The Deadly Joker Read online

  I now perceived that one of the two bigger boys was the bailiff’s son. He said this was the gipsy who had set fire to his father’s ricks. They had been hunting for him all this evening, seen him disappear into the wood yonder, laid an ambush for him when he came out: now they were going to take him back and send for the police—this, at any rate, was the gist of the narrative, which was difficult to follow in detail, for all the gang were telling it at the tops of their voices too.

  Meanwhile their captive stood silent, a slight, drooping figure, head buried in hands; a thread of blood, black in the moony twilight, coming through the slim fingers. Though the head was averted, I recognised the gipsy boy now. I told young Gates he had done well: I would take charge of their prisoner, and they could all go home.

  It was a ticklish moment. Young Gates and his gang showed no disposition at first to hand over their legitimate prey. But I had not been a schoolmaster for nothing, and I finally managed to send them packing down the lane. When they were out of earshot, I turned to the gipsy, who was still standing beside me in the same docile, fatalistic attitude.

  “I’m sorry about this, Vera,” I said. “I hope they didn’t hurt you badly.”

  She took her hands away from her beautiful brown face. There was a cut on one cheekbone, still oozing blood a little.

  “One of them threw a stone. When they waylaid me. Have you a clean handkerchief, John?”

  I mopped at the cut: then, throwing off the scarecrow hat, she took my handkerchief and held it to her cheek. Her hair was glossy ebony in the moonshine.

  “Shall I take you home now, or would you like to come and rest at my house for a bit?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to talk to you, John. It’s all so—” Vera broke off. “Let’s go and sit on that gate.”

  We perched ourselves on the top bar.

  “Do you think they recognised me?” she asked.

  “I’m quite certain they didn’t.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yes. I fancy I recognised you before I was aware of doing so. You don’t run like a boy. Even the way you stood there—”

  “It’s lucky it was you.” She gazed at me in a ruminative way. “You don’t think I set fire to those ricks?”

  “Of course not. But wasn’t it rather unwise of you to go wandering about like this when the village believes it was done by a gipsy?”

  “I didn’t know they were saying that.”

  “But your husband was there when—no, perhaps he’d gone home before they started talking about it, after the fire was put out.”

  “He didn’t tell me, anyway.” Vera Paston’s brooding look grew darker. “It’s going to be rather awkward.”

  “Awkward?”

  “Well, those boys will all rush home and tell their parents they caught the gipsy and handed him over to you. How are you going to explain—”

  “I shall say I satisfied myself that you were not responsible for the fire, and then let you go.”

  “They won’t like that. They’ll say you should have sent for the police to interrogate me.”

  “Well then, I tell them you escaped. You tripped me up and ran away. Being an elderly party, I couldn’t catch you again.”

  Vera came out with her trilling laugh. “Really, John, you are the most extraordinary man. You look so respectable and staid. Who would ever guess—?”

  “Guess what?”

  “Oh, never mind. This gate is awfully hard. Would you die of exposure if you took off that mackintosh and laid it on the grass?”

  I said that I would survive the ordeal. We sat down in the field, our backs against the hedge bank. I reflected that Vera, for her part, was a most extraordinary woman. The things she had just said would have sounded arrantly flirtatious from any other woman’s mouth: from Vera, with her strange aura of passivity, of fatalism—whatever it was—they seemed perfectly ingenuous, the very reverse of female manoeuvring. A goddess does not need to flirt, I found myself thinking: that is why she is so dangerous.

  “Well,” she said, when we had sat in companionable silence for a minute. “Ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “Really, John, it’s not possible that a man can be so uninquisitive. You must be burning to know what I’ve been doing in this—this masquerade.”

  “Perhaps I am. But are you burning to tell me? You don’t have to, my dear.”

  “Guess, then. I promise to tell you if you’re right.” Her face was turned away a little, a watchful look on it as if she were listening for some voice inside herself.

  “Well then,” I said. “You get bored, cooped up alone in the Manor. The gipsy has never been seen at week-ends, when your husband is at home. You can’t roam the countryside in a sari, so you put on these clothes. You don’t want anyone to recognise you—perhaps Ronald wouldn’t approve of his wife wandering about at night, alone. There’s something wild about you—primitive—that wants solitude, no, freedom. The cat that walked by itself.”

  I found her gaze fastened upon me, the large eyes unblinking and shining like a cat’s.

  “You’re very romantic in your ideas,” she murmured.

  “I’m wrong, then?”

  “Or perhaps too gentlemanly to say what you really suspect. Go on, say it.”

  “You mean you come out at night to meet someone?”

  She was silent for so long that I feared I had offended her, and began to apologise.

  “No, no”—she brushed it aside—“you’re quite right. I do. At least, I did. Yes, a lover. You see why I had to disguise myself. I wouldn’t have him in Ronald’s house; there’d have been something off-colour about that”—she giggled—” off-colour even for a nigger. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she added, in a droll puzzled tone.

  The word “nigger” gave it away; and I remembered too a remark—how atrocious it sounded now!—I’d overheard in the Manor garden on the night of the dinner party.

  “He’s an unmitigated cad,” I burst out. “You’re well rid of him, my dear. If you’re rid of him.”

  “You know who?—Has there been gossip about us?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  “I know he’s a brute. I knew it from the start, I suppose.” Vera’s voice was infinitely sad. “But there seemed no reason to—to refuse him … We’ve been meeting up there in the wood. It’s supposed to be haunted, because of the old chantry. Bertie said the village people wouldn’t go near it.”

  I was aware of her eyes on me again. That musing look. And a fragment of Hardy came into my head “… would muse and eye me, while Life unrolled us its very best.” I felt, in a disconcerting flash, that this was such a moment for me. The next thing, I felt her hand in mine, very small, amazingly flexuous.

  “I’m afraid of him,” she said. Then after a pause, “I believe he did it as a sort of revenge upon Ronald, for supplanting him and his brother.”

  “Isn’t that rather melodramatic? He’s just an incorrigible womaniser, if you ask me. I don’t believe he really cares a damn that the Cards are no longer lords of the manor. Now if it had been Alwyn—”

  “Oh, but he tried too.”

  “Good God!—tried to seduce you?”

  “Yes.” Her voice rippled with an undercurrent of laughter. “It’s absurd, isn’t it? He was so flowery about it, too. I couldn’t help laughing at him. I’m hopeless—I always laugh at the wrong times. It’s nervousness, really. Anyway, you see why Bertie and I couldn’t meet at Pydal: it would have been too cruel for poor old Alwyn.”

  I refrained from telling her that, judging by their conversation in the garden when Jenny and I had first visited their house, Alwyn knew very well about his brother’s amour—indeed, the two had all but compared notes on the subject of Vera.

  “Are you very shocked?” she asked.

  “Oh, dreadfully scandalised.”

  Vera laughed, stroking my fingers. “It started when he began giving me riding lessons.”

  Involu
ntarily, my hand jerked away from hers: the remark had been all too near the knuckle.

  “My daughter’s having riding lessons with him.”

  Vera made no comment on this. Tact or egotism? “I’d like to know her better. She seems a very sweet girl.” She paused. “Has Sam got any further with his detection?”

  “Detection?”

  Vera seemed to be taken aback. “Oh, didn’t you know? He came to see us last Saturday—asked us a lot of questions about the things that’ve been happening in Netherplash. He said he might work it up into a story for his newspaper.”

  I was dumbfounded by this. My son has his reserves, but I’d never known him to be secretive before. How odd that he should not have told Jenny or myself. And surely it was altogether unlikely that a Bristol paper would print a story about events in a remote Dorset village?

  “I hope your wife doesn’t mind him coming to our house.”

  “Why on earth should she?” I asked; but an answer to the question occurred to me at once. With this trouble over Corinna on her mind, Jenny might well worry about Sam too falling under a spell. And how potent that spell was, I now knew all too well.

  Vera might have been a mind reader. She said, “Perhaps your wife is afraid I might be a bad influence on him.” There was a sadness in her voice which touched me deeply.

  “Now that’s absolute nonsense, my dear.”

  “So few people ever come to see me.” It was said without self-pity, which made it all the more poignant.

  “That’s their loss,” I fatuously remarked.

  Vera’s small fists beat on the ragged old trousers she was wearing. “I simply can’t understand you English. In my own country I was a person of—well, my family is a distinguished one. But I’ve been here for six or seven years now—in England, I mean—and I’ve hardly got to know a soul. Oh, the neighbours pay formal calls; but that’s the beginning and end of it.”

  “I expect people are frightened of you.”

  “Frightened? Of me?”

  “Great beauty does set a woman apart. It creates awe, or jealousy.”

  “Oh, don’t be absurd, John. You’re trying to make excuses—for the colour bar.”

  I could not tell her that the bar was much more likely to have been set up by her husband than by her colour.

  “You Indians are all over-sensitive about this colour-bar business.”

  “Naturally we are. It’s we who suffer from it.”

  “Well, you can’t accuse me of supporting it.”

  “No, I don’t. But suppose your daughter wanted to marry a negro?”

  “Oh, I don’t pretend that wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Or an Indian man?”

  Vera’s voice had grown quite shrill as she pressed me. Intellectual Indians must be the most argumentative people on earth. I could feel her, beside me, tense with controversial passion.

  “I’ll jump that hurdle if and when I come to it,” I said, and instantly regretted the face-saving flippancy. But Vera did not take me up. The musing look was back on her features.

  “He’s a nice boy, your Sam.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope he’s not going to fall in love with me.”

  There seemed no end to the shocks I was getting to-night. Not the least of them was the nature of my own response to this exquisite creature beside me.

  “You think he is?” I asked lamely.

  “Maybe.”

  “It wouldn’t do him any harm,” I found myself saying. “In fact, it’d be a wonderful experience for him.”

  Her laughter chimed out on the night air. “You really are an extraordinary man! But what about me? Are you encouraging me to—”

  “A father always wants the best for his son,” I said lightly.

  “You’re not a father-figure to me, dear John. Far from it.”

  “I’m an old man, and shouldn’t be sitting about in the night dew. Time we went back.”

  Docilely, she began to get to her feet. Then, on her knees, she said, “You won’t tell anyone about this—the person who was in the gipsy clothes? Anyone at all? Promise.”

  “I’ll just say the gipsy escaped my clutches.”

  “And he’ll never be seen again.”

  “Or heard of again. I promise.”

  I held out my hands to lift her up. The next instant all the sweetness and strangeness of the night came to a point as Vera’s mouth was laid on mine. I was beyond thinking or fearing—aware of nothing but her, and a sense that this had been for a long time going to happen. For a few moments only we stayed like that. Then, in a tremulous voice, she said, “It seems the gipsy has not escaped your clutches,” and moved gently out of my arms. It was the last thing she said to me that night. In a daze, I put on my mackintosh. Vera’s raggle-taggle hat was lying on the grass: I asked her if she wanted it, but she shook her head. We climbed over the gate. She took my arm, and in silence we walked down the lane. Where it branched right, leading past Pydal to the Manor House, she released my arm, gave me one long, searching look, then took the right-hand fork and flitted into the darkness, elusive as ever.

  Jenny came running out as I opened the garden gate. She flung her arms round me. “Where have you been, darling? You’ve been so long. And you’re wet.”

  “It’s only dew. I sat in a field for a bit.”

  The misleading truth had come so glibly to my lips, I had no trouble with the lies that followed—how I had found the gang of children attacking a gipsy boy, sent them home, and begun to question the gipsy, but he had run away.

  Jenny seemed hardly to listen to what I was saying: and this for some reason made my lies sound all the more discreditable in my own ears. When we were sitting down, she gave me a dubious look, as if wondering how I would take her news, and told me that Bertie Card had just left.

  “What on earth was he doing here?” I asked, rather irritably.

  Again that look passed over her face—an almost sly look. But I failed to understand it at the time, being still bemused by my experience with Vera: only later did I realise that Jenny was ill at ease lest I should misinterpret this visit of Bertie’s.

  “Oh, he just dropped in. To see us. Nothing special.”

  I did begin to wonder then if it had all been quite so innocent on his part. Suppose he had seen me leave the house, and thought this was a good opportunity? But for what? He could hardly have expected to find Corinna alone. At any rate, perhaps this was why he had not kept his assignation with Vera in the wood.

  “Was Corinna with you?”

  “Yes, darling. At first. Then she went up to bed.”

  Buster was on Jenny’s lap, and she bent down to scratch his ears, her feathery blonde hair screening her face.

  “She’s not all that obsessed by him, then?”

  “I asked her to go up.”

  “I dare say that was wise of you, my dear. We don’t want to seem to encourage—”

  “I told her I had a private matter to discuss with Bertie.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “No, you don’t see, John,” Jenny exclaimed, flushing. “Oh, why weren’t you here! You’re her father. Don’t you realise how difficult it is for me?”

  “I couldn’t know he’d come calling, love—how could I? This ‘private matter’—you mean you wanted to talk to him about Corinna?”

  “Of course. What else should I want to talk to him about? It makes me feel dirty, just to be alone in a room with him.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He was insolent to me.”

  “Was he, indeed? I’ll have to give the fellow a good talking to.”

  “He said it wasn’t his fault if a schoolgirl got a crush on him. He couldn’t do anything about it. He was only interested in maturer women. And so on.”

  Such as Vera Paston, I said to myself. The thought of Vera emotionally at the mercy of such a callous, conceited brute sickened me.

  “I appealed to him—asked him to stop behaving towards Corin
na as if he was interested in her, when he’d just said he was not interested.”

  Crass as I was, I failed to hear the tacit appeal Jenny was making to me now.

  “Do you know what he said? He said we could always stop her riding lessons, but we’d agreed to let her have a course of them, and we must pay for the remainder.”

  “Well, it’s blackmail. But I think that’d be the best line to adopt. Though I don’t know how Corinna will—”

  Jenny, with a wild-eyed look, her voice going high, interrupted me. “The alternative was—”

  “Look, love, you mustn’t get so worked up about all this. I’m sorry you had such a beastly ordeal. I’ll deal with him myself. Let’s go to bed now.”

  And so it was that I failed to learn what was the “alternative” Jenny had mentioned.

  8. The Scissors Man

  The gipsy boy, it was to be presumed, would not walk again. But next morning my mind kept recurring to the problem of his—her—capture. How had young Gates and his gang known where to look for the gipsy? Was it coincidence that they’d arrived in the right place at the right time?

  If they had been tipped off, it could only have been by someone who knew about Vera’s nocturnal escapades. The obvious informer was Bertie Card himself: it was significant, perhaps, that he should have failed to keep the assignation with Vera last night; but, unless he was tired of her, even the detestable Bertie would hardly arrange things so that his mistress and their rendezvous should be exposed.

  Alwyn, then? He had certainly encouraged the boys to hunt for the gipsy. It was quite possible that he knew about the place of assignation. He had two motives for discrediting Vera: it would embarrass his bête noire, Ronald Paston, and it would pay Vera back for rejecting his own advances. Such reasoning, I realised, was based on the premise that an elderly man could behave like a bitter, mischievous child, and this I found impossible to accept: practical jokes were one thing, a campaign of vindictive violence was another.