Be Shot For Six Pence Read Free

debentures and preference shares and unsecured loans and arrangements of all sorts. And that’s where I brought Douglas in. I’d met him in the War and I knew he was a teetotaller and a chartered accountant. My impression was that he was an able chap; and I was right.
    For four years we hung on by our eyelashes. There were big firms who didn’t like us cutting in. And some of them weren’t too scrupulous. It was a fight. I didn’t work a six-hour day then. Sometimes I didn’t get much sleep out of the whole twenty-four.
    It was the Combine Hedge Clipper that put us on top. We didn’t sell it to people. We hired it to them, with a crew that knew how to work it. Not to small gardens, but big places. It paid very handsomely, and, as often as not, got us the other orders as well.
    For some time now, I’d just sat back and let the money come in. I hadn’t realised, until that morning, that the whole idea had died on me.
    Douglas, of course, wanted to go on. On to bigger and better things. I didn’t. I wanted to back-pedal, which, come to think of it, was the situation between me and Penny, too, in a nutshell.
    The porter came into the coffee room where I was browsing through the early editions of the evening papers and said that Mrs. Pastonberry was asking for me. He had told her that he would ascertain if I was in the building.
    (Mrs. Pastonberry is Penny. Mr. Pastonberry had been a very superior sort of wholesale grocer who had married Penny when she was eighteen and lived just long enough to endow her with his considerable worldly goods before passing away as the result, it was believed, of over-indulgence in his own port.)
    “I hope that you didn’t say I was here.”
    “Of course not, sir.”
    Silly question really.
    “Well, that’s all right. Because I’m not.”
    I had lunch at the Polidor, rather a lengthy function as I met two people I knew. They had a spare girl with them and we made up a foursome. There was, I thought, a faint look of invitation in the spare girl’s eyes when we parted, but I disregarded it and went off to spend the afternoon at the zoo.
    As an antidote to mental disequilibrium there is nothing like the aquarium. Through warm, uncounted hours I lingered, staring across the glass frontier into another world. A world of strange dimensions where Time did not exist, and it was as easy to go upwards and backwards as it was forwards and downwards. A frightening world where dwelt Esox Lucius, the Pike and Maia Maia, the spider crab. A world of shadows and half-lights in which you might encounter bustling little characters like the Trigger Fish and the Schoolmaster Snapper, witless oafs like Dollo’s lung fish or, for plain horror, Silurus, the Giant Catfish, who sits white eyed in the shadow of his rocky chamber, his thick whiskers trembling as he dreams of ancient evil.
    When I got back to the Club the porter said, “Mrs. Pastonberry called, sir.”
    “She actually came here?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What did you do with her?”
    “We put her in the small committee room.”
    “That was rather drastic. How long did she survive?”
    “She left approximately forty minutes later, sir.”
    “She’s tougher than I thought.”
    The small committee room is a terrible apartment. It contains two hundred volumes of Punch, which have been specially bound for the Club in half-yearly numbers in black buckram with the Club’s crest on the spine; a buffalo’s head with one eye, and no windows of any sort. Even bailiffs have been removed from it screaming in less than thirty minutes.
    I went up to dress for dinner.
    In the morning, Penny telephoned again.
    This time, for a change, I decided I would take the call.
    She sounded cross.
    “I tried three times to get hold of you yesterday,” she said.
    “I got the messages,” I said.
    “I don’t believe you were out at all.”
    “I assure you I was. I went to the zoo in the afternoon and the Crazy Gang in the evening.”
    “Stop behaving like a