Clarence studied the benign and fleshy features of the corpulent man in the bilious mustard-colored suit, and smiled to himself. It would be a bit like clubbing carp in a rain barrel, he admitted to himself, but if he couldn’t sell a fake-genuine diamond stickpin, or a gold brick, to anyone with that taste in clothes, he would retire and take up needlepoint. No, he decided, the best way was the easiest way. Just take the money away from them as quickly and painlessly as possible, send them about their business, and go on about life.
His mind made up and the little wheels in his head now purring along beautifully, meshing with lovely synchronization as he perfected the final details of his basically simple plan, Clarence came to his feet and tilted his head toward the bar.
“Order something while I check on Gibraltar Air schedules, will you, Hal?” he asked. “Something,” he added, thinking about it, “other than beer.”
“Air schedules?” Harold asked, confused. “Hey, Clare, why do you want air schedules? We can’t go home yet, can we? We goin’ someplace different, Clare?”
But Harold was addressing a vacant bench, for Clarence was already at the telephone booth, leafing through the proper volume for the number of Air Gibraltar. It was a pity that Clarence did not have the prescience to pay a visit on Sir Percival Pugh, or even to chat with Captain Manley-Norville of the S.S. Sunderland, asking for all available information regarding the three old men. In that case there is no doubt that Clarence would have dropped the telephone book like a hot offer of respectable employment and would have returned, with gratitude, to his drink, whatever it was, shaking his head at his narrow escape...
Chapter 2
As a result of one of those very odd coincidences which are the despair of statisticians but the delight of authors needing them for their plots, the very same edition of the very same Sunday supplement in color which had intrigued Clarence Alexander with its financial possibilities — and which had so warmed the cockles of Harold Nishbagel’s heart — on the very next morning was having quite an opposite effect upon one of the three subjects of the article. Timothy Briggs, seated with Clifford Simpson at a small metal table on the veranda of their modest hotel in Gibraltar, put aside his brandy, took no notice of the champagne nestling in a bucket at his side, and gripped his copy of the Sunday supplement crushingly as he read the article for a second time. He shook his head and sneered openly.
“...after enjoying a pleasant cruise on the luxurious S.S. Sunderland!” he quoted with blistering sarcasm. “That miserable tub!”
Timothy Briggs was a tiny mite of a man with a temper that easily made up for his lack of size. His iron-gray hair seemed to stand on end, as if from the electricity generated by his own jerky but constant movements, or by his explosive temperament; it made him look like an upright bath brush suffering from static. His small face, seamed with a network of wrinkles, was dominated by his small but exceedingly sharp, snapping black eyes. Timothy Briggs, it often seemed to his two friends, went through life demanding to be taken advantage of, just so he could properly respond. Nor — at least to his own mind — was he often disappointed.
“It makes one wonder,” he went on bitterly, “just what the British Merchant Marine is coming to, when they license some overhauled ferryboat like the Sunderland, and call it a cruise ship. And put a clown like that Manley-Norville on as captain! Couldn’t properly run a collier on the Tyne, in my opinion! And did you notice?” he added querulously. “They had the utter gall to fly the Union Jack, instead of the skull-and-crossbones! With those prices!”
Clifford Simpson merely puffed on his cigar and smiled gently. Simpson, after knowing Briggs — as the newspaper article had noted in one of its extremely few correct statements — for over five decades, had become accustomed to the other’s tendency to exaggerate. Simpson was a very tall man, roughly twice the height of his companion, and almost painfully thin, who went through life with a constant expression of wonder on his slightly horselike face, as if silently marveling at the foibles of this earth of ours. He looked, in general, like a perpetually pondering pipe-cleaner, usually dressed in fuzzy tweed.
“Come now, Tim,” he said in a rather amused, quite reasonable tone of voice, waving his Corona-Corona gently as he spoke, “the S.S. Sunderland is considered the finest British cruise ship afloat. Its captain is considered England’s finest mariner. The fact that we got ourselves kicked off the ship by getting ourselves into trouble—”
“You mean because I was getting into trouble, don’t you?” Briggs demanded belligerently.
“As you say,” Simpson said, agreeing. Clifford Simpson was one of those men with the unfortunate habit of honesty. He shrugged elaborately and brushed ash into an ashtray on the table. “After all, dousing yourself with perfume and painting yourself with lip-rouge and pretending you were having a blazing affair with that poor girl aboard ship — and expecting to be believed, at your age! If it hadn’t been for the services of Sir Percival Pugh—”
“Pugh!” Briggs made it sound like a homophone. It was the one name above all others guaranteed to raise the small man’s hackles. “That twister! That thief! That penny-pinching miser! If he were a pot I’d bet he’d call the kettle collect! Not that he isn’t a pot, mind you,” Briggs added, thinking about it. “If it hadn’t been for Pugh we’d never have been on the bloody boat in the first place!”
Clifford Simpson stared at his companion through the smoke of his cigar. Even for Tim Briggs, this was a bit much.
“Come, now, Tim!” he said in a tone that attempted to bring some degree of reason into the conversation. “Do you mean to say that if it hadn’t been for Pugh’s intervention when I was charged — quite accurately, as we both know — with murder, we might never have won the Jarvis award? And thereby been able to afford the cruise?” Simpson shook his head reprovingly. “Really, Tim! How convoluted can a person’s thinking get? Even yours?”
“What I meant was—” Briggs began, and then stopped. He actually had no idea of what he meant. It was merely that to mention Sir Percival Pugh to Tim Briggs was like waving a copy of The Worker at a Tory. But he was saved the necessity of explaining himself, because at that moment the third member of the triumvirate that had won the Jarvis G-L-H-N-M Foundation award the previous year — as well as comprising the now-defunct Murder League — arrived. He was puffing a bit from his climb up the hill.
William Carruthers — Billy-Boy to his friends — was a rotund, cherubic-looking man with exceedingly bright china-blue eyes set in a round face beneath a halo of pure white hair. Billy-Boy Carruthers looked like a Kewpie doll that had been allowed to weather over too long a period of time; he looked the sort of perfect stranger that doting mothers would entrust their little babies to before ducking into a pub for a quick one. He might easily have played the part of an American senator on stage or screen, if an American senator could be pictured as benign, or as wearing a suit of a particularly nauseating shade of mustard yellow.
He seated himself with the other two, tapped the table significantly to draw the attention of a rather languorous waiter more interested in snapping a napkin at flies, waited until, at last, he had been furnished with a pony of brandy and a glass for the champagne, and then drank first the one after which he chased it with the other. These essentials of civilized conversation attended to, he burped gently, raised his eyes in the required apology, dabbed at his full lips with his handkerchief, tucked it back into his jacket sleeve, and beamed in genial fashion at his two companions.