The Deadly Joker

  “And what about you, Mr. Paston?” he said.

  “Well, what about me?”

  “Your movements last night. If I’m to do my job, I must know where everyone was.” Maxwell’s tone was humouring but firm. Ronald’s face darkened with anger and his fingers played a tattoo on the arm of his chair. Then, controlling himself, he turned to me.

  “You see, John, Charlie keeps us all in order. I’ve always stood out for the democratic approach in my firms. The most junior of my employees can speak his mind to me, and we discuss our problems in a man-to-man way.”

  “All are equal, but none so equal as you?” Alwyn put in impishly.

  Ronald Paston stated that he had got home about six-thirty, dined with his wife, retired to the library to study papers, and gone to bed shortly before midnight. His secretary had been dismissed, after a brief conference, with orders to see that he was not disturbed.

  “No alibi, Charlie, I’m afraid.”

  “Same as the night some joker tossed a Mills bomb through the pub window. Looks bad, Mr. Paston,” said Maxwell with a grin. “All these outrages seem to have happened when you were in residence.”

  “Frankly, that does worry me a bit. Could be someone was trying to frame me.”

  “Except,” I remarked dryly, “that no one could possibly know you’d be alone in this room at the hour in question.”

  “Not quite no one, John,” said Alwyn. “His secretary would know. And Vera, I suppose.” He indicated the french windows, adding, “Easy enough to slip out that way, through the garden—”

  “I must ask you to leave my wife out of this,” Ronald interrupted, his dark eyes smouldering at Alwyn. “And my secretary I can absolutely vouch for—been in my employment best part of ten years.”

  “My dear fellow, I was only teasing. No one could possibly suspect Vera. She walks in beauty through the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.”

  I glanced sharply at Alwyn. The misquotation was odd, coming from him. I was more than ever convinced that he knew about Vera’s nocturnal escapades; but I could not make out why he should keep hinting at the knowledge.

  “What about Fred Kindersley?” Ronald was saying. “Have you got anywhere there?”

  “Says he and his missus were dog-tired the night the ricks went up and they slept right through the kerfuffle.”

  “About the only people in the village who did, Charlie. I’m not suggesting anything, mind you, but he’s had it in for me since I—that business about the pub.”

  “Naboth’s vineyard,” Alwyn murmured in my ear, inaudibly to the others.

  “Fred’s a good chap,” I said with some heat. “If you seriously think he’d fire your ricks because of some squabble—”

  “That took place several years ago,” Alwyn put in.

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Ronald irritably repeated. “But under the circumstances we have to explore every avenue.”

  “But not every blind alley,” I retorted.

  Glancing up, I noticed Vera drifting past the french window. Her sari was draped to cover her temples: so that was how she managed to conceal the bruise the stone had made. Her profile looked exquisite against the background of the yew hedge, in the sunshine. There was something sad, though—almost tragic—about this beauty: she could have been a ghost, drifting so silently, aimlessly, past. She was carrying in her palms, like an oblation, a baby tortoise.

  Nothing much else came of our conference. Charlie Maxwell had investigated, I learnt, the matter of the playing-cards. There were a number of packs at the Manor, but new ones—typically, Paston used fresh cards for each session—and his secretary had stated that none of the discarded packs, which were sent to a local hospital, had been of the pattern used for the anonymous letters. At Pydal, a lot of old packs had been turned up, but with the jokers intact.

  It had now been proved that the ricks were fired deliberately. But no fingerprints were found on the empty paraffin tin except Alwyn’s, who had handled it in full view of everyone after the blaze was put out. Presumably any other prints there might have been on it—the shopkeeper’s, for instance—had been wiped off by whoever had started the fire. The police were investigating purchases of paraffin in the neighbourhood. Their efforts to trace the Mills bomb had been equally abortive. Our local sergeant had made house-to-house inquiries; but, of the few war souvenirs known to be possessed by villagers, none was found missing.

  At midday we broke up. Ronald Paston directed Maxwell to leave, as he had arrived, through the french windows and the garden, so that his connection with the Manor should remain unnoticed by the village as a whole. This cloak-and-dagger procedure seemed quite farcical to me; but it was all of a piece with the childishness, the grotesque fantasy of the outrages in which Netherplash had become embroiled—not the least odd, I reflected, being the sudden reconciliation, if such it was, between the old squire and the new.

  I remarked on this as Alwyn and I walked towards Pydal.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Humble pie is not my favourite dish. But there are others that taste even more rancid.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, actually, it was a case of sauve qui peut.” He stopped dead on the green, his eyes gazing into mine with a hang-dog, rather pathetic expression. “You see, John, I was getting to feel a bit ashamed about that hoax.”

  “The Mastership? Or the cuckoo?”

  “Oh, the cuckoo didn’t matter. I doubt if our Ronald even got the message. Anyway, the two of us have to live in this village, so—” He broke off, mopping his forehead. The sun was indeed strong to-day. “Especially now he’s going to be a non-absentee landlord.”

  “You said, ’a case of sauve qui peut,’” I prompted, as we moved on again.

  “Yes, to be sure. You see, I’m getting worried by all these foolish tricks—want to dissociate myself from them. Particularly as, in a way, I feel I’m responsible for them.”

  “Responsible?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid that hoax of mine triggered off some lunatic to—well, to start a spite campaign all round. So I thought I’d better come clean to Ronald Paston.”

  “I’ve wondered myself if that wasn’t the explanation. I can’t somehow see you throwing Mills bombs or masquerading as a monk. But it wouldn’t account for the ‘Lhude sing cuckoo’ scrawled on my study wall. That happened before the hoax.”

  “Oh, some school kids did that, I imagine.”

  “In medieval spelling?”

  He opened the rusted wrought-iron gates of Pydal. “Need a lick of paint,” be said. He took me into his study, and padded out to get a drink. The room was indescribably untidy, like a schoolboy’s: books in disarray, a pair of trousers on the floor, a specimen case of birds’ eggs with a drawer open, hunting prints askew on the wall, a bow and quiver and an assortment of rackets and golf clubs in a corner, dust everywhere. A roll-top desk lay open, on its ledge a drift of what, shamelessly eyeing them, I found to be unpaid bills. An elderly and smelly dog, lying upon a basket chair, opened a listless eye at me.

  “Who can this lunatic be?” I asked, when Alwyn returned with a bottle of Chambéry.

  “God only knows. The inhabitants of Netherplash are as sane as mud, I’d have thought. Mind you, they’ve intermarried a lot through the centuries. We Cards are pretty inbred too, if it comes to that. My mother was a cousin of my father’s. My stepmother brought some new blood into the family. But I don’t know if that was an unmixed blessing. Wild sort of creature she was. Gipsyish. Touch of the tarbrush, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wish Bertie’d marry and settle down. In felix lolium et steriles nascuntur avenae”

  “You remember your Eclogues, I see.” I was surprised by the erudition of his reference to wild oats.

  “Chap called Barnard came to tutor me one summer holiday—oh, ages ago. Drummed some Virgil into me. Never forgotten it.”

  “Tom Barnard. Yes, I know him well. He’s my college’s Visitor now.”

  “I wish to God he’d be
en mine,” said Alwyn with unexpected violence. “My tutor at Eton was hopeless. Barnard could have put me on the right path, if only he’d come here more than that once. He might even have made my bone-headed father see sense.”

  Alwyn’s eyes had turned misty, the pink of his cheeks seemed deeper, and his whole chubby face looked as if some invisible hand was squeezing it out of shape.

  “Yes,” he went on, barely audible now, “Tom Barnard—he was a very young chap then, but he could have saved my soul.”

  “Who could have saved your soul?” said Bertie, entering the study. “Must be a miracle-worker.” He pushed the aged dog off the chair and sat down, still without any recognition of my presence. I was nettled by his bad manners to me, and angered at the boorish way he spoke to his brother: also, I had perhaps over-indulged in Ronald Paston’s champagne—a drink which invariably goes sour on me. All this may account for the uncharacteristic manner in which I was shortly to behave.

  “A man called Tom Barnard,” replied Alwyn, his voice dreamy still. “You wouldn’t remember him.”

  “Caspar stinks,” said Bertie. “The whole room stinks of him. Why don’t you have him put down?” He pushed the toe of his riding boot at the dog.

  Ignoring this, Alwyn said, “Paston has brought down a tame investigator. Name of Maxwell. He’ll be coming to see you this evening, Bertie.”

  “Bloody fool! Why can’t he leave it to the police?”

  “And he’s giving up control of his business—going to settle down as a full-time country gent.”

  “Paston? Christ! We’ll have to emigrate.”

  “That could be the solution. For you,” said Alwyn silkily.

  “Remittance man, eh? My dear old Al, you’ll not get rid of me as easily as that. What’s this gnat’s-piss you two are drinking?” Bertie poured himself a glass and sprawled back in the chair. “This fellow—Maxwell, is it?—what does he want?”

  “Well, for one thing he’ll want to know where you were last night.”

  “Last night? Why?”

  “When young Gates and Co. were being terrorised by a phantom monk.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Alwyn told him.

  For the first time, Bertie met my eyes. “Why didn’t you chase after him? You’d have got round that wood quicker than he could have got through it, by the time he’d hidden his stilts and all. Scared of bogles?”

  “Don’t be offensive, Bertie,” said Alwyn. “John had an injured child there to attend to.”

  “You know the wood well?” I asked.

  “I’ve been there. That ride is pretty overgrown in the middle.” Bertie turned to his brother. “I say, old boy, you used to be rather a wizard on stilts in your youthful days.”

  “Yes, I remember you and I had races on them.”

  “Well, well—which of us was the Hooded Horror, I wonder?”

  “Your childish memories are very affecting, no doubt. The point is, where were you last night? Maxwell will ask you.”

  “Maxwell can—himself.”

  The telephone rang. Bertie went out, and I could hear him talking in the passage outside: someone was wishing to change the hour of her riding lesson to-morrow. When he returned, Alwyn repeated his question.

  “I must say, you two are a couple of old busybodies. What the devil is it to you where I was? Can’t I even go out for a walk without you interrogating me like a pair of bloody policemen?”

  “You didn’t walk the Chantry wood way, then?” said Alwyn. I felt a genuine anxiety behind his words.

  “As it happens, no.”

  “That’s interesting,” I quietly remarked, “since you’d made an assignation to meet my wife in the wood at nine o’clock.”

  10. The Poor Puppy

  It was the first time I had seen Bertie Card utterly outfaced: I am not, I hope, a small-minded man; but I must confess that, after what he had done to Jenny and Corinna, the spectacle was not unpleasing. His bold eyes started, then swerved away from me. All he could say, when he got his tongue working, was “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “You know perfectly well.”

  “An assignation with—? You must be mad.”

  “Jenny told me herself.”

  Bertie was on the run, but he tried to make a stand here. “Some women make that sort of thing up. When they are sex-starved,” he said, sneering.

  “I had already heard her conversation with you on the telephone.”

  “Eavesdropping again?”

  I kept my temper. “You can’t bluster your way out of this. You were to meet her at the edge of the wood—”

  “She was ever so willing, you know.”

  “That’s yet another lie—and a filthy one, even by your standards. You blackmailed her into it. It was the price you asked for stopping the game you were playing with Corinna. It must be an advantage for a person like yourself not to possess even the rudimentary decency to realise how despicable he is.”

  I thought he was going to spring at me then. But Alwyn suddenly stood up between us, saying in a heartbroken voice:

  “Oh, Bertie! This is beyond everything. I couldn’t have believed it possible. Corinna! Why, she’s only—”

  “As usual,” Bertie broke in sulkily, “you assume whatever anyone says against me is true, if it’s nasty enough.”

  Alwyn’s voice was thin and searing as a lash. “You deny it’s true, then?”

  Bertie shrugged his shoulders.

  “It was bad enough for you to go wenching around with—” Alwyn turned to me. “I can’t tell you, John, how sorry I am about this.”

  “Bloody old hypocrite!”

  Alwyn ignored his brother. “I feel partly responsible for—”

  “Let’s forget all that,” I said. “The point is, if your brother intended to keep this assignation, he could hardly have planned the monk trick for the same time and place.”

  “Don’t mind me,” said Bertie childishly.

  “Did you keep it?” Alwyn asked him.

  “Mind your own business.”

  “You’re behaving like a graceless schoolboy. Did you or did you not go up to the wood last night? You might as well tell us—you’ll have to tell Maxwell.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake stop nagging! Yes, I did.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Damn all happened. I waited just inside the entrance of that ride. After about five minutes, a mob of kids turned up. They didn’t see me. I waited a bit longer. Then I presumed Mrs. Waterson had got cold feet—anyway, it’d have been a bit dicey with those kids lying about in ambush—so I paddled off through the wood. Now are you satisfied?”

  “And came straight home?”

  “Not straight. I was suffering from sex-starvation, so I decided to walk it off. On my return, I found my kind nanny waiting up for me with a night-cap. Which brings the story to its end.”

  “While you were in the wood, did you hear anyone moving about?” asked Alwyn.

  “No, sir. Please sir, may I leave the room, sir?”

  He did so, Alwyn muttering an Edwardian “Insolent puppy!”

  I managed to stem poor Alwyn’s fulsome apologia for his brother, and came away.

  I had gleaned little. The telephone was just outside the study: and there had been one curious, but possibly innocent little discrepancy of evidence in the conversations of the morning. That was all. For the reasons I had already given myself, Alwyn could have played the monk. What about Bertie, though? He, as well as Alwyn, had learnt stilt-walking in their young days. But why, if it were Bertie, should he have involved Jenny, complicating the whole business for himself? And it was Alwyn, not Bertie, who had suggested to the boy, Jim, that young Gates’s gang should have another try for the gipsy boy. If Bertie had masqueraded as the monk, it could only have been that he was planning to terrorise Jenny.

  This was a disagreeable thought indeed, and not so fantastic as it first appeared. Jenny had treated him with a conte
mpt which even I found embarrassing at times. Was Bertie bloody-minded enough to take this sort of revenge, rather than that of dominating her sexually? The anonymous letter could be construed as an attempt to unsettle her mind; and Bertie might well have learnt from his brother that poor Jenny’s mind had been unstable not so long ago.

  But the major problem was still insoluble. Why all the other outrages? The joker, whoever he was, seemed to have been hitting out, indiscriminately, against so many members of our little community. Or else there were two jokers, a relatively harmless one (Alwyn had now admitted to the hoax), and a more deadly one, whose madness had been set in motion by the former. Since only the anonymous letters and the rick-burning were criminal, the police could not officially spend much time on the other manifestations. The letters had ceased, and no more ricks had been fired. One could hardly be surprised that the police should apparently not press home very hard their investigation into the alibis—which seemed to me the hub of the case as a whole.

  I remember talking about it to Sam the following week, when he’d come home for his summer vacation. Sam is unusually level-headed for his years, and I told him about the more recent events as I saw them. He listened with the slightly ironic attentiveness he gives, no doubt, to some pompous civic dignitary he is interviewing.

  “Yes,” he said at the end, “I had a talk with Vera last time I was down. She saw the thing as a campaign to drive her husband out of the village.”

  “Did she, now? Of course, motive is the most difficult factor to pin down here.”

  “Alwyn put it into her head, she told me. At that dinner party. The cuckoo. An elaborate way of telling her husband he was being cuckolded. Was he, by the way?”

  “Yes.”

  “By whom?” Sam asked, almost too equably.

  “Bertie Card.”

  “I imagined so. Well, the poison-pen’s letters to Ronald took up the same theme, and—”

  “You do seem to know a lot about all this.”

  “Yes, Vera talked her head off. She’s quite a chatter-box when she gets going, isn’t she?”

  I was disconcerted by Sam’s objective attitude towards her, after what she’d told me in the field—and my own gush of romantic feeling about her.