Carson's Conspiracy

by Michael Innes

  ‘Certainly we do. But they’re as old as the hills. I cherish them as I cherish the Sèvres. Incidentally, I had the feeling I mentioned to you after the Carsons’ party. That the woman is a bit off her head. She had quite a lot to say to me, as well as to Mr Busby, about needing new sheets for her blue room. She kept on about her blue room, and eventually she explained that she was getting it ready for her son.’

  ‘Robin Carson. I remember about him. They go over and visit him at sweet little Key Biscayne.’

  ‘That’s right – but now Robin has arrived in England. Mum had a telephone call from him at Heathrow a few evenings previously, to say he was hiring a car and would be on his way to Garford. But he didn’t turn up, and hadn’t turned up yesterday. I suppose his courage had failed him before the prospect of the family hearth. The poor lady was relieved in a way – about the delay, I mean. It gave her an opportunity to go after sheets and things. But she was beginning to be anxious as well. And she said her husband had gone quite tense and jumpy.’

  ‘Then perhaps we’d better hold our hand about inviting them until the dilatory Robin has been restored to their bosom. Of course we’ll have to ask him as well.’ Appleby paused on this. ‘I remember her as being quite sensible about their son. But definitely a bit dotty in some other regions of discourse.’

  ‘You sometimes sound a bit dotty yourself, John. Regions of discourse, indeed! The Carsons struck me as not having a single general idea between them. It would have been a frightfully boring occasion if Humphry and that nice wife of his hadn’t been there.’

  ‘The Lelys undoubtedly saved us. Which reminds me that I saw Humphry the other day, and he said he’d been painting Carson’s portrait. What about your getting a commission to do Mrs C in bronze?’

  ‘It’s a thought.’ Judith Appleby, who was a sculptor (or sculptress) seemed unenthusiastic before this idea. ‘Have you discovered anything much about Carson himself?’

  ‘No – and I can’t say I’ve tried. Arthur Watling – who’s Carson’s neighbour in my modest sense of the term – has mentioned him to me once or twice. Arthur called him a clever little city chap. For Arthur “clever” is quite as dismissive a word as “little”, don’t you think? It’s my impression that Carson is pretty prosperous in what’s possibly a ramshackle way. Share-pushing type. Promotes things.’

  ‘He belongs, in fact, to the great entrepreneurial class. I wonder whether Robin follows in his footsteps.’

  ‘You can ask the young man himself, when he finally turns up and is introduced to us.’

  ‘I suppose he will turn up?’

  Lady Appleby had produced this question abruptly and as if it rather surprised her. Sir John Appleby, who was about to enter upon his daily half-hour with The Times, put the paper down again on the breakfast-table.

  ‘Ah!’ he said.

  ‘The woman was surely quite right to be worried about the non-appearance of her son. He telephones that he has arrived, and then no more is heard of him. One can think of various explanations, some of them merely undutiful. For instance, he may have suddenly gone off after a promising girl. But if I were the Carsons, I’d be ringing round the hospitals.’

  ‘Carson may well have done that, without alarming his wife by telling her. She may be a little mad, but he’s quite sane and competent. And if he did so and drew a blank, an accident or sudden illness isn’t the explanation, since it’s almost impossible to imagine anything of the kind that could bring in a casualty there was no means of identifying.’

  ‘Robin might have been robbed, and stripped of anything carrying his name, and be in a coma.’

  ‘Good heavens, Judith, what a macabre imagination you have! A hospital with that on its hands – and there’s probably not a single such case in all England at this moment – doesn’t let any inquirer get away without a come-look-see. It’s long odds against the missing Robin being anywhere of the sort.’

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘It’s a good question.’ Appleby didn’t say this with much enthusiasm. ‘Do you know my bet? He took one look at England in this present year of Grace, and bolted back to the USA.’

  ‘I don’t see that as in the least plausible, John. If Robin Carson is a hypersensitive type, he might certainly back hastily out of England. But it wouldn’t be from a deplorable frying-pan into an equally deplorable fire.’

  ‘Out of the frying-pan of Paynim rites into the fire of Mahometry.’ Appleby in retirement passed the time with much miscellaneous reading. ‘He’d probably try Kamchatka or the South Pole.’

  But later that morning Appleby found himself again thinking about the missing Robin Carson. Just why he did so, he didn’t clearly know. Many years before, and when cutting that unusual path for himself through the CID to the surprising elevation of Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, he had been a good deal concerned from time to time with missing persons. Perhaps that was it. But just lately Garford House and its inhabitants had interested him too. Judith had been interested in the gardener, who had worked at Long Dream as a boy. He himself had taken notice of the butler, in whom he recognized a criminal type, hopefully reformed. But the employers of these people had attracted a larger speculation. Carl Carson was somehow rather more than just a scantily educated tycoon. Much in him had been commonplace – as when he had been quick to reveal, or pretend, that he was familiarly acquainted with the Lord Mayor of London, or had – to Judith’s quite improper amusement – described as his ‘grounds’ certain large stretches of lawn interspersed with rectangular beds overfilled with uninteresting modern roses. But, if elusively, there was a strong dash of enterprise in Carson. Commercial enterprise, no doubt. But also, in sudden far-away looks, a hint of something potentially more freakish in that area. He was the sort of man – Appleby told himself – who might one day notice, say, a fire-balloon drifting overhead, and within a fortnight achieve a corner in the manufacture of the things. Fellows with that sort of facility were likely to amass quite a packet in the bank. They were also liable to come a cropper. To come a cropper and bob up again. Carson wasn’t a nice man. Probably he wasn’t at all a nice man. But there was a good deal there, all the same.

  As for Mrs Carson – so ineptly christened Cynthia – her silliness was of an almost endearing kind. ‘A little mad’ was no doubt a fair description of her now, although a mad doctor might describe her as no more than neurotic. It was probable that she would eventually go downhill, so that if she had the misfortune to reach her eighties it would be in a state of senile dementia. Appleby felt he had met such Cynthias in old age before – and commonly amid the sort of family misfortunes that lie on the fringes of crime. The Carsons’ son, although for some reason long resident in the USA, could be felt as her mainstay in point of an undistorted sense of reality. So if Robin was currently engaged in more or less ditching his parents – whether in favour of metal more attractive or for any other reason – he was a thoroughly unfilial and blameworthy young man.

  Thus did Sir John Appleby, a senior citizen tolerably well-seen in human nature, meditate dispassionately on the Carsons of Garford House. He was, as it happened, still doing so when a Rolls-Royce appeared unexpectedly on the drive. When it drew up before the front door it was Carl Carson who stepped out of it. For some seconds Appleby was far from pleased. He supposed that the awkward chap was paying what he’d dimly think of as a courtesy call. But this, he at once decided, was a false scent. Carson’s son had disappeared, and Carson, aware of the eminence from which Appleby had retired, had come to seek his advice. That must be it. It wasn’t a development Appleby exactly relished. But he reflected that the man might well be in considerable distress, and he hurried out to be properly welcoming.

  ‘I thought I’d just drop in on you,’ Carson said.

  ‘Very nice of you, my dear Carson. Do sit down. Judith will be delighted.’

  This last was an unnecessary, and eve
n slightly excessive assurance. When a man turns up on one, there is no call hastily to declare the enchantment of one’s wife. But Carson seemed pleased.

  ‘Cynthia,’ he said with a certain solemnity, ‘had the pleasure of running into Lady Appleby yesterday.’

  ‘Ah, yes – so Judith has told me. Mrs Carson spoke of your son, and of your expecting a visit from him.’

  ‘Just so. And we’re a little surprised, as a matter of fact, that Robin hasn’t yet turned up on us. But there’s nothing out of the way about it; nothing out of the way, at all.’ Carson offered this information not so much easily as airily. ‘Boys will be boys, wouldn’t you say?’

  Literally received, this appeared to be a glimpse of the obvious, and its application in a larger sense to Robin Carson’s non-appearance at Garford was, at least as yet, not for Appleby to comment upon. So he remained silent.

  ‘Only, you see, my wife is a little nervous about Robin,’ Carson pursued. ‘I don’t know whether you noticed the fact, but she’s decidedly of a nervous type. Highly strung, as they say. A splendid creature, Appleby, but undeniably highly strung.’

  This again was a shade difficult to respond to. It did seem fairly clear to Appleby that about Carson himself there hung a distinctly nervous air. And about this there was something indefinably complex. Was the man in a state of anxiety which for some reason – perhaps a notion of proper manly behaviour – he felt obliged to dissimulate? And was he conceivably off-loading this anxiety on his wife? There was a small puzzle here – but Appleby told himself it was a puzzle he felt no particular impulse to resolve.

  ‘It’s no doubt natural,’ he said, ‘that Mrs Carson should be a little worried if your son has failed to turn up on an expected date.’

  ‘Exactly that. And, of course, it’s all nonsense. Young people are so thoroughly independent nowadays, wouldn’t you say? Robin will judge a few days to be neither here nor there. He probably has a fish or two of his own to fry in London before coming down to dull old Garford.’

  ‘It’s fortunate that you feel no unreasonable anxiety in the matter yourself, Carson. You must be the better able to reassure your wife.’ But as Appleby said this he continued to be aware that Carson’s nonchalance was assumed. The man’s wife had told Judith that he was tense and jumpy, and so he really was. Yet that didn’t quite adequately describe the thing. It was almost as if, despite everything he said, Carson was designing to be detected as beset by apprehensions. And why, if he was really not worried about his son, had he turned up at Long Dream now? It could scarcely be, as Appleby had at first imagined, to seek more or less professional advice on how to track down a missing person. But now Carson himself offered an explanation of this.

  ‘I’ve been rather afraid,’ he said, ‘that when Cynthia met Lady Appleby yesterday she may have given the impression that there is really some cause for alarm about Robin. But, as I’ve said, it just isn’t so. And I wouldn’t like Lady Appleby to feel worried about it. Which is why I’ve called, you see, to say a reassuring word.’

  Appleby was again silent for a moment. It wasn’t easy to see how to cope civilly with this absurdity. For an absurdity it was. Judith would have to be a person of quite morbid sensibility were she to be thrown into a state of distress by the non-arrival at his parents’ dwelling of a totally strange young man. Carl Carson was no doubt a somewhat egocentric chap, inclined to believe that his affairs made more impact on others than in fact they did. But the notion he had just advanced was rather dotty, all the same. Perhaps he had picked up a streak at least of eccentricity from his wife.

  ‘I think Judith must be out around the place,’ Appleby said. ‘But, of course, I’ll tell her what you say. I’m sure she’ll be relieved.’ Appleby paused on this untruth, and then added another. ‘It has been extremely kind of you to call.’

  ‘I’m only sorry I must hurry away.’ Carson got to his feet as he made this handsome response. ‘As it happens, I have a good deal on hand at the moment. Really a great deal on hand.’ This time, the man was openly agitated. ‘It happens in business every now and then, you know. Quite suddenly, there’s such pressure on one from this and that that one hardly knows how to find the time for it all.’

  ‘Then it’s the kinder of you to have run over to Dream,’ Appleby said with dishonest heartiness. At least the man did seem to be going away.

  ‘And it’s easy to get flurried on such occasions – and find that the more haste the less speed. The feeling that time is running out before things are properly fixed up. But perhaps, Appleby, it hasn’t been within your experience – anything, I mean, of that sort. Anyway, I’m off to town. Driving up. Can’t spare the time for that damned train.’

  This sudden obsession with the tempus fugit aspect of things lasted until Carson was actually at the wheel of his car. ‘And I’m driving myself,’ he then went on. ‘Punter’s a damn sight too slow. My regards to your good lady, Appleby.’ And with this no doubt proper expression Carl Carson might be said to have shot suddenly out of sight. Only a slight cloud of dust on the drive of Dream Manor remained as a token of his visit.

  Appleby turned to go back into the house, and found Judith at his shoulder.

  ‘Was that the man Carson?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘Asking for your help?’

  ‘Well, no. Or not exactly. I thought it was going to be that – because of his son’s failure to turn up, and the fuss his wife is in as a result. But it didn’t seem to be quite that. The fellow had a cock-and-bull story about wanting to relieve your mind of any worry his Cynthia may have caused you by her talk in Busby’s shop. Sheer moonshine. And he wasn’t, as I say, asking for help. Rather he came to tell me something – or perhaps just to hint at something or set something stirring in my head. The lord knows why, and I almost feel the man’s up to no good. Incidentally, I said you’d be delighted to see him.’

  ‘Did you, indeed!’

  ‘And he sent you his compliments as he drove off. I said you were probably messing around, and unaware that he was here.’

  ‘I was on the telephone, as a matter of fact. Answering a call. It was from his wife.’

  ‘The thing’s a persecution! Just what did she want?’

  ‘She did want help. She asked to speak to the Commissionaire, and I said he was engaged – which was true enough.’ For many years it had been one of Judith Appleby’s tasks to head off importunate demands for her husband’s attention.

  ‘Did she know her husband was over here?’

  ‘I don’t think she did. It was her line that he was worried off his head by Robin’s vanishing, but I feel that she herself is really the one most disturbed about it. She said something about Robin’s romance making it so certain he’d want to come home. The young man is more or less engaged, she seemed to imply, to the Watlings’ girl, Mary.’

  ‘The people at the Grange? I don’t see how this Robin…’

  ‘He and Mary met in America, it seems. It was all a little obscure and scatty. You remember the poor woman is like that. But she was sure you could help in some way.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby, although indisposed to view the Carsons in a particularly sympathetic light, received this soberly. ‘So what can be done? Probably nothing much at the moment, except trying to get these people clear in one’s head. They themselves seem to be in a bit of a muddle, and it’s possible there isn’t a normal husband-and-wife relationship of confidence between them.’

  ‘You’d say that’s the normal thing?’

  ‘I’ve always assumed so, although perhaps on rather a narrow basis of experience. But stick to the point. The woman’s the easier of the two to size up – although one has to allow for the fact that she’s a bit mad and may be prone to imagine things. She’s in a tizzy because this Robin has gone astray; she sees, or believes, that her husband is in a tizzy too; and she remembe
rs that she has lately made the acquaintance of a kind of great detective or top policeman. She tries to enlist this chap’s help. All that’s simple enough.’

  ‘So it is. Particularly the great-detective part.’

  ‘The man’s more difficult. He presents himself here in a most unnecessary way to assure us there’s nothing to worry about, and that he himself is quite easy in his mind about the tardiness of friend Robin. But, quite patently, he’s in a tizzy as well – just as his wife says he is. In an obscure way, he almost obtrudes the fact. And time is in some equally obscure way an enemy. He’s having to rush around, apparently on business occasions having presumably nothing to do with the Robin crisis. That’s about it.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Judith took a moment to weigh this summary. ‘Carson drove over here to create an impression.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why on us? We scarcely know the people. It’s the great detective factor again.’

  ‘Allowing, Judith, for the satirical slant of your mind, that must be about the truth. It’s not just that he wants to create an impression. He wants to start a train of thought along what one may call professional lines. It’s really uncommonly odd, and I can’t say I make much of it.’ Appleby said this with a touch of genuine impatience, and Judith could see that he believed himself far from anxious to get absorbed in anything that could be called the Carson mystery.

  ‘What about the lady’s plea for help?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes – one oughtn’t to ignore such things. But a missing person is very much a matter for the police. They have the machinery – and it’s probably not very like the machinery in my time. The problem is a sizeable one, you know. The number of persons who can be described as missing in this country at any one time has to be reckoned by the thousand. It requires evidence of there being crime in the picture to set the machine at all effectively in motion.’

  ‘And there’s nothing of the sort in Robin Carson’s picture.’