Uneasy Money, P. G. Wodehouse [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

sorts of extraordinary places, you know.”

“He must have been standing quite close to us while we were talking,” said Elizabeth with a shiver.

Bill looked about him. Everywhere was peace. No sinister sounds competed with the creaking of the tree frogs. No alien figures infested the landscape. The only alien figure, that of Mr. Pickering, was wedged into a bush, invisible to the naked eye.

“He’s gone now, at any rate,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

Elizabeth gave another shiver as she glanced hurriedly at the deceased. After life’s fitful fever Eustace slept well, but he was not looking his best.

“With⁠—it?” she said.

“I say,” advised Bill, “I shouldn’t call him ‘it,’ don’t you know. It sort of rubs it in. Why not ‘him’? I suppose we had better bury him. Have you a spade anywhere handy?”

“There isn’t a spade in the place.”

Bill looked thoughtful.

“It takes weeks to make a hole with anything else, you know,” he said. “When I was a kid a friend of mine bet me I wouldn’t dig my way through to China with a pocket knife. It was an awful frost. I tried for a couple of days, and broke the knife and didn’t get anywhere near China.” He laid the remains on the grass and surveyed them meditatively. “This is what fellows always run up against in the detective novels⁠—what to do with the body. They manage the murder part of it all right, and then stub their toes on the body problem.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk as if we had done a murder.”

“I feel as if we had, don’t you?”

“Exactly.”

“I read a story once where a fellow slugged somebody and melted the corpse down in a bathtub with sulphuric⁠—”

“Stop! You’re making me sick!”

“Only a suggestion, don’t you know,” said Bill apologetically.

“Well, suggest something else then.”

“How about leaving him on Lady Wetherby’s doorstep? See what I mean⁠—let them take him in with the morning milk? Or, if you would rather, ring the bell and go away and⁠—you don’t think much of it?”

“I simply haven’t the nerve to do anything so risky.”

“Oh, I would do it. There would be no need for you to come.”

“I wouldn’t dream of deserting you.”

“That’s awfully good of you.”

“Besides, I’m not going to be left alone tonight until I can jump into my little white bed and pull the clothes over my head. I’m scared. I’m just boneless with fright. And I wouldn’t go anywhere near Lady Wetherby’s doorstep with it.”

“Him.”

“It’s no use, I can’t think of it as him. It’s no good asking me to.”

Bill frowned thoughtfully.

“I read a story once where two chappies wanted to get rid of a body. They put it inside a fellow’s piano.”

“You do seem to have read the most horrible sort of books.”

“I rather like a bit of blood with my fiction,” said Bill. “What about this piano scheme?”

“People only have talking machines in these parts.”

“I read a story⁠—”

“Let’s try to forget the stories you’ve read. Suggest something of your own.”

“Well, could we dissect the little chap?”

“Dissect him?”

“And bury him in the cellar, you know. Fellows do it to their wives.”

Elizabeth shuddered.

“Try again,” she said.

“Well, the only other thing I can think of is to take him into the woods and leave him there. It’s a pity we can’t let Lady Wetherby know where he is, she seems rather keen on him. But I suppose the main point is to get rid of him.”

“I know how we can do both. That’s a good idea of yours about the woods. They are part of Lady Wetherby’s property. I used to wander about there in the spring when the house was empty. There’s a sort of shack in the middle of them. I shouldn’t think anybody ever went there⁠—it’s a deserted sort of place. We could leave him there, and then⁠—well, we might write Lady Wetherby a letter or something. We could think out that part afterward.”

“It’s the best thing we’ve thought of. You really want to come?”

“If you attempt to leave here without me I shall scream. Let’s be starting.”

Bill picked Eustace up by his convenient tail.

“I read a story once,” he said, “where a fellow was lugging a corpse through a wood, when suddenly⁠—”

“Stop right there,” said Elizabeth firmly.

During the conversation just recorded Dudley Pickering had been keeping a watchful eye on Bill and Elizabeth from the interior of a bush. His was not the ideal position for espionage, for he was too far off to hear what they said and the light was too dim to enable him to see what it was that Bill was holding. It looked to Mr. Pickering like a sack or bag of some sort. As time went by he became convinced that it was a sack, limp and empty at present but destined later to receive and bulge with what he believed was technically known as the swag. When the two objects of his vigilance concluded their lengthy consultation and moved off in the direction of Lady Wetherby’s woods, any doubts he may have had as to whether they were the criminals he had suspected them of being were dispersed. The whole thing worked out logically.

The Man, having spied out the land in his two visits to Lady Wetherby’s house, was now about to break in. His accomplice would stand by with the sack. With a beating heart Mr. Pickering gripped his revolver and moved round in the shadow of the shrubbery till he came to the gate, when he was just in time to see the guilty couple disappear into the woods. He followed them. He was glad to get on the move again. While he had been wedged into the bush quite a lot of the bush had been wedged into him. Something sharp had pressed against the calf of his leg and he had been pinched in a number of tender places. And he was convinced that one more of God’s unpleasant creatures had got down the back of his neck.

Dudley Pickering moved through the wood as