Carson's Conspiracy by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

satisfaction with the Punters ought to have been unflawed.
    He had nevertheless come to distrust them – and this in a direction that was distinctly odd. Had he taken it into his head that they constituted the avant-garde of a gang of professional burglars, covertly engaged in taking impressions of latch-keys and expertly examining the signatures on oil-paintings and the authenticating marks on the under-side of porcelain figurines, he would have been succumbing merely to the normal anxieties of a man of property. But it was another system of suspicions that Carson had found gaining on him.
    The under-side he had one day himself given way to looking at was that of his telephone. Of this particular telephone he was rather proud. It didn’t trail a flex. (In this it was probably like the red one habitually toted round by the President of the United States.) He could carry it, or it could be brought to him, anywhere in the house, or even within the nearer reaches of the garden, and put into operation straight away. It was this harmless toy that, being one day alone in the house, he had found himself inverting and studying with care. In other words, there had presented itself to him the dreaded spectre of being bugged. He was suddenly apprehensive that within the sanctity of his own home industrial espionage had reared its ugly head.
    He knew that it was silly. He knew that it was in the Far East – in Singapore and Hong Kong and such places – that the anti-bugging people had found a happy hunting-ground of gullible tycoons convinced they were being thus pried into. He even had some money in that sort of thing himself. It was vanity that the anti-bugging crowd preyed upon; it ministered to a man’s self-importance to believe that his mere chit-chat was valuable to other people.
    The telephone had looked wholly innocent. But that told you nothing. He got a screwdriver and opened the thing up, but of course that wasn’t informative either. Then he found he couldn’t put the damned contraption together again. He had to pretend he’d dropped it on the marble floor of Garford’s hall, and send for a mechanic. It had been a most embarrassing aberration.
    And that didn’t conclude the matter. Punter could have filled the whole house with the devilish contrivances! His office in the city, too: other villains might have been at work there. Hadn’t there been that monstrous affair in the American Embassy in Moscow? And conversations about complex financial manoeuvres were one thing: even substantially caught and transcribed, they mightn’t convey much. A simple life-and-death affair (and what better description could there be of what he was taking in hand?) was quite another. The deepest secret could be given away in a sentence.
    So the subject was worth going into thoroughly. Carson, although not much of a reading man, read it up. Giving it out that he was thinking of perhaps installing large-scale precautions, he even picked the brains of an expert. What he discovered was interesting and rather startling. Distance wasn’t an important factor in the bugging business. Granted adequate instrumentation, you could pick up the conversation of a couple of chattering bedouin across a substantial stretch of the Sahara Desert. But not from amid, say, a populous casbah or a caravanserai. The bug can’t filter out din. Conduct your conversation close to a general uproar, or even under a comfortable warm shower, and you are as safe as houses.
    There was very seldom, of course, any sort of uproar at Garford. The two village girls (who still came in to do the rough) must have got through their gossiping elsewhere. The woman who cooked had been dismissed, since Mrs Punter cooked very well. Mrs Punter creaked a little, so you sometimes had warning of her approach as a result, much as if she had been the crocodile in Peter Pan . As for her husband, he made no sound at all. Of a stiff and almost