The Sad Variety Page 6

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a tape-recorder. Are we going to play with it?’

  The mustard-faced woman took a sheet of paper from her handbag and unfolded it. ‘I suppose you can read?’

  ‘Of course I can read. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Very well. I want you to read this into the microphone. It’s a message to your father—just to tell him you’re being well looked after.’

  ‘You’re going to send him the tape?’

  ‘We—I shall let him have it.’

  ‘But why can’t I talk to him? On the telephone?’

  ‘Don’t keep interrupting. You must read out just these words and nothing else. As if you were talking to him. Get the idea? And where there are three dots, you make a pause. It’ll be rather fun. Like doing a broadcast play. Now, let’s have a practice.’

  Lucy had got quite used to humouring this loopy female. She started reading from the typewritten paper.

  ‘“Hallo, Daddy. It’s me”—No, that won’t do.’

  ‘What d’you mean, won’t do?’

  ‘I never call him “Daddy”. Papa, or Father.’

  ‘Well, alter it then.’

  Lucy began again. ‘“Hallo, Papa. It’s me. Lucy … Yes, I’m very well, and the people are being very kind to me. I have plenty to eat, and a nice room with lots of toys and books … No, I’m not allowed to say where I am. It’s somewhere in London. Is Elena well——?” ’

  ‘No, child,’ Miss Stott broke in. ‘You’re reading it, as if it was a story book. Say it. Put some life into it. Don’t you ever act at school?’

  ‘How can I? The way you’ve written it makes me sound like a kid of six,’ said Lucy resentfully: Miss Stott reminded her of her least favourite school-mistress.

  ‘Don’t waste my time,’ snapped the woman, flushing. ‘Do it again. Pretend you’re talking to him on the telephone. Use your imagination, you silly little boy.’

  Lucy blinked away the tears that had risen at the thought of talking to her father on the telephone, and tried again. After several attempts, Miss Stott pronounced herself satisfied, put Lucy in front of the microphone, and started the tape-recorder for a level test.

  Desperately, Lucy tried to think of some way of putting a secret message to Papa into the script. Or suppose, at the end of it, she just yelled for help. Fat lot of good that’d be. As it happened, though, this fantasy became real; for, as she neared the end of the recording, Lucy glanced up from the script and saw that Annie was holding a hypodermic syringe. Lucy began to scream …

  A few minutes later, Miss Stott left the cottage, got out the car, and drove cautiously along the snow-covered road to Longport where she posted the small parcel to London, then turned the car in the direction of Belcaster. It was now 11.25 a.m. …

  Alfred Wragby put his car in the municipal car park, and turned to Elena.

  ‘You wait, darling. The Post Office is a couple of minutes from here. I’ll come straight back. Hallo, isn’t that Leake’s car parked over there?’

  His wife’s tragic eyes held his for a moment. ‘I wish you hadn’t decided to do it this way,’ she said.

  ‘Look, we’ve had it out. Even if I gave them what they want, there’s no guarantee we’d get Lucy back. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, almost inaudibly. ‘But——’

  ‘The only hope—don’t you see?—is for the person who collects the information to be followed. He might lead us to wherever Lucy is. I’ve told you—Strangeways thinks she may be quite near.’

  He left Elena staring stonily in front of her. The clock in the tower of the eighteenth-century town hall was striking twelve as he entered the General Post Office. He took a folded sheet from his wallet, inserted it at the back of the Premium Savings Bonds forms in the holder above the long counter, and walked straight out.

  The plain-clothes man behind the grille on the opposite side of the Post Office alerted himself.

  In a side turning, a police car waited. Along the main roads at the edge of town, other police cars cruised, their radio operators on the qui vive. A plain van, with radio and souped-up engine, stood thirty yards away in the main street. Its driver was apparently asleep, its other occupants invisible: all five were armed. This was the one that would do the following, when a description of the quarry had been received.

  As midday struck, Nigel was turning over the pages of a book in a bookshop whose window gave a clear view of the Post Office across the street. A man was polishing the letter-boxes in the wall of the building. He could see through the window his colleague inside. When the latter made a sign, he would know that the information had been collected and the collector was on his way out.

  A dumpy, yellow-faced woman entered the shop. She took up a book and began leafing through it, then moved closer to the window as if to get a better light to read by. Nigel was aware of her eyes momentarily upon him; but he paid her no special attention, for a few seconds afterwards he saw Justin Leake stroll into the Post Office, a figure so unobtrusive that he might almost be wearing a cloak of invisibility. In the dim, quiet little bookshop, Nigel felt an extraordinary tension: he noticed that the book in his hands was shaking, and put it down, his eyes fixed on the Post Office door. Justin Leake. It could be a coincidence; but, if he’d been asked to pick out the secret agent from among the visitors at the Guest House, it was Leake he would have chosen: the man smelt wrong to him.

  A couple of minutes passed. Then Leake came out of the Post Office and walked in the direction of the car park. Nigel sauntered out of the bookshop. But the man cleaning the letter-boxes gave no sign.

  It was a bitter moment of anti-climax. A word with the plain-clothes man behind the counter satisfied Nigel that Justin Leake had gone nowhere near the Premium Savings Bonds holder: he had innocently bought some stamps, then written a telegram and handed it in. Nigel asked the plain-clothes man to arrange at once that his Superintendent should see a copy of the telegram, and waited, keeping the Savings Bonds holder under his eye till the man returned.

  People clumped into the G.P.O. kicking the snow off their Wellingtons. Cars, passing up and down the main street, were turning the snow into a demerara-sugar slush. A lorry cruised slowly down, with men shovelling grit from it on to the road. A child on a brand-new fairy-cycle skidded and fell bawling on the pavement: his mother picked him up and shook him angrily, as if he had committed some shaming nuisance. The market town seemed to be afflicted still with an after-Christmas lethargy. A north-west wind was blowing up, biting into the bones, numbing the mind, as Nigel walked up the street, past the statue of some forgotten civic worthy wearing a snow top-hat, and entered the Police Headquarters.

  ‘Thought we had a bite just now,’ he said to Superintendent Sparkes, ‘but the fish never went near the bait. Chap called Leake, staying at the Guest House. Mystery man.’

  ‘Plenty of time yet, Mr Strangeways. Have a cup of tea—you look clemmed.’

  ‘Thanks, I will. I’ve a feeling their chap’s going to keep his nose out.’

  ‘Meaning he’s been tipped off from the Guest House that Professor Wragby was not playing? I expect you’re right. But there’ve been no telephone calls from the place this morning, not suspicious ones.’

  ‘Leake could have come here to give the warning.’

  ‘My chaps weren’t told to keep a special eye on him,’ said the Super with a touch of resentment.

  ‘I’m not blaming you. You can’t follow everyone around. What did he say in that telegram, by the way? Has it come through?’

  The Super handed Nigel a sheet of paper.

  SirJames Allenby. The Red House. Altringham, Surrey. Nothing to report yet, but am on possible trail. Leake.

  ‘Who’s this bird Allenby?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Big industrialist, I believe. Seem to remember seeing something about him in the papers last year. Daughter went off the rails, wasn’t it? I can’t exactly remember.’

&nbs
p; ‘“Possible trail”?’ mused Nigel. ‘Well, he looks rather like some kind of seedy private investigator. Anyway, I shouldn’t think it’s relevant.’

  The Super flexed his powerful hands on the desk. ‘I’d like to get my fingers on someone’s throat. Any kids yourself, Mr Strangeways?’

  ‘No. But I know what you mean. And Lucy’s a real winner.’ Nigel found himself muttering,‘ “How soon my Lucy’s race was run”.’

  ‘That’s Wordsworth, isn’t it? Learnt it at school. We mustn’t lose heart, sir.’

  ‘It’s this waiting about.’

  ‘Like war. Ninety-nine per cent of waiting to one of action.’

  ‘Yes, we’re in a war all right.’

  The two men discussed arrangements. County police would inquire at every isolated farm and cottage, on the chance that Nigel was right in his hunch that Lucy had not been taken through the cordon to London. As to the Belcaster G.P.O., plain-clothes men would be on duty there all night and watch the staff leaving this evening in case the enemy agent might be one of them.

  It was shutting the stable door before the horse had entered, thought Nigel. The anonymous telephone call would hardly have instructed Wragby to deposit this information sharp at midday unless it was to be collected soon afterwards. As the afternoon passed by, without any alarm given from the G.P.O., it looked more and more likely that the collector had been warned off. But how? Nigel read through the monitored telephone calls made from the Guest House this morning: they were few, and seemed innocent enough; but the Super set one aside for further investigation. And he must find out if any of the guests other than Justin Leake and the Wragbys had come in from Downcombe before midday.

  Nigel left Belcaster and drove back to Downcombe with the blowing snow clotting his windscreen and the wipers squeaking. On the way back a yellow Cyclops’s eye winked at him from the darkness fifty yards ahead. It was the light of a snow-plough, shovelling its way through a drift in an exposed section of the road. He drew in to the side and let it pass.

  ‘How far you going?’ shouted the driver.

  ‘Downcombe.’

  ‘That’s all right. You wouldn’t get much farther. Valley’s blocked beyond.’

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  The Blizzard

  DECEMBER 28–29

  HALF AN HOUR before Nigel met the snow-plough, Paul Cunningham had set out for Longport with the boy called Evan. He had wrapped the boy from head to foot in a rug and put him on the back seat: it was essential that his passenger should not be seen by anyone on the road to Longport junction. The boy accepted Paul’s statement that he must wrap up like this against the cold, as he had accepted all the other queer happenings of the last few weeks, with the stolid fatalism his short life had taught him. Of course, he wasn’t a bit cold: he had something in his heart which was enough to warm his whole body—and now the lovely, miraculous event was only a few hours away. He felt for the disc on his chest, under the layers of clothing.

  Paul Cunningham peered through the snow that danced and eddied in his headlights. Thank God they were getting rid of this boy at last. Evan had little attraction for him, with his sandy hair and subdued manner: he might as well be a little, stocky automaton, answering questions politely, seldom asking them—asking for nothing, really, except to be kicked around. There seemed to be no vivacity about him, no give: it was like the dead feel of driving this car with chains on the rear wheels.

  The farmhouse echoed back the clink of the chains as Paul passed it. The tractor had beaten down the rough road pretty well. Half a mile farther and they hit the secondary road through the village. Here and there the snow had blown through a field gate and formed itself into a peninsula stretching out into the road: the car slowed as it bit its way through these patches. Paul congratulated himself on having left forty minutes to get to Longport, though it was less than four miles away.

  It was rough, rolling country here, protected from the north-east by a high ridge a mile distant. Paul had a choice of routes now. He could continue on his present road, over the ridge, and drop down to Longport half-a-mile beyond in the next valley; or he could turn left on to a main road a few hundred yards away, continue along it for a mile, then strike off on a secondary road to the right, which made a detour round the end of the ridge and would bring him to Longport in another two miles. Paul had made a reconnaissance of the two routes several days ago. His instinct was to avoid main roads. It would be disastrous if anyone flagged him down and caught sight of the boy in the back seat. Following his instinct, Paul crossed the main road and started up the long winding incline to the top of the ridge.

  Not till he had almost reached the top of it did he realise the violence of the blizzard. Up here, with no shelter from trees, he ran into what seemed at first a runaway fog. The north-easter was blowing the snow off the heights, so that in front of the car there was a white spume which the headlights could not penetrate. Paul slowed down to a walking pace and opened his window to see better. The blizzard rushed in, hitting the side of his face like a hammer swathed in ice-cold cotton-wool. The impact made him swerve. The car buried its wheels in a drift that was piling up on the left of the road.

  He got out, walked a few paces forward, and found himself up to his knees in snow, with flying snow fuming in clouds across the road ahead and cutting short his vision. He examined the wheels: all four were embedded in snow, and the rear ones must have skidded into a shallow ditch, for the car stood listing to the left. He had a spade in the boot, but by the time he had dug the rear wheels clear, backed down the hill, got on to the main road and made the long detour round to Longport, they might miss the train; and it was the last London train tonight.

  Paul got into the car again. On the back seat the boy crouched, immobile and silent. He was inert, like a dreadful load on Paul’s conscience, which somehow or other he must throw off. Paul felt the clutch of a monster panic.

  ‘We’re stuck. We’ll have to walk. It’s only half a mile from here. Plenty of time. Take ten minutes at the most. Out you get, Evan.’

  Docilely the boy got out, clutching his cheap canvas zip-bag in one hand. The other, after a moment’s hesitation, took one of Paul’s hands. The pair floundered through the drift up towards the top of the ridge. Here was a clearer patch of road to walk on, and in a brief lull of the blizzard they could see the lights of Longport in the valley below. Then the white hell enclosed them again. They struggled on for another fifty yards.

  Paul soon saw that on this, the exposed face of the hill, the going was considerably worse. If he took the boy as far as the station approach, he would have to climb back again up this bloody hill, and at the rate the snow was piling up he might well fail to extricate the car. To spend the night in it would wreck their plan—he must not be known to have come in the Longport direction at all; there must be no connection made between a boy who got on to the train at Longport and the ‘boy’ who was now staying at Smugglers’ Cottage.

  Cowardice—the fear of being stopped on the main road—had pushed Paul into taking this calamitous short cut. Cowardice now impelled him to a worse betrayal: the lacerating wind, the eldritch whirling of the snow had destroyed what little nerve remained to him. He pulled his hand out of the boy’s clasp. ‘I’ve got to turn back now,’ he babbled. ‘Dig the car out. Can’t delay. You’ll be all right. Just follow the road. Only quarter of a mile.’ He turned round and plunged back uphill, feeling only a blessed relief that the devilish wind no longer blew in his teeth.

  ‘Good-bye,’ said the boy uncertainly, but his companion had already disappeared into the whirling night. The boy shivered in his shoddy overcoat, then started forward again. He must not miss the train. There’d be plenty of time, Uncle Paul had said. His face ached less atrociously—it was going numb. The snow seemed to get deeper at every step: he floundered through a waist-high drift, with the ungainly movements of a bather walking out through the sea. He caught a glimpse of the lights again: they were nearer, but no
t near enough. Now the biggest drift of all lay in a hollow section of the road. The boy could not get through it. He summoned all his strength and determination, and clambered up the bank at the side of the road, intending to join the road again beyond the drift.

  But now, dazed by the lashing wind, he lost his sense of direction and stumbled round the rough field in a circle, to fall off the bank presently into the drifted road at the very point where he had left it. He struggled a few yards farther, without even the strength now to call out for help. Then he fell, and lay where he fell. The snow did not feel cold any more. A feather bed. To sleep on.

  The boy put his hand into his breast, clasping the medal-shaped thing hidden there. He sighed, and soon he was asleep. He had a beautiful dream about the person who was going to meet him in London. Not long after the dream was over, he died. The snow blew into the corners of his smiling mouth, then over his head, his body and the cheap canvas zip-bag still clutched in his other hand.…

  ‘My God,’ said Paul, with the air of one who has come heroically through great tribulations, ‘there’s an absolute blizzard raging. I only just managed to get the car out of a drift we ran into.’ He chafed his hands before the log fire.

  ‘Did he catch the train?’ asked Annie Stott, unimpressed.

  ‘Oh, bound to. I walked him to within a hundred yards of the station. Had to turn back then and dig the car out before it snowed right under.’

  ‘You should have taken him all the way.’

  ‘And frozen to death during the night?’

  ‘Oh, stop dramatising yourself, Paul.’

  ‘You just don’t know what it’s like on the hills. You don’t seem to have done so brilliantly yourself,’ he pettishly added.

  ‘I told you—Wragby tried to double-cross us. It wouldn’t have been very sensible to walk into a police trap in order to collect a faked piece of information, would it?’

  ‘So what do we do next?’