‘You’re coming to the house?’ he gasped.
‘I go into residence this evening. And, by the way,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘another small point. I nearly forgot to mention it. My name during my visit will be Brabazon-Plank. Major Brabazon-Plank, the well-known Brazilian explorer. Don’t forget it, will you.’
From between Pongo’s hands, which he had clasped on either side of his head, as if to prevent it dividing itself into two neat halves like a plaster bust, there proceeded a low moaning sound. Lord Ickenham regarded him sympathetically and, in an endeavour to relieve the situation of some of its tenseness, began to chant in a pleasant baritone an old song hit of his youth. And he was interested some moments later to find that this, starting as a solo, seemed suddenly to have turned into a duet. Glancing over his shoulder, he perceived the reason. Constable Potter was riding up on his bicycle, shouting ‘Hoy!’
Lord Ickenham was always the soul of courtesy. You had only to shout ‘Hoy!’ at him from a bicycle to have him drop everything and give you his immediate attention.
‘Ah, officer,’ he said. ‘You crave an audience?’
Constable Potter dismounted, and stood for a space bent over the handle-bars, puffing. His sharp ride, taken at a moment when he was loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with eggs, bread, tea and kippered herrings, had left him short of breath. Lord Ickenham, in his considerate way, begged him to take his time.
Presently the puffing ceased, and Harold Potter spoke.
‘Ho!’ he said.
‘Ho to you,’ replied Lord Ickenham civilly. ‘Have a cigar?’
With an austere gesture Constable Potter declined the cigar. A conscientious policeman does not accept gifts at the hands of the dregs of the criminal world, and such he now knew this man before him to be.
Ever since that odd episode in the garden, the reader of this record, the chronicler is aware, has been in a fever of impatience to learn what it was that sent this splendid upholder of law and order shooting into his cottage with such curious abruptness. This can now be revealed. The social lapse which had caused Mrs Bella Stubbs to purse her lips and comment acidly on his lack of manners had been occasioned by the fact that he had got the goods on Lord Ickenham. He had remembered where he had seen him before, and he had hurried indoors to consult his scrap album and ascertain his name. Having ascertained his name, he had mounted his bicycle and ridden off to confront and denounce him.
He fixed Lord Ickenham with a gimlet-like eye.
‘Brabazon-Plank!’ he said.
‘Why,’ asked Lord Ickenham, ‘do you say “Brabazon-Plank” in that strange tone, as if it were some kind of expletive?’
‘Ho!’
‘Now we’re back where we started. This is where we came in.
Constable Potter decided that the time had come to explode his bombshell. On his face was that hard, keen look which comes into the faces of policemen when they intend to do their duty pitilessly and crush a criminal like a snake beneath the heel. It was the look which Constable Potter’s face wore when he was waiting beneath a tree to apprehend a small boy who was up in its branches stealing apples, the merciless expression that turned it to flint when he called at a house to serve a summons on somebody for moving pigs without a permit.
‘Brabazon-Plank, eh? You call yourself Brabazon-Plank, do you? Ho! You look to me more like George Robinson of 14 Nasturtium Road, East Dulwich.’
Lord Ickenham stared. He removed the cigar from his mouth and stared again.
‘Don’t tell me you’re the cop who pinched me that day at the Dog Races!’
‘Yus, I am.’
A bubbling cry like that of some strong swimmer in his agony proceeded from Pongo’s lips. He glared wildly at the helmeted figure of doom. Lord Ickenham, in sharp contra-distinction, merely beamed, like one of a pair of lovers who have met at journey’s end.
‘Well, I’ll be dashed,’ he said cordially. ‘What a really remarkable thing. Fancy running into you again like this. I’d never have known you. You’ve grown a moustache since then, or something. My dear fellow, this is delightful. What are you doing in these parts?’
There was no answering cordiality in Harold Potter’s manner as he intensified the gimlet quality of his gaze. He was taut and alert, as became an officer who, after a jog-trot existence of Saturday drunks and failures to abate smoky chimneys, finds himself faced for the first time with crime on a colossal scale.
For that this was the real big stuff he had no doubt whatsoever. All the evidence went, as he himself would have said, to establish it. On the previous afternoon that shambling miscreant, Edwin Smith, had insinuated himself into Ashenden Manor under the alias of Twistleton. This evening along came his sinister associate, George Robinson, under the alias of Brabazon-Plank. And here they were together by the roadside, plotting. If you could not call this the Muster of the Vultures, it would be interesting, Harold Potter felt, to know what set of circumstances did qualify for that description.
‘What are you doing in these parts, is more like it,’ he retorted. ‘You and your pal Edwin Smith there.’
‘So you’ve recognized him, too? You have an extraordinary memory for faces. Like the royal family. What are we doing in these parts, you ask? Just paying a country-house visit.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I assure you.’
‘You think you are,’ corrected Constable Potter. ‘But a fat lot of country-house visiting you’re going to do.’
Lord Ickenham raised his eyebrows.
‘Pongo.’
‘Guk?’
‘I think the gentleman intends to unmask us.’
‘Guk.’
‘Do you intend to unmask us, Mr Potter?’
‘Yus.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Ho!’
There was infinite kindliness in Lord Ickenham’s voice as he went on to explain himself. You could see that he felt the deepest sympathy for Constable Potter.
‘No, honestly I wouldn’t. Consider what will happen. I shall be ejected —‘
‘You’re right, you’ll be ejected!’
‘— And my place as judge of the Bonny Babies contest taken by another judge, less prejudiced in favour of your sister’s little Basil. The child will finish among the also-rans, and in this event will not your sister make enquiries? And having made them and ascertained that it was through your agency that I was disqualified, will she not have a word or two to say to you on the subject? Think it over, my dear chap, and I fancy you will agree with me that the conditions for unmasking are none too good.’
It sometimes happens to a policeman that he is sharply censured by a bench of magistrates. When this occurs, he feels as if he had been kicked in the stomach by a mule and the world becomes black. The effect of these words on Constable Potter was to give him the illusion that he had been censured by half a dozen benches of magistrates, all speaking at once. His jaw drooped like a lily, and in a low voice, indistinct with emotion, he uttered the word ‘Coo!’
‘You may well say “Coo!”‘ agreed Lord Ickenham. ‘I know Mrs Stubbs only slightly, of course, but she struck me as a woman of high spirit, the last person to mince her words to the man instrumental in robbing her child of the coveted trophy. Potter, I would think twice.’
Constable Potter only needed to think once. For a long instant there was a silence, one of those heavy silences which seem to be made of glue. Then, still without speaking, he mounted his bicycle and rode off.
Lord Ickenham was a fighter who could always be generous to a beaten foe. ‘Amazingly fine stuff there is in our policemen,’ he said. ‘You crush them to earth, and they rise again. You think you’ve baffled them, and up they pop, their helmets still in the ring. However, this time I fancy the trick has been done. There, in my opinion, pedalled a policeman whose lips are sealed.’
Pongo, always prone to the gloomy view, demurred.
‘How do you know? He was heading for the house. He’s probably gone off to tell old
Bostock the whole story.’
‘You say that because you do not know his sister. No, no. Sealed lips, my dear Pongo, sealed lips. You have now nothing whatever to worry about.’
Pongo uttered a mirthless laugh of a quality which would have extorted the admiration of Bill Oakshott, a specialist in that line.
‘Nothing to worry about? Ha! With you coming to stay with Hermione’s people under a — what’s the word —‘
‘Pseudonym?’
‘Pseudonym. And planning to prowl about busting open cupboards!’
‘Don’t let that trivial matter give you the slightest anxiety, my dear boy. I shall attend to that tonight, and then we can all settle down and enjoy ourselves.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes. I phoned Sally from the inn, and everything is arranged. She will drive over in my car and be waiting in the garden outside the collection room at one ack emma. I shall secure the bust and hand it to her, and she will drive off with it. As simple as that.’
‘Simple!’
‘What can go wrong?’
‘A million things. Suppose you’re caught.’
‘I am never caught. They know me in the Underworld as The Shadow. I wish I could cure you of this extraordinary tendency of yours always to look on the dark side.’
‘Well, what other sides are there?’ said Pongo.
The dinner hour was approaching. In her room, Lady Bostock had finished dressing and was regarding herself in the mirror, wishing, not for the first time, that she looked less like a horse. It was not that she had anything specific against horses; she just wished she did not look like one.
Footsteps sounded outside the door. Sir Aylmer entered. There was a heavy frown on his face, and it was plain that something had occurred to disturb his always easily disturbed equanimity.
‘Emily!’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘I’ve just been talking to Potter.’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘Dam’ fool!’
‘Why, dear?’
Sir Aylmer picked up a hairbrush, and swished it. There was a wealth of irritation in the movement.
‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘the time I played Dick Deadeye in Pinafore at that amateur performance in aid of the Lower Barnatoland Widows and Orphans?’
‘Yes, dear. You were splendid.’
‘Do you remember the scene where Dick Deadeye goes to the captain to warn him his daughter is going to elope, and won’t come out with anything definite?’
‘Yes, dear. You were wonderful in that scene.’
‘Well, Potter was like that. Mystic.’
‘Mystic?’
‘It’s the only word. Kept hinting that I must be on my guard, but wouldn’t say why. I tried to pin him down, but it was no use. It was as if his lips had been sealed. All I could get out of him was that he thought danger threatened us, probably tonight. What are you wriggling like that for?’
Lady Bostock had not wriggled, she had shuddered.
‘Danger?’ she faltered. ‘What did he mean?’
‘How the dickens should I know what he meant, when every time he started to say anything he stopped as if somebody had clapped a hand over his mouth? I believe the man’s half-witted. But he did go so far as to advise me to be on the alert, and said that he was going to lurk in the garden and watch the house carefully.’
‘Aylmer!’
‘I wish you wouldn’t bellow “Aylmer” like that. You’ve made me bite my tongue.’
‘But, Aylmer —‘
‘Thinking it over, I have come to the conclusion that he must have found out something further about this impostor who calls himself Twistleton, but why he couldn’t say so is more than I can imagine. Well, if this so-called Twistleton is planning to make any sort of move tonight, I shall be ready for him.’
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Never mind,’ said Sir Aylmer, rather inconsistently for one who had reproached Constable Potter for being mystic. ‘My plans are all perfected. I shall be ready.’
8
The quiet home evening to which Lord Ickenham had so looked forward had drawn to a close. Curfews had tolled the knell of parting day, lowing herds wound slowly o’er the lea. Now slept the crimson petal and the white, and in the silent garden of Ashenden Manor nothing stirred save shy creatures of the night such as owls, mice, rats, gnats, bats and Constable Potter. Down in the village the clock on the church tower, which a quarter of an hour ago had struck twelve, chimed a single chime, informing Pongo, pacing the floor of his bedroom overlooking the terrace, that in just forty-five minutes the balloon was due to go up.
As Pongo paced the floor, from time to time quivering all over like a Brazilian explorer with a touch of malaria, he was still in faultless evening dress, for the idea of going to bed on this night of fear had not even occurred to him. A young man visiting the parents of the girl he loves, and knowing that at one sharp an uncle of the maximum eccentricity will be starting to burgle the house, does not hop between the sheets at eleven-fifteen and sink into a dreamless sleep. He stays up and shudders. Pongo had made one or two attempts to divert his thoughts by reading Murder in the Fog, but without success. There are moments when even the most faceless of fiends cannot hope to grip.
In a past the contemplation of which sometimes affected him as if he had bitten into a bad oyster, Pongo Twistleton had frequently been called upon to tremble like an aspen when an unwilling participant in the activities of his Uncle Fred, but seldom had he done it more wholeheartedly than now. He was feeling rather as the heroine of Murder in the Fog was wont to do when she got trapped in underground dens, the illusion that his nerves were sticking two inches out of his body and curling at the ends being extraordinarily vivid. And it is probable that mental distress would have unstrung him completely, but for the fact that in addition to suffering agony of the soul he was also in the process of dying of thirst, and this seemed to act on the counter-irritation principle.
The thirst of which he was dying was one of those lively young thirsts which seem to start at the soles of the feet and get worse all the way up. Growing in intensity ever since his arrival at the house, it had reached its peak at eleven o’clock tonight, when Jane, the parlourmaid, had brought the bedtime decanter and syphon into the drawing-room. He was no weakling, but having to sit there watching his host, his uncle and Bill Oakshott getting theirs like so many stags at eve — he himself, in deference to his known prejudice against alcoholic liquor, having been served with barley water — had tested his iron control almost beyond endurance.
For some minutes he continued to pace the floor, cursing the mad impulse which had led him to tell Hermione that he never touched the stuff and sketching out in his mind the series of long, cool ones with which, if he ever got out of here alive, he would correct this thirst of his. And then, as he reached the end of the carpet and was about to turn and pace back again, he stopped abruptly with one foot in the air, looking so like The Soul’s A wakening that a seasoned art critic would have been deceived. Two chimes had just sounded from the church tower, and it was as if they had been the voice of a kindly friend whispering in his ear.
‘Aren’t you,’ they seemed to say, ‘overlooking the fact that that decanter is still in the drawing-room? One merely throws this out as a suggestion.’ And he saw that here was the solution of what had appeared to be an impasse. His guardian angel, for he presumed it was his guardian angel, had pointed out the way. Hats off to the good old guardian angel, was Pongo’s attitude.
A minute later he was in the corridor. Three minutes later he was in the drawing-room. Three and a quarter minutes later he was pouring with trembling fingers what promised to be the snifter of a lifetime. And four minutes later, reclining in an armchair with his feet on a small table, he had begun to experience that joy, than which there is none purer, which comes to the unwilling abstainer who has at last succeeded in assembling the materials,
when from immediately behind him a voice spoke.
All the voice actually said was ‘Coo!’ but it was enough. Indeed, in the circumstances, a mere clearing of the throat would have been sufficient. His knotted and combined locks parted, each particular hair standing on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine: his heart broke from its moorings and crashed with a dull thud against his front teeth: and with a wordless cry he shot toward the ceiling.
It was only some moments later, after he had hit the ceiling twice and was starting to descend to terra firma, that the mists cleared from his eyes and he was able to perceive that the intruder was not, as he had supposed, Sir Aylmer Bostock, but Elsie Bean, his old playmate of the rude sling days. She was standing by the door with a hand to her heart, panting a little, as housemaids will when they enter drawing-rooms at twenty minutes to one in the morning and find them occupied by the ruling classes.
The relief was stupendous. Pongo’s equanimity returned, and with it a warm gush of the milk of human kindness. To a man who had been anticipating an embarrassing interview with Sir Aylmer Bostock in his dressing-gown Elsie Bean was like something the doctor had ordered. He had no objection whatever to Elsie Bean joining him, quite the reverse. A chat with one of the finest minds in Bottleton East was just what he was in the mood for. He beamed on the girl, and having released his tongue, which had got entangled with his uvula, spoke in a genial and welcoming voice.
‘What ho, Bean.’
‘What ho, sir.’
‘It’s you, is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You gave me a start.’
‘You gave me a start, sir.’
‘Making two starts in all,’ said Pongo, who had taken mathematics at school. ‘You must forgive me for seeming a little perturbed for a moment. I thought you were mine host. Thank God you weren’t. Do you remember in your inimitable way describing him as an overbearing dishpot? You were right. A dishpot he is, and a dishpot he always will be, and to hell with all dishpots is my view. Well, come along in, young Bean, and tell me your news. How’s the Harold situation developing? Any change on the Potter front?’
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