The Deadly Joker

by Nicholas Blake

  She came first out of the part of the marquee reserved for judges and committee, and mounted the low dais which had been set up in front of it, beautiful beyond all words in her golden sari. I thought her eyes rested upon mine, where I stood in the front row of the crowd. Other women emerged from the enclosure, wearing—as Jenny had anticipated—orchids. Then the judges, with carnations on their lapels, the stems of the flowers in metal containers. Ronald Paston came last.

  There was a rattle of applause, in the course of which I saw Ronald turn to Alwyn Card and say something, whereupon Alwyn looked sheepish, began to walk off the dais, then muttered in his brother’s ear. Bertie went into the committee room, and came out with his hands folded round some object which he handed to Alwyn, whose back was now turned to the audience. I could see Alwyn place this object on the floor behind him, leaning against the canvas wall: it appeared to be a buttonhole flower in a container.

  Ronald Paston rose now to make his speech. It was considerably less pompous than the one he had inflicted upon us at the dinner party—deprecating almost—he had laid on the whole show, after all, and if we required a monument to his generous activities, we had only to look around. He welcomed the visitors, thanked the judges and other helpers, ventured to express the feelings of his audience that this was the most successful of all the Netherplash shows, said that his wife had been prevailed upon to present the prizes, and with a significant glance at Alwyn, sat down.

  Vera half rose; but Alwyn, smiling at her, patted the air with his hand, and she resumed her seat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “It falls to my lot to thank Ronald Paston and his lady for their munificence. He has said, truly, that this has been the best of our Flower Shows to date: he is too modest to say that, without him, the Netherplash show would no longer exist at all.”

  Alwyn paused for a sip of water. He seemed in tremendous fettle; indeed I was not sure that he had not primed himself with liquor for the occasion.

  “We are all delighted to hear that our squire has given up his widespread commercial activities, and will now be living permanently amongst us—in the most beautiful village of the most beautiful county in England.

  “Some of you are aware that unpleasant things have been happening to mar the peace of this beautiful village, of which we, its natives, are so proud.” At this point the audience ceased to fidget and grew painfully attentive. “We hope and believe that those—ah—occurrences are now at an end, and the culprit may soon be laid by the heels. I will say no more of that. But I would like to crave Ronald Paston’s indulgence for telling you that if there have been any misunderstandings between his household and mine, they are now things of the past.”

  “Why don’t thic old fool goo home?” came in a deafening whisper from one of the ancients I had heard at the fruit display. Alwyn, nothing discomposed, answered in broad Dorset, “If thee can spik better than I, Jack Masters, do ee come up on this yurr platform.”

  There was a roar of laughter, and the ancient wagged his head in good-humoured surrender. Alwyn, with an impish look at us, resumed.

  “I have been known, in the remote past, as an exponent of that antiquated form of humour called the practical joke. I wish to mark this auspicious occasion, ladies and gentlemen, by playing such a joke.”

  Alwyn certainly had his audience transfixed with interest and amazement now. Ronald Paston, beside him, wore the exaggeratedly appreciative look a chairman directs at an after-dinner speaker. Alwyn stopped, groped behind him, and came up with the flower container, which he fixed in his buttonhole.

  “But do not be alarmed,” said Alwyn, fumbling at his lapel. “Here is a buttonhole, a flower, a container—and a bulb. If I invite someone to smell the flower, and squeeze this bulb, a spray of water is projected into his face. A simple, nay childish, mechanism. To-day I have filled it, not with water, but with expensive perfume. And who more fitting to be so aspersed than the flower, the prize bloom of Netherplash—the beautiful lady who is now to present the prizes? Ronald Paston, I should add, has gladly given his consent to this little ceremony of mine—this tribute to loveliness and grace.”

  He made a sign to Vera, who rose and moved towards him on the front of the dais with a docile, if slightly embarrassed, look on her exquisite face. She bent her head to smell the flower in Alwyn’s buttonhole. As he squeezed the bulb, some instinct made me cry out—in my mind, silently—“No!”

  For some seconds, nothing happened. Vera had a puzzled expression, which communicated itself to Alwyn’s chubby face. Then hers seemed to change colour, a purplish hue suffusing the brown, and her hands went to her delicate throat, and she began to weave about on the dais, bumping into table and chairs, knocking the carafe to the floor, dipping and blundering like some exotic moth in her golden sari—a moth fluttering within an invisible jar from which it cannot escape.

  At first we thought Vera must be acting up to some plan, outlandish and in the worst possible taste, which she had concocted with Alwyn. But the look of utter stupefaction upon his face, and then the atrocious strangled sounds she began to make, swiftly disillusioned us. Ronald Paston had got up and was trying to restrain his wife, but she broke from his hands and pitched forward off the platform into my arms.

  People began pressing round us from all sides; but with Ronald’s help and Sam’s, I managed to carry her through into the committee annexe. As I laid her down there, I heard a voice shouting above the hubbub, “Stay where you are! No one’s to leave the marquee!” Bertie Card and Ronald, looking paralysed, stood beside me.

  “Get a doctor. And don’t let anyone else in,” I ordered them.

  Vera’s face was hideously distorted. She retched, whooped for air, and her body thrashed about in spasms. Then her long lashes fluttered, she seemed to recognise me for a moment, giving me a look of desperate appeal. There was nothing I could do except half-lift her and hold her in my arms. I felt a last convulsion shake her. She gasped, went still, A faint smell of peach-blossom hung between us.

  12. The Angry Tycoon

  In the days that followed, dear Jenny was a wonderful stand-by to me. The shock of Vera’s death made me feel an old man, unresilient, useless. Somehow I should have divined that the horrible events, so trivial now, which had marred our life in Netherplash, had been leading towards her death, pointing to it, and therefore I should have been able to prevent it. That first night, when we had gone to bed exhausted, Jenny whispered to me:

  “You were in love with her a bit, darling, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  She said it with great tenderness, with no arrière-pensée; nor did she seek to catechise me about my feelings.

  “If you want to talk about it,” was all she said.

  “Yes. I will. But not now. I never—you had nothing to fear from her.”

  I could not help a touch of bitterness coming into my voice. It was like an echo of the bitter harshness with which Sam, when at last we emerged from the marquee, said to me, “I must go and telephone the Press Agency. Wonderful story. Spectacular. God damn him, whoever it was.”

  Our local policeman had kept us in the marquee for an interminable time, taking down the names and addresses of all present. When reinforcements arrived, preliminary statements were taken from everyone who had used the committee enclosure—everyone except Alwyn who, looking dazed and very ill, was allowed to go back under escort to Pydal.

  In the general nightmare fog, one thing stood out clearly to me: at some point, the flower-container filled with perfume had been removed, and one filled with prussic acid substituted. It was inconceivable that poor old Alwyn should have done this, then publicly incriminated himself. Yet it was he whose hand had killed Vera, and the police might well think they need look no farther for the murderer.

  During this period, I stopped keeping the diary from which my story has so far been written up, so I am a bit hazy about the sequence of events.

  Villages off main roads are not noisy places; but fo
r several days an unnatural silence seemed to possess Netherplash, as if it were holding its breath. As a subject for gossip, the murder of Vera Paston was too sensational—so grotesque in its circumstances that it gave our village gossips no margin for imaginative ornamentation. The chief point of controversy, I gathered, was whether an Indian lady could be buried in consecrated ground. The investigation into her death, conducted by a Scotland Yard C.I.D. inspector and sergeant for whom the chief constable had at once applied, was received with rural canniness and fatalism; speculation about the murderer’s identity—when I was in the pub, at least—seemed far from rife. Fred Kindersley attributed this to Alwyn’s popularity with the villagers, particularly the older ones, and their disinclination to kick such a man when he was down: they mostly took it for granted that Alwyn had committed the murder, but they closed their ranks against strangers who made the same assumption.

  What was most poignant to me was the way Vera disappeared from people’s minds. It seemed as if, after their brief convulsion, the waters closed over her head, leaving no trace of the creature, vivid, enigmatic and doomed, that she had been. Only a few of us had known her at all well, in spite of the years she had lived here: for the others, she was a dark head and a sari glimpsed occasionally on the Manor lawns, a myth which had no relevance to their workaday lives, a name in a febrile newspaper story. Even the wish to have known her, to have made her feel more at home, was sadly lacking.

  It was the day after the funeral—Vera had been buried in the churchyard, which gave the more rigorous formalists a chance to hint that her husband must have made a large contribution to church funds—when I visited the Manor for the first time since the Flower Show, at Ronald’s invitation.

  I was shown into the library, and asked to wait a few minutes. Books, mostly leather-bound and fusty, taken over from the Cards. Ronald was a great taker-over, I sourly meditated: the village, and now Bertie’s riding-school field. But would he stay on, after what had happened, alone in this magnificent shell of a house? For a shell it was, vacant, not even haunted, not even for me. One corner of a Dorset field was what I would remember Vera by. In this muted place, smelling of floor-polish and roses and money, her presence did not exist.

  Ronald came in, step brisk, face haggard—or rather, I amended it, as if he had lost a layer of skin. His eyes burned out at me in a feverish way. I attempted a few condolences, wishing I liked him better, found him less unreal. Then I asked hesitantly if he were going to stay on here.

  “Damn’ right I am. They won’t get me out,” he exclaimed; then, hiding again behind his conventional clichés, “Of course, the place will always have sad memories for me, but I must try to live them down.”

  “But surely, Ronald, no one’s trying to get you out.”

  “They cold-shouldered poor Vera. They accepted my money and patronised me. Now they’ve killed her. They make me sick, these fossilised county families. Bloody snobs, the lot of them.”

  A human being was beginning to emerge from the integuments.

  “Yes, but Ronald, you can’t suggest that Vera was killed from motives of snobbery.”

  He gave a smile like a grimace. “No, indeed. Not directly. But if they’d behaved a bit more warm-heartedly to her, this would never have happened.”

  I stared at him.

  “She’d not have been bored, at a loose end. I blame myself for leaving her here all the weeks I was away.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean she must have got herself into a mess,” he explained. “With a man. And he had to get rid of her.” Ronald gave me a shrewd look. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s generally the husband, not the lover, who kills an unfaithful wife.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “But if she is threatening her lover’s security—?”

  For an uncomfortable moment, I thought that Ronald must suspect Vera of having been my mistress.

  “Have you any evidence for this?” I feebly asked.

  “Oh, come off it, John. What about that filthy anonymous letter I got?”

  “It’s not very reliable evidence.”

  “Where there’s smoke—And I know of only one man in this village who chases women.”

  “Possibly. But how on earth could she threaten his security?”

  “If their affair came to light, he’d know damn’ well I’d run him out of my village.”

  “We are talking about Bertie Card, I take it?”

  “Who else?”

  “How could you run him out of the village?”

  “Money,” Ronald replied, and now I got another glimpse of his ruthlessness. “I let Alwyn have Pydal virtually at peppercorn rent. I don’t mind telling you, in strict confidence, when Alwyn came and ate humble pie about that stupid hoax of his, I put the screws on him. I told him, either he’d got to get his brother out of the place, or I’d raise the rent and push them both out. I’m negotiating for Bertie’s riding school, too, with the owner of the land.”

  “All this before you had any real evidence about Bertie and your wife?”

  His eyes swerved away from mine.

  “In which case his security was already endangered, so why should he kill her?” I persisted.

  “Perhaps he was tired of her, then. Perhaps she’d broken it off, recently. You know, I’ve caught her once or twice looking at me in a strange manner, timid; as though she might be going to confess to me.” Ronald was a curious mixture of obtuseness and acuity.

  “Do you really think Bertie would do it in that extraordinary way?” I asked.

  “Well, then, who did do it?”

  “I haven’t a notion,” I replied irritably. “I don’t even know the facts yet.”

  Ronald became businesslike again. “Of course not. Stupid of me. I’ll bring Charlie Maxwell in. He’s got them at his fingertips—been confabbing with this Scotland Yard chap—seems they pounded the beat together in their young days.”

  It struck me, while we waited, that a murderer would be in a strong position with an ex-policeman in his employment who was acquainted with the investigating officers. Or would he?

  Charlie Maxwell had assumed a black tie and the expression of a mute at a funeral. Poor Vera would have giggled at him. Ronald asked him for his report, in the tone of a chairman calling upon a sub-committee. The gist of it was as follows:

  The poison had been prussic acid. Vera had inhaled enough of it to kill her—she also had a “heart condition,” which was news to me and no doubt had made her death more certain.

  The idea of spraying her with perfume was Alwyn’s, who also supplied the joke container and bulb. He must have inhaled enough of the noxious stuff himself to make him ill. He, Vera and Ronald had been the only ones in the secret of this odd little bit of ceremonial, so far as the police knew. It would have been natural, they thought, for Alwyn to tell his brother about it; but the latter denied that he had been told and the former was unable to remember if he had done so.

  When Alwyn was searched after the murder, a large bottle of Arpege was found in his pocket, full except for the quantity he had put into his trick container to spray Vera with. The bottle was to be presented to her after she had given away the prizes.

  The innocent container was later found under the flap of the marquee, just outside the committee enclosure. The only fingerprints on it were Alwyn’s. The lethal container was of an identical pattern with the innocent one.

  The latter, said Alwyn, he had brought with him into the marquee, already filled, in his old satchel, which he hung upon a peg in the committee room. The substitution could have been made at any time in the afternoon, but only by one of those who were in the secret of the perfumed container.

  Ronald and Alwyn had been in and out of this room frequently during the afternoon: Bertie said he had not entered it until, just before speech-making, Alwyn asked him to fetch the buttonhole container out of his satchel.

  The police had not yet traced the source of the poison.

  “Well
, sir, what d’you make of all that?” asked Charlie Maxwell when had ended his recital.

  “There’s one very peculiar anomaly,” I replied. “Here’s Alwyn, who thought up this perfume-spray business, who was going to be the centre of interest when he carried it out, yet he forgets to put the darned thing in his buttonhole when they’re all coming out on to the dais.”

  “Bang on, sir,” Charlie cried exuberantly, forgetting his funeral-mute role. “Just what the inspector said, too.”

  “And how does Alwyn explain that?” asked Ronald.

  “Says it just slipped his mind for the moment.”

  “That’s pretty thin,” Ronald commented.

  “I disagree. We all have these lapses of memory. He’s an absent-minded old boy. Anyway, if he was the murderer, he’d not be likely to forget the murder instrument.”

  “That could be pure eyewash,” said Ronald impatiently.

  “Well, it seems to me the action of an innocent man.”

  “Any other comments, Mr. Waterson?”

  “Yes. First, I’d like to be sure nobody else was in the secret. Alwyn could have told his brother—he does gossip. And Vera might have told someone.”

  “So might I,” said Ronald. “As it happens, I didn’t.”

  “One would think the murderer would spread it about as much as possible. To diffuse suspicion.”

  “Increase the two-to-one odds against him, eh?” said Charlie.

  Ronald was eyeing me watchfully.

  “What about fingerprints?” I asked.

  “Alwyn’s on the innocent container; his and Bertie’s on the lethal one. That gets us nowhere. You could use a handkerchief to pick them up. Anything else, sir?”

  “Oh, the biggest problem of all. You say Alwyn thought up this spray business. You’re certain it was his idea, Ronald?”

  “I’ve said so.” He sounded petulant, on the defensive.

  “What amazes me is that you and Vera should have agreed to it.”

  “Good God! I’d never have—we never imagined he—someone—was going to use it for—”