought together in my time, if placed end to end, not that I suppose one could do it, of course, would reach from Piccadilly Circus to well beyond Hyde Park Corner. You don't know Bill Oakshott, do you? He was one of my clients, my nephew Pongo another. And there was the pink chap down at Mitching Hill, I've forgotten his name, and Polly Pott and Horace Davenport and Elsie Bean the housemaid, oh, and dozens more. With me behind him, the most diffident wooer can get the proudest beauty to sign on the dotted line. In your case, the relationship between you and the adored object being somewhat unusual, one will have to go rather carefully. The Ickenham system, for instance, might seem a little abrupt.'
'The Ickenham system, Mr I?'
'I call it that. Just giving you the bare outlines, you stride up to the subject, grab her by the wrist, clasp her to your bosom and shower burning kisses on her upturned face. You don't have to say much – just "My mate!" or something of that sort, and, of course, in grabbing by the wrist, don't behave as if you were handling a delicate piece of china. Grip firmly and waggle her about a bit. It seldom fails, and I usually recommend it, but in your case, as I say, it might be better to edge into the thing more gradually. I think that as a starter you should bring her flowers every day, wet with the morning dew. And when I say "bring", I don't mean hand them over as if you were delivering a parcel from the stores. Put them secretly in her room. No message. An anonymous gift from a mystery worshipper. That will pique her curiosity. "Hullo!" she will say to herself. "What's all this in aid of?" and at a suitable moment you reveal that they came from you, and it knocks her base over apex. Wait!' said Lord Ickenham. A thought had come like a full-blown rose, flushing his brow. 'I'm seeing deeper into this thing. Isn't there a language of flowers? I'm sure I've read about it somewhere. I mean, you send a girl nasturtiums or lobelias or whatever it may be, and it signifies "There is one who adores you respectfully from afar" or "Watch out, here comes Albert!" or something. You've heard of that?'
'Oh, yes, indeed. There are books on the subject.'
'Get one, and make of it a constant companion.' Lord Ickenham mused for a moment. 'Is there anything else? Ah, yes. The dog. Has she a dog?'
A cocker spaniel, Mr I, called Benjy'
'Conciliate that dog, Bert. Omit no word or act that will lead to a rapprochement between yourself and it. The kindly chirrup. The friendly bone. The constant pat on the head or ribs, according to the direction in which your tastes lie. There is no surer way to a woman's heart than to get in solid with her dog.'
He broke off. Through the window of the pantry he had seen a gentlemanly figure pass by.
'The boss's conference has concluded,' he said, rising. 'I'd better go and pass the time of day. You won't forget, Bert? An atmosphere of the utmost cordiality where the dog Benjy is concerned, and the daily gift of flowers.'
'Yes, Mr I.'
'Every morning without fail. It's bound to work. Inevitably the little daily dose will have its effect,' said Lord Ickenham, and went along the passage to the study where, he presumed, Sir Raymond Bastable would still be – gloating, possibly, over the ruby ring he had purchased.
His manner was even more preoccupied than it had been when he ignored the paddling cow. So many problems had presented themselves, coming up one after the other. It was never his habit to grumble and make a fuss when this happened, but he did sometimes, as now, feel that the life work he had set himself of spreading sweetness and light – or, as some preferred to put it, meddling in other people's business – was almost more than any man could be expected to undertake singlehanded. In addition to that of his godson Johnny, he now had Albert Peasemarch's tangled love life to worry about, and to promote a union between a butler and the sister of his employer is in itself a whole-time task, calling for all that one has of resolution and ingenuity. And there was, furthermore, the matter of the reformation of Beefy Bastable, whose attitude toward his sister Phoebe, so like that of a snapping turtle suffering from ulcers, he was determined to correct.
A full programme.
Still, 'Tails up, Ickenham. Remember your triumphs in the past,' he was saying to himself. This was not the first time in his career that the going had been sticky.
He was right about Sir Raymond being in the study, but wrong about the ruby ring. His half-brother-in-law was sitting huddled in a chair with his head between his hands, his air that of a man who, strolling along a country lane thinking of this and that, has caught an unexpected automobile in the small of the back, and his outward appearance mirrored perfectly the emotions within. At about three-fifteen on a November afternoon at Oxford, when the University rugby football team were playing Cardiff, a Welshman with a head constructed apparently of ivory or one of the harder metals had once butted Sir Raymond Bastable in the solar plexus, giving him the illusion that the world had suddenly come to an end and judgment day set in with unusual severity. It had happened a matter of thirty years ago, but the episode had never faded from his memory, and until this evening he had always looked on it as the high spot of his life.
Some five minutes previously, when Oily Carlisle, producing Cosmo Wisdom's letter, had revealed its contents and gone off to give him, as he explained, time to think it over, it had been eclipsed.
CHAPTER 10
Lord Ickenham came into the room, concern in every hair of his raised eyebrows. Many men in his place, beholding this poor bit of human wreckage, would have said to themselves 'Oh, my gosh, another toad beneath the harrow' and ducked out quickly to avoid having to listen to the hard luck story which such toads are always so ready to tell, but to the altruistic peer it never occurred to adopt such a course. His was a big heart, and when he saw a toad not only beneath the harrow but apparently suffering from the effects of one of those gas explosions in London street which slay six, he did not remember an appointment for which he was already late but stuck around and prepared to do whatever lay in his power to alleviate the sufferer's distress.
'Beefy!' he cried. 'My dear old bird, what on earth's the matter? You look like a devastated area.'
It took Sir Raymond some little time to tell him what the matter was, for he had much to say on the subject of the blackhearted villainy of his nephew Cosmo and also a number of pungent remarks to make about Oily Carlisle. As he concluded the recital of their skulduggery, his audience, which he had held spellbound, clicked its tongue. It shocked Lord Ickenham to think that humanity could sink to such depths, and he blamed himself for having allowed this new development to catch him unprepared.
'We should have foreseen this,' he said. 'We should have told ourselves that it was madness to place our confidence in anyone like young Cosmo, a twister compared with whom corkscrews are straight and spiral staircases the shortest line between two points. Seeing that little black moustache of his, we should have refused him the nomination and sought elsewhere for a co-worker. "Never put anything on paper, my boy," my old father used to say to me, "and never trust a man with a small black moustache." And you, my poor Beefy, have done both.'
Sir Raymond's reply was somewhat muffled, for he was having trouble with his vocal cords, but Lord Ickenham understood him to say that it was all his, Lord Ickenham's, fault.
'You suggested him.'
'Surely not? Yes, by Jove, you're right. I was sitting here, you were sitting there, lapping up martinis like a vacuum cleaner, and I said... Yes, it all comes back to me. I'm sorry.'
'What's the use of that?'
'Remorse is always useful, Beefy. It stimulates the brain. It has set mine working like a buzz-saw, and already a plan of action is be
ginning to present itself. You say this fellow went off? Where did he go?'
'How the devil do I know where he went?'
'I ask because I happen to be aware that he has a sensitive skin and is undergoing considerable discomfort because his wife made him put on his winter woollies this morning. I thought he might be in the garden somewhere, stripped to the buff in order to scratch with more authority, in which case his coat would be on the ground or hung from some handy bough, and I could have stolen up, not letting a twig snap beneath my feet, and gone through his pockets. But I doubt if he is the sort of man to be careless with a coat containing important documents. I shall have to try the other plan I spoke of, the one I said was beginning to present itself. Since you last heard from me, I have shaped it out, complete to the last button, and it will, I am convinced, bring home the bacon. You're sure he's coming back?'
'Of course he's coming back, curse him!'
'Through those French windows, no doubt. He would hardly ring the front door bell and have himself announced again. It would confuse Albert Peasemarch and make him fret. All right, Beefy, receive him courteously, ask after his sensitive skin and keep him engaged in conversation till I am with you again.'
'Where are you going?'
'Never mind. When the fields are white with daisies, I'll return,' said Lord Ickenham, and withdrew through the door a minute or so before Oily Carlisle came in through the French windows.
It could scarcely be said that Sir Raymond received Mr Carlisle courteously, unless it is courteous to glare at someone like a basilisk and call him a slimy blackmailer, nor did he enquire after his skin or engage him in conversation. What talk ensued was done by Oily, who was in excellent spirits and plainly feeling that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Cosmo's letter, nestling in his inside coat pocket, made a little crackling sound as he patted it, and it was music to his ears. There was a brisk cheerfulness in his manner as he started talking prices that gashed his companion like a knife.
He had just outlined the tariff and was suggesting that if Sir Raymond would bring out his cheque book and take pen in hand, the whole thing could be cleaned up promptly, neatly and to everybody's satisfaction, when there came to him a sudden doubt as to the world being, as he had supposed, the best of all possible. The door opened, and Albert Peasemarch appeared.
'Inspector Jervis,' he announced, and with an uneasy feeling in his interior, as if he had recently swallowed a heaping tablespoonful of butterflies, Oily recognized, in the tall, slim figure that entered, his fellow-traveller from the station. And noting that his eyes, so genial in the cab, were now hard and his lips, once smiling, tight and set, he quailed visibly. He remembered a palmist at Coney Island once telling him, in return for fifty cents, that a strange man would cross his path and that of this strange man he would do well to beware, but not even the thought that it looked as if he were going to get value for his half dollar was enough to cheer him.
If Lord Ickenham's eyes were hard and his lips set, it was because that was how he saw the role he had undertaken. There were gaps in his knowledge of his godson's literary work, but he had read enough of it to know that when Inspector Jervis found himself in the presence of the criminal classes, he did not beam at them. The eyes hard, the lips set, the voice crisp and official – that was how he envisaged Inspector Jervis.
'Sir Raymond Bastable?' he said. 'Good evening, Sir Raymond, I am from the Yard.'
And looked every inch of it, he was feeling complacently. He was a man who in his time had played many parts, and he took a pride in playing them right. It was his modest boast that there was nothing in existence, except possibly a circus dwarf, owing to his height, or Gina Lollobrigida, owing to her individual shape, which he could not at any moment and without rehearsal depict with complete success. In a single afternoon at The Cedars, Mafeking Road, in the suburb of Mitching Hill, on the occasion when he had befriended the pink chap to whom he had alluded in his talk with Albert Peasemarch, he had portrayed not only an official from the bird shop, come to clip the claws of the resident parrot, but Mr Roddis, owner of The Cedars, and a Mr J. G. Bulstrode, one of the neighbours, and had been disappointed that he was given no opportunity of impersonating the parrot, which he was convinced he would have done on broad, artistic lines.
Oily continued to quail. Not so good, he was saying to himself, not so good. He had never been fond of inspectors, and the time when their society made the smallest appeal to him was when they popped up just as he was concluding an important deal. He did not like the way this one was looking at him and, when he spoke, he liked what he said even less.
'Turn out your pockets,' said Lord Ickenham curtly.
'Eh?'
'And don't say "Eh?" I have been watching this man closely,' said Lord Ickenham, turning to Sir Raymond, whose eyes were bulging like a snail's, 'since I saw him on the station platform in London. His furtive behaviour excited my suspicions. "Picking pockets right and left, that chap," I said to myself. "Helping himself to wallets and what not from all and sundry."'
Oily started, and a hot flush suffused his forehead. His professional pride was piqued. In no section of the community are class distinctions more rigid than among those who make a dishonest living by crime. The burglar looks down on the stick-up man, the stick-up man on the humbler practitioner who steals milk cans. Accuse a high-up confidence artist of petty larceny, and you bring out all the snob in him.
'And when I shared a cab with him to Hammer Hall and discovered on alighting that I was short a cigarette case, a tie pin, a packet of throat pastilles and a fountain pen, I knew that my suspicions had been well founded. Come on, my man, what are we waiting for?'
Oily was still gasping.
'Are you saying I picked pockets? You're crazy. I wouldn't know how.'
'Nonsense. It's perfectly simple. You just dip. It's no use pleading inability. If Peter Piper,' said Lord Ickenham, who on these occasions was always a little inclined to let his tongue run away with him, 'could pick a peck of pickled peppers, I see no reason why you should not be capable of picking a peck of pickled pockets. Has the fellow been left alone in here?' he asked Sir Raymond, who blinked and said he had not.
Ah? Then he will have had no opportunity of trousering any of your little knick-knacks, even if he still had room for them. But let us see what he has got. It should be worth more than a casual glance.'
'Yes,' said Sir Raymond, at last abreast. He was always rather a slow thinker when not engaged in his profession. 'Turn out your pockets, my man.'
Oily wavered, uncertain what to do for the best. If he had been calmer, it might have struck him that this was a most peculiar inspector, in speech and manner quite unlike the inspectors with whom his professional activities had brought him into contact in his native country, and his suspicions, too, might have been excited. But he was greatly agitated and feeling far from his usual calm self. And perhaps, he was thinking, all English inspectors were like this. He had never met one socially. His acquaintance with Scotland Yard was a purely literary one, the fruit of his reading of the whodunits to which he was greatly addicted.
It was possibly the fact that Sir Raymond was between him and the window that decided him. The Beefy Bastable who had recently celebrated his fifty-second birthday was no longer the lissom athlete of thirty years ago, but he was still an exceedingly tough-looking customer, not lightly to be engaged in physical combat by one who specialized in the persuasive word rather than violence. Drinking in his impressive bulk, Oily reached a decision. Slowly, with a sad sigh as he thought how different it all would have been if his Gertie had been there with her vase of gladioli, he emptied his pockets.
Lord Ickenham appeared surprised at the meagreness of their contents.
'He seems to have cached the swag somewhere, no doubt in a secret spot marked with a cross,' he said. 'But, hullo! What's this? A letter addressed to you, Sir Raymond.'
'You don't say?'
'Written, I should deduce
from a superficial glance, by a man with a small black moustache.'
'Well, well.'
'Just what I was going to say myself
'Most extraordinary!'
'Very. Will you press a charge against this man for swiping it?'
'I think not.'
'You don't want to see him in a dungeon with dripping walls, getting gnawed to the bone by rats? You string along with the Bard of Avon about the quality of mercy not being strained? Very well. It's up to you, of course. All right, Mr Carlisle, you may go.'
It was at this moment, when everything appeared, as Oily would have put it, to have been cleaned up neatly and to everybody's satisfaction, that the door opened again and Mrs Phoebe Wisdom pottered in, looking so like a white rabbit that the first impulse of any lover of animals would have been to offer her a lettuce.
'Raymond, dear,' she said, 'have you seen my pig?'
For the past half-hour Sir Raymond Bastable had been under a considerable strain, and though relief at the success of his half-brother-in-law's intervention had lessened this, he was still feeling its effects. This sudden introduction of the pig motif seemed to take him into a nightmare world where nothing made sense, and for a moment everything went blank. Swaying a little on his base, he said in a low whisper:
'Your pig?'
'The little gold pig from my charm bracelet. It has dropped off, and I can't find it anywhere. Well, Frederick, how nice to see you after all this time. Peasemarch told me you were here. When did you arrive?'
'I came on the 3.26 train. I'm staying with my godson, Johnny Pearce, at the Hall. You don't look too well, Phoebe. What's the trouble? Not enough yeast?'
'It's this book of Cossie's, Frederick. I can't imagine how he came to write such a book. A bishop denouncing it!'