Carson's Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF

of cash. But in that particular regard moderation was something he didn’t care for. Extradition, moreover, was an engine nowadays conceivably operative even amid the snows of Everest. He had to vanish. Be dead to the world. Dead . That was the crux of the thought that had fleetingly come to him.
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    But at what point, if any, would he actually be breaking the law? As his plan began to take shape, Carson asked himself this question with some anxiety. It must not be thought that, as was the case with young Pluckworthy, he found the notion of illegality attractive or exciting in itself. He would have described himself as a law-abiding man – meaning thereby that he had no impulse to go shoplifting or avoid paying for a dog or television licence. There were, of course, more complex fields in which the largest legal luminaries might differ as to the legitimacy of this or that. In those fields one could allow oneself what might be termed a reasonable private judgement and some freedom of manoeuvre.
    It wasn’t illegal to be dead. It wasn’t even illegal to be content to be believed dead, unless some element of fraud were involved. Was he heading towards fraud? He couldn’t see it. The money he was going to disappear with was his own – or most of it was his own – and this could not be affected by the manner in which he chose to make it immediately available to himself. It was true that, in a few months’ time, various people might be asserting their right to chunks of it. But that would be merely a civil matter, and in any case he wouldn’t himself be taking much interest in such claims. The main point was comfortingly clear. Even if something went wrong – even if, so to speak, they yanked him out of his grave – there would be a good deal of head-scratching before they found out what to charge him with.
    But nothing was going to go wrong. Nothing could go wrong. His plan, although it still had some rough edges he must work on, was simply too clever to go wrong. More precisely, its mainspring was to be so simple yet of so shattering an effect as to place it quite beyond the conceiving of any copper or private eye in England. Had it not started up in his mind like a creation – which is the hallmark, he had somewhere read, of genius on a job? Chaps like Einstein, and the earlier one who had been stopped short by the falling of an apple: their minds had worked that way.
    But neither of these fellow-geniuses had, so far as he knew, been married to a Cynthia. And Cynthia was one of the rough edges. It was going to be a tremendous shock to Cynthia – and what would be the effect of that? With any luck, of course, it would simply send her further up the pole – so wacky that nobody would listen to her. But what if it had the contrary effect? What if his wife turned wholly sane ? What if she announced, not on any trick cyclist’s couch but to some rozzer, dick or flic, even perhaps to a judge, that Robin was an airy nothing, that she’d never had a son? Undeniably, the fat would then be in the fire, all right. But never mind, he said to himself. Never mind; these things take time; time to be over the hills and far away; excelsior!
    This last spirited ejaculation framed itself almost audibly on Carson’s lips as he climbed to the attic for what proved to be his final session with Humphry Lely. Having never had occasion to peruse the poetry of Longfellow, he was unaware that the scrap of dubious Latinity had once accompanied a stiffer ascent and presaged a distinctly chilly end.
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    Artist and sitter entered the improvised studio together. Lely removed the cloth from the easel. They stood side by side, looking at the painting.
    Just this hadn’t happened before. Becoming conscious of the fact, Carson wondered about it. Perhaps there was a convention involved, which he had hitherto obeyed without being aware of it. He had preserved from early days the habit of