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  ‘The thing?’ Miss Pringle had been at once thrilled and startled by what she judged to be a maniacal glint in Captain Bulkington’s eye. ‘Murder?’

  ‘Murder?’ The Captain was a little doubtful. ‘Rather gone off that, as a matter of fact. Not much money in it, if you ask me. What I’ve been thinking about is kidnapping. What would you say to that?’

  ‘Kidnapping?’ Miss Pringle felt a momentary sense of disappoint-ment, which no doubt betrayed itself in her tone. Infirmity of purpose in Captain Bulkington must be countered, if anything at all was to come of her grand design. This interview had taken her by surprise, and it was only slowly that her mind was becoming at all clear on what ought to be her line. But she saw it now. Captain Bulkington’s promisingly criminal vision must be encouraged and – so to speak – canalised. ‘I’m afraid,’ Miss Pringle said, ‘that kidnapping wouldn’t interest me very much. I’d scarcely consider myself competent to work out anything of the kind, or to give you an effective hand at it. Murder is another matter. I could put you on the rails there.’

  ‘Ha, ha! Deuced odd conversation this, eh? Our just thinking about writing a book, I mean.’ Captain Bulkington was suddenly looking at Miss Pringle with broad and unspeakable guile. ‘But we understand each other, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I am sure we do.’ Miss Pringle was a little surprised by the effect of dark double-meaning she had contrived to lend these simple words.

  ‘And you are the expert, my dear. I shall be delighted to work at murder, if that’s how you feel. Just a matter of finding the right victim, and going ahead. Or victims, for that matter. What about Jenkins and Waterbird? Much to be said for murdering them.’ The Captain frowned, as if conscious of having gone rather badly off the rails. ‘Very jolly fellows, eh? Good families, too.’ He paused, and shot a sharp glance at Miss Pringle. ‘Pinkerton, now – what would you say to him?’

  ‘Pinkerton?’

  ‘Sir Ambrose. Fellow who read the lessons. Baronet, and all that. We might well think of Pinkerton.’

  ‘As somebody to be murdered?’

  ‘Or kidnapped. Bound to say my mind comes back to that.’

  ‘But what would be the point of kidnapping Sir Ambrose?’ Not surprisingly, Miss Pringle’s head was beginning to swim.

  ‘Give him a bad time.’ Captain Bulkington’s reply was alarmingly prompt. ‘And his wife would be no good. Nobody would give twopence to get her back.’

  Miss Pringle restrained an impulse to rise and bolt. Of Captain Bulkington’s substantial madness there could now be no doubt whatever. He existed, as Barbara Vanderpump had averred, in a dream of unachieved crimes. Whether this could be called a hopeful circumstance, Miss Pringle was by no means sure. He is a dreamer – she almost heard herself saying with Julius Caesar – Let us leave him: pass. But one couldn’t be certain. His bite might be as bad as his bark. Miss Pringle (who was already becoming the victim of her own splendid imagination) thought it was worth continuing to take a chance on.

  ‘For the moment,’ she said, ‘let us stick to the central fact. Sir Ambrose is to be your victim. He is going to be killed, and the killer is going to get away with it. But just who – I mean, what sort of person – is going to commit the crime? Have you at all thought, for instance, of somebody rather like yourself?’ Miss Pringle’s voice was more loaded than ever; transparent conspiratorial irony positively clotted it.

  ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ Captain Bulkington laughed so loud and long that Captain Bulkington’s housekeeper, a respectable female, stuck her head through the door of the sanctum, and then withdrew it again. ‘Capital joke, that. Matter of fact, my mind has been moving towards Miss Anketel. Playing around her, you might say. What would you say to her?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of Miss Anketel.’ Miss Pringle was bewildered. ‘Is she a friend of yours?’

  ‘Woman who sat in front of you in church. Thick with the Pinkertons, as a matter of fact. And then there’s the parson, Henry Howard. He ought to come in. Up your street, that. Ratsbane in the Rectory, eh?’

  This was not, as it happened, the title of one of Miss Pringle’s romances of the clergy, but the Captain’s use of it showed that he at least remembered the general character of her work. She sipped her madeira, and wondered whether it would be wise to stay to lunch. Perhaps she should escape; make her way to, say, that interesting White Horse at Calne; and try a little to think things out. Perhaps she ought to call the whole thing off. Any joint enterprise (if that was how to think of it) undertaken with Captain Bulkington was revealing itself as something to which considerable hazards must attach.

  ‘Kidnapping and murder!’ the Captain said suddenly. ‘A double bill, so to speak. How about that?’

  ‘It deserves to be considered, certainly,’ Miss Pringle said, rather desperately. ‘And we might even go further. Arson could be got in, too. And a little forgery. Embezzlement, for that matter.’

  ‘Arson’s quite an idea.’ Captain Bulkington, as he absent-mindedly poured himself more brandy, was plainly pondering deeply. ‘Yes, arson attracts me. The Hall, eh?’

  ‘The Hall?’

  ‘Pinkerton’s place. A pretentious bounder, Pinkerton. Amusing to see the flames licking round him, you think, my dear? A great crackling and roaring there would be, as well as a howling, if one managed a really healthy blaze. Yes, I like that. Not so sure about forgery and what’s-its-name. A shade tame, to my mind. For our readers, that’s to say.’

  There was no doubt that an hour was revealing much. The psychology, or rather the psychopathology, of Captain Bulkington was coming, indeed, alarmingly clear. He seemed not to be a mercenary man. It was true that his devotion to the cause of higher education could be felt as rather a bread-and-butter affair. But every man, after all, has to find a livelihood, and coaching youths and boys was a perfectly honourable means to that end. And his original suggestion to Miss Pringle, although cock-eyed, had not been economically motivated; indeed, he had rather suggested that he was prepared to pay £500 for the fun of having a go at a mystery story and seeing his name in print. But the obverse of all this was disturbing. What compelled the fancy of the Captain on its more morbid side was not any sort of crime that came along; it was decidedly what the law calls crime against the person. The image of Sir Ambrose Pinkerton – surely a blameless enough landed proprietor – howling amid the flames of his collapsing mansion was a shade daunting to one of Miss Pringle’s natural refinement of mind. Collaboration with Captain Bulkington, even although she was proposing to construe ‘collaboration’ in a private and somewhat Pickwickian sense, would require a good deal of finesse. In particular, it would require delicate timing in the final phase of the affair.

  ‘Captain Bulkington,’ Miss Pringle asked with some formality, ‘have you considered what means we might take to launch this joint enterprise?’

  ‘Suggest you move in here.’ The Captain’s reply was prompt and confident. ‘Free bed and board, eh?’ He laughed robustly, apparently unaware that his collaborator had judged his form of words to verge on the indelicate. ‘And I dare say you wouldn’t mind lending a hand with some of the men? Jenkins and Waterbird, for instance. Good for them to have a mature woman about the place. Take their minds off the village girls.’

  ‘Initially, at least, I judge that it would be best to proceed differently.’ Miss Pringle was not sure how she regarded being described as a mature woman, nor whether she altogether relished being envisaged as a socially elevating factor in the libidinous fantasies of Captain Bulkington’s young men. But she was quite clear that she was not prepared to suffer domestication in ‘Kandahar’. ‘I suggest that we correspond. That seems to me the best means of discovering whether something can be worked out.’ Miss Pringle rose on this vague note. ‘And it has been so kind of you to ask me to stay to lunch. Unfortunately I have an engagement with a clerical cousin who lives near Lechlade.’ Like all novelists, Miss Pringle believed in making her lies circumstantial. ‘A Rural Dean. A most charming man
.’

  ‘Aha! Out for a bit of copy, eh? Death at the Deanery. Only, do Rural Deans have Deaneries? I don’t believe they do.’ To Miss Pringle’s surprise, Captain Bulkington appeared unoffended by her abrupt intimation of departure. He led her to the door of the sanctum. ‘Write each other letters, you mean, about whatever dodges we either of us think up?’

  ‘It is something of that sort that is in my mind.’

  ‘Capital! Bound to say I hadn’t thought of it. But it might fit very well.’ Captain Bulkington paused to rub his hands – a gesture which Miss Pringle had not observed him to perform before. ‘The very thing, my dear. Deuced clever suggestion.’ There was something like a new glint in the Captain’s eye. ‘And the sooner we begin the better.’

  ‘No doubt. But there is one condition which, I suggest, must be observed.’ Miss Pringle glanced a shade warily at her private madman (for it was thus that she was coming to think of the Captain). ‘The postal service – particularly in country areas such as we both live in – is not always reliable. In point of confidentiality, I mean.’

  ‘Confidentiality? Prying eyes, steaming letters open and so forth? Perfectly true.’

  ‘In our conversation, Captain Bulkington, we have been led into talking at times almost as if we were contemplating real crime–’

  ‘Good Lord!’ The Captain looked much shocked. ‘But you’re entirely right. Extraordinary thing.’

  ‘A mere shorthand, of course.’

  ‘Just that. You express it deuced well.’

  ‘A façon de parler, in fact.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’ The Captain sounded a little vague on this one. ‘So you would suggest–’

  ‘My own letters will be strictly about the writing of a book. And I have no doubt that your own’ – and Miss Pringle bent upon the Captain what in print she would have described as a subtly ironical regard – ‘I have no doubt that your own will observe a similar discretion.’

  ‘Not a doubt about it. Bear it in mind. Damned good tip. Comes of being a pro.’ Captain Bulkington’s admiration had drawn him into even more than commonly staccato utterance. ‘All plain sailing, eh?’

  ‘I certainly hope so.’

  ‘And about the money, now. Remember some mention of £500, my dear? Would that be about right, if we brought the thing off?’

  ‘For the mere technical know-how for a single simple murder,’ Miss Pringle said with gruesome facetiousness, ‘it would be a most adequate remuneration.’

  The accomplices (as they might whimsically have been called) now made their way into the garden of ‘Kandahar’, and thereafter the Captain courteously proposed to escort his visitor to the front gate.

  ‘Where shall we begin?’ he asked.

  ‘With the outline of a story turning on arson, I suppose, since you tell me you have taken a fancy to that.’

  ‘Arson and murder.’ Captain Bulkington was emphatic. ‘And – do you know? – I think we might have at least a dodge or two in the murdering way first. Yes – I think I’d feel happier with that.’

  ‘Then so be it,’ Miss Pringle said composedly. And she shook hands graciously, and returned to her car.

  7

  It had been a tiring morning, however, and Captain Bulkington’s madeira hadn’t really taken her very far. At Lechlade (near which lived a mythical Rural Dean) there was no doubt a hotel and the prospect of a substantial lunch. But here in Long Canings she had noticed a pub – no more than a pot-house, but bound to respond to a robust call for bread and cheese and a half-pint of bitter. Moreover it bore rather a mysterious name – the Jolly Chairman – and she was always attracted by mysteries. So why not drop in? She might even pick up some useful gossip from the locals as they tanked up before their Sunday dinner. Something of the sort had been, after all, part of her original plan of campaign.

  Miss Pringle turned away from her car, and walked over to this promising hostelry.

  She chose the public rather than the saloon bar, for she was a woman who knew the ropes in such matters. Four village lads were playing darts, and two of them were so young that a magistrate would certainly have frowned upon their frequenting licensed premises. But she knew that in such trivial matters the rule of law does not always obtain in places like Long Canings, since a just entitlement to free beer is attractive to village constables. There was, of course, the graver point of Sabbath Observance, upon which Miss Pringle commonly held unbending views. The darts ought to be locked up. But in the interest of the serious investigation upon which she was engaged it might be reasonable to disregard this.

  The tortoise was also present. A solitary man, he was engaged in feeding sixpences into a fruit machine, tugging the handle, and then standing back to stare at the consequent gyrations of the silly little symbols with morose indifference. Miss Pringle, whose modest order was being quite civilly attended to by the man behind the bar, wondered whether the tortoise could be coaxed into conversation. But a suitable initial topic eluded her. Their common ground, after all, was singularly limited; it might be said to consist of a sermon that hadn’t been preached and two or three hymns so execrably sung that no sane person would want to recall them. She was about to turn her attention to the youths playing darts when the bar door opened and Messrs Jenkins and Waterbird walked in.

  Or rather they made to walk in, hesitated, and then did walk in. The hitch had presumably been occasioned by Miss Pringle, whom they hadn’t expected to see. Or had they? Miss Pringle, professionally acute in the reading of small appearances, found that she wasn’t sure. Had they followed her from ‘Kandahar’ out of idle curiosity? Had they made her a subject of ribald talk – and then had the decency a little to falter when thus impertinently once more in her presence? However this might be, she was not going to show herself put out. There might be information to be extracted from them of a more reliable order than from the tattle of rustics. And it might be amusing, at least, a little to take the wind out of their sails.

  ‘So we meet again!’ Miss Pringle called out cheerfully. ‘It must be to allow me to take the privilege of my years.’ And she laughed what she thought of as a sporting-aunt type of laugh. ‘What would you care to drink?’

  Mr Jenkins (who was the fair and chinless youth) merely let his mouth gape open a little, like a fish feeling a sudden need to extract an extra ration of oxygen from its tank. But Mr Waterbird (who on the other hand might have been proposing to seize and savagely shake the bars of his cage) had more presence of mind.

  ‘Large gin and small tonic,’ he said briskly. ‘And a large tonic and a small gin for the boy.’ And at this he in his turn laughed so heartily that the tortoise turned round to stare, a sixpence held suspended in his hand. Then, quite abruptly, this simian youth changed, as it were, his persona, and became the best type of English public school boy. ‘I don’t think we were really introduced,’ he said, producing a modest smile. ‘This is my friend Ralph Jenkins. And I’m Adrian Waterbird.’

  ‘How do you do? My name is Priscilla Pringle.’ Miss Pringle paused for a moment then, finding Mr Ralph Jenkins apparently indisposed to emend his companion’s facetious suggestion, ordered the gin and tonics as proposed. ‘Why,’ she enquired humorously, when the drinks appeared, ‘are you not both busy with those decisive battles of the world?’

  ‘We nipped out on the quiet,’ Adrian said. ‘Ralph, that’s right?’

  ‘We nipped out,’ Ralph agreed with a gulp.

  ‘It’s all we can do. Treated rather like kids, you see. Ralph?’

  ‘All we can do,’ Ralph said hastily. ‘Kids. That’s it.’

  ‘I say, Miss Pringle – shall we all go and sit outside? Quieter. I’ll carry your sandwiches. We’ve got half an hour before lunch.’ Adrian was already holding open the door. ‘It’s nice to have somebody to talk to. The old Bulgar doesn’t have many visitors.’

  ‘The old Bulgar?’ Miss Pringle echoed. She hoped that she had accurately heard this word.

  ‘Our name for Captain Bulkington. I
think Bulgars are the same as Tartars, more or less.’ Adrian had produced this ethnographical statement with confidence. ‘And he’s that, all right. Ralph?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s an old–’ Ralph seemed a little at sea. ‘Jolly day,’ he said hastily. ‘A shame not to be outside.’

  There was an unkempt garden at the side of the inn, with a few benches and tables, and untenanted except for a dog dismally clanking its chain beside a kennel. They all sat down. Miss Pringle found herself pinning a good deal of hope on the gin – even on the inane Ralph’s small one. She was conscious of being still undesirably short of facts. And particularly of one large psychological fact. How harmless was Captain Bulkington? If complete harmlessness was his true token, she told herself, he was really going to be no use to her at all. Of course if he was dangerous she would have to look out for herself. He might be precisely that to her. But she was a courageous woman. And in the interest of the mighty thought that had come to her she was prepared for a certain amount of risk. Some sense of the character of her hopeful collaborator was the first thing to get hold of. And these two odd young men were living with him in what must be a quite uncomfortable degree of intimacy. It was true they were not clever (although she was not quite sure about the anthropoid yet protean Adrian Waterbird). Nevertheless they must have their view.

  ‘Does Captain Bulkington work you very hard?’ she asked conversationally.

  ‘He certainly does,’ Adrian said decidedly. ‘He has the edge on us, you see. Ralph?’

  ‘That’s it!’ There were signs of Ralph’s being suddenly prompted to voluble speech. ‘You see, he found out–’

  ‘Shut up, Ralph, and drink your kindergarten drench.’ Adrian’s more polite manner had momentarily vanished. ‘It’s just that the Bulgar has got our people – my father and Ralph’s guardian – taped. Our last chance, and so on. I get through this rotten exam, or I’m booked for New South Wales. You see, my family has some property there. But I don’t know anything about it. Full of blacks, I expect.’ Adrian shook his head gloomily. ‘As for Ralph, he’s going to be put in a bicycle factory.’