Carson's Conspiracy

by Michael Innes

  All this clarity (as the retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police saw it) at least defined the problem. But it didn’t immediately help to a solution, if that solution was to be conceived of as primarily the rescuing of Robin Carson from his captors. Nothing is so dangerous, so ruthless, as a kidnapper or gang of kidnappers under threat of being cornered. Once the possibility of extortion vanishes, it is a matter – one may say – of cut and run, and the cutting may conceivably include an inconvenient captive’s throat.

  So what could be done – either with Carl Carson’s concurrence or without it? Appleby’s mind went to work on the problem in a professional way. Punter offered some hope. With just a shade more of evidence to connect Punter with the crime, it might be possible to take him in and intimidate or bribe him into grassing on his pals. Achieve that, and the hide-out where they were guarding their prisoner could be located, ringed, and closed in on. Ten to one, they’d then surrender. Presumably they, too, were professionals, unlikely to panic to the extent of cutting throats to no good purpose.

  Appleby had got as far as this in his cogitations when he was called to the telephone. It was Tommy Pride.

  ‘John? Good! Tommy here. No problem.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a moment.’

  ‘Don’t you? You may be right. I just mean that what you wanted has turned up straight out of the hat. That newspaper para, for a start. In most of the rags in one form or another, just a week ago. But it’s no more than a garbled version of something it turns out my neighbours are working on now.’

  ‘Your neighbours, Tommy?’

  ‘The cops in the next county. Of course, info on it has come in here, but I didn’t know about it. Not everything is brought to me.’

  ‘Heaven forbid.’

  ‘Quite so. Well, it was conceivably your kidnap, although a precious rum specimen. One-man show, for a start. Did you ever hear of such a thing as that, John?’

  ‘Often enough. Dad snatching a kid from mum, or mum from dad, and bolting to Australia or wherever.’

  ‘I don’t call that a kidnap. I call it mere family despair and misery.’ The Chief Constable said this with a sudden sobriety that was almost a rebuke. ‘Not that I go along with the way our people tend to shy away from what they call domestic disputes. I tell my chaps the Queen’s peace has to be maintained, even if the brawl is between husband and wife in the back yard.’

  ‘Physical violence being the crux, wouldn’t you say? But get on with what you’ve been kind enough to turn up. The one-man kidnap.’

  ‘It happened at dusk, just off the M4 and near Heathrow. Some little chappie was tootling along in his Mini when he came on a roadside rumpus. He stopped to watch it.’

  ‘And just what did he see?’

  ‘I gather his first observation was made while he was still on the move. There was another car ahead of him: perhaps, he says, a couple of hundred yards ahead. And there was a chap at the roadside, flagging it down.’

  ‘Hitch-hiker?’

  ‘Just a moment, John.’ There was a brief pause during which the Chief Constable might have been consulting a note. ‘Yes, here it is. The chappie thinks definitely not. More like somebody with a breakdown wanting a message taken to the nearest garage or any AA man.’

  ‘Your chappie sounds to be one who prides himself on precise observations. Well?’

  ‘So the car in front obligingly stopped, and there was a bit of a palaver. Then, just as this opportune witness was almost up on it, the really rum thing happened. In the halted car there was only a single young man. And what did he do? Jumped out – and in a moment what was going on was a bloody battle. Our man drew to a halt, sat – a bit nervously, I imagine – in his own car, and just watched the fray. It lasted no time. The man who’d done the flagging down broke clear, whipped out a gun, forced the young man back to his wheel at the point of it, jumped in beside him, and made him drive off at speed. Would you call that a kidnap?’

  ‘Most definitely. And, as you remark, a pretty rum one at that. Economical, one might say. Does the story continue, Tommy?’

  ‘Not very far. Of course the Mini man did nothing about it in the way of trying to interfere. It was all over too quickly, no doubt – and I don’t know that I’d blame him for a little hanging back. He did find the nearest telephone, and ring the police.’

  ‘Good mark.’

  ‘Yes, and he earns another. He managed to memorize the registration number of the car.’

  ‘And it has been traced?’

  ‘Apparently so – but only this very morning. Parked at Heathrow.’

  ‘Long term?’

  ‘No. I don’t think one can do that without contacting somebody. Just one of the multi-storey places. Not a bad hidey-hole for a week or so.’

  ‘Has the car’s provenance been traced yet?’

  ‘Yes, it has. They’ve been uncommonly prompt. It’s a self-drive car, and was hired – there at the airport – only about an hour before the kidnap happened. The hirer gave his name as Carson, and paid in cash.’

  ‘In cash?’ Appleby took this up at once. ‘A bit unusual, surely. Those deals are generally done on a credit-card basis.’

  ‘That’s certainly so, but I suppose they don’t mind if the money put down is big enough. What do you think of the whole picture, John?’

  ‘I’m out of touch with these affairs, Tommy, but this one sounds a bit atypical. I suppose the chap in the Mini is to be relied on?’

  ‘Another moment, John.’ There was a short rustle of papers, and then the Chief Constable spoke again. ‘Yes, they have something on that. Unexceptionable character, it says.’

  ‘And there were some objective signs of a struggle?’

  ‘Blood, it seems. The chap can’t have drawn his gun straight off.’

  ‘Odd. And this Robin Carson sounds to be quite a lad. Tumbling to the situation, jumping out of his car, and having a go with his fists. It almost seems to me…’

  But at this moment Appleby was checked by a low buzzing on the line, and then the Chief Constable spoke again.

  ‘Just hold on a minute – will you, John? That’s the intercom I have to answer pronto.’ This time, the pause was much longer. Then Pride was speaking again – decidedly on a new note. ‘Hell’s bells and bloody bodkins!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘My dear Tommy, whatever…?’

  ‘Your confounded Mrs Carson, John. On the blower to my people here, and sounding, apparently, clean off her head.’

  ‘She’s a lady who does, at times, appear to be a little on the eccentric side. What’s she rampaging about?’

  ‘About her husband, your blasted neighbour.’ The Chief Constable was plainly much rattled. ‘She says he has disappeared.’

  It must be admitted that Sir John Appleby, although he refrained from emulating the Chief Constable in point of bizarre ejaculation, failed to take this information entirely in his stride. There was a perceptible pause before he asked a question.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘That’s not yet twenty-four hours ago – which isn’t all that out of the way. There are married men – and, no doubt, married women – who are a bit casual about their coming and going. It’s a reprehensible habit, as being sure to occasion anxiety. But Carson may be like that. I don’t think of him as likely to be a very thoughtful person.’

  ‘I gather they put that notion to his wife as tactfully as they could. She denied it flat. She said that Carl was very careful about intimating the probable length of his absences. His staying away for a night, without any word about it, she declares to be quite unexampled.’

  ‘She seems at least to have been articulate. Do you gather she ran to any particulars?’

  ‘Carson drove away in her car, taking a couple of suitcases.’


  ‘Dear me! They must have required a little explaining.’

  ‘Apparently he explained them to his butler. He said he was taking a lot of his winter clothes – overcoats and the like, one imagines – to the dry-cleaner. It sounds a bit odd. Do you think the fellow is levanting? You know what I mean. Doing a bunk from his creditors.’

  ‘I’d say he’s well within the category of persons about whom one might have such a thought. I’ve even had him more or less explicitly in my mind that way. But it doesn’t – does it? – quite fit within the present context.’

  ‘John, I’ve just thought of quite a fresh possibility. Mrs Carson sounds a thoroughly trying woman. Robin hasn’t turned up simply because he has some sort of rendezvous with his father. They plan to bolt together just as soon as dad can collect enough money. As he has now done. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Words simply fail me, Tommy.’ It was true that this extraordinary suggestion had almost taken Appleby’s breath away. ‘I suggest we swap this telephone chat for deeds. Have a rendezvous of our own chez Carson in, say, an hour’s time. The arrival of top brass might brace the lady, and get something useful out of her.’

  ‘I agree to that.’

  ‘Good. Incidentally, I’ll probably bring a friend with me.’

  ‘A friend, John?’

  But Appleby had put down the receiver.

  14

  Appleby made a telephone call, and then drove over to Garford. On the way, he found himself giving some thought to Tommy Pride’s notable suggestion. It can’t be said that he entertained it. But he found it stimulating, all the same.

  The notion of the Carsons, father and son, as being jointly engaged in financial and other dispositions making possible a simultaneous flight from the tiresomely dotty Cynthia Carson mightn’t stand up to scrutiny, yet it held a certain attractiveness for the speculative mind. Eccentric behaviour is always in some degree infectious. History affords numerous examples of irrational beliefs and senseless conduct spreading from one group or community to another. The same mechanisms are frequently to be observed in domestic contexts, notably in the growth of what psychiatrists call foli à deux. The disorder, Appleby understood, most frequently afflicted sisters, or husband and wife. He wondered whether it ever got going on father and son.

  But now a more relevant thought came to Appleby. A novel view – such as this of Tommy’s – of some perplexing situation has a kind of magnetic force in it. One begins to see how many already established circumstances peripheral to the core of the thing can be locked into it in one way or another. But this is always liable to be a mere sporting with red herrings. When something new of an evidential character turns up, one’s first job is not to slot it into an existing picture but to consider it with an absolutely open mind. There had been, for example, William Lockett’s story of the sinister behaviour of Punter, the Carsons’ butler, when in that covert way he had brought to Mrs Carson’s notice a newspaper account which now looked as if it might have been of Robin Carson’s kidnap. Appleby saw how he had himself shoved this into his existing jigsaw. Punter belonged to the conjectured gang of kidnappers, or at least was in their pay. His action had contrived further to destabilize Cynthia Carson, thereby enhancing her husband’s desperation in face of his predicament and serving as a step in forcing him to pay up.

  But this was not the right way in which to regard the Punter incident. Appleby saw no present reason to begin to doubt that Robin had been kidnapped and was being held to ransom. He also saw no reason to doubt that the young man’s father had decided to knuckle under to the threat, and purchase his son’s liberty. And although Carl Carson appeared to him a far from amiable or trustworthy character, and although his own entire professional career inclined him to the view that the man’s behaviour was injudicious and even technically illegal, he by no means felt that he was to be censured outright. It was an agonizing situation, and he ought himself to act with the utmost caution and be sparing of speech about it. Moreover, whatever were his views, he ought to be chary of feeling that he was dealing with established fact. In considering Punter’s role in the current mystery he ought to remember that. In one fashion or another, he might have got Punter entirely wrong.

  It was Punter who opened the door when he rang the bell at Garford House. Punter failed to produce anything that could be called a welcoming smile. But perhaps, Appleby thought, the man judged anything of the kind to be unbecoming in a butler except when a caller happened to be an established friend of the family. Punter’s expression might have been described as impassive, had it not contrived to hint at one and the same time a conventional respect and the suspicion with which one regards a caller who has put up an unconvincing story of having come to do something about the drains.

  ‘Is Mrs Carson at home?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘Mrs Carson is indisposed, sir. She regrets that she is not receiving.’

  This was very august. Appleby tried again.

  ‘Mr Carson, perhaps?’

  ‘Mr Carson was called away on business yesterday afternoon.’ Punter paused on this. ‘We are given to understand,’ he then added in a wooden manner.

  ‘I see. I think I will ask you to take my card to Mrs Carson, and say that I hope to speak to her for a few minutes. And add that two other callers are likely to turn up within the next quarter of an hour. Mr Lely, whom, I think, you know, and the Chief Constable of the county.’ Appleby contrived an august pause of his own. ‘The Chief Constable and I are engaged on an inquiry in which Mrs Carson is likely to be of help to us. It is very probable that you will have to answer some questions yourself.’

  If the butler was perturbed by these intimations he concealed the fact. Ushering Appleby into the hall with a solemn bow, he received on a salver the scrap of pasteboard offered to him, and withdrew into the recesses of the house. Appleby glanced about him – perhaps with the notion of detecting evidences of the sudden exigency that had been responsible for the abrupt spiriting away of the Romneys, the Reynoldses, and the Rolls-Royce. But the hall was as he remembered it, containing nothing more portable than a couple of life-size marble statues in niches: Victorian assertions of the unflawed propriety of female nudity when done in something sufficiently impenetrable and chilly white. Appleby recalled his wife as having shuddered at these as she passed them on the occasion of the Carsons’ luncheon party.

  Punter returned. He preserved his formal manner. But it was now combined, if not with a shifty, at least with a wary glance. He had certainly been up to no good on that garden occasion, and perhaps he was coming to suspect that he had somehow been detected in it. Appleby remembered forming an unfavourable impression of the man when he first set eyes on him. He had known himself to do just that of persons who had subsequently proved to be totally blameless. He wondered, all the same, whether this upper-servant business was in any permanent way Punter’s authentic walk of life.

  ‘If you will come this way, Sir John.’ Punter uttered this invitation, or command, with all the consequence of a court chamberlain deciding to accord the grande entrée to a minor nobleman not quite deserving it. But halfway down a corridor he came to a halt and turned to Appleby. ‘I wonder, sir,’ he said, ‘whether I might have your permission to offer an observation?’

  ‘My good man, if you have anything to say, by all means out with it.’ It was probably many years since Appleby had addressed anybody as ‘my good man’, and he wouldn’t have done so now had he not been feeling a mounting irritation with Punter. The man was overacting a part in a positively clumsy way. He wasn’t too bright, was Punter. If he was a crook, he was a small-time one. And he seemed quite unoffended by Appleby’s lapse.

  ‘I am merely moved to warn you, Sir John, that you will find Mrs Carson in a distraught condition. She has been worried for some time by the failure of Mr Robin Carson to visit us at Garford. It would appear…’

  ‘Yes, I kno
w about that, Mr Punter. Anything else?’

  ‘And now Mr Carson himself. She is worried about him too.’

  ‘Quite so. Would you say those worries were justified?’ It was with a calculated abruptness that Appleby fired off this question, and Punter detectably hesitated before replying. And when he did so, it was again by having recourse to his role.

  ‘I hardly think it is my place, Sir John…’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Mr Punter! Stop talking nonsense, and say what you have to say.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I know nothing of Mr Robin Carson. He appears to have been resident in America for some years, and I have gathered little as to either his disposition or his habits. It would hardly be my…’

  ‘Quite so. Go on.’

  ‘But I judge there is some reasonable cause for concern. Mrs Carson received, I understand, some specific information of his having arrived in this country – since when there has been silence. And her apprehensions have been sharpened, it seems, by something she happened on in a newspaper.’

  ‘What newspaper?’

  ‘I have no idea, Sir John.’ Punter produced this lie smoothly enough. ‘I understand the account was of some wayside assault, or the like. Mrs Carson had reacted to it in a somewhat morbid fashion, supposing that her son was involved, and that he has very possibly been murdered. A most distressing aberration, Sir John.’

  ‘No doubt. And Mr Carson?’

  ‘He is also in some distress – and naturally so. But his own brief absence from Garford seems to me insignificant, and I have taken the liberty of suggesting to Mrs Carson that she need be in no anxiety about it. Business gentlemen have their sudden occasions, have they not?’

  Appleby assented to this harmless generalization, and the walk down the corridor was resumed. Punter then opened the door of a small sitting-room.

  ‘Sir John Appleby,’ he said.