Stop Press (22 page)

Belinda’s stool scraped sharply on the floor. ‘John,’ she said, ‘you have an abominably lucid mind. That particular horror hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘Of course it mightn’t be a bad thing. That was your phrase, wasn’t it? From what I’ve seen of your father I should imagine that nothing would be more likely to make him walk out for good. Which is what you and Timmy appear to want.’

‘At least a scandal of that sort wouldn’t be good for Timmy’s idiotic diplomacy.’

‘I don’t know about that. You’re rather confounding the diplomatic, perhaps, with a fussy and exclusive club. And I gather you don’t approve of it anyway. Long-lived Spiders on the one hand and infant ambassadors on the other: they’re both tiresome?’

The stool scraped again. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at. There – that’s just what the suspects say in the books. But I suppose you go round everyone like this?’

‘I don’t get everyone into a nice, quiet, dark, secret chamber. But – roughly – yes. I told you about policemen. And now let’s talk about publisher Wedge.’

‘Let’s, for the lord’s sake… I knew we’d never be found in here… Of Wedge, what?’

‘These parties are his idea?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they’re manipulated into a mild form of publicity?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s very tire – It’s mildly annoying.’

‘Suppose this funny-business piled up a bit more and were splashed in the national press. Would that be good for Wedge and the books?’

‘Oh, dear! John, this is this most depressing. You’re not nearly so cogent when aiming at Wedge as when circling deftly round my poor father’s children. Daddy has to be kept in the public eye, but I don’t think Wedge would in the least relish a sensation. The result would be much too problematical. With somebody just less than moderately successful it might be worth taking a chance on, but not with a smooth-sailing best-seller. And you must consider the effect of the business on daddy. Is it likely that Wedge would risk driving one of his most valuable assets half crazy? And Wedge, though fond of playing the buffoon at times, is tremendously astute. He’s been far more the making of Spider, really, than daddy has. These are facts. And I’m strongly of the opinion that he is honest as well. In fact, John Appleby, think again.’

‘Certainly. Let’s take–’

Belinda stood up – and bumped her head. ‘Damn,’ said Appleby.

‘Thank you. I was going to listen. I’m not sure I didn’t hear that idiotic secretary’s stick. Don’t you think this game is taking an awfully long time?’

‘Having no idea of what the game is I can’t form an opinion. Let’s go back to where we started.’

‘All right.’ Belinda began fumbling with the panel.

‘I didn’t mean that. With this discussion.’

Belinda sighed. ‘Patricia has introduced a fiend to Rust. But carry on.’

‘Let us hope’ – Appleby spoke soberly – ‘that nobody has introduced a fiend to Rust – or will introduce one anywhere else.’

‘I suppose that’s the authentic cryptic note. Just what do you mean?’

‘There’s nothing cryptic about it. So far this persecution, which appears curiously haphazard, has confined itself to Rust. Is it going to confine itself to Rust and your father in the future, or is it going to propagate itself elsewhere and to other Eliots? I take it you haven’t had any trouble at Shoon Abbey?’

‘Not a spot.’

‘It would be a good place for trouble,’ said Appleby with mild professional glee.

Midnight was distant only a few minutes, and by this time boredom – were boredom possible to a scientific abstraction – would have overtaken Dr Chown’s observer in his elm tree. There had sprung up a faint, cold wind. It sighed through the bare branches with just power enough to brush the last pendent rain-drops from the twigs; they fell to earth with a sound which sharpened itself in the silence to the semblance of distant pattering feet. Nothing else stirred. The lights from the living-room glowed steadily and reassuringly behind their curtains; others higher up marked windows giving on corridors. The house was to be imagined as one large well of light from which winding tunnels of light radiated out through darkness; all other illumination had been extinguished by the exigencies of what was going on within. Once, twice a fluttering shadow passed across one of the dimly glowing upper windows, as if a flake of incumbent night had detached itself and drifted to the dark below – bat or owl brushing, circling Rust. An owl hooted. Then across the farthest living-room window a larger shadow moved with superior deliberation; for a moment light shone naked, as if a curtain had been withdrawn. Once more the shadow moved, swift and assured. And after that, nothing; the episode, if episode it were, seemed closed. In the upper branches the wind sighed louder and the tree stirred uneasily, as if a storm were coming.

In the priest-hole the conversation had drifted. ‘There’s going to be a grand visit to the Abbey,’ Belinda was saying. ‘I’m going to smuggle you in. You don’t know Jasper?’

‘No.’ Appleby chuckled. ‘One day I hope to arrest him.’

‘Arrest Jasper!’

‘When one is young’ – Appleby’s tone was provocatively fatherly – ‘one may want to liquidate Spiders. When one gets on one thinks it wouldn’t be a bad idea to liquidate the Shoons.’

‘But, John, he’s a nice old party in his queer way. And I don’t believe people as wealthy as he is are ever arrested.’

Appleby sighed. ‘Well, not often. But one day we may get him. He’ll run a gun or two to the wrong people – say on the fringes of British India – and somebody will lose patience and the important people will be tipped to get quietly off his boards and we may be told to sail in. It’s an improbable fantasy, but I like it. I don’t suppose you’ve burrowed much into the economic foundations of Shoon Abbey?’

‘I know’ – Belinda was petulant again – ‘that Jasper thinks me worth eight pounds a week.’

‘Yes. Patricia was awfully cheered when you joined her there. He began to pay her that too.’

There was a pause: it represented Belinda thinking. ‘But, John, surely she got that before? Why, Patricia took a better degree than I did.’

‘Belinda Eliot, you are a child of privilege – didn’t you know? Friend Shoon is a very wealthy man, and he felt that he couldn’t give the daughter of another very tolerably wealthy man less. The feeling may be called plutocratic solidarity. But being, I gather, graceful in little matters, he pushed up Patricia to the same screw. She was shoutingly pleased and has begun doing her shopping in different streets.’

‘I do think this interminable game–’ Belinda stopped and appeared to think better of evasion. ‘And do all policemen specialize in these chastening asides? Consider me as feeling small. And tell me more about poor Jasper.’

‘There’s not much to tell. He’s flourishing at the moment, as you may guess from the amount of money you’re given to play with in the sale-rooms. You see, he doesn’t have to play the old dangerous game of arming rebels. He arms rightful governments.’

‘Rightful governments?’

‘The people who would be governing if other people hadn’t been wrongfully elected to the job. On the strength of that he can buy any number of Egyptian papyri and Attic pots.’

‘I think this conference has been most depressing all round. Still, you ought to enjoy meeting the villain, to say nothing of seeing the Abbey.’ Belinda got cautiously up. ‘Look here, let’s get out. We haven’t been found and the game must be over long ago.’

‘Yes’, said Appleby. ‘Nothing seems to have happened since–’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Belinda, didn’t you say that for this game the corridor lights remained on?’

‘They all remain on. Only lights in rooms aren’t allowed.’

‘There was a gleam of light from the corridor here through a crack. I’ve just noticed it’s gone.’ He laid a hand on Belinda’s arm. ‘Listen.’

Directly above their heads – in their confined darkness at once as immediate and as bafflingly remote as the signal of a diver to men trapped in a submarine – passed the melodramatic, the absurd, the sinister sound of the blind secretary’s stick.

Within and without, Rust Hall lay in darkness. And this time John Appleby had no electric torch to hand. Nobody had a torch; the score or so which had flitted about the house shortly before had been stowed neatly away in a bag by Sir Rupert Eliot. Rust was peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with a second invasion of night.

Appleby and Belinda tugged back the secret panel between them; as they did so a confused murmuring reached them from above, about, below. It rose, as they stumbled out, to shouts and cries. Once more, Mr Eliot’s party was having a bad time.

‘This,’ said Belinda, ‘is monotonous.’ She spoke quickly, as if making a timely grab at her own reactions. ‘I can even hear Miss Cavey taking up her role of leading the pack.’ Miss Cavey’s yell, though somewhat muted by distance, was indeed unmistakable.

Appleby took Belinda’s arm and they groped along the corridor. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘that the eyes of those four puppies are squinnying at her in the dark… It’s the deplorable truth that I have a match-box with only one match; we’ll save it for emergencies. You’re guide. I suppose you didn’t contrive this yourself with a master-switch hidden in our cubby-hole and a gramophone for the tap-tap?… Lord, what a row.’

They had come to the head of the main staircase; a petty chaos echoed up the well. Here and there a match spurted and went out – extinguished by a chill night wind which had begun to blow inexplicably about the house. ‘Try that very persuasive voice,’ said Belinda.

Even as he filled his lungs to obey, Appleby was forestalled. From a central position below somebody called out, ‘Stop it!’ The voice was not persuasive; it was, however, so formidably angry that nearly everybody stopped.

‘Timmy’s Toplady,’ said Belinda. ‘Another little diplomat. And a creature not without surprises.’

‘And now’, said the voice of Toplady, ‘the windows. A lot are open. Will some people – just two or three – try to find them and shut them?’ The voice paused, waiting for evidences of obedience; when it continued it had abandoned its emergency
staccato
. ‘It will be reasonable to suppose’, it pursued in tones which were a soothing epitome of reasonableness, ‘that the candles, of which there were a great many, may have been left on the dinner-table till morning. It is often done.’ Toplady’s anxiety, echoing out of the darkness, to avoid any suggestion of inadequacy in the domestic economy of Rust was eminently impressive and the party was rendered quite dumb. ‘I’m going to find them. And then perhaps the gentleman who helped us before – I’m afraid I must confess to having forgotten his name – will make another inspection of the fuses.’

Leaning over the top of the staircase Appleby chuckled anew. ‘I’m whacked,’ he murmured. ‘Toplady, did you say? The ruling caste, I suppose. Just so do Topladys take charge beneath palm and pine. Down we go and I’ll try to perform my little mechanic task.’ His voice grew serious and his hand tightened momentarily on Belinda’s before letting it go. ‘It is my opinion’ – the words came with an authority of their own – ‘that nothing very alarming has happened.’

‘Good,’ said Belinda – and asked no questions. They hurried down.

‘Because’ – Appleby was briskly communicative – ‘something is being worked up to. A bastard artistic process. And we haven’t reached the climax yet.’

Like celebrants at a smartly-costumed witches’ sabbath a semi-circle of Mr Eliot’s guests held up silver candlesticks. Windows had been closed and the draught substantially controlled, but eddying gusts still caught the candles so that they smoked and flared uncertainly, giving the appearance of a lively sequence of emotion to faces now resolved to be as cool and impassive as might be. Only Wedge, who had secured a branching candelabra and was standing in a pose most consciously hieratic, and Peter Holme, who was irresistibly impelled to gestures suitable to the taper scene in
Julius Caesar
, were without an apparent anxiety to be eminently correct. Toplady and Chown were standing one on each side of Mr Eliot, who was responding with conscientious courtesy to two conflicting sedative techniques.

‘It’s not’, said Appleby, deciding after a moment’s reflection on a general dissemination of intelligence, ‘the fuses this time. It’s the main switch – the little lever affair one throws out or presses home. Somebody has wrenched it away bodily, with a good deal of strength and at some risk. At the moment I’m afraid I see no substitute.’ There was a pause, the harassed party standing woefully round. ‘Wait a minute, though. I want a large india-rubber and every available packet or tin of cigarettes. Not cigarette-cases: tins or packets.’ The party stirred, chattered; there was a little fuss of coming and going; the required articles were handed up as to an illusionist on a stage. ‘Motorists in particular’, Appleby said instructively, ‘should carry abundant tinfoil. It works’ – abruptly Rust was deluged in light – ‘wonders.’ He slid to the floor.

For the second time in a brief space Hugo Toplady rose to an occasion. ‘How cheering’, he said commandingly, ‘that we can all see to go to bed.’

Rather like the chorus of a musical comedy, being huddled off stage so that the principals can get on with the romantic business of the piece, the majority of the party went hastily through the business of breaking up for the night. Only Miss Cavey was chary of departing. Perhaps her spirits were more volatile than those of the rest; perhaps she was reluctant to be left alone in bed in the dark, meditating her pendent puppies and listening for the uncanny musical meditations of the Spider. The former appeared to be the truth, for she enquired with some anxiety whether it was Friday or Saturday which had just elapsed, and on being assured that it was Friday remarked that it was Saturday night, after all, that was the grand night of the party. Mr Eliot was left surrounded by his relations and a sort of inner-circle of semi-confidants. But no one seemed very certain of what course the play ought now to follow, or just what part he or she might judiciously take. Somebody had fetched drinks from the library – to which several of the departed guests had made a detour to fortify themselves against the night – and the little group sat about the hall, some on the staircase and some on scattered chairs, giving every evidence of contemplating a thoroughly uncertain situation. Hugo Toplady, having dispersed the herd, seemed to feel that his job was done. It was Appleby who broke silence, taking the horns of the first bull that came to hand. ‘There is no doubt of its being deliberate this time. And I shall be surprised if nothing is involved beyond a second cutting off of the lights. What interests me is the curious moment chosen for the joke.’