The Deadly Joker

by Nicholas Blake

  A minute after leaving the pub, I was sitting in the shabby drawing-room of Pydal, sipping a glass of whisky that Alwyn Card had put in my hand, and feeling rather like a barrister who has come into court without his brief. Bertie was there too, in a dinner jacket. He had been dining with friends in Tollerton, it transpired, and returned about a quarter of an hour ago—in fact, he was putting his car in the garage at the very time I rang up—or so his brother said, he himself being in the study then. Bertie appeared to be somewhat fuddled with drink, and bereft of speech. As I told them what had just happened at the Quiet Drop, he sat slumped in the chair, staring at his toe-caps.

  Alwyn affected great surprise and indignation, but I sensed an uneasiness behind it. “I don’t know what’s happened to this village. Ever since that bounder Paston came, we’ve had nothing but trouble. Still, it’s a mercy no one was hurt.”

  “No thanks to the joker,” I said, “whoever he is. Some of the women might easily have been injured, with everyone milling to get away from the bomb.”

  “Joker, you call him,” exclaimed Alwyn, his blue eyes troubled. “I could find a worse word. It makes my blood boil. Are you sure it wasn’t one of those young sailors larking about?”

  “That has been definitely established.”

  Bertie began to emerge from his stupor. “You know, Dr. Waterbury, my brother—old Al here—he was a great joker in his time. Within living memory, for example, he perpetrated a stunner on British Railways. There’s a one-horse junction in these parts called Evershot—”

  “Really, Bertie, this is no time for—”

  “And old Al found on the platform one of those wooden doo-dahs they put travel brochures in. Empty, of course. It had written on it THESE MAY INTEREST YOU. PLEASE TAKE ONE. So Al filled the wooden thing with filthy postcards. But the cream of it is that, when we went back to the station a fortnight later, all the filthy pictures were still there. That shows you, Dr. Waterman, what a dead-alive place Evershot is. What’s all this about a bomb?”

  I repeated the tale, Bertie staring at me with lack-lustre eyes, and untruthfully ended, “I had a notion I’d seen your car passing the pub just before this happened, so I rang up just in case you’d noticed anyone lurking about.”

  “No dice. My alcoholic intake required me to concentrate on the road.”

  “Not even the mysterious gipsy boy?” I asked at a venture.

  Bertie’s addled look gave way to one of secret amusement. “Gipsy boy? Oh, him. No, he never walks at week-ends.”

  “What the devil are you talking about?” his brother irritably inquired.

  “I thought you heard all the local gossip—all of it you don’t start yourself, I mean,” said Bertie.

  “I resent that.”

  “Resent away, chum. Incidentally, where did you get all those feelthy peectures?”

  “Look here, Bertie, if you can’t discuss this serious matter in a responsible way, you’d better go to bed.”

  “I can’t see what’s so serious about it. Nobody got killed. Let the police deal with it.”

  Alwyn’s plump, pink face looked like a worried baby’s. “That’s the whole point, Bertie. They’ll start making inquiries all round the village. And as you seem to spend your time telling everyone that in my younger days I was rather addicted to practical jokes—”

  “I say, where is that Mills bomb?” Bertie interrupted.

  I said Fred Kindersley was keeping it, to hand over to the police.

  “No. Father’s one. A souvenir of the First War.”

  “Somewhere in the attics, I suppose,” said Alwyn.

  “Well, hadn’t you better go and see if it’s been pinched?”

  Alwyn hesitated for a moment, then got up and padded out of the room. Bertie gave me some more whisky, and himself a considerably stronger dose, after which he relapsed into sodden silence.

  My mind suddenly set off on an unexpected course. I remembered Jenny saying, after our first meeting with the brothers, that there was no love lost between them. I wondered now if the displays of animosity they occasionally put up in my presence might not be calculated and staged. These displays seemed so gratuitous. If the brothers really were at daggers drawn, how odd that they should go on living together. But suppose they were colluding over something—the anonymous letters, the Mills bomb incident, the hoax against Ronald Paston—a show of mutual dislike would be a smoke-screen to hide the collusion. But, if all this were part of a campaign, what conceivably could be its objective? Surely two grown men would not launch an elaborate scheme merely to terrorise the other members of our little community? There must be some practical end towards which this squalid campaign was directed.

  The obvious answer seemed to be Ronald Paston. He had dispossessed the Cards; his wealth and influence, not their family tradition, were what mattered most in the village now. Were the events of the past weeks all part of a plan to drive him out of Netherplash? One could see that the ridicule created by the Mastership hoax might serve this end, and the poisonous letter about Paston’s wife. But the Mills bomb and the other letters—how could they affect him? Perhaps their purpose was simply to create a general confusion which would occlude the real objective, and thus the real motive, of the campaign. It was all disagreeably childish and vicious, certainly: but Alwyn did have a childish streak, and Bertie a vicious one.

  My train of thought was broken by Alwyn’s reappearance.

  “Yes, it was up there all right,” he said, tossing a rusty Mills bomb into his brother’s lap. “But wasn’t there another one?”

  “Horrid little thing,” said Bertie, stroking it. “I think war is perfectly beastly.”

  “So does everyone, I imagine.”

  “Oh no, Al. People love the idea of giving a son for their country. Or a brother. I can just see you standing proudly to attention in front of my name on a War Memorial. Give you a hell of a kick.”

  Alwyn’s voice turned silky: “Too bad you survived, my dear. Still, everyone knows you were a hero—you don’t let them forget it.”

  Bertie’s reply to this was to hurl the bomb straight at his brother’s face. Providentially, it just missed him.

  “That might have hurt me,” said Alwyn, in a childishly querulous tone which made Bertie chuckle.

  It seemed to be the moment of truth. I found myself saying, “Do you two always put on this act for visitors?”

  “Act?”

  “Of hating each other’s guts?”

  For the first time, I saw both the brothers thoroughly disconcerted. Alwyn recovered first.

  “Oh, Bertie was always chucking things at me when he was a kid. I’m used to it.”

  “You irritated me. You still do.” Bertie turned to me: “Why did you say ’act?’“

  “Because it doesn’t strike me as real.”

  “And why the hell should I care what strikes you as real?”

  “Why the hell,” I rejoined, “should you get so worked up about it?”

  “I don’t care for Paul Prys.”

  “Bertie! John is our guest. How dare you insult him like this.”

  “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  “I must apologise for my brother,” said Alwyn. “Drink takes him this way. Nobody in their senses supposes that you are actuated by anything but public-spiritedness in concerning yourself over these regrettable happenings.”

  “Pompous old bastard,” muttered Bertie. “I refer to my brother, of course.”

  It seemed pointless to stay on, and in any case I was beginning to feel a bit wobbly—the effect of delayed shock, I dare say, as well as the drink I had taken. Alwyn insisted on accompanying me across the green. As we strolled towards my house, stumbling over an occasional tussock, he said rather hesitantly:

  “John, I do hope you won’t—I don’t quite know how to put this—I hope you won’t let my brother’s loss of temper just now prejudice you against him.”

  I muttered something non-committal.

  “I mean, because
he chucked that Mills bomb at my head—well, it doesn’t imply that he’d do the same thing in cold blood, or just out of mischief.”

  “No.”

  “I’m so glad you agree. I could not for one moment believe him responsible for the outrage at the Quiet Drop. Not for one moment. Bertie may be a bit wild still, but he’d never do a thing like that.”

  Was Alwyn protesting too much? Something in his tone made me feel he was trying to persuade not only me but himself of his brother’s innocence. My idea of them working in collusion seemed now like the vapours of a diseased mind, blown away by the gentle breeze that carried to my nostrils a fragrance of dewy grass.

  7. The Gipsy Boy

  It was late on the following Friday that the malice broke out again. Woken by distant shouts, I went to the window. From the direction of the Cards’ house, a pulsating rose glow was visible through the trees. I told Jenny there was a fire, threw on some clothes and awoke Sam, who was staying with us that week-end. He and I hurried across the green, a roaring, crackling sound growing louder in our ears. We soon realised that the fire was not at Pydal but the Manor Farm, a hundred yards beyond it.

  The ricks must have flared up like incendiaries after those weeks of bone-dry weather. By the time we reached them, their red-hot hearts were already beginning to cave in, each collapse throwing out a shower of sparks which the south-west wind carried across the rickyard towards the farm’s thatched roof. The heat was ferocious, and at first it was difficult to make out anything through the billows of smoke.

  Then we saw that a chain of men and boys were passing buckets: the bailiff himself, Arthur Gates, ran up a ladder and handed a bucket to a man at the top, who threw its contents over the thatch. Away to our right, in the cowsheds, the terrified animals bellowed; but, unless the wind changed, there seemed little fear of the sheds catching fire.

  Sam and I added ourselves to the bucket-chain. The man next to me, coughing with the smoke, managed to tell me it was Bertie Card up on the roof. Twice the thatch had caught fire, but Bertie, crawling along its steep pitch, had beaten out the flames with a broom. A figure emerged from the farm—Ronald Paston—shouting orders to which nobody, so far as I could see, paid any attention. Mrs. Gates had brought her children out of the house: they stood in a row, sucking their thumbs and staring sleepily at the burning ricks. Figures moved to and fro in the murk.

  I became aware of a somewhat shaming exhilaration. Ever since I was a boy, I have enjoyed lighting bonfires—even household fires. The flapping, dancing vitality of flame has something masterless and elemental about it which appeals, I suppose, to a law-abiding temperament like mine. There’s a lot to be said for the antique practice of burning the hero’s body upon a pyre: a glorious, warm-hearted send-off, compared with our drab anticlimax of clay and coffin.

  “Hey! Look at the old squire!” said my neighbour.

  A farm van moved past us, drawing up beside the house. On its roof sat Alwyn Card, with a bucket and a stirrup-pump beside him. The bucket chain, giving way, raised a cheer, to which Alwyn responded with a courtly wave of the hand. Standing up on the van, he passed the length of hose-pipe to his brother, and pumped vigorously while Bertie sprayed the thatch. Alwyn’s face, when he looked down, reflected my own exhilaration; the old boy was obviously enjoying himself to the top of his bent, and the villagers loved him for it. The van moved slowly along beside the house, so that Bertie could spray new sections of the roof.

  The bucket chain could now give its attention to the ricks, which in another ten minutes were reduced to sullenly smouldering heaps. As we worked on them, I overheard two men talking.

  “Us knows who done this, Bill, don’t us?”

  “Old Paarson, you mean?”

  “Paarson my aarse!”

  “Ar. Paarson and aarson goo together, see. Like fish and chips.”

  “Don’t be bloody silly. ’Tes that wanderen gipsee, you mark my words. That’s who done en.”

  “Who told ee?”

  “You’m daft. No one told I. Stands to reason, though.”

  “You seen gipsy yurr with a box o’ matches?”

  “How could I see gipsee yurr with a box o’ matches, seeing as I was in bed?”

  “Maybe that gipsy were sleepen under the stack, and struck a match to warm eeself like.”

  “That wouldn’t be aarson, Bill. That’d be accidental damage to property. Aarson be wilful damage, if you get my meaning.”

  “I could do with a wet.”

  “Suppose I told you I found a gallon tin of paraffin—”

  “Don’tee drink that stuff, matie. Perishes the innards.”

  “—empty, t’other side of rickyard. That proves ’twere aarson. To my way of thinking, it ud take more than a match to set this lot ablaze, with the heavy dew and all.”

  “Messus Gates’ll give us a wet, shouldn’t wonder. Keeps a nice drop of scrumpy, er do.”

  “Look at Paaston, bollocken around like a may-bug in a meat safe. The man don’t have no sense. Ah, well, this night the Lord have put down the mighty from their seats.”

  “What’s a few ricks to Paaston? ’E can spare en. ’Tes all a fiddle, when these city gents set up farmen.”

  Sam took me aside, beaming all over his blackened face. The fires were out, and we moved over to the farmhouse.

  “I could do with a wet, too, Dad. Perhaps Mr. Paston will ladle out champagne all round. Those chaps had him taped, didn’t they?—‘a may-bug in a meat safe!’”

  “Is it my imagination, or do they only talk like Hardy bucolics when the gentry are in earshot?”

  Ronald Paston was shouting up to Bertie Card, telling him the fire brigade had arrived and he could come off the roof now. As Bertie bent down towards him, holding the nozzle of the hose, Alwyn must have resumed pumping, for a jet of water struck Paston on the neck. Bertie ran down the ladder, apologising all too effusively. Alwyn was helped off the roof of the van, and started mopping with a bandanna handkerchief at the heavy, astrakhan-collared overcoat which Paston wore over his pyjamas.

  “Beats the Crazy Gang,” Sam murmured in my ear.

  I was not so sure, seeing the expression on Ronald Paston’s face in the light that streamed from a window, that he took the matter light-heartedly. However, he could hardly make an issue of it, when the two brothers had saved his farm-house.

  Gates, the bailiff, brought out a cask of cider, and the helpers gathered round. I noticed that, of those I knew in the village, Fred Kindersley was the only absentee: perhaps, like Ronald Paston, he had been here and now gone home again—which I proposed to do myself, since I find cider an unpalatable beverage. As I strolled across the rickyard, I came upon Alwyn Card, with a group of boys, carrying a paraffin tin. They had discovered it thrown away in the midden, empty. Alwyn waved it at me, saying enthusiastically:

  “You see, John? It was no accident, this fire!”

  I protested that the tin might have been lying there for days.

  “Nonsense, my dear fellow. Gates isn’t one of these slovenly farmers. Everything in apple-pie order, here.”

  And Gates, appealed to, confirmed that there had certainly been no paraffin tin in the midden this evening. A voice I recognised said:

  “’Tes this wanderen gipsy lad—didn’ I tell ee? You seen en skulken around, Mester Gates?”

  The bailiff said that neither he nor any of his family had set eyes on a gipsy for months.

  “They be craafty volk,” replied the man, swigging deep at his cider mug and drawing scriptural reference from it. “Yurr to-day and gone to-morrow. Like the pestilence that walketh by noonday.”

  “’Tesn’t noonday now, you old fool,” said another voice.

  “I was spikken in parable. And don’t ee mock at the Word, Bill, you ignorant bugger. They gipsies be from the ancient old Egyptians—them as held Moozes in captivitee. Caan’t trust en. I zeen en like the hosts of Midian prowl and prowl around. They bin terrors and afflictions to Christian volk ever since. Ennat zo,
Mister Caard?”

  “We mustn’t get in a panic about one gipsy lad.” Alwyn patted the head of a boy beside him. “But if any of you do chance upon him, you just bring him along to me, and we’ll see what he has to say for himself.”

  As I walked home with Sam, I reflected on the community’s need for a scapegoat. This gipsy boy was, very likely, a figment of the villagers’ imagination. Nevertheless, the growls round the cider cask had shown how many of them believed their own myth, and boded ill for any vagrant who might turn up in these parts. As it happened, I was to come upon the gipsy myself in a few days, and bring about the final disappearance of that elusive wanderer.

  It occurred on the following Wednesday night. After dinner, Jenny played the Schubert B flat major sonata. The sombre phrases of its andante movement kept repeating themselves in my head as I strolled along the lane that winds uphill out of the village in a south-easterly direction. Somewhere away to my right lay the remains of the chantry after which our village was named—we had not visited it yet, but intended to do so when Sam took his summer holiday. It was dusk, with a young moon, the white campion flowers glimmering on the banks, a delicious smell of leaves and grass freshening the air, and here and there a spicy tang of honeysuckle breathing across the high-hedged lane.

  As I neared the top of a rise, a clamour broke out on the far side of the hedge—shrill voices yelling “There he is! Catch the—!”

  A few yards farther, I found a gate on my right. A field path faded into the twilight, pointing towards a dishevelled wood, a few hundred yards away, in which—I was to find out later—stood the few remaining stones of the chantry. Along this path a figure was running, with a peculiar floundering gait, as if running did not come naturally to it, pursued by half a dozen boys, two of whom were about the same height as the fugitive.

  Ten yards short of the gate, they caught up with the figure: the older boys seized it by the coat, the others began to dance round it, jeering and screaming, then darted in, aiming blows at their quarry or pinching him. The gipsy lad—for he it was—made no attempt to retaliate or escape: his sole concern seemed to be to keep his hat from being knocked off and his face concealed from his tormentors. He did not utter a sound, even when I climbed over the gate and approached the group, who had begun to bait and pummel him in a still uglier way when they met with no resistance.