Sheiks and Adders (5 page)

‘Taking the day off, Tommy?’ Appleby asked.

‘Taking the day off, John? Or have they hired you as a private eye?’

‘I don’t quite know. I was certainly invited to come and look around.’

‘By this chap Chitfield?’ There was sudden sharp curiosity in Pride’s tone.

‘I haven’t met Chitfield. It was by his younger daughter, as a matter of fact, when I made her acquaintance, quite by chance, yesterday.’

‘Well, I’m blessed!’ The Chief Constable glanced rapidly round him, apparently to assure himself that this conversation was not being overheard. ‘Brought any of the family along with you?’

‘No, I haven’t. I did suggest it to Judith, but she wouldn’t play.’

‘No more would Mary. I wanted her to tog up as a Dresden Shepherdess or something, but she turned the idea down.’

‘Women are more sensible than men, Tommy.’

‘So they are. Utterly irrational, of course. But a damn-sight more sensible, as you say. I just thought that if I had Mary with me I’d be less noticeable than on my own.’

‘My dear Tommy! Do you mean that you’re here as a minion of the law yourself?’

‘Not exactly – although I’ve had to bring a couple of my men. Heaven knows why.’

‘Both disguised as Robin Hood?’

‘No, no. Distinctions of rank have to be observed – wouldn’t you say, John? – even in fancy dress. They’re here in their off-duty togs – looking like respectable grocers, no doubt.’ Colonel Pride, as he produced these remarks, seemed decidedly unhappy about them. ‘Let’s take a turn around the show,’ he said abruptly. ‘Opportunity for a little chat.’

They took a turn around the show, but for some time Colonel Pride was silent. He was certainly in a state of perplexity, and was perhaps hesitating about whether or not to confide in a John Appleby so oddly encountered. It had been with Judith Appleby’s family that Pride had been on terms of intimacy in the first place, and although he had taken to the retired Metropolitan Commissioner in a personal way he was a little inclined to think of him as a hardened Londoner, much implicated with tiresome mandarins in the Home Office and elsewhere in Whitehall. Pride believed that the less he was badgered by people of that sort, and the more he was left to make do with county committees and magistrates of his own kidney, the better could he carry out his job of keeping the Queen’s peace throughout a substantial tract of rural England. So for the moment he had fallen back upon treating Appleby simply as a fellow-observer of what was at least a sufficiently colourful scene.

When several hundred people have turned up at a kind of garden party, mostly in fancy dress, their behaviour becomes sufficiently unusual to merit the interest of a psychologist. They evince, for one thing, a disinclination to stay put. They become restless or (more learnedly) hyper-kinetic. Perhaps this is the result merely of an impulse to show themselves off in rapid succession to as many people as possible. Or conceivably the act of dressing up as what they are not has symbolized a suppressed impulse to escape from themselves, and they are now dodging around with the obscure intent of carrying this process of release further. Visually, the effect is kaleidoscopic and rather exciting. On the present occasion it was to be supposed that a substantial proportion of the company would be required shortly to settle down as spectators of whatever quasi-dramatic entertainment the open-air theatre was going to offer. A dozen rows of chairs there already awaited them. The kaleidoscopic effect would vanish, and the company take on the appearance of an enormous flowerbed. Appleby found himself doubting whether this would be a great success. It was probable, for one thing, that quite a lot of those costumes would be rather uncomfortable when one was required to assume a sedentary position in them for long.

Colonel Pride’s mind appeared to be moving like Appleby’s, since when he did speak it was to take up this more or less superficial aspect of the occasion.

‘All this toggery is straight theatrical stuff, wouldn’t you say? Designed for the stage, I mean, and to be seen at a distance and under artificial light.’

‘Not quite all of it. There are women in their grandmothers’ riding-habits and men in their grandfathers’ uniforms.’

‘Perfectly true. You show you’re among the nobs that way, eh? Tell a lot about a fellow from what he chooses to masquerade as. Look at that pirate over there. Timid little chap, I expect, always feeling he’s been done down and robbed by somebody. He’d have come as a highwayman if he could sit a horse.’

‘Very probably. And I wonder whether appropriate mounts are barred? I’d rather fancy turning up as a rajah on my private elephant. Or as a sheik on a camel.’ Appleby glanced swiftly at Pride. ‘Incidentally, there’s a young man, a friend of the Chitfields, who wants to come as a sheik, but isn’t being let.’

‘It sounds rather arbitrary, that. Hard to see any offence in it. I could understand this fellow Chitfield not much caring for a chap turning up as Jesus Christ, armed with a scourge with which to whip the money-changers out of the temple.’ Making this very profane joke, Pride chuckled innocently. ‘A top money-changer in his way, I take this Richard Chitfield Esquire to be.’

‘A usurer, you mean?’

‘No, no – just the ordinary City scum. Entirely respectable until somebody obliges us to turn up on him with a warrant.’

‘I see.’ Appleby wasn’t sure that he saw much – or not on the score of this stiffly intolerant speech. But it did seem to him that Pride had been quite uninterested in his oblique reference to the entertainment proposed by Cherry Chitfield and the young man called Tibby. The small mystery attached to this (which Appleby had so perplexedly to acknowledge to himself as the sole reason of his being now at Drool Court) was no part of Pride’s own pigeon. Just what Pride’s pigeon was, and why a couple of his men in plain clothes were on the spot as it were to pluck the bird, it was high time to find out. If Tommy Pride, that was to say, was prepared to play.

‘Tommy,’ he said firmly, ‘just what is this nonsense about your having a couple of plain-clothes men uselessly lost in that mob? I can understand those Chitfields wanting a spot of security, modern times being as they are. But I’d expect them to do their hiring from a private firm.’

‘Quite right, if all that they apprehended was a bit of pilfering, and so on. Bobbies much too thin on the ground, these days, to be deployed on that sort of thing, even on a cash-down basis. If there’s a threat of public disorder it’s another matter. We have to be there, although we may send in a bill to the concern that has generated the risk of trouble. But that’s all beside the point here. My men are on the spot simply on the orders of my boss in London.’

‘Come off it, Tommy. You haven’t got a boss in London.’

‘True enough, in a fashion. But it’s complicated in various ways, as you very well know. For example, there are things I’m authorized to do only if I ask the Home Secretary to instruct me to do them. But more often, of course, it’s just a matter of receiving a word in the ear that this or that spot of co-operation would be helpful. It’s going to be helpful to have these men here this afternoon. God knows why. But I’ve said that before.’

‘So you have.’ It was Appleby’s turn to look cautiously round, and he saw that for the moment he and the Chief Constable had achieved complete seclusion. ‘Your men aren’t here at any suggestion emanating from Richard Chitfield?’

‘Not so far as I know. But I don’t know much. That’s my point, isn’t it?’

‘Seemingly so. Just what are your men meant to
do
?’

‘Keep an eye open.’ Colonel Pride was suddenly breathing rather heavily. ‘Believe me, John, those were the very words.’

‘I see.’ This time Appleby did see. ‘Your men are here so that – following some incident not communicated to you – their having been here can be pointed to by some wretched Minister as showing that all proper precautions had been taken?’

‘It may be no more than that. Arranging a presence, as they say – but denying me the information that could make it an effective presence. I can imagine one of those bloody leather-bottoms in Whitehall thinking up that one.’

‘One wonders why he should want to think it up.’

‘Quite so, John. And I’m here myself to try to find out. That’s a muddled notion, perhaps. But it’s the best I can manage.’

‘Has it occurred to you that this entire fête may be a cover for something else?’

‘Yes, it has. But I don’t think it is. Or not quite. I suspect it was all arranged as a piece of routine charitable endeavour by these damned Chitfields, and that then somebody has seen the chance of exploiting it to a different end. And I’m going to be gestured at if something goes wrong. “We alerted poor old Pride,” they’ll say, “and he did his best.”’

‘In fact, you’re standing by to carry the can?’

‘Well, to be fair, John, those button-headed desk-hoppers don’t see it quite that way. But the whole thing makes sense only in terms of some discreditable diplomatic equivocation. You know the kind of thing. Letting something happen because you don’t particularly see why it needn’t be let happen. But having some face-saving gesture to make. Not in public, of course. As part of a smooth confidential reply to an indignant
aide-mémoire
, or whatever they call it.’

‘Deep waters, Tommy. What about some sort of hush-hush conference or rendezvous going on here – one that other interested parties have been conceivably tipped off about with the chance of awkward and even violent consequences?’

‘Nothing more likely. Nothing more absurd and bizarre, and therefore nothing more likely. As the next thing to a kid in Military Intelligence during the war, you know, I brushed up against such lunacies often enough. They were incubated by crackpot dons recruited for the purpose and hatched in houses not unlike Drool Court.’

‘And very successfully at times.’

‘Well, that’s true.’ Pride, a fair-minded man, nodded gloomily. ‘And I have to admit I may be taking too dark a view of the thing. There is a suggestion that some sort of genuine action may be called for. Down there in the car park I have a fellow in uniform waiting for further instructions, if any, on the VHF. Not that they say “instructions”, you know. They say “briefing”, because they feel it’s more polite.’

‘Contingency planning,’ Appleby said. ‘There’s a mania for it.’

‘Just that. If we’re told in advance just what
may
happen, we may go gossiping round when it
doesn’t
happen – and somebody in some embassy or other is going to be offended. So the blasted contingency is kept like a cat in a bag till the last moment. And now, my dear John, let’s join the crush again, and keep that confounded eye on things.’

But quite soon Appleby and Colonel Pride parted company. Two Robin Hoods walking shoulder to shoulder perhaps rather uncomfortably suggested to them the spectacle of a couple of police constables prudently twinned up in a particularly rowdy district. Not that Appleby – however it might be with his companion – had any wish to veil his true identity. His garments were a concession to the occasion, and not a disguise. He had been drawn to the fête by the sense of a small mystery. And now, if Pride was right, it seemed probable that it was harbouring a larger one as well. Even so, no retired top policeman could have dreamed of anything so indecorous as turning up at it in a feigned character. Appleby had declared himself to the elder Miss Chitfield; he now looked around for the younger – who, he hoped, might be come upon in the company of her young man. Tibby, it occurred to him, was really a girl’s name: a diminutive of Isabel which Professor McIlwraith would probably declare to be imported from Scotland. Perhaps in this case it was short for Theobald. In neither form, somehow, did it sound a very promising name for a sheik.

Professor McIlwraith himself, as it happened, was the next acquaintance Appleby encountered. His presence seemed a little surprising, since one would somehow not have expected a severe scholar to turn up at such an affair. He was, of course, still virtually a stranger to Appleby, and it was conceivable that he put in much of his retirement roving the countryside in quest of just such diversions as Mr Chitfield was affording today. But he had not accommodated himself to the spirit of the occasion by assuming fancy dress, and he was thus among the small minority of those present who might be described as rationally attired. Perhaps, however, he had come as an Eminent Lexicographer (just as Appleby might have come as a Commissioner of Police). Before he opened his mouth you could almost guess that he was that. Like the man in Yeats’s poem, Appleby thought, he seemed to cough in ink.

‘Good afternoon, Sir John,’ McIlwraith said genially. ‘Worse than death, would you be inclined to say?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘One sometimes speaks of a fate as that, does one not?’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘The jest is a little blunted, I fear, because the two words are only approximately homonymic. And doubtless there are worse fêtes than this one – although one is conscious of it as being on the disorganized side. It is an unexpected pleasure to find you at it.’ Professor McIlwraith accompanied this polite remark with a sharp glance.

‘I may be said to have turned up a little on impulse.’

‘It is almost so with me. But the son of the house, as it happens, was one of my last pupils.’

‘Mark Chitfield?’

‘The same. It was, of course, as a postgraduate student, as I had long since ceased to have any concern with undergraduates. He is a clever young man, and came to me professing to have discovered an interest in phonemic analysis. Has phonemic analysis, by any chance, been among your own studies, Sir John?’

‘No, I can’t say that it has.’ Appleby felt this to be a shade bald. ‘Not hitherto,’ he added – rather as if at this very moment the interest in question was rising up in him.

‘Ah! Well, I fear that in Mark Chitfield’s case “professing” was what is vulgarly termed the operative word. He wanted to remain in residence at the university to pursue what I conjecture to have been less intellectual interests, and phonemic analysis was the first resource to come into his head.’