I well-I’ll-be-dashed. He had surprised me.
‘Surely you aren’t suggesting that he would frisk me?’
‘I think it highly possible, sir. In the conversation which I overheard, Mr. Spode gave me the Jmpression of being prepared to stop at nothing. If you will give me the object, I will see that Miss Byng restores it to the collection room at the earliest possible moment.’
I mused, but not for long. I was only too pleased to get rid of the beastly thing.
‘Very well, if you say so. Here you are. Though I think you’re wronging Spode.’
‘I think not, sir.’
And blow me tight if he wasn’t right. Scarcely had I steered the car into the stable yard, when a solid body darkened the horizon, and there was Spode, looking like Chief Inspector Witherspoon about to make a pinch.
‘Wooster!’ he said.
‘Speaking,’ I said.
‘Get out of that car,’ he said. ‘I’m going to search it.’
12
I was conscious of a thrill of thankfulness for Jeeves’s prescience, if prescience is the word I want. I mean that uncanny knack he has of peering into the future and forming his plans and schemes well ahead of time. But for his thoughtful diagnosis of the perils that lay before me, I should at this juncture have been deep in the mulligatawny and no hope of striking for the shore. As it was, I was able to be nonchalant, insouciant and debonair. I was like the fellow I once heard Jeeves speak of who was armed so strong in honesty that somebody’s threats passed by him as the idle wind, which he respected not. I think if Spode had been about three feet shorter and not so wide across the shoulders, I would have laughed a mocking laugh and quite possibly have flicked my cambric handkerchief in his face.
He was eyeing me piercingly, little knowing what an ass he was going to feel before yonder sun had set. ‘I have just searched your room.’
‘You have? You surprise me. Looking for something, were you?’
‘You know what I’m looking for. That amber statuette you said your uncle would be so glad to have.’
‘Oh, that? I understood it was in the collection room.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘A usually well-informed source.’
‘Well, it is no longer in the collection room. Somebody has removed it.’
‘Most extraordinary.’
‘And when I say “somebody”, I mean a slimy sneak thief of the name of Wooster. The thing isn’t in your bedroom, so if it is not in your car, you must have it on you. Turn out your pockets.’
I humoured his request, largely influenced by the fact that there was so much of him. A Singer midget would have found me far less obliging. The contents having been placed before him, he snorted in a disappointed way, as if he had hoped for better things, and dived into the car, opening drawers and looking under cushions. And Stiffy, coming along at this moment, drank in his vast trouser seat with a curious eye.
‘What goes on?’ she asked.
This time I did laugh that mocking laugh. It seemed to be indicated.
‘You know that black eyesore thing that was on the dinner table? Apparently it’s disappeared, and Spode has got the extraordinary idea that I’ve pinched it and am holding it… what’s the word . . . Not incognito . . . Incommunicado, that’s it. He thinks I’m holding it incommunicado.’
‘He does?’
‘So he says.’
‘Man must be an ass.’
Spode wheeled around, flushed with his excesses. I was pleased to see that while looking under the seat he had got a bit of oil on his nose. He eyed Stiffy bleakly.
‘Did you call me an ass?’
‘Certainly I did. I was taught by a long series of governesses always to speak the truth. The idea of accusing Bertie of taking that statuette.’
‘It does sound silly,’ I agreed. ‘Bizarre is perhaps the word.’
‘The thing’s in Uncle Watkyn’s collection room.’
‘It is not in the collection room.’
‘Who says so?’
‘I say so.’
‘Well, I say it is. Go and look, if you don’t believe me. Stop that, Bartholomew, you blighted dog!’ bellowed Stiffy, abruptly changing the subject, and she hastened off on winged feet to confer with the hound, who had found something in, I presumed, the last stages of decay and was rolling on it. I could follow her train of thought. Scotties at their best are niffy. Add to their natural bouquet the aroma of a dead rat or whatever it was, and you have a mixture too rich for the human nostril. There was a momentary altercation, and Bartholomew, cursing a good deal as was natural, was hauled off tubwards.