Pigs Have Wings Read Free Page B

rum I have accepted at her hands. What’s become of her? Is she still working the old beer engine?’
    ‘Oh no, Mr Galahad. She married and retired.’
    ‘I hope her husband appreciates her many sterling qualities.’
    ‘He is no longer with us, sir. He contracted double pneumonia, standing outside a restaurant in the rain.’
    ‘What on earth did he do that for?’
    ‘It was in pursuance of his professional duties, sir. He was the proprietor of a private investigation bureau, Digby’s Day and Night Detectives. Now that he has passed on, my niece conducts the business herself, and I believe gives general satisfaction.’
    Penny gave an interested squeak.
    ‘You mean she’s a sleuth? One of the bloodstain and magnifying glass brigade?’
    ‘Substantially that, miss. I gather that she leaves the rougher work to her subordinates.’
    ‘Still she’s a genuine private eye. Golly, it takes all sorts to make a world, doesn’t it?’
    ‘So I have been given to understand, miss,’ said Beach indulgently. He turned to Lord Emsworth, who, finding the Maudie topic one that did not grip, had started to scratch the Empress’s back with a piece of stick. ‘I should have mentioned, m’lord, that Sir Gregory has arrived.’
    ‘Oh, dash it. Where is he?’
    ‘I left him in the morning-room, m’lord, taking off his shoes. I received the impression that his feet were paining him. He expressed a desire to see your lordship at your lordship’s earliest convenience.’
    Lord Emsworth became peevish.
    ‘What on earth does the man want, coming here? He knows that I regard him with the deepest suspicion. But I suppose I shall have to see him. If I don’t, it will only mean an unpleasant scene with Connie. She is always telling me I must be neighbourly.’
    ‘Thank goodness I don’t have to be,’ said Gally. ‘I can look young Parsloe in the eye and make him wilt. That’s the advantage of not having a position to keep up. That was interesting, what Beach was telling us, Clarence.’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘About Maudie.’
    ‘Who is Maudie?’
    ‘All right, master-mind, let it go. Trot along and see what that thug wants.’
    Lord Emsworth ambled off, followed at just the right respectful distance by his faithful butler, and Gally looked after them musingly.
    ‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘Do you know how long I have known Beach? Eighteen years, or it may have been nineteen, ever since I was a slip of a boy of forty. And only today have I discovered that his name is Sebastian. The same thing happened with Fruity Biffen. I don’t think you met my old friend Fruity Biffen, did you? He was living down here at a house along the Shrewsbury road till a short time ago, but he left before you arrived. In the old days he used to sign his I.O.U’s George J. Biffen, and it was only after the lapse of several years, one night when we were having supper together at Romano’s and he had lost some of his reserve owing to having mixed stout, crème de menthe , and old brandy, to see what it tasted like, that he revealed that the J. stood for –’
    ‘Gally,’ said Penny, who for some moments had been tracing arabesques on the turf with her shoe and giving other indications of nerving herself to an embarrassing task, ‘can you lend me two thousand pounds?’
4
    It was never an easy matter to disconcert the Hon. Galahad. For half a century nursemaids, governesses, tutors, schoolmasters, Oxford dons, bookmakers, three-card-trick men, jellied eel sellers, skittle sharps, racecourse touts and members of the metropolitan police force had tried to do it, and all had failed. It was an axiom of the old Pelican Club that, no matter what slings and arrows outrageous fortune might launch in his direction, Gally Threepwood could be counted upon to preserve the calm insouciance of a pig on ice. But at these words a spasm definitely shook him, causing his black-rimmed monocle to leap as nimbly from his eye as the pince-nez had ever leaped from the nose of his