Sheiks and Adders (9 page)

‘It seems to me,’ Appleby said, ‘that Chitfield is holding some sort of business conference. And it must be an important and more or less emergency affair to take him unexpectedly away from that cherished theatre. You’d better defer your interview with him, if you ask me.’

‘Oh, rot!’ Tibby said impatiently and indeed rudely. And he threw open the door and entered the room. Appleby himself took a couple of paces forward, with the consequence that he became momentarily aware of something very odd indeed. There was a man barring Tibby Fancroft’s further progress, and doing so by the decidedly drastic method of pointing a revolver at him. Then a voice spoke sharply from the far end of the room, the revolver vanished, and its owner resumed what was clearly a porter’s or guardian’s chair by the door.

But if this was disconcerting, the larger spectacle revealed in the library was more confounding still. At one end of a long table was the man who had just briefly spoken: Richard Chitfield, in ordinary clothes, beyond doubt. Facing him at the other end was Nick Bottom the weaver, by no means relieved of the spell that Puck had presumably cast upon him. There were also present the stately sheik of Appleby’s earlier observation, a Chinaman, a Teddy bear, the deep-sea diver, and the two bizarrely painted circus clowns.

It might have been expected that Mr Richard Chitfield, an eminently respectable City man, would be a little abashed at being discovered in such odd company. But this wasn’t apparently so.

‘Tibby,’ Mr Chitfield said with mild severity such as might be employed to a son, or the friend of a son, who has committed some minor impropriety, ‘you must see that I am engaged.’

‘I’m very sorry, sir.’ For a moment Tibby Fancroft gaped at the company unbelievingly, much as might a wandering Greek who had strayed into some Circean revel. Then his nerve broke. He turned and fled from the library, unceremoniously bundling a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police before him. And the door at once closed behind them, presumably at the hand of its armed janitor.

‘Oh, my God!’ Tibby exclaimed. ‘The place is a bloody madhouse. There can have been nothing like it since the March Hare and the Hatter held that tea party. Don’t you agree, sir?’

‘We have certainly glimpsed something a shade on the bizarre side, Mr Fancroft. But we were intruding, after all, and ought not perhaps to complain.’

‘I’m not complaining. I’m exclaiming.’

‘No doubt. And I’d myself go so far as to join in your pious ejaculation. Oh, my God, as you say. But I don’t agree about the bloody madhouse. We have blundered in upon a freak of the imagination, perhaps. But not upon any sort of group lunacy. People don’t hold board meetings – for it looked rather like that, wouldn’t you say? – togged up as Teddy bears and heathen Chinamen for no better reason than that they ought to be in the bin. The madness has method in it. But whether it’s any business of ours, I can’t at the moment assert.’

‘Not of yours, perhaps. You’re here only because Cherry for some reason persuaded you to buy a ticket. But I’m different.’ Tibby Fancroft was now contriving to look less bewildered than sulky. ‘Cherry’s my girl, and I don’t think the old chap particularly disapproves of me. Contrariwise, actually. I mayn’t be much of a catch, but I have a hunch he’ll be quite willing to buy. And that’s going to make me part of the Chitfield outfit. And now it proves capable of behaving like this.’

‘Perhaps we exaggerate the oddity of the thing, Mr Fancroft. Mr Chitfield’s friends and associates come to his party – and in fancy dress, as they have been asked to do. Then the need for a business discussion suddenly turns up, and they get down to it without delaying to change into their London suits and grab their bowler hats and umbrellas. Perhaps it has all been no more than that.’

‘You did see that chap with a gun, I suppose? I found myself looking down the bloody barrel of the thing myself.’

‘I agree that such a pitch of security is a little odd. But we live in disturbed times. Even the minds of coachmen are unsettled.’

‘Funny,’ Tibby said gloomily. He was clearly in no mood to receive mild jokes out of Dickens. ‘And you don’t believe what you’re now saying, Sir John. You know that it’s unaccountable and alarming, really.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Appleby had judged Tibby’s last speech to be forthright and commendable. ‘And now let’s get into the open air again.’

The two men were already back in the imposing hall of Drool Court, and they now moved towards the lobby and the open front door. But Tibby Fancroft paused for a moment before walking on.

‘I say!’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t that security wallah with the gun be better prowling the house and guarding the family loot? There’s a little fortune under our noses at this moment. And the whole place seems deserted. So think what could be stolen just from two or three of the nearer rooms. No end of silver. And even the Boucher! Girl with a perfectly gorgeous bottom. I’ve sometimes been tempted to pinch her myself. Nobble her, that’s to say.’

‘Young man, if I understand you aright it is your ambition to enter shortly into the married state. You should endeavour to put licentious thoughts behind you.’

For a moment Tibby appeared disconcerted, and perhaps offended, by this solemnity. It then had the effect, however, of restoring him to a more cheerful mood.

‘Arsy-versy on a sofa,’ he amplified. ‘Would you care to take a quick dekko now, sir?’

‘Another time, perhaps. If, that is, I continue to enjoy the acquaintance of the family.’ Appleby stepped out on the terrace. ‘Are you on fairly intimate terms with Mark Chitfield?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. He’s not a bad chap, Mark. Succumbed a little too much to education to be quite my sort. But we play squash together, and natter away.’

‘Go and find him. Tell him casually about our mild surprise at what we came on in that library, and see if he has anything to say about it.’

‘Recruited, am I?’ Tibby Fancroft’s cheerfulness increased. ‘Sexton Blake’s boy Tinker, wasn’t it? Before my time. But I’ll have a go. What about the great sleuth himself?’

‘If you mean me, Mr Fancroft…’

‘Quit Mr Fancrofting me. It’s snubby.’

‘If you mean me, Tibby, I’m just going to take another walk round.’

‘Take care not to loiter in a suspicious manner, sir, or they may nab you.’

‘Just who may nab me?’

‘Well, it’s a funny thing. Although Mr Chitfield doesn’t seem to be security-minded about his possessions there in the house, there seem to be a couple of private eyes of a sort prowling the grounds. You could tell them from twenty yards off. And yet what is there to pinch in all that crowd? Nothing except a few bottoms – if that thought may be recurred to.’

‘Perhaps they’re guarding distinguished visitors.’ It had been acute in Tibby Fancroft, Appleby thought, to spot Colonel Pride’s mysteriously briefed assistants. Tibby, in fact, was far from being an idiot.

‘Let’s meet in half an hour in the tea-tent,’ Tibby said. ‘I’ll introduce you to Cherry’s mum.’

The first sight to greet Appleby on emerging from Mr Chitfield’s mansion was two more sheiks. Counting Tibby Fancroft (although he had now discarded the character) that made six sighted so far. And these latest recruits were keeping company together; they were engaged, in fact, in what appeared to be conversation of an urgent character, and this was precluding them from taking much notice of their surroundings. But as Appleby now looked down on them from the terrace, it did happen that they both glanced up simultaneously and looked at him. He had a fleeting impression that they didn’t much like what they saw – although it was no more than an elderly gentleman dressed up as Robin Hood. Then, whether fortuitously or not, they changed course and moved off towards a corner of the house. Appleby descended a flight of steps and turned in the other direction. He had progressed no more than a dozen paces when yet another couple of sheiks came into view – simultaneously, although they were walking in opposite directions and clearly unconnected with one another. Appleby told himself that these were Pring-like sheiks – which the others just glimpsed in some indefinable way were not.

This throng of desert persons haunting English lawns undoubtedly stood in some need of explanation. Why should it occur to so many men to dress up for Mr Chitfield’s fête virtually in an identical way? The most obvious explanation lay in Richard Chitfield himself. He had persuaded his humble associate Mr Pring so to attire himself, and it was conceivable that he had given the same direction to a number of others. But this would have been, surely, a rather pointless joke – in addition to which Appleby had been assured that Mr Chitfield was not of a jocular habit. There was a
serious
reason involved. Appleby was aware that he had known for some time of something serious being afoot at Drool Court. He hadn’t, indeed, arrived at Drool as a consequence of quite that knowledge. He had come to the Chitfield fête at the prompting of a fairly trivial curiosity: asking himself why the girl Cherry’s father was being so intransigent over the detail of a particular piece of miming or charade. It was now clear, however, that his instinct in this matter had led him into a situation which, although obscure, looked like being far from frivolous. There were two pointers to this. One was the fact that there must be some connection between Richard Chitfield’s reluctance to see his younger daughter’s suitor dressed up as a sheik and the present plethora of pseudo-sheiks at the somewhat laboured diversion now in progress. The other pointer was the enigmatic instruction or request which had been received by the Chief Constable, Colonel Pride.

It was this last factor that seemed to Appleby to stand most clearly in the way of a quite simple explanation of all those sheiks. Real sheiks were popularly supposed to be possessed, virtually one and all, of almost fabulous wealth. So they were enviable, particularly to persons in the business and commercial sphere in which Richard Chitfield presumably revolved; and as a consequence a number of these – fortuitously and in no sort of concerted manner – had become make-believe sheiks for the afternoon. A similar mechanism had transformed Mrs Pring, for example, into Joan of Arc.

But this wouldn’t really do. Appleby knew perfectly well it wouldn’t do. There was trouble brewing at Drool Court, and it wasn’t of anything that could be called a domestic order. It wasn’t at all improbable that some violent event was about to transact itself – and this upon a stage much less confined than that which Mr Chitfield had caused to be erected in a corner of his grounds. An international stage, in fact. One could imagine a thriller based upon it, and appropriately entitled
Seven Sheiks
.

As this thought came to Appleby he rounded a high yew hedge and stopped in his tracks – this with a vivid momentary impression that
Seven Sheiks
would by no means answer.
Twenty
Sheiks
,
Thirty
Sheiks
: it looked to be something like that. They were advancing upon him in a solid phalanx, chanting in what was doubtless a ritual Islamic fashion as they came. Then he saw that these were not sheiks but druids. Sheiks and druids, particularly when glimpsed only
en masse
, are capable of resembling one another in a singular degree. And what was here in question was doubtless a local society with bardic interests and unusual astronomical persuasions, making its way to take part in the pageantry of the afternoon. The druids moved with a majestic port. Some of them carried wands. Others walked with raised arms, as if invocating invisible planets. There was a female druid (although this must have been uncanonical, and a concession to the liberated feminism of the age) who was encinctured with what appeared to be plastic mistletoe. The majestic character of the procession, however, was a little marred by the undignified behaviour of a single straggler, who was hurrying forward in the rear while at the same time grappling with his flowing garments as if he had only that moment struggled into them. The main column swung away in the direction of the theatre; the straggler continued to hurry straight ahead; he was quite close to Appleby before Appleby realized that here was not another and laggard druid, but a further sheik after all.

This, in its way, was confusing. To Appleby, however, the spectacle of this scurrying person tugging at his robes at least suggested one small clarification of the perplexed situation at Drool Court. The druids had come through the main entrance to the grounds, as Appleby himself had done on his arrival. And he now remembered that one of the amenities so thoughtfully provided by Mr Chitfield for his guests was located there in a small marquee erected for the purpose. This was where, for a mere five pounds, persons who had not given previous thought to the matter could hire a fancy-dress outfit for the day. Appleby made his way there now.

The inflow of visitors to Drool had almost dried up, and the marquee was deserted except for an elderly woman, a kind of Mistress of the Robes, who sat at a table totting up her accounts. The place smelt strongly of trampled grass and faintly of something like petrol vapour – the latter effect no doubt testifying to the cleaning process regularly undergone by the stock-in-trade of the concern. This was in part arranged in a more or less orderly way on long clothes-racks down one side of the marquee, and in part tumbled about on trestle tables in a forlorn fashion, as if hurriedly and contemptuously rejected by impatient customers. There were several curtained-off spaces, as in a tailor’s shop, in which it was presumably possible to robe or disrobe, but no sound came from them. Appleby had the impression that not a great deal of business had been done.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and was aware that there was no reason for a person already dressed up as Robin Hood to penetrate to this curious emporium at all. ‘I’m hunting around for a friend who, I believe, may just have arrived, and I thought I might find him here. But I see that I was wrong.’

‘I’ve had only three customers in the last half-hour.’ The woman in charge of the place seemed quite willing to converse. ‘Things were a little brisker earlier on. But the last of them can’t have left more than ten minutes ago.’