Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  “Flinging me as a sop to still the public clamour?” suggested Nigel, smiling gently.

  “Well, a bit of that,” Captain Wise admitted. “But of course I’ve every confidence that you’ll solve our little problem as well. It’s probably simple enough. I’m afraid I’m not cut out for a detective myself.”

  “You say you’ve taken precautions——”

  “Yes. Members of the staff patrol the chalets at night now, and others keep an eye on this building. Then, we’re particularly careful about—well, for instance, there’s a cabaret show tonight organised by the women visitors: the staff take turns to guard the concert hall and the room back-stage where the dresses and properties are kept.”

  “You have implicit confidence in your staff, then? I noticed, when you suggested just now that these outrages might be an attempt on someone’s part to damage the Wonderland company or your own position in it, you made no reference to the staff. Surely, if anyone has a grievance, it’d most likely be one of them?”

  “You’d think so, I agree. But actually our staff is extraordinarily happy—this isn’t just advertisement eye-wash: they’re well paid, the hours aren’t hard, no one is under notice or anything like that. I don’t see how there could be any grievance against the company. Against me personally—well, it’s not for me to say: but you’ll have full facilities for interviewing the staff, and I don’t think you’ll hear any complaints—first-hand or second-hand—about my treatment of them.”

  “Captain Wise is very popular with the personnel of the camp,” Miss Jones interposed. Nigel was struck by the contrast between the intelligence of her eyes and the sensuousness of her lips. If I was Captain Wise, he thought, I should have some difficulty in treating her as a mere office machine. Maybe he doesn’t.

  “Supposing you’re right,” he said, “we’re left with a choice between one of the visitors and this hermit fellow. We know the hermit has a grievance against Wonderland and there are certain indications—the aerial photograph, the unknown man who turned up this morning—that he may have been in the camp. If it’s one of the visitors, the odds are that these outrages are bone-fide practical jokes or else the work of someone with a screw loose. You’ve already made inquiries at your central office and discovered that none of the visitors has ever been in the company’s employment: unless, of course, someone is here under a false name. In any case, Wonderland Ltd. has only been in existence for three years, and within such a short time any grudge again the company could easily be traced.”

  Captain Wise nodded. “Yes, that sums it up very well.” He glanced at his wrist-watch—a thin, gold, rather feminine affair, Nigel noticed—and suggested they should have an aperitif. Miss Jones removed her horn-rimmed spectacles, walked over to a shiny cabinet by the wall which Nigel had vaguely assumed to be a radiogram, and opened it to reveal a cocktail bar. The removal of the spectacles had changed her at once from the confidential secretary to the charming hostess: gracefully handling the cocktails, she might have been a woman who had never had to do a day’s work for her living.

  “They do you very well here,” Nigel remarked. “Free drinks, private bar installed—or is that an addition of your own?”

  “No. Supplied by the company. We get a few perks.”

  Miss Jones opened a filing-cabinet and took out some papers. “Here is some material you may find useful, Mr. Strangeways. A statement of the action we took after the first practical joke: a list of the people who were on the beach then, in the order in which they left it: and notes about people who were absent from meals at times when the outrages might have been prepared—I’m afraid these are very incomplete and won’t be much help—we couldn’t pursue that sort of inquiry very far without giving offence.”

  A waft of some rare, sophisticated perfume came to Nigel as she leant over his shoulders with the papers. He tucked them away in a pocket and took another sip of his excellent cocktail.

  “I imagine you’ve got no definite suspicions of anyone yet,” he said.

  “No. I must say I can’t believe it’s one of the visitors. The recluse I mentioned seems the likeliest bet at present. Have you got those copies of the press cuttings there, Miss Jones?”

  The secretary took some carbon copies from the drawer and passed them over.

  “This is a dossier of the controversy that took place over the building of the holiday camp. You’ll find the hermit’s evidence here—Philip Grebble seems to be his legal name, but everyone’s got into the habit of calling him Old Ishmael—and a few paragraphs about his private life; and here’s a photograph Miss Jones managed to dig up, taken at the time of the controversy.”

  “Dear me,” murmured Nigel, regarding the photograph. “‘His beard was grizzled—no?’”

  “‘It was, as I have seen it in his life, a sable silver’d,’” Miss Jones neatly capped the quotation.

  “And the treacly tennis-balls. ‘The old ornament of his cheek hath stuffed tennis-balls.’”

  “I’m afraid I can’t compete with that one,” Miss Jones smiled.

  “Out of Much Ado.”

  Captain Wise glanced impatiently at them. “Well, perhaps you’ll tell me what lines you intend to work on, Strangeways. Any help I can give you——”

  “Yes. To be sure.” Nigel was still staring dreamily at the photograph. “‘Now may Jove in his next commodity of hair send thee a beard.’ I’d better look into Ishmael first. Can you lend me an ordnance map of the district? And I’d like to go over the course of the treasure-hunt.”

  ‘‘I’ll get my brother to take you. He’s our games organiser, and arranged the clues.”

  “You mean, he made them up?”

  “No. He hid them at the various points. Miss Jones composed them. She has a literary turn of mind.”

  “She seems a paragon of the virtues,” said Nigel gallantly. “By the way, why did you put one clue so close to where this recluse lives? Wasn’t it rather asking for trouble?”

  Captain Wise looked considerably disconcerted. It was his first experience of the direct way in which Nigel often leapt upon a weak spot. Miss Jones came to his rescue.

  “I’m afraid it was my doing. Old Ishmael has been a bit of a nuisance to us. You’ll read more about it in the report I’ve given you. I thought that, if we sent a number of the visitors routing round on the outskirts of his wood, he might pack up and go off somewhere else. He doesn’t like his privacy to be disturbed. It was a sort of counter-attack—a stupid idea, really, I suppose.”

  “Why do you want to go over the treasure-hunt?” asked Captain Wise.

  “To find out how this girl got the blisters, if I can. It seems more likely to have happened there than in the camp, seeing that nobody else was affected.”

  “But surely you don’t entertain the notion that it had anything to do with mustard-gas? It’s quite fantastic. She’s not a healthy-looking girl, and Doctor Holford found out that she often gets skin-trouble.”

  “Mm. Still, blisters are not skin-trouble in the normal sense. There must have been some pretty powerful external irritant to create ones like these.” Nigel set down his cocktail glass precariously on the arm of his chair. “Who put about this mustardgas theory, anyway?”

  “Well, you know the way rumours do crop up,” Captain Wise replied slowly. He looked embarrassed: his instinct, thought Nigel, is to protect the customer. Miss Jones began:

  “Mr. Strangeways has only to ask Doctor Holford——”

  “I don’t think I shall require you any more for the present, Miss Jones,” the manager said frigidly. “You have the programme for to-night to duplicate.”

  Miss Jones reddened, threw up her firm chin and went out. Captain Wise looked at Nigel apologetically.

  “I have to keep that girl down a bit. She’s invaluable, of course, but sometimes she trades on it. You were asking?—Oh, yes, about the rumour. Well, actually a young chap staying here, called Perry—he’s a Mass Observer and doing a survey of the camp—he was the first to su
ggest mustard-gas. Tactless of him, but nothing more, I’m sure. The doctor noticed the resemblance at once, too. Unfortunately the girl has a friend who happened to be there when Perry came out with the remark, and I’m afraid she broadcast it.”

  “I see. Yes. Tell me more about your Mr. Perry.”

  Captain Wise gave an account of the questionnaire, and mentioned that Paul had struck up acquaintance with Mr. Thistlethwaite. “But I don’t see that young man behind this business,” he ended.

  “The psychology of the practical joker is apt to be pretty odd, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Captain Wise dryly. “So Miss Gardiner keeps telling us. She’s a schoolmistress staying here.”

  “I think we may find that Miss Arnold’s blisters are nothing to do with the case—not one of the practical joke series, I mean. But, if the Mad Hatter is quick-witted, he’d jump at an incident like this and do his best to give the impression that it was one of the series. If he was quick-witted and in deadly earnest, that is to say. And what could be better calculated to create panic than a rumour of poison-gas?”

  “That’s all very well. But there’s not a suggestion of motive——”

  At this point the gong boomed out for luncheon. “I’ve arranged for you to have meals with the guests. I imagine you’d prefer that?”

  “Thanks. Yes. You don’t eat with them yourself?”

  “Not as a general rule. One has to be frightfully careful to avoid favouritism, and if I had a sort of captain’s table——”

  In a few minutes, Mr. Thistlethwaite was introducing Nigel to the other people sitting at his table—his wife and Sally, Paul Perry, Albert Morley. Nigel liked the look of Mr. Thistlethwaite’s daughter: she struck him as being a little overwrought at the moment, but that was to be expected as a result of what had happened to her in the last two days. He wondered just what was behind her attitude towards young Perry: she would tease him unmercifully for a little, and then break off, and eye him in a covert, undecided sort of way when he was not looking. Nigel, too, was unobtrusively taking stock of the young man who had started the mustard-gas rumour. Dark, touchy, eyes a trifle protuberant, a trace of some Midland or Northern accent in his voice, features from time to time set in a scowl (concentration? self-consciousness? pugnacity? recurrent headache?), serious, not much humour, perhaps a bit of a prig, tougher perhaps than he looks, could be vindictive—Nigel enumerated his impressions as they came to him.

  The subject of his observation leaned across the table and said to him abruptly:

  “I thought amateur detectives only existed in books.”

  It was an ungraceful opening to a conversation; but Nigel guessed that it had been less deliberately offensive than characteristic of a person who tried to give himself confidence by assuming a blunt, dominating manner towards strangers. He replied equably:

  “Oh no, they exist in real life too. I’m not an amateur, though: I get paid.”

  “By the hour, or by results?”

  “That depends on the client. Normally, I ask a retaining fee plus expenses.”

  “And what sort of people do you get as clients? Ones who are afraid to call in the police?”

  “Sometimes. Or it may be a person under suspicion by the police, or an arrested man whom his friends believe innocent.”

  “What happens if you’re being hired to prove someone’s innocence and you discover they’re guilty after all?”

  “I don’t hire myself out to prove anyone’s innocence. I do it to discover the truth. If the truth turns against them, that’s their look-out.”

  “It must be a wonderful feeling,” Mr. Morley chipped in, “battling for a mans’ innocence, probing into the dark corners of human nature——”

  “Especially when you get a nice, fat fee for it,” said Paul Perry with a quick, nervous sneer.

  Nigel was not one to let that kind of thing pass. Gazing steadily at Paul, he said:

  “Is it me you disapprove of, or private investigators as a class?”

  “I’m not disapproving anything. I’m just interested in facts.”

  “So, oddly enough, am I. And one of the first facts I have come across in this case is that you are being openly offensive. Several inferences might be drawn from this. We might infer, for example,” Nigel continued in his most dispassionate voice, “that you are a person of naturally boorish disposition: or that you’re rattled about something and trying to take it out on the first available subject: or that you have some reason to be frightened of me, and—in an attempt to put a bold face on your fears—are betraying those fears. Or perhaps you’ve just eaten something that disagreed with you.”

  “Golly!” murmured Sally Thistlethwaite, gazing wide-eyed at Nigel. “Send for the ambulance, somebody.”

  “Nevertheless,” Nigel added, “in the course of your remarks, you made one which may prove quite illuminating.”

  XI

  AFTER LUNCH NIGEL had a brief conversation with Dr. Holford, and then went off with Teddy Wise to retrace the treasure-hunt. Miss Arnold’s partner on that occasion had been Mr. Easton, the live-wire young man on the Sports Committee who had suggested that the management should organise a competition for discovering the Mad Hatter. At Nigel’s suggestion, they took Mr. Easton with them so that they should cover exactly the same ground.

  “Just what will you be looking for, Mr. Strangeways?” the young man said as they made their way towards the place where the first clue had been hidden.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t quite know. But Doctor Holford has satisfied himself that Miss Arnold could not have come by her injury inside the camp grounds; and the blisters came up after the treasure-hunt; so the chances are she got them somehow in the course of it. She didn’t complain of being stung, or anything like that?”

  “No. She couldn’t, I suppose, being a Christian Scientist. Not rightly.” Mr. Easton proceeded to recite the somewhat hackneyed limerick on this subject—a donnish limerick which consorted oddly with his on-the-spot, executive appearance, the lantern jaw, the tuft of hair that stood up like a parrot’s crest above his forehead, and the cockney accent.

  Presently he brought them to the first clue. It had been tucked inside the coiled halliards of a flag-pole that stood on a slight eminence three or four hundred yards west from the main building.

  “Easy, this one was,” commented Mr. Easton:

  “‘Wonderland waves

  Up in the sky:

  Where the rope coils,

  There lurk I.’

  Not quite up to Shakespeare, Mr. Strangeways, is it?”

  “Far from it,” said Nigel, gazing at the green flag with Wonderland in white letters that hung limply above them. “Still, it served its purpose. Captain Wise must have fun working out these rhymes.”

  “Not my bro—he’s no bard. It’s Esmeralda who makes them up. His secretary.”

  “Of course. I remember, he told me that,” said Nigel, who had never in fact forgotten it. He examined the coils of the halliard and the flag-pole. “No poison unknown to science here, as far as I can see. Lead on, Mr. Easton.”

  The next stage took them out of the camp grounds, farther westwards and along the cliffs. The cries of bathers came up to them, lazy and idyllic in the summer air, through the tangled wilderness of the landslide.

  “Bad weather for the Mad Hatter,” said Mr. Easton.

  “Why?”

  “Well, if it was raining, people’d be staying indoors and getting on each other’s nerves, see?”

  “That’s true,” said Nigel, who liked the young man’s sprightly, sensible air. “Yet Pan was an out-of-door god, and he was the one who started panics.”

  “D’you reckon that’s what he’s out for—to start a panic? Why doesn’t he do something a bit more sweeping, then? Set fire to the camp, for instance? Burn like fun, those chalets would.”

  “Hey,” cried Teddy Wise humorously, “don’t you start putting ideas in his head!”

  “He’ll have plenty t
o choose from by now, Mr. Wise. Half the people in the camp are talking about what he’ll do next.”

  “Apprehensively? Or are they just interested?” Nigel asked.

  “Well, you know what the public is like. They’re going to have their three quids’ worth all right, and for two pins they’d run a sweepstake on the Mad Hatter’s next move. When you’re on holiday, you quite enjoy a bit of excitement—gives you something to talk about back at work. But, mind you, I reckon plenty of ’em here’ll not go to a Wonderland camp another year, especially the older ones and those who’ve brought their kids. They’re not windy, exactly, but you can try anyone too far, see?”

  The second hiding-place took a bit of finding. Teddy Wise, of course, knew where it had been; but Nigel wished Mr. Easton to re-discover it for himself in the same manner as during the actual treasure-hunt. It involved taking cross-bearings between the distant mole of Applestock port, the just-visible top of the white Wonderland building, a church tower to the north and a gorse-bush not far from the cliff’s edge. Nigel’s eyesight was not good enough to pick out the first of these objects, but Mr. Easton, who kept up a running commentary on his own movements, explained that it was the eastward wall of the naval harbour.

  No results were yielded here, so the three of them turned off inland towards the third hiding-place. It had not been difficult to pick up—the clue leading down a high, narrow lane, through a gate on which “Beware of the Bull” had been scrawled in red paint and as untidily crossed out, into a rectangular-shaped pasture. To-day, however, Mr. Easton seemed at fault once they had entered the field.

  “It looks different,” he muttered as they skirted the hedge that separated field from lane. “Not that I’d know parsley when I saw it, except on fish-balls. Miss Arnold’s good at plants and such, luckily.”

  “Parsley?”

  “That’s what she said it was. I dunno. It’s gone now. Hasn’t someone been cutting the stuff on this bank?”