‘I am inquiring into the recent disappearance of a young girl, Lucy Wragby. You may have heard——’
‘Oh yes, it was on the news.’
‘Just a routine matter. May I have your names and addresses?’
Paul gave his own, Annie those of a woman doctor called Everley she had found in the Medical Directory.
‘Is there anyone else residing here?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘Our nephew. Evan. We brought him here for a holiday. He’d had a bad go of bronchitis.’
‘I’m afraid he’s ill again,’ said Annie. ‘I’m a bit worried it may turn to pleurisy. We meant to send him back to his parents in London yesterday, but I decided it was better not to move him yet.’
So that’s what they’re worried about, thought Hardman, not a visit from the police. Nevertheless, he ploughed on.
‘I understand, sir, you rented this cottage from Sir Henry——’
‘Yes. He’s Warden of my old college at Oxford. I’ve got this letter somewhere, if——’ Paul made a gesture towards the desk, kicking himself the next moment for having been so unnecessarily forthcoming.
‘Well, sir, just to get everything in order.’
As Paul Cunningham searched a drawer, P.C. Hardman glanced at Dr Everley: she was sitting, balled up in her chair, immobile, in a way that reminded him of the clemmed birds he had seen in the hedges on his way. A sour-looking female, right enough. He read carefully through the letter which Paul handed him. Sir Henry had addressed him as ‘Dear Paul’, which made a favourable impression on the constable.
‘Well now, sir and madam, do you have any objection to my searching the house?’
‘None at all,’ Paul answered. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I suppose it’s all right,’ said Annie grudgingly, ‘though no one could conceal a child here without our knowledge.’
‘Just a formality, Doctor.’
‘And may I see your own identification first. Just as a formality?’
Sarcastic old cow. Mrs Thwaite was right, thought Hardman as he fumbled for his card. He decided that, after all, he would spend a very long time searching the house, just to annoy the woman.
Annie Stott leading him, and Paul Cunningham trailing behind, Hardman inspected the ground floor rooms, opening cupboards, stooping to peer under tables, Annie growing visibly more impatient every minute.
‘What’s in here?’ he said, pointing to a door in the hall at the back of the stairs, then rattling its handle.
‘I believe Sir Henry keeps his wine there.’
Paul was correct in this belief. He did not mention that the large cupboard accommodated Annie Stott’s shortwave transmitter.
‘Open it up, please.’
‘Sorry, Officer, we don’t have the key to it.’
‘I don’t want to have to break it down.’
‘I fancy Sir Henry wouldn’t want you to, either,’ snapped the woman. ‘My brother has told you, Sir Henry did not leave the key with us.’
Paul Cunningham felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. He asked himself whether, as an honest householder—tenant—he ought not to be showing a bit of indignation; but before he could answer the question, the constable rattled the door-knob again, made a note in his notebook, and began clumping upstairs at Annie’s heels.
In Annie’s bedroom, then in Paul’s, P.C. Hardman went through the same slow-motion rigmarole. His two companions were silent now, for the real test was coming any minute and they dared not betray themselves by the slightest flutter in their voices. Hardman postponed it intolerably, electing to investigate the bathroom and lavatory next.
‘What about that room along there?’ he asked, emerging at last,
‘That’s Evan’s. He’s ill in bed. Asleep,’ said Annie firmly. ‘You surely don’t need to——’
‘Duty is duty, Doctor. My instructions are to——’
‘Oh, very well. If you must, you must. But you are on no account to wake him, or disturb him in any way. He’s under mild sedation.’
P.C. Hardman tiptoed into the room. It was pretty warm now, and there was a smell of camphorated oil. Light seeping through the curtain fabric revealed a sandy-haired boy lying in the bed, breathing rather stertorously, a high flush on his cheeks, a cloth pinned round his neck. The constable looked down at this figure for a few moments, gently touched the damp hair on the forehead, whispered ‘Poor little chap’, and went out into the passage again.
‘Hope he’ll soon be mending, Doctor. Pretty little nipper.’
‘He’s very feverish just now, Got to keep him quiet.’
Irritable with the relief of it, Paul said, ‘What is the point of all this? I thought you said it was a missing girl you were looking for.’
Annie cut in sharply. ‘Don’t you remember, Paul?—the news bulletin said that the kidnappers might have tried to alter the child’s appearance.’
‘So it did. But——’
‘Don’t you fret, sir. The child answers to the description Mr and Mrs Thwaite gave me of your nephew. What it is—I have to give my superior officers a report that I’ve examined every house in this vicinity.’
‘You are acting quite correctly, Officer,’ Annie reassured him.
‘“Slow but solid, that’s him”,’ quoted Paul sotto voce.
‘Any rooms at the back?’ asked Hardman.
‘A lumber room and a spare bedroom.’
‘Better just put my nose inside them.’
The lumber room was filled with junk. Hardman prodded about for a bit, then they went into the room in which Lucy was normally incarcerated.
‘Sort of nursery, eh? Yes, I remember Sir Henry used to have grandchildren staying. Not much of a view.’ The constable glanced out of the window, turned round. ‘You didn’t tell me there was another occupant in the house.’
‘But there isn’t. Just the three of us,’ Annie protested.
‘Somebody’s been sleeping in that bed, sir.’
Annie Stott was staring at the unmade bed, the rumpled bedclothes, incapable of speech. Paul suddenly felt in absolute command of the situation.
‘Why, you forgot to make it, Annie.’ He turned to the constable. ‘Evan’s being using this as a sort of playroom. We made him lie down for a rest every afternoon: till he got ill again yesterday.’
Hardman again felt his animal intuition that something was wrong, but he could not put a finger on anything suspicious. At a loss, he took up a sheaf of foolscap that lay on the table. ‘Nipper writing a book, eh? The things they get up to! “Chapter One. The Snatching of Cinders”,’ he read.
‘Sorry. Thought I heard Evan calling.’ Annie Stott ran from the room.
‘Who’s this Cinders now?’ asked Hardman.
‘Evan heard of the kidnapping on the news. Started to write a story about it. Don’t know why he called the heroine “Cinders”. Heartless little bastards these kids are,’ said Paul coolly, fighting down a wild urge to tear the foolscap from the constable’s hands. As it happened, this would have been unnecessary as well as unwise. Hardman put the manuscript down on the table again, without reading any further. ‘Well, sir, I’m much obliged. Sorry to have troubled you. I must be on my way now. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for the nipper. Good-day to you.’
‘It was a near miss,’ said Paul some minutes later, after describing the episode to Annie. He still felt a certain exultation at having kept his nerve when she had lost hers: it evened the score for his panicky desertion of Evan in the blizzard, and for the first time Annie was treating him with something like respect.
‘You did well,’ she said. ‘What about this story she was writing?’
‘Oh, I’ve burnt it. Made me feel rather a brute. How much longer shall we have the wretched child on our hands?’
‘That depends on Petrov’s next move.’
‘He’s making the next move, is he?’
The woman did not answer. She had been in communication with Petrov over the short-wave transmitter last
night—that was all her companion knew.
‘If only we could be sure what’s happened to Evan,’ she said. ‘Well, he can’t have given anything away, or we’d be in jug by now.’
‘You know what I think? Evan did get to London all right, and Petrov is pretending he didn’t.’
Annie studied the faun’s face of her companion. ‘Why on earth should he do that?’
‘Search me. To keep us on tenterhooks, maybe. He enjoys power and intrigue and deception—for their own sake, I mean.’
‘Oh, rubbish,’ retorted Annie, not with entire conviction though.
‘Well, do you trust him?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘More fool you. If this scheme of his falls through, do you realise what he’ll do? He’ll duck out and leave us holding the baby.’
The woman’s expression hardened. ‘I see. You’re suggesting we should duck out, before it happens?’
‘You would, Annie, if you had any sense. I can’t—he’s got me by the short hairs, as well you know. Oh, of course you’ll stick it out—Party discipline and all that cock. It must be nice to feel that nothing matters in life except the victory of the Cause.’
‘Lots of other things matter, Paul. You talk as if we weren’t human beings. It’s just that we know what matters most. And act on the knowledge.’
There was something softer, almost appealing in her expression, more disturbing to Paul than her usual indifference or hostility. He found himself mentally shrinking from her, as if she were making a sexual advance towards him. ‘The trouble with your lot is that your morality encourages you to tell lies, to us or to each other, whenever it’s expedient.’
‘Do you suppose capitalist politicians never tell lies?’
‘That’s not the point. Your creed that there’s no truth except the truth of expediency means in effect you can trust nobody. And people who won’t trust are condemning themselves to hell. All your dreary slogans—the solidarity of the masses, that sort of cant—they’re just covering up the truth, that your solidarity is an abstraction, a paper façade, which prevents you making any real contact with others. You can’t, not if you must always be suspicious of them, ready to distrust or destroy individual human beings in the interests of humanity. You’re living in hell, though you don’t know it. Hell is isolation. You worship a Purpose, historical necessity, like other people worship God: and you worship it so servilely that when your God tells you, go to hell for my sake, off you trot.’
‘You should be a Quaker,’ she said, not aggressively. ‘You and your bourgeois romanticism, Paul.’
‘There you go again. When you can’t answer an argument, you dismiss it with some meaningless catch-phrase.’
‘After what I’ve told you about my childhood, you can still talk as if I had no contact with—with reality? We know reality by acting upon it, not by sitting about contemplating it from a respectful distance, theorising about it.’
‘But——’
‘You belong to a working group yourself. You must know that, as a Party member, a shop steward, I have a close, active relationship with other people. We’re in it together, working to make a better world for——’
‘Oh good God! So that children shan’t have to go to school cold and hungry like you did, and be given hell by bigger children, you feel justified in putting that kid upstairs through hell.’
‘You’re doing it too.’
‘I was forced into it. You’ve done it of your own free will—if I may use that dirty word to a determinist.’
‘You could have refused.’
‘I should have refused. No need to remind me that I funked it, Annie. Why can women never resist an opportunity to use their claws?’
‘You could assuage your conscience, my dear Paul,’ she said with a return to her acid manner, ‘by keeping the child company now and then. If you consider your presence would mitigate the hell you say she’s living in.’
After a pause, Paul said, ‘Very well,’ as if he were issuing a threat, and flung out of the room. In a few moments, however, he was back. ‘Asleep still. She’s breathing awfully heavily. You didn’t overdo that sleeping-draught, I hope.’
‘Of course not …’
Lucy did not in fact wake up properly till 2.15 p.m. When she did, it was with an aching head and the memory of horrid dreams. She recollected the madwoman giving her a drink of orange juice: nothing after that but the things that had mocked and gibbered at her in the nightmares, stalked her as she ran down endless streets to find her father, who himself turned into one of them when she found him. The horror of this last betrayal was all too vivid still. Lucy buried her head in the pillow and began to cry. She knew she would never see her father again: the adventure-fantasies which had sustained her so far shredded to nothing and she was left alone, alone, all all alone.
After some time, a new voice said, “Hallo there, Lucy’. The electric light was switched on. She started up in bed, rubbing her eyes, not sure if this wasn’t another of the dreadful dreams beginning.
‘How are you now?’
‘I’m so hot.’
‘We’ll turn off the fire then.’
Lucy saw she was in the room at the front of the house, not her own. A man was gazing at her: a man with rather long hair and a rather small buttony sort of mouth. The mouth opened and said, ‘You’ve been crying, my dear. No need to cry.’
‘I couldn’t help it,’ she replied miserably.
‘There’s shepherd’s pie and tinned peaches for lunch. Can you force them down, you poor invalid chee-ild?’
Lucy gave a tentative smile. She liked this sort of talk.
‘I expect so. Have I been asleep long?’
‘Several hours.’
‘But I never sleep after breakfast. And I’ve got a foul headache.’
‘Bad luck. That’ll go soon.’
‘Will it …? Who are you?’
‘My name’s Paul.’
‘Are you that loopy woman’s keeper?’
The man giggled in an agreeable way. Lucy noted that he had long eyelashes. When the eyes weren’t dancing at you, they had a queer hangdog sort of look.
‘Aunt Annie’s keeper? Well, as you mention it, I am. But don’t tell her. The cow stood up, the keeper stood up to keep the cow.’
Lucy began to laugh, though she could not tell why.
‘You sound as mad as she is. Oh, what’s this smelly thing around my neck? And there’s another on my chest.’
‘Aunt A. thought you were sickening for bronchitis or something. I think we can take them off now. If you promise not to open the window. Cold air really would be dangerous after being wadded up with wormogene and perforated oil——’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s Thermogene and camphorated oil, you nit.’
‘So it is. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Paul unpinned the dressings and threw them into a corner of the room. ‘Here, put on this jersey. I’ll get your lunch.’
The man sat watching her while she ate it. He seemed a nice man, thought Lucy; but he couldn’t really be nice if he was helping to keep her prisoner, and besides there was something about the way he looked at her that made her vaguely uncomfortable.
Paul was thinking what a pretty boy she made, with that well-shaped head and shining grey eyes.
‘Can’t we have the curtains open?’ she asked presently.
‘Why not?’
Lucy gazed out over the great vista of snow. ‘I wish we could go tobogganing,’ she said wistfully.
‘Perhaps we will one day.’
‘Oh, when? Tomorrow? It may all melt before——’ Lucy’s voice quavered, and she could not go on, remembering how her father had promised to get her a toboggan.
‘You’re not going to start crying again?’
His tone, making her indignant, braced her against tears. ‘That isn’t fair. You can’t expect me to feel happy here.’
‘You’re well looked after, aren’t you?’
said Paul, averting his eyes.
‘But I want to go back to my father, and Elena. I don’t know why you’re keeping me here.’
‘You will before long, I hope—go back to them.’
Lucy gazed steadily at him, trying to measure the truthfulness of what he’d said. ‘Do you swear that? Cross your heart.’
Paul swallowed hard. ‘Cross my heart.’
‘I had some horrid dreams this morning. I dreamt I was looking everywhere for Papa and couldn’t find him.’
‘Come on, Lucy, cheer up. Shall we have a game of draughts?’
‘I’d rather have a bath. I’m poofy.’
‘All right.’
He took her into the bathroom, ran the water. When she had finished, he was waiting outside. He sniffed the air over her head theatrically. ‘You smell nice now, Lucy.’
‘Do I have to be shut up in that other room all day?’ They were back in the room at the front of the house. ‘It’s so dull there, I can’t see anything out of the window.’
‘I’ll have to ask Annie. I don’t see why we shouldn’t let you roam around the house a bit.’ Now that Evan is no longer here. ‘But—do you know what parole means?’
‘It’s what prisoners give.’
‘Yes. Will you promise not to try and escape—you couldn’t get far anyway, the roads are all deep in snow. Promise on your honour?’
It might possibly have worked with a boy. Lucy gave him a wide-eyed guileless look. ‘Of course I’ll promise. On my honour.’ She was woman enough already to have no time for that sort of ‘honour’ and to be dimly aware that Paul was a weak spot in the prison walls, worth playing on.
‘Well, I’ll see what Annie says.’
‘But I thought—you mean she isn’t really mad at all?’
The man’s little fat mouth pouted. ‘Not all the time. One has to humour her, though.’ He was thinking that, whether or not the blackmail attempt succeeded, they would have to make up their minds what to do about this child, and it would be just as well to have her on his side. He had closed his mind, as he did with all disagreeable things, to the idea that Petrov might have planned to stop her mouth for ever.
He stroked her stubbly hair. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you, Lucy.’
The Sad Variety Page 10
