Carson's Conspiracy

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  Carson's Conspiracy

  First published in 1984

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1984-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120884 EAN: 9780755120888

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Part One

  CARL CARSON

  1

  And now Cynthia was on about her son again: her confounded dream-son. Their dream-son. Carl Carson wouldn’t have minded so much if his wife had ascribed this tedious invention to an earlier marriage of her own. But to involve him in it, to endow him with the fatherhood of a child that simply hadn’t happened, was surely a bit much. He’d have rather liked a son. All he’d been landed with was a couple of daughters – who had cost him a packet before getting themselves simultaneously killed in a motor accident. At the funeral he’d totted up what he was going to save as a result. But that had proved to be just one of those queer ways the mind behaves under shock. Before the accident, Carl Carson had been an indifferently honest businessman of a moderately prosperous sort. After it, having made the discovery of the mean and ruthless way the universe works, he had fallen into line with it and never looked back. He was among the least scrupulous men in the city of London.

  ‘What we are so sorry about,’ Cynthia artlessly prattled to the guests at her luncheon party, ‘is that our son Robin fights rather shy of England. It comes, I think, of all that education at Groton and Harvard. He was quite brilliant, they say, at the wonderful Business Studies, and after graduating he forged straight ahead. So his time isn’t really his own. Carl and I run over and see him from time to time at a sweet little place at Key Biscayne. You won’t have heard of Key Biscayne.’

  ‘Florida?’ the elderly man called Appleby suggested on a politely interrogative note.

  ‘Yes, Florida.’ Mrs Carson was clearly launched on something. ‘In my earlier years,’ she said with a sudden and absurd grandeur, ‘my circumstances were such that I saw a great deal of the entire United States. But I have always liked retired and unassuming places, as here at Garford. Key Biscayne is so much nicer than Palm Beach or Boca Grande, don’t you think? I adore quiet, quaint places. Sometimes we go to the Grenadines. Mustique – a dear little spot near St Vincent. We have a tiny place there, too. Robin is terribly fond of it.’

  ‘We quite envy you,’ Lady Appleby said. This was mere politeness, and offered wholly without irony. One of those well-bred women, Carl Carson told himself, who keep irony for their intimates. Although he hadn’t been in the neighbourhood for long, Carson felt he knew a bit about these virtual strangers whom Cynthia had enticed to her board. The wife, he’d heard, came of some petty and antique squirearchical crowd in the next parish. The husband might have been a Civil Servant – the kind that just misses a Permanent Secretaryship, and retires a bit early as a result. Unimportant people. But it was annoying to hear them treated to this romancing about the non-existent Robin, all the same.

  And Carson had heard it so often before! He knew that a good many people must have tumbled to the fact that Cynthia was dotty, or at least had dotty spells. It had been another of the universe’s meannesses, marrying him to such a person. She was the sort of wife whom, in more sensible times, one had kept locked up in an attic. He indulged occasional fantasies in which Cynthia came to a sudden end at the wheel of her car. But if a number of people would have said of her, ‘She seems to me a bit mad’, nobody – oddly enough – would have dreamed of saying, ‘She even imagines she has a son’. Carson had come to suspect, indeed, that Robin was sometimes regarded as one of the poor woman’s anchoring sanities: a sober reality protecting her from afar from going further round the bend. Of course, Carson knew, nobody brooded very much over him and his wife in their private lives. He was himself ‘prominent’, even perhaps a shade notorious, in his own sphere. But, apart from that, and having neither gift nor apparent desire for intimacy of any sort, the couple were no more than acquaintances of virtually anybody in the land. Lunches here, and dinners there: that was about it. And this affected Carl Carson’s manner of coping with the Robin business. On the fairly frequent occasions when (so to speak) the myth di
rectly challenged him he simply went along with it. Unemphatically yet without reservation, he acknowledged his son, confident that nobody would be sufficiently interested in this absentee to pursue inconvenient curiosities.

  It was a little different with his wealth, since here people were inquisitive. Of course his wealth existed, but it irked him a little that it had to be exhibited to the world through, as it were, a magnifying glass of superficial opulence, as in the appointments of his wife’s table, the Rolls-Royce in his garage, the pictures that hung (on a confidential hire-and-insure basis) on his walls. There were, of course, people who knew that on Carl Carson the touch of Midas had been no more than skin-deep; that he thought of pounds and dollars in their hundred thousand, even at times their ten thousand, rather than in their millions. But such people commonly had their own reasons for refraining from suggesting that Carson was not as solid as Threadneedle Street or Fort Knox. And since, at one time or another, he had put a number of them on to a good thing, he even commanded a certain loyalty among them. They would leave money in some Carson concern a shade longer than was prudent. But only a shade, he had sometimes had occasion to reflect. His was a world in which there had to be limits to what one would do for a chum. He had discovered that during years in New York. It had become even more evident when he had returned to settle in London – or rather to settle here in the country and twice a week be delivered from that Rolls into the London train.

  ‘Those Caribbean places must be very jolly,’ Humphry Lely said. Lely was some sort of painter whom Cynthia had picked up, and he and his wife were the other guests at the luncheon party. Before sitting down, Carson had shown him a Peter Lely hanging in the room, and asked, ‘Painter an ancestor of yours, eh?’ to which his guest had answered, amiably if incomprehensibly, ‘No Dutch blood, I’m afraid. But what about the sitter? One of your ancestors?’ As the portrait was of an aristocratic Caroline person with the appearance of emerging in some fatigue from a high-class bawdy-house, and as Carl Carson was very evidently what used to be called, rather snobbishly, a ‘new man’, Carson hadn’t quite known whether to be gratified or not. So there had been a slight awkwardness – which was presumably why Lely had now offered this hearty remark about distant places.

  Carson became aware that a little scallop of caviare had appeared before him. It probably wasn’t quite right, that – not at lunch. One of Cynthia’s all too frequent faux pas. (He wondered what a faux pas was.) Uneasy, he took a consolatory gulp of champagne. Then he wondered about that, too. Perhaps he ought to have said hock. You laid on champagne at garden parties as well as at dinners. But perhaps not at lunch? Not that it mattered a damn. Unimportant people. And he had more urgent things to think about. Soon they might be very urgent indeed.

  ‘I’m sure you must be fearfully busy,’ Cynthia was saying to the painter on an admiring note. ‘Haven’t you been doing a portrait of the Lord Mayor?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean.’ Lely was amused. ‘Not the Lord Mayor of London, you know. Quite obscure mayors have got themselves lorded recently.’

  ‘So they have,’ Cynthia said. ‘Like bishops,’ she added brightly.

  This piece of ignorance produced a moment’s silence, briskly broken by Mrs Lely. Lely’s wife, like Appleby’s, seemed to be a socially competent woman.

  ‘Humphry–’ Mrs Lely said, ‘–do tell. It was rather amusing.’

  ‘Well, yes – I suppose it was. You see, he was a quite preternaturally red-faced chap…’

  ‘Not like his London colleague, then,’ Carson interrupted quickly. ‘Daubeney is unusually pale. I was noticing it as I spoke to him the other day.’

  ‘Is that so?’ For an instant Lely’s glance at his host was of a penetrating order. ‘Well, the fellow had to be painted in a scarlet and fur affair like an overgrown winter dressing gown. And there were gongs, trinkets and gewgaws draped all over him. Incidentally, the gongs, etcetera, were brought along to my studio several days running by a functionary in a top hat. He stood by while I did justice to them.’

  ‘How very boring!’ Cynthia said. ‘But if the sitter himself was interesting, I suppose the gewgaws wouldn’t matter. If he had strong features, marked by experience…

  This inane and silly talk on his wife’s part went on for longer than Carson cared for. Then suddenly – for he was a clever man, with whom pennies dropped quickly – he saw what was cooking, and just why this Lely couple had been asked to lunch. Was he not himself exceptionally interesting? When he studied his own features as he shaved every morning was it not strength and experience that he saw written all over them? And could he prudently reveal, either to Cynthia or anybody else, that the four-figure bill fired at him for a portrait wouldn’t be exactly a trifle? So if the woman had taken it into her head to have him painted, there wasn’t much that he could do about it. He might, of course – bang off at this very moment – suggest that Lely have a go at her. But that wouldn’t help. There would simply be two portraits as a result, one on each side of a fireplace, like a couple of china dogs.

  Carl Carson saw, he marked with interest, that on this trivial-seeming matter he was of a divided mind. The idea of a portrait – particularly by an up-and-coming man, such as he gathered this Humphry Lely to be – tickled his vanity in a mild way. But somehow, and at the same time, he didn’t want to be painted. He was proud of being a somebody, but he had an obscure sense that there was a sort of safety in being a nobody; in not, that was to say, scattering unnecessary memorials of himself here and there. It was a rum feeling, this. But it hitched up with a good deal that lay at present rather heavily on his mind.

  And now Cynthia had gone back to the charms of the Caribbean again. He’d read in a book, and tried to pass on to her, that one didn’t, if a good conversationalist, recur to a topic that had been on the carpet earlier in the sitting. But at least she hadn’t gone back to Robin. There was more than irritation, there was even a lurking hazard, in Robin – chiefly because Cynthia was capable of sudden appeals to her husband to confirm one thing, or amplify another in the recent history of her tedious illusion. Responding to these appeals with an air of casual ease was a tricky matter – at least in any sort of vigilant company. There was always the possibility of appearing a shade uneasy or evasive. And nothing was worse for business – his sort of business – than that. One of the things he had to be (or so he believed) was a monument of all-round integrity. The Caribbean was at least okay here. Mustique was even better, since he did, in fact, possess a small property on the island. It was true that in this area of his wife’s chatter shafts of obvious minor lunacy were apt to appear, whereas she was always coherent and persuasive about Robin. But that didn’t matter. The chap’s wife was a bit loco – so people would fleetingly conclude – and why not? Good luck to her.

  ‘I suppose,’ the man called Appleby – Sir John Appleby – said, ‘that a good many people retire to those agreeable places nowadays. Plenty of sunshine, and no servant problems. Would you think of it yourself, Carson?’

  Carson liked thus being ‘Carson’ rather than ‘Mr Carson’ quite early in an acquaintanceship of this sort. It was – as it wasn’t among Yanks – the upper-class thing. A reply, nevertheless, required a fraction of a second’s thought.

  ‘My dear Appleby,’ he said humorously, ‘I’m blessed if I could afford it.’

  ‘Oh, Carl darling, what nonsense!’

  This loyal interjection on Mrs Carson’s part was of most harmless order – whereas she might have said, ‘Last night I dreamt that the bailiffs had come’, or even (more gnomically), ‘Twice clogs, once boots’. And her husband immediately went into what was, in fact, a routine.

  ‘Of course, simple tastes – as you can see ours are – will take one a long way. I remind some of my friends of that when they start moaning about unfilled order books and horrible taxes. Take eighty thousand a year. You couldn’t own racehorses on it. But you could sen
d a couple of kids to Eton and such places, and have a bit over to stock your cellar. If the money came to you, that is, in the right way.’

  ‘There, no doubt,’ Appleby said, ‘is the rub.’

  Carson accepted this reflection with a confidential nod. It was possible, he thought, that this fellow Appleby knew his onions. Perhaps he had been high up in the Inland Revenue. If so, it was even conceivable that Carson himself had pulled off a smart one against the chap on some occasion now forever buried in the files. It was an amusing thought, and Carson became expansive.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there are plenty of people who go off to those places just as they continue to do to Biarritz and Cap d’Antibes: the vulgar rich, as we used to say, with stacks of money to burn. But if you know your way about, you can manage tiptop style on not all that. Call it that eighty thousand – but merely in dollars, not pounds. And there I’m thinking more or less of a family. On your own, fifty thousand – or even forty-five – would run to pretty well anything you had a fancy for.’

  ‘I must remember that,’ Cynthia Carson said, ‘when I become a widow.’

  This remark, although doubtless gamesome and innocent, occasioned a moment of perceptible constraint. But if Carson himself was vexed, it was because of those eighties and fifties and forty-fives. He was recalling that among the sort of people who were his guests at the moment there existed a senseless disinclination to talk in general society about specific sums of money. Moreover the effect of his little speech hadn’t been quite of the modesty he’d intended. So he decided, in effect, to declare the meeting closed.

  ‘Darling,’ he said to his wife (for people did call their wives that), ‘perhaps we should have our coffee on the terrace? And then, since it’s such a marvellous afternoon, our guests might care to stroll through the grounds.’