The Sad Variety

by Nicholas Blake

  Oh, God! thought Clare, I can’t go on with this. Bloody Judas. Damn you, Nigel. She tore off the sheet, scrumpled it up, threw it on the floor, and started again.

  ‘Do you miss the stage?’ she asked presently.

  Elena shrugged. ‘That is all of the past.’

  ‘“Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead”.’

  ‘I do not know this.’

  ‘William Blake. One of the Proverbs of Hell.’

  ‘Proverbs of Hell? I should be familiar with those. I think I must be one of the people who have doom in them, like a disease. Carriers, you call them?’

  ‘You mustn’t feel like that. You’ve brought joy and understanding and love to many people too.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’ A tear rolled down Elena’s cheek. Her next words seemed to spurt out of her, uncontrollably, like blood. ‘But not to … my child. I’d have given it all up, gladly—the bouquets, the applause, you know?—for being a good mother. And now they say I cannot be a mother, ever again.’

  ‘You’re thinking of the baby you lost?’ asked Clare gently.

  Elena’s head swung round. Her eyes looked as if a beautiful dream was dying out of them, visibly fading and dying. ‘My baby? Oh yes. That was very sad. But it too is of the past. No, I am thinking of the poor little Lucy. Her too I have failed.’

  The agony in the woman’s face was so naked that Clare had to turn her own eyes away. ‘To have to choose,’ Elena muttered. ‘Did I do wrong? I could not help myself. It’s like a cancer eating at me … I am sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. You never had a child, Clare?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are a creative artist. You make things. I only passed them on, interpreted them. The work of your hands is your children, and they can’t be taken from you.’

  Clare was silent. She felt that she and Elena had been on the brink of some revelation, only to step away from it.

  ‘It is strange,’ Elena resumed, ‘that the children of our bodies should have such power over us. Your works—the children of your mind and hands—you have suffered as much to make them, done much more to make them, and yet when you have made one, you don’t mind what happens to it—is it not so?—you are detached from it as if it were a stranger’s child?’

  ‘Well, in a way it is.’

  ‘It cannot be taken from you because it never belonged to you.’

  ‘That’s also true, in a sense.’

  Elena’s eyes stared intensely into Clare’s. ‘But if you saw a man with a hammer raised to beat one of your works into fragments, what would you do? Beseech him to spare its life?’

  ‘I’d hit him first, with my mallet.’

  Elena sighed heavily. There was silence for some minutes while Clare worked on, wretchedly postponing the moment when she must do what Nigel had asked her, more and more conscious that her recalcitrance about doing it had impaired her skill as an artist. Finally, it was Elena herself who took the initiative out of Clare’s hands.

  ‘Oh, damn it to hell!’ Clare tore the sheet off the block. Before she could throw it away, Elena said, ‘May I see it?’

  ‘It’s no good. Yes, if you like.’

  Elena studied the drawing. ‘No,’ she said at last, ‘it is interesting, clever; but you are not perhaps in form today? Your mind is not on it, perhaps. Why is this?’

  Now the crisis had come, Clare found she could not be Machiavellian or equivocal. She must declare herself. ‘Elena, I must tell you. I’m here under false pretences a bit. Nigel believes you were a party to Lucy’s kidnapping.’

  Elena stared at her, then she shook her head incredulously, then she rose and stood over Clare in formidable indignation.

  ‘No! This is beyond everything! Have you gone mad?’

  ‘I hope Nigel is wrong. I honestly believe he must be,’ said Clare truthfully.

  ‘He has sent you to spy on me?’ Elena’s eyes looked hard as agates.

  ‘It’s not a question of spying. I’m being quite open with you. Someone here informed the kidnappers about your husband’s plan to outwit them and trap them at the Post Office. Only you and Nigel and the police knew about this plan,’ said Clare bleakly.

  ‘Why does not your Mr Strangeways come and make these accusations to my face?’ Elena exclaimed.

  ‘He thought you might be able to speak more freely to me than to people in an official position like himself or the Superintendent.’

  ‘Speak more freely? Speak what?’

  Clare gazed out of the window at the snow-blossomed trees. ‘Well, for instance, did anyone here put pressure on you to tell him your husband’s scheme for dealing with kidnappers?’

  ‘Certainly not. If anyone had tried, I would have gone straight to the police myself.’ Elena’s eyes were distracted. ‘But this is madness. Why, why, why should I help the people who took poor little Lucy away? I loved her. Could you not see that?’

  ‘Yes, Elena.’

  ‘And even if I didn’t, I love Alfred—how could I bring this sorrow on him?’

  Clare turned from the window to face the most difficult moment of all. ‘I’m sure there’s some explanation. But Nigel is worried about—he thinks you must have known Lucy was being kidnapped. When I came up here just after it, before I actually told you, you were overwrought; yet she’d not been missing long, and you hadn’t even come downstairs to ask about her. So, you——’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. I do not need every “t” to be crossed. This is typical policeman’s logic. Don’t they understand that a woman, a mother, may have premonitions about a child? Good God, you are a woman, can you not imagine such a state of mind? I felt something dreadful had happened: but my reason told me not to be a fool, not to go chasing after Lucy, like some possessive mother, just because she was a little late.’

  Elena was superb in her indignation and grief. It was not, Clare felt convinced, an act: no actress in the world could simulate the inner violence of the conflict which was tearing Elena apart. Never again, she swore, will I do Nigel’s dirty work for him.

  There was a silence in the room, where exhausted emotions stirred like bits of rag flapping on a barbed-wire fence. Clare was about to retreat when sounds of altercation came up from the lawn outside. She moved to the window again, brushing past Elena who sat huddled in the chair …

  Downstairs, Nigel, hearing the sounds, hurried out and went round the house, to see Lance Atterson thrusting a snowball down Justin Leake’s neck. ‘Stuff it, you crappy old bastard!’ he was yelling. ‘You bug me. Why don’t you go away some place and drop dead. Can’t you get it into your lousy head that Cherry isn’t playing?’

  ‘Dead right, I’m not,’ said the girl, emerging from behind a bush on the drive’s edge. ‘Let’s pelt the stinker.’

  She and Atterson began hurling snowballs at close range at the unfortunate Justin, who at first, seeing Nigel watching him, tried to pretend it was just a romp and flung snowballs back, but soon began to swear at his tormentors. He tried to run past them into the house, but Lance tripped him up and put the boot in. Yelping, Justin Leake wrenched at Lance’s foot, dragged him to the ground and jabbed a thumb into his eye. Cherry hurled herself on Leake as he struggled to his feet, tore at his hair and ran her nails down his cheek.

  ‘Why don’t you stop them, Mr Strangeways?’ called the Admiral’s wife through a drawing-room window. ‘This is the most disgraceful exhibition I’ve ever——’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Nigel called back, ‘they’re amateurs, they can’t do each other much harm.’ He was already running for the house, a certain phrase of Lance’s stinging him on like a gadfly. Without knocking, he rushed into the Wragbys’ room. The two women stared at him in speechless amazement as he loped round the room, subjecting to a close scrutiny the electric light fixtures fastened to the head of the double bed, the ceiling light, the wainscot plugs for the electric fire.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Nigel?’ said Clare.

  Elena’s voice was shaky,
between anger and stark incredulity. ‘I believe the man really is mad.’

  ‘Sorry. Hope you don’t mind,’ muttered Nigel, tearing open the wardrobe door, pushing Elena’s clothes aside and examining the back of it. Then, to Clare’s increasing consternation, he crawled on hands and knees under the dressing-table and looked upwards, seized the bed, lifted it on end, stared at its underside, let it down again. Finally he pulled a chest of drawers away from the wall, went down on his knees again, uttered a sound of satisfaction.

  ‘Let this be a lesson to me, Mrs Wragby. I owe you a very humble apology.’

  ‘I think you certainly do, breaking into my room in this extraordinary way. Will you please explain——’

  ‘You’ve been bugged.’

  ‘Bugged? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Look. Hole bored through the wainscot here. See? And a few fragments of sawdust. Untidy operator, should have swept them up. The microphone was out of sight behind the chest of drawers: the wire ran through this hole into—whose is the room next door?’

  ‘Mr Leake’s,’ said Elena.

  ‘The naughty man. So the voice Mrs ffrench-Sullivan heard in his bedroom that morning was yours.’

  ‘Mine? But I’ve never—what morning?’

  ‘Friday last. Your husband was telling you how he intended to deal with the kidnappers’ demand when they got in touch with him. You were upset, protesting. Leake in his room was listening in. He must have tipped off the kidnappers somehow in Belcaster, three hours later. After that, he didn’t dare leave the bug in position any longer.’

  Elena Wragby’s fine eyes were alight with relief and excitement. ‘Thank God we know this. You will arrest him now?’

  ‘No. Not yet. We can’t afford to.’

  ‘But he must know where Lucy is.’

  ‘I doubt it. And if he does, he’s not going to tell us.’

  ‘But the police could extract it from him.’

  ‘They’re not allowed to torture prisoners. If Sparkes finds the apparatus in Leake’s room, it would help: but he’s enough sense to have got rid of it. No, we mustn’t say a word yet to anyone about this discovery . If Leake knows we know about the bug, he’ll not attempt to contact the kidnappers again. We want him to do just that—he’s our only lead to them. From now on, he’ll be watched more closely than ever.’

  ‘I’ve just thought of something, Nigel,’ said Clare. ‘All telephone calls from the Guest House and Downcombe are being monitored—right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And none of us can leave the village without being followed?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But suppose one of those newspapermen is bogus—I’m trying to think how Mr Leake could get a message out to the kidnappers—’

  ‘It’s a good idea; but Sparkes has had all their credentials very carefully checked, and confirmed them with their offices. I must ring him now.’ At the door Nigel turned. ‘Mrs Wragby, I have your promise not to breathe a word about this discovery?’

  ‘But surely I can tell my husband?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘And if you’re talking to Justin Leake, behave quite naturally. Don’t let him suspect——’

  ‘I understand. You can rely on me.’ Elena smiled charmingly. ‘I was trained as an actress to wear a mask.’

  ‘What they call “a false face” in Scotland,’ put in Clare. ‘I believe I could make a better go of your real face now, Elena. Could you bear to sit again?’

  Nigel had a telephone conversation with the Superintendent, the result of which was that Sparkes transmitted orders for the plain-clothes man established in the Guest House to search Justin Leake’s room. It must be done at dinner tonight, when the detective would be sure he would not be interrupted.

  When Nigel entered the drawing-room, he found three of the guests there.

  ‘Finished snowballing?’ he asked Cherry, who sat hunched up by the fire thawing her hands. ‘How’s the victim?’

  ‘Oh, all right, I expect. He and Lance did each other up a bit. They’re having a lie-down upstairs.’

  ‘Perfectly disgusting—grown-up people brawling like that—on a Sunday too,’ said the Admiral’s wife.

  ‘Well, there doesn’t seem anything else to do here on Sundays.’

  The Admiral looked up from his book of oriental philosophy. ‘You don’t carry the doctrine of non-violence to extremes, Cherry?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t actually murder Leake. Not actually.’

  ‘Would you kill a scorpion if you found it on your pillow?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Oof, no! I’d run away.’

  ‘But you don’t run away from Mr Leake,’ said the Admiral’s wife. ‘You three seem as thick as thieves.’

  ‘A curious expression,’ remarked her husband dreamily. ‘I’ve always understood that members of the criminal classes don’t trust one another an inch.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not one of the criminal class!’

  ‘No, no, my dear, of course not. You misunderstand me. I was going to say, if you hold all life sacred, like these fellows’—he gestured at his book, and Cherry interrupted him.

  ‘Sacred? Why should it be? I think life is a bloody drag. I hate it. What’s it for, anyway?’ Her voice rose. ‘You’re born, you go through the motions of being alive, then you die. You eat, you shit. What a gas! It’s all wasted.’

  ‘“Thy lot esteem I the highest who wast not ever begot. Thine next, being born, who diest and straightway again art not”,’ quoted Nigel. ‘You’d apply that to Lucy?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’d say she’d be best off if the kidnappers killed her?’

  ‘You know I don’t mean that. She’s an angel child’

  ‘That’s the point, Cherry,’ said the Admiral. ‘One may not see any arguments for being alive oneself, but one feels—knows, without an instant of doubt—the value of Lucy being alive.’

  ‘Yes. But does she feel it? Is she feeling it now, about herself?’ Cherry’s voice quavered. Mrs ffrench-Sullivan struck in, with the acidity of one who must destroy a mood into which she cannot enter.

  ‘The trouble with you, my girl, is that you don’t take enough exercise. Makes you morbid.’

  Cherry glanced at her. ‘I was always taught not to make personal remarks.’

  ‘Mrs ffrench-Sullivan is right,’ said Nigel. ‘And you’re coming for a walk with me now.’

  Three minutes later they were going down the drive. At the gate Nigel turned right, up the hill. ‘You’d prefer this way,’ he announced.

  ‘Would I? Why? I don’t care a damn which way we go.’

  ‘You might meet one of those newspapermen in the village and be recognised.’

  Cherry stopped dead, and began scuffling in the snow with a knee-length black boot. Her eyes glanced at him, swivelled away.

  ‘I don’t——’

  ‘Yes, you do. Don’t be absurd. And for God’s sake keep walking or we’ll freeze to death. You don’t want it to get to your guardian’s ear that you’ve actually run off with Atterson, or where you’re staying.’

  Cherry plodded on at his side, silent.

  ‘Sir James got wind about your affair with Atterson. He knows the chap’s after your money—I presume you come into the capital when you’re twenty-one, and at present you get an allowance through your guardian. He could apply sanctions. But what he’s really worried about is whether you marry Atterson. Right so far?’

  ‘O.K.,’ she sulkily replied.

  ‘He doesn’t want a public scandal, so he hires someone to find you and detach you from the egregious Atterson. That’s what I’m interested in. Oh, look!—there’s a hare. See it?’

  Nigel pointed towards a pair of long ears lolloping away over the snow-covered breast of a hillock to their left. They stood a moment, watching. Cherry’s fur-gloved hand stole into his. ‘I’ve never seen a hare before, except hanging up at the butcher’s. It’s
lovely. Well, what are you going to do about us?’

  ‘If you really want to tie yourself up with a heel like Atterson, that’s your affair. The person I’m interested is Justin Leake. What’s he up to?’

  ‘You could ask him.’

  ‘I’m asking you. And if you don’t come clean about him, I’ll get in touch with your guardian this evening. Leake’s been trying to blackmail you, hasn’t he?’

  Cherry looked up at him, a sly smile on her dead-white face. ‘No comment.’

  Seizing the puppy-fat shoulders, he shook her till she felt her teeth were starting from their sockets. ‘Don’t give me that,’ he said, releasing her at last. ‘Leake is blackmailing you. Go on from there.’

  ‘I rather liked that.’ She grinned at him shamelessly. ‘Yes. The idea being that I should make him monthly payments until I come into my money, and then give him a slab of that. I was to write a statement about me and Lance, which he’d show to my guardian if I double-crossed him about the payments.’

  ‘But you refused?’

  ‘Bloody true I refused.’

  ‘You didn’t care if Leake spilt the beans to your guardian?’

  ‘Why should I? James can’t do anything to me.’

  ‘Only break it up between you and Lance.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind that.’ Cherry’s voice was at its flattest and most childish. ‘You see, I’ve just about had Lance. Mind you, I was dead chuffed when he first took me on. But I don’t dig him any more. He’s all right in the sack, I admit: but I get narked with that show-off act of his. He’s phoney to the gills.’

  Nigel looked down at the girl trotting by his side like a fat, woolly dog. ‘It must have been a disillusioning moment for our Mr Leake when he found you impervious to his fiendish suggestions.’

  Cherry giggled. ‘The really funny thing was him being shocked—I swear he was—at my just not caring what he told my guardian. Fancy a blackmailer being shocked! But he’s such an old square, he simply isn’t with it. You should have seen his face when I said to him. “But all my generation is promiscuous”—it’s not strictly true, I was sending him up a bit—“you’re thinking in terms of damaged goods, a lady’s reputation being ruined for life by a breath of scandal, all that antediluvian stuff. You ought to have stayed in the Ark, my poor Leake,” I said, “your mind’s as jokey as your clothes.” Well, I ask you!’