The Deadly Joker

  Its grotesquely elongated figure and strides called to mind the worst horror-image of my childhood—the Scissors Man. But I had little leisure to observe it, for one of the small boys it was chasing—he had become separated from the others and was pelting downhill nearer the wood’s edge than they—suddenly disappeared with a dreadful shriek. His companions, amongst whom I could now recognise young Gates, the bailiff’s son, raced towards us. Jenny ran forward, to put herself between them and the hooded pursuer, and I followed her at the best speed I could muster. As young Gates hurled himself to the ground beside Jenny, whimpering and burying his head in his arms, I saw the figure stop dead: then it turned away and with its weird, ostrich-like gait, made for the wood and vanished into it.

  It took some few minutes to calm the boys. Young Gates recovered quickest, his nerve sufficiently restored even to accompany me to the spot where I had noticed one of the fugitives disappear. As we neared it, I saw it was an old quarry, its edge screened with straggling vegetation; two ends of rusted wire were dangling where the boy had broken through in his panic flight. His body lay crumpled at the foot of the quarry’s chalk cliff, just discernible in the gloom.

  I summoned Jenny. We sent the other boys running to the village for help. Then the three of us cautiously scrambled down a less precipitous side of the quarry. The boy who had fallen was unconscious, but not dead: he had been concussed—there was blood leaking from his temples—and it looked as if a wrist were broken too. Jenny bandaged the head with my handkerchief, then we laid his limbs in a more comfortable position, and leaving Jenny and young Gates to keep him company, I clambered out of the quarry.

  Some thirty yards uphill I found the place where, as I judged, the hooded figure had re-entered the wood—the mouth of a rutted ride which led away into the fastnesses of the place. And here, too, I found something else I was looking for. I had an electric torch in my mackintosh pocket. Though the field itself was parched hard and in the gloom offered no traces, just inside the wood I observed by the torch’s light, as I bent down over the rutted track, a faint, circular mark in a softer patch of earth there.

  It could be the impression of a stilt. It had to be. Unless I was prepared to accept the figure we had seen as the monkish ghost by whom Chantry wood was said to be haunted, there could be no other explanation for its height and gait.

  Even on this balmy night, the wood felt chill. A smell of decaying trees mingled with the sweet, corrupt scent of elder bushes. The silence had that positive, almost menacing quality one finds in antique and derelict places. Whoever it was that had carried out this obscene masquerade—there’d been time for him to discard his stilts and his disguise, hide them in the depths of the wood, and make his way out on the other side before we even reached the quarry. On the other hand, I could not be certain that he was not still lurking in the dark tangle, and I had no wish to try conclusions with one who must surely be a madman.

  I walked up the side of the wood, round the top end of it. From some point in its southern face the figure must have emerged, and moving west, appeared on the ridge where we had first seen it. I came to the entrance of another ride, leading north: the two rides perhaps bisected the wood, and each other at its centre, in a cruciform pattern; they might even have been cut originally by the monks who served the chantry. Here, too, I thought I discovered a stilt mark—in a clump of moss.

  As I strolled back towards the quarry, my mind was busy upon the chief mystery—who could the “monk” have been, and why should he have set out to terrorise young Gates’s gang? I felt bound to assume that he was the author of the previous ugly tricks in Netherplash. But even here I might be wrong: for the only person I knew with a reason to feel resentment against the boys was Vera Paston herself. I found it impossible to associate her with the Mills bomb affair or the rick burning, and still more so to imagine her, in the short time since she had been stoned by the boys, getting hold of a pair of stilts, making a monk’s habit long enough to conceal the stilt legs, and secretly conveying these items into the wood.

  In any case, how did the “monk” know the boys would be there again to-night? And, indeed, why were they, when the hunt for the gipsy had been called off? Young Gates would no doubt be able to answer this question presently.

  But then I remembered the assignation dear Jenny had been forced to make with Bertie Card. He had bidden her to meet him at the ride by which the monk had re-entered the wood, the rendezvous of his previous meetings with Vera Paston. Where was Bertie now? I assumed he had waited half an hour for Jenny, or seen her sit down with me in the field, or spotted the boys lying in ambush, and walked through the wood and home down the hill on its far side. It was hardly conceivable that he should have planned the monk apparition for the very time and place of his assignation with Jenny: unless, of course, he wished to frighten her out of her wits and had made the rendezvous simply to get her in position for doing so—a fantastic notion, in all conscience, but the whole of to-night’s proceedings had been the grimmest phantasmagoria.

  Returning to the quarry, I found the injured boy unconscious still, covered with Jenny’s coat and young Gates’s jacket. We could hear voices from the lane: but before the rescuers arrived I was able to ask Gates a few questions. He said they had been lying in ambush beside the wood for about a quarter of an hour before the monk appeared, had seen no one enter it, and heard no human sounds from within it. So the monk must have been in position at the south end of the wood before they had arrived.

  “But why did you come up here at all?” I asked. “Surely you didn’t expect the gipsy would return, after you’d caught him out last night?”

  “Well, sir, somebody told Jim here us ought to hunt after en again to-night.”

  “Who told him?”

  “Dunno. Jim wouldn’t let on.”

  So a vital part of the puzzle was locked in the mind of this concussed child lying in the quarry beside us.

  “Told Jim he’d give us half a dollar if we caught the gipsy,” young Gates volunteered. “But you’ll not find me comen here again, not for a quid, I won’t. That old ghoost scared I proper.”

  “It wasn’t a ghost. It was a man on stilts.”

  “Get on!”

  “It was. If you search the wood to-morrow, you might find the stilts—like long crutches they are—and the clothes he wore.”

  A number of villagers filed down into the quarry. The injured Jim was laid on a hurdle and borne away homewards, Jenny and I walking arm in arm behind. Last night seemed an age away. I had come to my senses, I suppose; but traces of a bitter-sweet regret brushed me, light as the cobwebs that brushed and clung to my face as I walked down the lane.

  Sighing, I pushed those memories away. I had yet to ring for a doctor or an ambulance, and tell Jim’s widowed mother what had happened—repeat a story which bewildered me no less than it astonished the men who had come to carry him back to the village.

  9. The Security Officer

  Looking back on it now, although the worst was yet to come so far as Netherplash Cantorum was concerned, I can date a general recovery of morale at Green Lane from the day the “monk” appeared. Corinna became more cheerful, her listless mien vanishing. Jenny, by her brave action in running to protect the boys, must have cleared her mind of subjective doubts and fears, while the Bertie problem ceased to loom so disproportionately. Indeed, Jenny had the cheeky notion of ringing him to ask why he had stood her up last night. I did not discourage her, for his answer might have been enlightening in relation to the monk episode: but Bertie, his brother told her, was at the riding school this morning, where there was no telephone.

  “Where did he ring you from yesterday, then?” I asked Jenny.

  “Pydal, I suppose.”

  It occurred to me that, had Bertie done so, Alwyn might easily have overheard the conversation; and if the properties for the ghostly monk were already prepared, he could have laid on the apparition as another of his practical jokes. Then an even more startling idea st
ruck me. I asked Jenny if, during the telephone conversation, Bertie had ever addressed her by name. She was pretty sure he had not.

  So, I reasoned, Alwyn would assume Bertie was talking to Vera Paston, whose affair with his brother he certainly knew about. And Vera had turned Alwyn down, so she told me—“I couldn’t help laughing at him”—perhaps Alwyn still resented this mockery enough to hit back at Vera; the letter Ronald Paston had received was a venomous blow at her. But again, was it even remotely conceivable that the elderly Alwyn Card should have gone through all this rigmarole with stilts and disguise, just to frighten a woman, or to spoil his brother’s fun? Surely a diseased mind—and we had no proof that his mind was diseased—would think up something more damaging?

  About eleven o’clock that same morning I was rung up by Ronald Paston’s secretary. Mr. Paston’s compliments, and could I spare the time to step across to the Manor. It did not seem likely that I should make any progress with Virgil this morning, so I went. It was unusual for Ronald to be home in the middle of the week: unless he had made a very early start and come down by car, he must have been here last night. Was it conceivable, then, that it was he who had masqueraded as the monk? Only if one could believe that Vera had confessed to him (by telephone) about her escapade, told him that young Gates’s gang had stoned her, and Ronald had taken this bizarre revenge upon them. I dismissed the notion at once. That I should have entertained it at all was an indication of the way these events had impaired my critical faculty.

  When I was shown into the library, I saw to my astonishment that Alwyn Card was there, as well as Ronald. The latter greeted me civilly, and offered me a glass of champagne.

  “This is by way of a little celebration,” he said, with a meaning look at Alwyn. “The beginning of a good-neighbour policy, I hope and believe.” Though we were sitting in arm-chairs, Ronald gave the impression of being at the head of a long, shiny boardroom table. “Alwyn and I have come to an agreement that the best interests of the village will not be served while, er, personal antagonism subsists between us.”

  “Well, I’m delighted to hear it. But—”

  “The hatchet is buried. The feud is over,” said Alwyn, blue eyes twinkling at me.

  “Alwyn and I have adjusted the differences between us.”

  “I’ve owned up and begged pardon.”

  “Very handsomely,” said Ronald, his round swarthy face set in an expression of suave goodwill. “I should be the first to admit there have been faults on both sides.”

  “Owned up to what?” I asked, irritated by this smooth and curiously implausible cross-talk.

  “Why, my dear fellow, to a rather foolish hoax at which you yourself were present. I am now a reformed character. And Ronald here has been generous enough not to stipulate for a public apology.”

  “I should perhaps say at this point that I have sold out my business interests—you will see the details in the Press to-morrow, John. I propose to take Vera on a world tour after the Flower Show. Then I shall settle down here. Under the circumstances, it was all the more essential that Alwyn and I should clear up our, er, little differences.”

  I noticed Alwyn’s lips twitching at these locutions, but he avoided my eye and looked, for him, almost subdued.

  “We’ve also got to clear up this trouble in the village. It’s a real headache. I hear you were involved in another, er, outrage, last night, John.”

  I opened my mouth to describe it, but Ronald held up his hand, a large signet ring on the third finger, to stop me. “I think there’s someone else should hear this.” He spoke into the house telephone on his desk. “The police seemed to be getting nowhere, so I sent down a man of my own to make inquiries. He’s security officer in one of my factories. He’s working, er, under cover, so I’d be obliged if you gentlemen will keep his identity under your hats.”

  “Oh, Maxwell, you mean?” I asked.

  Ronald Paston frowned. “How the devil did you know—?”

  “I guessed. Met him in the pub.”

  “He must be a slick operator,” remarked Alwyn, “if he’s going to get anywhere. Our people don’t welcome strangers poking their noses into—”

  “I’ve every confidence in him,” said Ronald stuffily. “Ah, Maxwell. Mr. Alwyn Card. And Mr. Waterson you’ve met already.”

  “Good morning, gentlemen all. What’s this I see before me? Bubbly? Champers? The Widow in person? Birthday celebration, Mr. Paston?”

  “Let us get to business,” said Ronald repressively, not offering the egregious Mr. Maxwell a glass. “If you will lead off, John?”

  I gave a full account of the previous night’s episode, omitting only Jenny’s reason, and mine, for having gone up towards the Chantry wood. I was aware of Maxwell’s eyes, piggy but shrewd now above the deplorable check jacket, scrutinising me.

  When I had finished, Ronald turned to him and curtly asked:

  “Well, Charlie, any ideas?”

  “It’s a piece of cake, sir. All we need is to find out from that injured boy who it was told the lads to go up to the wood again last night.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “the boy has concussion and we don’t know when he’ll be in a condition to tell us.”

  “Perhaps we should tip off the hospital people to be on their guard,” said Charlie Maxwell. “Don’t want this joker creeping in there to silence him.”

  “Oh, come now, that’s a bit melodramatic, Charlie.”

  “And unnecessary, as it happens. It was I who suggested they should have another go at the gipsy.”

  We stared at Alwyn in amazement.

  “No, no, don’t misunderstand me.” There was a certain uneasiness, I felt, behind Alwyn’s beaming countenance. “I am not, in person, the Horror of Chantry Wood. I’m too old for stilt-walking, anyway. No, that kid was shooting at a moorhen with a catapult, at the end of my garden, yesterday evening; and I told him he’d be better employed shooting at the gipsy. Well, I like moorhens, and I never believed in the gipsy much. Otherwise, I’d not have risked half a crown.”

  “Could anyone else have heard you?” asked Maxwell.

  “Possibly. I shouted at young Jimmy a bit.”

  “Did you actually see anyone within earshot?”

  “Can’t say I did.”

  “Was your brother at home?” Maxwell persisted.

  “Possibly. I don’t know. Why not ask him? But if you seriously think my brother—”

  “You said just now, sir, you didn’t believe in this jolly old gipsy. In his existence, did you mean?”

  “No. As the arsonist.”

  “You knew that, on the previous night, Mr. Waterson had helped to catch the gipsy, and then let him escape?”

  “Good God! I must have my grape-vine repaired.” Alwyn turned to me. I seemed to detect a mocking light in his eyes. “You caught him and let him go, John?”

  “Young Gates’s gang caught him. They—” I was about to say they had stoned the gipsy, then I remembered the cut—still visible, perhaps—on Vera’s forehead. “They handed him over to me, but he escaped.”

  “Was he a boy?” asked Alwyn, still with that secret mocking look.

  “Well, he wasn’t a man. About fifteen years old,” I hastily added. “He wouldn’t answer my questions about where he lived. Just said he hadn’t done anything wrong. Then he slipped out of my grasp.”

  “I don’t think this is relevant to our problem,” Ronald broke in. “The police are searching the wood, I understand, for the stilts and the monk’s costume. That may give them a lead. What line do you propose to take, Charlie?”

  “The line of least resistance, Mr. Paston. Sit in the pub and listen to the locals. Find out if anyone was seen walking back to the village last night, after the occurrence. Probably the joker’d lie low up in the wood till it was quite dark, though.”

  “I don’t pay you to sit about all day in pubs,” said Ronald sharply.

  “No, sir,” replied Maxwell, as if mentally springing to attention. “But
I can’t go round, house-to-house, asking where everyone was between nine and eleven last night.”

  “Why the hell not? I want some action.”

  “Because I have no official standing here, Mr. Paston.”

  “You’re my employee, aren’t you?”

  “But you told me not to let on about that when you sent me down here.”

  “I told you to use your discretion about it. And a little initiative wouldn’t come amiss either, Maxwell. For an ex-policeman, you might have got things a bit more under control.”

  I expected the ebullient Charlie Maxwell to be deflated by this treatment, but it was not so.

  “Very well, sir,” he said. “I’ll start in right away. We know where you were during the relevant period last night, Mr. Waterson. What about you, Mr. Card?”

  Alwyn looked startled. His mouth took on a babyish pout.

  “At home,” he said.

  “Anyone to confirm that?”

  “I don’t altogether like this catechism. But the answer is no. My housekeeper goes to bed early, and she’s deaf.”

  “Your brother, then?”

  “He went out soon after dinner—about quarter to nine, I’d say.”

  “And returned when?”

  “I couldn’t say. Ask him.”

  “I shall, sir. So you didn’t see him again till this morning?”

  “I didn’t say that. We had a night-cap together about eleven o’clock. He may have been back in the house long before that, for all I know.”

  “I hope you’re not trying to take the micky, sir.”

  “Watch your tone, Maxwell,” said Ronald sharply.

  Charlie Maxwell may have been a ham actor, but he was no yes-man.