Carson's Conspiracy (5 page)

‘I think,' he said suddenly, ‘my son Robin was mentioned when you and your wife lunched with us?'

‘Yes, indeed.' Lely was slightly surprised. ‘Mrs Carson said something about him.'

‘Cynthia is very fond of him, naturally. She'll be delighted by the news.'

‘You've had news?'

‘Yes – although don't mention it. I'm saving it up as a treat. Robin's coming on a visit in no time. I had a cable from him the other day.'

It was thus that Carl Carson crossed his Rubicon.

 

 

But affording Cynthia her treat wasn't going to be plain sailing. And would it really
be
a treat? It had for long been his habit simply to acquiesce in her delusion, but he had never before taken any initiative in, as it were, fleshing it out. What would be the result now? Carson had no use for psychiatrists and their like, and his wife's imaginings, although inconvenient and, of course, distressing, had never prompted him to seek any professional opinion on her. He had frequently told himself that there would be time enough for anything so embarrassing and expensive if and when the thing really got out of hand. That had never quite happened so far, and he had gone along with the nonsense without thinking all that about it.

But he had to do some thinking now. There must, he supposed, be a corner of her mind in which Cynthia knew that she had invented Robin; that he had sprung, so to speak, not from her womb but from her head. Might not the news that such a phantasm was about to arrive at Garford simply terrify her to the point of screaming? And if he didn't arrive (as, of course, he couldn't) and she had to conclude that he had met with very considerable misadventure on the way, mightn't she react more badly still – even to that dread point of proclaiming to the world that Robin Carson was a fake? Carson wasn't yet altogether clear about the misadventure; his plan was proving, after all, to be still at an elementary stage; but he knew that misadventure there would have to be. And
speedy
misadventure. A glimpse or two of Robin was something somebody could perhaps be persuaded he had had. But what was going to happen must happen within, say, an hour of the phantasm's touching down at Heathrow.

He did some hard and, of course, knowledgeable thinking about airports. There was the girl who took your ticket and processed it. There was the man who glanced at your passport and nodded you on. There was somebody further – man or girl – who took your ticket again, gave you a second ticket of sorts, and allotted you your seat. And at that you were on board. You had possibly been frisked. You had certainly passed through a contraption which behaved dramatically if you were harbouring large chunks of metal about your person. But that was the whole thing.

In flight there might be some routine stuff about currency or the like, but that was neither here nor there. And at the other end you just got off, went through a passport business – again on the nod unless you looked like some species of dubious alien – and that was it. Baggage collecting and customs people, of course – but they were nothing to worry about. Except, perhaps, for mere tin-pot journeys, there was somewhere, no doubt, a record preserved of the people who had checked in: there had to be, since occasionally whole plane-loads of travellers got themselves burnt to cinders.
But on no normal occasion did your passport and your ticket come simultaneously under the same eye
. So on your ticket you could be Mr Black, and on your passport Mr Brown. There might, of course, be exceptional circumstances, and even certain routes, upon which not all of this convenient state of affairs obtained. You would have to make sure. But, by and large, it held. Provided that Mr Brown had his authentic passport – and visas, if required – he could, if he had a fancy for it, actually travel as one of the Incas of Peru.

It was only very briefly that Carl Carson had to wonder why he had been reviewing these familiar facts. They had never been of any concern to him before, since his own aerial occasions had invariably been as blameless as yours or mine. He realized that they were in his head now simply because his plan was after all less nebulous, was further advanced, than he had been consciously aware of. The time for action had, in fact, arrived.

Carson's thought-processes so far, although tentative in parts and not entirely lucid, were rational enough. This was unsurprising, since cool – even cold – calculation was habitual with him. Quite soon, however, he was to become intermittently aware that a change was taking place. He became wary in areas in which wariness was so superfluous as to be a waste of nervous energy.

The Punters were a case in point. On moving into Garford, the Carsons had for some time made do with domestic service of a rather scrappy sort. There was a gardener, Lockett, with a cottage in the ‘grounds', who stuck to gardening and refused to do anything else. A couple of women ‘came in' from the village on alternate weekdays and messed around. A third and elderly woman, of somewhat less humble status as having retired from an obscure catering enterprise, also appeared regularly and cooked a dinner. Carson drove his own car. Although it was so grand a car, its owner felt that he was still on the wrong side of a great divide as long as he himself thus sat at its wheel – in addition to which he had to be irritatingly cautious when driving home after well-lubricated business occasions. So he had decided that, in addition to the two non-resident rustic drudges, it would be reasonable and proper to run to a married couple of the superior and professional, but nevertheless all-purpose sort. The Punters, contacted through the advertisement columns of a top newspaper, were the result.

It had turned out, of course, that such couples cost the moon. Carson had been quite shocked by the figures he had seen quoted as necessary to secure their services. They were in a bracket even higher than that of nannies prepared to look after nice children in Jeddah or New York. But the Punters, in addition to having turned up at once, had been surprisingly moderate – although still not exactly unassuming – in their financial demands. Punter himself proved to be every inch, and undeviatingly, a butler; one felt he could have sustained the part with distinction even in a superior West End comedy; but at the same time he was quite willing to assume a peaked cap and drive the Rolls – a function a little outside that of butlers in the traditional hierarchies of English society. Mrs Punter addressed Cynthia as ‘madam' on all available occasions, and seemed only to be waiting with some confidence for the day on which this would become ‘m'lady'. Carson's satisfaction with the Punters ought to have been unflawed.

He had nevertheless come to distrust them – and this in a direction that was distinctly odd. Had he taken it into his head that they constituted the avant-garde of a gang of professional burglars, covertly engaged in taking impressions of latch-keys and expertly examining the signatures on oil-paintings and the authenticating marks on the under-side of porcelain figurines, he would have been succumbing merely to the normal anxieties of a man of property. But it was another system of suspicions that Carson had found gaining on him.

The under-side he had one day himself given way to looking at was that of his telephone. Of this particular telephone he was rather proud. It didn't trail a flex. (In this it was probably like the red one habitually toted round by the President of the United States.) He could carry it, or it could be brought to him, anywhere in the house, or even within the nearer reaches of the garden, and put into operation straight away. It was this harmless toy that, being one day alone in the house, he had found himself inverting and studying with care. In other words, there had presented itself to him the dreaded spectre of being bugged. He was suddenly apprehensive that within the sanctity of his own home industrial espionage had reared its ugly head.

He knew that it was silly. He knew that it was in the Far East – in Singapore and Hong Kong and such places – that the anti-bugging people had found a happy hunting-ground of gullible tycoons convinced they were being thus pried into. He even had some money in that sort of thing himself. It was vanity that the anti-bugging crowd preyed upon; it ministered to a man's self-importance to believe that his mere chit-chat was valuable to other people.

The telephone had looked wholly innocent. But that told you nothing. He got a screwdriver and opened the thing up, but of course that wasn't informative either. Then he found he couldn't put the damned contraption together again. He had to pretend he'd dropped it on the marble floor of Garford's hall, and send for a mechanic. It had been a most embarrassing aberration.

And that didn't conclude the matter. Punter could have filled the whole house with the devilish contrivances! His office in the city, too: other villains might have been at work there. Hadn't there been that monstrous affair in the American Embassy in Moscow? And conversations about complex financial manoeuvres were one thing: even substantially caught and transcribed, they mightn't convey much. A simple life-and-death affair (and what better description could there be of what he was taking in hand?) was quite another. The deepest secret could be given away in a sentence.

So the subject was worth going into thoroughly. Carson, although not much of a reading man, read it up. Giving it out that he was thinking of perhaps installing large-scale precautions, he even picked the brains of an expert. What he discovered was interesting and rather startling. Distance wasn't an important factor in the bugging business. Granted adequate instrumentation, you could pick up the conversation of a couple of chattering bedouin across a substantial stretch of the Sahara Desert. But not from amid, say, a populous casbah or a caravanserai. The bug can't filter out din. Conduct your conversation close to a general uproar, or even under a comfortable warm shower, and you are as safe as houses.

There was very seldom, of course, any sort of uproar at Garford. The two village girls (who still came in to do the rough) must have got through their gossiping elsewhere. The woman who cooked had been dismissed, since Mrs Punter cooked very well. Mrs Punter creaked a little, so you sometimes had warning of her approach as a result, much as if she had been the crocodile in
Peter
Pan
. As for her husband, he made no sound at all. Of a stiff and almost military bearing from the waist up, from there downwards there was something that seemed immaterial about Punter, so that at times you could swear he was levitating rather than treading the carpet or the parquet. It was hard work conversing with Punter; he had no apparent fondness for saying anything other than ‘Thank you, sir', and a particular fondness for saying it when told to go away. Carson suspected that this wasn't quite right in a butler. He had from time to time been in the houses of other men who kept butlers, and had noticed that a little familiar chat between employer and employee seemed to be quite the thing. So he had become, as we have seen, suspicious of Punter, and inclined to wonder whether he was quite what he seemed to be. Carson wasn't prepared to see this suspicion as madness (one mad person in a household being quite enough) but he knew there was a word for it – one of those troublesome para-something words – and that those were particularly liable to it who were occasionally troubled by the fussy and importunate curiosities of other men's accountants and of beastly little lawyers on the make. Nevertheless he did insist on talking to Punter from time to time.

‘Punter,' he said, on the day following the completing of the portrait, ‘has your mistress said anything to you about preparing Mr Robin's room?' Carson wasn't sure about ‘your mistress', although it was certainly what people said in the rather old-fashioned novels he dipped into from time to time. Punter didn't appear put out by it. He had an air of slight surprise, all the same.

‘Mr Robin, sir?' Punter asked – and perhaps with eyebrows ever so fractionally raised.

‘Yes, damn it – Mr Robin. My son.'

‘No, sir. But Mrs Carson would more probably speak to my wife.'

‘Well – has she?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Mr Robin is coming on a visit. From America.'

‘Very good, sir.'

This struck Carson as a singularly idiotic thing to say, and for a moment, in the vulgar phrase, he lost his cool.

‘Blast it, man!' he said. ‘I sometimes can't make you out. Don't you like the job? There's a remedy, if you don't.'

This time, and very understandably, Punter's eyebrows did go right up.

‘By no means, sir. And I only trust we give satisfaction. If I may venture on a remark, a household like your own – that of a gentleman of great wealth that is yet conducted in a modest manner – is particularly agreeable to persons like Mrs Punter and myself. On account of our having been, as we always so fortunately have been, only in the best service.'

This speech astonished Carson. It astonished him – so taciturn was Punter's normal habit – merely as being a speech (or ‘remark') at all. There was something gratifying in being judged a gentleman of great wealth, which unfortunately wasn't quite his own idea of himself. And ‘only in the best service' was gratifying as well. He was in two minds, all the same – uncertain whether to embrace Punter and suggest they have a drink together, or to dismiss him on the spot on the strength of a monstrously impertinent irony. This dubiety (which speaks, after all, for that acuteness of perception which seldom deserted him) held him silent for a moment, so that it was left to Punter to sustain the dialogue.

‘Would you yourself, sir, have any instructions to give in view of the young gentleman's imminent arrival?'

‘No, no – nothing of the sort. We'll let you know when anything is required.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

Punter gave a bow – rather as a prime minister might do at the conclusion of an audience with a monarch – and withdrew.