Carson's Conspiracy by Michael Innes Page A

breakfast-table.
    â€˜Ah!’ he said.
    â€˜The woman was surely quite right to be worried about the non-appearance of her son. He telephones that he has arrived, and then no more is heard of him. One can think of various explanations, some of them merely undutiful. For instance, he may have suddenly gone off after a promising girl. But if I were the Carsons, I’d be ringing round the hospitals.’
    â€˜Carson may well have done that, without alarming his wife by telling her. She may be a little mad, but he’s quite sane and competent. And if he did so and drew a blank, an accident or sudden illness isn’t the explanation, since it’s almost impossible to imagine anything of the kind that could bring in a casualty there was no means of identifying.’
    â€˜Robin might have been robbed, and stripped of anything carrying his name, and be in a coma.’
    â€˜Good heavens, Judith, what a macabre imagination you have! A hospital with that on its hands – and there’s probably not a single such case in all England at this moment – doesn’t let any inquirer get away without a come-look-see. It’s long odds against the missing Robin being anywhere of the sort.’
    â€˜Then where is he?’
    â€˜It’s a good question.’ Appleby didn’t say this with much enthusiasm. ‘Do you know my bet? He took one look at England in this present year of Grace, and bolted back to the USA.’
    â€˜I don’t see that as in the least plausible, John. If Robin Carson is a hypersensitive type, he might certainly back hastily out of England. But it wouldn’t be from a deplorable frying-pan into an equally deplorable fire.’
    â€˜Out of the frying-pan of Paynim rites into the fire of Mahometry.’ Appleby in retirement passed the time with much miscellaneous reading. ‘He’d probably try Kamchatka or the South Pole.’
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    But later that morning Appleby found himself again thinking about the missing Robin Carson. Just why he did so, he didn’t clearly know. Many years before, and when cutting that unusual path for himself through the CID to the surprising elevation of Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, he had been a good deal concerned from time to time with missing persons. Perhaps that was it. But just lately Garford House and its inhabitants had interested him too. Judith had been interested in the gardener, who had worked at Long Dream as a boy. He himself had taken notice of the butler, in whom he recognized a criminal type, hopefully reformed. But the employers of these people had attracted a larger speculation. Carl Carson was somehow rather more than just a scantily educated tycoon. Much in him had been commonplace – as when he had been quick to reveal, or pretend, that he was familiarly acquainted with the Lord Mayor of London, or had – to Judith’s quite improper amusement – described as his ‘grounds’ certain large stretches of lawn interspersed with rectangular beds overfilled with uninteresting modern roses. But, if elusively, there was a strong dash of enterprise in Carson. Commercial enterprise, no doubt. But also, in sudden far-away looks, a hint of something potentially more freakish in that area. He was the sort of man – Appleby told himself – who might one day notice, say, a fire-balloon drifting overhead, and within a fortnight achieve a corner in the manufacture of the things. Fellows with that sort of facility were likely to amass quite a packet in the bank. They were also liable to come a cropper. To come a cropper and bob up again. Carson wasn’t a nice man. Probably he wasn’t at all a nice man. But there was a good deal there, all the same.
    As for Mrs Carson – so ineptly christened Cynthia – her silliness was of an almost endearing kind. ‘A little mad’ was no doubt a fair description of her now, although a mad doctor might describe her as no more