Carson's Conspiracy by Michael Innes Page B

– and unusual – admiration at his employer. ‘But why pick on me to be the victim of this bogus kidnapping? Is it because I talked some nonsense about that portrait being a shade like me – and therefore your son and I having a possible lick of one another?’
    â€˜It did cross my mind, Peter, as being conceivably useful. But it’s not much of an idea, is it? I pick on you because you’re a reliable man.’
    â€˜Thank you very much. By the way, there isn’t a real Robin Carson, is there?’
    â€˜Of course not.’ Carson – as he had resolved to do – took this point quite casually. ‘But everybody believes there is. It’s quite extraordinary. And if you are an exception, it says something for your wits.’
    â€˜The plan does say something for yours. The police can’t rescue Robin, because Robin doesn’t exist.’
    â€˜And they can’t capture the kidnappers, because they don’t exist either.’
    At this, Peter Pluckworthy laughed abruptly – and also rather loudly, so that the two fat men at the nearby table turned to stare at him.
    â€˜I suppose,’ he asked, ‘it has to be rather a spectacular kidnap – enough to engage at least a mite of attention by the media?’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜Has it occurred to you, Carl, that to make the papers with the kidnapping of a non-person by other non-persons will be technically on the demanding side?’
    â€˜That’s where you and I put our heads together,’ Carson said.

 
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6
    So it was a conspiracy. Carl Carson was well aware that ‘conspiracy’ was a word much endeared to Attorneys General and Directors of Public Prosecutions. To be a conspirator was held – for some totally irrational reason – to be considerably more heinous than to be a crook on one’s own. And, as soon as they began to move in concert, he and Peter Pluckworthy were conspirators.
    Or were they? Carson had a great respect for the law. He liked, that is to say, to think of legality in generous and comprehensive terms. As spreading wide, in fact. A man mustn’t be too ready to feel himself outside it. Lawyers themselves understood this, and plenty of them were prepared to exercise great powers of mind to make juries believe, and therefore judges declare, that their client’s intentions, and even actions, had been as blameless as the skipping of lambs in spring. So although he and Pluckworthy were now undoubtedly cooking up something together, could it really be regarded as a course of conduct insusceptible of some sort of favourable interpretation in the hands of a wily chap in a wig and gown?
    Carson spent a little time considering his position in this hopeful light. The money involved was, he reiterated to himself, his own – or at least it would be difficult to prove that any very substantial part of it was not. For his own legitimately private purposes – he heard this admirable barrister explain – Mr Carson had been obliged to make various redispositions which, if they became public, might readily be so misinterpreted as to occasion alarm and despondency among the minor investing classes. This he had been magnanimously prepared to go to considerable trouble to avoid. So, being a man of some imagination and resource, he had evolved a plan, in itself no more than a harmless and amusing prank…
    On ‘prank’, however, he pulled himself up – detecting in the word what scribbling fellows called a hollow ring. You can’t fake, any more than you can actually effect, a robustly sensational kidnapping and holding to ransom without prompting a good deal of activity by the police. Extensive police operations in such a field cost money, and – at least in the pious sort of theory that would be advanced – divert the forces of the law from more fruitful activities. If on nothing else, they’d get you on that.
    So