The China Governess

by Margery Allingham

  ‘But there’s no such person!’ The words escaped Julia for the second time that day and the superstitious element surrounding them flared suddenly in her mind, and she put her hand over her mouth because she was afraid of screaming.

  Her alarm seemed to reach the newcomer physically as if he had heard or smelled it, for he retreated a yard or so and stood swaying again, not quite weaving but horribly near it. He was also angry.

  ‘You’re lying, you’re in love with him, you’re hiding him.’

  He was spitting and whispering and the short syllables were like grit in the fluff of sound.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Tim took over. He was puzzled, curious rather than frightened, and his tone was soothing. ‘Who is it exactly that you want? Let’s get it quite clear. There is no Basil Kinnit. Are you sure you have the name right?’

  ‘Well, yes. As a matter of fact I am.’ The newcomer relaxed again and the confidential lisp, soft and ingratiating, returned to his voice. ‘I’ve known his name was Kinnit for a long time, see? But I only got the Basil today. I had to wait for a telephone call.’ He conveyed that he considered the use of the instrument to be important and romantic. ‘I put a friend of mine on to find out and she telephoned from outside the cemetery and left a message for me at a shop we use for that sort of thing. “His name is Mr. Basil and the address is The Well House.” That was the message I got. When I heard that, well, I mean to say it was waiting for me, wasn’t it? There was no point in me messing about any longer. So I came round right away.’

  ‘But you must have been here some time. When did you take the glass out of the window?’

  He seemed to have no objection to answering questions. His answers were glib and at least partially truthful.

  ‘This afternoon. I’ve been round here all the time. There’s a lot of perching places round here, see. It’s made for it and you don’t see a bogie. I smoked twenty sitting in a ventilator next door. Twenty. It was a boast. ’Twenty in an afternoon.’

  ‘Why did you wait so long?’

  ‘I always wait. I like to look round. I like to know who comes in and out. It’s my business. I’m interested, see? Mr. Basil Kinnit, that’s who I want to talk to.’

  ‘What do you want to say to him?’

  ‘I want to warn him to lay off me. I want to teach him not to interfere, see? I don’t like private dicks making inquiries into my birth, see? I’m not having no prying, see? And nor is Ag. I’ve given his bloodhounds a warning and now I’m going to warn him. And you two can keep your mouth shut or you’ll learn the same song. . . . Words and music.’ The final phrase had no meaning but was a threatening series of sounds only, and he repeated them with satisfaction. ‘Words and music!’

  ‘Why should he want to know about your birth?’ Tim’s quiet question was yet so forceful that it captured his wayward intelligence and held it on course.

  ‘Because he wants to stop Ag getting the money, see? My Dad slips her a bit, see? As soon as Ag heard about this Kinnit lark it came to her what it was about, see? Ag’s not a great intelligence. She’s got no mind. She’s not with it, really, but she’s bright enough over money. She knew what he was after and so she came to me and told me and of course I took it up. Tonight will put a stop to his mucking about round us.’

  ‘Is Ag your mother?’

  ‘No, she’s not. She’s not. She’s not. She never said so and she isn’t. She’s a friend; she’s interested. She does what I say. Like today. She went to the graveyard, see? I told her she’d find the address on a wreath when we couldn’t find it in the paper but she went right away. Then she used the telephone.’

  ‘All right. I understand.’

  ‘You don’t. You don’t understand. You’ve got no idea. I’m not ordinary, see? Ag rescued me when I was born. I wasn’t born normally, see? A lot of famous people aren’t as a matter of fact, if you read history and all that. I wasn’t quite in the world when a bomb hit the hospital I was in. On the first day of war this was, and my Mum was killed and Ag rushed in and picked me up like a kitten and carried me off all bloody to the rescue buses. Then she had to look after me, she was months going round the camps, until she found my papers and the nuns took over for her and found my Dad.’

  ‘But there were no bombs on the first day of the war. There were no bombs for a year.’ Julia made the protest and got the full repercussion.

  ‘That’s a lie!’

  It was an objection which he appeared to have heard before.

  ‘People say anything but they’re wrong and I’m here to prove it anyway, aren’t I? I’m not ordinary. I’ve got certificates. I’m legal. I’ve got rights. My Dad and Mum were legally married. In a mucking church. It was a white wedding. Five hundred guests, I believe. Fancy spending all that on a do. It’s amazing!’

  ‘What is your name?’ Tim was trying to distract his attention from Julia.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve! What’s my name? I’m not sure I shan’t pay you for that. That’s cheek, that is. That’s what they call it in the posh schools. Cheek. What’s my name. Do me a favour! You must think I’m bonkers.’

  ‘Is it Cornish?’ Julia spoke as Timothy thrust her behind him.

  He was just in time. The figure made a dart at her and for the first time brought out his right hand. The sight of it sent them both back on their heels and their reaction satisfied him. He paused to enjoy the sensation he was making. Up to the elbow his arm was a paw furnished with mighty bloodstained talons, a fantastic and improbable horror familiar to connoiseurs of certain comic strips and films.

  Its realism as far as construction and fit were concerned was quite remarkable and as convincing as moulded and painted rubber, inset with a certain amount of genuine monkey fur, could make it. Only the distinctive convention in which the original designer had worked lent it a merciful artificiality.

  Timothy began to laugh. ‘We had some of those last term,’ he said. ‘Did you get it from the joke shop in Tugwell Street?’

  The newcomer forgot his anger and smirked himself. He sat back in the air again, but intentionally this time, and let his forearms swing upwards from the elbows, his hands flapping.

  ‘Child of the Fall-out’, he said and laughed.

  The offbeat joke which to any other generation must be indescribably shocking amused them all, albeit a little guiltily, but it was very shortlived. Flushed with his triumph over them, he turned his right hand in its ridiculous glove palm uppermost. The five razor-blades appearing through the rubber caught the hard light.

  Tim leapt straight for him, caught his upper arm and jerked it backwards. It was a purely instinctive movement so prompt and thorough that it came as a complete surprise. The stranger’s reaction, which was equally spontaneous, almost over-balanced them both. He began to scream in a terrifying, hoarse, but not very loud voice and every joint in his body sagged limply to the ground, so that Tim was left holding his full weight. He let him drop and put his foot on his shoulder while he stripped off the glove. The razor-blades were stitched into a webbing bandage inside it and its removal was a major operation with the quivering, yelping creature writhing round his feet on the stones. When he stopped screaming be began to swear and the stream of filth, in the soft lisping voice, had a quality of nastiness which was out of their experience. Tim turned a furious face on Julia.

  ‘Take these damn things out of the way and put them somewhere safe. Don’t cut yourself, for God’s sake. You’ll get tetanus, they’re dirty enough.’

  She obeyed him silently, taking both glove and bandage, and disappeared into the dark kitchen.

  Left to himself Tim stood back and wiped his hands.

  ‘Shut up and get up,’ he said.

  The speed with which the creature on the floor leapt to the window high in the wall was as sudden as Tim’s own leap at his arm had been, and had the same instinctive precision. Only the bars prevented him from getting away. Their close spacing, which had required a certain amount of negotiation even from one so slender, effec
tively prevented him from bolting through and he fell back and lay against the wall, hanging limply, a black streak against the grey.

  ‘Get down and turn round.’

  The newcomer obeyed. His subservience was more distasteful than his arrogance. He shuffled into a corner and stood in it, letting it support him. His dirty hands hung limp in front of him. His face was wet with sweat and blubber and he smelled like a sewer.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Barry Leach, sixty-three Cremorne Street, The Viaduct, E.’

  He gave the information in a stream, clearly the result of long experience, and then paused. A new idea passed over his face as visibly as if he were an infant. ‘That’s the name I arrange with Ag to give. It’s her name. She’s Mrs. Leach. We don’t give my Dad’s name until we have to. It’s part of Ag’s arrangement, see? We keep him quiet and he pays up. It’s Ag’s address too. I live with her when I live anywhere, but you know my real name that’s on my papers so it’s no use hiding it from you. Ag’s got my papers. She doesn’t show them but she’s got them and I read them when I feel like it.’

  ‘Do you ever see your father?’

  Timothy was concentrating and much of the youthfulness had left his face so that he looked tired and absorbed. He made a good looking but worried young man, very much a product of the age. ‘Does he talk to you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Not as often as he wants. Can’t take him, see?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, he’s old – we’re not the same generation, see. We don’t see things the same way. He’s got no sense of humour. You’ve got more humour than he has. It’s age, see?’

  ‘But he gives you money?’

  ‘He gives Ag money for me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I don’t keep it a day, see. I spend it. I take taxis when I have any money.’

  ‘Taxis? Where to?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere. I like taxis, they make me feel I’m who I am. . . . educated and legitimate and that.’

  ‘I see. Have you ever lived with your father?’

  ‘No. I never wanted to. Ag’s right when she’s against that. Your soul wouldn’t be your own, not with him. He’s very rich but he doesn’t spend it. He’s a do-gooder. It’s because he thinks I ought to be living with him, and he doesn’t want it because he’s got a new wife, that he keeps giving Ag money for me. If you read you keep learning about men like that. Guilty, that’s what he is. It suits me.’

  ‘Where do you do your reading?’

  ‘Inside. I get a job in the library, see, because I’m educated. The screws can’t read at all. They don’t know half the books they’ve got in those libraries. It makes me laugh and it would you too. You’re about my age, aren’t you? The old generation is responsible for the next. That’s what they think. But it’s not true. It’s your own generation that lives with you, isn’t it? Blaming the bloody old fools doesn’t help. I didn’t read that, you know. I thought it. I think sometimes. What are you going to do with me?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Do me a favour! Now, of course. Have you gone soft or something? Push me out, that’s what you’d better do. Push me out. You might lose your job if they found us together. I might say anything and you couldn’t deny it. I’ve got a say same as you have. I’m legal. I’ve got papers, you can’t take those away. Can you?’

  ‘Something is happening upstairs.’ Julia’s voice came in to them from the passage. ‘Tim! Somebody is screaming upstairs.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I want to.’ Tim was answering the boy in the corner. He turned and spoke to Julia.

  ‘The house is aroused, is it? I think we’d better take him with us. He’s our pidgin.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Night-cap

  ‘VERY NICE,’ SAID Luke, settling back in Mr. Campion’s most comfortable chair. A glass was in his hand, the telephone was on his knee to save him having to get up when it should ring again, and his feet were on the fender. ‘This is how I like waiting. We’ll give them another half-hour. O.K.?’

  His host glanced up from the message he was reading. He had found it on his desk when they had come in to the Bottle Street flat some little time before, and his anxiety to see if it had arrived had been one of the reasons why he had asked Luke in for a night-cap instead of being persuaded to go elsewhere after they had left the dining-room of the Eagle Tavern. It was a long dispatch, written in Mr. Lugg’s schoolboyish hand, and had been taken down from the telephone which in England is now so often used for the relaying of telegrams. Mr. Campion had read it without astonishment and now there was a curiously regretful smile on his pale face as he put it into his pocket.

  Luke cocked an eye at him. ‘Secrets?’ he suggested. ‘You don’t tell us more than you have to, do you, you old sinner? I don’t blame you, we’ve got no finer feelings. Lugg has gone to bed on principle, I suppose? What does he do, a forty-hour week?’

  ‘He says it’s nearer a hundred and forty and that if he had a union he’d complain to it, ruin me, and be deprived of the little bit of comfort he has got. I could hardly help overhearing you on the telephone just now. They’ve got Mrs. Leach, then?’

  Luke’s grin appeared widely, as it only did when he was truly amused. His eyes shone with tears of laughter and his mouth looked like a cat’s. ‘I don’t know why these gormless habituals tickle me so,’ he said. ‘It’s not a nice trait. They do, though. Do you know where she was all the time? In custody at the Harold Dene nick.’

  ‘The cemetery Harold Dene?’

  He nodded. ‘On a charge of pinching flowers and trying to sell them to the little shop opposite the main gates. The startled proprietor had only just handed an expensive and distinctive sheaf of Arum lilies to a regular customer, who hadn’t left the shop above fifteen minutes so he could hardly ignore it, when she brought them in. He asked Agnes to wait while he got some money and nipped out of the back door to find a policeman. While he was away she helped herself to a telephone call and was just hanging up as he returned with a copper. We find ’em, don’t we!’ He was silent for a moment and sat sipping his drink and looking into the gas fire as if he saw castles there.

  ‘That boy Timothy was lucky,’ he observed at last. ‘That was his Mum’s last throw turned that number up. Some guardian angel looked after him all right.’

  He appeared to be very serious, the long waving lines deep on his forehead. ‘Remember that tale we heard tonight about the head-scarf? I thought at the time it had the true outlandish ring about it. Little white lambs dancing on a blue field and “Happy and Gay” – Happy and Gay! – written all over it in flowers. I ask you, Campion! Think of that poor girl, dying in a hospital which everyone confidently expected to be bombed in a couple of hours. She was married to a nervy, over-conscientious nut who didn’t even know he was a father and was away on active service anyhow. Her only relative was helpless and there was no one to mother the baby. So what did she do? She caused the kid to be wrapped in a shawl marked “Happy and Gay” and then dropped off uncomplaining into Eternity. What happened? What you’d think? Not on your nellie! A bird turned up out of the air, a wayward nit, who scooped up the kid as a pink ticket to safety and flapped off with it, to drop it neatly into the empty cradle of the one kind of woman who wouldn’t see anything extraordinary about its arrival and who found the message perfectly comprehensible. There you are, a straight answer to a straight prayer.’

  Mr. Campion regarded his friend dubiously.

  ‘It’s one way of looking at it,’ he said. ‘There are others.’

  ‘Not if you take her viewpoint.’ Luke was unrepentant. ‘Locate the true protagonist of each story and straight away you’re living in an age of miracles. That’s my serious and considered opinion. I see no other reasonable explanation for the stuff I come across.’ He laughed and dismissed the whole stupendous subject. ‘Munday is wild, I understand,’ he remarked. ‘There’ll
be some ruffled plumage to be smoothed down there, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Hadn’t he realized that Barry Leach was anything to do with Cornish?’

  ‘He didn’t know Barry Leach or Barry Cornish existed. Why should he?’ Luke was mildly ferocious. ‘One Charles Luke, Superintendent, might have pulled a finger out and recollected something about a small-time problem brat in a totally different manor when the flat-wrecking case first came up, but did he? No, of course he didn’t. He’d never heard of the silly twit until this afternoon when he put a query through to records. It’s my fault. Cornish is somebody in Munday’s area. It might have helped him had he known about this skeleton in his cupboard before. Munday has a grievance.’

  ‘Will he show it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see, won’t it?’ As if in answer to his question the telephone upon his knee began to ring and he lifted the receiver.

  ‘Luke,’ he said, and brightened visibly. ‘Ah. Hello. Your name was on my lips, Chief. How goes it? What? Here? Why not? Mr. Campion won’t mind, he may even give you a drink. Right away then. O.K.’

  He hung up and made one of his comic faces.

  ‘He’d like to have a direct word with me, if I don’t mind. Very proper and correct. That’ll teach me!’

  He was still mildly apprehensive when Munday appeared ten minutes later; and when Mr. Campion, who had not met him before, let him in the thin man was surprised by the newcomer’s attitude, which was not at all what he had been led to expect. The correct pink-faced official was neither reproachful towards Luke nor packed with secret satisfaction at the new advantage he had suddenly acquired over the Councillor. Instead he came in with the unmistakable air of a man determined to put a delicate piece of tactics across. His light eyes were cautious and his prim mouth smiling.

  ‘I must apologize for intruding on your hospitality at this time of night, Mr. Campion’, he said, with an effusiveness which was obviously foreign to him. ‘I’ve always hoped to meet you but this is an imposition.’