A Penknife in My Heart

by Nicholas Blake

  NICHOLAS BLAKE

  A Penknife in My Heart

  For

  Barbara and Geoffrey

  Contents

  1. The Nelson Arms

  2. The Water Test

  3. The Unholy Pact

  4. The Snared Falcons

  5. The Upright Director

  6. The Faithless Wife

  7. The Bereaved Lecturer

  8. The Faithful Dog

  9. The Other Woman

  10. The Market Gardener

  11. The Secret Drawer

  12. The Aquarium Meeting

  13. The Bleeding Heart

  14. The Second Voyage

  A Note on the Author

  When my back began to smart

  ’Twas like a penknife in my heart.

  When my heart began to bleed

  ’Twas death and death and death indeed.

  Nursery Rhyme

  1 The Nelson Arms

  It was shortly after entering the bar of the Nelson Arms on a Saturday in August, 1955, that Stuart Hammer first perceived how he might commit the perfect murder.

  He had come into the estuary an hour before nightfall, on the last of the flood, and anchored Avocet by the stern so that she would swing round and point seaward when the ebb started to run, for he had no wish to spend the night in a river that, at low tide, would be little more than a deep ditch between the saltings. Indeed, but for shortage of beer he would not have ventured into this tricky channel—one he had never sailed before. But the map showed a village half a mile upstream, and where there was a village there would presumably be a pub.

  Stuart Hammer lowered himself, with an empty crate, into Avocet’s dinghy. There had been no sign of human life or habitation since he had ghosted into the river mouth on his auxiliary engine. The expiring light showed, even here, nothing but water, dunes and ashen-colored grass. “Godforsaken bloody spot,” he muttered as he pulled away, the current pushing him toward Brackham Staithe. A sharp bend in the channel swept Avocet from his sight. Glancing over his left shoulder, he saw lights a couple of hundred yards away; the stream broadened into a pool where a ghostly flock of dinghies lay moored. Stuart threaded his way through them, and made fast to the hard on the northern bank of the river.

  “Brackham Staithe,” he grumbled. “The yachtsman’s Mecca. They can have it. Handy place for smuggling, though, it could be.”

  Sailing single-handed—and he did it from choice, not necessity—had got Stuart Hammer into the habit of talking to himself. At any time, though, he preferred his own conversation to that of almost anyone else—a fact of which his numerous acquaintances and boon companions were blissfully unaware.

  Brackham Staithe was very far from being a yachtsman’s Mecca. Apart from occasional visitors, those who sailed here were all local residents; so the place was dead enough except at weekends, when the salt-water lagoons, with their roughly marked and awkwardly placed sandbanks, made an interesting obstacle race for dinghy enthusiasts.

  Tonight being Saturday, the Nelson Arms was crowded with them, slaking the demoniac thirst induced by salt-water sailing, and giving off the forced animation that is generated by a group of people who have little interest in one another outside the hobby which has brought them together. Men in jerseys, shorts or stained trousers; weather-beaten women who looked as if they were made of rope rather than human flesh; one or two of those impossibly exotic girls who are to be found on the fringe of every sailing community, and seem, with their linen suits and painted nails, to have strayed in from the pages of Vogue.

  In this gathering, Stuart Hammer’s arrival went almost unnoticed. The locals assumed him to be a visitor staying at the Nelson Arms; the few visitors took him for a local. A copper-haired girl of extreme beauty, sitting very close to a man on a settle opposite the door, glanced up at the short, broad-shouldered figure who entered, vaguely noting the piratical look of his beard, his reddish-brown face and the shade he wore over one eye.

  Pushing his way to the bar, Stuart ordered a pint of mild and bitter, and two dozen of bottled beer to replenish his crate. He ran an eye over the room as he drank. Deal and pitchpine; hard chairs and settles; trade advertisements; beer-slopped tables. It was poky and smoky, dead-alive—just the place for these inland mariners, he thought. With some red leather and chromium he could do wonders for it: a few converted ship’s lanterns instead of these blinding naked bulbs; keep those prints on the wall over there—frigates and ships of the line in action—customers like a bit of ye quainte olde.

  An oleograph above the bar, representing the sailor after whom the pub was named, caught Stuart’s attention.

  “The patron keeping an eye on things, eh?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” said the innkeeper.

  Stuart jerked his head at the picture. “Nelson.”

  “That’s right, sir. He was born in these parts. Over to Burnham Thorpe, see? Your first visit, sir?”

  “Yes. What? Oh, yes. I’m—”

  Stuart’s voice faded out. Above the oleograph ran a long mirror, set at an angle so that it reflected the far side of the room. What had attracted Stuart’s eye was the red head sitting so close to the dead-beat chap on that settle; what held it was the chap himself. He had never seen a chap so obviously at the extreme end of his tether. There was no mistaking it: Stuart Hammer’s experience in Coastal Forces and later in the Palestine Police had taught him the signals you made when you were about to rush round the bend. The couple were talking in undertones—a conversation which, one felt, had been going on, going round in circles, for hours; perhaps for weeks and months. Leaning on the bar, his bright blue eye turned dreamily toward the couple, Stuart followed this conversation. It was, of course, quite inaudible in the shindy: but one of his curious and cryptic skills was that of lip reading.

  He had acquired it as a boy, in hospital, during a long period of deafness which followed a fracture of the base of the skull. He had kept it up, as a man, for the secret feeling of power it gave him. Stuart Hammer loved power, and was never quite satisfied even by the large measure of it which his forceful personality provided for him. Since becoming personnel manager in his uncle’s Midland factory five years ago, he had had ample opportunity among the clattering machines to exercise this gift. It was part of the boyish streak in him and went with the glee of feeling incognito, of growing a beard and continuing to wear a now quite unnecessary eyeshade during his holidays at sea. Because it was perfectly genuine, this boyish streak was all the more disarming, and therefore all the more dangerous.

  Stuart Hammer watched the lips moving. He all but heard the rasp of utter emotional exhaustion as the white-faced chap spoke:

  “… But, darling, we’ve been into this over and over again. I know Helena. She’d never consent to divorce me. She enjoys her cat-and-mouse game far too much. There’s nothing she’d like better than to know I want to get away from her and to play me on the line.”

  “Poor Ned! So she has you hooked?”

  “I suppose so. In a way. When you’ve lived with someone for ten years—”

  “Well then, there’s nothing for it but—”

  “No! Laura, I won’t give you up. I’m only alive when I’m with you. Everything else is unreal. Do you want me to give you up?”

  “Oh, please, Ned! You know how I love you. But it’ll go bad in me—I can’t go on much longer with this hole-and-corner life. It’s so squalid and messy.”

  The man looked up, his haunted eyes meeting Stuart Hammer’s for an instant. After a pause, the girl’s lips moved again.

  “I still don’t see why you can’t just leave her, my darling. At least it’d bring things to a head. Even if she refused a divorce or a separation then, you’d at lea
st—”

  “Oh, we’ve had this out a dozen times.”

  “It’s not as if you and she had any children.”

  “It’s not as if I had any regular income, either. You keep forgetting that. If I left her, she’d bloody well make sure that I supported her for a change. What would you and I live on?”

  “When your play’s put on, darling—”

  “When the cows come home!” A gloomy, savage look showed on the man’s face. His mouth twitched uncontrollably and he jerked back the lock of dark hair that lay over his wrinkled forehead. His eyes glared sightlessly at Stuart Hammer across the room. “I wish she was dead,” he said.

  “Oh, Ned, you mustn’t!”

  “And so do you, my beautiful love, and so do you.” The two gazed deeply at each other for a moment. The reckless look that accompanied his last words took years off the man’s face and gave it extraordinary charm. The girl gripped his hand, pressing her thigh close to his; a complex expression came and went on her face—triumph, perturbation, tenderness were in it. She was one of those very rare women to whom some subtle blending of innocence and experience gives a special quality of elusiveness. Not that this thought occurred to Stuart Hammer, who was as insensitive as he was shrewd. “What she wants,” he said to himself, “is less natter and more bed. And I don’t see that bloke giving it to her.”

  He turned to the innkeeper. “Many people staying here?”

  “Yes, sir, we’re full this weekend.”

  “Don’t I know that red-headed girl over there? An actress. Now, what’s her name?”

  “That’ll be Mrs. Saunders, with her husband. Came last night. They’re staying till Monday. So she’d be an actress, would she? Fancy that! Such a quiet, nice-spoken couple.” Breathing heavily, the man craned his neck to see over the heads of his customers.

  “Well, I thought I’d seen her in a play somewhere,” Stuart vaguely replied. Glancing at the couple again, he read the white-faced man’s lips saying:

  “I wouldn’t lift a finger to keep her alive. She’s a hopeless case. If she was an animal, somebody’d have put her out of her misery long ago.” He was trembling all over.

  “I want you, Ned,” the girl whispered. “Let’s forget her for tonight.”

  “You go up then, love. I must have a breath of air—it’s foul in here. I shan’t be long.”

  Stuart Hammer’s eye roved round the bar. No one here he knew. No one who knew him. With a curt good night to the landlord, he picked up his crate and went out of the room a little ahead of “Mr. Saunders.”

  “Excuse me,” he was saying a moment later, “could you give me a hand with this crate to my dinghy? Strained my arm a bit yesterday.”

  “Of course,” replied Ned. “Lovely night.”

  The masts of the sailing dinghies stood motionless in the air; the ebb lisped and chuckled along their sides as they strained at the moorings, all facing one way like a flock of sheep, pointing upstream. The hard was deserted. In the light of a quarter moon the mudbanks of the channel were smooth and molded, like chocolate blancmange. The two men stowed the crate in the dinghy.

  “Stretch my legs for a few minutes,” said Stuart Hammer. “My boat’s a few hundred yards downstream. You a sailing man?”

  “I’ve done some dinghy sailing. No deep-sea stuff. Hoping to borrow a boat tomorrow.”

  “Smoke? Oh, my name’s Hammer, Stuart Hammer.”

  “Thanks.” Ned did not vouchsafe his name. He took some deep breaths, inhaling the delicious night smells of water, mud, dune, grass, tar, then lit Hammer’s cigarette and his own. A light went on in an upstairs room of the Nelson Arms. Laura would be getting undressed now. Ned smiled in the darkness—he would stay out a bit longer, to sharpen anticipation. The stranger was strolling away from the hard and the pub, Ned at his side, along the riverside path, their feet silent on the grass, till fifty yards farther on they came to a ramshackle seat.

  “Staying long?” asked Hammer when they had sat down.

  “I really don’t know. My wife has to get back to London on Monday morning. I might take a few days more. I’m a free lance just now.”

  “Lucky chap.” Stuart’s personality, like some exotic weed, seemed to flower extravagantly there in the darkness. “I say,” he went on, with a rush of boyish impulsiveness, but keeping his voice low, “if you are at a loose end for a few days, would you like to join me in Avocet?”

  “Well—”

  “Sounds like a crazy suggestion from a total stranger. But the fact is my partner got ill—had to put him ashore last Wednesday. Normally Avocet’s easy to sail single-handed; but now I’ve strained an arm—”

  “I don’t know if I’d be much help,” Ned dubiously answered. But the idea attracted him. It would at least postpone his return to Helena.

  “Don’t you worry about that. If you can sail a dinghy, you’ll pick it up quickly enough.” Stuart Hammer fell silent a moment, pondering how best to approach the crucial point. This chap is obviously a bit of an egghead, he thought: therefore the bluff, breezy manner is indicated: appeal to his romantic side—these sedentary blokes all dream of being men of action.

  “Ever tried your hand at smuggling?” he suddenly asked.

  “Smuggling? Well—no.”

  “Any moral scruples about it?”

  “I—I haven’t really thought. Depends what, I suppose.”

  “How do you mean?” The glow of his cigarette lit up Stuart Hammer’s keen blue eyes, fastened upon Ned.

  “Well, I’d draw the line at drugs. That’s a filthy game.”

  “Quite. But watches, brandy—that sort of thing?”

  “Oh, I’d pass them. I’m a bit of an anarchist.”

  The stillness of the night, the faint moonshine, the presence of this compulsive stranger combined with Ned’s own abnormal state of mind to cast a singular unreality over the encounter. Muffled sounds from the pub, a dog barking in a farm beyond the village, seemed like noises out of a dream.

  “I’ll put my cards on the table,” said Stuart quietly. “I’m fetching a consignment from the Dutch coast on Wednesday. Must have some help with the sailing part of it. You’d get a cut, of course—wouldn’t be less than fifty quid, might be more. Bit of excitement for you, too. Story in it, maybe—you’re a writer? But no real danger: I’ve got the thing taped. Are you on?”

  Hammer’s voice and manner were so infectious, so agreeably challenging, that his companion perversely felt the need to put up at least a token resistance.

  “But why me? I mean, you don’t know the first thing about me. I might trot off tomorrow to the nearest Revenue and Excise boys.”

  Hammer chuckled. “I’ve knocked about. I can pick out the odds and sods. You’re all right.”

  Ned felt an absurd glow of gratification. “O.K., I’ll come in,” he said.

  “Good man. By the way, what is your name?”

  “Edwin Stowe—Saunders. Ned for short.”

  “Double name? Stowe-Saunders?”

  There was no use trying to hide the slip. “I’m Saunders down here,” Ned replied, flushing a little.

  “I get you. ’Nuff said.” Stuart Hammer at once became extremely businesslike. He told Ned exactly where and when he would pick him up on Monday night, and how Ned should get there. He gave him an alternative rendezvous for a couple of hours later, in case either of them should miss the first one. He advised him to bring nothing but razor, toothbrush and sneakers; there were spare jerseys, oilskins and sea boots on the Avocet.

  “And one thing more. It’s to safeguard you as much as myself. No one must know you’re joining me. Repeat, no one: which includes—er—Mrs. Saunders. Compris?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not of course, old man.” There was an edge of steel beneath Hammer’s affable, brusque tone. “You’ve got to cover your tracks when you leave this place. Whatever story you think up—off for a few days to potter round the Norfolk churches—whatever it is, it must account for your tem
porary disappearance and give no lead to our little expedition. You’ve never met me, never heard of me—savvy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can always change your mind. If you don’t turn up at either rendezvous, I’ll know you’ve had second thoughts. People do.”

  “I’ll be there,” answered Ned, slightly nettled.

  Stuart glanced at his wrist watch. “I must get out of this ditch before it dries up. No, not together. Give me three minutes’ start. Be seeing you, Ned.”

  The stocky figure disappeared into the darkness. A few minutes later, as he sauntered back to the Nelson Arms, Ned heard the faint splash of a dinghy’s oars passing him downstream. He realized, with a start, that for the last quarter of an hour he had only once thought of Laura, and that was when the stranger had mentioned “Mrs. Saunders.”

  “I’m still here,” said Laura.

  “Yes, love. Sorry.”

  “You mustn’t brood. It’s a lovely day, Ned, and we’ve got it all to spend. Don’t think about her, my darling.”

  “Yes.” But it was not Helena that Ned had been brooding about. The extraordinary encounter last night—he could not put it out of his mind: he had not dreamed it, yet it had the vivid unreality of a dream that, on waking, seems both absurd and bodingly prophetic.

  Ned sifted the powdery sand of the dune through his fingers. Smuggling? If I were a smuggler, is it conceivable that I should pick out a total stranger in a pub, tell him my name and the name of my boat (well, of course, they may have been false names), and invite him to join me? A crazy risk. Or was it? Stuart Hammer could just deny everything, if I rang up the police now. It’d be my word against his. But how could he be sure that I’d not have the authorities alerted, ready to catch him with the contraband on his return? Do I look like a desperado?

  Ned found he had murmured the last words aloud.