The Sad Variety Page 16

  ‘Without any money changing hands? Do you take me for an imbecile, Leake?’

  ‘Do I have to answer that question?’

  Sparkes controlled himself with difficulty. ‘Your story is very different from hers. Why should she lie about the business?’

  ‘I presume because she dislikes me, dislikes my having found her out, and wants to do me all the dirt she can,’ replied the colourless man. ‘You realise, of course, that she’s a pathological liar. I don’t see her evidence standing up in court.’

  The impudence of it took Sparkes’s breath away. Nigel came to his rescue. ‘You’re telling us, Mr Leake, that your attempts to ingratiate yourself with Cherry were motivated by an unselfish desire to rescue the young woman from a fortune-hunter?’

  Leake looked at him cautiously. ‘You could put it that way.’

  ‘I do. You were prepared to break your agreement with her guardian?’

  ‘If necessary. I——’

  ‘And of course return the fee he’s paying you?’

  ‘Oh, no. I shall have earned the fee by stopping the marriage.’

  ‘I see. Thank you, Mr Leake. You are’, continued Nigel in the same unimpassioned tone, ‘one of the nastiest and most contemptible persons I’ve ever had the ill luck to meet. But you have made one useful contribution to the case Mr Sparkes is working on, so I suppose we should be grateful to you. Good-morning.’

  ‘You’d better put on your bullet-proof vest,’ said Sparkes when the man had gone out. ‘See that look he gave you?’

  ‘Well, we know now who tipped off the kidnappers. The question is, what do we do about it?’

  Nigel and Sparkes discussed this at some length. They were prepared to take action without waiting for absolute proof; but in so delicate a situation, a false move could wreck any plan of action. The one they finally worked out depended upon a preliminary talk with Professor Wragby.

  But Professor Wragby was not to be found.

  Sparkes and his sergeant hurled themselves into activity. The Guest House was searched, every room and outbuilding of it. No car had been taken out of the garage: if there were footprints they had been covered up by the falling snow. It was inconceivable that Wragby had been kidnapped from under their noses, nor were there any signs of a struggle. He must have voluntarily walked out and disappeared.

  The last people to have seen him were his wife—after tea, when he told her he was going to write some letters—and the plain-clothes man on duty, who had noticed him going through the hall towards the writing-room. He had chatted for a minute with Mrs Wragby after her husband retired.

  The Professor could have gone out by the other door of the writing-room into the back quarters of the Guest House, while Nigel and Sparkes were interviewing the guests, though neither the proprietor nor any of the staff had seen him do so.

  One thing, after all these investigations, became clear. Since by 9 p.m. the Professor had not returned or sent any word back, he must somehow have received a communication from the kidnappers and gone out to meet them on foot. Whether he had walked to be picked up by a car, or to some house in the neighbourhood, the rendezvous could not have been very far away. Sparkes had alerted the whole county force, and road blocks were set up on the few roads that were not already blocked by snow.

  ‘Do you think he’s knuckled under to them at last?’ said Sparkes wearily, looking up from the large-scale ordnance maps on which he had marked the clear roads.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ replied Nigel. ‘He’s not a quitter. We’ve failed to find Lucy, so he decided he must try himself. His only hope was to meet the other side’s agent, and make some sort of bargain.’

  ‘He’s got nothing to bargain with except the information they’ve been demanding. So he is going to quit.’

  ‘He’ll try to trick them again. I’ll give you what you want when you’ve shown me Lucy alive, and let her go. Then he’ll hold them off as long as he can, and after that he’ll kill himself. That’s how I read it, anyway.’

  ‘It’s more or less what his wife told me, too.’

  ‘Is it indeed?’ Do you think she knew he was going to bolt?’

  ‘Can’t tell. I’d have doubted it, from her manner. But she’s an actress. And she did hold my chap in conversation for a little—never talked to him before, he said—just at the time Wragby went into the writing-room.’

  ‘That child found dead in the drift——’

  ‘Nothing to do with the case. A boy. I told you.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘No visible signs of injury. They’ll ring me again if the autopsy finds anything.’ Sparkes’s voice was rough with exhaustion. ‘Listen to the late night news bulletin and hear all about it. Now I must go and throw some meat to the vultures.’

  ‘You’ll have to fight them off Elena Wragby, when you tell them the Prof has disappeared.’

  ‘She’s in her room, with one of my chaps at the door,’ said Sparkes. ‘No one’s going to get in. Or out,’ he added grimly.

  But Elena Wragby did. A little before the regional news was due, Nigel, who had arranged it with the man on guard, sent Clare to fetch Elena down. He knew the guests would all be in the drawing-room, waiting for the news bulletin, and he wished to observe reactions—one person’s in particular. A theory had formed in his mind which could only be tested thus: a theory which had nothing to commend it except its cold logic, from which he shrank.

  The other guests, who had been talking in a desultory way, fell silent when the two women came in. They knew the Professor had disappeared: they did not know how to take it. Had he been kidnapped? Had he gone over to the other side? Had he just, after the fearful strain of the last few days, lost his wits and wandered out into the snowy night?

  The Admiral took Elena’s hand and led her gently to an armchair by the fire, opposite his wife’s. She moved, as always, with dignity, but her limbs seemed stiff, as though she had just come through some physical ordeal, and there was a far-away look in her deep eyes.

  The others kept eyeing her covertly, with embarrassment or a shameful intentness, as one might eye the still-living body of a martyr. Only Mrs ffrench-Sullivan, after one glance, averted her eyes and began poking at the fire: her lips were set in a faintly complacent expression which might have been interpreted to convey a silent ‘I told you so. No foreigners are ever reliable. You can take it from me—she’s mixed up in all this somehow.’

  Justin Leake had been playing patience, at a table apart from the others. Presently he resumed the game, his cards slurring one over another, but his whole mien suggesting a wary attentiveness to something quite different. Lance Atterson, looking half-dead with boredom, tickled the Guest House cat behind the ears. It was Cherry who broke the intolerable silence, moving over to sit on the floor by Elena’s feet and saying:

  ‘I’m awfully sorry. I’m sure he’ll be all right. Try not to worry, Mrs Wragby.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  The Admiral glanced at his watch, turned up the volume of the muttering radio set, went back to his chair. Nigel, standing beside the set, saw Clare’s fingers curl into fists: his own tension had communicated itself to her. The others moved a little closer, or leant forward, as if the announcer’s voice were that of the Delphic oracle.

  ‘Professor Alfred Wragby, F.R.S., whose daughter disappeared last Thursday and is believed to have been kidnapped, is now missing. He was last seen—’ the well modulated voice began. A description of the Professor was given; an appeal was made for anyone who had seen him to come forward: the police believed he might have lost his memory … It was as cagey as an announcement could be. Only the handful of people in Britain who knew the nature of Wragby’s work would realise that his disappearance could mean a major defeat for their country.

  The announcer gave a gentlemanly cough, and apologised. There was a rustle of paper. He began speaking again.

  ‘A snow-plough, clearing a road in the vicinity of Longport this evening, turned up the bo
dy of a child.’

  Elena Wragby gasped, as if she had been kicked in the heart.

  ‘The body, that of a boy of about eight, had been lying buried in a drift for several days. There were no signs of violence upon it. It is believed that the boy may have died in a blizzard, while making his way towards Longport station: a zip-bag containing articles of clothing was found near the body, and the boy had a return ticket to London in his pocket. His identity is at present a mystery, for no boy had been reported to the police as missing in this part of the country.’

  Elena, who had relaxed in her chair when the sex of the dead child was mentioned, grew tense again.

  ‘A curious feature of the affair is that there were no name-tapes or other distinguishing marks on the boy’s clothing. The only clue is a thin silver medallion, about the size of an identity disc, worn on a chain under the boy’s clothing. On one side of the disc is embossed a phoenix rising from the ashes. On the reverse, an engraved inscription——’

  The announcer’s voice was blotted out by the most terrible sound Nigel had ever heard. Elena’s face had gone ashy; her eyes stared at the radio set as if the voice of her damnation spoke from it. A shuddering cry broke like blood from her bloodless lips—a cry all the more appalling because it was not loud and yet it filled the room and seemed to beat back off the walls in waves of agony after Elena had started to her feet, then fallen on the floor fainting. ‘Ivan!’

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  Confession

  DECEMBER 31

  NIGEL CARRIED ELENA Wragby upstairs and laid her on the bed, where Clare attended to her. The plain-clothes man was on guard again outside the door.

  Elena had made one last attempt, on recovering consciousness. ‘I’m sorry to have been so stupid, giving you all this trouble,’ she whispered, looking up at Nigel. ‘The relief of knowing it was not Lucy——’

  ‘No, Elena,’ he answered gently. ‘It’s too late for that. Ivan was your child, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she muttered at last, and broke down into dry sobbing, which seemed as if it would never end, and shook her whole body in spasms like an electric current. Clare held the woman’s hands, giving her what little comfort the human contact could give: she herself was quietly crying.

  It had to be Elena, Nigel was thinking. The way she had received the news of Lucy’s disappearance; the fact that other sources of information to the kidnappers had been virtually eliminated. But above all, there was the hole in the wainscot by which she deceived him for a little. When she realised how grave was the suspicion that had fallen on her, Elena borrowed the auger from the proprietor’s workshop and made that hole. She was a resourceful woman, who kept her nerve under the most acute strain: she had resisted the temptation to ‘find’ the hole herself and show it to Nigel. The notion of a bug was allowed to enter his mind, with no forcing from her. But, once it was established that it had been Cherry’s voice, not Elena’s, which Mrs ffrench-Sullivan had heard from Leake’s room, the device of the imaginary bug had recoiled upon her: nobody else could have had a conceivable motive for boring that hole. In any case, it could only be a desperate and temporary expedient. She needed to delay her unmasking, to gain a little time for her employers.

  Here, sobbing on the bed, was a woman who had helped in the kidnapping of her own step-daughter, and very possibly wrecked her husband’s life; yet Nigel could feel no disgust, no hatred, no contempt for her. Elena, like some heroine of Greek tragedy, had been caught in a dilemma of fate, the victim of impersonal forces which had exploited her deepest instincts to further their own ends, and ruined her in the process. There was no doubt in Nigel’s mind that Ivan had somehow been used to put an intolerable pressure on Elena, as Lucy was being used to coerce her father.

  Presently the sobbing ceased. Elena sat up, encircled by Clare’s arm, and sipped the glass of brandy Nigel had sent for.

  ‘You must despise me,’ were her first words.

  Nigel gazed at the once beautiful face, haggard now and racked almost out of recognition. ‘No, Elena, I do not despise you. I can guess what happened. You must tell us all about it. But first, do you know where they took Lucy?’

  ‘Oh, if only I knew, I would tell you! Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes. You can’t even guess?—whether it was to London, or somewhere near by?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. Oh, my God, why did I trust them!’ Elena wildly exclaimed.

  ‘Because you had to. For the chance of being reunited with Ivan.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘You are understanding. Perhaps if I could have had another child. I tried to love Lucy. I did love her. But she was not my own. My life is quite finished now. If I could get Lucy back for Alfred—but I’m afraid she is dead too. And I’m responsible.’

  There was a distant jangle. The church bells were being rung up to herald the New Year in. It only needed this, thought Nigel bitterly.

  ‘Tell me how it started,’ he asked

  ‘They got in touch with me, last September. I thought I’d left all that behind me when I escaped to this country. I should have known better.’

  ‘They told you Ivan was alive, after all?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you believed them?’

  ‘Not at first, oh no. I did not trust them; I am not a stupid woman, and I’d had experience of their methods. Too much experience. Even when they told me about the medallion: it’s a family heirloom of my first husband’s—he was called Ivan too—and about a birthmark the child had on his body: even then I did not quite believe them. But I wanted to. I wanted so badly. Can you understand?’

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ said Clare.

  ‘I thought, they would have found these things out after they’d shot the man who was carrying him to the frontier. It was snow then. I tried to run back to my baby, but my friends stopped me. They told me he too was dead. That was to make me feel better for not going back to him. He was quite silent, in the snow in no-man’s-land. I expect he’d been stunned by the fall. My little Ivan! And now he is dead. In a snowdrift.’

  Elena choked on the words, glaring sightlessly at the atrocious picture in her mind.

  ‘But they convinced you at last?’ Nigel prompted.

  ‘Yes. The frontier guards who had shot at us picked up the baby and found it was alive. One of them took him to a farm, where he was warmed and fed. Now it happened the farmer was a secret sympathiser with us: we had hidden in the farm the day before we made our dash across the frontier. He and his wife kept Ivan for nearly a year, but they had no way of communicating with me. After that year, the regime decided Ivan must go to a State Orphanage. The man who contacted me last autumn, when he saw I did not believe him that Ivan was alive, arranged for me to get in touch with this good farmer. He also arranged that the farmer and his wife should visit Ivan in the orphanage, and assure themselves—by the birthmark—that he was the baby they had taken in. So at last I believed.’

  There was a long silence in the room, while gusts of wind tossed the sound of pealing bells against the window-pane.

  ‘And now we come to the difficult part,’ said Clare, chafing Elena’s cold hands. Touched by her sympathy, the woman gave a wan smile.

  ‘Yes. Please remember, I am not trying to excuse, only to explain. I had never forgiven myself for abandoning Ivan; but when I learnt he was alive—learnt I had left him to have his childhood in that orphanage, and be indoctrinated, turned into a little automaton—then I suffered worse than ever. You see, when my husband died in my arms, during the rising, his last words were committing little Ivan to my care. It was a sacred trust … Oh, why do those bells keep ringing?’

  ‘They’ll stop soon. They’re ringing in the New Year.’

  ‘New Year! It can only be worse than the old one. They should toll for death, not ring for life—in this accursed world.’ Even in her extreme anguish, Elena showed unconscious touches of the histrionic.

  ‘You must see, please. I wa
s fond of Alfred, and the poor little Lucy. They helped to heal my spirit. But Ivan was my first husband and the greatest love in my life. It only comes once. Perhaps never it comes. But if it does, nothing afterwards can compare with it—not for a woman at any rate. When I heard the little Ivan was alive, nothing else mattered except to save him—try to give him back the years he had lost, and keep my faith with his father.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nigel sighed. ‘So they said they’d let you have him if you did what they asked. And because they had told you the truth about Ivan’s being alive, you felt you could trust them about this too?’

  Elena shaded her eyes with one hand. “I had to trust them. I could not let slip even the slightest chance of getting Ivan back. Alfred’s formulas—what did they matter to me compared with my own flesh and blood? These scientists and their great inventions!— why should I care which side overreaches the other? Let them fight amongst themselves for their filthy secrets—how to destroy humanity most efficiently! I am a mother.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘but there was Lucy.’

  ‘You have a right to reproach me. I am not hard in my heart about the little Lucy. Since I helped them to take her away, I have lived in such a hell no preacher, no religious picture could express. But they promised me she should come to no harm. And again I believed them. I was foolish, wicked, yes. But it was Lucy against Ivan. There was no choice for me.’

  ‘When they had your husband’s secret, Lucy would be returned to him, and you and Ivan would——?’

  ‘I was to meet Ivan in London. They would smuggle us back to Hungary. I could think of nothing but to have him in my arms again.’ Elena’s face seemed to splinter with agony. ‘Why did they bring him down here? Why? If they meant to double-cross me, why bring him out of Hungary at all?’

  ‘The answer’s easy, I’m afraid. To stand in for Lucy.’

  ‘Stand in? I don’t know what you are saying.’

  ‘Ivan and Lucy were rather alike?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him all these years, or a photograph of him even.’