The Sad Variety Page 18

  Back at the station he received further confirmation. One of the soldiers who had escorted the three gangsters volunteered that he had seen a large man, answering to the café-owner’s description of the enemy agent, get into a car and drive off westwards along the main road: the road that passed through Longport. He had not noticed the car’s registration number, but it was a Morris Oxford, black or dark maroon under the travel-stains and patches of snow. Messages went out to the patrol cars. The net was beginning to close.

  Sparkes’s inspector told him the three men under custody had at first refused to talk. Finally one of them was persuaded to admit that they had been hired on Saturday by a man called Peters to drive their van down from London yesterday, meet up with him at the café, and do a little job. They’d be told later what the job was. No, never seen Peters before—a contact brought him along.

  Sparkes had a pretty good idea what they’d been hired for: to act as strong-arm for ‘Peters’, and to convey Lucy—alive or dead—in their van out of a neighbourhood that was growing too hot for the kidnappers.

  ‘All right,’ he said to the inspector. ‘Charge them with malicious wounding—anything you bloody well like, they’re bound to have done it. Fingerprints. Get their records from Scotland Yard. I’ll have a go at them myself later.’

  The vexing problem remained, though. How was it that no policeman in Longport and district had turned up, during his search, the pseudo-Ivan or got to hear about the real Ivan who had been living in the same house? Then Sparkes remembered that Bert Hardman, the Eggarswell chum, was off-duty, in hospital. Eggarswell, only a few miles from Longport: a small and remote village in a wild part of the country. Hardman wasn’t too well equipped in the upper storey, but——

  Sparkes seized the telephone, demanded to speak to the matron in person. No, this formidable lady replied, it was quite out of the question to talk to the patient: Bert Hardman was on the danger list and delirious.

  He put the receiver back, his face heavy with defeat. Almost at once the telephone rang.

  ‘Sparkes here.’

  ‘Strangeways. I’ve discovered where she is. Lucy. If she’s still there.’

  ‘Good God! Are you—is it Eggarswell?’

  ‘Never heard of it. I’ve got a description of the house and the view from the front windows.’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about? How did you——?’

  ‘Lucy wrote it. Reached here this morning. You could say she threw it here. Longport postmark. Must be one of the villages round about—a small one: letters collected, brought in to Longport, postmarked there.’

  ‘But look here, Strangeways——’

  ‘Stop chattering, old boy. Wastes time. I’m driving in straightaway.’ Nigel sounded positively manic. ‘Have an expeditionary force ready. Get hold of someone who knows that area. We’re looking for a remote cottage on a hillside, with a farm near by. Gothic-shaped windows, an extensive view in front and a conical hill with a clump of trees on it in the middle distance to the left. It should be easy: oh yes, and the photograph of a bearded academic gentleman in one of the bedrooms. Be seeing you.’

  Nigel rang off before Sparkes had time to tell him that the Professor had been found. …

  The post-van had arrived at the Guest House while they were breakfasting. The proprietor distributed the letters to the other guests, but left the Wragbys’ mail on the hall table for another half hour. Clare and Elena were having breakfast in the latter’s room. Nigel, who expected a call from the Superintendent, told a servant where he could be found and went out to the garage. Snow had drifted against its doors again during the night, and the yard itself was a foot deep. The sooner they could get Elena into Belcaster, the better. Nigel found a spade, and set to work digging the snow away from the doors. It had become stiff yet friable, like icing sugar: his spade hurled it aside in chunks. The doors opening at last, he started up his Citroën, let the engine warm, then backed out. The drive-in to the yard sloped upwards, and here, with front-wheel traction, the car’s rear wheels could get no grip on the surface: the car slewed sideways and the engine stalled. Nigel restarted it and drove back into the yard. Another ten minutes was spent in digging out two wheel-tracks along the drive-in. He backed out again, the engine pushed the car up the slope until he was able to turn it and leave it ready for departure.

  Entering the Guest House again, he found the Wragbys’ letters on the hall table. One of them was addressed to the Professor in the childish capitals which Nigel associated with anonymous letters. Some crack-pot writing to abuse him for not taking better care of his daughter, probably: other people’s tragedies always brought out the filth from poison-pen types and neurotic or officious busy-bodies.

  Nigel’s first impulse was to destroy the letter, but he restrained it and went upstairs with the mail. Elena was dressed. She had even managed to eat a little breakfast. Nigel sent the plain-clothes man down to have his. Clare gave Nigel an anxious look.

  ‘No word from Sparkes yet,’ he said. ‘Elena, here are some letters for your husband. I’m going to open this one myself.’

  She nodded apathetically.

  Nigel stared at the foolscap sheet. He read:

  Will the finder please post this to Professor Alfred Wragby, F.R.S. , The Guest House, Downcombe. It is a scientific experiment. REWARD OF £5.

  Nigel turned the sheet over. He grew tense as his eyes read along the lines written there.

  ‘Who’s Cinders?’

  ‘Why, that’s an old nickname of Lucy’s,’ said Elena.

  ‘I thought so. It’s not a hoax. Look!’

  The two women were reading over his shoulder.

  CHAPTER II. WHERE AM I?

  Next morning, the madwoman, who Cinders had to call Aunt Annie, took her into a room at the front of the house. She let Cinders, who she called Evan for some loopy reason, look out of the window. Down below was a man called Jim. He had brought some milk. There was another man, but Cinders could only see the top of his head standing in the doorway. ‘I expect he lives in the house and is Annie’s keeper,’ thought Cinders. Jim waved to her, and she waved back. He had on Wellingtons, an old Army great-coat, and a red woolly hat with a bobbel on top. ‘Don’t you dare call for help,’ hissed the madwoman,‘or I’ll stick this hipodurmic sirynge into you.’ So Cinders didn’t. She hates pricks, ever since she was so ill when she was a kid.

  The pannerama from the window was truly spectaculer. Snow- covered hills lay like frozen waves of a bumpy sea. One hill, to the left of the picture, attracted her attention. It was connical, with a clump of trees four or five of them on its top. The cottage stood on the side of a hill, at least the ground went down into a valley beneath it. Cinders’s observant eye noticed some farm buildings quite near on the right, I expect it was where the milk came from. It was the only house in sight. The window she looked out of had a sort of arched top and white wooden bars on it, which cut up the view. Cinders could see no more now, because the mainiak closed the curtain and with a fowl othe bade her begone to her own appartment. Cinders bewent, but not before she had seen a photograph of a bearded man in a cap and gown like her father wears hanging on the wall.

  ‘Seven out of ten for spelling, ten out of ten for composition,’ said Nigel, thinking, ‘a hundred out of ten for resource.’

  ‘How on earth did it get here?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Look. See these faint fold-lines? She made a dart of it, and threw it from that window.’

  ‘But——’

  ‘And some children picked it up, I guess—no grown-up would pay attention to it—and saw about the reward and posted it. Unfortunately, in their excitement they forgot to write their own address, where we should send the reward to.’

  ‘But the envelope has a Longport postmark,’ said Clare.

  ‘Quick!’ Elena cried, ‘Let us go there at once!’

  But Nigel was out of the room, running downstairs to ring Sparkes. Waiting for the call, he reflected on one name in the missi
ve. ‘Evan’—they called Lucy ‘Evan’ to keep up the pretence that it was still Ivan in the cottage: no doubt they had called him Evan too.

  Five minutes later they were whirling out of Downcombe on the Belcaster road, Clare driving, Nigel beside her, the plain-clothes man—who had been dragged from the breakfast table—in the back with Elena Wragby …

  Petrov was plodding down the lane that led to Eggarswell. He was in a very wicked temper; but with Petrov temper did not rage in a vacuum, it smouldered until he found someone to vent it upon. Two miles back, rounding a bend, he had run his car into a drift from which he wasted ten minutes extricating it. The drift, as he proved by walking through it, stretched for some twelve yards ahead and at one point came half-way up his thighs. There was a spade in the car, but it would take him far longer than he could afford to dig a passage through; besides, even on this lonely road another motorist might turn up, and ask awkward questions.

  Petrov dug out his front wheels and reversed along the road. A hundred yards back, a track led off it into a little wood. He got out again and tested this track. Under the trees, the snow lay less thickly. Petrov drove the car in reverse along the track, then into a clear space screened by trees, where it would not be noticed by anyone passing along the road.

  He sat in the car for a few minutes, studying the map and adjusting his plans. He must not be seen in Eggarswell—what outlandish names the English gave their villages! That meant leaving the road quarter of a mile short of it, and striking across the fields. He must also avoid being seen by the people in the farm near Smugglers’ Cottage, which would involve a wider detour.

  Pieces of snow fell on the car roof from a wind-shaken branch, with the sound of fingertips gently tapping a door.

  Petrov calculated times and distances. It was now some fifty minutes since he had killed the Professor. Quite conceivably one of his hired yobs would at first be suspected of it. No attempt had been made to prevent him leaving the café. Sooner or later, of course, one of the dumb English policemen would start asking questions about the man who had been talking so long with the Professor in the café last night, and a description of him would go out. But, Petrov calculated, he still had several hours to play with, at least.

  It was a nuisance that he had lost the three men and the van in which he had intended them to remove the Professor and his little girl, dead or alive according to whether the Professor coughed up his information quickly or not. However, there was Paul Cunningham’s car, which he would be unlikely to need much longer. Petrov could take that as far as the wood, drop Cunningham and Lucy here, and drive on with Annie. There might or might not be time to bury the bodies of Paul and Lucy in the wood: even unburied, they might with any luck not be discovered for weeks, months even.

  Petrov got out, locked the car doors, patted the revolver in his overcoat, and whistling tunelessly went on his way… .

  At Smugglers’ Cottage, Annie and Paul awaited him, with varying degrees of eagerness. They had heard on the radio last night the news of Wragby’s disappearance. They had waited up till 1 a.m. for Petrov to arrive, either with the Professor’s secret or with the Professor himself: this was the plan which Petrov had conveyed to Annie over the short-wave set on Sunday. Something presumably had gone wrong with it: perhaps the road from the rendezvous to Eggarswell was now snowbound.

  They had also heard about the discovery of Evan’s body. This brought Annie down on Paul like a fury and sent him into a panic. She was still nagging at him this morning.

  ‘If I’d had any sense,’ he was saying, ‘I’d have cleared out last night.’

  ‘Sense! You didn’t clear out because you were afraid of you own skin—afraid of getting caught by another blizzard and dying in it, like that wretched boy you left to die.’

  Peevishly, Paul reflected how even the most unwomanly woman shares her sex’s attibute of making a point endlessly and indefatigably, returning to it over and over and over again, like drops of water wearing a hole in stone.

  ‘You’re like the Chinese water torture,’ he said.

  ‘How far from the station did you leave him?’

  ‘I’ve told you a dozen times, and why. A few hundred yards. He must have got lost and wandered round in circles. I didn’t leave him to die.’

  ‘Have it your own way. You left him and he died, if that suits your conscience better.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake pack it up! Don’t you see the point? This’ll bring the police swarming all over the district. We’ve simply got to clear out while we have the chance.’

  ‘We’re waiting here till Petrov comes, or rings us up.’

  ‘Petrov will have heard the radio news last night too. He’ll be making tracks back to London. That’s why he’s not come here. Like any good Communist, my poor Annie, he’s taught to save his own skin and leave his subordinate comrades holding the baby.’

  Annie Stott did not take up this provocation. She was thinking of the baby they held. Annie had been brought up in a hard school: she admired toughness and courage, and during the last day or two, since Lucy’s attempted escape, had come to respect these qualities in the little girl. Lucy seldom whined: she kept herself amused and made the best of the unnatural life she was living.

  Paul too was favourably inclined towards the child, but only because she gave him no trouble. All he wanted now was to get her off his hands. If he could do this without further imperilling himself, he would do it. Tonight, when Annie was asleep, he’d smuggle her out into his car, drop her off in some village where she could knock up a householder, and drive away. Beyond this, he could see nothing: his was the brute reaction of the murderer who feels that, if he can get the blood off his hands, what he had done will vanish like a bad dream.

  Upstairs, Lucy put the skipping-rope back in the cupboard. The first day after she’d tried to escape, she’d had to skip on one foot only; but now the ankle she’d twisted was much better and she could manage both. It was important, her father had once told her, if you were a prisoner of war, to keep as physically fit as possible: then, when the moment came to escape, you stood a better chance. Papa knew. He had been one, and he had escaped. Lucy had absolute confidence in him. She knew he would come to rescue her. It was now a matter of waiting patiently and keeping fit so that she would not be a drag on him when he and she ran away together. The prisoners of war who survived best, he had also told her, were the ones who kept their minds occupied too. No use sitting around on your boo-boo, brooding. Flushed with the exercise, Lucy got out paper and pencil, and began writing down all the animals she could remember beginning with the letter A. From them, she turned to towns beginning with L. She was sucking her pencil, gazing out of the window in thought, when the extraordinary thing happened.

  Over the vertical cliff close outside, its top level with the window, appeared the head of a man, then his body, then his legs. Standing there, he loomed as huge as a statue. He was the first living thing Lucy had seen out of this window. He paused a moment, then moved along the bank out of sight, scuffing up the snow in little puffs with his boots, walking with a lumbering gait that reminded Lucy of a bear’s. This must be the friend Annie was expecting. It was funny he should approach the cottage in this roundabout way, instead of walking up the track past the farm. I expect he’s a gangster, she thought, though he doesn’t look like one any more than Paul or Annie. Of course, he could be a policeman in plain clothes, searching for me. But she had been too surprised by this bulky apparition to bang at the window and attract his attention.

  Petrov kicked the snow off his boots and went in at the front door. The footsteps in the hall were the first intimation Paul had of his arrival. Annie hurried out to receive Petrov. Paul Cunningham shrank in his chair by the log fire: he had made himself believe that Petrov would never come, but the rumbling voice outside was unmistakable.

  ‘So here you are, all nice and cosy.’ Petrov stood close to the fire, drying his trousers. ‘I’ve had a long walk. I’m hungry.’

&
nbsp; Paul started up—to get food, to get out of the room which the massive figure dwarfed.

  ‘No, no, sit down. Talk first, then food.’

  ‘You’ve got it?’ asked Annie eagerly.

  ‘The information? No.’

  ‘But—but isn’t Wragby with you, then?’

  ‘Professor Wragby is with his fathers.’

  ‘I don’t——’

  ‘I had to dispose of him. He tried to set another trap for me. I strangled him. Are you cold, Mr Cunningham?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘You are shivering.’

  Paul became aware that Petrov was raging with anger, for all his ice-calm exterior, and shivered still more uncontrollably.

  He licked his lips, and ventured, ‘So we’ve got to pack it in?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Petrov turned to Annie. ‘Why did you not return the boy to London as you were ordered? Is he still in this house?’

  ‘He’s dead. His body was found yesterday. Didn’t you hear the radio news last night, comrade?’

  ‘So? Explain, please.’

  ‘Cunningham can tell you all about it,’ said the woman maliciously.

  ‘Indeed? Let me hear from him then. Are you too hot, Cunningham? Better move away from the fire. You’re sweating.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Paul’s voice went up to falsetto.

  ‘That is for me to judge. Get on with it.’

  Paul told the story of the journey through the blizzard. In Petrov’s formidable presence, the conclusion of it sounded more humiliating to him than ever.

  ‘I see. You lost your nerve.’ The eyes, small and dangerous as a boar’s, drilled into Paul’s. ‘I made an error of judgment choosing you. The error must be corrected. Have you lost the other child too, Annie?’

  ‘No, of course not. She’s upstairs. You can hear her skipping.’

  And Lucy was, having put on shoes—skipping as loudly as she could in case the visitor was indeed a policeman searching. To call out was more than she dared, with memories of the hypodermic.