Carson's Conspiracy by Michael Innes Page A

But Pluckworthy, who at least for a space was continuing to control the situation, would have nothing of this.
    â€˜Quit it, Carl,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘If you behave like all the conspirators in Rome, people will really start getting interested in you. Perfect strangers – those two fat men at the table in the window, for instance – will do their best to listen in, just as a matter of idle curiosity. Unwind, and keep it chatty, old boy.’
    Carson, although resigned to his underling’s use of his Christian name, resented ‘old boy’ as intolerably familiar. ‘Chatty’, however, reminded him that the occasion was eminently one on which Pluckworthy had to be chatted up. And, of course, bought, as well. There would be a haggle over the figure later. At the moment, he was relying chiefly on what he judged to be the young man’s temperamental liking for a wild-cat scheme.
    â€˜Cat-naps,’ Pluckworthy said telepathically. ‘We’d got as far as cat-naps. Or, rather, we’d advanced from that to kidnaps. Carry on from there.’
    â€˜You’re going to carry on from there, my boy.’ Carson had resolved to be spirited. ‘You’re going to be kidnapped, believe you me. But not as a mere nobody called Peter Pluckworthy…’
    â€˜Thank you very much.’
    â€˜Just keep your mouth shut for a minute, and listen. You’re going to be kidnapped – at or near Heathrow, I think – as my son.’
    â€˜Your son? Don’t make me laugh.’
    â€˜Yes – my son.’ Carson, although he reiterated this firmly, was checked for a moment. There came back to him the suspicion that Pluckworthy knew . But that was really neither here nor there, since the fact of the non-existence of the person in question could be acquiesced in at once, if need be.
    â€˜Robin?’ Pluckworthy asked – surely teasingly. ‘The one Cynthia sometimes tells me you meet up with at that dear little Mustique?’
    â€˜Yes – Robin. As Robin Carson you’re going to be kidnapped. Kidnapped and held to ransom. Get?’
    â€˜I get.’ Pluckworthy’s eyes had rounded in a fashion that Carson judged distinctly hopeful. ‘The hell of a big ransom, no doubt?’
    â€˜Big, but not out of all reason big. Enough to set me up very comfortably elsewhere.’
    â€˜Key Biscayne, perhaps? I seem to have heard of it too.’
    â€˜Of course not. Somewhere, naturally, that I’ve never been to before.’
    â€˜A new and purer life. But just where is the ransom-money coming from? A guild of philanthropists?’
    â€˜The money will be my own, naturally.’ Carson couldn’t resist a note of modest pride as he said this. ‘But, of course, getting it together is the ticklish thing. If word were to get round that I was drastically increasing my liquidity ratio, the fat would be in the fire at once. You do see that?’
    â€˜Yes, of course.’ Pluckworthy was impatient before this elementary fact. ‘If a dubious character like you, Carl, suddenly exhibits a marked liquidity preference, the prison gates pretty well begin to yawn.’
    â€˜You can put it that way, if you like.’ Carson, naturally, wasn’t too pleased by this unseemly expression. ‘But everybody knows that ransom-money has to be got together in the most hush-hush way. It has to be managed, for instance, so that the police can say they know nothing of your intention to pay up. So here will be me, going ever so quietly round, moaning “My son, my son!”…’
    â€˜Moaning “Pluckworthy, Pluckworthy!”, you mean.’
    â€˜I’ve told you to shut your trap, haven’t I? Everybody will be tremendously sympathetic, and make no end of necessary transfers and cashing of cheques just as quietly as may be.’
    â€˜You have a point there.’ Pluckworthy glanced with a certain