The Deadly Joker

  “You’d be well advised to take this matter seriously,” said Alwyn.

  “Oh, I do, I do.”

  “For instance, by accepting your anonymous correspondent’s advice and paying your blasted bills instead of sponging on—”

  “Balls to that, Nanny.”

  Alwyn’s discomposure had released itself into anger. He was positively shaking with it. But I could not take advantage of this rift between the brothers—I was too much preoccupied with concealing my own disquietude.

  “It’s obviously a matter for the police,” said Alwyn after a long silence. “We must show them these abominable messages, and the envelopes.”

  “And of course the cards they’re stuck to,” Bertie murmured from behind his newspaper.

  “Naturally,” said Alwyn.

  I interposed. “Might it not be better to find out just who else in the village has had an anonymous letter?”

  “Why?” Bertie asked flatly.

  “The more evidence we collect, the better. People tend to destroy this sort of communication. We should try to anticipate their doing so.”

  “Aha! The first-class mind at work. An excellent suggestion, my dear Waterson.” Alwyn’s mercurial aspect was in the ascendancy again. “How should we go about it?”

  “Telephone round—that’s the obvious way,” said Bertie.

  I turned to Alwyn. “I agree. And I think you’re the person who should do it. I’m a newcomer.”

  He consented, but asked me if I would make the inquiries at the Manor. “Fact is, there’s been a bit of a rumpus with that fellow Paston.” Alwyn did not enlarge upon it; and this was obviously no time for broaching my suspicions about the recent hoax. I rang Corinna, who told me Jenny was still asleep, and asked her to ring me at the Manor if I was needed during the next hour.

  The butler showed me into the library, at the far end of which Ronald Paston was sitting behind a desk. It seemed a long walk. I remembered that Mussolini used to inflict such a peregrination upon those who came for an audience with him. When I finally reached him, he stood up and received me civilly enough. There was a dangerous smoulder in his eyes, though, which broke into flame when, after telling him the reason for my visit, I mentioned that Alwyn Card had asked me to come along.

  “I’m not surprised. That passé old playboy!—shouldn’t wonder if he’d written these letters himself.”

  “Have you had one?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve not destroyed it, I hope. The more of them we can collect, the better chance the police will have to—”

  “Of course I haven’t destroyed it,” he interrupted brusquely. “Men in my position frequently get anonymous letters. Most of us ignore them. Bad policy, I think: one in a hundred of them may let out something which can be turned to advantage—straws in the wind, you know. My confidential secretary files the ones I get.”

  I was silenced for a moment by this bizarre revelation. Then I said, “It’s occurred to me that the nature of these letters might give us a line on the writer.”

  “Quite.” Ronald Paston’s expression made it clear that he had no patience for truisms.

  “I mean, the two I’ve seen—my wife’s and Bertie Card’s—don’t show any specialised or private knowledge, so to speak, about the recipients: nothing that the writer couldn’t have picked up through slight acquaintance or local gossip.”

  “Well, that’s pretty negative, isn’t it? Where does it get us?”

  I shrugged. “We can’t tell till we see any other letters that have come. It may eliminate one kind of writer—the one who’s really in the know.”

  “You mean, you want to see the card I got.”

  “Certainly not,” I replied, nettled at the implication that I was a busybody. “I haven’t the least wish to pry into—”

  He cut me short again, throwing a card on the desk before me. “Here it is, anyway. Nasty enough. But the chap’s evidently a lunatic.”

  I read the message:

  WATCH OUT FOR YOUR INDIAN BAG YOU JUMPED-UP SCRAP DEALER—SHE’S WIDE OPEN AT THE SEAM.

  “My father made his fortune out of buying Government surplus,” Paston volunteered.

  I felt extremely embarrassed—the more so because he seemed to expect some comment from me, and I could think of none except “Is she?” Finally I pulled myself together.

  “Has, er, Mrs. Paston seen this?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Another silence.

  “Has she had a letter herself?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Never see her till midday,” he added, with a trace of pettishness in his voice. He began meticulously to rearrange the objects on his desk, his hands quite steady. “Well, does that help you?”

  “Help me?”

  “Towards establishing the identity of the letter writer?”

  “I don’t know. The three letters I’ve seen suggest it’s an educated person.”

  “How so?”

  “The vocabulary is not that of a—well, an agricultural labourer. And yours is witty, in its scurrilous way.”

  “Witty?” Paston’s voice struck like a hammer. His face had suddenly lost its usual impassive look. “You call this sort of filth witty?” He was glaring at me as if I was the anonymous writer.

  “I mean that it shows a certain quickness of mind, inventiveness, in the way it—”

  “Inventiveness! I should think it damn’ well does! Suggesting that my wife—” He spluttered to a stop. I realised what fury he had been repressing till now: it also occurred to me that, if he were perfectly confident of his wife’s virtue, he would not have made this outburst.

  “I’ve another reason for thinking that the writer must be well educated,” I said, and told him about the scrawl Jenny had found on my study wall. Ronald Paston brushed it aside impatiently, as if I had been rather long-winded—which indeed I sometimes am.

  “Well, what action do you propose taking?” he brusquely demanded, making me feel like an under-manager.

  “Obviously, the police must be informed. But I don’t know the local—”

  “No use going to them. The chief constable’s our man. I’m in touch with him over another matter.” Paston made a note on an ivory-laid memorandum pad.

  “What else do you advise?”

  “We should try to collect any other letters that may have been sent before the recipients destroy them. Actually, Alwyn Card has agreed to telephone round and—”

  “Alwyn?” Paston’s brown eyes opened wide. “Oh, well, just the job for him. Old busybody … I wonder if it’s wise, though.”

  “Wise?”

  “In confidence, between you and I, I strongly suspect that Alwyn was the perpetrator of that stupid hoax the other night.”

  “That’s the theory you’ve discussed with the chief constable?”

  “Yes. He’s not buying it, though. All these county stuffed-shirts stick together, you know.”

  Ronald Paston was not a man I took to, but I felt a certain sympathy for him in the humiliation he had suffered.

  “It was a silly hoax, whoever did it,” I said. “Still, these letters strike me as a much more serious matter. I wouldn’t be disposed to assume that their author is the same person as the hoaxer.”

  “Can you enlarge on that?”

  “The hoax was a practical joke—nasty for you, of course, but fundamentally childish. The letters are no joke: they’re evil—aimed at doing real mischief to individuals, not just getting a rise out of them in public.”

  “Well, you may be right, though the distinction seems a pretty fine one to me. If Alwyn didn’t write them, who did? We’ve not got a wide selection of highly educated people in the neighbourhood, and your theory is that—” Paston broke off, giving me a sharp look. “What’s on your mind, Waterson?”

  This damnable shrewdness of his disconcerted me. Fortunately, I was saved from having to manufacture a reply by Vera Paston, who drifted into the room like a coloured cloud.

 
“You are up early, darling,” said her husband, sliding the blotter over the anonymous letter. “Anything wrong?”

  “I knew I’d copied out something about it in my book, so I looked it out and—”

  “Something about what?” asked Ronald, in a humouring way. “Look, darling, Mr. Waterson is here.”

  “Good morning, John. About practical jokes, of course.”

  “Vera is barely compos at this time of day.” Ronald’s voice throbbed with fatuous pride as if he were showing off an infant prodigy. I had not seen this uxorious quality in him before.

  Vera gave me a flashing smile. “We Indians are the most insatiable culture-seekers, John. For instance, I’ve kept a—a commonplace book ever since my schooldays. Why do you call it a commonplace book when one copies down great thoughts in it?”

  “It must be our English habit of self-depreciation.”

  “But that wouldn’t be self-depreciation. It’s depreciating the thoughts of poets and philosophers. Well, of course you do that too, don’t you? You’re a philistine people.”

  “Vera!”

  “Oh, John knows I’m teasing him. He’s a great scholar. In India, I would be sitting at his feet.”

  “Just as well we’re not in India, then. You’d make him thoroughly uncomfortable. Now what’s this you’ve found, darling?”

  With a tinkle of bracelets, Vera held out a book bound in brightly-coloured paper, opened it at the marker, and read out:

  The practical joker despises his victims but at the same time envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own.

  “That was written by the poet, W. H. Auden,” she said. “So you see?”

  “What do we see?”

  “Why, Ronald, you’ve got to look for a person who has no desire which he can call his own.”

  “Quite a good description of you, Vera.”

  Though he said it lightly, I found myself shaken by Paston’s remark. For a moment, Vera had that puzzled, arrested look in her eyes I had noticed before, as if she’d come up against an invisible brick wall. Paston went on, hurriedly:

  “What I mean is—you’re a passive type, you accept everything, it’s your oriental fatalism. Let me see—” he took the book from her hands—“‘despises his victims but at the same time envies them.’ Well, that seems to pinpoint Alwyn Card, wouldn’t you say?”

  But, as I walked back to Green Lane, my mind was not on the psychology of the practical joker. Like a piece of shrapnel embedded beneath the skin, lay Ronald Paston’s question—“If Alwyn didn’t write them, who did?”

  Just before her breakdown, I had discovered that poor Jenny was writing anonymous letters to my friends in Oxford. It was part of her illness. The affair had been hushed up—everyone was very kind and understanding about it.

  Everyone? I ask myself now. Had I been as kind and understanding as I should have been, after I made the discovery?

  5. The Riding School

  Jenny was awake when at last I got back. The hair lying lank about her flushed face had lost its shine, and there was an imploring anxiety in her eyes. I sat down on the edge of the bed, determined to grip the nettle firmly, and began to tell her about my interview with the Cards and Ronald Paston. When I had finished, she gripped my hand hard.

  “Do you—do you think it was me?” she faltered.

  “Now, Jenny love—”

  “No. Be honest.”

  “I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t you. And you know it wasn’t.”

  She sighed. “Last time it happened, I didn’t know I was doing it.”

  “But this is quite different. You weren’t well then, you were having a breakdown.”

  “I shall have another soon, if this sort of thing goes on. Why should anyone write such cruel things?”

  I was silent a moment, thinking of the letter Jenny had received. “You sick bitch …” I remembered the way Alwyn had harped on her health when we went to dinner with him: almost as if he had known about Jenny’s breakdown. But how could he? We had no acquaintances in common.

  “You see? Only someone sick in their mind could write letters like—”

  “Now you’re being quite absurd, my darling,” I replied, trying to ignore the tremble of self-pity in her voice. A happy thought struck me. “Look, the letters I’ve seen so far—they’re all stuck on to jokers, and the playing-cards are well worn. Whoever wrote them had at least three packs of old cards. You and I never play cards. We haven’t got any. And you can’t buy used ones. Q.E.D.”

  Jenny’s whole face lighted up. “Oh, you clever old man! What it is to have the trained mind!” She pulled me down to her and kissed me. “Of course, I might have stolen some old packs,” she said gaily.

  “I’ve just thought of something else. You don’t use jokers in bridge or whist, do you? The anonymous-letter cards are well worn. So whoever wrote them must be a person who plays card games in which jokers are used.”

  “Yes, and do you know what I think? It’s a funny way to send poison letters, on playing-cards. I think someone is trying to throw suspicion on Alwyn and his brother—hinting at the Cards.”

  “That’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it?”

  “But the whole thing is. It’s unbelievable, in a place like this—”

  “The more paradisal the Eden, the more poisonous the snake.”

  Jenny laughed. “No one would think, to look at you, what a romantic sort of man you are. Or perhaps they would. Was Vera there?”

  I’m fairly used to the erratic dartings of Jenny’s mind, but for a moment this baffled me.

  “Vera? Oh, at the Manor this morning? Yes, she put in an appearance. She advanced a theory about the nature of the practical joker.”

  “Did she, indeed?”

  “She’d read it somewhere. I wasn’t entirely impressed by it—Jenny, you aren’t suspecting her of—?”

  “Well, she seems to have nothing else to do.”

  “There’s poison circulating, but don’t let us get infected by it.”

  “Somebody wrote those letters. And as far as we know, the Pastons have most cause for wanting to do Alwyn down.”

  “Ronald I can imagine behaving vindictively. But, with his money and influence, he’d hardly need to use the poisoned-pinprick method.”

  “But you can’t imagine Vera being vindictive?” said Jenny, giving me a sly look.

  “I’d say she isn’t a positive enough character for that. Ronald made the same point—he was teasing her, of course—that she fitted this theory of the practical joker as a person who had no desire he can call his own.”

  “No desire? If that’s his idea of his wife, he must be even crasser about human beings than—”

  “He didn’t mean it in that sense.” Then I heard myself saying, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, three words which seemed to have been put in my mouth by someone else—an image I was to recall with horror some weeks later. “She’s a moth.”

  “A moth?”

  “A moth doesn’t desire the flame: it’s dragged into it.”

  Jenny glanced up at me sideways through the fall of her hair. “You do find her fascinating.” Her voice was too carefully neutral. “Don’t you, John?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Mysterious?”

  “She’s certainly that. But the mystery may be only skin deep.”

  “Because she’s a different colour, you mean? I wonder how Ronald met her.”

  “Why not ask her? You see, you’re fascinated too.”

  “Intrigued, yes … John, did you ever have an Oriental woman, in your wild young days?”

  “No, love. And I’m not going to now, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’m past the dangerous age. And I’m quite happy as I am.”

  It never ceases to amaze me, how women can create a situation, even an emotion, out of thin air. I had admired Vera Paston and been interested in her, without feeling any stir of physical attractio
n. Now, with a faint waft of her jealousy, Jenny had contrived to make me think about Vera in terms of sexual curiosity.

  Nothing happened for some days. The sun shone, the bees hummed. Netherplash Cantorum drowsed in summer air spiced with the fragrance of pinks. Jenny practised the piano, and I set to work upon my edition of Virgil. It was good to see Corinna with the rose flush back in her cheeks, browning herself outside my study window. We were a picture of contentment; but at the back of my mind there lurked a premonition that our village had not seen the end of its troubles. We had one visit from the police: a sergeant from the County C.I.D. turned up, took the anonymous letter Jenny had been sent, asked a few routine questions, and informed me that letters had also been received, the day after the first batch, by Alwyn Card, the Kindersleys, the Vicar of Tollerton, the Pastons’ bailiff, and one of the local farmers. All had Tollerton postmarks.

  The sergeant, a sturdy, flaxen-haired man, did not seem greatly perturbed by the poison-pen outbreak, giving the impression that it would soon die a natural death provided nobody got worked up about it—an example he himself set by the placid, slow-motion character of his inquiries.

  I was getting acclimatised to the tempo of life in a secluded country district. The tractor had superseded the horse, but it would be a long time before the countryman lost that deliberation of thought and movement implanted in him by centuries of the hard manual labour which required him to husband his strength over a long day’s work. Shopping too, I discovered, could be an endurance test. A few days later, Corinna and I drove into Tollerton to buy groceries. As we approached the shop, I saw Egbert Card emerge and get into his Bentley. A village woman was in deep conversation with the shopkeeper as we entered. The latter beamed at us, then resumed the talk, both women adapting their style to the presence of foreigners, so that the dialogue developed the cryptic and portentous allusiveness of a passage between the Messenger and the Chorus in a Greek play.

  “I wonder if he’ll keep at it this time.”

  “I wonder. And a packet of Quaker Oats.”

  “Quaker Oats … Some aren’t born that way.”