Carson's Conspiracy

by Michael Innes

  ‘So far as we know, nothing at all. It’s my bet that the young man will simply turn up – perhaps leaving something rather discreditable behind him.’

  ‘So that’s that.’ Judith Appleby knew that when her husband came out with a rather heavy remark of this sort he was intending to dismiss a topic from his mind. She rather suspected, nevertheless, that he would in fact continue to do some thinking about the tiresome Carsons and their elusive son.

  9

  For some days, however, nothing of the sort happened. Somewhat sporadically at this time, Appleby was writing a book. It wasn’t autobiographical, and such sensational crimes as it touched on had occurred for the most part in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Appleby had taken to that investigating and recording of local history which has become prominent as an unassuming pursuit among the elderly and literate classes. When questioned about it, he would say that it served as well as the bees. This was understood to be an allusion to the final phase in the career of Sherlock Holmes.

  It was an activity having the advantage of requiring very little equipment. A typewriter, a filing cabinet, a magnifying glass (Sherlockian in suggestion) and plenty of hot water filled the bill: this last because of the decidedly dusty condition of such minor archives as commonly came his way. He might, indeed, have added to the need for plenty of hot water (together with soap and towels) the need for plenty of petrol as well. Appleby drove around the countryside a good deal. He was doing so on the day we resume our acquaintance with him. Having lunched agreeably on bread and cheese with an aged clergyman at Boxer’s Bottom, and been by him alerted to the possibility of interesting discovery in the parish registers at Sleep’s Hill, he was making his way to the latter rural centre over rather unfrequented roads when he became aware of something amiss with the ancient Appleby Rover. He drew to a halt, and found he had a puncture.

  Appleby was displeased. Casual observation had convinced him that punctures, like some of the less important diseases, simply didn’t happen to people nowadays. And if the car was old, its tyres were reasonably new.

  It was a vexatious situation, but had to be dealt with. Appleby took his jacket off and yanked the tool kit out of the boot. But then, glancing along the deserted road ahead, he became aware of some sort of garage or service station a couple of hundred yards away. What a mechanic could achieve in minutes, he saw no occasion himself to labour at. Standing on his years, he’d hand the job over to a professional. It wasn’t exactly an athletic decision, but this didn’t perturb him.

  Then for a moment it looked as if he were going to draw a blank. In the garage there didn’t seem to be much going on, and ominously erected beside it was a large notice saying ‘For Sale’. But the situation turned out to be not so bad as it seemed. Nothing, indeed, that could be called an activity was visible. But a young man in blue dungarees sat perched on an oil-barrel under another notice which read ‘No Smoking’. Perhaps by way of declaring his independence of the moribund establishment employing him, he was puffing at a cigarette. He was presumably willing to sell petrol. He could probably be persuaded to change a wheel.

  This proved to be so. The young man clearly expected no more business for his firm that day, and it was presumably as a citizen rather than an employee that he would eventually name a fee for his services to Appleby. He provided himself with the superior sort of jack that trundles along on wheels, and set off for the Rover. He was an alert-seeming young man with an observant eye, but at present so obviously sunk in gloom that Appleby expected no conversation from him.

  ‘Appleby, isn’t it?’ the young man asked.

  ‘Yes, my name’s Appleby.’ Appleby was unoffended by the egalitarian cast of this question. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘William.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much doing here, William. You must find it a bit dull.’

  ‘Dump is closing down at the end of the week. Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve felt the undertakers and gravediggers to be raring to get busy on it. And the job’s been no more than part-time, anyway. Now I’m out on my bloody ear.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. By the way, how do you come to know my name’s Appleby?’

  ‘My dad – a step-dad, he is really – worked at Long Dream, come he was a lad. Name of Jim Lockett. I call myself William Lockett, it being easier that way. Dad has pointed you out to me. Your missis, too, who was born in the place, he says.’

  ‘So she was. Does your dad work somewhere else now?’

  ‘Gardener at Garford he’s been, these thirty years or more. For the old lot there, and now for the new – name of Carson, never known in these parts before. I help out at times around the place. Ruddy moonlighting, really. But I can quite take gardening. Learnt a packet about it, too, from dad. I’d sooner cart muck all day than go messing around with this grease and stinking petrol… Your car looks like it might have come out of Noah’s Ark.’

  ‘Twenty years ago, William, they knew how to make cars to last.’ Appleby produced this senior citizen’s platitude with confidence. ‘What about Mr Carson at Garford taking you on full-time to help your dad? Wealthy, isn’t he? And he could do with an under-gardener, what with all those roses.’

  ‘You make me laugh.’ William Lockett scowled as he said this, and applied himself viciously to the nuts on the peccant wheel. ‘What about Long Dream?’ he asked suddenly. ‘You wouldn’t have a job going there? I’m not all that bloody useless.’

  Appleby, who had just decided that – so strange were the times – a couple of pound coins would be the decent thing to slip to the lad for his fifteen minute’s work, realized that this small occasion had taken on a new dimension. A young man with the dole queue dead ahead of him had shown the kind of enterprise of which one ought to approve. It had to be treated with respect and responded to with care.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Appleby said at once. ‘You see, we have Mr Hoobin – your father may remember him – and also a lad called Solo. Of course Mr Hoobin is elderly, and Solo is about as useful as a garden gnome. But there they are. I could possibly do you a day a week, and see how you all got on. But you’d want something more than that.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be exactly a living – would it?’ With a deft tug, William pulled the wheel from its hub. ‘But thanks for the idea.’

  ‘Mightn’t it start you on something, William? There must be an increasing number of people in these parts with fair-sized gardens, who can’t run to help in them for more than a day in the week or the fortnight…’

  ‘Distressed gentry, like.’ The spare wheel was now in place. ‘A quid an hour, and a cup of tea.’

  ‘You’d have to get together your own tools – including one or two power-tools. Power-tools always impress distressed gentry. Not too difficult, that. And then there’s only one further step, and it’s no doubt the tricky one. Organize your transport.’

  ‘A pram, maybe. Sometimes you see a tramp going along with one of them.’ William was now being his own power tool as he twisted the nuts tight with the simple implement known as a spider.

  ‘But you won’t be a tramp. You’ll be a garden contractor.’

  ‘Jack down the crate, and another turn on the nuts. If the pressure’s right in your spare, you’re on the road… I’ll say you talk more sense than some.’ For the first time, William hesitated a little. ‘You’ll be over this way again?’

  ‘Probably not for quite some time. If you’re interested, come to Dream one morning, and we’ll have another word about it. But no commitments.’

  ‘I’ll think.’ William uttered this as one who makes a handsome concession. He had disengaged the jack, and given a ritual kick at the spare tyre. ‘That’s a quid,’ he said.

  Appleby handed over the quid. To add a second would, he decided, be an act of possibly offensive benevolence. He then realized that his zeal in thinking up a career for Willia
m Lockett had caused him to pass over a point of some interest in their discussion.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘why should my suggesting that Mr Carson might take you on full-time strike you as funny? It seems a perfectly reasonable idea to me – particularly as you and your father are used to working together.’

  ‘What do you know? The man’s clean busted – just as much as this bloody service station.’

  ‘Busted? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Carson, of course. That bastard of a butler told my dad there’s not a doubt about it. All sudden-like. The Rolls went yesterday. And the day before, Punter says, it was some of the pictures. Carson told him they were going to be cleaned. I ask you! Who ever heard of cleaning pictures – like they might be your best pants? Bankrupt, that’s your Carson. Full time, indeed! Like enough, it’s what he himself will be doing in clink.’

  Appleby considered this surprising communication on its merits. They scarcely seemed substantial merits. Pictures do get cleaned. If of sufficient importance, they are sometimes lent to galleries and exhibitions. Even Rolls-Royces have to be serviced. Or one may be taken away in order that, a few days later, an even grander one may take its place. Carson was probably not very popular with his retainers. Marked prosperity emanating from a mysterious region of intricate financial operations was liable to be suspect alike to sophisticated and unsophisticated intelligences. And so on. William might very well be talking nonsense. But Appleby found himself not very confident about this. And if Carson’s peace of mind was simultaneously under threat from two quarters – this of looming business disaster on top of the disappearance of his son – his very evident unease would be amply accounted for.

  ‘Dad will be all right,’ William was saying as he wiped his hands on a cotton rag. ‘If he’s as careful as hell, that is. His pension’s coming along, and he has a bit put by. But it won’t exactly be two at the pub.’

  ‘All the more reason for thinking about what I’ve said.’ Appleby spoke briskly as he got into his car. ‘And thank you very much for your help.’

  Driving on, Appleby found himself rather puzzled by his own behaviour. William Lockett was probably a decent enough lad, deserving of the chance of continued employment. But Appleby was not by temperament any sort of travelling philanthropist, so how was his interest in the young man to be explained? The answer proved not hard to find. What was operative in him wasn’t an interest in William at all. It was an interest in the Carsons of Garford House, and anything he could hear about them. Almost without being conscious of the fact, he had developed a considerable curiosity in that direction. But there was something more positive to it than that. Obscurely, but insistently, he had a sense of having failed to put two and two together. And that was something that a detective – even in retirement and much taken up with the complexities of local history – ought not to do.

  On the remainder of the drive to Dream Appleby pursued these unsatisfactory thoughts. During that final phase of his career in which he had administered the Metropolitan Police his wife had sometimes made fun of what she called his retentive nose for a mystery. It had been fair enough, since he had undeniably devoted a good deal of diplomatic skill to masking a continuing and unseemly interest in mere murder and mayhem. And the impulse was with him still. In the rural seclusion in which he now lived sensational crime was undeniably in short supply. But what might be called puzzles did turn up. Carl Carson was lodging himself in Appleby’s head as a puzzle of sorts – and as a result Appleby had taken on at least a small domestic problem. The notion of recruiting William Lockett to back up the horticultural efforts of the aged Hoobin and his nephew Solo was perfectly rational in itself – yet he had to acknowledge that it simply wouldn’t have occurred to him if William Lockett hadn’t happened to live with his stepfather at Garford. The gardens at Dream weren’t what they had been once upon a time; the topiary, for example, had gone; the tennis-court, now seldom in use, had turned bumpy. But quite a lot was in reasonable order, and considerable labour was required to keep it so. He supplied a good deal himself, but nevertheless Hoobin was perhaps entitled to be helped out a little more than he was. Hoobin, however, was himself the small domestic problem. He might take a dark view of young Lockett. Appleby was reflecting on this as he turned the Rover into his drive. Fifty yards on, he had to pull up sharply.

  This was because of Solo. Solo was standing in the middle of the drive, his body canted forward in the effort to edge a Dutch hoe through a clump of dandelions. Or that was how it looked. But Solo, of course, was asleep. Falling asleep in unlikely postures and amid abrupted activities was Solo’s forte. Hoobin, although expending much energy on loudly dratting the boy when he was awake, stoutly maintained that his nephew’s precarious health necessitated the utmost caution on his employers’ part when they judged it essential to rouse the youth from his slumbers. Appleby, whose instincts were always humane, at times indulged this view of the matter. So he climbed out of the Rover now, advanced upon the virtually Ephesian sleeper, and laid a cautious hand upon his shoulder.

  ‘Solo,’ he said gently, ‘wake up.’

  Rather surprisingly, Solo woke up at once. For some seconds he glanced at Appleby vacantly and without expression. Then – faintly but unmistakably – his features took on a look of malicious glee. (This – Appleby was accustomed to remark – constituted the only reliable evidence that Solo and Hoobin were indeed in some blood-relationship.)

  ‘Cump’ny’, Solo said with relish.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Cump’ny – up at house.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ In relation to Long Dream Manor and all its policies both Hoobin and Solo indulged extreme territorial feelings. All visitors were intruders and a disaster – and this view they never doubted was that of their employers too. So Solo now regarded himself as enjoying the satisfaction of conveying ill tidings.

  ‘Do you know who they are?’ Appleby asked. Solo shook his head, and then his eyes appeared about to close again. Appleby gently possessed himself of the hoe, dealt with the dandelions, and carefully restored Solo to an approximately perpendicular posture. ‘Carry on,’ he said encouragingly. And he got back into the Rover.

  He put the car away in its garage and walked towards the house – wondering, although without the gloom taken for granted by Solo, who had called. Hoobin, as usual, was sitting by the door of his potting shed. The hour having drawn on towards teatime, Hoobin (always, as he liked to describe himself, a perusing man) had advanced far into his diurnal task of consuming the Daily Mirror. Politics, pugilism, the varying fortunes of race horses – all of them topics upon which he was completely ignorant – he had fingered his way through with equal care. So he could afford the diversion of articulate speech.

  ‘Cump’ny’, Hoobin said.

  ‘So Solo has told me. Do you know who they are?’

  ‘Furriners.’

  For a moment Appleby had the agreeable thought that he was perhaps being visited by confrères retired from the Sûreté nationale. Then he recalled that, just as Judith regarded as neighbours any persons of substance within half a day’s journey of Long Dream Manor, so did Hoobin regard as foreigners the entire human race not actually resident in the tiny hamlet of Long Dream itself. Appleby had never, indeed, heard Hoobin speak, like rustics in Thomas Hardy, of the distant kingdom of Bath. But had he mentioned that he had that day visited both Boxer’s Bottom and Sleep’s Hill (to say nothing of having passed through Snarl, Sneak, and Little London) Hoobin would indubitably regard it as an expedition as recklessly far-flung as that announced in the opening lines of the Odyssey.

  ‘Do you know any of them?’ Appleby asked – perhaps wondering whether the company was one into which he must hasten.

  ‘Parson.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t call Dr Folliott a foreigner, Hoobin?’

  ‘All parsons be a bit aside from folk. And there�
��s one o’ they from Upton. T’wench, it be. And the artist-creature and his wife that visit times enough.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Lely, you mean?’ Appleby wondered whether Hoobin ought to be reproved for calling Humphry Lely an artist-creature, but decided that nothing markedly derogatory had been intended.

  ‘Them it be. And all sitting under the cedar on lawn. A dangerous tree, that cedar’s coming to be.’ Hoobin offered this information with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Biding their tea, all of them. And parson maybe thinking to wait on for something else.’

  ‘Well, I must go and join them.’ Appleby had again considered the propriety of rebuking Hoobin for this last aspersion, and had concluded that it would be injudicious to do so. Moreover, there was a bull to take by the horns. ‘Hoobin,’ he asked, ‘do you know a young man called William Lockett?’

  ‘Old Lockett be beknown to me – we being colleagues here afore your time, Sir John.’ Stray words culled from his perusals occasionally filtered into Hoobin’s vocabulary. ‘Along o’ Heyhoe.’

  ‘I knew Heyhoe, Hoobin. Although not for long. And Spot.’

  ‘Spot? The dratted creature that was for ever casting a shoe.’

  ‘So he was, Hoobin. Old times, those.’ Appleby felt that he had now successfully chatted up his aged gardener, and might proceed to the nub of the matter. ‘William Lockett is old Mr Lockett’s stepson.’

  ‘So he be. But I take no account o’ stepsons. Queer cattle, times enough, Sir John. Unholy incest be at the back o’ them, often as not.’

  ‘This young William Lockett has picked up a little gardening at Garford.’ Appleby chose to ignore the serious moral issue upon which Hoobin was plainly minded to advance. ‘And now he may be looking for occasional work that way elsewhere. He’s probably coming over to talk to me about it.’ Appleby paused on this, but the information was received in ominous silence. ‘He might make it easier for Solo.’