Pigs Have Wings (23 page)

From time to time, as he moved about his new home, Jerry had been aware of curious noises, evidently supernatural. If asked by the Committee of the Society of Psychical Research to describe these noises, he would have been rather at a loss. Well, sort of grunting noises, he would have told them.

Grunting?

Yes.

When you say grunting, do you mean
grunting
?

That’s right. It doesn’t go on all the time, of course. For a while there will be a kind of lull, as if the spectre were thinking things over and resting its vocal chords. Then, refreshed, off it goes again … grunting, if you see what I mean.

Upon which, the Committee of the Society of Psychical Research would have said ‘Well, Lord-love-a-duck!’ grunting ghosts being new in their experience.

It was in the living-room that the sounds were most noticeable. Back there now, he was startled by a series of five or six almost at his elbow. The poltergeist, for such he assumed it to be, appeared to have holed up behind the door that led presumably to the kitchen, the only part of the house he had not yet inspected.

He opened the door.

It is not easy to state offhand what is the last thing a young man starting out in life would wish to find on the premises of the furnished villa ready for immediate occupancy which he had just begun to occupy. Bugs? Perhaps. Cockroaches? Possibly. Maybe defective drains. One cannot say. But a large black pig in the kitchen would unquestionably come quite high up on the list of undesirable objects, and Jerry, as he gazed at Queen of Matchingham, was conscious of that disagreeable sensation which comes to those who, pausing to tie a shoelace while crossing a railway line, find themselves struck in the small of the back by the Cornish express.

It was the unexpectedness of the thing that had unnerved him. It had caught him unprepared. If Lancelot Cooper, handing him the keys, had said ‘Oh, by the way, when you get to Sunnybrae, you will find the kitchen rather full of pigs, I’m afraid,’ he would have known where he was. But not a word had been spoken on the subject. The animal had come upon him as a complete surprise, and he sought in vain for an explanation of its presence. It was not as though it had been a corpse with a severed head. A corpse with a severed head in the kitchen of Sunnybrae he could have understood. As a writer of mystery thrillers, he knew that you are apt to find corpses with severed heads pretty well anywhere. But why a pig?

It was just after he had closed his eyes, counted twenty and opened them again, hoping to find that the apparition had melted into thin air, that the front door bell rang.

The moment was not one which Jerry would have chosen for entertaining a visitor, and the only thing that made him go and answer the bell was the thought that this caller might have something to suggest which would help to clarify the situation. Two heads, unless of course severed, are so often better than one. He opened the door, and found standing on the steps a large policeman, who gave him one of those keen, penetrating looks which make policemen so unpopular.

‘Ho,’ he said, in the sort of voice usually described as steely.

He was tough and formidable, like the policemen in Jerry’s stories. Indeed, if Jerry had been capable at the moment of thinking of anything except pigs, he might have seen in his visitor an excellent model for Inspector Jarvis, the Scotland Yard man whom he was planning to set on the trail of Lavender Joe. He pictured Inspector Jarvis as a man who might have been carved out of some durable substance like granite, and that was the material which seemed to have been used in assembling this zealous officer.

‘Ho!’ said the policeman. ‘Resident?’

‘Eh?’

‘Do you live in this house?’

‘Yes, I’ve just moved in.’

‘Where did you get the keys?’

‘From Caine and Cooper in the High Street.’

‘Ho.’

The policeman seemed to soften. His suspicions lulled, he relaxed. He tilted his helmet and passed a large hand over his forehead.

‘Warm tonight,’ he said, and it was plain that he was now regarding this as a social occasion. ‘Thought at one time this afternoon we were in for a thunderstorm. Well, I must apologize for disturbing you, sir, but seeing a light in the window and knowing the house to be unoccupied, I thought it best to make inquiries. You never know. Strange occurrences have been happening recently in Market Blandings and district, and I don’t like the look of things.’

This was so exactly what Jerry was feeling himself that he began to regard this policeman as a kindred soul, one to whose sympathetic ear he could confide his troubles and perplexities. And he was about to do so, when the other went on.

‘Down at the station the boys think there’s one of these crime waves starting. Two milk cans abstracted from doorsteps only last week, and now all this to-do up at Matchingham Hall. You’ll have heard about Sir Gregory Parsloe’s pig, no doubt, sir?’

Jerry leaped an inch or two.

‘Pig?’

‘His prize pig, Queen of Matchingham. Stolen,’ said the policeman impressively. ‘Snitched out of its sty and so far not a trace of the miscreant. But we’ll apprehend him. Oh yes, we’ll apprehend him all right, and then he’ll regret his rash act. Very serious matter, pig stealing. I wouldn’t care to be in the shoes of the fellow that’s got that pig. He’s laughing now,’ said the policeman, quite incorrectly, ‘but he won’t be laughing long. Making an extended stay here, sir?’

‘It may be some time.’

‘Nice little house,’ said the policeman tolerantly. ‘Compact, you might call it. Mind you, you don’t want to treat it
rough
… not go leaning against the walls or anything like that. I know the fellow that built this little lot. Six of them there are – Sunnybrae, Sunnybrow, Sunnywood, Sunnyfields, Sunnycot, and Sunny-haven. I was having a beer with this chap one night – it was the day Sunnycot fell down – and he started talking about mortar. Mortar? I says. Why, I didn’t know you ever used any. Made me laugh, that did. Well, I’ll be getting along, sir. Got my round to do, and then I have to go and report progress to Sir Gregory. Not that there is any progress to report, see what I mean, but the gentleman likes us to confer with him. Shows zeal. Mortar!’ said the policeman. ‘Why, I didn’t know you ever used any, I said. You should have seen his face.’

He passed into the night, guffawing heartily, and Jerry, tottering back to the living-room, sat down and put his head between his hands. This is the recognized posture for those who wish to think, and it was obvious that the problems that had arisen could do with all the thinking he was at liberty to give them. Fate, he perceived, had put him in a tight spot. At any moment he was liable to be caught with the goods and to become, as so many an innocent man has become, a victim of circumstantial evidence.

This sort of thing was no novelty to him, of course. He could recall at least three stories he had written in the past year or so in which the principal characters had found themselves in just such a position as he was in now, with the trifling difference that what they had discovered in their homes had been, respectively, a dead millionaire with his head battered in, a dead ambassador with his throat cut, and a dead dancer known as La Flamme with a dagger of Oriental design between her fourth and fifth ribs. Whenever the hero of a Vail story took a house, he was sure to discover something of that sort in it. It was pure routine.

But the fact that the situation was a familiar one brought no comfort to him. He continued agitated.
Vis-à-vis
with the corpses listed above, his heroes had never known what to do next, and he did not know what to do next. The only thing he was sure he was not going to do was answer the front door bell, which had just rung again.

The bell rang twice, then stopped. Jerry, who had raised his head, replaced it between his hands and gave himself up to thought once more. And he was wishing more earnestly than ever that something even remotely resembling a plan of action would suggest itself to him, when he seemed to sense a presence in the room. He had an uncanny feeling that he was not alone. Then there sounded from behind him a deferential cough, and turning he perceived that his privacy had been invaded by a long, lean, red-haired man with strabismus in his left eye, a mouth like a halibut’s, a broken nose, and lots of mud all over him.

He stood gaping. Hearing that cough where no cough should have been he had supposed for an instant that this time it really was the official Sunnybrae ghost reporting for duty, though what ghosts were doing, haunting a red-brick villa put up at the most five years ago by a speculative builder, he was at a loss to understand. Reason now told him that no spectre would be likely to be diffusing such a very strong aroma of pig, as was wafted from this long, lean, red-haired man, and his momentary spasm of panic passed, leaving behind it the righteous indignation of the householder who finds uninvited strangers in the house which he is holding.

‘Who on earth are you?’ he demanded, with a good deal of heat.

The intruder smirked respectfully.

‘Wellbeloved is the name, sir. I am Sir Gregory Parsloe’s pig man. Sir?’

Jerry had not spoken. The sound that had proceeded from him had been merely a sort of bubbling cry, like that of a strong swimmer in his agony. With one long, horrified stare, he reeled to a chair and sank into it, frozen from the soles of the feet upwards.

IT WAS THAT
light shining in the window that had brought George Cyril Wellbeloved to Sunnybrae, just as it had brought the recent officer of the Law. Happening to observe it as he passed along the road, he had halted spell-bound, his heart leaping up as that of the poet Wordsworth used to do when he saw rainbows. He felt like a camel which, wandering across a desert, comes suddenly upon a totally unexpected oasis.

The fact has not been mentioned, for, as we have explained, a historian cannot mention everything, but during the period of the former’s tenancy of Sunnybrae relations of considerable cordiality had existed between Admiral G. J. Biffen and Sir Gregory Parsloe’s pig man. They had met at the Emsworth Arms one night, and acquaintance had soon ripened into friendship. Admiral Biffen liked telling long stories about life on the China station in the old days, and no story could be too long for George Cyril Wellbeloved to listen to provided beer was supplied, as on these occasions it always was. The result was that many a pleasant evening had been passed in this living-room, with the gallant Admiral yarning away in a voice like a foghorn and George Cyril drinking beer and saying ‘Coo!’ and ‘Lumme’ and ‘Well, fancy that!’ at intervals. The reader will be able to picture the scene if he throws his mind back to descriptions he has read of the sort of thing that used to go on in those
salons
of the eighteenth century.

His host’s abrupt departure had come as a stunning blow to George Cyril Wellbeloved. He would not readily forget the black despair which had gripped him that memorable night when, arriving at Sunnybrae in confident expectation of the usual, he had found the house in darkness and all the windows shuttered. It was as if a hart, panting for cooling streams when heated in the chase, had come to a cooling stream and found it dried up.

And then he had seen that light shining in the window, and had assumed from it that his benefactor had returned and that the golden age was about to set in anew.

All this he explained to Jerry as the latter sat congealed in his chair.

‘Far be it from me to intrude on a gentleman’s privacy,’ said George Cyril Wellbeloved in his polished way. ‘It is the last thing I would desire. But seeing a light in the window I thinks to myself “Coo! It’s the Admiral come back,” so I ring the bell, and then I ring it again, and then, when no reply transpires, I remember that the Admiral is a little hard of hearing, as is only natural in a gentleman of his advanced years, and I see the door on the jar as if someone had forgotten to close it, so I took the lib of barging in. I’m sorry to discover that it’s not the Admiral come back, after all, though very glad to make your acquaintance, sir,’ said George Cyril politely, ‘and I’ll tell you why I’m sorry. On a warm night like this, his kind heart melted by the thought that I’d been toiling all day at my numerous duties, Admiral Biffen would have given me a bottle of beer. And I don’t mind telling you, sir,’ said George Cyril, frankly laying his cards on the table, ‘that, what with it being a warm night and what with me all worn out from toiling at my numerous duties, a bottle of beer is what I’m fairly gasping for.’

He paused for a reply, but no reply came. Not, that is to say, from Jerry. But Queen of Matchingham, hearing that loved voice, had just uttered a cordial grunt of welcome. It seemed to Jerry’s strained senses to ring through the room like the Last Trump, and he was surprised that his companion appeared not to have heard it.

‘Admiral Biffen,’ said George Cyril Wellbeloved, throwing the information out casually, though with perhaps a certain undertone of significance, ‘used to keep his bottles of beer in a bucket of cold water in the kitchen.’

And so saying, he moved a step towards the door, as if anxious to ascertain whether his present host pursued that same excellent policy.

For an instant, Jerry sat rigid, like a character in one of his stories hypnotized by a mad scientist. Then, leaping to his feet, he sprang across the room. In doing so, he overturned a small table on which were a bowl of wax fruit, a photograph in a pink frame of the speculative builder to whom Sunnybrae owed its existence, the one who never used mortar, and a china vase bearing the legend ‘A Present From Llandudno’. It also contained the notebook in which he had been jotting down his notes for the story of Lavender Joe, and as his eye fell on it, inspiration came to him.

He looked at George Cyril Wellbeloved, and was encouraged by what he saw. He took another look, and was still more encouraged.

The world may be roughly divided into two classes – men who, when you tell them a story difficult to credit, will not believe you, and men who will. It was to this latter and far more likeable section of the community that, judging by his fatuous expression, George Cyril Wellbeloved belonged. He had the air, which Jerry found charming, of being a man who would accept without question whatever anybody cared to tell him. His whole aspect was that of one who believed everything he read in the Sunday papers.