Uncle Fred in the Springtime (21 page)

‘Don’t
take that tone with me, young man.’

‘Not
one single, solitary porker do you set your hands on,’ said Ricky. ‘My price
for stealing pigs is two hundred and fifty pounds per pig per person, and if
you don’t wish to meet my terms, the deal is off. If, on the other hand, you consent
to pay this absurdly moderate fee for a very difficult and exacting piece of
work, I on my side am willing to overlook the offensive things you have said
about a girl you ought to think yourself honoured to have the chance of
welcoming into the family.’

‘Stop
talking like a damned fool. She’s obviously the scum of the earth. The way a
man’s nephews get entangled with the dregs of the human species is enough to
give one apoplexy. I absolutely forbid you to marry this female
crossing-sweeper.’

Ricky drew
a deep breath. His face was like a stormy sky, and his eyes bored into his
uncle like bradawls.

‘Uncle
Alaric,’ he said, ‘your white hairs protect you. You are an old man on the
brink of the tomb —’

The
Duke started.

‘What
do you mean, on the brink of the tomb?’

‘On the
brink of the tomb,’ repeated Ricky firmly. ‘And I am not going to shove you into
it by giving you the slosh on the jaw which you have been asking for with every
word you have uttered. But I would just like to say this. You are without exception
the worst tick and bounder that ever got fatty degeneration of the heart
through half a century of gorging food and swilling wine wrenched from the lips
of a starving proletariat. You make me sick. You poison the air. Goodbye,
Uncle Alaric,’ said Ricky, drawing away rather ostentatiously. ‘I think that we
had better terminate this interview, or I may become brusque.’

With a
parting look of a kind which no nephew should have cast at an uncle, Ricky
Gilpin strode to the door and was gone. The Duke remained where he sat. He felt
himself for the moment incapable of rising.

It is
bad enough for a man of imperious soul to be defied by a beardless boy, and his
nephew’s determination, in face of his opposition, to cling to the ballet girl
or whatever she might be with whom he had become entangled would have been in
itself enough to cause a temporary coma. But far more paralysing was the
reflection that in alienating Ricky Gilpin he had alienated the one man who
could secure the person of the Empress for him. Pig-kidnappers do not grow on
every bush.

The
Duke of Dunstable’s mind was one of those which readily fall into the grip of
obsessions, and though reason now strove to convince him that there were prizes
in life worth striving for beside the acquisition of a pig, he still felt that
only that way lay happiness and contentment. He was a man who wanted what he
wanted when he wanted it, and what he wanted now was the Empress of Blandings.

A cold
voice, speaking at his side, roused him from his reverie.

‘Pardon
me, your Grace.’

‘Hey?
What’s the matter?’

Rupert
Baxter continued to speak coldly. He was feeling bleakly hostile towards this
old image. He disliked people who threw eggs at him. Nor was he the man to
allow himself to be softened by an sportsmanlike admiration for a shot which
had unquestionably been a very creditable one, showing great accuracy of aim
under testing conditions.

‘A
policeman has just informed me that I must move the car from the inn door.’

‘He
has, has he? Well, tell him from me that he’s a blasted officious
jack-in-office.’

‘With
your Grace’s permission, I propose to drive it round the corner.’

The
Duke did not speak. A sudden, flaming inspiration had come to him.

‘Hey,
you,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

Rupert
Baxter sat down. The Duke eyed him closely, and felt that his inspiration had
been sound. The secretary, he observed, had a strong, well-knit frame,
admirably suited for the performance of such feats as the removal of pigs from
their sties. A moment before, he had been feeling that, Ricky having failed
him, he would seek in vain for an assistant to do the rough work. And now, it
seemed, he had found him. From this quarter he anticipated no defiance. He was
well aware of the high value which Rupert Baxter placed upon his job.

‘Ever
done any pig-stealing?’ he asked.

‘I have
not,’ said Rupert Baxter coldly.

‘Well,
you start today,’ said the Duke.

14

It was at about three o’clock
that afternoon that the Market Blandings station cab (Ed. Robinson, propr.)
turned in at the gates of Blandings Castle and started creakily up the long
drive. And presently Mr Pott, seated in its smelly interior, was setting eyes
for the first time on the historic home of the Earls of Emsworth.

His
emotions, as he did so, differed a good deal from those of the ordinary visitor
in such circumstances. Claude Pott was a realist, and this tended to colour his
outlook. Where others, getting their initial glimpse of this last stronghold of
an old order, usually admired the rolling parkland and the noble trees or
thrilled with romantic awe as they thought of what sights those grey walls must
have seen in the days when knights were bold, he merely felt that the owner of
a place like this must unquestionably have what it takes to play Persian
Monarchs.

Mr
Pott, like Ricky, had arrived at Market Blandings in good spirits. Lord Bosham’s
telephone call, coming through just as he was dropping off to sleep, had at
first inclined him to peevishness. But when he discovered that he was talking
to a client, and not only to a client but a client who was inviting him to
Blandings Castle, he had become sunny to a degree. And this sunniness still
lingered.

Ever
since he had made Lord Emsworth’s acquaintance, Claude Pott had been sighing
for a closer intimacy with one whom his experienced eye had classified
immediately as the king of the mugs. There, he had felt, went one literally
designed by Nature to be a good man’s opponent at Persian Monarchs, and the
thought that they had met and parted like ships that pass in the night was very
bitter to him. And now he was being asked to come to Lord Emsworth’s home and,
what was more, was being paid for coming.

Little
wonder that life looked rosy to Claude Pott. And he was still suffused with an
optimistic glow, when the cab drew up at the front door and he was conducted by
Beach, the butler, to the smoking-room, where he found a substantial, pink
young man warming a solid trouser-seat in front of a cheerful fire.

‘Mr
Claude Pott, m’lord,’ announced Beach, and withdrew with just that touch of
aloofness in his manner which butlers exhibit when they would prefer not to be
held responsible for peculiar visitors.

The
pink young man, on the other hand, was cordiality itself.

‘Hullo,
Pott. So here you are, Pott, what? Fine. Splendid. Excellent. Capital. Take a
seat, dear old clue-collector. My name’s Bosham. I’m by way of being Lord
Emsworth’s son. To refresh your memory, I’m the bird who rang you up.’

Mr Pott
found himself unable to speak. The sight of his employer had stirred him to his
depths..

Up till
now, he had regarded Lord Emsworth as the most promising claim that any
prospector for ore could hope to stake out, but one glance at the latter’s son
told him that he had been mistaken. This was the mug of a good man’s dreams.
For a long instant he stood staring silently at Lord Bosham with the same
undisguised interest which stout Cortez had once displayed when inspecting the
Pacific. It is scarcely exaggerating to say the Mr Pott was feeling as if a new
planet had swum into his ken.

Lord
Bosham, too, after that opening speech of welcome, had fallen into a thoughtful
silence. Like so many men who have done their business on the mail-order
system, he was reflecting, now that the parcel had been unwrapped, that it
would have been more prudent to have inspected the goods before purchasing. It
seemed to him, as it had seemed to Pongo Twistleton on a former occasion, that
if this rummy object before him was a detective, his whole ideas about
detectives would have to be revised from the bottom up.

‘You
are
the right Pott?’ he said.

Mr Pott
seemed to find a difficulty in helping him out. The question of the rightness
or wrongness of Potts appeared to be one on which he was loath to set himself
up as an authority.

‘The
private investigator, I mean. The bloodstain-and-magnifying-glass bloke.’

‘My
card,’ said Pott, who had been through this sort of thing before. Lord Bosham
examined the card, and was convinced.

‘Ah,’
he said. ‘Fine. Well, going back to what I was saying, here you are, what?’

‘Yes,
sir.

‘I was
expecting you yesterday.’

‘I’m
sorry, Lord B. I’d have come if I could. But the boys at the Yard just wouldn’t
let me.’

‘What
yard would that be?’

‘Scotland
Yard.’

‘Oh,
ah, of course. You work for them, do you?’ said Lord Bosham, feeling that this
was more the stuff.

‘When
they get stuck, they generally call me in,’ said Pott nonchalantly. ‘This was a
particularly tough job.’

‘What
was it?’

‘I can’t
tell you that,’ said Mr Pott, ‘my lips being sealed by the Official Secrets
Act, of which you have doubtless heard.’

Lord Bosham
felt that his misgivings had been unworthy. He remembered now that quite a
number of the hottest detectives on his library list had been handicapped — or
possibly assisted — by a misleading appearance. Buxton Black in
Three Dead
at Mistleigh Court
and Drake Denver in
The Blue Ribbon Murders
were
instances that sprang to the mind. The former had looked like a prosperous
solicitor, the latter like a pleasure-loving young man about town. What Mr Pott
looked like he could not have said on the spur of the moment, but the point was
that it didn’t matter.

‘Well,
let’s get down to it, shall we?’

‘I
should be glad to have a brief outline of the position of affairs.’

‘Brief?’
Lord Bosham looked dubious. ‘I’m not sure about that. As a matter of fact,
bloodhound, it’s rather a long and intricate story. But I’ll cut it as short as
I can. Do you know what impostors are?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Well,
we’ve got them in the house. That’s the nub of the thing. Three of them — count
‘em! Three! — all imposting away like the dickens.’

‘H’m.’

‘You
may well say “H’m.” It’s a most exasperating state of affairs, and I don’t
wonder my aunt’s upset. Not nice for a woman, feeling that every time she goes
to her room to fetch a handkerchief or what not she may find the place littered
with bounders rifling her jewel-case.’

‘Are
these impostors male?’

‘Two of
them are. The third, in sharp contra-distinction, is female. And speaking of
her brings us to what you will probably find it convenient to register in your
mind as the Baxter Theory. Do you register things in your mind, or do you use a
notebook?’

‘Is
Baxter an impostor?’

‘No,’
said Lord Bosham, with the air of one being fair. ‘He’s a gosh-awful tick with
steel-rimmed spectacles, but he’s not an impostor. He’s the Duke’s secretary,
and his theory is that these blighters are here not for what they can pouch,
but in order to lure the Duke into allowing his nephew to marry the girl.
Ingenious, of course, but in my opinion there is nothing to it and you may
dismiss it absolutely. They are after the swag. Well, when I tell you that one
of them played the confidence trick on me a couple of days ago, you will be
able to estimate the sort of hell-hounds they are. Write them down in your
notebook, if you use a notebook, as men who will stick at nothing.’

Mr Pott
was beginning to feel fogged. If anything emerged clearly from this narrative,
it seemed to him that it was the fact that the entire household was fully aware
of the moral character of these miscreants. And yet they were apparently being
given the run of the house and encouraged to make themselves at home.

‘But if
you know that these individuals are here with criminal intent —’Why don’t we
have them led off with gyves upon their wrists? My dear old cigar-ash inspector,
it’s what I’d give my eye-teeth to do, but it can’t be done. You wouldn’t understand,
if I explained for an hour, so just take it at this, that no — what’s that word
beginning with “o”?’

‘What
word beginning with “o”‘

‘That’s
what I’m asking you. Opal? Oval? Ha! Got it! Overt. You must just accept the
fact that no overt act can be contemplated, because it would lead to
consequences which we don’t want led to. When I say “we,” I speak principally
for my aunt. Personally, I don’t care if Baxter loses his job tomorrow.’

Mr Pott
gave it up.

‘I don’t
follow you, Lord B.’

‘I
thought you wouldn’t. Still, you’ve grasped the salient fact that the place is
crawling with impostors?’