The Deadly Joker

by Nicholas Blake

  “Can’t they just! And isn’t there some truth in the letters?”

  “Not in the one you got, anyway.” His elbow on a gleaming saddle, Bertie turned to me. “What reason does a person have for writing such filth, John?”

  I took my time about answering. “Well, I suppose in the end it’s a desire to get your own back—not on particular individuals so much as on life, which has condemned you to failure or insignificance. A desire to exercise power in secret, or something destructive in you coming out, that’s been suppressed. I don’t know.”

  “What I’d call pure bloody-mindedness.”

  “You can call it what you like,” said Jenny. “The fact is that poison-pen letters are written by people who are sick in their minds.”

  6. The Mills Bomb

  Nothing eventful happened for some days, unless one counts the gipsy boy. I heard about him from Fred Kindersley, who asked me if I would drive him into Dorchester for provisions, his own car having broken down.

  During the last few weeks several villagers had met a gipsy boy late at night in the lanes. It struck them as odd, since there was no encampment of gipsies in the neighbourhood. They described the lad as slimly built, with an old felt hat drawn down over his forehead: he had made no reply to the salutations of those who encountered him, but glided furtively past.

  “What do they suppose he was doing? Stealing hens?”

  “Nobody’s missed any,” said Fred.

  “Perhaps he’s a Russian spy in disguise.”

  “Not much to spy out round here. Well, it gives them something else to talk about.”

  “Something else?”

  “That’s right. Beside these mucky letters.”

  “The village people know about them?”

  “What they don’t know, they make up.”

  We turned left, at the top of the ridge, on to the Sherborne-Dorchester road, which quivered in front of us with refractions of heat.

  I had always respected Fred’s north-country reticence, and so was unwilling to probe him about the anonymous letter he himself had received. But now, sitting rigid beside me, he unexpectedly came out with it.

  “Dorothea’s very upset you know. I’m wondering if I was right to show her the letters.”

  I made sympathetic noises.

  “What beats me is how the writer could have known—” Fred broke off, staring ahead through the windscreen. “I told you we’d had a bit of trouble with Mr. Card—Bertie. The letter said my wife was carrying on with him. Said it in a filthy way. Well, I’m not losing any sleep over that. I know it’s not true. But how could this person have found out that Card had made a pass at her?”

  “Village gossip? You said yourself that—”

  “No. He never did it in public. He used to try it on in the bar when it was empty.”

  “When Dorothea was alone there, you mean?”

  “That’s how it began. But once or twice he started making a play for her in my presence. I soon stopped that. He’s got a bloody nerve, I will say.”

  I was disturbed, thinking of certain passages between Bertie and Jenny.

  “His old dad, I’m told, wasn’t above exercising the droit de seigneur in the neighbourhood,” Fred went on. “I reckon young Card takes after him. But the point is, nobody could have know about it, except the three of us.”

  “And me. You did tell me.”

  “Now, now, Mr. Waterson, if I thought you were a poison-pen, I’d not be riding in a car with you.”

  “Well, I suppose Bertie might boast about it—to other women, say.”

  Fred Kindersley sighed. “We’ve had our little troubles in Netherplash: but never anything like this. It’s getting everyone down, you know. You feel you can’t trust anyone. Like having Big Brother’s eye on you.”

  “Big Brother Alwyn,” I muttered at random.

  Fred took his time about it. “Alwyn? … He’s harmless enough, surely? I know he’s a bit of an old gossip, but—”

  “The hoax over the Mastership—you wouldn’t call that harmless?”

  “We don’t know for certain it was Alwyn’s doing. Any road, that hoax was a sort of practical joke—a bit malicious, I grant you, but you can’t put it in the same class as these letters. I mean, the hoax was out in the open—Alwyn was present himself at that dinner party, enjoying it all to the full. But the letters—they’re cowardly, furtive: stabs in the dark.”

  “It’s interesting they started up so soon after the hoax.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The hoax could have put it in somebody’s mind to write the letters, knowing the author of the hoax would now be suspected of writing them; and the poison-pen stuck them on playing-cards to press the point home.”

  Fred deliberated on this. “It’d have to be a person who knew Alwyn was the hoaxer.”

  “Knew, or suspected.”

  “And a person who had it in for Alwyn—wanted him to get the blame for the letters.”

  “That might be so. But it doesn’t necessarily follow.”

  “If it is so, you’d not have to look very far, Mr. Waterson.”

  “For the culprit?”

  “Yes. The person who suffered most from Alwyn’s hoax.”

  “But can you imagine a big business man going to the trouble of writing anonymous letters?”

  “Paston’s a ruthless sort of chap. We’ve had evidence of that before now.”

  “Ruthless, maybe; but vindictive in a petty-minded way?”

  “What worries me,” Fred remarked after a pause, “is what’s going to happen next. The letters have dried up, as far as we know; but I feel it in my bones we’ve not heard the last of this nasty customer, whoever he is.”

  “It depends what he’s really after, I suppose. Is he aiming at Alwyn, or just at doing the greatest possible mischief all round?”

  This next week-end Jenny was taking Corinna to stay for a few nights with her parents. I had noticed a certain tension in the atmosphere of our house, and put it down to Jenny’s nerves still jangling from the poisonous letter: Corinna, too, seemed more distrait than usual. When Jenny and I retired to bed on Friday night, the trouble came out.

  “What are we going to do about Corinna?” she asked.

  “Corinna? Is there something wrong with her?”

  “Yes. She’s fallen for Bertie. And for heaven’s sake, John, don’t say ‘Oh, but she’s only a schoolgirl.’”

  “All right, love, I won’t. But I don’t see how we can get the child out of love with him, if she’s really—”

  “The point is, he’s a rotter and perfectly capable of seducing her.”

  “That may be so, but—”

  “Oh, John, how can you be so dispassionate about this! She’s your daughter. Don’t you realise he could break her heart?”

  I felt Jenny grow tense in the dark beside me. “Has she said anything to you about it?”

  “Not directly. And that worries me—Corinna has always talked about everything with me, till now. She’s become secretive.”

  “Well, I doubt if it would be any good to forbid her seeing him any more. And you’ve gone with her to each of her riding lessons.”

  “She resents that—being chaperoned.”

  “But how would she get in to Tollerton at all?”

  “Oh, Bertie has offered to drive her there and back on her lesson days. And then, there are these long walks she’s been taking—how do I know she isn’t meeting him?”

  “You could ask her. She’s always been a truthful girl.”

  “No woman is truthful, when she’s in love. We’re all sly as cats.”

  “Well, do you want me to warn him off?”

  “If I thought it would be any good, yes. But it wouldn’t. I think you should talk to her. She’s tremendous admiration for you.”

  “Well, I don’t know. All I can say is that he’s a bad hat—and that’s the classical way of driving a young female into a man’s arms. Perhaps we should do the reverse and na
useate her with praise of him.”

  “I do wish you’d be serious about this, John. If her own mother was alive—”

  “She couldn’t have done more for Corinna than you do, my darling.”

  Jenny’s hand gripped mine hard. She was still at times so unsure of herself—so absurdly unsure even of my love for her—that a little word of praise from me had a quite disproportionate effect. But it was not entirely in gratitude that she gripped my hand now. I was mistaken. Her next words showed that she had been nerving herself thus to face an ordeal.

  “John. You know why he’s been playing up to Corinna? To make me jealous. No, don’t say anything. It’s me he wants really. And he knows how much I dislike him. He’s doing this to Corinna to get his own back for my refusing to succumb.”

  “Oh, come now, love—”

  “But I know it. His vanity has been wounded. Here’s a woman who doesn’t find him irresistible. So Corinna’s got to pay for repairing his vanity.”

  “Well, you may be right. But I can hardly believe he’d be so, so—”

  “Bloody-minded? You’re too civilised, John. Too good. You don’t know what his type is capable of.” Jenny sighed heavily. “I do feel so responsible for Corinna. I wish I knew what to do.”

  I tried to reassure her, and presently she went to sleep. But I lay awake for a long time, horribly disquieted by what she had told me. If it was true, what steps could one take? But things would be as bad if poor Jenny had imagined or wildly exaggerated the situation, for this would mean that her mind had grown unstable again.

  I was just dropping off to sleep when she started up in a nightmare, crying out “I must! I must!”

  The next morning I drove Jenny and Corinna to Sherborne for the London train. I’m no great performer at the oven, and had fixed up with the Kindersleys to dine at the Quiet Drop over the week-end. It being Saturday, the pub was pretty crowded, so I shared my table with two R.N. officers, a lieutenant and a sub-lieutenant, who had brought a party of men over from Portland where their frigate was lying.

  Though I share Miss Austen’s admiration for naval officers, I generally find them heavier going than her heroines did. Their training and discipline, all the circumstances of their vocation, give them for me some of the unapproachability of an enclosed order: outside the profession in which they are so expert, they have the innocence, the boyishness, the emotional and intellectual limitations of monks. This concentration of interest within the orbit of ship and crew must be intensified nowadays, when their profession demands so much more in the way of technical expertise.

  However, the couple I found myself with to-night proved agreeable company. After we had shared a bottle of Nuits St. George, they loosened up. The sub-lieutenant had been at Amberley—many years after I taught there, of course—and his senior officer, Lieutenant Barnwright, held intelligent and unorthodox views about naval strategy in the atomic age: I could imagine him rising high in his profession; or else coming violently in conflict with accepted authority and being broken. From strategy we moved to the subject of naval discipline, on which Barnwright was no less interesting. He spoke about the different character of discipline in big ships and small ones, the common factor being, as he said, “to have every chap in the state of mind that he’ll do what he has to do just a shade faster than his oppo in the enemy ship.”

  Conversation became more difficult as the ratings at the bar warmed up and the din increased. There were two petty officers and about a dozen A.B.’s in the party, the former conversing quietly together. I was particularly struck by one of them—his chief petty officer, Barnwright told me—a dark-haired, remarkably handsome man in his thirties, with a look of tacit authority which at once impressed me. At one point, when a few of the ratings got a bit too larky, I heard this C.P.O. say a few words to them in his gentle Devon voice that immediately calmed them down.

  “We don’t have any problems of discipline in our ship,” said Barnwright. “Warren—that’s my C.P.O.—he’s a natural. Ought to have a commission.”

  It must have been a quarter of an hour before closing time when Barnwright and his sub. challenged the two petty officers to a game of darts. I offered to score for them. The C.P.O. had taken aboard a load of drink by now: his face was white and his legs were unsteady, but his faculties otherwise unimpaired. He shook my hand affectionately, said it was a privilege to meet me, and threw a dart into the double twenty for the start. He then began with a treble twenty, a treble nineteen, and a one—the latter occasioning him to remark, “Something wrong with my bloody shooting to-night.”

  I was sitting with my back to the window on the road side of the bar. The windows opposite were dark now: outside them lay the garden. Behind the bar, Fred and Dorothea were frantically busy quenching naval thirsts.

  The two petty officers won the first leg in five minutes. Barnwright then became inspired and carried his partner to victory in the second. The final was a ding-dong affair, and destined never to be finished; for there was a crash of glass, a hole appeared in one of the garden-side windows, and a black object flew towards me over the bar and fell at the feet of the darts players.

  It took me a second or two to realise that the object was not a small black pineapple but a Mills bomb. I heard Barnwright yell “Down, everybody!” Fred and Dorothea ducked behind the bar, some of the customers threw themselves flat, others pressed away from where the thing had fallen. My own reactions were deplorably slow. During these first seconds of panic I was still frozen to my chair, which enabled me to see the chief petty officer in one continuous movement stoop, pick up the bomb and lob it through the open window beside me. At least, it should have gone through the window, but it struck the vertical wooden bar and bounced back.

  Someone began to scream. I at last managed to break my inertia and throw myself to the floor. The screaming stopped. There were a few seconds of terrible silence—I say “a few seconds,” but time had lost all meaning. I became aware that the C.P.O. was lying, face down, beside me. After an eternity of this, which lasted perhaps for another ten seconds, he slowly got to his hands and knees, and picked up the Mills bomb, on which he had flung himself bodily, from beneath him.

  “It’s all right, lads,” he said shakily. “It’s a dud. No bloody charge in it.”

  The sense of anti-climax was like a physical presence in the room. The C.P.O.’s act of fantastic heroism seemed mocked, spoilt by the fact that there had been no need for it. A young rating called out, “Hey, Chiefie, you laid an egg?”—then blushed scarlet at a look from Lieutenant Barnwright.

  Naval discipline now took over. The other petty officer reassembled his men and called a roll. There was none missing; three of them, who had tried to escape through the front door when the bomb fell, reported that it was locked on the outside. Barnwright, evidently relieved that none of his party could have been responsible, sent two men through the back door to search the garden from which the dud bomb had been thrown, and another through the window to see if the key had been left in the front door: it had. Only then did the lieutenant turn to C.P.O. Warren, and speak a few words of commendation.

  Fred Kindersley returned from telephoning the police. I asked him if I might use his telephone. There was a babble of talk and laughter in the bar as I hurried through to the Kindersleys’ private sitting-room. I rang Pydal, and after some little delay heard Alwyn Card’s voice on the wire. It might have been my imagination, but he seemed to be breathing a bit heavily.

  “Waterson here. Is your brother in?”

  “Good evening to you. Do you want to speak to him? I’m not sure if he’s back yet.”

  “Please don’t trouble. But may I come over for a few minutes? Something rather ugly has happened at the Quiet Drop.”

  “By all means, my dear fellow. But what—?”

  I cut him off and rang the Manor. The Pastons’ young manservant answered. Yes, his master was at home this week-end: but he had given orders not to be disturbed after dinner this evening—h
e had business papers to deal with.

  “This is an urgent matter,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, sir. If you would state the nature of your inquiry, I will convey a message to Mr. Paston’s secretary.”

  “Never mind, I’ll ring again in the morning.”

  Even if I could get Ronald Paston to the telephone now, it would be out of the question to say to him, “Have you been in your study all the evening?” Anyway, I only wanted to eliminate him: I could not seriously see him, or the exotic Vera, throwing Mills bombs through pub windows.

  It was only five minutes since the incident had occurred. The naval party were leaving to board the private bus which had brought them here: Fred’s other customers were chatting in the lane outside or starting up their cars. The Tollerton sergeant had asked Fred to take the names and addresses of all who had been in the pub when the bomb came in; he himself would come out to-morrow morning. The searchers had, inevitably, found no signs of the culprit, and might well have trampled over any traces he had left in the garden.

  I said good-bye to Lieutenant Barnwright, had a few words with Dorothea Kindersley, who was looking very shaken still, and hurried over the green to Pydal. One thing was quite clear in my mind—whoever it might be, he had taken no inordinate risks. It was a moonless night. He could watch the front door of the Quiet Drop from the screen of trees across the lane, make sure no one was stirring outside, slip into the porch, open the outer door wide enough to take the key, lock it from outside, sneak past the side of the house into the garden at the back, and hurl his infernal missile, with little danger of being heard or seen. If he met anyone before actually throwing the bomb, he could easily explain his presence and call the thing off: unless it was the mysterious gipsy boy. The locked front door would hold up pursuit long enough for him to get away—across the green? along the road to Tollerton? up the lane towards the Manor and the Manor farm? The latter would involve passing the Quiet Drop’s car park, but in the darkness that would not hold much risk.