“He’s no damned fool, you know.”
Nigel refrained from comment. He did not want to rush her. She went off at a tangent. “That Inspector asked me if I’d rung Alec up after lunch—the day you and Clare came. The police do suspect him, don’t they?”
“Had you rung him up?”
“I never went near the telephone. I’ve not seen Alec or spoken to him, since the robbery.” Her beautiful, wide mouth contorted bitterly. “When I’ve been sold a pup, I know it all right. Cut your losses, Mum always used to say.”
“You’ve broken with him because you suspect it was he who stole your jewels?”
Hesione’s index and middle fingers chased each other along the counterpane. After a pause, she said, “Alec Gray is a boor, a cheap skate, a proper young Demon King. But he’s brave as they come, and no fool; and he has what it takes. He walks straight up to you, and next moment you’re on your back. Excuse my tongue—I was brought up rough. Oh, I fell for him all right. I wouldn’t have cared if he’d robbed all my best friends, and tanned his dear old granny to make a pair of shoes.”
“But you drew the line at his robbing you?”
“Ah, if only I knew, if only I knew!” Hesione shook her clasped hands. “But between you and me and the bedpan, I could swear I never told him the combination of the ruddy safe—unless I talk in my sleep. I’m not that damn silly. Of course, as I’ve delicately intimated, he has been in my bedroom. But—No, what put me off young Alec was the blatant way he chased other skirts in front of me, and the way he chased that boy, Foxy, the night of my party. I saw the look on his face. He’d have half killed the boy. I never did go for hunting noises and blood sports.”
“Yes. I see. But Foxy isn’t an angel, you know. He pinched a little jade idol from your house.
Lady Durbar’s splendid eyes opened wide. “Oh no he didn’t. I gave it to him. He’s not in trouble for—?”
“Will you do something for me, Lady Durbar?”
“Hess to you.”
“Don’t tell anyone for a few days—anyone at all—that you gave it to him. If you’re asked about it, just say you hadn’t noticed it was missing. Foxy won’t get into trouble, I promise you.”
“All right. If you say so.”
“Now, going back to young Gray, did your husband know about it?”
“This is where I draw myself up and say, ‘How dare you, Mr. Strangeways, accuse my husband of being a complaisant cuckold!’” She gave him the full benefit of her swaggering, theater look, then laughed infectiously. “We didn’t ever talk about it, but I’m sure Rudie knew.”
“And he’s in a position to make things very hot for Gray.”
“Oh yes,” she vaguely replied. “He could make it hot for anyone, if he wanted to. But he’s too big to get worked up over my little peccadilloes. Besides—”
“Besides?” Nigel prompted.
“Well, after my baby died—it was stillborn—Rudie sort of lost interest in me, in that way.” She was speaking jerkily, painfully now. “I can never have another. And Rudie’s heart was set on an heir. We get on awfully well, though.”
Nigel regarded his visitor thoughtfully. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“I couldn’t tell the police, could I now? It’d be like—like discussing one’s sex life with the Income Tax authorities.”
“About Gray, I meant.”
Her eyes fluttered away from him. She gave the impression of a woman who, disconcerted, is wondering whether to lie or tell the truth—wondering which will pay her best. Then she said, with deliberation, “I don’t want him messing up your Clare. From what she said to me the other—”
“Clare can look after herself,” interrupted Nigel, disregarding the possessive pronoun Hesione had used, though it gave him a queer little shiver of delight.
“My poor man! ‘Look after herself’—that’s the cue line for trouble. No woman can. Well, leave Clare out of it if you like. I want Alec”—her clear, rich voice grew harsh—“I want Alec stopped.”
“Stopped?”
“Stopped doing whatever he is doing.”
There was a question in her tones which Nigel ignored. He was not here to be pumped. He said, “What do you think he’s doing?”
For an instant she seemed about to confide something; then she drew back. She still had a loyalty—a compunction, at least.
“Oh, how should I know?” she vaguely replied.
Remembering a phrase she had come out with at the lunch party, when he talked about the boy he was searching for, Nigel decided to take a risk.
“That boy who’s disappeared—Bert Hale—you’ve seen it in the papers—it’s possible that Gray kidnaped him.”
“Kidnaped? But why?”
“Not for ransom. To get something out of him.”
Hesione was visibly trembling. “Oh, the poor little boy! But it’s—I can’t understand it. Even Alec. Are you sure?”
“Where would he take him? Has he anywhere in the country?”
“He has a cottage in Hampshire.”
“The police are making routine inquiries there. But I mean somewhere secret—a place, perhaps, that he would take a woman to.”
“Not that I know of.” She lifted her beautiful head. “I used to go to his flat. Still got the key, in fact.”
“That might come in useful.” Nigel paused; then lightly added, “I was hoping he might have a hideout you knew about, in East Anglia. A hundred miles or so from London. Suffolk, say.”
“Suffolk? Why d’you say Suffolk?” she asked sharply.
“Oh, it’d be convenient,” was Nigel’s evasive answer.
Lady Durbar was gazing into her lap. “Do you know the Stour Valley?” she presently said, in her social voice. “It’s beautiful country. Lush and gentle. Sort of maternal.” She is talking at random, thought Nigel: like a woman trying to avoid a crucial question. Then she doubled off on another track. “Some men are absurdly maternal. More than women. When I was expecting, Rudie spent hours studying those catalogues of baby apparatus. I just couldn’t have believed it. Of course Rudie’s a bit of an old pasha.”
“Hess, you’re babbling.”
She gave him an uncertain, April kind of smile, and squeezed his hand. “I suppose I am. Listen, it’s nothing to do with kidnaping—at least, it can’t be; but one night, about a fortnight ago, I was with Alec. He’d gone to sleep. After a bit he said, quite loud and sharp, ‘Elmer Steig.’ Then he mumbled something about ‘a gun for sale.’ That’s the name of a book, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But who is Elmer Steig?”
“I haven’t a clue. Next morning, I told Alec what he’d said in his sleep. Do you know what he did then?”
“No.”
“He knelt on my arms, put the pillow over my face, and started to suffocate me. I thought it was—well, one of our games—at first. Then I knew it wasn’t. I think I must have been half dead before he stopped. He said the object of the exercise—those were his actual words—was to make sure I didn’t repeat what I’d heard him say in his sleep; if ever I did, he’d go through with the exercise. I was—I don’t know—just dazed, bewildered. After that, he made love to me till I didn’t care any longer. I was mad for him in those days.”
Hesione had been talking to herself, more than to Nigel. Her voice was panting a little before she finished, and her hands, palm uppermost, trembled on her lap, the fingers curling up like leaves in a fire. Nigel firmly and tactfully changed the subject. “Is he interested in politics?”
Her faraway eyes gradually focused him, as if she was coming out of an anesthetic. “Politics? Oh, I see. I shouldn’t have thought he had any time for that.”
“You never discussed with him these new peace moves—the invitation to Russia?”
“Deary me, no. He wouldn’t include a woman’s opinions among her charms. If he went in for politics, it’d be for what he could get out of them. Why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to get at his motive for kidnaping
Bert. If he did. Does he belong to any political body, or Old Soldiers’ Association? Does he work for anyone?”
Hesione Durbar sucked in her ripe underlip. “Well, once or twice lately, when he’d stood me up, he made excuses afterward that he’d been detained by work. ‘The syndicate is so exacting,’ he said once. I let it ride. Alec work! I assumed he’d been with some other woman.”
Which is exactly what you were intended to assume, thought Nigel. He asked Hesione a number more questions—about people she had met in Gray’s company, about his past, his war career, the sources of his apparently unearned income.
“Women gave him money,” she said, not looking at Nigel.
“Blackmail?”
“Sometimes, perhaps. Just love, generally, I imagine. If love is the word. It’s funny you should mention blackmail, though. I’ve often wondered, recently, if he was blackmailing Rudie.”
Nigel sat up. “Why? I shouldn’t have thought it’d be healthy to try that on your husband.”
“No. But it was curious that Rudie should let him go on coming to the house, after he’d found out about us. Even on the night of my cannibal party, they seemed quite thick—well, I mean they weren’t avoiding each other, like you’d expect.” She went off into a trill of laughter. “Perhaps it’s the other way round: Rudie blackmailing Alec.” The idea was so droll that she bent over her knees, laughing with the demonstrative heartiness of her plebeian upbringing. Suddenly she sobered again.
“Anything I can do to help about that poor little boy—what’s his name?—Bert Hale, you’ve just to ask me.”
Bert was peering through the bars of the nursery window, sideways and downward. The previous morning, when he was awakened by the sound of a shot, he had jumped out of bed and run to the window, with a vague, wild hope of rescue. All he had seen, though, was the barrel of some firearm poking—in a way that unpleasantly reminded him of the house in Belvedere Street—through a first-floor window below him to the right. The weapon kicked, and there was another whipping crack. Automatically his eye followed a line protracted from the rifle barrel, to be arrested by a stake which had been driven into the unkempt lawn. On the stake was fastened a target. Several more shots followed. Bert’s hope of rescue faded into the realization that one of his captors was indulging in target practice. Before the unseen marksman emerged to take up his target, Bert heard footsteps approaching his door. He jumped back into bed, and when “Nanny” entered with a breakfast tray, he was pretending to be asleep.
The day had passed in waves of boredom and misery. There was nothing to be seen from the window, which was high up in a large gray house, except a terrace with stone balustrade directly beneath him, then a stretch of lawn bounded by what looked like a waterless moat, and beyond this the country—a countryside resembling, to his town-bred eyes, Hyde Park, except that the trees were much taller. The view was no doubt beautiful, peaceful, rural; but it gave Bert a pain in the neck, for it was a landscape without figures. Even if he had dared to call out for help, it would have been pointless, since not one solitary human being appeared, either in the foreground or the middle distance, all day. The place was as silent, too, as it was deserted: Bert heard no sound of train or car—only the occasional, distant mooing of a cow, and the day-long complacent roo-coo-rooing of pigeons which somewhow reminded him of Nanny’s voice.
He had written a letter to his mother, assuring her he was well and being properly looked after, and given it to the old woman to post. It told nothing about his kidnaping or his captivity, but he had little hope of its ever reaching its destination. He found a brand-new paint box and brushes in the cupboard, and spent an hour or two coloring the pictures in one of the kids’ books. But it was a dreary, interminable day, relieved only by the meals Nanny brought and her fits of gossip about distinguished babies she had once had in her charge, so Bert was glad enough when bedtime came.
This morning, waking a bit earlier than on the first day of his imprisonment, he went again to the window. The prospect before him was unchanged. The sun, mounting the sky to his left, revealed the same boring expense of sky, trees and rich, rank grass. Looking nearer at hand, however, he observed one new feature in the landscape. On the lawn below his window, about where the stake had stood yesterday morning, was set a plain kitchen chair, and on this chair was sitting the old woman who called herself Nanny. Her back was toward him, and she was either asleep or admiring the view. Bert stayed at the window, not in any positive hope of seeing other human figures—indeed, he had not even bothered to put on his spectacles—but as a castaway surveys the expenses of ocean, in a dreary self-hypnosis, and because there is nothing else to look at.
Presently, he heard the sound of a window being gently opened, below him and to his right. The muzzle of the rifle poked out. It was trained in the same direction as yesterday. Bert opened his mouth, yelling a warning to the old woman asleep on the kitchen chair. His cry was drowned by the crack of the rifle, to which, like an almost instantaneous echo, was added a sort of sharp “clock”—the sound of a cricket bat meeting a ball—and the head of the figure seated in the chair visibly jerked.
Bert scrambled back to bed, hid his face in the pillow; then, as further shots followed, he dug his fingers into his ears, sobbing. The memory of another shot, another head jerking and disintegrating, in the derelict house, rushed back at him. The old woman was silly, aggravating; but she had been kind to him. Now, for all he knew, he would be alone in this mansion with the person who had killed her. But why had she been killed? It seemed crazy, a piece of mad, meaningless nightmare. Then Bert remembered the letter he had written. Perhaps she really had tried to post it, and been caught, and this was her punishment.
Bert was still sobbing, hiccuping with sobs, when he heard a key turn in the lock. He burrowed under the clothes, away from whoever was coming in. A hand pulled the bedclothes back. A voice said, “Now, now, Master Bert. Hiding?”
It was Nanny.
Bert stared at her, rubbed his eyes, then flung himself into her arms.
“There, there,” she said. “Was it a horrid dream?”
The word touched off again his doubt and his horror. Running to the window, he gazed out. Then, putting on his spectacles, he looked a second time. He could see clearly now: the figure on the chair was a dummy, dressed in apron and gray gown: the head, Nanny’s head, was a coconut, its sparse hair painted grayish-white.
“I thought he was shooting at you,” the boy blurted out.
Nanny clucked cozily. “The idea! Now, eat up your breakfast like a good boy. I’ve brought you some lovely rusks for a treat.”
“But who is he? Who’s been firing at that dummy?”
“It’s a gentleman staying here, ducky. He’s ever so fond of a nice bit of shooting.”
“But why does he?—did he borrow those clothes from you?”
“Well, he wouldn’t want to ruin his own, would he? They’re just some old things of mine, I don’t mind if he makes bullet holes in them.”
The logic of this was so unassailable that for a moment its utter irrationality was lost on Bert. When he perceived it, he was appalled.
“But—” he began.
“Little boys should keep their but’s to butter their bread with.”
“Look here, I do wish you’d realize I’m not a little boy. I’m twelve.”
But it was no good. The old woman’s eye took on the wandering, bewildered look he had noticed before. Bert began to eat his breakfast. Presently Nanny, still at the window, waved her handerchief.
“Who are you waving to?” Bert asked, getting up and moving toward her.
“No, Master Bert! Sit down at once and get on with your breakfast!” she said sharply. “Mister Inquisitive got his fingers burned.”
Bert got on with it. He had never eaten rusks before, and found them quite good.
“Who else lives here?”
“There’s me, and my nephew. And the gardener; but he has a cottage in the grounds.”
&
nbsp; “Do you and your nephew own the house?”
“Listen to him!” The old woman went off into a paroxysm of wheezing chuckles. “No, dearie, we’re caretakers. Most of the house is shut up. We just keep a room or two ready for visitors—like you, and the gentleman who’s staying. Ever so sad, I call it, when I remember the house parties and goings-on we used to have in the old days.”
Bert let her ramble away. He had discovered yesterday that there were certain questions she would not answer: she would not tell him, for example, where this house was, or who had invited him—as he tactfully put it—to stay here. So now he was exercising his brains to get at the information in some devious way.
At a pause of her reminiscences he said, “It’s an awfully out-of-the-way place isn’t it? Where do you get your food from? Is there a village near?”
“Well, Master Bert, when you’re my age you don’t want gallivantings and cinemas and that. The village is two miles away. But they send regularly from—” she stopped in mid-sentence, a flicker of fear in her eye.
“Send what?”
“The groceries and meat and such. We have our own fruit and vegetables, of course. And the dustman comes every second Monday. It wouldn’t suit everyone, mind you. The young mistress couldn’t abide it. Too quiet for her. But then, she was used to racketing about in—”
Once again, Bert shut off his attention. A wheeze, a brain wave whose brilliance startled even him, accustomed though he was to the visitations of ingenuity, had come into his head. By hook or by crook, he was thinking, I must get out to where they keep the dustbins, for the day after tomorrow is the second Monday of the month.
12
Light at Eventide
BERT’S APPARENT DOCILITY, his acceptance of the extraordinary situation in which he was placed, must have impressed his captors. On Sunday morning, when he asked the old woman if he might go out and play ball on the lawn, she said she would ask her nephew. There had been no shooting today from the first-floor window; instead, Bert heard the sound of church bells, faint or swelling on wafts of wind from the east: that way lay the village, then. The old woman returned, to tell him that her nephew would take him out for exercise in the yard this afternoon. It sounded—this curious phrase—as if he was a dog; or, for that matter, a prisoner. But the boy’s heart leaped. A yard was where one kept dustbins. No doubt the yard would be a safer place than the lawn, from his jailers’ point of view: it could not be overlooked; though, for all the signs of human activity around this god-forsaken place, they could have let him fire off rockets from the roof with little risk of anyone noticing it.