The China Governess

by Margery Allingham

  ‘Your old boss was doing essential work and could use you.’ Luke hardly made it a question. It was the most natural development, the history of thousands of young men who were early casualties in a war of tremendous movement and change. ‘Where were the Boxer & Coombe works then?’

  ‘Out at Epsom. We only got back here after old Fred died in 1948. I’d just married his only daughter Marion, a nice girl. I’d always liked her. She knows nothing whatever about this story, by the way.’

  Luke ducked his chin. He looked most discreet and intelligent.

  ‘And that,’ he said presently, ‘is not all, I take it? Now we arrive at the bit which made you come to see me.’

  His eyes were friendly but very sophisticated and they filled with surprise at the other man’s sudden reaction.

  ‘Neither bigamy nor blackmail, Superintendent,’ Cornish said briskly. ‘I think I could have met either of those with less embarrassment. My difficulty is that I have the son of that marriage complete with his birth certificate and he’s a very awkward young customer, but not I think entirely to blame for what he is – and does. The time has come when I feel I’ve got to clear my mind about him and so I’ve forced myself to come to you.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ Luke had become remarkably cautious. ‘How do you mean “you have him”?’

  ‘I know him. I support him. His name is Barry Cornish.’

  Luke recognized the mood behind the abrupt words. It was the confessional state of mind, a phenomenon of human behaviour which never ceased to make him nervous.

  ‘Address?’ he inquired.

  ‘I don’t know it at this moment but I could find him. At any rate he’ll appear at the end of the month.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ The superintendent pulled his jotting pad towards him once more and waited. It was all coming. He could feel the man looking for the best place to begin.

  ‘I first heard of Barry at the end of 1947 when the Trays returned to their shop. They’d been in the West Country all through the war.’ The Councillor sounded as if he were dictating and Luke coughed.

  ‘I shan’t take it down at this moment, sir,’ he murmured. ‘Just let it come out as it will. We’ll sort it out later. Where were you at that time?’

  ‘In Epsom still. My father-in-law was ill and Marion and I were due to inherit the business and the house where we live now. Our premises had escaped and we were moving the works back to London. I had put up for the Council. I was always keen on social work and the state the place was in made me mad to get at it and see if I couldn’t get a better deal for people.’ He ran out of breath, coloured, and glanced angrily at the policeman. ‘I’m not trying to excuse myself for what I did, I’m only explaining it.’

  Luke nodded gravely. ‘I understand, sir.’

  ‘Then the boy turned up,’ Cornish said. ‘I was reached through the Trays as soon as the shop opened again. The only thing which existed to lead to me was the envelope of a letter I had written to his mother at that address. It was in a little cardboard writing folder she had had with her in hospital, tucked in the back. The birth certificate was there and so was our marriage certificate and half a letter written to me.’ His voice betrayed him and he pulled himself up savagely. ‘Still no mention of the child, even though she was dying, silly girl. Only love stuff and wishing I was with her and worrying how I was. Dear God, who’d be young, eh?’

  The superintendent’s eyebrows drew close together.

  ‘I haven’t got this,’ he said. ‘The child didn’t come alone, surely?’

  ‘Oh no, of course not. It was the nuns who brought him.’ Cornish was peering at him earnestly through his fierce brows. ‘I’d have taken an entirely different line if it hadn’t been for them. You must believe that. There’s a lot in my life that I reproach myself for, but if they hadn’t been there to look after him you must believe me that I’d have done something more than merely paying. I’d have told Marion —’

  He broke off and Luke leant across the table, a man of his own age and outlook. ‘Look sir,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. I believe every word you’re saying. There’s only one really impossible thing about the truth and that’s how to tell it. The nuns brought the child to you, did they? Who were they, Sisters of Mercy?’

  ‘Nuns of the Good Shepherd. They’ve got a rather poor but very good place in Crusader’s Row, almost into Islington. Do you know it?’

  Luke waved him on. ‘Wonderful people,’ he said. ‘How long had they had him? Just tell me the story as it comes . . . start from the first interview. Where did it take place?’

  ‘At Tray’s shop. Doris Tray wrote me a note at the works asking me to step down there. When I did she told me how some nuns had come round asking if she knew me. We fixed a meeting and two of them turned up and shewed me a little cardboard attaché-case. It had this writing compendium in it and a broken comb and a strap. That was all. The sisters were very kind. There had been other items in it, no doubt, they said. But when people were poor and tempted things got used up. That was how they put it. They were sweet unworldly women although they appeared to be living up to the knees in sin and dirt and rubble.’

  Luke laughed. ‘They have a sort of triple glaze,’ he observed, ‘and as long as they follow the instructions it never wears off, or that’s what they taught me when I was a nipper. Had they got the child with them?’

  ‘No. I saw him later.’

  There was a shadow in his tone which made Luke glance up at him but Cornish went on without elaborating. ‘The story they told me was so damn silly I knew it must be true,’ he said. ‘It struck a dreadful bell inside me, like first hearing the facts of life when you’re a kid. Incredible and ridiculous but inescapably, horribly true. There was a woman who was slightly “sub”, they said. They didn’t call her that but they made it perfectly clear. She had been a casual, part-time ward-maid at St. Saviour’s, Ebbfield at the outbreak of war. The whole hospital had been in a panic getting ready to be cleared for the expected blitz casualties and she was frightened by all the talk. She heard that mothers of newly born babies had been issued with pink tickets, which entitled them to a seat on a bus to take them to complete safety as soon as the warning came. Because she was terrified she stole the suitcase of a patient who had died in childbirth, went down to the crêche part of the hospital or whatever they call it, presented the other woman’s credentials and got the baby. Then she went off to join the bus. That was on the Sunday morning, September 3rd.’

  Luke sat back in his chair. ‘Blow me down!’ he said inelegantly.

  Cornish met his eyes. ‘I know the type of woman, don’t you?’

  ‘God yes! A right nit! We breed ’em in the cities. Too little grub, too little air, too much of everything else including noise. The hospital must have accepted her story that she was the next of kin and been pretty relieved to see her if they were clearing the wards for casualties. So she went on the bus with the child and the suitcase?’

  ‘No. Not the suitcase. The little attaché-case I saw had been inside a larger affair containing clothes, I understood. She found this too heavy to carry as well as the child so she left it, if you please, with the porter of the hospital and asked him to have it sent to her own address, which was some digs in Bethnal Green. Are you with me?’

  ‘Utterly.’ Luke had given up writing and was in the story himself, on his own ground. ‘It’s extraordinary how they never vary, that particular type,’ he observed. ‘Do you know their behaviour is more predictable than a normal person’s? They simply move straight on, taking the easiest way every time. That is why they appear to get away with so much. Paths open up before them as they trickle along like water on the ground. The landlady kept the suitcase quite safely, I suppose?’

  ‘She did,’ Cornish said. ‘That’s another amazing part of the story, to my mind. She put it in a cupboard and thought no more about it until five years later when she happened to see the girl again in a bus queue. She’d been in London all the time. The house had stood up to
all the raids. Dozens of people had passed through the building. Every sort of commodity was short but still there the bag was, unopened under a pile of junk, exactly as it had been placed when the porter sent it round out of the kindness of his heart. The Nuns of the Good Shepherd reproached me for finding it extraordinary. It was willed that the papers should survive, they said.’

  Luke was thinking, his brows raised and the long furrows deep on his forehead.

  ‘This evacuees’ bus,’ he began cautiously. ‘where did it go? Suffolk?’ The Councillor interrupted him. ‘Oh, my dear good chap,’ he said, ‘don’t think that I haven’t been wondering about that possibility. Ever since that woman Flavia Aicheson – a type I hate on principle – told me the story of Timothy this morning I’ve been trying to prevent myself regarding it as a revelation.’

  ‘Why?’ Luke spoke in astonishment. ‘Why prevent yourself? It could so easily be the other half of your story. It’s worth exploring, surely?’

  ‘No!’ The exclamation was vehement, and at the sound of the tone Luke’s experienced ear pricked up and his eyes became wary once more as he recognized the point at which their views were due to separate.

  ‘One could make it fit!’ The Councillor said. ‘One could want it to fit so much that one could deceive oneself and everybody else. Anyone would rather have a splendid, intelligent, decent, good-looking, honest boy than – well, than what I have.’

  The man was lashing himself with a bitterness Luke could just understand but which he was far too old a hand to believe he could cure. ‘I haven’t told you about Barry yet,’ Cornish went on. ‘It’s the thing I came to tell you and I still haven’t brought myself to do it. He’s abnormal, Superintendent. It was apparent when he was a child. That was why I felt I couldn’t ask Marion to take him into our home and why I left him with the nuns.’

  Luke was very serious. The pattern was unfolding before his knowledgeable gaze like the symptoms of a familiar illness before a physician.

  ‘Is he what they call a mongol, sir?’ he murmured, his gaze on his notes.

  ‘Not quite. But he’s not right. Yet he’s not a fool. I wish he were. In some ways he’s damnably intelligent. Horribly so.’

  Luke sat rubbing his chin. All his training and experience shied at the pitfall which he saw opening before him, and yet his human judgement told him it did not exist and that the man, however misguided, was at least honest.

  ‘Sons tend to take after their mothers,’ he began slyly.

  ‘The ward-maid? Agnes Leach? Of course I’ve thought of that.’ Cornish dismissed the inference with a gesture. ‘The nuns thought of it. They suspected me and insisted that they brought the woman while they watched us to see if there was recognition there. I could have been lying. All the story of my first wife could have been a fiction. I admit that.’

  ‘No, no sir,’ Luke was laughing softly. ‘Come. That isn’t what I was saying at all. There’s an old English word which isn’t often used nowadays but it’s still useful on occasions, and that’s “changeling”. Mothers have been known to do that before now.’

  ‘No.’ Cornish shook his head with a martyr’s obstinacy. ‘I’ve thought of that. With longing. It would be a nice, easy, soft way out, wouldn’t it? But life isn’t like that or I haven’t found it so.’

  Luke leant back. He knew he was going to waste his time but couldn’t help having a shot.

  ‘My official life hasn’t exactly been what you might call sheltered,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never found it anywhere near as consistent as the cynics do. “Surprise, surprise!” That’s the message of life in my opinion. Look here, sir, what makes you think that your first wife and you would have produced the sort of child you describe to me? No. Don’t answer yet. But then tell me what sort of kid you would expect this subnormal Agnes Leach to mother?’

  The Councillor shook his head. ‘You mean very well, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I should like to believe you, but aren’t you overlooking something? What sort of chance has a child whose mother, my first wife, came from the most dreadful of slums (and believe me, there’s nothing in England today to match Turk Street when I was a boy) and was then, almost on the day after he was born, thrown to a half-wit, hysterical girl who dragged him through the countryside in terror? Wouldn’t that account for him, whatever he’s become?’

  ‘No sir.’ Luke spoke briskly. ‘Not if he’s what you describe.’

  ‘But don’t you think so?’ There was a masculine naïveté in the man’s face and all the passionate ignorance of the unscientific mind on a deeply emotional subject.

  ‘No sir.’ Luke was a father too but also a practical man. ‘As long as he was properly fed (and he must have been to survive), not dropped on his head, and kept reasonably warm, it wouldn’t hurt him at all.’

  ‘I think you are wrong.’

  Cornish spoke simply and his weakness was revealed like a man uncovering a wound. ‘It was my fault. I ought to have known the child was coming and I ought to have been there to take over when my wife died. It was a duty I failed in. The R.A.F. was reasonable in such matters. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘No sir.’ Luke was wooden.

  Cornish smiled at him and his mouth twisted.

  ‘You think I’m clinging to a cross,’ he said.

  Luke’s sudden grin was disarming.

  ‘Well, if you set it up yourself it’s nothing much to cling to, sir, or that’s what the Holy Sisters taught me, but I take it we’re not having that kind of discussion. What exactly are you trying to tell me about this boy of yours, Mr. Cornish? You’re thinking of the fire and the flat-wrecking, aren’t you?’

  Cornish looked up gravely and sighed.

  ‘I don’t know anything, mind you. But as soon as I realized that the probable reason for the attack on the flat was an attempt to frighten a private detective off an inquiry into the history of a baby evacuated from Turk Street on the first day of the Second World War, I thought of my son Barry. It’s the sort of interference which might make him very excited. Agnes Leach keeps in touch with Ebbfield gossip. He would hear about it from her.’

  Luke’s glance grew bleaker.

  ‘Who did you think had employed the detective?’

  ‘I knew. The police told me. Alison Kinnit. I associated her with Miss Aicheson and I thought she had done it in an attempt to find out something to discredit me.’

  ‘Really?’ Luke sounded amazed and a touch of colour appeared in the Councillor’s thin cheeks.

  ‘Now I’ve met her socially I see that’s unlikely,’ he admitted. ‘But you’ve no idea what she’s like in committee: she gives you the impression she’d fight with no holds barred.’

  Luke’s smile escaped despite himself, but he made no comment.

  ‘When this boy Barry gets excited, is he liable to do dangerous and even criminal things, sir?’ he inquired.

  Cornish nodded. It was an admission which he had prepared himself to make but he still found it difficult. ‘All his life he has been frighteningly awkward. The Nuns of the Good Shepherd passed him on to the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul who specialize in caring for that sort of case. He became too much for them and he went to some Brothers who wouldn’t keep him at all.’

  Luke began to understand very clearly. ‘Has he got a record?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh well,’ the superintendent made it sound a relief, ‘don’t distress yourself, sir. I’ll look him up. We probably know more about him than you do. Does he live alone in the normal way?’

  ‘No. I should have felt more guilty still about him if he had, but this Mrs. Leach . . .’

  ‘The ward-maid?’

  ‘The ward-maid, Agnes Leach, has been quite touchingly faithful to him. Through all his vicissitudes she has always been about. Actually I pay his allowance to her, now, so that he keeps it for at least a day or so.’

  ‘And yet you really believe. . . . ?’ Luke bit back the rest of the sentence. ‘She’s good to him, anyway,’ he said instead
and made a note.

  The Councillor had risen and now stood looking at him with a stern dignity which was yet homely enough not to appear absurd.

  ‘You know what you’re forgetting, Luke,’ he said, using the name as if they were friends for the first time. ‘You’re overlooking the facts, man. The boy is my son. He’s got written proof. He’s got his papers.’

  The superintendent was taken aback. It was an aspect of the situation, a purely legal one, which had indeed escaped him entirely in the emotional problem.

  ‘Who is to judge the age of a youngster?’ Cornish asked. ‘Is a squinting, backward baby four years or three? Or a gangling teenager twenty or nineteen?’ He held out his hand. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said. ‘I shall do what I can for him as I always have. You must be prepared for that, but these dreadful acts of destruction must be stopped. I see that. Look up your files and I’m afraid you’ll find him, under “Cornish” alias “Leach”. He always uses his own name when he’s in trouble. He has his papers, you see?’

  As soon as Luke got back to his own room he told his clerk to find Mr. Campion. ‘Wherever he is,’ he said, ‘and get him on the line. Meanwhile I want details of a youngster called Barry Cornish. There’ll be a juvenile record if nothing else.’

  Twenty minutes later he was talking over the telephone to his old friend.

  ‘Campion, I want to see you right away. Quicker than soon. It’s quite a story and quite a development. I think we’ve got our delinquent. He has a record like a horror-comic strip. Campion?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Mr. Campion’s light voice, which still had its characteristic streak of vagueness, came gently to him over the wires. ‘I’m at the Well House. The Kinnit’s home you know. There’s a bit of a flap on. The nurse I told you about, Mrs. Broome, has just come in with the story that she has again met the woman who brought Timothy to Angevin with the other evacuees all those years ago. What? Oh yes. She says she knew her at once. She was in the cemetery snooping round the governess’s grave.’