Money for Nothing (20 page)

Half-way down the garden, he encountered Sturgis, returning
with an empty tray.

'You must have misunderstood Mr Carmody, sir,' said the butler, genially, as one rabbit-fancier to another. 'He says he did not ask for any drink. But he came ashore and had it. If you're looking for him, you will find him in the boat-house.'

And in the boat-house Mr Carmody was, lolling at his ease on the cushions of the punt, sipping the contents of a long glass.

'Hullo,' said Mr Carmody. 'There you are.'

Soapy descended the steps. What he had to say was not the kind of thing a prudent man shouts at long range.

'Say!' said Soapy in a cautious undertone. 'I've been trying to get a word with you all the morning. But that darned policeman was around all the time.'

'Something on your mind?' said Mr Carmody affably. 'I've caught two perch, a bream and a grayling,' he added, finishing the contents of his glass with a good deal of relish.

Such was the condition of Soapy's nervous system that he very nearly damned the perch, the bream and the grayling, in the order named. But he checked himself in time. If ever, he felt, there was a moment when diplomacy was needed, this was it.

'Listen,' he said, 'I've been thinking.'

'Yes?'

'I've been wondering if, after all, that closet you were going to put the stuff in is a safe place. Somebody might be apt to take a look in it. Maybe,' said Soapy, tensely, 'that occurred to you?'

'What makes you think that?'

'It just crossed my mind.'

'Oh? I thought perhaps you might have been having a look in that cupboard yourself.'

Soapy moistened his lips, which had become uncomfortably dry.

'But you locked it, surely?' he said.

'Yes, I locked it,' said Mr Carmody. 'But it struck me that after you had got the butler out of the way by telling him to bring me a drink, you might have thought of breaking the door open.'

In the silence which followed this devastating remark there suddenly made itself heard an odd, gurgling noise like a leaking cistern, and Soapy, gazing at his host, was shocked to observe that he had given himself up to an apoplectic spasm of laughter. Mr Carmody's rotund body was quivering like a jelly. His eyes were closed, and he was rocking himself to and fro. And from his lips proceeded those hideous sounds of mirth.

The hope which until this moment had been sustaining Soapy had never been a strong, robust hope. From birth it had been an invalid. And now, as he listened to this laughter, the poor, sickly thing coughed quietly and died.

'Oh dear!' said Mr Carmody, recovering. 'Very funny. Very funny.'

'You think it's funny, do you?' said Soapy.

'I do,' said Mr Carmody sincerely. 'I wish I could have seen your face when you looked in that cupboard.'

Soapy had nothing to say. He was beaten, crushed, routed, and he knew it. He stared out hopelessly on a bleak world. Outside the boat-house the sun was still shining, but not for Soapy.

'I've seen through you all along, my man,' proceeded Mr Carmody, with ungenerous triumph. 'Not from the very beginning, perhaps, because I really did suppose for a while that you were what you professed to be. The first thing that made me suspicious was when I cabled over to New York to make inquiries about a well-known financier named Thomas G. Molloy and was informed that no such person existed.'

Soapy did not speak. The bitterness of his meditations precluded words. His eyes were fixed on the trees and flowers on the other side of the water, and he was disliking these very much. Nature had done its best for the scene, and he thought Nature a washout.

'And then,' proceeded Mr Carmody, 'I listened outside the study window while you and your friends were having your little discussion. And I heard all I wanted to hear. Next time you have one of these board-meetings of yours, Mr Molloy, I suggest that you close the window and lower your voices.'

'Yeah?' said Soapy.

It was not, he was forced himself to admit, much of a retort, but it was the best he could think of. He was in the depths, and men who are in the depths seldom excel in the matter of rapier-like repartee.

'I thought the matter over, and decided that my best plan was to allow matters to proceed. I was disappointed, of course, to discover that that cheque of yours for a million or two million or whatever it was would not be coming my way. But,' said Mr Carmody philosophically, 'there is always the insurance money. It should amount to a nice little sum. Not what a man like you, accustomed to big transactions with Mr Schwab and Pierpont Morgan, would call much, of course, but quite satisfactory to me.'

'You think so?' said Soapy, goaded to speech. 'You think you're going to clean up on the insurance?'

'I do.'

'Then, say, listen, let me tell you something. The insurance company is going to send a fellow down to inquire, isn't it? Well, what's to prevent me spilling the beans?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'What's to keep me from telling him the burglary was a put-up job?'

Mr Carmody smiled tranquilly.

'Your good sense, I should imagine. How could you make such a story credible without involving yourself in more unpleasantness than I should imagine you would desire? I think I shall be able to rely on you for sympathetic silence, Mr Molloy.'

'Yeah?'

'I think so.'

And Soapy, reflecting, thought so, too. For the process of beans-spilling to be enjoyable, he realized, the conditions have to be right.

'I am offering a little reward,' said Mr Carmody, gently urging the punt out into the open, 'just to make everything seem more natural. One thousand pounds is the sum I am proposing to give for the recovery of this stolen property. You had better try for that. Well, I must not keep you here all the morning, chattering away like this. No doubt you have much to do.'

The punt floated out into the sunshine, and the roof of the boat-house hid this fat, conscienceless man from Soapy's eyes. From somewhere out in the great open spaces beyond came the sound of a paddle, wielded with a care-free joyousness. Whatever might be his guest's state of mind, Mr Carmody was plainly in the pink.

Soapy climbed the steps listlessly. The interview had left him weak and shaken. He brooded dully on this revelation of the inky depths of Lester Carmody's soul. It seemed to him that if this was what England's upper classes (who ought to be setting an example) were like, Great Britain could not hope to continue much longer as a first-class power, and it gave him in his anguish a little satisfaction to remember that in years gone by his ancestors had thrown off Britain's yoke. Beyond burning his eyebrows one Fourth of July, when a boy, with a maroon that exploded prematurely, he had never thought much about this affair before, but now he was conscious of a glow of patriotic fervour. If General Washington had been present at that moment Soapy would have shaken hands with him.

Soapy wandered aimlessly through the sunlit garden. The little spurt of consolation caused by the reflection that some hundred and fifty years previously the United States of America had severed relations with a country which was to produce a man like Lester Carmody had long since ebbed away, leaving emptiness behind it. He was feeling very low, and in urgent need of one of those largely advertised tonics which claim to relieve Anaemia, Brain-Fag, Lassitude, Anxiety, Palpitations, Faintness, Melancholia, Exhaustion, Neurasthenia, Muscular Limpness and Depression of Spirits. For he had got them all, especially brain-fag and melancholia; and the sudden appearance of Sturgis, fluttering towards him down the gravel path, provided nothing in the nature of a cure.

He felt that he had had all he wanted of the butler's conversation. Even of the most stimulating society enough is enough, and to Soapy about half a minute of Sturgis seemed a good medium dose for an adult. He would have fled, but there was nowhere to go. He remained where he was, making his expression as forbidding as possible. A motion-picture director could have read that expression like a book. Soapy was registering deep disinclination to talk about rabbits.

But for the moment, it appeared, Sturgis had put rabbits on one side. Other matters occupied his mind.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' he said, 'but have you seen Mr John?'

'Mr who?'

'Mr John, sir.'

So deep was Soapy's preoccupation that for a moment the name conveyed nothing to him.

'Mr Carmody's nephew, sir. Mr Carroll.'

'Oh? Yes, he went off in his car with my daughter.'

'Will he be gone long, do you think, sir?'

Soapy could answer that one.

'Yes,' he said. 'He won't be back for some time.'

'You see, when I took Mr Carmody his drink, sir, he told me to tell Bolt, the chauffeur, to give me the ticket.'

'What ticket?' asked Soapy wearily.

The butler was only too glad to reply. He had feared that this talk of theirs might be about to end all too quickly, and these explanations helped to prolong it. And, now that he knew that there was no need to go on searching for John, his time was his own again.

'It was a ticket for a bag which Mr Carmody sent Bolt to leave at the cloak-room at Shrub Hill station, in Worcester, this morning, sir. I now ascertain from Bolt that he gave it to Mr John to give to Mr Carmody.'

'What!' cried Soapy.

'And Mr John has apparently gone off without giving it to
him. However, no doubt it is quite safe. Did you make satisfactory progress
with the hutch, sir?'

'Eh?'

'The robert-hutch, sir.'

'What?'

A look of concern came into Sturgis's face. His companion's manner was strange.

'Is anything the matter, sir?'

'Eh?'

'Shall I bring you something to drink, sir?'

Few men ever become so distrait that this particular question fails to penetrate. Soapy nodded feverishly. Something to drink was precisely what at this moment he felt he needed most. Moreover, the process of fetching it would relieve him, for a time at least, of the society of a butler who seemed to combine in equal proportions the outstanding characteristics of a porous plaster and a gadfly.

'Yes,' he replied.

'Very good, sir.'

Soapy's mind was in a whirl. He could almost feel the brains inside his head heaving and tossing like an angry ocean. So that was what that smooth old crook had done with the stuff – stored it away in a Left Luggage office at a railway station! If circumstances had been such as to permit of a more impartial and detached attitude of mind, Soapy would have felt for Mr Carmody's resource and ingenuity nothing but admiration. A Left Luggage office was an ideal place in which to store stolen property, as good as the innermost recesses of some Safe Deposit Company's deepest vault.

But, numerous as were the emotions surging in his bosom, admiration was not one of them. For a while he gave himself up almost entirely to that saddest of mental exercises, the brooding on what might have been. If only he had known that John had the ticket...!

But he was a practical man. It was not his way to waste time torturing himself with thoughts of past failures. The future claimed his attention.

What to do?

All, he perceived, was not yet lost. It would be absurd to pretend that things were shaping themselves ideally, but disaster might still be retrieved. It would be embarrassing, no doubt, to meet Chimp Twist after what had occurred, but a man who would win to wealth must learn to put up with embarrassments. The only possible next move was to go over to Healthward Ho, reveal to Chimp what had occurred, and with his co-operation recover the ticket from John.

Soapy brightened. Another possibility had occurred to him. If he were to reach Healthward Ho with the minimum of delay, it might be that he would find both Chimp and John still under the influence of those admirable drops, in which case a man of his resource would surely be able to insinuate himself into John's presence long enough to be able to remove a Left Luggage ticket from his person.

But if 'twere done, then, 'twere well 'twere done quickly. What he needed was the Dex-Mayo. And the Dex-Mayo was standing outside the stable-yard, waiting for him. He became a thing of dash and activity. For many years he had almost given up the exercise of running, but he ran now like the lissom athlete he had been in his early twenties.

And as he came panting round the back of the house the first thing he saw was the tail-end of the car disappearing into the stable-yard.

'Hi!' shouted Soapy, using for the purpose the last remains of. his breath.

The Dex-Mayo vanished. And Soapy, very nearly a spent force now, arrived at the opening of the stable-yard just in time to see Bolt, the chauffeur, putting the key of the garage in his pocket after locking the door.

Bolt was a thing of beauty. He gleamed in the sunshine. He was wearing a new hat, his Sunday clothes, and a pair of yellow shoes that might have been bits chipped off the sun itself. There was a carnation in his buttonhole. He would have lent tone to a garden-party at Buckingham Palace.

He regarded Soapy with interest.

'Been having a little run, sir?'

'The car!' croaked Soapy.

'I've just put it away, sir. Mr Carmody has given me the day off to attend the wedding of the wife's niece over at Upton Snodsbury.'

'I want the car.'

'I've just put it away, sir,' said Bolt, speaking more slowly and with the manner of one explaining something to an untutored foreigner. 'Mr Carmody has given me the day off. Mrs Bolt's niece is being married over at Upton Snodsbury. And she's got a lovely day for it,' said the chauffeur, glancing at the sky with something as near approval as a chauffeur ever permits himself. 'Happy the bride that the sun shines on, they say. Not that I agree altogether with these old sayings. I know that when I and Mrs Bolt was married it rained the whole time like cats and dogs, and we've been very happy. Very happy indeed we've been, taking it by and large. I don't say we haven't had our disagreements, but, taking it one way and another . . .'

It began to seem to Soapy that the staffs of English country-houses must be selected primarily for their powers of conversation. Every domestic with whom he had come in contact in Rudge Hall so far had at his disposal an apparently endless flow of lively small-talk. The butler, if you let him, would gossip all day about rabbits, and here was the chauffeur apparently settling down to dictate his autobiography. And every moment was precious.