Patricia Wentworth - Beggar’s Choice

“What do you mean?”

“What I say-somebody met me.”

“Somebody met you here?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know how. I thought perhaps you did.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said,

“Who met you, Mr. Fairfax?”

“A lady,” I said.

“You don’t know who she was?”

“Oh yes, I know; but if you don’t, I can’t very well tell you.”

“A lady? A lady?”

I thought it was a blow to him. Then he seemed to pull himself together.

“What happened?” he said.

“She took me for a drive.”

“She took you for a drive?” There was the extreme of surprise in his voice.

“For a nice country drive,” I said.

“At ten o’clock at night?”

“From ten to eleven,” I replied.

I could hear him beat on the wheel with an exasperated hand.

“Mr. Fairfax, you’re not serious!”

“Oh, but I am.”

“On your word of honor?”

“I’ll take an affidavit if you like.”

He said, “Well, well-” and made a clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth. Then he asked me point-blank “Who was this woman?”

I didn’t say anything.

He hit the wheel again.

“Where did she take you?”

I thought I’d let fly at a venture. If he didn’t know anything, I shouldn’t be telling him anything; and if he knew already, there wouldn’t be anything to tell.

“She took me to Linwood Edge,” I said-and I’d have given a good deal to be able to see his face.

There was a complete and hollow silence. I could hear two branches rubbing against each other somewhere overhead where the trees crossed one another along the wall, and I could hear the sound of traffic on a main road a long way off. It’s funny how town things and country things sound alike in the distance. That noise of cars and lorries and trams passing each other on a tarred road had just the sound of waves coming in on a pebble beach after a storm. I thought of that whilst I was waiting for him to speak. I had to wait a long time.

When he did speak, I could tell by his voice that he had turned away from me and was looking into the dark ahead of him. He said,

“Get in, Mr. Fairfax, and sit down. We shan’t be driving down to Linwood to-night.”

I hesitated for a moment. then I got in.

There was one curious thing about these talks with Z.10 Smith-I would go to ring him up or to meet him, feeling how damned fishy the whole thing was, but the minute I began to talk to him, the oddest interview seemed to be perfectly ordinary and respectable; before I had been talking to him for half a minute I felt as if I was being interviewed by my bank manager or my solicitor. I suppose it’s partly something dry and prosaic about his voice, and partly the little jerky way he has of putting his pince-nez straight-but there it is, and it must be a tremendous asset to him if he’s on the cross.

Well, I sat down and waited for him to begin. He’d got his glasses off, and I think he was polishing them-out of sheer habit, I suppose, for the place was nearly as dark as a shut room. I could just see the spokes of the wheel and his hands fidgeting to and fro, and once or twice his pince-nez caught the very little faint light there was. He finished polishing them and put them on. He was sitting well into his own corner facing me.

“So you want to throw up your job, Mr. Fairfax?” he began.

I said, “I can’t throw up what I haven’t got. If you give me a job, I’ll do it; but I can’t go on taking money which I’m not doing anything to earn.”

“And yet,” he said, “jobs aren’t so easy to get. You’ve had some experience of that, I think.”

I said, “Yes.” I tried not to sound as depressed as I felt. I’d been too near the gutter to feel cheerful about giving up the best part of a hundred and fifty pounds and the promise of more to come.

“Well, perhaps you’ll change your mind,” he said. “We can talk first, and you can make your decision afterwards. Perhaps when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say-”

I wanted him to get on and say it, but he’d got his own elderly, fussy way of doing business. It was one of the things that made him seem so respectable. I couldn’t help thinking that a sharp crook would have come to the point long ago-but perhaps that’s what he wanted me to think. This sort of business makes one most frightfully suspicious. I was determined not to speak first. In the end he said about the last thing in the world that I could have expected:

“I believe you have an uncle, Mr. Fairfax.”

It made me jump, because, naturally, I hadn’t been thinking about my uncle. I expect he thought me facetious because I came out with,

“Most people have.”

He clicked with his tongue against his teeth in a reproving sort of way.

“Your uncle is Mr. John Carthew of Linwood?”

I made amends by saying “Yes,” as soberly as I could.

“Now, Mr. Fairfax-why has your uncle not come to your assistance in the straits to which you have from time to time been reduced?”

“That,” I said, “is his affair.”

“Well-it might be said to concern you-yes, it might be said to concern you rather intimately. If Mr. Carthew did not assist you, it was not from lack of means to do so. He is, I believe, a man of large property and ample means.”

“I believe so.”

“What, in fact, would be correctly described as a wealthy man.”

“I suppose so.”

“Mr. Carthew is not married?”

“He is a widower.”

“A childless widower?”

“Yes.”

He moved slightly. I thought he leaned a little forward.

“You were, naturally, brought up to consider yourself his heir?”

I took a moment to think about this. It’s very difficult to be sure just what one had thought about a thing like that.

I said, “I don’t know-I don’t think I thought about it very much-I don’t really think that I thought about it at all-not before the smash anyhow.”

“And after the smash?” he said.

“Well, then I knew for a dead cert that I was right off the map.”

“Your uncle gave you to understand that he wouldn’t do anything for you?”

I wondered what on earth he was driving at. It seemed to me that we were working round to the Anna Lang business again. I couldn’t see what it had got to do with him anyhow.

“My uncle and I had a quarrel,” I said-“and that was the end of any prospects I might have had. I’ve never seen him nor heard from him since.”

Mr. Smith leaned forward again. I could see his hand move on the wheel.

“Exactly. And you very naturally experienced some resentment?”

I didn’t see what it had got to do with him if I had.

“That’s my affair,” I said.

“You’re very cautious, Mr. Fairfax, But you can speak freely. Any young man of spirit must have felt resentment at being treated in the way that you were treated. I really think”-he leaned back again-“I really think that we may take your indignation and resentment for granted, and that being the case, we may proceed to my next point.”

I nearly said, “Get on, you old stick-in-the-mud!” but his frightfully respectable manner kept me just politely attentive.

“Feelings of anger and resentment,” he went on, “are, of themselves, of no practical use; but if you were accorded an opportunity of translating these very natural feelings into action, what, I wonder, would be your attitude?”

This was coming to the point with a vengeance. In his long-winded and respectable manner, Z.10 appeared to be “offering me the opportunity” of knocking my uncle on the head, or tipping him into a pond, or perhaps merely picking his pocket or what not. There was a beautiful rolling vagueness about “translating my very natural feelings of anger and resentment into action.” I would have liked to draw him, but I didn’t think it was decent. I wasn’t going to discuss my uncle with him, and I was feeling a bit hot about his butting in on my family affairs, so I said pretty stiffly,