The Christmas Egg

by Mary Kelly

  He pulled himself together, stuffed the map and flashlight into his pocket, removed the ignition key, and climbed out of the car. He slammed the door, not without a sense of bidding good riddance to the contraption which had failed him, and set himself to retrace his route through the snow.

  The snow was falling much less heavily. No sooner had he observed this than it was suddenly quite suspended, in a pocket or air lock like the one he had experienced on the main road. He took advantage of it to flood the beam of his flashlight and see the state of the road and the sides. All shapes were swollen by the snow and their edges blurred, but he could discern on the right the deceptively shallow depression which marked the course of the ditch, banked by a blobby hedge. A couple of yards away there was a gap, and the ditch appeared to be bridged or filled, for the line of the depression was broken by level snow which led from the lane to a field. He could strike no trees with the long beam of his flashlight.

  He walked as far as the gap in the hedge; and there, for no accountable reason, he stopped and listened. Nothing broke the silence of the muffled countryside. Yet he switched off the flashlight and waited.

  Some seconds passed. He was about to dismiss his urge to pause as a silly fancy, when he heard something or, rather, he could hardly define a sound but he was aware of movement approaching. Rapidly the movement became distinct, identifiable sounds; someone was running, floundering through the snow, gasping for breath. He was coming up behind him and to his right, beyond the hedge. He was very close. When he reached the gap, he would surely see Nightingale, whether he came through or not. Now they were level.

  Brett saw the runner vaguely, alone, smaller than himself, staggering past the gap which led to the easier surface of the road. In a second he realized that the runner was frightened, and then he recognized a certain quality in the sharp, heaved-in breath. The runner was a woman.

  He darted through the gap and flooded his flashlight along the inside of the hedge.

  She stopped dead and seemed to shrink together, paralyzed like a rabbit in the terror of headlights.

  “Stephanie!” he cried, and leaped toward her. “Stephanie, it’s all right, don’t be afraid.”

  She turned, slowly, perhaps at the sound of her name. He halted, and in an access of self-possession held out the flashlight and directed it back on his own face.

  A cry rushed out of her, uncontrolled as a gust of wind. She stumbled forward, one hand outstretched. “It’s you,” she cried, “oh, it’s you, it’s you!”

  He clasped the hand, but said nothing. He was astonished, then alarmed, and then doubtful. Was she a decoy flung out by Majendie? It was possible. Even that would not settle her complicity. Majendie could have spun the yarn, no doubt. But she was badly shaken by something. She was clinging to his arm as if she would never let it go. What then? Experience gave priority to one explanation—reprehensible conduct on the part of a man. Brett felt that he only now fully appreciated the services of women police to whom, had he been on duty, he would have handed any girl who confronted him with such a display of emotion.

  “Stephanie,” he whispered unwillingly, “what’s the matter? Tell me—it won’t seem so bad then.”

  She started to pull his sleeve, as if to drag him with her on a resumed journey. “Quick,” she gasped, “quick, quick.”

  “Wait a minute. Where are you going?” he asked without hurry.

  She went on tugging at him. “Mr. Majendie,” she cried. Brett’s heart sank. “What about him?”

  “We’ve got to get to the police,” she almost sobbed. “Oh, do come, quick, please.”

  “I am a policeman,” he said, a little puzzled.

  Her hand dropped. “What?”

  He wasn’t shirking the issue, he told himself, as he rolled off his full name, rank, and department. She had to know, and the knowledge might instill a scrap of confidence. In fact, she seemed dumfounded for a few seconds, then made to draw away from him. He let her go.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Did you know? What are you doing here?”

  “Does that matter? I think you’d better tell me. How can I help you unless I know what’s happened?”

  “All right, all right,” she said still breathlessly. “Only put your flashlight out—please,” she entreated, as he hesitated. “Oh, yes, yes, that’s it, just in case. Only you see Mr. Majendie, he’s in a car, at least he was. He gave me a lift from Folkestone. And there was someone chasing him. He told me all of a sudden, and said he’d slow down around the next bend and I was to jump out and get behind the hedge till the next car had passed, then get to the police.”

  “But it was me all the time . . .”

  “No, there was another much closer. I saw it go past. I’d only just gotten behind the hedge. When they’d gone, I started to run. And then all of a sudden the flashlight shone. I thought it was more of them. I thought they’d seen me and chased me. I couldn’t move.”

  What he had heard was so relievingly different from what he had expected that Brett was only too anxious to believe it. But he remained cautiously skeptical. Even if Majendie had been pursued, she need be no less a decoy, intended for them, not for him. Perhaps her nerve had failed; she hadn’t been able to face them.

  “Why should they follow you?” he asked.

  “I thought they’d seen me through the hedge or something. You see, I had to stop to bury the case.”

  “Case?”

  “A little attaché case of Mr. Majendie’s. He said to hide it where I’d remember the place, so I buried it under the snow near a tree at the edge of the hedge.”

  Brett switched the flashlight on her face, disregarding her nervous exclamation. Her eyes, blinking and screwed up against the light, met his with fearful anxiety and bewilderment, but with complete frankness. He absolved her from guile, and put Majendie finally in the black. Her presence at Folkestone had been providential for Majendie. Had he guessed what might overtake him? The rest of his conduct made that unlikely, nor would he have made the journey. He had simply used her in an emergency.

  “All right,” said Brett. “I’ll take a chance.”

  “On what?”

  Your honesty, he said to himself. “That the case wasn’t filled with toffee apples. Did Majendie open it in the taxi?”

  “No. Oh—have you been following us?”

  “He didn’t have a duplicate in the car and change it?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Majendie told you to make for the nearest police. You know where that is? Not Pettinge?”

  “No, the other way, back on the main road. There’s a policeman’s house. He could phone . . .”

  “Yes. We’ll make for it. Here comes more snow, so we’d better hurry.”

  “Please switch off,” she pleaded. “It makes it so easy for someone to see us.”

  “But without a light we’ll probably land in the ditch as my car did. At least, it isn’t mine, it’s the property of Kent County Constabulary.”

  “But what—you haven’t smashed it? Have we got to walk?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said, moving toward the gap.

  “No,” she cried, “behind the hedge.”

  He shook his head. “Too difficult. We want to find this policeman as fast as we can. Besides, if someone did come along looking for you, the hedge wouldn’t give very good cover. I saw you and I wasn’t searching. We might as well use the road.”

  He held out his arm, which she ignored; but she moved forward. They crossed the ditch and turned right.

  “There’s a short cut,” she said.

  “In this visibility? No.”

  “But it’s a proper road, a lane, the first on the right. It cuts off the wood corner and takes you out nearer the village on the main road. I’ve been along it in my uncle’s car.”

  “All right. We’ll risk it, when we come to it.”

  “Risk?”

  “Only in the sense that a short cut is always a risk.”

  “If you we
re behind us all the way from Folkestone,” she said, “were you chasing us or the others?”

  “I wasn’t chasing; I was following Majendie.”

  “But why? To look after him or something?”

  “Purely from curiosity.”

  Suddenly she stopped and caught his arm. “There’s a car coming.”

  He stood still. The snow, again driving hard, pattered against his ears. “I don’t think so,” he said. “We’ll carry on.”

  She didn’t release his arm, although they were now almost running.

  “If they did come along before we could get off this road,” she panted, “what would we do? Are they—are they dangerous?”

  “Perhaps to Majendie.”

  She uttered a cry of distress. “And he made me run away. I do feel awful.”

  “Spare yourself,” said Brett dryly. “He made you run away with the best part of the danger.”

  “What?”

  “The case.”

  “That?” Her voice squeaked in her astonishment. “What’s in it? Not something that might blow up?”

  He couldn’t help laughing. “Can you imagine Majendie coming within a mile of a bomb? But you’ve no idea of what might be inside?”

  “No, of course not—oh look! Here’s the lane.”

  Brett swung the flashlight beam to the right. It was dazzled back by the swirling snow, but he could see the hedge and the ditch turning at a sharp angle.

  “Right then,” he said.

  They turned off the road and ran plodding on in silence for a time. The ground rose, not very steeply but continuously. Snow lay in most places about six inches deep, and hampered them, whether they kicked through it or pulled their feet out at each step and plunked them down again. The fall drove on their backs, yet such were its eddies and flurries that flakes were constantly blown in their faces. Trying to puff them aside was exhausting, but an instinctive reaction, so was brushing them off, even though this left the face wet and stinging.

  Brett was warm, but he wondered about Stephanie. Her coat was thinner than his, and she had been out longer. The yellow raincoat was soaked to darkness and the flat semi-slippers which he’d noticed at Folkestone were no longer beige but black.

  “What are you wearing under your coat?” he asked.

  “My shop clothes. The gray dress.”

  “What ineffable vanity made you wear that coat and those shoes in such weather?”

  “I didn’t know I was going to have to do all this.”

  “But even if all this had never happened—oh, never mind. Shall we stop plunging along in this tiring fashion? I’m not sure that it’s so much faster than walking.”

  Their amended pace, although slower, was as brisk as conditions allowed.

  “How long before you met me had the car passed you?” he asked.

  “No idea. It was all a dream. You know, time didn’t count.”

  “And when you jumped out of Majendie’s car and hid behind the hedge? You’d hardly consult a watch in such a crisis, but did you happen to see . . .”

  “No.”

  There was a considerable pause.

  “Do you do murders?” she asked suddenly.

  “Not as a rule,” he said, taking her meaning after a bewildered moment. “I have encountered one or two in my time.”

  “What then? Robberies and burglaries and that? I suppose that’s bad enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s such a ghastly job, isn’t it? Daddy says in the end all detectives get the same as the greasy people they mix with.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  Brett marched on in silence.

  He was aware that such an opinion was widely held; it had never before been uttered point blank to his face. Stephanie’s tone had been not waspish but indifferent, almost blithe. He was fairly sure she hadn’t intended him to infer a personal slight. She had simply demonstrated once more the thoughtlessness of the self-centered, somewhat spoiled child. And he wondered that a remark so little to be heeded should have stung him, as, momentarily, it had.

  The snow had begun to lighten, and in a few minutes ceased to fall. He saw trees on either hand. Stephanie was walking very close to him and as he turned to her, she stopped.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid we’ve come the wrong way,” she said in a very small voice. “We shouldn’t come into the woods at all. The proper lane would cut them off on the left.”

  “Well then, that’s not so bad,” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “We missed the right lane and took a later one, which goes through instead of skirting the woods. I expect it’ll join the main road in the end.”

  “But there isn’t another between the one we should have taken and the road. Nothing goes through the woods.”

  “Well, where are we? You know this region.”

  “But I don’t, not all that well. We only come here for Christmas or sometimes a weekend. And then not really here but Pettinge.”

  He wished she’d said so before offering to take them by a short cut. “Shine the flashlight down,” he said. “I’ll look at the map.”

  He glanced at the sides of the lane, which had narrowed to little more than a path. Trees grew right to the edges, which were as straight as if they had been ruled.

  “I think this is a private road,” he murmured, feeling in his pockets for the map, “or a cut through a plantation. That means there should be a fairly large house nearby. All to the good.”

  His search for the map ceased to be casual.

  “Have you lost it?” asked Stephanie.

  “I suppose so,” he muttered. “I must have dropped it right back at the car, slipped it past my pocket instead of into it. Well, it doesn’t much matter. We can’t be lost in a county like Kent. We’re bound to come to a house of some sort fairly soon. We’ll go on.”

  They plodded forward.

  “I’m going to switch off the flashlight,” he said. “Shut your eyes for a second or two and you should be able to see well enough when you open them.”

  “All right. So’s not to waste the battery?”

  “Partly.” He switched off. “You find it light enough?”

  “Oh, yes. But it doesn’t ever seem quite right, does it, in the snow? Everything seems closer, or further; you can’t tell which—somehow not in its right place.”

  “It’s because the natural direction of light is reversed. The earth shines and the sky is dark, so there are no shadows. I suppose they’re cast upward and absorbed into the night.”

  She shivered. “Let’s hurry. I don’t like these trees.”

  “Quem fugis . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “A bit of Virgil,” he said.

  “Don’t you know any more?”

  “Quem fugis, a, demens? habitarunt di quoque silvas.”

  “How nice it sounds. What does it mean?”

  “Go on, try. Surely you can do quem fugis?”

  “Who flies?”

  “What? Fugis. And quem, accusative.”

  “Well? Oh, you fly. Why do you fly?”

  “Whom do you fly. Now—a, demens.”

  “Well, a’s the same as ab. From, away from. Whom do you fly from?”

  He stared hard at her. As far as the uncanny light allowed him to see, there was no trace of her minx-like smile.

  “It just means ah,” he said calmly, “or oh, if you like. Go on—a, demens.”

  “Oh—oh, demon?” she hazarded.

  “De-mens.” He carefully separated the syllables, “What’s mens?”

  “A month.”

  He groaned. “Mind. Demens, out of one’s mind, crazy, insane.”

  Stephanie began to laugh. “Oh, you should have been one, especially with that nose. A Roman, I mean.”

  “My nose is not Roman. Much too long and sticks out too far.”

  “Well, it has a bumpy bridge. Brett . . .”

  “You didn’t
see that on a coat,” he observed rather absently.

  “There was a note in your kitchen from your wife—at least, if that’s who Christina is.”

  “You read it through?” he asked. “Estimable.”

  “I was going to say,” she went on in a much abashed voice, “I think we’re coming to a clearing.”

  “I’ve seen it for some time.” He stared at the white space which broke the line of trees some twenty yards ahead.

  “Tell me the rest of the Latin,” said Stephanie irrepressibly, skipping forward. “Or can’t you?” She burst out laughing.

  “Ah, crazy, whom do you fly?” he began.

  Stephanie stopped dead in her tracks. Brett’s voice failed him.

  A man had stepped silently from between the trees and was waiting at the end of the path.

  Brett forced himself to carry on walking and speaking. “Even gods have lived in the . . .”

  Around him in the dark he heard voices swelling and fading, close and distant at once, like the voices of sailors talking in a railway carriage as one nods off to sleep. He listened apathetically for a while. Then he thought that he couldn’t be in a train, because . . . He drifted back to sleep.

  Hours later, drowsily half opening his eyes, he saw the sheets and white quilt of his bed bumping away into shadows. Of course, he was not in a train but in bed in the nursery. He felt the chill of a fever sweat, heard the hiss of the steam kettle in the grate. He could see the fire, but not look at it, because it was so bright that it hurt his eyes. Wavering figures blotted out its light from time to time. They were his mother and the nurse, and the murmuring voices belonged to them; and they were talking about making him well. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  When he woke, he felt ghastly. He was ill, no doubt of that. Although it was still dark, Christina must have had to get up. The lamp on the dressing table nearly blinded him when he looked to see her vague shadow moving as she dressed and brushed her hair. She must also have brought the radio into the bedroom, because someone else was talking, a man. That would be the first news bulletin of the day.

  He moved his head and immediately felt sick. Alarmed, he lay still, waiting for the qualm to subside. He became conscious that the bedclothes touching his head and hands were soaked with cold sweat, and tried to push them away. But he found that he couldn’t move. He puzzled over this for a few minutes before the explanation came on him. He was paralyzed.