The Sad Variety

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘But he took after you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Why yes, as a baby people thought he was just like me.’

  ‘And you happened to remind people of Alfred’s first wife?’

  ‘Yes. But——’

  ‘And Lucy takes after her.’

  Elena’s great haunted eyes lit up with intelligence. ‘Ah! I see. That is why I had to hide away the photograph of Alfred’s first wife. So that it would not give your agents a clue—put into their minds the idea of a likeness, and a substitution. You mean Ivan was brought down here so that Lucy could be substituted for him?’

  ‘It’s the only possible inference. I imagine the kidnappers must have taken a house in the neighbourhood—somewhere near Longport, probably. They’d bring Ivan, so the neighbours knew there was a child in the house. What colour hair had he?’

  ‘Sandy. Like mine before it went white.’

  ‘When Lucy was kidnapped, they’d dye her hair, put boy’s clothes on her, let the neighbours see her but not talk to her. If police inquiries were made, there’d be perfectly good evidence that the child in the house was the same one who’d been there before the kidnapping. No suspicion could attach to the house.’

  ‘And, when they’d used Ivan, those devils killed him and left him in the snowdrift?’

  ‘But he hadn’t been injured,’ Glare put in.

  ‘They have ways of killing that do not show.’

  ‘He had the return half of a ticket to London in his pocket,’ said Nigel. ‘If they’d intended to kill him, they wouldn’t have bought a return. No, my guess is that they meant to put him on the London train, and something went wrong on the way to Longport. They’d move him by night of course, so that neighbours wouldn’t notice his departure. Perhaps they found the road blocked at some point and had to walk the rest of the way, and the poor little chap couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Then they did murder him. As surely as if——’ Elena broke off, her face hardening into the stony look of an avenging goddess.‘They left him to die there.’

  ‘It’s a gentle death,’ murmured Clare; but Elena made no response, sunk in her own thoughts.

  The sound of bells clamoured round the house, like ghosts crying to be let in.

  Nigel waited for a little, then began a series of questions about the agents who had first contacted Elena. She answered without reluctance, but such information as she could give was limited to a few facts—the initial telephone calls, two rendezvous with a large, bear-like man in a London tea-shop, and the method by which she was enabled to communicate with the farmer who had taken in the baby Ivan. It soon became evident that Elena’s memory for these transactions was weak: no doubt she had wanted to forget their detail, and the horror of the last week had wiped many things from her mind. Unfortunately, it had obliterated, amongst them, the most crucial fact of all.

  ‘You had to tell them how your husband was reacting to their demand for information. You put through a second call from the telephone booth here last Friday morning, to tell them he intended to leave false information at the G.P.O., and the police were laying a trap for the collector—right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, almost inaudibly.

  ‘What number did you have to ring?’

  Elena looked up at him with an expression of despair. ‘I’m afraid it has gone from my head. No, please, you must believe me. I have been trying, trying to remember, since I heard what they did to Ivan. They told me I must memorise it: but I have a bad memory, so I disobeyed them and wrote it on a piece of paper, which I destroyed after making the call.’

  ‘But you can remember if it was a local one, surely?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was the Longport exchange, and there were three figures in the number. A four and a nine, I think—479 was it? 497? No, it’s hopeless.’

  ‘Never mind. It may come back. Who answered you?’

  ‘It was a woman. I had to say “Millie here”. And if the person answered, “Hallo, how is Ingham?”—that’s my husband’s birthplace—I would give the message. Only a few words. If all was clear for them, I would say, “Much better, thank you”. If my husband was not consenting, I’d say, “About the same”. If a trap was being laid, “Not so well, I’m afraid”. Oh, if only I could remember that number!’ Elena beat her fists against her temples, frantic with the frustration of it.

  ‘Please try not to worry,’ said Clare consolingly. ‘They surely wouldn’t have taken Lucy to the same house whose number you were to ring. I mean, they’d not trust you not to change your mind after Lucy was gone, and tell the police the number.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got a little nearer, anyway,’ said Nigel. ‘Clare darling, would you fetch my ordnance map and the railway timetable.’

  When she returned, Nigel spread the map on the table. ‘Here’s Longport. Their exchange serves this whole group of villages—’ he pencilled a rough circle on the map. ‘Your contact was in one of them, or in Longport itself. Now this is where Ivan’s body was found, on the hill going down to Longport’—he made a cross. ‘I’m sorry if I’m being rather brutal about this, Elena.’

  ‘My feelings do not matter any more. Nothing matters except to find Lucy.’ Elena stared at the map, as if a vision of Lucy might spring from some spot amongst its colours and contours.

  ‘Lucy was taken to a house somewhere here, and substituted for Ivan. A house whose nearest main line railway station is Longport. The last train to London leaves Longport at, let’s see—six twelve. So, unless the kidnappers have two cars, they could not have taken Ivan to the station till the following evening, Friday. Of course, there may have been a whole gang of them with a fleet of cars; but the arrival of so many in a country house would set the neighbours talking. I’d guess there were only two or three of them—two perhaps, masquerading as Ivan’s parents.’

  Clare broke in. ‘Surely we can narrow it down a bit more? Look, you said they’d not smuggle Ivan out till after dark. They’d want to make sure of his catching that train, and they knew some of the roads might be blocked. Now they got Ivan to within half a mile of the station. Even if they were able to drive all that way more or less straight, starting after dark and aiming to reach the station in good time, six o’clock say, they’d not have much over an hour’s driving time. How many miles an hour could one average over hilly, snow-covered roads? Twenty-five? Thirty at the very most. So the house is within a radius of thirty miles from Longport. Doesn’t seem to help much. But think of the conditions that night. They may have had to get out and walk some way to the place where Ivan was found. That narrows the distance they travelled.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘it’s a fair inference. And I think we can take it further. We can find out tomorrow which roads were blocked on Friday night. But the point is, they had to make sure of getting Ivan to the train—otherwise there’d be two children in the house instead of one. They could not know how many roads were being blocked by the blizzard that evening. They’d have to allow for a number of detours. Under those conditions, they couldn’t risk the chance of doing a thirty-mile journey in the hour they had at their disposal: but they could be reasonably certain of accomplishing a journey of say, ten miles as the crow flies.’ Nigel drew a small circle on the map. ‘I believe Lucy is somewhere inside that circle.’ He did not add, ‘If she is alive.’

  ‘May I say something?’ asked Elena. ‘You are assuming that Ivan would not be removed till after dark. But he could be hidden at the back of the car, in a rug perhaps. They might have started earlier.’

  ‘It’s possible of course. But look, there are two other main-line stations, at which that train stops, in thirty miles. But it was Longport they aimed at. Longport must be the nearest one to the hide-out. That roughly checks the ten-mile radius.’

  ‘But, Nigel, didn’t the police search every house in that area?’ said Clare.

  ‘They were looking for a girl, not a boy. We warned them that Lucy’s appearance might be altered. We didn’t at that time allow for the substitution of
a kidnapped child for a bona fide one. I wouldn’t be surprised if some village bobby set eyes on Lucy during the search—she’d be drugged maybe, they’d say she was ill and mustn’t be woken—and padded off quite satisfied that she was the little boy who’d been seen about the place for a week.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Elena. ‘Perhaps Alfred’s there now.’

  ‘They picked him up in a car, you think?’ Nigel’s pale blue eyes regarded the woman steadily. ‘You knew he was going to meet them?’

  ‘He did not tell me much. I believe he did not quite trust me any more. Why should he?’ Elena added remorsefully. ‘He just said one thing: we were talking about Lucy—whether she was alive or dead—and he said he’d know soon, one way or the other. Oh, yes, and then he asked would I despise him if he gave them what they wanted.’

  ‘In exchange for Lucy? Would he do that?’

  ‘I just don’t know. He is a good man, and a strong man. He is a little inhuman sometimes—it’s the nature of his work, perhaps. But he loves Lucy very dearly. No, I don’t think he would give them anything till he could assure himself Lucy was alive, and saw them let her go. After that——’ Elena shrugged.

  ‘So the chances are he’s now in the same house where Lucy is, or soon will be, if the road to it is not blocked.’

  ‘Well, then, why do we sit here doing nothing, talking?’ she exclaimed. She started pacing the room, with those long dipping strides, like an animal in a cage. ‘The police must start searching that area again, at once. Or do you have to get permission from some bureaucrat in London first? Oh, you are so slow in this country.’

  Nigel smiled wryly at such imperiousness from a woman who had lost all right to command. Yet it was impressive: her figure, as it must often have done in the theatre, seemed to add a cubit to its stature.

  ‘Elena,’ he said patiently, ‘I can’t just press a button and start the whole operation. It’s dark. There are drifts everywhere. I’ll see that Sparkes moves his men in as soon as it’s light. If Lucy is still alive, they’ll certainly not do anything to her now that your husband is with them; and he’ll be playing for time. Maybe he’ll be able to get a message to us.’

  ‘But he’s in deadly danger! Please! I’ve done him so much harm already, I can’t bear——’

  ‘He’d be in still deadlier danger, and so would Lucy, if we went off at half cock,’ Nigel broke in firmly. ‘If their captors knew we were so close on their heels, they’d shoot them both and make a bolt for it. The road blocks are out again: they’d not get far if they tried to take Lucy and her father out of the county.’

  Elena was silent for a little. Then she said decisively: ‘Very well. I will try to sleep now. In the morning you will take me to the Superintendent and I will make a statement. Ah, the bells have stopped.’

  ‘It is 1963,’ said Clare. ‘Good luck to it.’

  Elena turned to her. ‘Good luck to Alfred and to Lucy. My dear, you have been very kind to me. Will you do one thing more—sit up a little longer with me. I cannot bear my own company.’

  It was said with a pathos that brought tears to Clare’s eyes: but it was also like a royal command.

  Nigel left them, told the plain-clothes man outside the door that he must treat Elena as under arrest, and rang Sparkes’s home number. He gave him a rapid résumé of Elena’s confession.

  ‘So what we have to look for,’ he went on, ‘is a house, probably within a ten-mile radius of Longport, where a boy answering to the description of the boy found in the snowdrift, was staying for some days before the kidnapping—a boy who was a stranger in the neighbourhood, with two or three grown-ups looking after him. They’d probably be strangers too: rented a cottage, perhaps, for the holidays—an isolated place, or quiet digs in Longport itself. Main thing is, if you find the place, don’t alarm the customers.’

  ‘I’ll wake Up every bloody member of the Force now.’

  ‘Happy New Year, and good hunting.’

  Sparkes spent the next two hours dragging his men out of bed to the telephone. He rang Longport first, then worked outward from village to village. And it was all quite fruitless. For it so happened that Bert Hardman, the village constable at Eggarswell, had been carried off to Belcaster hospital that morning with an acute attack of pleurisy.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  Dart Home

  JANUARY 1

  IN SPITE OF his long bout of telephoning, Superintendent Sparkes was at his desk by 8.30 on New Year’s Day. And it was just as well, for this morning the log-jam of the last week began to break up. Sparkes had hardly started work when a telephone call came through from the owner of the Bellevue Café. A man answering to the description of Professor Wragby had been attacked in his café: an ambulance was conveying him to the General Hospital at Belcaster. There seemed to be no witnesses of this affray, but a large man from London, who had greeted the Professor when he arrived and talked with him for some time, had disappeared shortly before Wragby’s half-lifeless body was discovered.

  Sparkes obtained a description of this man, who was presumably the agent sent to contact Wragby, and had it disseminated throughout the country. The only theory he could form was that the Professor had been attacked and left for dead by this agent, after giving him the information: why should the man attempt to kill him before he had given it?

  But Sparkes had no time to develop theories just now. The café owner told him about the brawl between three thugs who had spent the night there and the detachment of soldiers. These three would shortly be arriving at the Belcaster Police Station under a military escort.

  ‘See what you can get out of them,’ he said to his detective-inspector. ‘And keep your kid gloves in your pocket. The bloke at the café has an idea they were in cahoots with the big chap we’re looking for. You can get me at the hospital if anything breaks.’

  By the time he reached it, the ambulance had just arrived and Wragby was being examined. Sparkes brushed aside the usual hospital delaying-tactics and made his way into the private room where the Professor lay, with two doctors and a sister at his bedside. The sister gave Sparkes an outraged look and tried to hustle him out, but she might as well have tried to shift one of the stone men off Easter Island. The senior doctor said:

  ‘Hallo, Sparkes, you’re up early. Interested in my patient? Who is he?’

  Sparkes told him. The doctor gave a low whistle.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘I think we’ll keep him. Sound constitution. And he needs it. Looks as if he’d been fighting a gorilla. We’ve treated him for shock and given him a tracheotomy.’

  ‘When can he talk, Doctor?’

  ‘Not yet. Just take a look at him.’

  On Wragby’s dead-white face, freckles stood out like disease-spots. His breath was like the noise of sandpaper.

  ‘We’ll let you know when——’

  ‘Sorry, I’m waiting here.’

  ‘Now look, I’m in charge. My job is to save this man’s life.’

  Sparkes drew the doctor out of the room, and had a whispered conversation with him. ‘Wragby may have given away a vital secret to enemy agents. Or he may not. And he may know where his kidnapped daughter is. I’ve got to find out. Every minute counts.’

  But many minutes passed, slow as hours, while Sparkes leant against the wall, staring at the unconscious man as if willing him to give up his secrets.

  At last Wragby’s eyelids fluttered open. Sparkes moved forward. The doctor laid a hand on his sleeve. ‘He is not to talk. You may ask a few questions, and let him nod or shake his head. But wait till I tell you.’

  The two doctors busied themselves around the bed, while Sparkes stood fuming with impatience.

  ‘Don’t try to talk, old man,’ said the house physician. It was an unnecessary order, for Wragby, desperately attempting speech, could hardly utter an articulate word.

  Presently, at a sign from the doctor, Sparkes stood over the patient. ‘Professor Wragby, you recognise me—Su
perintendent Sparkes? No, don’t talk. Just nod or shake your head. I must ask you a few questions. You understand what I’m saying?’

  Nod.

  Sparkes described the big man who had disappeared from the café. ‘He is the enemy agent you had to meet?’

  Nod.

  ‘He is the man who tried to kill you?’

  Nod.

  ‘Did you give him the secret information he was after?’

  Wragby shook his head so violently in spite of his weakness that the doctor interposed, laying his fingers on the Professor’s pulse. ‘Take it easy, old man … All right, Superintendent, go ahead.’

  ‘This agent contacted you by letter to arrange the rendezvous?’

  Nod.

  ‘Did your wife know you decided to keep the rendezvous?’

  Shake.

  ‘Your idea, Professor, was to make a bargain with him? If he took you to where Lucy is being kept, and released her, you would then hand over the information?’

  An agonised expression came over Wragby’s face. He tried to speak, but only a whispering croak came out.

  ‘Wait a minute. I see I’m distressing you. Would I be putting it better if I said your plan was that he should take you to Lucy, on that understanding, and let her go, but you would then refuse the information?’

  Wragby nodded.

  ‘Good for you, sir. Just one more question. In your talk with this agent, did you get any inkling where Lucy is to be found?’

  Nod. But Wragby’s expression was unutterably sad.

  ‘Where?—sorry—London?’

  Shake.

  ‘In this county?’

  Wragby gave a little shrug of the shoulders.

  ‘Somewhere to the west?’ Sparkes asked at a venture.

  Wragby nodded. The doctor, who had been watching his patient carefully, intervened. ‘He’s had enough. I’ll ring you as soon as he’s fit to talk, Mr Sparkes.’

  Poor chap, thought the Superintendent, finding his way out. So near to making contact with his little girl, and then frustrated. Still, it bears out Strangeways’ theory that Lucy is somewhere in the Longport area.