The Christmas Egg

by Mary Kelly

  He opened his mouth to call Christina. Nothing happened. His locked throat cracked with no effect. Then he realized to his despair that Christina had gone. He was abandoned.

  Suddenly he felt a splash on his cheek and the wetness of it ran down his chin. Something hard was pushed against his mouth, something cold trickled between his lips. Instinctively, he swallowed. The cold turned burning hot. Brandy.

  He woke up, groaning in relief. He was lying not in a fever sweat but in snow. He was not paralyzed but bound. In slipping down the crevasse he must have struck his head and knocked himself unconscious. They were treacherous, these Bavarian Alps. Nor, of course, was he abandoned. Christina and Reinhard had gone to fetch help. Now it had come. That explained the brandy, which must have been poured from a cask at the neck of a St. Bernard dog. He had been brought to consciousness by a dog, like—like someone he’d heard about recently. Already the rescue party was at work. He was being hauled, strapped, to safety. There was the blinding searchlight; there the roaring engine of the helicopter—the helicopter . . .

  The helicopter. Brett opened his eyes. The world spun as if he were perched on the spoke of a circus wheel. It settled. It seemed larger than was right. That, he realized, was due to the angle from which he was seeing it. He was lying on the ground. And he knew that he was at last truly awake. He knew where he was, what had been done to him, and what was happening. He was being dragged by the shoulders, bound, through a snowy clearing in a Kentish wood, having been hit on the head from behind his back—by the same hand as had hit Beddoes—as he came along the path between the trees. He knew who had brought him to it. Stephanie.

  Nausea rushed out of his nightmare to seize him. “I’m going to be sick,” he said weakly. He was still dragged backward. “Stop,” he gasped. “I mean it.”

  Someone, with last-minute speed and humanity, rolled him face down in the snow, lifted his shoulders, and held his head. Everything flew from his consciousness except the horrors of vomiting. While it lasted, life faded, time was suspended, yet an end was inconceivable. But of course it did end; and as the spasms abated, the first of his returning perceptions was of a pain insistently chiseling into the back of his head. Sight, hearing, and touch came back in confusion. All he wanted was to lie down and be left alone in the dark. Shuddering, he turned his head, seeking somewhere to lean it. He found someone’s arm and let it lie on that.

  He was rolled back, propped against someone’s knees. Whoever it was, they had a clean handkerchief with which they wiped his mouth and let him blow his nose. After a moment’s fumbling, someone passed the scent of brandy near Brett’s nostrils.

  Feebly, he shook his head. “Water,” he whispered.

  He felt a cold substance held to his lips. He opened them and received a rather clumsily administered mouthful of snow. After the first surprise and the first convulsive shiver had passed, he let it melt gratefully down his throat.

  “Duster come down too rough,” someone muttered.

  “He didn’t know who it was.”

  “Come down too rough all the same. Here.”

  Brett was offered, and took, a second mouthful of snow.

  “You’ll make a bloody Niagara of this,” went on the first voice. “Can’t you see they’re sniffing around us?”

  “Must be a coincidence. The police wouldn’t be so stupid.”

  “You don’t know them like I do. You don’t know just how stupid they can be. Here, have a drop of this now.”

  This time Brett did not refuse the brandy, which was, however, withdrawn so quickly that he swallowed only once.

  “What are you doing?” a third voice demanded. “What the hell are you doing? I said get him in.”

  It was not until the newcomer spoke that Brett fully awoke to the contrast between voices one and two. Voice one spoke in a low rapid mutter with which years of duty had made Brett familiar. Voice two, and now voice three, proclaimed a middle-class origin and environment.

  “Stan here thinks the police are stupid,” said two, “and he’s nursing this one like a mother. Yet he’s breezy because he thinks they’re on our tail.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” said three. “There can’t be anything wrong or we’d have had a message. You want your share?”

  “What share?” said the Stan voice. “Don’t forget we’ve got nothing on our hands but trouble.”

  “That’s not our fault. We did our best. Anyway, she may help us. Come on now, bundle him in.”

  “Why don’t you listen to me?” Stan expostulated. “I’ve been in it since I could spit. You want to leave this old bath-chair; no one’s going to find it here for days, weeks. Two cars, hood to bumper. Sticks out a mile to the rawest flat in the force.”

  “Not at Christmas. Parties . . .”

  “We ought to stick together, all in the fastest.”

  “Too much load. What could look more suspicious than a car bulging with men?”

  “Not at Christmas,” Stan retorted sulkily.

  “All right, that’ll do. You can get in the back with them, Duster driving. Tim, drive for me, will you? Get a move on, Stan, time’s short. Pick him up.”

  “Here, give us a hand then,” cried Stan. “As if he’s a fairy!”

  From a slight distance came a rejoinder that Brett could not make out.

  “Smug little cocky!” muttered Stan with venom. “Duster! Give us a hand.”

  Someone approached. Together they took hold of Brett as nurses heave up paralyzed patients. As he was swung up into the air, the snow jumped into a glare under two dazzling beams.

  A noise like a waterfall broke the stillness. So much, thought Brett, for the rescue searchlights, the helicopter. He gathered from the third voice that there were two cars, although he couldn’t see a second set of headlights. As he pondered this problem, his shoulders fell from four hands to two. One of the men went to his feet. As he bent to pick them up, the lights lit his face.

  Wacey. Brett felt no surprise. That was Stan, the old hand at the game. Wacey, not the other, had held his head and had given him a handkerchief, snow, and brandy. Why such tenderness? He was no friend to Wacey. An explanation was trapped somewhere inside his brain, like a fly buzzing against a pane. He was raised, to the accompaniment of a good deal of grunting. His right side bumped against some sort of frame.

  “Shove up, nutcase, can’t you?” he heard a voice say roughly.

  His shoulders were jerked, slipped, and fell. His head cracked against a wall. Through the dinning pain that seemed to fill his skull he heard a groan, the sort that greets a fumbled catch in a test match.

  “Mr. Nightingale!” Someone at the far end of a speaking tube called his name.

  “Hullo!” he answered.

  “Shut up.”

  “Dear fellow . . ”

  “Shut up, I said.”

  Two Whitehall lines had crossed, he concluded, and waited for the speakers to sort themselves out. Nothing happened. He felt himself hoisted into a sitting position, his support being soft yet curiously uneven. He opened his eyes. He was in a small dark cabin. In the corner of the far side a pale face was suspended in gloom, like an old tenth-rate painting in an historic mansion. He stared at it in silence for a while.

  “The portrait of a blinking idiot,” he said finally, and closed his eyes.

  When he woke, he knew at once that he was much better. He moved his head experimentally; although it still ached, it was clear. He didn’t feel at all sick. For that he supposed he had to thank the ministrations of Wacey. He opened his eyes.

  Wacey was sitting opposite him, looking not exactly at him but vaguely around about his ears, with the uneasy ambience of an old convict.

  “Better?” he muttered.

  Brett nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

  He had no fear that Wacey would not extract from these two words the last dram of significance. He had understood the nature of Wacey’s solicitude. It was an insurance policy taken out against the obviously not far-di
stant hour of reckoning. No doubt he hoped Brett would remember to credit him with the installments of brandy and snow. Conscious of a certain strength in his weakness, Brett looked out of the window.

  They were driving at fair speed along a wide but unlit road. No snow was falling, although it lay thick on verge and hedges. Brett remembered bitterly the drift in the lane to Pettinge. But that had been in a tiny side road; and if he hadn’t pulled to the left he still might have been . . .

  The phrase warned him that any line of thought which followed would be quite futile. If in the circumstances he could do nothing but speculate, he must at least speculate on the future; on where, for instance, he was being driven in this large square car. The second car—naturally he hadn’t been able to see the lights, as he was being carried back toward the car—the second car. Stephanie had said only one passed—but why was he still believing her? The only certainty of his awakening was that she had made a fool of him. He wished he had stayed in the hazy world of the nursery and the Bavarian Alps.

  He saw that Wacey’s seat was pulled down from the division which shut off the driver. Next to Wacey’s was a similar seat, occupied by the person whose suspended face he had seen before but whom he now perceived to have a body also. The fourth corner too held a passenger. Brett peered at him. The car was lit only by reflection from the snow outside, but that was strong enough.

  “Majendie,” said Brett.

  The figure stirred in an oddly restricted way. “Nightingale, my dear fellow! How do you . . .”

  “For heaven’s sake!” said Brett, disgusted. “Don’t you think you could peel off that skin of hypocrisy? Haven’t we passed the price-cutting stage?”

  “Shut up,” Wacey murmured in tones of mild reproof.

  “Look here,” Majendie protested, “can’t you hear the man’s beside himself? Surely you’re not so blunted to humane . . .”

  “Shut up,” said Wacey more firmly. “Now cut it out.”

  Brett, who had turned his head away from Majendie, promptly turned it back. He divined the reason for Majendie’s clumsy movement, for his present stillness. Majendie, propped in the corner of the back seat, was bound like himself.

  His diagnosis of the situation, of the whole affair, disintegrated, and in a minute or so was reformed to a new pattern. Of course Majendie had been pursued, and not only by him; that much was right. Majendie had underestimated the shrewdness of his associates, and now he was hoist with his own petard. As for Stephanie, Brett’s opinion of her was modified only to the extent of wondering where in his new disposition she belonged—to the main party or to Majendie.

  “Where is she?” he asked, almost against his will.

  No one answered. Nor did Wacey tell him to shut up, as Brett had expected.

  “Where is she?” he repeated.

  “I shall never forgive myself,” said Majendie suddenly.

  “Oh, stop this unutterable birdseed!” Brett said. Suddenly he was stricken with apprehension. “What happened?” he asked, oblivious of her lies and defection, remembering only her smooth neck and straight back and the golden hairs caught up on her shoulder.

  “Poor child—she did so struggle and cry. I’m afraid . . .” Majendie broke off.

  The car had slowed and come to a standstill with its engine running. Without a word Wacey leaned forward, opened the door a little, slipped out, crouching, into the ashy twilight, closed the door soundlessly, and was gone. The whole thing was over in a few seconds, and the car went forward.

  Brett was reminded of the first crime he had ever seen, as a child, shopping with his mother in a crowded store, when he had turned around suddenly and caught a man in the act of whipping a bolt of gingham under his overcoat. Then, as now, he stared, his brain numbly doubting whether he had really seen or only imagined. He never knew. Then, as now, he was silent. The man had slipped unobtrusively away.

  But why, in this case, was there such silence? That Majendie shouldn’t care was not surprising, but what about the man on the other seat? He was surely one of them. He certainly wasn’t another bound victim, for his hands lay limp on his knees. His face was turned toward the door by which Wacey had left. His stare passed blankly through the window. He sat, as he had all the time, quite still.

  Something in the face and posture struck a response from Brett’s memory. At the same time he was aware that what had so clearly shown him the face and the hands on the knees was a brighter light. There was a car following them, another about to pass in the opposite direction. They were traveling faster. They had turned into a major road.

  “Mr. Nightingale, do you hear me?” Majendie whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “You understand what I say?”

  “Of course.”

  “Forgive me, dear fellow. You’ve said such odd things—I wondered if you were quite yourself.” Majendie rushed this out in one breath. “But—we can speak freely if we don’t raise our voices above this—you understand . . .”

  Brett could half see Majendie, his head turned away from the pale man, trying to convey by grimaces that reticence was superfluous.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “This is the main Dover road, you see, A2,” hissed Majendie. “Do you think—traffic seems reasonably heavy—could we make a bid . . .”

  “At this speed? Tied?”

  “But perhaps manage to attract attention? If we’re overtaken again . . .”

  “Where’s Stephanie?”

  “Miss Cole? In the other car. It went ahead, but I can’t see it. You’re thinking it would be scandalous to leave her. But if we could get away to tell the police, have that car stopped—unless you know it couldn’t be done. Poor child, poor child!”

  So she was of the main party, Brett thought, with no more than a passing gibe for his wasted anxiety. Naturally she went with the Kellett’s or Geoffrey side of the business. Yet by the very name Brett was reminded that without her help he would have known nothing of Geoffrey, the cellars, Majendie’s collection. She had mentioned the dressing case itself . . .

  “Did you give her a case to hide?” he asked.

  “But of course—didn’t she tell you?” Majendie sounded astonished.

  “She did. But I’ve been thinking that was simply flimflam to distract the great gullible while he was led into the love nest.”

  “Do you suggest that she’s one of them?”

  “Why not? You gave her the case—all right, but suppose she just handed it to them as they passed on the road?”

  “Then why did they come on after me and nearly smash us all to pieces forcing me to stop, and, and, dear fellow, rip up the seats and the carpet looking for the case?” Majendie was quite triumphant.

  “Of course,” Brett murmured, “the second car. It’s yours.” They did have only one. She had been truthful in that. “Did they pull into the woods to strip the car in seclusion?” he said.

  “Yes. One of them knows the country. So do I, of course. It was Colonel Waring’s place we turned into, by a side drive. Acres of woodland. That glade used to be the site of a Palladian temple of Love—odd you should call it a love nest just now—I thought you must know it too. The Colonel had it pulled down some years ago. An excellent spot for their purposes. Only two approaches, ours and yours.”

  “Yet you can believe that we stumbled into it by chance.”

  “But if you’d seen her fight and kick, despite the gun . . .”

  “The what?”

  “Yes. I was too cowardly, I fear. I knew someone was coming; so did they, of course. One of them was posted at the main entrance, another at that path. I gather he saw a light at some distance. He called the others—there are four, or there were—and one of them went into the trees while he waited at the edge. I heard you coming. The path seemed to act as a sound channel, and in the open air, I think, one tends to raise the voice unawares. Then I heard Miss Cole laugh; I didn’t recognize her voice, but I knew I should call out to whoever it was. But as I say, to my
shame, I couldn’t do it. The man Geoffrey, you see, pointed the gun at me.”

  “Geoffrey.” Brett remembered the third voice.

  “So they call him. You think that perhaps you know him?”

  “It’s a fanciful name for a thug, that’s all.”

  “But you know, they’re an ill-assorted bunch. Two of them I imagine to be typical underworld characters, the one who jumped out and this driver—Duster, they call him. I don’t know whether . . .”

  “Occupational,” said Brett dryly. “He dusted me a little while ago.”

  “Then thank God he’s with us and not with Miss Cole.”

  “And the other two? Perfect gentlemen? I think you said Geoffrey pointed the gun. Look, we’re turning off A2. Do you know where we are?”

  “We joined the road when that fellow left us, just past Barton, my own home. We’ve turned northeast toward Adisham, would it be, I wonder, or the next road up . . .”

  Northeast. Brett felt a flutter of hope that after all his disappointment and despair he was being carried to no other place than Richborough. He recalled the arguments in the Palladian love glade. Wacey guessed, scented trouble with a professional keenness. The others, overconfident, were sailing ahead. Admittedly they were the Hampstead people, who had pulled off two robberies important enough to boost anyone’s confidence. But clever as they were, they lacked both the cautionary sense developed by long practice and the inside tricks which distinguish professional polish from amateur zeal. The instinct of the underworld on meeting a policeman, in Brett’s experience, was to slip quietly away; and if the worst came to the worst and they laid him out, to pelt off at full speed leaving him to recover as best he might; certainly not to encumber themselves with him. These people were not only new but foreign outsiders. Was that why information had at first been so difficult and why Pink, at last, had informed with such obvious relish?

  “Do you think,” Majendie suddenly said, “that there’s any question of—a threat to life?”