A Gross Carriage of Justice

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.

“I have been to the airport,” he announced. “In fact, I had the pleasure of seeing our good friend. Sir Percival, getting his ticket as well. He shall be on our flight, but he will travel first class, of course.” He disregarded the Grrraaagh that came from Briggs at the hated name. “He sends his best, by the way.”

“What he can do with his best—” Briggs began.

Carruthers disregarded this. Instead he tapped his breast pocket.

“I also picked up our tickets. Our flight is at one this afternoon. It will give us ample time to complete our packing and have a leisurely drink at the airport before departure. Luncheon will be served aboard the aircraft, I have been reasonably assured.”

“At what price?” Briggs asked sourly.

“At no charge. You will also be both surprised as well as gratified, to learn that tipping is not only discouraged but is actually prohibited aboard aircraft.”

“A pity the bloody Sunderland didn’t have wings,” Briggs said darkly, thinking back on the nicking their pocketbooks had taken in that regard aboard the vessel. He forced his mind from the unhappy memory of the voyage, in favor of more important business. He cleared his throat, trying to sound insouciant and almost succeeding. “Why don’t I meet you two at the airport?”

Simpson looked up at him, surprised. “Aren’t we all going down together?”

“I think I’ll go ahead,” Briggs said lightly, and came to his feet. “I’m all packed, you know. I’ll just take my little airplane bag with me. I’d appreciate it if you could sling my other bag into the taxi with yours when you go down there.” He saw the questioning look that remained on Simpson’s face, and added a bit lamely, “I just want to do a little last minute sightseeing, you know. And possibly a little personal business.” He raised a hand. “Ta, then. See you at the airport around one-ish. No need to get there too early, I suppose—”

Billy-Boy smiled at him gently.

“Sit down, Tim,” he said quietly.

“But I’ve got this—”

“Sit down, Tim. There is no reason for any of us to get to the airport early, especially you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Carruthers said with a faint smile, “that I’ve been through your airplane bag, and I’m afraid I had to remove several items. So why not sit down and relax?”

Briggs paled. He tried to bluster, but the words wouldn’t come out. Simpson merely looked mystified, Carruthers turned to Simpson and explained. There was still a benign look on his pleasant, round face, and the smile remained on his lips, but the china-blue eyes were hard.

“Clifford,” he said, “do you know what our small reprobate friend here was attempting to do? He had a small placard in his airplane bag, apparently purchased in one of the novelty shops here. It reads: out of order.”

Simpson’s look of bewilderment merely intensified. “Oh?”

“Yes. Our friend Briggs has also been visiting the airport,” Carruthers went on coldly, “probably when we were napping. He has helped himself to some of those forms in the little box beside the contraption that dispenses air-insurance to any who wish it. Most of the forms, I imagine, if not all of them.”

Simpson looked at Briggs in astonishment.

“Our larcenous friend was planning on attaching his sign to the insurance-vending machine. He then intended to sell the insurance to anyone who approached, wishing that service. He intended to use the proper form put out by the company, but instead of allowing the coins to go into the proper slot, of course, he intended to collect the fees himself. The only thing out of order is Timothy Briggs,” Carruthers finished flatly. He turned to Briggs who was trying his best to look indignant at this violation of his privacy. “Tim, you utter idiot, have you considered what would happen if, perchance, the airplane might crash?”

“What?” Briggs asked defiantly.

“You know very well what! Bookmakers without proper funds to back them up probably furnish the River police with as much work dredging up their bodies as do paupers, or university students walking the Embankment railing after a night on the town!”

“You don’t think I intended to countersign the bloody forms with my own name, do you?” Briggs exclaimed hotly. “Or put down my proper address?” He seemed more upset by the implied charge of stupidity than by having been caught.

“Still,” Simpson said, having had time to digest what was occurring, “we’d be on the plane, too, so they could hardly hope to collect if it did crash, don’t you see? I mean from Tim, of course.”

While being incurably honest, Clifford Simpson was also logical. And while veracity was important to him, in his time he had been known to direct that honesty in advantageous ways. His conscience, in fact, would undoubtedly have caused any professor studying it to consider changing professions, or to babble.

“And if the plane didn’t crash,” Simpson went on, now caught up in the thing, “the passengers would have gotten their money’s worth. The insurance company couldn’t do any better than that for them, don’t you see? If the plane didn’t crash, that is.” He puffed on his cigar while he thought a moment more, and then nodded. “It really isn’t a bad idea at that, you know. If Tim got started right now, he could probably still get a few of them coming in to pick up their tickets—”

“Clifford, stop it! It’s fraud,” Carruthers said angrily.

“Of course,” Simpson said, agreeing readily. “But we don’t really know if the insurance company pays off either, do we? In case of a crash, I mean. After all, there are so few air accidents these days...” His voice became dreamy with memory. “I remember I wanted to use insurance fraud in a story I wrote many years ago — not about airplanes, of course, since there were only a few Spads and Camels about at the time — but I really couldn’t see what was so fictional about it, so I dropped the idea. I don’t imagine insurance companies are any less fraudulent these days—”

Carruthers’ large hand slammed down on the table, making their brandy glasses jump and causing a man at a nearby table, eating prawns with a toothpick, to stab himself painfully in the cheek. He looked at Carruthers reproachfully a moment and then forewent the toothpick to continue eating the prawns with his fingers.

“Now listen, you two reprobates,” Carruthers said, keeping his voice down but using a tone the others knew meant Billy-Boy was not — as Clarence W. Alexander would have put it — playing potsie. “I believe I went through this entire routine once before for you, aboard the Sunderland. There is to be an end to chicanery, do you understand? There is to be no more fiddling! I told you before of that fine American author who lost a book-club sale of an accounting of our activities in the Murder League because we were naughty. Should that same fine and worthy American writer at any time in the future put into print our adventures since then, would you wish to deprive him of a possible book-club sale, through the needless repeating of our errors? As ex-writers ourselves, would that be cricket?”

Briggs stared at him in amazement.

“We commit ten murders,” he said unbelievingly, “we push people from underground platforms—”

“We did, didn’t we?” Simpson said, remembering, and added his bit. “We tossed them over hotel railings—”

“We poison their beer—” Briggs went on.

“We cosh them with soap bars wrapped in washcloths,” Simpson said, getting into the spirit of the thing.

“We push fish slices in their throats, we drop them down elevator shafts,” Briggs went on, “and you cavil at selling insurance to a bunch of blokes who ought to know better than to risk their lives flying in the first place—?”

“Tim may be right,” Simpson said thoughtfully. “Think of all the money you and I took from those card sharpers on board the Sunderland, Billy-Boy. I know at the moment you claimed it was all right because it was merely the biter-bit ploy, but—” He shrugged.

“Money we didn’t even get to keep,” Briggs said bitterly. “That so-called captain impounded it for evidence, and that was the last we saw of it! And as for that bloody, blithering, blaggedy blister of a bleary American writer!” he added hotly.

“Enough!” Carruthers raised his hand over the table again, but lowered it in deference to the suddenly cringed shoulders of the prawn-eater, watching defensively from the corner of his eye. “There will be no further discussion,” Carruthers said quietly but firmly. “Our investments in the Namibian Chartered Mines” — he tapped the money belt about his middle that contained the certificates of the shares, for Carruthers had not trusted banks since he had investigated them in 1922 for a book he was doing entitled Vaulted Vultures — ”give us sufficient returns to handle our meager needs. There is no necessity for doing anything not completely legitimate. From now on we will live the easy and blameless lives men our age are supposed to live. I myself shall probably take up the growing of roses. I would suggest daisies for you, Tim, as they grow closer to the ground. And possibly sunflowers for you, Cliff.”

He drew a pocket watch from the depths of a vest pocket of his bilious suit and consulted it. His eyes came up.

“And now I suggest we begin gathering together our effects. We should not care to miss a final libation at the airport before embarking. And when we do, we shall toast” — he paused for a stern look at his two companions — “we shall drink to an end to malfeasance, at least on our part. For one thing, we’re too old. We shall toast the start of the peaceful, the relaxed, the rewarding life...”