Free Gay Phoenix by Michael Innes Page B

needed to push that first vital manoeuvre through. But the trouble with alcoholically boosted cunning was that it treacherously faded, more often than not, at just the wrong moment. He suddenly remembered with increased misgiving that he had drunk a companionable brandy as well. So here was a minor problem dead in front of him: just what, if anything, it would be judicious to recharge the battery with now.
    And he knew there was another problem, although he found it hard to pin down. Macbeth on the blasted heath, advised by the Weird Sister to be bloody, bold and resolute, must have felt rather as he was feeling now, must have wondered whether any of these qualities was his in a measure quite adequate to the job on hand. That was it. He couldn’t quite convince himself that treacherous murder was exactly his line. In fantasy at times, yes. But he had reached middle age without practical experience of any such definitive violence. He braced himself, and shoved open a swing door. Butter – hopefully the doomed Butter – was sitting in a secluded corner of the saloon bar, with what looked like a double whisky in front of him. Povey took a grim resolution to try a double whisky too.
    ‘So now we can have our chat,’ Butter said. ‘A quiet chat, man to man. No more of that guest and menial stuff. It’s confusing.’
    ‘I quite agree.’ Povey said this amiably enough. For one thing, if he was to get Butter effectively on the spot, he must begin by successfully chatting him up. But another factor was at work in his relaxed tone. At their first encounter he had regarded Butter in the nakedness of his blackmailing design as a kind of ne plus ultra of wickedness, and he had been further offended by the insolent manner the fellow had intermittently assumed. But since then he had suffered his encounter with that ferocious nameless thug, and in comparison with him Butter appeared almost civilized. Butter was also – and here again he differed markedly from that other scoundrel – as clever as they come. Povey admired cleverness. As a virtually disinherited younger brother, it had been for a long time his own sole asset. Still, all this didn’t alter the basic situation. Delenda est Butter . Butter must be rubbed out. The prospect of Butter permanently on his back was intolerable.
    ‘I quite agree,’ Povey reiterated, returning to their retired corner with his double whisky. ‘And I’ve no doubt, my dear chap, that we can come to an arrangement – an accommodation.’
    ‘Now you’re talking turkey.’ Butter nodded approvingly. ‘No need for you and me to fall out. Let there be frankness between us, I say. That brother of yours, now. I can’t say I ever much cared for him. Hoity-toity, he was. I’m the cream of the cream and you’re the hoi polloi was his line. Even when you were using your wits to get him off a licking. He didn’t care for a licking, young Master Charles didn’t. Not the sort to bend over with a stiff upper lip, was he? Yellow, I’d call son-and-heir Charles.’
    ‘Definitely,’ Povey said. These remarks, which had reference to certain barbaric simplicities of discipline in the ancestral Povey home, were not ungrateful to him.
    ‘And lost at sea! Smart, that was. You tumbled him in, did you?’
    Arthur Povey was startled by this frank query. For one thing, it was astutely within the target area, although in fact it had been a corpse that Povey had committed to the deep. For another thing, there was a striking dramatic irony in the suggestion. Tumbling in was what now awaited Butter himself.
    ‘Not exactly,’ Povey said. ‘Just put it that I didn’t mourn him. And it’s my turn to ask a question now. Man to man means turn about, wouldn’t you say? So tell me, Butter. You’re a hardened crook, aren’t you? A crook down on his luck.’
    ‘I am that I am.’
    This reply, whether Biblical or Shakespearian in its reference, was again startling. It suggested that Butter, although doubtless of