Carson's Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

and bizarre statement preparatory to making a ludicrous but scandalous claim upon him: declaring, in fact, that he was his employer’s bastard son and entitled to cash in upon the fact. For a wild moment, Carson even wondered whether this could conceivably be true. He had no sooner seen that it could not than he came by a less disconcerting but yet faintly disturbing perception. There was a certain validity in what Pluckworthy had said. Between Carson’s portrait as it was evolving itself on the canvas and the young man now staring at it a fortuitous resemblance did exist. Pluckworthy might look rather like this when he was turned fifty. Alternatively, Lely’s work suggested that Carson might have looked rather like Pluckworthy twenty-five years ago. In addition to which, there was the further corollary – whimsical, indeed – that if Robin Carson had existed he might have been not unlike the young man now gaping at Robin’s putative father’s portrait.
    But the thing was elusive, as Pluckworthy himself had said. There was nothing striking about it. All that it need have suggested was the reflection that Peter Pluckworthy must have had his own photographic image much at his command. Carson, however, found himself otherwise affected. It might have been said of him that – like the boy who springs up from his knees in Robert Browning’s poem – he had been stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
    â€˜Perhaps so,’ Carson said – casually, but favouring his assistant with a hard look the while. ‘However, you needn’t go round prating about it. And now, we’ll get you a drink, and you’d better be off. But don’t, in the next day or two, find yourself too far from your telephone. I’ll be contacting you.’

 
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    Although the thought was from the first indeed a splendid one, it was only gradually, and with a good deal of groping, that the elements of Carson’s conspiracy came together in his mind. At first it was hardly a conspiracy at all, since he saw himself as a lone operator, manoeuvring and manipulating other people, but taking nobody into his confidence.
    He had been much struck by the sagacity of Pluckworthy’s warning about the hazardousness of being detected as drawing in his horns. It went without saying that for what he had begun to contemplate with some urgency he would require a great deal of ready money, or at least of what was the next thing to that in his peculiar world. But if he started liquidating assets in a big way, and with no apparent financial or commercial objective in view, there would soon be plenty of people asking why. Of course he could go to work cautiously, so that eventually adequate funds were free and within his instant grasp. But the more he thought about one probing or another of his affairs that might already be going on, the less leisure did he see for anything of the kind. He had to create a situation, a crisis situation that yet held no hint of his true design, in which his suddenly requiring a great deal of ready money would appear not merely blameless but positively laudable.
    Carson possessed, as has been recorded, very considerable resources in the imaginative way. Had he become a scientist, he might well have been one exceptionally fertile in the crucial field of forming hypotheses. As a novelist or playwright, he would not have eschewed extravagant situations and hazardous tours de force . Addressing himself to his present problem, and examining its various facets as here outlined, he had found all sorts of promising schemes coming into his head. But when, one by one, he chased them up he invariably came on a serious snag. He thought, for example, of being stricken by some rare disease requiring years of costly treatment somewhere in the Himalayas. That would at least get him out of the country – perhaps uncomfortably on a stretcher, but at least moderately provided for in the way