‘A little blotto,’ explained Pilbeam. ‘I’ve just had a bollerer champagne, and, what’s more, I had it on an empty stomach.’
‘Are you interested in Mr Pilbeam’s stomach, Constance?’
‘I am not.’
‘Nor I,’ said Lady Julia. ‘Let us waive your stomach, Mr Pilbeam, and get back to the point. Why will it do us a fat lot of good seeing Beach?’
‘Because he hasn’t got it.’
‘You seemed to suggest that he had.’
‘So he had. But he hasn’t. He gave it to Ronnie.’
‘My son, do you mean?’
‘That’s right. I always think of him as Ronnie.’
‘How sweet of you.’
‘He tried to break my neck once,’ said Pilbeam, throwing out the information for what it was worth.
‘And of course that forms a bond, doesn’t it?’ said Lady Julia sympathetically. ‘So now Ronnie has the manuscript?’
‘No, he hasn’t.’
‘But you said he had.’
‘I said he had, and he had, but he hasn’t. He gave it to Bonty Modkin.’
‘Oh, the man’s impossible,’ cried Lady Constance. Pilbeam looked about him, but could see no man. Some mistake, probably.
‘What is the good of wasting any more time on a person in his condition? Can’t you see he’s just maundering?’
‘Wait a minute, Connie. I may be wrong, but I think something will soon emerge from the fumes. Everybody seems to have been handing Galahad’s great work to somebody else. A little patient inquiry, and he may discover to whom Mr Bodkin handed it.’
Pilbeam laughed a ringing laugh.
‘“Handed it” is good. Oh, very good, indeed. Considering that I had to crawl under his bed to get it.’
‘What!’
‘Gave my head a nasty bump, too, on the woodwork.’
‘Do you mean to say, Mr Pilbeam, that all this time we’ve been talking you have got my brother’s manuscript?’
‘I told you something would emerge, Connie.’
‘Yes, Connie,’ said Pilbeam, ‘I have.’
‘Then why in the name of goodness could you not have said so from the first? Where is it?’
‘Ah, that’s telling,’ said Pilbeam, wagging a playful finger.
‘Mr Pilbeam,’ said Lady Constance, with all the Cleopatrine haughtiness at her command, ‘I insist on knowing what you have done with it. Kindly let us have no more of this nonsense.’
She could not have taken a more unfortunate attitude. The detective’s resemblance to a roguish, if slightly inebriated, pixie vanished and in its place came pique, mortification, resentment, anger and defiance. His beady little eyes hardened, and from them there peeped out the fighting spirit of that Albert Edward Pilbeam who once refused to pay a fine and did seven days in Brixton jail for failing to abate a smoky chimney.
‘Oh?’ he said.’ Oh? It’s like that, is it? Let me tell you, Connie, that I don’t like your tone. Insist, indeed! A nice way to talk. I’ve got that manuscript hidden away somewhere where you won’t find it let me inform you. And it’s going to stay there till I take it to Tilbury…’
‘What is he talking about?’ asked Lady Constance despairingly. Tilbury to her suggested merely a small town in Essex. She had a vague recollection that Queen Elizabeth had once held a review there or something.
But Lady Julia, with her special knowledge of Tilburies, had become suddenly grave.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘This is beginning to look a little sticky. I wouldn’t take it to Lord Tilbury, Mr Pilbeam, really I wouldn’t. I’m sure, if we only talk it over sensibly, we can come to some arrangement.’
Pilbeam, who had risen and was now tacking uncertainly towards the door waved a hand and clutched at a table to restore his balance.
‘Too late,’ he said. ‘Too late for that. Been insulted. Don’t like Connie’s tone. I was going to sit and let you bid against each other, but too late, too late, too late, because I’ve been insulted. No further discussion. Tilbury gets it. He’s waiting for it at the Emsworth Arms. Well, good-by-ee,’ said Percy Pilbeam, and was gone.
Lady Constance turned to her sister for enlightenment. ‘But I don’t understand, Julia. What did he mean! Who is this Lord Tilbury?’
‘Only the proprietor of the publishing concern with whom Gally signed his contract, my angel. Nothing more than that.’
‘You mean,’ cried Lady Constance, aghast, ‘that if the manuscript gets into his hands, he will publish it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘I won’t allow him to. I’ll get an injunction.’
‘How can you? He’ll stand on the contract.’
‘Do you mean, then, that nothing can be done?’
‘All I can suggest is that you telephone to Sir Gregory Parsloe and get him over. Tell him to come to dinner. He seems to have some influence with that little fiend. He may be able to talk him round. Though I doubt it. He’s in a nasty mood. I rather wish sometimes, Connie,’ said Lady Julia meditatively,’ that you were, a little less of the grande dame. It’s wonderful to watch you in action, I admit—one seems to hear the bugles blowing for the Crusades and the tramp of the mailed feet of a hundred steel-clad ancestors—but there’s no getting away from it that you do put people’s backs up a bit.’
Down at the Emsworth Arms, a servitor informed Lord Tilbury that he was wanted on the telephone. He walked to the instrument broodingly. The Bodkin popinjay, he presumed, that broken reed on which he had foolishly supposed that it would be possible to lean. He prepared to be a little terse with Monty.
Ever since his interview with Monty in the garden of the Emsworth Arms, Lord Tilbury had found his thoughts turning wistfully to the one man of his acquaintance who could have been relied upon to put through this commission of his. During the years when P. Frobisher Pilbeam had worked on his staff as editor of Society Spice Lord Tilbury had never actually asked him to steal anything, but he had no doubt at all that, if adequately paid, Percy would have sprung to the task. And now that he had blossomed out as a private investigator it was probable that he would spring to it with an even greater readiness. All that afternoon Lord Tilbury had been wondering whether the solution of the whole thing would not be to send Pilbeam a wire, telling him to come at once.
What deterred him was the reflection that it would be impossible to get him into the Castle. You cannot insert private inquiry agents in country-houses as if you were slipping ferrets down a rabbit-hole. This it was that had made him abandon the roseate dream. And it was the fact that he had been compelled to abandon it that lent additional asperity to his manner as he now took up the receiver.
‘Yes?’ he said curtly. ‘Well?’
A rollicking voice nearly cracked his eardrum.
‘Hullo, there, Tilbury! This is Pilbeam.’
Lord Tilbury’s eyes seemed to shoot out suddenly, like a snail’s. This was the most amazing coincidence he had ever experienced. More a miracle, he felt with some awe, than a mere coincidence.
‘Speaking from Blandings Castle, Tilbury.’
‘What!’
The receiver shook in Lord Tilbury’s hands. Was this what was known as the direct answer to prayer? Or—taking the gloomier view—was he undergoing some aural hallucination?
‘Speaking from Blandings Castle, Tilbury,’ repeated the voice. ‘You don’t mind me calling you Tilbury, do you, Tilbury?’ it added solicitously. ‘I’m a bit tight.’
‘Pilbeam!’ Lord Tilbury’s voice shook. ‘Did I really understand you to say that you were speaking from Blandings Castle?’
‘Quite.’
A man capable of building up the Mammoth Publishing Company is not a man who wastes time in unnecessary questions. Others might have asked Pilbeam how he had got there, but not Lord Tilbury. He could do all that later.
‘Pilbeam,’ he said, ‘this is providential! Kindly come to me here as soon as possible. There is something I wish you to do for me. Most urgent.’
‘A commission?’
‘Yes, a commission.’
‘And what,’ inquired the voice, playfully, yet with a certain metallic note, ‘is there in it for me?’
Lord Tilbury thought rapidly.
‘A hundred pounds.’
A hideous noise sent his head jerking back. It was apparently a derisive laugh. When it was repeated more softly a moment later, he recognized it as such.
‘Two hundred, Pilbeam.’
‘Listen, Tilbury. I know what it is you want me to do. Oh, yes, I know. Something to do with a certain book…’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Then let me tell you, Tilbury, that I’ve been offered five hundred in another quarter, and can easily work it up to the level thousand. But, seeing it’s you, I won’t sting you for more than that. Think on your feet, Tilbury. One thousand is the figure.’
Lord Tilbury thought on his feet. There were few men in England whom the prospect of parting with a thousand pounds afflicted with a greater sensation of nausea, but he could speculate in order to accumulate. And in the present case, what was a mere thousand? A sprat to catch a whale.
‘Very well.’
‘It’s a deal?’
‘Yes. I agree.’
‘Right!’ said the voice, with renewed cheeriness. ‘Be in after dinner tonight. I’ll bring the thing down with me.’
‘What!’
‘I say I’ll bring the you-know-what to you after dinner tonight. And now a river-whatever-it-is, Tilbury, old cock. An revoir, Tilbury. I’m feeling rather funny, and I think I’ll get a bit of sleep. Ay tank I go home, Tilbury. Pip-pip!’
There was a click at the other end of the wire. Pilbeam had hung up.
Fingers tried the handle of Pilbeam’s bedroom door. A fist banged on the panel. The detective looked up frowningly from the bed on which he lay. He had been on the point of sinking into a troubled doze.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Open this door and I’ll show you who it is.’
‘Is that old Gally?’
‘Damn your impudence!’
‘What do you want?’
‘A little talk with you, young man.”Go away, old Gally,’ said Pilbeam. ‘Don’t want any little talks. Trying to get to sleep, old Gally. Tell ‘em I shan’t be down to dinner. Feeling funny.’
‘You’ll feel funnier if I can get in.’
‘Ah, but you can’t get in,’ Pilbeam pointed out.
And, laughing softly to himself at the wit and cleverness of the retort, he sank back on the pillows and closed his eyes again. The handle rattled once more. The door creaked as a weight was pressed against it. Then there was silence, broken shortly by a rhythmic snoring.
Percy Pilbeam slept.
Chapter Thirteen
Darkness had fallen on Blandings Castle, the soft, caressing darkness that closes in like a velvet curtain at the end of a summer day. Now slept the crimson petal and the white. Owls hooted in the shadows. Bushes rustled as the small creatures of the night went about their mysterious business. The scent of the wet earth mingled with the fragrance of stock and of wallflower. Bats wheeled against the starlit sky, and moths blundered in and out of the shaft of golden light that shone from the window of the dining-room. It was the hour when men forget their troubles about the friendly board.
But troubles like those now weighing upon the inmates of Blandings Castle are not to be purged by meat and drink. The soup had come and gone. The fish had come and gone. The entree had come and was going. But still there hung over the table a foglike pall of gloom. Of all those silent diners, not one but had his hidden care. Even Lord Emsworth, who was not easily depressed, found his meal entirely spoiled by the fact that it was being shared by Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe.
As for Sir Gregory himself, the news communicated to him over the telephone by Lady Constance Keeblean hour before had been enough to ruin a dozen dinners. His might have been, as his whilom playmate, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, had made so abundantly clear in Chapters Four, Seven, Eleven, Eighteen, and Twenty-four of his immortal work, a frivolous youth, but in his late fifties he was taking life extremely seriously. Very earnest was his wish to represent the Unionist party as their Member for Bridgeford and Shifley Parliamentary Division of Shropshire: and if Pilbeam fulfilled his threat of taking that infernal manuscript to Lord Tilbury, his chances of doing so would be simply nil. He knew that local committee. Once let the story of the prawns appear in print, and they would drop him like a hot brick.
He had come tonight to reason with Pilbeam, to plead with Pilbeam, to appeal to Pilbeam’s better feelings, if such existed. And, dash it, there was no Pilbeam to be reasoned with, to be pleaded with, or to be appealed to.
Where was the dam’ feller?
The same question was torturing Lady Constance. Where was Pilbeam? Could he have gone straight to Lord Tilbury after taking his zigzag departure from the drawing-room?
It was Lord Emsworth who put the question into words. For some moments he had been staring down the table over the top of his crooked pince-nez in a puzzled manner like that of a cat trying to run over the muster-roll of its kittens.
‘Beach!’
‘M’lord?’ said that careworn man hollowly. Foxes were gnawing at Beach’s vitals, too.
‘Beach, I can’t see Mr Pilbeam. Can you see Mr Pilbeam, Beach? He doesn’t seem to be here.’
‘Mr Pilbeam is in his bedchamber, m’lord. He informed the footman who knocked at the door with his hot water that he would not be among those present at dinner, m’lord, owing to a headache.’
The Hon. Galahad endorsed this.
‘I knocked at his door just before the dressing gong went, and he said he wanted to go to sleep.’
‘You didn’t go in?’
‘No.’
‘You should have gone in, Galahad. The poor fellow may be feeling unwell.’
‘Not so unwell as he would have felt if I could have got in.’
‘You think you would have made his headache worse?’
‘A good deal worse,’ said the Hon. Galahad, taking a salted almond and giving it a hard look through his monocle.
The news that Pilbeam was on a bed of sickness acted on three members of the party rather as the recent rain had acted on the parched earth. Lady Constance seemed to expand like a refreshed flower. Lady Julia did the same. Sir Gregory Parsloe, in addition to expanding, gave such a sharp sigh of relief that he blew a candle out. Three pairs of eyes exchanged glances. There was the same message of cheer in each of them. If Pilbeam had not taken the irrevocable step, those eyes said, all might yet be well.
‘God bless my soul,’ said Lord Emsworth solicitously, ‘I hope he isn’t really bad. These infernal thunderstorms are enough to give anyone a headache. I had a slight headache myself before dinner. I’ll run up and see the poor chap as soon as we’ve finished here. My goodness, I don’t want Pilbeam on the sick list now, of all times,’ said Lord Emsworth, with a glance at Sir Gregory so full of meaning that the latter, who was lifting his wine-glass to his lips, shied like a startled horse and spilled half its contents.
‘Why now, particularly?’ asked Lady Julia.
‘Never mind,’ said Lord Emsworth darkly.
‘I only asked,’ said Lady Julia, ‘because I, personally, consider that all times are good times for Mr Pilbeam to have headaches. Not to mention botts, glanders, quartan ague, frog in the throat and the Black Death.’
A soft, sibilant sound, like gas escaping from a pipe, came from the shadows by the sideboard. It was Beach expressing, as far as butlerine etiquette would permit him to express, his adhesion to this sentiment.
Lord Emsworth, on the other hand, showed annoyance.
‘I wish you wouldn’t say such things, Julia.’
‘On the spur of the moment I couldn’t think of anything worse.’
‘Don’t you like Pilbeam?’
‘My dear Clarence, don’t be fantastic. Nobody likes Mr Pilbeam. There are people who do not actuall
y put poison in his soup, but that is as far as you can go.’
‘I disagree with you,’ said Lord Emsworth warmly. ‘I regard him as a capital fellow, capital. And most useful, let me tell you. Attempts are being made,’ said Lord Emsworth, once more sniping Sir Gregory with a penetrating eye, ‘by certain parties whom I will not name, to injure my pig. Pilbeam is helping me thwart them. Thanks to his advice, I have now put my pig where the parties to whom I allude will not find it quite so easy to get at her. Let me tell you that I think very highly of Pilbeam. I’ve a good mind to send him up half a bottle of champagne.’
‘Making the perfect example of carrying coals to Newcastle.’
‘Eh?’
‘Oh, nothing. ‘Twas but a passing jest.’
‘Champagne is good for headaches,’ argued Lord Emsworth. ‘It might make all the difference to Pilbeam.’
‘Are we to spend the whole of dinner talking of Mr Pilbeam and his headache?’ demanded Lady Constance imperiously. ‘I am sick and tired of Mr Pilbeam. And I don’t want to hear any more of that pig of yours, Clarence. For goodness sake let us discuss some reasonable topic’
This bright invitation having had the not unnatural effect of killing the conversation completely, dinner proceeded in an unbroken silence. Only once did one of the revellers venture a remark. As Beach and his assistants removed the plates which had contained fruit salad and substituted others designed for dessert, Lady Julia raised her glass.
‘To the body upstairs—I hope,’ she said.
Percy Pilbeam, however, was not actually dead. At the precise moment of Lady Julia’s toast, almost as if he were answering a cue, he sat up on his bed and stared muzzily about him. The fact that the room was now in darkness made it difficult for him to find his bearings immediately, and for perhaps half a minute he sat wondering where he was. Then memory returned, and with it an opening-and-shutting sensation in the region of the temples which made him regret that he had gone on sleeping. Even if he had had the Black Death to which Lady Julia had so feelingly alluded, he could not have felt very much worse.
There are heads which are proof against over-indulgence in champagne. That of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood is one that springs to the mind. Pilbeam’s, however, did not belong to this favoured class. For a while he sat there, wincing at each fresh wave of agony; then, levering himself up, he switched on the light and hobbled to the wash-stand, where he proceeded to drink deeply out of the water-jug. This done, he filled the basin and started to give himself first-aid treatment.
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