“You can’t expect him to give you a pension simply because Power knocked out your teeth.”
“He’ll stop Power smuggling,” said Godfrey.
“I suppose,” I said, “that it’s no use my telling you that he was not smuggling?”
“I saw him at it,” said Godfrey, “and I’m going to write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
“What on earth do you expect to gain by that?” I asked.
“He ought to be grateful to me for putting him on the track of the smuggling,” said Godfrey. “I should think he’d want to do something for me afterwards. He might—”
“Give you a job,” I said.
“Yes,” said Godfrey. “I always heard that fellows in the Treasury got good salaries.”
I was greatly relieved when I left Godfrey. I expected that he would want to take some sort of legal proceedings against Bob Power which would have involved us all in a great deal of unpleasantness. I should not have been surprised if he had tried to blackmail Bob or Conroy, or both, and I should have disliked that very much. But his letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer seemed to be merely foolish. In the first place Bob Power was not smuggling. In the next place the Chancellor of the Exchequer would never see Godfrey’s letter. It would be opened, I supposed, by some kind of clerk or secretary. He would giggle over it and show it to a friend. He would also giggle. Then unless the spelling was unusually eccentric the letter would go into the waste-paper basket. Nothing whatever would happen.