Gay Phoenix (15 page)

‘No reason why you should. He’s a newcomer, comparatively speaking. But
I
remembered him. Recognized him at once.’ Butter paused warily; he had a stiff new fence to get over in vindicating his competent handling of things. ‘He ran the London fuzz, old boy. When he retired he was their bloody top man.’

‘Good God,
that
Appleby!’ Povey was aghast. ‘I’ve heard of
him
, all right. What’s he doing, nosing round here?’

‘Nothing very much, I’d say. But I looked him up as soon as he went away. Long ago, he married a woman who inherited a place called Long Dream Manor. Name of Raven.’

‘Well, I’m damned!’ Povey was as astonished as alarmed. ‘I remember
them
, although we didn’t know them very well. All as mad as hatters. And
they
ran to morons quite often, people said. It was a Raven father that boy had, if you ask me! What the hell was this fellow doing, poking in pretty well the moment we’ve arrived? And what the hell did you mean yattering to him? He was the one to set the dogs at.’

‘Come, come – no panic, old cock.’ Butter, if not quite at ease, spoke in easy tones. ‘He’s the very man to feed the story to. The last man anybody would think could have any wool pulled over his eyes. So just pull it, good and hearty, and you’ve played a trump card.’

‘Which is more psychology, I suppose.’ Povey, before whom stood a decanter of port, applied himself nervously to this refreshment. ‘You spotted Appleby. What about Appleby spotting you?’

‘Well, there’s the rub, I’m free to own. I don’t think he did. But he may have.’ For a moment Butter, too, brooded. Then his natural resilience triumphed. ‘I’ve been quite a famous man in my day, you know. Almost in the big time, you might say. Before undeserved misfortune overtook me.’

‘It’s dam’ well a deserved misfortune that may be coming your way now, Butter. I don’t like this, at all. It’s a shock to me. It gives me that nasty feeling of an empty bit in my head.’

‘I don’t want to hear any more about that empty bit in your head, Mr Charles Povey of Brockholes Abbey. It’s not wholesome, that kind of thinking.’

‘And after a bloody bad day.’

‘What do you mean – a bloody bad day?’ Butter was startled. ‘I told you you oughtn’t to go mucking off to London. That’s unwholesome too. All those business satraps of yours’ – this was a flash of Butter the scholar – ‘are contacted only through yours truly. That’s the drill. The mystery man of Brockholes runs his bleeding empire only through me. You’ve taken to abstruse studies, you have. And dreaming up large schemes of philanthropy.’ Butter paused. ‘Just what happened?’ he demanded savagely.

‘It may be nothing. It’s only that a lot of them seem to want to clear out. A lot of those new chaps we put in when we fired the old ones. Something’s changing in them. Keen as mustard, weren’t they, at first? As they bloody well should be, on three times the salary they ever touched before. Do you know how it seems to me? They’ve heard something. That’s it.’

Butter got up and walked to the door of the dining-room. An old instinct was suddenly alive in him. He opened the door abruptly, but there was nobody there.

‘This sort of talk,’ he said, returning to the table, ‘ought to be kept for when you and me are walking round your ancestral estate. With nobody listening except your bleeding pedigree herd.’

‘I haven’t got a bleeding pedigree herd.’

‘Yes, you have. I’ve bought you one.’ Butter’s grin had returned. ‘Stock breeding. That’s one of your absorbing ploys now. Not the Stock Exchange, old cock, but improving your country’s livestock. It’s a most gentlemanly thing.’

‘Gentlemanlike,’ Povey said automatically. He had formed the habit of correcting Butter’s minor solecisms. ‘We just don’t know enough,’ he added.

‘If you’re sufficiently nippy,’ Butter said cheerfully, ‘a little goes a long way. Still, I wouldn’t mind filling up the dossier on that brother of yours, I must say. You ought to remember more about him than you do.’

‘About who?’ Perhaps because he had now drunk a good deal of port, Povey looked vaguely confused.

‘About Charles. Why can’t you listen to me?’

‘Yes, of course. Charles.’ Povey nodded vigorously. ‘Charles,’ he repeated.

Butter consulted his own glass. There were moments, he might have been reflecting, in which something demonstrably odd was going on in his employer’s mind.

‘For instance,’ he went on, ‘who did Charles mean to leave his money to?’

‘Not to me – or we shouldn’t be in just this position now.’ Arthur Povey chuckled; he was again entirely alert. ‘He did once say an uncommonly queer thing. There mightn’t be a penny for anybody, he said. Not enough to start a cat and dog home.’

‘Charles said that?’ Setting down his glass, Butter frowned. ‘He just meant, I suppose, that he was in a good many pretty risky enterprises. We’ve discovered that, all right.’

‘We certainly have. But do you know what I sometimes think?’ Povey looked moodily at his assistant. ‘I think he may have been aware of the possibility of a very big crash indeed. And if it was coming to him then, it may be coming to me now.’

‘What do you mean – a very big crash?’

‘Suppose we’re not just involved with phoney affairs as often as not. That sort of thing can be coped with easily enough. You just turn on those accountants and people to mix up this and that – and long before the mess can be unscrambled you’ve made your own getaway from it.’ It was with an effect of considerable lucidity that Povey thus expounded the elements of company finance. ‘But suppose that the whole show hinges on a single colossal fraud? One’s heard of such things. Something so simple that it went like a bomb from the start. But so simple, too, that the whole show will be given away instantly if somebody just happens to open the right drawer. I sometimes dream about that. The chap going to the right drawer.’

‘You’re fancying things, old cock. Always your trouble, that is. One day, you’ll get matters badly wrong.’ Butter for a moment looked frankly troubled. ‘I’ve got to keep an eye on you, I have,’ he added broodingly.

‘It would bust me in a day. I’d wake up, and – just as Charles said – there wouldn’t be a penny.’

‘There’d be a copper, old boy.’ Butter seemed cheered up by this grim joke. ‘Waiting at the bedside with the bracelets. And then, Squire Povey, you’d spend months being hustled in and out of a Crown Court with a blanket over your head.’ Butter paused. ‘Probably a smelly one,’ he added brutally.

‘Then there’s Charles’ private life.’ Povey had ignored these pleasantries. ‘This woman Corp brings
that
up.’

‘You’re going morbid, you are. Who cares about the Corps? What if there are half a dozen crazy women around, thinking to father their bastards on you? It’s still an English gentleman’s privilege, that. To scatter his Maker’s image o’er the land, as some long-haired character put it.’ Butter was plainly delighted at displaying this reach of literary reference. ‘If you were a bit of a lad in your youth, Mr Charles Povey as now is, the locals will only think the better of you.’ Butter announced this with the conviction of one who commands a clear view of English society in the twentieth century. ‘Mind you, I don’t say it wouldn’t cost you a tenner now and then,’ he added humorously. ‘But scattering tenners o’er the land is quite your forte, if I remember aright.’

‘I wish you’d go to hell!’ It was wholly unfavourably that Povey had responded to this facetious reminiscence. ‘What do I know what Charles may have done? He had a violent streak in him. All the Poveys have a violent streak – and that’s something you’d better remember. That I have it myself, Butter.’ Arthur Povey gulped down more port – being perhaps a little taken aback at having inadvertently uttered this threat. ‘I wouldn’t have chopped off Charles’ finger in the woodshed otherwise.’

‘Well, well – here’s a revelation!’ Butter was delighted. ‘Sometimes I admire you – Mr Arthur Povey that was. And you made amends, didn’t you, on board that blessed yacht? An eye for an eye, as the Good Book says.’

‘Shut your silly mouth!’ This further and profane joke had very properly offended Povey. ‘It’s a nightmare, I tell you, what I may have inherited from Charles, one way and another. I ought to have thought about it.’

‘It’s no use crying over spilt milk – or fingers either.’

‘I don’t like your tone, Butter. All this isn’t funny.’

‘We’d better see it as funny. Keeps the spirits up. That’s–’

‘Psychology, I suppose.’ Povey uttered these words on an injudicious shout – a circumstance underlined by the fact that the butler had just entered the room with coffee. Povey watched him come and go with understandable impatience. ‘And all those servants,’ he resumed querulously. ‘Who the devil are they? Why do we need them? I don’t like their looks at all. You hired them. Where do they come from?’

‘They’re old friends of mine.’ Butter made this shocking revelation composedly. ‘Your butler’s on parole, as a matter of fact. A gentleman has to have an establishment. But don’t you worry. I have tabs on the lot. There won’t be any trouble there.’

‘You mean you’ve filled this house with a pack of jailbirds?’

‘Not a pack. Birds don’t go in packs. Say a flock of them. Nice people, really.’

‘They’ll spy on me.’

‘Nobody will spy on you. Or not in the house. There was a spy of sorts in the park this afternoon.’

‘What’s that?’ Povey seemed to find this an even greater shock than the discovery that his new servants were recruited exclusively from the criminal classes. ‘What sort of spy?’

‘A pretty inefficient one, old boy. But it was a rum thing. Just after I’d got rid of those Corps, I happened to look out of the window of my office. You haven’t seen that yet, but it’s going to be very snug. And a nice bit of afternoon sun.’

‘Damn the afternoon sun! Go on.’

‘There’s a scrap of woodland, and just in front of it there was an odd sort of stump I hadn’t noticed before. Then a woman appeared, and chucked a stone or something–’

‘What sort of woman?’

‘I haven’t a clue. It was a fair way off, you see. She chucked a stone, and out came a man with a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. They had a word together, and the woman marched off. Then the chap packed up, and went off too. He’d been spying, all right, and this woman had caught him out.’

‘She wasn’t one of those precious servants of yours?’

‘Not a bit. The sort of person who might have been coming to tea, with you, old boy. As I said, quite a rum go altogether.’

There was silence for a moment, as Arthur Povey contemplated these facts. It looked as if the more he contemplated them the less he liked them, for he might have been observed to be turning positively pale.

‘Perhaps,’ he said on a note of momentary hope, ‘he was just planning a common burglary.’

‘Very probably. With an eye on the family Caravaggio.’

‘There isn’t a family Caravaggio.’

‘Yes, there is – or there’s going to be. I’ve bought you one. It will arrive with the pedigree herd.’

‘I’ve listened to enough of your nonsense for tonight, Butter.’ Povey got to his feet. It was quite likely, he reflected, that there really were such purchases coming along. Their absurdity would gratify Butter’s freakish sense of humour – in addition to which he would no doubt have arranged himself a substantial rake-off.

‘Very well.’ Butter had some appearance of being genuinely offended. ‘I’ll offer you a dozen words of cold sense instead, Povey. It
is
tricky. It’s tricky all round. And I’ve been hearing things, I have. I’ve had my ear to the ground – and others’ ears too. Why did your brother go on that last long cruise with you? Maybe he liked that sort of thing. But it was convenient as well.’

‘Convenient?’

‘Now, just you listen. I’ve spared you, I have. Your nerves aren’t too good. But I’ll tell you now. There were those that were gunning for him. Literally, Arthur Povey. And they’re gunning for him now. How do I know, you ask? It’s because I have my methods – that’s what it is. So you do as I tell you, see? Without fail, and every time. That’s your best chance, Mr Charles-Arthur or Arthur-Charles.’

As this speech progressed, Povey’s pallar had taken on a greenish tinge. In his rational mind he dimly knew that Butter might well be lying; once or twice before, his self-appointed secretary had unmasked this kind of battery; had thus, as it were, tightened the screw. But for the moment Povey was bowled over. He had a sense of unknown dangers assailing him on every hand. He bitterly rued that mad hour on the broad waters of the Pacific Ocean. He had bitten off enormously more than he could chew. He felt – it was almost like a moment’s hysteria – that all was lost.

‘Curse you,’ Arthur Povey cried, ‘and curse the lot of them!’ And he waved his fists in air, much in the manner of a villain in Victorian melodrama. ‘But they shan’t catch me – never! They shan’t get me down!’ He was glaring at Butter much as the unfortunate Doctor Faustus might have glared at Mephistopheles. ‘Not as long as I know a way out!’

‘Well, well!’ Butter (now Bread) broke into brutal laughter. ‘The dishonoured squire retreats to the barn with his shotgun, and a dull report follows.’ He grinned at Povey, who stared back at him blankly – so that an exact observer might have detected that some curious misapprehension had arisen between these two closely confabulating men. ‘No, no, old cock,’ Butter continued. ‘It won’t do. The death of Brutus, eh? Povey the noblest Roman of them all. It’s very pretty on the stage, but it’s futile in real life. It isn’t on, suicide isn’t. And I tell you why. It gets you nowhere.’

The felicitousness of this last expression (carrying, as it did, a sardonic implication of which Mephistopheles himself might not have been ashamed) was unfortunately lost on Arthur Povey. He was engaged in recollecting himself, in pulling himself together. His outcry represented an aberration of a sort most urgently demanding to be controlled – and he was uneasily aware of himself as perhaps increasingly liable to fly off the handle from time to time. It was largely Butter’s fault; he was a most irritating man. But there was no question of Butter being expendable. Realizing this, Arthur Povey made his peace with him now. They were an isolated couple, after all, sharing a secret known to nobody else in the world. Both knew that, if they didn’t manage to be companionable on the whole, only chaos could succeed. It was in tacit acknowledgement of this fact of life that the two men consumed a good deal of brandy together before going to bed.