Carson didn’t want coffee, and he didn’t want to be deafened. But he did want to avoid the menace of the bugs. And this he was certainly achieving. Not the most refined acoustic device conceivable could have unscrambled a conversation from the din. Raising his voice still higher, he endeavoured to explain this wise precaution to his companion. What Pluckworthy immediately gathered from it was that his employer had gone nearly as dotty as his wife. Madness was infectious, no doubt. Yet it wasn’t so much insanity of any recognizable sort as a mere crumbling of nerve. So, even more than commonly, he must mind his p’s and q’s with Carson. If the man had some outstanding villainly in mind, that might mean something exceptional in the way of bribe or bait for him. And be amusing as well. But, first, Carson needed to be recalled to his senses. This lunatic fit of jitters didn’t augur well for his reliability in a tight spot.
‘See here, Carl,’ Pluckworthy said. ‘It’s nearly one o’clock, and what I need is a decent meal. You’re going to give it to me.’ He paused for a moment, and then named the most expensive restaurant that came into his head. ‘We’ll go there.’ With this, Pluckworthy jumped to his feet and flagged down a passing taxi. ‘Get in,’ he commanded briskly.
And, obediently, Carson got in.
The change of setting was a success. Almost with his first glass of wine, Carson relaxed a little. When the bottle was finished, and brandy before them, confidence had fully returned to him. He even managed to see his fears about the bug as having been almost comically excessive. Nevertheless, when he judged the time had come to unfold his plan (or part of it, perhaps it should be said) he was unable to resist leaning confidentially over the table and dropping his voice almost to a whisper. But Pluckworthy, who at least for a space was continuing to control the situation, would have nothing of this.
‘Quit it, Carl,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘If you behave like all the conspirators in Rome, people will really start getting interested in you. Perfect strangers – those two fat men at the table in the window, for instance – will do their best to listen in, just as a matter of idle curiosity. Unwind, and keep it chatty, old boy.’
Carson, although resigned to his underling’s use of his Christian name, resented ‘old boy’ as intolerably familiar. ‘Chatty’, however, reminded him that the occasion was eminently one on which Pluckworthy had to be chatted up. And, of course, bought, as well. There would be a haggle over the figure later. At the moment, he was relying chiefly on what he judged to be the young man’s temperamental liking for a wild-cat scheme.
‘Cat-naps,’ Pluckworthy said telepathically. ‘We’d got as far as cat-naps. Or, rather, we’d advanced from that to kidnaps. Carry on from there.’
‘You’re going to carry on from there, my boy.’ Carson had resolved to be spirited. ‘You’re going to be kidnapped, believe you me. But not as a mere nobody called Peter Pluckworthy…’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Just keep your mouth shut for a minute, and listen. You’re going to be kidnapped – at or near Heathrow, I think – as my son.’
‘Your son? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘Yes – my son.’ Carson, although he reiterated this firmly, was checked for a moment. There came back to him the suspicion that Pluckworthy knew. But that was really neither here nor there, since the fact of the non-existence of the person in question could be acquiesced in at once, if need be.
‘Robin?’ Pluckworthy asked – surely teasingly. ‘The one Cynthia sometimes tells me you meet up with at that dear little Mustique?’
‘Yes – Robin. As Robin Carson you’re going to be kidnapped. Kidnapped and held to ransom. Get?’
‘I get.’ Pluckworthy’s eyes had rounded in a fashion that Carson judged distinctly hopeful. ‘The hell of a big ransom, no doubt?’
‘Big, but not out of all reason big. Enough to set me up very comfortably elsewhere.’
‘Key Biscayne, perhaps? I seem to have heard of it too.’
‘Of course not. Somewhere, naturally, that I’ve never been to before.’
‘A new and purer life. But just where is the ransom-money coming from? A guild of philanthropists?’
‘The money will be my own, naturally.’ Carson couldn’t resist a note of modest pride as he said this. ‘But, of course, getting it together is the ticklish thing. If word were to get round that I was drastically increasing my liquidity ratio, the fat would be in the fire at once. You do see that?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Pluckworthy was impatient before this elementary fact. ‘If a dubious character like you, Carl, suddenly exhibits a marked liquidity preference, the prison gates pretty well begin to yawn.’
‘You can put it that way, if you like.’ Carson, naturally, wasn’t too pleased by this unseemly expression. ‘But everybody knows that ransom-money has to be got together in the most hush-hush way. It has to be managed, for instance, so that the police can say they know nothing of your intention to pay up. So here will be me, going ever so quietly round, moaning “My son, my son!”…’
‘Moaning “Pluckworthy, Pluckworthy!”, you mean.’
‘I’ve told you to shut your trap, haven’t I? Everybody will be tremendously sympathetic, and make no end of necessary transfers and cashing of cheques just as quietly as may be.’
‘You have a point there.’ Pluckworthy glanced with a certain – and unusual – admiration at his employer. ‘But why pick on me to be the victim of this bogus kidnapping? Is it because I talked some nonsense about that portrait being a shade like me – and therefore your son and I having a possible lick of one another?’
‘It did cross my mind, Peter, as being conceivably useful. But it’s not much of an idea, is it? I pick on you because you’re a reliable man.’
‘Thank you very much. By the way, there isn’t a real Robin Carson, is there?’
‘Of course not.’ Carson – as he had resolved to do – took this point quite casually. ‘But everybody believes there is. It’s quite extraordinary. And if you are an exception, it says something for your wits.’
‘The plan does say something for yours. The police can’t rescue Robin, because Robin doesn’t exist.’
‘And they can’t capture the kidnappers, because they don’t exist either.’
At this, Peter Pluckworthy laughed abruptly – and also rather loudly, so that the two fat men at the nearby table turned to stare at him.
‘I suppose,’ he asked, ‘it has to be rather a spectacular kidnap – enough to engage at least a mite of attention by the media?’
‘Of course.’
‘Has it occurred to you, Carl, that to make the papers with the kidnapping of a non-person by other non-persons will be technically on the demanding side?’
‘That’s where you and I put our heads together,’ Carson said.
6
So it was a conspiracy. Carl Carson was well aware that ‘conspiracy’ was a word much endeared to Attorneys General and Directors of Public Prosecutions. To be a conspirator was held – for some totally irrational reason – to be considerably more heinous than to be a crook on one’s own. And, as soon as they began to move in concert, he and Peter Pluckworthy were conspirators.
Or were they? Carson had a great respect for the law. He liked, that is to say, to think of legality in generous and comprehensive terms. As spreading wide, in fact. A man mustn’t be too ready to feel himself outside it. Lawyers themselves understood this, and plenty of them were prepared to exercise great powers of mind to make juries believe, and therefore judges declare, that their client’s intentions, and even actions, had been as blameless as the skipping of lambs in spring. So although he and Pluckworthy were now undoubtedly cooking up something together, could it really be regarded as a course of conduct insusceptible of some sort of favourable interpretation in the hands of a wily chap in a wig and gown?
Ca
rson spent a little time considering his position in this hopeful light. The money involved was, he reiterated to himself, his own – or at least it would be difficult to prove that any very substantial part of it was not. For his own legitimately private purposes – he heard this admirable barrister explain – Mr Carson had been obliged to make various redispositions which, if they became public, might readily be so misinterpreted as to occasion alarm and despondency among the minor investing classes. This he had been magnanimously prepared to go to considerable trouble to avoid. So, being a man of some imagination and resource, he had evolved a plan, in itself no more than a harmless and amusing prank…
On ‘prank’, however, he pulled himself up – detecting in the word what scribbling fellows called a hollow ring. You can’t fake, any more than you can actually effect, a robustly sensational kidnapping and holding to ransom without prompting a good deal of activity by the police. Extensive police operations in such a field cost money, and – at least in the pious sort of theory that would be advanced – divert the forces of the law from more fruitful activities. If on nothing else, they’d get you on that.
So this whole line of thought was a waste of time, and it would be better to acknowledge the risks and get on with the job. He had merely sketched his rough idea to Pluckworthy at that rather heavy (and wickedly expensive) lunch. No doubt Pluckworthy’s own brains – which were by no means to be despised – would now be at work on it. But the main burden of the thing, what might be called the intellectual labour, remained with him. And he had to admit that there was still a good deal of mere groping in front of him. He was rather in the position, he reflected, of some poor devil churning out a whodunit – pushing along, he didn’t know quite where. He did, of course, command that beautiful main thought: that for an hour or thereabout Robin Carson would come into existence and then again cease to be. (Henry James himself – of whom Carson hadn’t heard – could not have been more overcome by the ‘beauty’ of an idea than was our hero when confronted by this one.) Of course the imagined Robin would simply have become the quite real Pluckworthy again, and this meant that Pluckworthy would thereafter be something of an inconvenience. He would know far too much. But what he wouldn’t know was the destination – some highly agreeable destination, it was to be hoped – for which his late employer had departed.
Would there have to be other inconvenient persons? Cynthia had perhaps to be reckoned as in that category. Knowing her dream-son to have been kidnapped and subsequently killed (for that, Carson quite understood, would have to be the implication) would she not be drastically cured of her delusion, and announce Robin to have been a fiction? He had dimly foreseen this risk already; now it became enhancedly formidable. Of course, it was true here, too, that nothing of the kind could happen until he was over the hills and far away. But it might mean that he would be hunted for. Unless, that was, he had himself joined Robin among the reputedly slain. Of that, also, he had thought already, but so imprecisely that he had almost forgotten about it. And yet it was the crown of the whole thing! Decidedly, he must now hold on to it, fit it in as he could. Wheels within wheels, he told himself rather desperately. The beauty of the idea wasn’t exactly going to be the beauty of simplicity, after all.
Kidnappings are usually perpetrated by gangs. On the continent, where they have been chiefly fashionable, the gangs may be suddenly-assembled small armies, sufficiently equipped with automatic weapons to overpower even substantial opposition from security police, private bodyguards and the like. Nothing of the sort was in question for the projected operation. But wouldn’t at least two or three accomplices be required? Carson was surprised and displeased to notice the term ‘accomplices’ coming into his head. ‘Assistants’ might be better. But, whatever they might be called, where were they to be found? A citizen as blameless as himself naturally had no connections with anything that could be called an underworld. If suddenly required, for instance, to find what was known as a hired gun, he would be as stumped as the local vicar or GP. For a moment, and surprisingly, he found his mind turning to Punter. Perhaps because of the mask-like effect achieved by Punter’s perpetual ‘Thank you, sir’, and the like, he had several times extended his doubts about Punter beyond the bugging business to wondering whether the man might not be the kind of villain that gets along on sudden and ruthless violence; whether, in fact, Punter might not any night tie him up with his own pyjama cord and depart with the spoons.
This was an extravagant apprehension, but it did set Carson wondering whether it mightn’t be possible to enlist Punter for the task ahead. Eventually, however, he dismissed this as a messy idea. And, even as he did so, he remembered that he had already formulated, if only in a hazy way, a much more elegant proposal. Pluckworthy had been on to it with his talk of non-persons. Work it out properly – make it, for example, a nocturnal affair – and no bogus kidnappers need be brought in. The captors could be as phantasmal as their supposed captive. Pluckworthy was going to be kidnapped. Let Pluckworthy also do the kidnapping.
A choreographer, supposing Carson to have had so unlikely an acquaintance, might have told him that he was here setting himself a pretty stiff problem in the contriving of a pas de deux. But Carson’s confidence was growing. What has been called by a poet the fascination of the difficult can – one has to suppose – beset quite other than poetic characters. Those are perhaps particularly vulnerable to it who have, in the old phrase, a good conceit of themselves.
Then, quite suddenly, Cynthia became a problem again. He had got home from a long day in town, and was applying himself rather fretfully to the cocktail cabinet in the drawing-room. It was an elaborate affair, the cocktail cabinet – all chrome and perspex and funny little concealed lights – and he had come to be a shade doubtful about it, and particularly about its location. There were plenty of advertisements – in the colour-supplements and such places – which showed prosperous and persuasively top people standing beside, or in the more elaborate examples even within, this particular prestige possession. But Pluckworthy had recently referred to the Garford one as the ‘bar’, and made fun of the natty little stools that had come along with it for free. Punter, too, could be detected at times as casting upon it a supercilious eye, as if it had never been his demeaning lot to keep company with such an object in all that long career in the best service which it had been his good fortune to share with his wife. This social dubiety could mar Carson’s pleasure in concocting himself even an unassuming Bloody Mary. He was concocting one when Cynthia came into the room.
‘Do you know?’ she asked. ‘You’ll never guess!’
‘I don’t want to. Have a drink.’
‘Just the plain tomato juice, dear. Only fancy! I’ve discovered who it is.’
‘Who who is?’ Carson moodily poured Cynthia her dismal draught. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘That’s what I say. You’ll never guess.’
Carson was, of course, used to this sort of conversation with his wife. It frequently veered into something fairly mad. And that was the way of it now.
‘Robin’s friend,’ Cynthia said.
‘Robin’s friend?’ Carson’s heart already foreboded ill as he repeated this. ‘Just what do you mean: Robin’s friend?’
‘The romance, dear. We must be clear-sighted, you know. We must be realistic. Robin will love to be with us again, of course. But the main attraction is Mary Watling.’
‘Mary Watling! You’re off your…’ Carson checked himself. He needn’t enunciate the obvious. ‘The daughter of those stuck-up people at the Grange?’
‘The Watlings aren’t stuck-up, dear. Only very well-connected – which will be nice for Robin. Robin is just a little fastidious, don’t you think?’
‘No doubt.’ Carson had never heard of Betsey Prig and her final courageous assertion that Mrs Harris existed only in Mrs Gamp’s mind. Nor, had he done so, would it any longer be feasible to
emulate her now. He was stuck with a real Robin. ‘But why should you imagine…’
‘Quite a long time ago, Mary had let something slip about Robin. Almost as if there were a secret! This time, she was a little evasive, and it was almost as if she didn’t know what to say. When I taxed her with it, that is. Of course, I oughtn’t to say taxed. I think congratulate would be right. Dear Robin will make such a very good husband.’
‘Just how did she confess?’ Although all this belonged, surely, to the larger lunacy, Carson felt that a little probing into it would he only prudent. ‘What were her exact words?’
‘She said, “I shall look forward to meeting your son again.” Just like that.’
At this – at least metaphorically – Carson breathed more freely. Then he suddenly frowned.
‘Again?’ he said. ‘You’re sure she said again?’
‘But of course, dear. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see any point at all.’ Carson made to pour the vodka for a second Bloody Mary, but then thought better of it. He also thought better of continuing to betray impatience. ‘But, of course,’ he said, ‘I’m terribly interested, darling. So tell me about your whole talk with Mary Watling. Right from the start.’
‘It was because she was standing in for her mother at the meeting about the bazaar. Such a nice girl, and so willing. We came away together, and were just passing the church when I realized the truth. Maryland, you see.’
‘Maryland?’
‘Robin was there for ever so long a time. Maryland, Mary Watling. You see how the truth came to me in a flash.’
Carson was silent. He didn’t know that his wife had produced – and for the first time – a classical symptom of real madness. But he did realize that here, all-obscurely, was possibly a crisis on his doorstep.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘then what? You broached the thing – is that right?’
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