Carson's Conspiracy (16 page)

‘I hate to say it, but in some ways Cynthia isn't always quite clear in her head. Carl has been a little embarrassed by some of her reactions to the situation.'

‘Mr Carson called on me to say something of the kind. I thought it slightly odd – as I am still inclined to judge your own call now, Mr Pluckworthy.'

‘I'm so sorry. Perhaps I'm not a good hand at explaining myself.' Pluckworthy produced what he would probably have described as a wry smile. ‘I know that Cynthia rang up Lady Appleby with some notion of enlisting your help in finding Robin. I hope you regarded it as excusable. Of course she knows of your former high rank in the police. And her anxieties are reasonable too in a way. After all, you know, she had a phone call from Robin at Heathrow – and after that there has been this silence. It
is
a little worrying.'

‘I am inclined, Mr Pluckworthy, to regard it as a little more than that. But I still don't know what you expect me to do.'

‘Nothing.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I've come to ask you to do nothing.' For a moment Pluckworthy's readiness seemed to desert him. He might have been hunting about for words. And it was somewhat tartly (and more than somewhat disingenuously) that Appleby took him up.

‘My dear young man, why should you suppose that I contemplate interfering in the matter? And how could I do it if I did?'

‘Come, Sir John. A word from you would set the entire police force of the county hunting for this wretched young man. Or nation-wide, for that matter.'

‘I fear, Mr Pluckworthy, that you overestimate the influence of a retired metropolitan man. But the merits of what you touch on are another matter. Now that you have put it in my head, I think I might well have a word with the Chief Constable. His men probably enjoy practice in setting up road-blocks and searching empty garages – and even dredging canals and diving into ponds.'

‘It might be absolutely fatal!' Pluckworthy had sprung to his feet, apparently in uncontrollable agitation. Then he checked himself and sat down again. ‘The point is that I think it possible that Mrs Carson may make another appeal to you – and at a pitch you might find it difficult to resist. It seems – I had a telephone call from Carl only this morning – that she has come on some alarmist and sensational rubbish in a newspaper. About some sort of fracas just off a motorway, I gather. And she has taken it into her head that Robin must have been mixed up in it. That he has been robbed and killed and heaven knows what.'

‘Have you any positive proof, Mr Pluckworthy, that Mrs Carson's persuasion is unjustified?'

‘Unjustified?' It was clearly for the sake of gaining time that Pluckworthy echoed this word. He was momentarily at a loss how to reply. But then he recovered himself. ‘But it's such obvious nonsense!' he exclaimed. ‘Why should anyone fall on this young man – virtually a stranger in England – and rob him or kidnap him or beat him up or whatever?'

‘The word of most weight there, I imagine, is “kidnap”. Isn't Robin Carson's father a very wealthy man?'

Pluckworthy's response to this question was to make an odd groping gesture which for a moment had Appleby baffled. Then he saw that his visitor was reaching for an umbrella which he had deposited on the carpet beside him. He was being prompted, in fact, to bolt from the room. But again – if very uncertainly – he rallied.

‘Well, yes,' he said, ‘I suppose it's a rational suspicion. But…'

‘But if this distressed lady comes to me with what you now agree to be a rational fear for the safety of her son, you want me to decline to do anything about it? I am to dismiss her as a muddle-headed person? Or do I mistake you, Mr Pluckworthy?'

This sudden broadside brought the young man to his feet again – and looking rather wildly round the room as if to remind himself where he would find the door.

‘It's all just too difficult!' he cried. ‘I've made a mess of it. I oughtn't to have come. I'm sorry – really frightfully sorry, Sir John. But I do beg of you – really beg of you – to hold your hand so far as the police are concerned. It would be disastrous. Please believe me. Goodbye!'

And with this Carl Carson's secretary took himself off, seemingly in blind disarray. But at least he had taken his umbrella with him, and at least he was quickly in command of his car. Within a minute the sound of an engine was diminishing down the drive.

 

‘Whoever was that?' Judith asked. ‘He came charging through the hall, and almost knocked this shopping-basket out of my hand.'

‘A young gentleman called Pluckworthy, who describes himself as Carson's secretary, and a family friend.'

‘And what was he doing here?'

‘You saw what he was doing. I believe it's called creating.'

‘Mounting a scene?'

‘It would perhaps be injudicious to say more than that he has a distinct stage sense. But so many people have, that the fact isn't notable in itself. He said he'd come to see me off his own bat – which rather makes me think he hadn't. In fact, I take him to be an emissary of his employer. And the picture now is this. The unfortunate Mrs Carson has had another shock about her Robin. That, I know to be true. I also know that it was administered, as one may put it, in a covert way by the Carson butler, Punter. Just why, heaven knows. But the idea of Messrs Carson and Pluckworthy seems to be that the lady is due to make a fuss about it all on a larger scale than before.'

‘Than on the occasion, you mean, of her ringing me up to enlist your help?'

‘Just that. And why not? Almost anyone would say it was high time to investigate this entire Robin business.' Appleby suddenly laughed softly. ‘As I happen to be doing myself in a quiet way. I've set Tommy Pride working.'

‘Did you tell this Pluckworthy person about that?'

‘No I didn't. In perplexed situations there is much to be said for reticence. And what is chiefly perplexing – if perhaps only superficially so – is that Carson and Pluckworthy feel that the lady ought to be discouraged. And that I ought to be as well. You might say they're all for taking it lying down. Each seems to go out of his way to obtrude – repeat, obtrude – both confidence that the whole thing is nonsense, and alarm and funk about it. There seems to be a contradiction in that. But the main pivot of the thing looks like being wide open.'

‘Can pivots be wide open, John?'

‘Don't quibble. I mean that the wretched Robin Carson has been waylaid and kidnapped when making for the sanctity of the family home. He's being held to ransom, in fact, and Carson and his henchman are trying – although in a confused way – to keep the fact from the police while Carson hastily scrambles together the money required to ransom the boy. I've put that – but with a certain misgiving, I'm bound to say – to Tommy, and it's my hope that the fact will presently establish itself beyond doubt.'

‘There will have been threats about Robin's safety, and even about his life?'

‘There have been, or there will be. Mrs Carson may receive one of her son's ears through the post. That sort of thing.'

‘John, you take on a terrible responsibility in having anything to do with it.'

‘That's obvious. It's equally obvious that I have to behave rationally about it. Villains have to be caught, you know, even at the cost of an enhanced risk to third persons. But there's more to it than that. Carson on his own has no means of setting a trap for the criminals. Given a fair chance, the police have. And I myself am just waiting for Tommy to turn up a little more evidence before I tackle Carson himself and try to persuade him to co-operate.'

‘You mean you want him to seem to be caving in and paying up, while really…'

‘Just that. It takes nerve. Whether Carson has the nerve, or his young whipper-snapper has the nerve, of course I just don't know.'

‘So meanwhile?'

‘We have some tea, and wait for a telephone call from Tommy. Patience, Judith, and shuffle the cards.'

 

 

It has to be recorded of Sir John Appleby that at this point he was confident of having penetrated at least to the essentials of the Robin Carson mystery. He hadn't, of course, kept his conclusion to himself. He had mentioned it to his wife as a matter of course, and briefly expounded it to Tommy Pride as a matter of duty. Robin had been kidnapped on the last stage of his journey to Garford. He was being held for ransom now: a fact known to his father, though not with any precision to his mother. Carl Carson was hard at work getting the money together. It must be a very large sum that was being demanded, since Carson, clearly a wealthy man, was being so hard put to it. Appleby didn't greatly care for Carson; obscurely, he felt he hadn't quite got the hang of the man; but he would have been ashamed of himself if he hadn't felt sympathy with the father's plight. And the fellow had a downright silly wife, who was unlikely to be of much support to him. If William Lockett's story was to be trusted, the woman had now got near to the truth of the matter. Perhaps it would turn out that it was she, after all, who had the guts or the good judgement to go to the police.

Appleby found himself pausing on young Lockett's story, and felt that he saw further illumination in it. One snag in the path of the kidnap theory was the difficulty of seeing how the kidnappers had been aware in advance of Robin Carson's movements. Punter could now be viewed as the answer to that one. The butler was a crook and a spy, and had got hold of the essential facts through his employer and – more probably – his employer's wife. He had heard about that cable; and, with everything down to a vital hour or half hour, he had heard about that telephone call from Heathrow too. His covert planting of that newspaper in Mrs Carson's way explained itself as well. What she had there read had sharpened her fears about Robin; had, in fact, got them almost in the target area; had thus, no doubt, increased the pressure upon Carson himself.

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?'