The Deadly Joker Read online

  Leaving Alwyn, I strolled along to the Manor. As on that first morning, when I had gone out to look for the remains of the cuckoo, Vera Paston was sauntering on the lawn in front of the magnificent house. I hesitated. We had not met since that night in the field below Chantry wood. There was a sudden unease in my mind—and a physical sense of suffocation, as if the air had grown more rarefied. I expected her to look different because of what had passed between us: but her attraction, so vividly felt across the striped green of the lawn, was still that of an enigma. “Romantic old fool,” I muttered to myself. Vera was an Indian woman—a highly personable creature indeed, but a woman, not a mythological figure: bored with her life, bored probably with her husband, capable of having her head turned by any male who came into her life.

  As I approached her, I knew all too well what a ramshackle defence such thoughts were. She inclined her head to me, the palms of her hands together in the Indian salutation.

  “It’s a long time, John,” she said. “Why haven’t you been to see me?”

  “A lot of things have been happening,” I vaguely replied.

  “In Netherplash?” Her voice was gently mocking.

  “Surely you’ve heard about them?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. In roundabout ways. My husband likes me to be sheltered from the cold draughts of reality.”

  In a minute, walking round the house, past the french windows of the library towards the gardens at the back, we had become as intimate as on the night we strolled down the lane together, arms linked. It was a trance-like state; words did not matter, the outer world lost meaning.

  “I hear you’re going on a world cruise, you and Ronald.”

  “He needs a holiday.” Vera’s voice was low and indifferent.

  “And what do you need?”

  “I don’t know. You must tell me. You’re my guru. Now I’ll sit at your feet and you shall speak out of your wisdom.”

  We were beside the swimming pool. She made me take a deck-chair, herself crumpling gracefully to the ground, her back leaning against my left leg. The water was Mediterranean blue.

  “You should take up good works, my child—run the Women’s Institute, become a J.P., give lectures about the problems of India.”

  “Oh, no!” Her voice went up in a delightful lilt. “I am much too domesticated for that.”

  “You—domesticated?”

  “Part of me. What a pity you are married.” Vera said it quite without flirtatiousness, in a matter-of-fact tone; but I could not answer.

  “I should have liked to live with you, and have your children,” she went on. “A man I could respect.”

  “Respect? I’m an elderly pedant. A stick-in-the-mud.”

  Her dark eyes came up to mine. “You know that is nonsense. But you needn’t be afraid of me. I shall not make things difficult for you. You have so much, and I wouldn’t take it away from you.”

  I shall never forget how my heart melted at this—the extraordinary tenderness for her which I felt then. There was a long, companionable silence between us.

  “I do miss my home,” she said at last. “Filled with people. Everyone talking and talking. You’d hate it—all that jabber.”

  “Why don’t you go home?”

  “We shall stay there for a while, on our world tour. If Ronald can face it,” she replied evasively.

  “That’s not what I meant, my dear.”

  “I know. But it’s too long since—I don’t think my roots would grow again there. I’ve made my limbo and I must lie on it.”

  “But it’s so unreal, surely, this life with Ronald?”

  Her lovely face clouded over. “Yes. It was a mistake … I was so ignorant, so dead—I had to do something desperate.”

  “You don’t mean marrying Ronald?”

  “No, no, Bertie. He made me feel alive for a bit.”

  “Well, that was a mistake all right.”

  “Still, I’ve learnt from it.”

  “What have you learnt?”

  “That I’m not a wicked woman—not by nature. It was exciting, of course; it’s always exciting to defy one’s nature, at first.”

  “Have you broken with him?”

  “I just haven’t seen him. Ought I to? Officially?” Vera giggled, but uncertainly. “I suppose he thinks I’m pining for him still. He’s very conceited that way.”

  “Bertie’s got other things on his mind just now,” I began.

  “I’d be afraid to tell him. He’s so violent.”

  After a pause, I asked, “Does your husband know—suspect anything?”

  “I’ve no idea what goes on in Ronald’s mind. He’s like a machine in some ways. An automatic brain. He is very clever, you know. But he’s always wanting to prove something to himself; prove that he can beat his competitors at business, prove he can be a country gentleman—”

  “Prove he can capture the loveliest woman in India. For his collection.”

  Turning, she laid an arm over my knees. “Oh, John. It is sad we didn’t meet seven years ago.” She smiled at me. “But by now you’d have been bored with my chatter.”

  We heard voices beyond the wall. Unhurriedly, Vera got up, leant over me, and kissed my mouth; then sat down in a deck-chair.

  Ronald and Charlie Maxwell came through the gate in the garden wall.

  “Ah, this is where you are,” Ronald said to his wife. “Good morning, John.”

  For all his beautifully cut, light-weight tweeds—or perhaps because of them—I could by no stretch of the imagination see Ronald as a country gent. But then, I had never been able to surmise what was going on behind that smooth, swarthy face, that managerial manner: persons concerned in “business” have always been a closed book to me.

  We discussed the Flower Show for a little. “We all want my wife to give away the prizes this year,” said Ronald.

  This was news to me; but I said, “Why, of course.”

  “No. You should get somebody else. I don’t feel—I don’t think we should monopolise the show like that.”

  “It’s not a question of monopolising it,” returned Ronald, with some irritation. “You are my wife. You should play your part in the life of my—of the village.”

  “Give the natives a kick to receive their prizes from the fair hands of Mrs. Paston,” said Charles Maxwell fatuously.

  Vera pouted. “You do keep on at me so about this.”

  “It’s not asking very much of you, my dear. I’m sure John will back me up.”

  “It would be very nice for us all,” I said uncomfortably.

  “Oh, well, if my guru instructs me—”

  “Guru? Who’s he when he’s at home?” asked Maxwell.

  “That’s splendid.” Ronald rubbed his hands briskly. “Particularly as we have an item on the agenda—a little secret which—”

  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” came Sam’s voice. He passed through the gate, said good morning all round, then, “Sorry we missed you yesterday afternoon, Mr. Paston. We all went sailing.”

  “Missed me? Did you call in here on your way?” Ronald, I thought, looked both foxed and wary.

  “No. When you called at Green Lane.”

  “Sorry, I don’t follow you,” said Ronald curtly.

  “Our neighbour, Mrs. Chalmers, told me she’d seen you go to our door. About five o’clock.”

  “Oh, I see. Poor old thing’s got it a bit muddled. I did have a word with Mrs. Peek—” she was our next-door neighbour on the other side. “She’s going to judge the cakes, you know. Used to cook for the Cards.”

  It was odd for Ronald to supply such gratuitous information. I could see beads of sweat on his forehead now; but of course it was a very hot morning.

  “Been doing some detection, old man?” asked Charlie.

  Glances passed between Sam and myself. Unobtrusively I nodded.

  “Yes,” said Sam. “Trying to solve the mystery of Buster.”

  “Come again?”

  “My sister’s puppy. He
’s dead.”

  “Oh, John, you never told me,” said Vera.

  “He got out of the house somehow and strangled himself in an old rabbit snare,” Sam went on, gazing at Ronald in his most poker-faced manner.

  “My tenants have no business to leave these things lying about. I’m extremely sorry—”

  “How do you know they were your tenants?” Sam contrived to ask it in an objective, quite inoffensive way.

  “As I own pretty well all the land hereabouts, it seems a statistical probability.”

  “Didn’t know there were any rabbits left in the country,” Charlie Maxwell put in.

  “That’s a point,” I said. “Alwyn thinks someone must have killed the dog and left it lying up there with the wire round its neck.”

  Vera gave a melodious little scream. “Oh, but how awful!”

  “This joker of yours, you mean?” asked Charlie.

  “Now I see the object of your questions.” Ronald, whose face had been darkening, gave Sam a very nasty look indeed. “And I don’t care for their implication at all.”

  “What implication?” Sam was altogether unquelled.

  “You appear to be suggesting that I had something to do with—”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Paston. That is quite inconceivable—” Sam’s voice was thickly coated with respectfulness. “I just wondered if you’d seen Buster wandering about when you visited, er, Mrs. Peek.”

  “Or a dog-stealer lurking in the undergrowth,” said Maxwell, grinning broadly.

  Ronald appeared to feel he had made a fool of himself, and was not the best pleased for it. “Sorry. Can’t help there. Alwyn’s a bit of an old scare-monger, you know. He’s got this joker on the brain.” He turned to Sam. “It’s bad luck on your sister, though. Parker, in Tollerton, has a new litter, he told me. I’ll get him to pick one for, er, Corinna.”

  “Thank you,” said Sam. “But I can afford to give her another puppy myself.”

  It was the first time I had heard my son administer a really thundering snub. I looked up at him, startled. His face bore a polite, impassive look. His eyes turned towards Vera, regarding her meditatively; then he smiled at her, with a devastating charm. She returned his smile.

  “You’re extraordinarily like your father at times, Sam.”

  The day of the Flower Show arrived, with no untoward events in the interim. Ronald Paston had certainly done Netherplash proud, I thought, as I walked after lunch into the huge marquee pitched upon the front lawn of the Manor. Here, on trestle tables, were shown the exhibits which had been judged and ticketed during the morning. The place smelt like a hot-house. Prize blooms, flower arrangements, vegetables, fruit in vases, baskets, cornucopias, jam jars, dazed the eye and assaulted the nostrils. In each class there were separate awards for professional gardeners and amateurs—a tactful provision on the part of Ronald and his committee.

  “I never thought nature could be made to look positively vulgar,” Jenny murmured in my ear as we faced a whopping great multi-floral exhibit which writhed at us in strenuous and artificial symmetry.

  “It is an interesting fact,” Sam was saying to Corinna, “that cut flowers were never used for household decoration till about a hundred years ago.”

  “How too madly enthralling,” said Corinna in an exaggerated deb. voice. “Hallo, there’s Jimmy!” She ran over to welcome the boy whose wrist had been broken in the quarry, now being brought through the entrance, peaky but perky, by his mother.

  As we moved along to the fruit I heard one aged cottager say to another, “I see Tom’s won again with ees raspberries. Second prize.”

  “That must’ve cost him a few pints for the judges in the boozer.”

  “Or else he paid parson to pray for en.”

  “Tom can have his raspberries. No flavour in bloody great things like them.”

  “He can’t, though. Got to go to hospital, all the prize exhibits have.”

  “You’m simple! Paston’ll keep back all the best, to fill ees own belly, you mark my words.”

  “Like old Parson Handasyde after harvest festival?”

  “Ar. ‘The fruits of the earth in their season,’ says he from the pulpit. ‘And the first fruits goo to me, my brethren, don’t you make no bloody error.’”

  “Is old squire showen this year?”

  “Him? He hasn’t enough to buy a sixpenny packet of mixed seeds, poor old sod.”

  “Things were different when ees dad was alive.”

  “You’m in the right there. Change and decay in all around I zee. How’s your rheumatism, mate?”

  “Comes and goes, er do. We’m all marked down for the tomb.”

  “Ar. Mortal flesh is like unto the grass that withereth.”

  “Talken of grass, have ee heard that Paston’s going to buy up that vild young Card uses?”

  “For ees horses? Go on!”

  “Ar. Tollerton chap told I. Young Card only rents it, see?”

  “What’s he want it for, then?”

  “Builden, maybe. What they call development.”

  “If you ask me, mate, there’s only one reason why Paston wants that vild—because he hasn’t got en.”

  We moved away from this passage of feudal dialogue before the interlocutors could pass on to other members of the gentry. At the far end, a segment of the marquee had been curtained off, with Judges and Committee written upon it. Ronald Paston emerged, greeting us in a fulsome manner as if we were some civic deputation.

  “You won’t forget to come in, just before the prize-giving, and get your spray, Jenny,” he concluded.

  We went out into the gardens. “Spray? What’s he talking about?”

  “Oh, he gives each of the women judges and committee a spray of flowers to wear. Orchids, I bet. And the men a buttonhole. It’s all part of the Paston service. I say, this is an awfully dressy occasion, isn’t it?”

  There did seem a considerable display of the droopy, chiffony, garden-party type of dress sauntering upon the lawn behind the house. The village people, on the other hand, looked stiff and subdued, as if got up for church-going. Only the children, larking about in the pleached alley signposted TO THE SPORTS FIELD, seemed uninhibited.

  At the end of this alley stood Vera Paston in her most gorgeous golden sari, shyly welcoming the guests. The villagers gazed at her with frank or sly curiosity: the grandees concealed their uneasiness behind an over-effusive manner, and moved on afterwards to comment upon their hostess with well-bred depreciation.

  “We seem to have everything here except the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards,” remarked Sam, rejoining us with Corinna in the field beyond the walled vegetable garden.

  It was half past two. I could see Bertie Card beginning to organise a children’s race in the middle of the field, round whose perimeter were the stalls, side-shows and games of chance, at one of which I was due to officiate with Fred Kindersley. Alwyn Card was strolling about looking every inch the eccentric squire in his shabby knickerbocker suit and a panama hat with the M.C.C. ribbon on it, affably conversing with all comers.

  The afternoon wore on. The field was thick now with people from the villages nearby, as well as the whole population of Netherplash Cantorum. A pig was bowled for: hydrogen-filled balloons rushed up into the blue sky: mothers unabashedly sought to give their children an extra yard’s start in the handicap races. From time to time I could hear Charlie Maxwell’s voice at the coconut shy, bellowing “Roll up! Roll up!” There was something innocent, hearty, hopeful, about it all—a sense of simple jollity and primary colours—which nostalgically brought back my Edwardian childhood.

  “What really happened about that dog of Corinna’s?” asked Fred during a lull. The uneasy present flooded back.

  “This is not for publication, Fred. Someone walked in, strangled it, and strung it up from the chandelier in the hall.”

  “For God’s sake! Well, I never believed that rabbit-snare story. Who found the puppy, then?”

  “Me, luckily. I manag
ed to get rid of Jenny and Corinna till Sam disposed of it.”

  “Very nasty shock it’d have given them. Any idea who—?”

  “Alwyn Card came up to see us that afternoon. And Ronald Paston visited our next-door neighbour. But that means nothing. It’s all so senseless.”

  “You’re damn’ right it is.” Fred Kindersley’s piercing blue eyes were preoccupied. “Nothing’s happened since then, any road, that’s something to be thankful for. Maybe the chap has simmered down. Lovely opportunity he’d have this afternoon, though. Dorry, come here a minute.”

  Dorothea Kindersley, looking cool and elegant in a dark coppery linen suit with white trimmings, moved over to us.

  “You remember that evening Corinna lost her dog?” said Fred. “It was just after we opened that Bertie Card came in, wasn’t it?”

  Dorothea nodded.

  “I was out at the back, and Dorry served him. Tell John what happened.”

  “Oh, nothing really happened. He just banged his glass down—broke it, actually—and stalked out. I thought he looked in a temper when he came in. I’d only said that we’d seen you and your family driving off a few hours before, and Sam had told me you were all going sailing.”

  “Now why should he get in such a rage about that?” asked Fred. “Had you forgotten an appointment with him?”

  “Certainly not.” But my heart sank. “Appointment? Assignation?” I remembered that Jenny had at first demurred when we received the invitation to go sailing, on the excuse that she was a poor sailor. Had she in fact made an assignation again with Bertie, then changed her mind without telling him. It would explain his rage when he found the house empty and us out for the day. But would he have vented his rage on a puppy?

  It is only one more indication of the way one’s mind was disturbed during those weeks, that I could think in such terms: the joker had created an atmosphere in which all sense of proportion and likelihood was lost. But also—I have to confess it—my own feeling for Vera played its part. One’s guilt seeks to justify itself through the guilt of another. As we assembled in the marquee at five-thirty, a discreditable John Waterson murmured to me that, if Jenny was indeed involved with Bertie Card, my own way to Vera was clear.