The Silver Ghost

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Aside from a brief and unrewarding visit to the elder Tolbathys and Dorks, Max hadn’t been able to accomplish much so far except to eat an excellent lunch of leftovers from the banquet. He was still in what Sarah had officially labeled the poking-around stage, hoping he’d find something useful and know it when he saw it, trying to avoid anything like a confrontation with the police.

  Captain Grimpen had shown up in jodhpurs and boots today but without a horse, displaying yet again his keen grasp of the nonessentials. He’d been all set to organize a band of scuba divers to search the pond. Nehemiah Billingsgate had mildly pointed out that the pond was nowhere more than three feet deep and that what they usually employed to clean it out were a couple of long-handled rakes. Bill had then brought out the rakes and offered to teach Chief Grimpen how to use them, to the amusement of everybody except Grimpen.

  So far, the rakers had come up with the remains of a toy submarine, a disgruntled mud turtle, several biggish rocks, and a good deal of sodden vegetable matter that Bill had claimed for the compost heap and Grimpen wouldn’t let him have, suspecting some dark machination. When Abigail had come out with a hamper of sandwiches for the policemen and an invitation for Max to join herself, Drusilla Gaheris, and Bill in the dining room, he’d been glad to leave the cops in the copse and go back to the house with the others.

  It hadn’t been a lively meal. Bill had got another message of doom from one of his already stricken radio stations. Abigail was depressed at having had to cancel the Sunday School picnic and instead spend part of the morning on the phone to the undertakers, planning Rufus’s funeral. All of them were increasingly worried about the still unheard-from Boadicea Kelling. Mrs. Gaheris had made a few commendable attempts at inconsequential table talk, then let her unanswered comments lie where they fell and finished her cold beef and salad in silence.

  Being a houseguest in a situation like this must be a difficult position, but Mrs. Gaheris was doing her diplomatic best to cope. She’d invited Max to her bedroom so he could see for himself exactly how much of a view she had. She’d even put on a red cardigan and yellow head scarf, borrowed from Abigail since her own wardrobe seemed to be all in shades of brown, and impersonated the Morris dancer.

  Max had timed her, as she strode briskly across the lawn and slipped into the copse, where her vivid garb did become invisible as soon as the dense green shrubbery closed in behind her. One minute and forty-seven seconds. An agile man unhampered by anything more than a few dags and slitters could no doubt have cut half a minute or more off the middle-aged widow’s time.

  Lunch over, Mrs. Gaheris had gone to help Abigail and Cook finish packing up the rest of the leftovers and take them to a soup kitchen in a mill town not far away from the affluent suburb. Max and Bill had wandered out to the terrace. Perhaps it was the empty pavilion and the trampled grass, unhappy reminders of yesterday’s gaiety, that had prompted Bill to open up about the problem that was bothering him far more than the loss of his two cars, perhaps even more than the frightful death of his old retainer. It was near the pavilion that Abigail found the men.

  “Max, you just got a phone call from Sarah. She’d like you to give her a ring if you can spare the time. I thought Sarah mentioned that Jem was with her, but my hearing’s not what it used to be and I must have got it wrong. Jem’s yachting with Harry Bellrope’s crowd, isn’t he?”

  Without stopping to answer, Max dashed for the house and dialed his own number. “Hi, what’s new?”

  As they talked, he scribbled fast in the little black looseleaf notebook that was his indispensable vademecum. “Is that the lot?” he asked her at last.

  “For the moment. He may think of something else along the way.”

  “What time will you be back?”

  “Fiveish, I hope, depending on the traffic. What about you?”

  “Hard to say. You’ve done better than I, so far.”

  Max would have liked to prolong the conversation, but Sarah had her guest to feed, and he had his own job to do. He’d better get back to Bill.

  As it happened, Bill came looking for him. “Max, I heard some shouting just now.”

  “I’ll bet the police have found the gun. Come on.”

  Sure enough, when they got to the pond, they found Grimpen, still natty in his shiny boots and bulging breeches, Myre living up to his name, and a couple of other policemen also muddied to the eyeballs, all clustered around a silt-covered object on the bank.

  “Can you identify this, Mr. Billingsgate?” barked the chief.

  “I might be able to if we rinsed the mud off,” Bill told him.

  “Myre!”

  The man thus roughly addressed took the object by its smaller end and sloshed it around in the murky water, then presented it for Bill’s inspection. He nodded.

  “That must be the tranquilizer gun Wouter Tolbathy made.”

  “No snap judgments, please,” ordered the chief. “Examine it closely, Mr. Billingsgate.”

  “Chief Grimpen,” Bill replied none too gently. “I am not a frivolous-minded man and I do not make snap judgments. As it happens, I was not at the going-away party where the dart gun was introduced so I’ve never actually seen it before. I have no hesitation in making the identification, however, because I know such a gun existed and because I can’t imagine who else than Wouter Tolbathy would have carved the stock in the shape of a crocodile and painted it chartreuse with magenta trimmings.”

  Grimpen wouldn’t accept this without being filled in on the details. After he’d got them, which took some time, he said they were irrelevant, which no doubt they were. Finally he demanded with surprising relevance, “Who had the gun last?”

  Bill didn’t know. “I should suppose Wouter himself held on to it after the party, but he could have passed it on to somebody else later. It could have been stolen, for that matter. The party took place about five years ago, if my memory serves me. The gun could have changed hands several times since then, for all I know.”

  “Or it might have been lying right here at the bottom of this pond the whole time,” Grimpen added with ill concealed scorn. “Before we waste any more valuable time investigating a red herring, we must determine whether this allegedly homemade weapon is still capable of being fired, and specifically of firing the dart that was found, as I predicted, in your late servant’s clothing.”

  Nobody asked when he’d made the prediction. Billingsgate glanced at Max, then nodded.

  “Whatever you think best, Chief Grimpen. I can’t authorize you to take the gun because it doesn’t belong to me, but I suppose you’re entitled to confiscate it as evidence.”

  “Possible evidence,” Grimpen amended. “Come along, men, there’s nothing more to be learned here. This gun must be rushed to the state ballistics laboratory instanter.”

  “Where do we put the rakes, Mr. Billingsgate?” asked Sergeant Myre.

  “Leave them,” ordered Grimpen. “You’re a police officer, Myre, not a hired man.”

  Unaware that he’d just uttered the words setting off a chain of events that would by the end of the present calendar year place Sergeant Myre at the head of the local police force and himself On the bottom rung of the ladder in his uncle’s cough drop factory, Chief Grimpen strode manfully from the copse, followed by his oozy minions. Max and his employer exchanged shrugs.

  “What now?” asked Bill.

  “I know the police have been all over the grounds this morning,” Max replied, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like to look around myself. Sarah raised an interesting question last night. Since nobody’s yet found any evidence that the Silver Ghost was either driven away or taken in a van, she suggested that might be because the car wasn’t taken far enough to notice. She wondered whether you or one of your neighbors might have a disused air raid shelter or something of that sort. Any chance?”

  “Good heavens, Max, that’s one possibility that never crossed my mind. Let me think. We have none here, certainly. Our neighbor Eric Hohnser built one
years ago when it was rather the going thing to do. The shelter was a sort of underground tank, as I remember it, with something like a submarine’s conning tower on top. There was a heavy steel door that worked on some kind of lever, with a long ladder leading down inside. The whole thing reminded me ludicrously of a gigantic in-the-ground garbage pail. I went down just once and came straight up again. It was a ghastly feeling, like being buried alive. Hohnser’s quite embarrassed about the shelter nowadays, I understand. He’s covered over the opening and planted Peace roses on top, which was surely the more sensible thing to do.”

  “How are the roses doing?”

  “Beautifully, I’m sure. Hohnser always has magnificent roses. We can drop over and take a look if it will set your mind at rest. I shouldn’t go poking around much, though. Hohnser takes his mulch very seriously, and I’m not his favorite person anyway.”

  “It wouldn’t take more than a glance to see whether the ground’s been disturbed recently.”

  “But naturally the ground would have been disturbed. Everybody always forks up and fertilizes his flower beds in the spring,” said Bill with the naive confidence of the wealthy landowner who has somebody else to do it for him. “But that porthole wasn’t much more than four feet across, as I recall, and it was a straight drop of about twenty feet to the bottom of the tank.”

  “Oh well, it was just a thought,” said Max. “Can you think of a hiding place where the car wouldn’t have to be dismantled and dropped down piece by piece?”

  “Not offhand. But if you want to look over the grounds, let’s go in the honeybug. Sometimes I get ideas while I’m driving.”

  That seemed as good an idea as any. Max walked with Bill down to the gardener’s shed and climbed aboard the screened-in electric cart. He’d never ridden in one of these things before. It reminded him of the Dodgems at Revere Beach amusement park when he was a kid. How soon would Davy be ready to ride the Dodgems?

  15

  AS THEY TURNED OFF the main drive into the bee fields, Max said, “Tell me some more about Ufford, Bill. How long have you known him?”

  “Versey? Dear me, it must be upward of thirty years by now. Not precisely a boyhood friendship, but certainly a long-standing acquaintance. Why, Max? Surely you don’t suspect poor Versey?”

  “I’m curious about him. You may recall that he accosted my wife up on the hill, not far from the car shed. You might also remember he was wearing bright green hose with that otherwise authentic costume, although the ones in the Arnolfini portrait are either black or some very dark color. I checked last night in a book I have at home. The exact shade was hard to make out from the reproduction, but they sure as hell weren’t emerald green.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It might be, if under that loose surcoat he happened to be wearing a red doublet and had a yellow hood slung down his back.”

  “Are you suggesting Vercingetorix Ufford was Drusilla’s wandering Morris dancer?”

  “Go ahead, make me a liar.”

  Bill sighed and shook his head. “Tick did say something about Versey’s being annoyed because they’d had to change the order of the dances, but surely—”

  “Tick said the sets that required fewer dancers were originally scheduled to come first in the program. That could mean somebody in a dancer’s costume strolling around the grounds by himself would be less apt to attract attention, mightn’t it?”

  “Unless one were to count the men remaining on the dancing green, find them all present, and wonder where the odd one came from,” Bill replied cautiously. “Then there’s the Betty, who doesn’t always appear. Betty’s a sort of clown, you know, who doesn’t dance with the rest but cavorts around the edges in that absurd farthingale. Not that I’m accusing young Erp, you understand.”

  “Erp seems to be clear,” Max assured his employer. “I checked him out with the Dorks and the Tolbathys this morning. He’s hoping to start a Morris dance group of his own at school, and stayed right there every minute of the time to pick up pointers. When he wasn’t doing the Betty, he filled in for one or another of the men who wanted a break.” Hester Tolbathy had commented spontaneously on Erp’s keenness, with a footnote to the effect that she wished her own grandsons would show a similar interest. So far, Monk Abbott was the only other member of the third generation who showed any inclination to follow in his father’s jangly footsteps. Because their Buck was dancing, she and Tom had watched most of the sets and claimed not to have noticed anything untoward.

  The Dorks, with both a son and a daughter-in-law performing, had also stayed close to the dancing green. Dorothy had particularly mentioned how easily Erp had been able to drop his Betty costume, just a rudely contrived hoopskirt framework with a wide swatch of red material draped over it, and leap in doublet, hose, and hood into the set with the rest. It turned out by a happy coincidence that she herself had devised the rig.

  Both Dorks and Tolbathys had been of the opinion that all dancers had remained with the group whether they were dancing or not, except for quick trips to the pavilion for refueling. The only ones who’d left early were the Abbotts, as expected. They in fact had not gone as soon as they ought to have. They’d wound up running for their car in their costumes with loud outcries and lamentations. Lilias had had to abandon her plan of staying for the banquet and drive the car so that her husband and son could change their clothes en route. Lilias in her kirtle would surely have outshone the bride, but she’d appeared when last seen to be bearing up bravely under that expectation.

  So that solved the question of what the Abbotts had done with their costumes and why Vercingetorix Ufford’s bright green hose were now interesting Max Bittersohn. Nehemiah Billingsgate wasn’t being particularly helpful as yet.

  “I don’t quite know what to tell you, Max. I suppose when you come down to it, I don’t know Versey all that well, myself.”

  “After thirty years?”

  “It does sound absurd, I know. But I expect you yourself have acquaintances of long standing whom you don’t exactly count as friends. The sad fact is that Versey isn’t the sort one warms up to.”

  “He’s hard to get along with?”

  “I shouldn’t call him contumacious. It’s more that gently condescending manner of his that gets under one’s skin. Versey does know a great deal, but he tends to take it for granted nobody else knows anything at all. You must admit it’s hard to get close to someone who’s giving the impression he thinks you’re a nitwit. I don’t suppose he really thinks anything of the sort, poor fellow, but there it is. Am I being uncharitable, Max?”

  “Not by me, Bill. I never got to talk with him yesterday, but I don’t feel all that charitable toward him, myself. Sarah had some trouble with him, as she mentioned last night.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s another of Versey’s problems. He fancies himself a ladies’ man, and that can become tiresome. We don’t have him out as often as we might for that very reason. However, the Renaissance Revel is one event from which we couldn’t possibly exclude him, considering how much he’s done to help us get started and keep them going.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Planning the music and the menus, advising on costumes, coaching the Morris dancers, helping Lorista assemble and equip her consort. How many people, for instance, would have known just where to put their hands on a cittern or a pandora?”

  “I thought Pandora was a girl who opened the wrong box,” said Max.

  “So did I,” Bill replied, “but thanks to Versey, I’ve learned it can have other meanings. That peculiar-looking guitar Tick’s niece Alison played yesterday for the minstrelsy was a pandora. Or bandore, if you prefer.”

  Max had no particular choice in the matter. “Alison was the pretty one in the Burne-Jones getup who looked as if she’d just ridden her palfrey in from Camelot?”

  “Yes, Alison is quite lovely, we think. She’s another who has little use for Versey, you can imagine why.”

  “How doe
s a guy like him manage to teach? By staying away from coed schools?”

  “Oh, Versey hasn’t taught much for years. He’s a visiting lecturer, which is to say he spends a little time at one place or another delivering a series of talks on Renaissance dancing, which is really his specialty, but he never stays anywhere long, so I suppose he manages to control himself for the duration.”

  “On the other hand, that may be why he never stays,” said Max. “How’s he fixed for money?”

  “Adequately, as far as I know. There’s some family money, I believe, as well as whatever Versey gets for his writing and lecturing. The pittance we pay him would hardly count, but he does enjoy the work, and it apparently gives him some kudos in academic circles.”

  “So he’s got enough to live on, anyway?”

  “Oh yes, though not lavishly.” Bill shook his head. “I shouldn’t say that; I have no idea how he lives when he’s abroad. But he lives rather frugally here. He has an apartment in somebody’s attic, from the way he describes it. He doesn’t even run a car. That’s a nuisance for us because it means he’s always having to be fetched and carried, but I don’t suppose he’d get enough use out of one to justify the cost of keeping it on the road. Versey does seem to spend a fair amount on recordings and sound equipment, from what he tells me, but I suppose he can write all that off as business expenses. His only other extravagance that I know of is clothes. Versey’s a dapper fellow. But he buys his things in Italy where they may not cost so much.”

  “Why Italy in particular?”

  “Because that’s where he spends at least half his time. Versey has a place in Venice. I can’t tell you what it’s like because I’ve never seen it. I do have the address, should you need that for any reason. Melly claims he keeps a mistress there who cleans the house and cooks the fettuccine, and carries on an amorous dalliance with a fat gondolier when Versey isn’t around. Melly and Tick are rather given to rude conjecture on the subject of Versey’s love life, I’m ashamed to say.”