The Silver Ghost (22 page)

“I suppose you found her a great deal changed.”

“No, not really. Goodness knows what she thought of me.

“She thought you were absolutely ravishing, naturally. How could she possibly not?”

“How dear of you, Sarah. Anyway, I’m glad she’s there to lend a hand. I called Abigail early this morning to see how things were going, and she sounded absolutely exhausted.”

“Not surprisingly all things considered,” Tom grunted.

Sarah might have said more, but Lionel was at her shoulder.

“If you people want another drink, you’d better get it now. Elizabeth’s making noises about shutting the bar and serving some food.”

“That’s fine with me. I don’t want any more,” said Sarah.

Her cousin glared at her. “Well, can’t you take one anyway and pass it along to me?”

“Honestly, Lionel, you are the living end!”

Sarah wished she herself could end this weary visit, but she still didn’t have a line on who that Morris dancer in the copse could have been. Max couldn’t have had any better luck than she, or he’d have said: He hadn’t said anything about Rufus’s
Totschläger,
either, and that worried her.

There were too many things they hadn’t been able to pin down yet. But at least they’d found Aunt Bodie alive and kicking, and the Silver Ghost and the New Phantom. She couldn’t let herself think about Vercingetorix Ufford now, not while she still must grill Cousin Lionel about that half-hour gap at the banquet and still must face Elizabeth Whet’s high-minded version of a buffet supper.

“T
HAT’S WHAT I SAID
, Bill, a bicycle. Sarah thinks there ought to be one. Why won’t you allow them on the place? Oh, so the kids don’t get to racing through the fields and stirring up the bees. Yes, I understand, but have Grimpen keep an eye out for one anyway, will you? He’s been trying to convince you Ufford’s death was an accident, eh? That figures. No, you’re under no obligation to talk to reporters. If they get too pushy just lower the portcullis, raise the drawbridge, and unleash the bees.”

It would have been too much to hope the news media could be kept at bay forever. Poor Bill, as if he and Abigail didn’t have troubles enough already. Half of him must be longing to scoop the others and get the story on his own stations first, and the other half praying nobody would run it at all. Fat chance. Max checked the address he’d obtained, shook hands with his new friends at XBIX, sent his kindest personal regards to the station manager’s daughter, and went on to the next stop.

Vercingetorix Ufford’s aerie didn’t take much finding. It was up among the gables and cupolas of an immense Victorian house on a sedate side road in West Newton. The house was three high-ceilinged stories tall, painted lemon yellow with a layer of chocolate in the middle and vanilla trimmings under the eaves. Ufford’s was a private entrance on the side. A flossy brass plaque screwed to the door proclaimed that this was indeed the place. Max turned the key Bill had lent him and it worked.

“Quite a pad,” he murmured as he reached the top of the stairs and switched on a light.

Ufford must have dreamt that he dwelt in marble halls. The plastered walls of what he’d probably dubbed his
salotto
had been painted over in a white travertine
faux marbre,
broken here and there by
trompe l’oeil
pilasters and pedestals in green serpentine, the latter surmounted by what looked to Max like funerary urns in
rosso antico.
Deep green velvet draperies dripping with gold fringe were caught back by heavy gold ropes to reveal glass curtains in shimmering cloth of gold.

To Max’s trained eye, the furniture and accessories were all reproduction, but what they reproduced were the wildest excesses of the Italian Renaissance. There was enough gold here to have stripped the hypothetical mines of Golconda if Versey’s gildings hadn’t been equally hypothetical. True or false, the decorating must have cost him a bundle. Taste this bad didn’t come cheap.

The bedroom would make a grandiose setting for a really spectacular nightmare. An immense tester bed, also gilded, had purple velvet hanging everywhere velvet could be hung, plus a fake polar bear rug thrown over the foot. And that was only the beginning. Max wasted little time straining his aesthetic sensibilities but went on into the recording studio.

Here, he was grateful to see not a fleck of spurious gold anywhere. Bill hadn’t exaggerated about the equipment, there was a lot of it. Max hadn’t the technical expertise to judge how good it all was, but he recognized some internationally famous brand names. Everything appeared to have been well cared for and efficiently arranged. Wall racks held thousands of recordings, all filed and labeled according to some elaborate system. There were drawers for cassettes and for what Max decided must be professional broadcasting tapes on large reels. He was beginning to feel depressed by the magnitude of Ufford’s collection when he discovered one rack marked “Experimental Tapes.”

Once he’d figured out how to play them, Ufford’s experiments proved well worth the trip. It was Ufford himself who’d made them; Max all too easily identified that pompous, overprecise articulation he’d heard so much of at the revel. One of the professor’s recorded messages was quite a little Renaissance drama in itself:

“Amaline Pettigrass, you are a slave to those turntables. For years you have stood here watching the turntables go around and around. They have hypnotized you. They hold you in their power. They are your enemies. You must destroy the turntables. You must break their evil spell. Take their cruel arms, Amaline Pettigrass. Bend them back and twist. Do it now, Amaline. Then forget what you did. You will remember nothing. You will only know the turntables don’t work. You won’t know why. Do it, Amaline. Break the arms and forget. Now, Amaline. Now.”

This must have been one of Ufford’s earlier attempts at recording a subliminal message. He’d kept the tapes, one in which he’d tried to meld the words with a bouncy jingle for a restaurant called Francine’s Fritter Factory, one with what must be the theme song for some of Bill’s little homilies. The first efforts were jumbled, but there was another tape where words and music must have been blended into an undistinguishable whole. Max couldn’t hear the hidden message at all, but Amaline Pettigrass’s subconscious mind would have sorted it out. Both the advertisement and the theme song would have been played again and again, probably several times a day over a period of weeks or even months. It would have taken plenty of urging to make a loyal employee sabotage expensive equipment for no apparent reason.

There were others, some suggesting that a named person nick a stylus or sever a cable, or hide a nice, big magnet next to where the tapes were stored, so that when the time came to play them there’d be nothing left to play. Some were less subtle, like the one that said, “Joseph Bunce, get out of here. Joseph Bunce, we don’t want you here. Joseph Bunce, you stink. Joseph Bunce, get out of here right this minute.” And there was a tape that repeated over and over, and over, “Revelers, eat the frumenty. Revelers, eat the frumenty. Revelers, eat the frumenty.”

Max wasn’t a bit surprised. He’d suspected something of the sort ever since he’d given himself heartburn eating the stuff and wondering why.

This could have been Ufford’s first experiment in instant mass manipulation. The choice of command had been a clever one. Being ordered to eat something that was perfectly wholesome if not particularly interesting would have aroused no strong resistance in guests who’d probably have taken a dab of the stuff anyway, simply because their hostess always made such a big deal of her genuine fourteenth-century recipe. Once some of the more suggestible revelers had begun attacking that massive silver bowl with unaccustomed gusto, the old follow-the-leader instinct would have incited others to dip in.

Max felt a stab of annoyance. Was he really that gullible? Obviously, yes. But had Ufford been that keen a psychologist? Had he been the real instigator of the trick or only the technician? Max wasted no more time playing the experimental tapes, but went back to the hunt.

Ufford was a systematic rogue, all right. In a neat little card file underneath the tape rack, Max found a bundle of index cards, filed under the various station call letters. Amaline Pettigrass was there; Ufford had meticulously entered the day on which she’d first have heard her specially tailored message, the number of times it would be broadcast, and the date on which the turntables had ceased to function. Joseph Bunce had his card showing the date on which he’d got his marching orders and when he’d finally marched. Ufford had even made up a card for the frumenty, the finicking old bastard.

He’d been here last night, presumably to update his files and change his clothes. Max found the Arnolfini costume in the bedroom closet, neatly zipped inside a plastic garment bag. The hat was on the shelf above, also swathed in plastic. The bright green tights were in the laundry hamper.

Of anything resembling the Morris dancer’s costume, though, Max could find no sign. It wasn’t in the small coat closet outside the
salotto;
it almost certainly wouldn’t be anywhere else in the apartment. If Ufford had been cocky enough not to bother hiding his tapes and file cards, he must have considered himself totally above suspicion. Egomania was an easy kind of craziness to manipulate.

Max wasn’t feeling any too cocky himself, though. Why hadn’t Ufford’s landlady been up here already, wanting to know who he was and why he was in her house? Maybe she’d called the cops and was just lying low until they got here. He’d better hit the road before his luck ran out; he wasn’t sure how well an argument that he was here on business for her tenant’s boss would stand up now that Ufford was known to be dead. Taking the experimental tapes and file cards out of the apartment was a risk, but it would have been riskier to leave them here. Bill had better go through them all tonight and make sure there weren’t still a few uncompleted experiments floating around the stations.

It was irritating that Ufford had stopped short of leaving any clues as to who’d been piping the tune to which he’d danced his final gigue. Max hadn’t been able to find a thing except a whopping phone bill that was made up mostly of calls to one particular number in Busto Arsizio in Italy. Max knew his geography pretty well, and Busto Arsizio was nowhere near Venice. Perhaps it was a mountain climber and not a gondolier with whom the Italian mistress was carrying on her extracurricular
ventura amorosa.
Max copied down the number in his little black book before he went out past the fake marble and picked his way silently down the stairs.

Sarah must be in some Milton restaurant by now, he thought as he unlocked his car and laid the tapes on the seat beside him. No, it was too late for that, she’d already have eaten. She’d be back at their house, giving Davy his bath and telling him his bedtime story because the kid’s father was too busy burgling a dead man’s apartment. The clock on the dashboard said seventeen minutes to eight. Max hadn’t realized he’d spent so much time at Ufford’s.

He ought to stop for a bite somewhere, himself. He ought to quit running the roads and get home to his wife and child. But how could he knock off now? What if Boadicea was awake and talking? What if she was saying the wrong thing to the wrong person? He leaned on the gas pedal, remembered he was a family man, and eased off to within the posted speed limit. Barely within. Damn it, he did want to get home sometime or other.

Maybe he ought to phone Bill about the tapes. If there were no facilities to play them at the house, Bill might prefer to meet him at whichever radio station was handiest. He managed to find a drugstore with a pay phone, and dialed.

It was Abigail who answered. “Oh, Max, I’m so glad you called. Sarah wants you to pick her up at the Tolbathys’.”

Oh God, what now? “What’s happened?” He had to grit his teeth to keep from yelling into the phone. “Did she have an accident?”

“Nothing to worry about. It’s just that she went to Bunny Whet’s party and somebody who was leaving backed into her car and smashed one of the headlights. The garage was closed and she couldn’t very well drive all the way home with just one light, so she left her car at the Whets’ and came on with Tom and Hester. She didn’t explain why she chose them particularly; perhaps they needed help with Sal. He’s still on crutches, you know.”

Max hadn’t known and right now he didn’t give a damn. Why should she help Sal Tolbathy? Why wasn’t she home taking care of her own child? For a moment, Max felt a surge of old-fashioned male chauvinist ire. But he was an honest man. He’d brought Sarah into this affair because he wanted her with him and because she was good. He didn’t know how she’d got to Bunny Whet’s, but he could guess it was because she’d happened to bump into Lionel and Young Dork. She’d seen her chance to plug some of the gaps and gone along with them. He’d have done the same. He’d better make up his mind what kind of wife he wanted.

Ah, the hell with it. He wanted Sarah any way she wanted to be, and he was gladder than anybody would ever know that he’d be seeing her in fifteen minutes or so instead of God knew when. He got squared away with Bill about the tapes, bought himself a packet of cheese crackers at the soda fountain, and went back to the car.

When Max got to the Tolbathys’, he found Sarah waiting for him with her coat on. “Abigail phoned to say you’d called them and were on your way,” Tom explained. “You’re welcome to stay and visit a while,” he added rather wistfully, “but I know they’re anxious to see you. And we did have a good talk with Sarah.”

Once they were in the car, Sarah made her report. Buck Tolbathy had dropped in at his parents’ house after they got back, to get a report on Bunny’s bonanza and offer whatever help Sal might need getting ready for bed. Sarah had managed to steer the conversation back to the Morris dancers and pick up a few more nuggets about who’d been where at the crucial time during the revel.

“The Abbotts did go to that wedding, so they’re out. Sal Tolbathy pulled a ligament and had to get a neighbor to take him to the emergency room at the hospital, so he’s out. Buck came straight from the dancing green into the pavilion and stayed there all through the banquet. So did Young Dork, and they both have different witnesses to prove they did. Erp and Monk were frisking around with the serving wenches a good deal, and Hester was keeping a sharp eye on them because one of her granddaughters brought an absolutely adorable friend who’s only fourteen years old and a bit precocious. That Ogham man from Schenectady sat and pigged out for two hours straight, according to Buck. He hadn’t had a chance to get any breakfast before he got on the plane, then he had to come straight to the Billingsgates’ and get into his dancing clothes, so he was starving.”