I remembered Vera’s delicious voice reading out from her commonplace book that quotation about the practical joker—his contempt for his victims, his envy of them. I remembered how, the first time we met him, Alwyn, under a guise of solicitousness, probed mercilessly at Jenny’s vulnerable spot—her nervous breakdown, her fear of madness. How Alwyn loved making mischief, disturbing people’s minds, creating doubt and misery. To this same end, he could not even resist telling his brother how I had warned him to beware of Bertie’s making another attempt upon Alwyn’s life …
A police car, with searchlight and radio, came bumping up the steep field, and shone its light along our side of the wood. Several policemen got out, and after a brief consultation with Wright, moved away to reinforce the men on its other sides. Every now and then the police car’s loudspeaker boomed into the darkness. “Come out. You are surrounded.” But the silence washed back, no figure emerged from the wood …
What passed through Alwyn’s mind, I wondered, while he lurked there, getting colder as the night wore on, among the rotting vegetation, the sickly smell of elders, the trees that pressed claustrophobically upon the narrow rides? Did he still believe that cunning and luck would attend him, as before, and somehow extricate him? That he could save himself again by the quick-witted impudence with which he had treated the discrepancies of evidence between Bertie and himself after the monk episode and over the fetching of the poison spray from the committee room? Or perhaps he had reached the terminus of his madness—apathy—and was lying there, beyond hope or thought, immobile, like the little hunted animal which shams dead in the pitiable illusion that, thus, its death will not be required of it.
Yet I could feel no pity for Alwyn, only repugnance. He had forfeited pity, not only by his own malice and atrocious deeds, but most of all by the sanctimonious and skilled hypocrisy with which he had pretended loyalty to the brother whose destruction was his chief aim. The loyalty, such as it was—and I could not help admiring it now—was all reposed in the man who shivered at my side, setting his teeth against the pain of his damaged hand: a spendthrift, a rake, a reprobate.
“This is a bastard,” he muttered. “He must know he’s had it. And so have I.”
He moved to the wood’s edge, calling out, “Al! Al! Come out! It’s me, Bertie. Come out! We’re all getting cold.”
But it was not for an hour or two yet, after the dawn had whitened and the outlines of men and trees grown visible, that we heard a crackling and shuffling in the wood. It ceased, as though Alwyn’s resolution had failed, and there was another interminable wait.
Then, as the first beams of the sun threw long tree-shadows, there he was suddenly, inside the wood’s edge, staring out at us.
He advanced a few paces—the tubby figure in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, a few leaves clinging to them, the quiver on his back, the tall bow in his left hand with an arrow notched.
He looked about him for a moment, his face quite blank as if he had lost his memory; then he descried Bertie, and the chubby face seemed to be squeezed out of shape, by despair or malevolence.
Wright and another man were moving rapidly down the hill towards him. “Put that thing down, Mr. Card,” the inspector called out.
Alwyn raised his bow, aiming the arrow at him. “I’ll kill the first man who takes another step.”
Wright signalled to the patrol car, which was a hundred yards away. But it had only started to move when Bertie Card muttered, “This is it,” and walked steadily towards his brother.
“Come along, Al, old chap, the picnic’s over,” he said.
There was a twang, a hiss, and the arrow point was standing out from Bertie’s back. Before Alwyn could fit another arrow to the bow, Wright jumped him and he was overpowered.
I ran to Bertie’s side. He died as I reached him. He had been right in saying that his brother was a dead shot, wrong perhaps in saying you could not kill yourself with a bow and arrow. Well, it had been a suicidal act on his part; but men have been honoured for less courageous ones.
THE END
A Note on the Author
Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet and author, Cecil Day-Lewis, used primarily for his mystery series.
Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904 – 72) was a British poet from Ireland and the Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.
Discover books by Nicholas Blake published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/NicholasBlake
A Tangled Web
A Penknife in My Heart
The Deadly Joker
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1963, Collins
Copyright ©1963 Nicholas Blake
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eISBN:9781448210152
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Nicholas Blake, The Deadly Joker
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