Crispin had heard enough.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Bill. Goodbye,’ he said coldly, and replaced the receiver with a bang.
2
For several minutes after he had put an end to this regrettable scene Crispin sat quivering as a man might who had come safe but shaken through a testing motor accident. His thoughts were for the most part chaotic, but he was conscious of a definite surge of gratitude to the late Alexander Graham Bell for having invented the telephone. Face to face with his forceful brother he could never have taken that splendidly firm stand. From boyhood up Willoughby had always dominated him, and only Mr Bell’s co-operation had kept him from doing so now. Thanks to that human benefactor’s ingenuity in enabling the weak to triumph over the strong at long range, he had borne himself with a fortitude and dignity which would have won the plaudits of the most captious critic. (Chippendale had been greatly impressed. It had come as a complete surprise to him that Crispin had it in him.)
As the after-effects of the battle of wills began to wear off, feelings of a more tolerant nature took the place of the indignation with which he had been seething. He could see now that one must make allowances for Willoughby. It was monstrous that he should have let his bereavement carry him away to the extent of inventing all that wild stuff about shoplifting, but no doubt quiet reflection would make him see how mistaken he had been. One must, at any rate, hope so. There was no real vindictiveness in Willoughby, it was just that he sometimes spoke without thinking.
He had reached this charitable conclusion and was preparing to go out again into the afternoon sunshine, hoping for a resumption of his interrupted conversation with Barney, when the door opened and Chippendale came in.
Reminded by the sight of him that he had other troubles beside those arising from a brother’s unchivalrous attitude towards a woman he respected and admired, Crispin regarded him without elation. The ‘Well?’ he uttered was entirely free from geniality. He had not forgotten that he had promised Ernest Simms that he would speak to this man on the subject of his misdemeanours, and the task was one from which his sensitive soul shrank. Speaking meant speaking severely, and he was good at that only over the telephone.
If Chippendale noticed any absence of warmth, it did not appear to distress him. He spoke as one old friend to another.
‘Like a word with you, cully.’
‘Don’t call me cully!’
‘No harm in being matey, is there, chum?’
In her recent remarks on this employee of the people who did the repairs about the place Barney had described him as a little shrimp, and any impartial observer would have felt bound to support her in this view. There were only some sixty-six inches of him, and in the opinion of most of those who knew him that was quite enough. He was not a physically attractive man. His complexion was muddy, his ears stuck out like the handles of an antique Greek vase, and he had the beak and eyes of a farmyard fowl. Seeing him, one wondered how Marlene Hibbs could enjoy his society, even though a free bicycle lesson went with it. That he was entrusted with responsible work by the firm he represented was presumably due to the fact that those who engage the services of broker’s men place more value on intelligence than on comeliness.
‘And don’t call me chum,’ said Crispin. “What do you want?’ In his lighter moments Chippendale would have replied that he wanted ten thousand a year, a Rolls-Royce, a villa in the South of France and a diamond tiara, but he was here on business.’
‘Just a brief word, mate,’ he said. ‘I must begin by saying that when you and your brother Bill were on the buzzer just now I happened inadvertently to be on the extension.’
Crispin quivered in every limb. Even his moustache became mobile. He found a difficulty in speaking, but after a moment managed it.
‘How dare you listen to a private conversation!’
‘And if you don’t mind me saying so, cocky,’ Chippendale proceeded, rightly taking the view that this, if a question, was merely a rhetorical one, ‘you were a mug to tell him off the way you did. If a bloke offers you two hundred quid, the least you can do is be civil. Civility never hurt anyone. Costs nothing, as somebody said. I learned that in Sunday school.’
Having administered this rebuke, Chippendale took a chair and put his feet up on the table.
‘You were right, though, in saying you wouldn’t go to the dame and tax her with her crime,’ he resumed. ‘That wouldn’t get you anywhere. All she’d have to do would be to deny it what’s the word, begins with a c, categorically,’ said Chippendale, modestly proud of the scope of his vocabulary, ‘and then where would you be? Where’s your evidence? But searching her room, that’s another matter. When Bill suggested that, he was talking sense. And as you probably won’t want to do it yourself, you not being used to that sort of thing, what you do is hand the job over to me. And you’re in luck, because I’m an experienced searcher. Had a lot of practice when I was a nipper. Whenever Father won a bit on the dogs, he’d hide the stuff around the house so that Mother couldn’t get her hooks on it, and Mother would pay me a small royalty on any of it I could find, and I always found most of it. It won’t take me long to locate that miniature, whatever a miniature is, sort of a small picture, isn’t it; they had some in the drawing-room of a house I was staying at last year, kept ‘em in a glass case. I’ll spot it all right. Just a matter of keeping one’s eyes open. We now have to ask ourselves,’ said Chippendale, this having been disposed of, ‘a very important question. Is Bill good for two hundred quid? It’s a lot of money, but from the tone of his voice he seems to be a man of substance. These rich blokes get a sort of something into the way they talk. Kind of an authoritative note, if you know what I mean, like a referee sending someone off the field at a football match. So we’ll take it the two hundred’s there all right and we can go ahead.’
Except for odd bubbling sounds from time to time, horror and indignation had held Crispin dumb during the course of this long and revolting soliloquy. He now found speech.
‘You are not to search Mrs Clayborne’s room!’ he bleated, and Chippendale smiled indulgently. These novices! Always getting the wind up.
‘I know what you’re thinking, chum. You’re saying to yourself Suppose something goes wrong and I get copped. Well, of course, if I did, the balloon would certainly go up all right. Everybody would be telling you to send for the police and have me bunged into the nick, and you’d say No, you didn’t want to bung the poor barstard into the nick because maybe it’s his first offence and he yielded to sudden temptation. And then they’d say Well, if you won’t jug him, chuck him out, and you’d say I can’t chuck him out, because he’s here in an official capacity, and they’d say How do you mean, an official capacity, and then it would all come out about you having the brokers in and what that would do to your social prestige would be plenty. But don’t you worry, cully, I won’t be copped, not if you do your bit all right. Your job is to get the dame out of the way while I operate. You say to her “Let’s you and me go for a stroll round the estate, baby,” and off you go and I pop in. Nothing to it. Though it’s a pity she’s got a suite and not just a bedroom, because if it was just a bedroom, it’d be simple. I’d go straight for the top of the cupboard, because that’s where women always put stuff they want to hide. With a sitting-room what you might call the scope of enquiry broadens. I may have to bust open drawers and what not. I must remember to take a chisel. And now,’ said Chippendale, ‘about the split. You providing the bloke who’s putting up the money and me doing the active work, I’d suggest a straight fifty-fifty.’
All the nausea and loathing which had been accumulating in Crispin since this man’s entry to the room came to a head. He would have given much to have been able to substitute for his customary bleat the organ tones of his brother Bill, but he did his best with what he had.
‘I forbid you to go near Mrs Clayborne’s suite,’ he came as close to thundering as his vocal cords would allow. ‘Get out!’
Chip
pendale stared at him, amazed.
‘You mean you won’t sponsor the enterprise?’
‘That is what I mean.
‘Not for all that lovely splosh?’
‘Damn the lovely splosh.’
The deal’s off?’
‘Yes, it is. Get out.’
‘Cor, chase my aunt Fanny up a gum tree,’ muttered Chippendale. It was an expression habitual with him when, as now, he was too astounded to say anything else.
3
Had there been an auditor of the two conversations just recorded, an auditor capable of hearing what was said at both, he could scarcely have failed to be impressed by the nobility of Crispin’s attitude throughout. Here, he would have murmured to himself, is a man so fiscally crippled that his home is bulging with broker’s men and in order to continue functioning he has to borrow two hundred and three pounds six and fourpence from his brother Bill, yet when this same brother Bill offers him a colossal sum to accuse a woman of stealing a miniature, he refuses because she is a woman he respects and admires and he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. And when the tempter suggests searching her room and securing the miniature by stealth, he dismisses him haughtily from his presence, saying that nothing would induce him to countenance such an outrage. The age of chivalry is not dead, the murmurer would have murmured, realizing that it was just behaviour of this sort that used to get the Chevalier Bayard such rave notices in his day.
It is with regret, therefore, that the chronicler has to state that what had activated Crispin’s iron stand was not exclusively the spirit of chivalry. Operating almost equally with it had been the invigorating knowledge that after Brotherly Love had gone through the formality of winning the two-thirty at Newmarket he would have no need of the two hundred pounds which had so excited Chippendale’s cupidity. He would be richer by more than a thousand.
Certain, however, though he was that Brotherly Love would not fail him, he could not help feeling a little nervous. Accidents, he knew, did happen. Horses strained fetlocks or tripped over their feet, causing the most gilt-edged snips to come unstuck. Jockeys bumped into a competitor and got themselves disqualified. There was no end to the list of things that could go wrong.
His watch told him that the race must have been over more than an hour ago, and he chafed at the inconveniences of living in the country. In the old days in London he would have had the result from the ticker at his club in a few minutes. At Mellingham he would have to wait for the nine o’clock news on the radio, for after what had occurred he could scarcely ring Willoughby on the phone and ask for information.
Pacing the library floor, he felt stifled. He felt that he must get away and out into the open, even though this would involve looking at the lake, and he was making for the door, when it flew open as if struck by one of those hurricanes off the eastern coast of America which become so emotional on arriving at Cape Hatteras, and Barney came in.
‘Still in here?’ said Barney. ‘Don’t tell me Bill kept you on the phone all this while. What did he want?’
It was in the circumstances an awkward question, and the best reply Crispin could find was that Bill had not wanted anything in particular.
‘Just yakking, eh? Just a couple of old biddies swopping gossip over the garden fence? Well, what I came for was to ask you if you’d care to come for a spin in Colonel Norton-Smith’s car. He’s driving me over to Salisbury to see the cathedral.’
The programme she outlined had little appeal for Crispin. Of all his paying guests Colonel Norton-Smith was the one whose society he least courted, and as for cathedrals he had always been able to take them or leave them alone. He condensed these sentiments into an ‘I don’t think I will, thanks’, and when Barney urged him to be a sport, he said, ‘No, I think I won’t, thanks’, and she went out with a genial ‘Suit yourself, but you’re missing the treat of a lifetime’, to poke her head in at the door a moment later.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, ‘you were smart not to have anything on that Brotherly Love horse I was telling you about. Came in second. I’ve just had a telegram.’
She disappeared again, and it seemed to Crispin that the library, hitherto static, had suddenly begun to execute the once popular dance known as the Shimmy. If the Collected Sermons of Bishop Pontifex (Oxford University Press, 1839) had shot from their shelf and struck him on the occipital bone, he could scarcely have gasped, gurgled and tottered more noticeably. The realization that his hundred pounds, like so many hundred pounds of his youth, had gone down the drain and that now he would be unable to fulfil his obligations to the repairs people and rid himself of their man at Mellingham affected him with a combination of epilepsy and ague. He was suffering, oddly enough, that very sense of guilt and remorse which Bishop Pontifex on page eighty-three of his monumental work warns his readers will always be the wages of sin. Paraphrasing the Bishop, he says that if you sin, you will inevitably feel like something the cat brought in, and that was how Crispin felt.
How long it was before he recovered the ability to face the crisis and examine the situation in depth he could not have said, but eventually something like coherent thought returned to him and he bent his mind to a careful study of his predicament, employing all his brain cells in an endeavour to find a way out of it.
And in due course he saw that there was such a way. It was not one of which the Chevalier Bayard would have approved, but it looked good to Crispin. His views on how one should behave towards women one respected and admired had undergone a radical change.
He rang the bell.
‘Chippendale,’ he said, when that blot on the local scene presented himself, ‘shut that door.’ Chippendale shut the door.
‘I have been thinking over the suggestion you made just now, Chippendale, and I have come to the conclusion that if you really are confident that by searching Mrs Clayborne’s suite you will be able to secure my brother’s miniature— —’
‘It’s a snip, chum.’
‘Then do so at your earliest convenience,’ said Crispin.
CHAPTER TEN
For some considerable time after he had heard the receiver replaced up at Mellingham Hall Willoughby sat motionless, a brooding figure not unlike Rodin’s celebrated Le Penseur. He was blaming himself for having wasted the price of a long-distance call on someone as unlikely to be of any help to him as Crispin. He had always been fond of Crispin, but he was not blind to the fact that in any sort of emergency he was the weakest possible reed on which to lean. Even had he reacted favourably to the recent S. O. S., nothing constructive would have been accomplished. Crispin, as Barney had said, was amiable, sober, honest and kind to animals, but as a recoverer of stolen miniatures he simply did not qualify. Not that one could blame him for this. Some men have the knack of recovering stolen miniatures, others not. It probably has something to do with the hormones.
For such a task, Willoughby felt, you wanted someone younger, brighter and less prone, when a situation called for decisive action, to stand about with his mouth open and a glassy look in his eyes; someone, for instance, like Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe stories, one of which he had been reading on the train, or, it suddenly occurred to him in a flash of inspiration, like his nephew Gerald.
Willoughby, though careful not to show it, for he believed in keeping Youth in its place, had always had an admiration for Jerry, the natural admiration of a golfer whose handicap is a shaky eighteen for one who is plus two and plays in amateur championships. And while skill with driver and putter does not necessarily guarantee proficiency in other directions, it at least implies a steady nerve and the ability to concentrate on the job in hand, both of which qualities were demanded by the delicate operation he was planning.
Men like Willoughby make their decisions quickly. They do not sit humming and hawing and telling themselves they must look at a thing from every angle. Scarcely had the thought of Jerry entered his mind when he was on the telephone again.
‘Jerry?’
‘Oh, hullo, U
ncle Bill.’
‘You busy?’
‘No.’
‘Can you come round here?’ To the office?’
‘No, the house.’
‘All fight.’
‘Well, hurry.’
Willoughby did not have to wait long. Jerry lived in one of the streets off the King’s Road, a short step from Chelsea Square, and a talk with his uncle was just what at the moment he desired most, for it was his intention to put a quick end to all this nonsense of trusts and trustees. He would demand his money from him and thus become, if not financially equal to the girl he loved, at least a reasonably respectable suitor at whom the world could not sneer.
Vera Upshaw had pointed out how it could be done. Nothing could be simpler. You went to your Uncle Bill and you said to him, very correct and dignified but icily firm, ‘Uncle Bill, I would have you know that I have examined the original indentures and I find that this trust is neither perpetual nor irrevocable but can be terminated by mutual agreement, so wash the damn thing out fight away, or I get a complaint and summons and have them served.’
Not immediately, of course. You don’t walk into a man’s house and start crushing him beneath the iron heel without so much as saying Hullo. Obviously there would have to be a few preliminary pourparlers just to get things going, Uncle Bill being a good old scout with whom your relations had always been of the friendliest. So the first minutes of the meeting were taken up with a certain amount of Did-you-have-a-good-time-at-Sandwich-ing and How-was-your-slice-ing, and it was not till Willoughby had shown with a pair of tongs and a piece of coal how he had sunk that long putt on the sixteenth that Jerry was able to strike the business note.
The Girl in Blue Page 8
