Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  “What’s that you’ve got in your finger-nail?” Paul asked abruptly, pointing to Mr. Thistlethwaite’s middle finger which was still running up and down the crease of a trouser-leg.

  “Treacle, I apprehend,” replied Mr. Thistlethwaite, unperturbed. “I chanced to be in the vicinity when that young woman found the tennis-balls, and I scraped one of them with my nail in order to determine the substance with which it was coated.”

  “Oh, I see.” Paul felt sadly deflated. “And that’s how you knew about the Elsie-Lacie-Tillie stuff?”

  “Just so.” An expression of mournful reproach came over Mr. Thistlethwaite’s bloodhound features. “You did not surely suspect me, sir, of any complicity in these occurrences?”

  “No. No, of course not. I just——”

  “Oh yes, you did, Paul Pry. Don’t try and wriggle out. You’re looking guilty. You’re blushing.” Sally was really angry. Her grey eyes flashed a wintry fire. “You go snooping around—yes, I’ve seen you—putting things down in a little notebook when you think nobody’s looking. And you dare to accuse Daddy of—why, you’re just the sort of person who’d play these mean tricks yourself. And your fingernails aren’t so jolly clean either.”

  “Talking of treacle,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite with fluent tact, “I am reminded of an episode which took place in Oxford when I was an apprentice. It centred upon no less a personage than his late Majesty King Edward the Seventh. A very great gentleman, King Teddy. A leader of fashion, too. A very high-spirited young gentleman when in residence. Yes, indeed. It was the result of a wager made between the King and the Duke of Hamilton. The Duke, entering a grocer’s establishment, asked for a pound of treacle. On the assistant inquiring whether his noble customer had brought a jar for the treacle, the Duke rejoined, ‘Put it in my hat.’ The assistant did so. Whereupon the Duke clapped the hat upon the assistant’s head, flung down a sovereign on the counter, and decamped. Ah, yes. Full of spirits was his late Majesty.”

  “A truly royal jest,” said Paul sourly.

  “I don’t see why they didn’t have the treacle in a tin—I mean, a jar—all ready. At the shop, I mean,” said Albert Morley.

  “Do you impugn the veracity of the anecdote, sir?”

  “Oh no. No. I only just wondered.”

  If we were casting present company for Alice in Wonderland, thought Paul, Albert would certainly be the dormouse. Mr. Thistlethwaite is Father William every time. Myself?—well, I’d rather fancy the Cheshire Cat. And Sally is quite pert and naïve enough for Alice. Paul gazed curiously at his hand, which Sally had taken up just now to demonstrate the alleged uncleanness of his nails: the contemplation aroused in him a feeling so unexpected, so strong that he was compelled to get up and walk straight away without a word from the party beside the tennis-court …

  In the manager’s office, high above the quiet sea, Captain Wise and his brother were talking.

  “Well, that’s the position, Teddy. Let me just run over what we’ve found out so far. Take this down, please, Miss Jones. It’ll be useful to have it handy in case we turn the business over to the police.”

  Only by a faintest pursing of the mouth did Miss Jones manifest her astonishment and disapproval. Not so Teddy.

  “Oh, look here, old boy. Not the coppers. That really is—why, it’d close us down in a fortnight.”

  “My dear Teddy, if this joker sticks seriously to his work, he can close us down in a week. I shan’t call in the police till the visitors force me to: but they will, if we don’t trip up the Mad Hatter pretty soon. Well, now. The announcement over the loud-speakers last night. No one has come forward with information. The chap could have come out of the body of the hall, or from outside the hall through one of the doors beside the platform, or he could be one of the band—in fact, he could have been anyone you damn’ well like, you or me or Miss Jones here.”

  “Not me, old boy. I was hoofing it with Sally under the spot-light.”

  “Yes, of course you were. Next, the duckings. Chap probably a man, certainly strong: large hands. Ninety-five people on the bathing beach; we’ll be able to eliminate a good few of those, if we ask each of them to say who was near him when the duckings took place, but it’ll still leave a packet of suspects. You took down the numbers on the identity discs of everyone who left the beach, the names of those who weren’t wearing them, and the order they went away in. Not a perfect check, of course. The joker might have complicated things by pinching somebody else’s disc for the occasion. Thirdly, the notice on the board. Unless the joker has an accomplice, he must have pinned it up himself. But Miss Jones swears the notice wasn’t there at twelve o’clock. Therefore the joker must have put it up after his bathe. Almost certainly, he must have been one of the first people to leave the beach; for the later he left it to pin up the paper, the more people there’d be wandering around by the entrance hall. That narrows us down to the earlier names on your list. We’ll go through them again in a minute. Lastly, the treacle business. The chef inspected his stores when you went to see him, but found no tin of treacle missing. Chap must have brought his own, which implies that his plan of action was prepared before he came, which looks as if we were going to hear a good deal more from him. We might search the chalets, but it’d make us unpopular, and anyway he’ll have got rid of the tin now if he’s any sense. Tennis-balls doped some time between 12.45, when the players put them away in the pavilion, and 2.15, when they were taken out again. That gives us a hell of a period for investigation, though we might have some luck with people noticed arriving late for lunch or leaving early. Damn it, the whole thing’s so vague.”

  Captain Wise exasperatedly smacked the thinning hair on top of his head. “What we want is a detachment of secret police, or something.”

  “Should I try to obtain an insufflator and finger-print apparatus?” asked Miss Jones, pencil poised over note-book.

  “Finger-print app——? Oh, I see. Yes, that microphone might have given us something. Well, perhaps——”

  “All these Johnnies wear gloves now, don’t they?” said Teddy.

  “It’s damned ticklish. We can’t treat the visitors like a hords of criminals. I——”

  There was a knock at the door. Paul Perry entered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you might be alone.”

  “Alone? Come to confess your crimes, eh?” said Captain Wise with immense jocularity.

  “No. But I thought I might be of use to you. About this Mad Hatter business. You see—well, I’d better tell you first what I came to Wonderland for.…”

  V

  PAUL PERRY WAS speaking in his professional voice. He was still new enough to his job to be conscious of this—to wear it both with a certain pride and with a sense of playing a part, as a young officer might feel wearing his uniform for the first time. It was a crisp voice—the voice of the capable, anonymous executive, the smoothly-running cog—far different from his normal tones, which were by turns diffident and aggressive, but by no stretch of imagination could be called assured.

  “Usually,” he was saying, “we conduct our investigations in an informal way. Gossip picked up in pubs, in the street, and so on: sometimes a prepared series of questions, but asked naturally in the course of conversation. People are apt to draw in their horns if they think they’re being got at, though of course Mass Observation is pretty well known to the man in the street by now, and I myself make no secret of being an Observer if asked point-blank. When they sent me down here to do a survey of a typical holiday-camp, I had intended to appear as an ordinary visitor. But these occurrences led me to think I could combine the survey with a bit of detective work.”

  “I see. How d’you suggest going about it?”

  “Well, you could announce that I was here taking a survey on behalf of M.O. That would give me an official status, and interest people too, I think. I could work on the lines I’ve already planned out, but put in any questions which you consider might be of use for discovering the identity of the pr
actical joker. I’d have a pull over any official detective, because the visitors would assume that all the questions I asked had to do with the survey.”

  “Yes, there might be something in it. What do you think, Teddy?”

  “Sounds O.K. to me. Of course, it’s up to Perry, I suppose. I mean, if he can rub along all right with the troops, that’s that. Don’t want him putting their backs up, though.”

  “You any ideas, Miss Jones?” asked Captain Wise quickly, seeing that Paul looked considerably disgruntled by Teddy’s comments.

  The secretary cocked her sleek head to one side, like a blackbird contemplating a worm. “I think the difficulty would be to fit questions concerning the practical jokes into any Mass Observation questionnaire. I doubt if they’d mix.”

  “Well, Esmeralda, I’ll leave that to you and Mr. Perry.” (Esmeralda, thought Paul. Esmeralda Jones. Good lord! And why ask her opinion just to override it?) “You two go and put your heads together, and see if you can make anything of it.”

  “Captain Wise is very worried about these developments,” said Miss Jones primly as they descended the stairs.

  “The nurse echoes the doctor.”

  She glanced at him sharply, then chuckled. “Yes, I suppose it did sound rather like that.”

  How nice, thought Paul, to talk to a girl who can pick up your allusions at once, a girl who isn’t always on the sex-offensive. He eyed her with more attention. That she was sharp, on the spot, intelligent, one knew: one had also seen her at last night’s dance, looking like something out of Vogue. The difficulty was to correlate these two persons—to decide which was the real Esmeralda. Paul Perry’s earnestness about females was, it may be plainly seen, only equalled by his ignorance of them.

  They were outside in the sunshine now, walking towards the swimming-pool whence arose a confused hubbub of bathers taking their dip before tea. Miss Jones seemed to be leading the way.

  “Aren’t we supposed to be discussing this questionnaire?” he asked.

  “The bath’s a fine and public place,” she said. “One should always discuss secrets in the middle of a crowd. It’s the safest way.”

  “You seem to have studied the technique of conspiracy, Miss Jones.”

  “Esmeralda will do. It’s not the name I should have chosen myself, but Miss Jones puts me straight behind the ribbon counter.”

  “I suppose you keep Miss Jones for the secretary, and Esmeralda for the——”

  “The what?”

  “Well,” said Paul, feeling suddenly very young and inadequate, “for your private self. You’re not a secretary all the time, I mean.”

  “I’m a secretary just now, my lad. Let’s sit down here.” She indicated a rustic seat on the grass terrace above the bath.

  “Why is your employer so worried?” he asked. “After all, a practical joker can’t do more than cause a bit of discomfort all round. It’s not as if you had a homicidal maniac hanging about.”

  Miss Jones took off her horn-rimmed glasses, and put them in a case into the side pocket of her neat, polka-dotted silk dress.

  “It’s not so simple, Paul. This is only the biggest of three Wonderland camps, all run by the same company. As you can see, a great deal of money has been put into them, and if one of the camps came under a cloud, the whole enterprise might easily go under. You’ve no idea how dangerous the wrong kind of publicity is—even a little of it—for a show like this. And I wouldn’t put it past some of our rivals to exploit it, either.”

  “Big Business does rather stink, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t be priggish, Paul,” she said sharply. “Ninety per cent. of humanity would behave the same way to get rich, if they had the courage and the talent to pull it off.”

  “I can’t see that makes it any better.”

  “Well, we’re not here for a symposium on the ethics of business. We——”

  “I say, Esmeralda,” Paul interrupted excitedly, “d’you think it might be some rival company behind all this? They could send one or two hired agitators, so to speak, as ordinary visitors, to organise trouble in Wonderland. And then——”

  Miss Jones laughed—a husky, mischievous laugh which made Paul blush—he did not know whether it was with pleasure or embarrassment.

  “Now you are being fanciful. No, I don’t think Big Business is quite as bad as all that.”

  “In America, they send agents-provocateurs into the Unions.”

  “We really must get down to business.” She moved a little closer to Paul. He saw Sally Thistlethwaite glancing towards them from the springboard, and obscurely rejoiced. It was nice to put your heads together, as Captain Wise had expressed it, when it was the dark, soigné head of Esmeralda. He waved negligently at Sally, and turned again to his companion.

  “You know,” he complained, stabbing a finger at the crowd that shrieked, splashed, swam, sauntered or sun-bathed below them, quite regardless—it seemed—of Mad Hattters and their malevolent pranks, “I still don’t think this is a good place to concentrate.”

  “The trained mind,” Miss Jones replied austerely, “can concentrate anywhere. Now, tell me first what lines you had intended to work on.…”

  By tea-time, a tentative scheme had been drawn up. If Captain Wise approved of it, he would make an announcement at dinner giving Paul an official status, and Paul could begin his survey next morning. He suggested that, as this was likely to keep him pretty busy, he should resign his place on the sports committee. Miss Jones agreed, and asked him to nominate a substitute. He proposed Mr. Thistlethwaite.

  “You’d better ask him if he’s willing.”

  “I’ll go along now. I want to get the scheme down on paper at once.”

  “Shall I have some tea sent to your chalet, then?”

  “Thanks very much.”

  Paul ran Mr. Thistlethwaite to earth on the little veranda of his chalet, where he sat with his wife and daughter awaiting, no doubt, the clamorous harbinger of victuals. He asked him if he would be willing to take his place on the committee: with as much gravity and gratification as if he were being sounded about his willingness to accept a knighthood, Mr. Thistlethwaite acceded to the request.

  “——The principle of local government,” he perorated, “of which this committee is a minor but none the less significant variation, may be held as integral to a system based upon democratic institutions.”

  No one sought to challenge the statement. Presently Sally remarked:

  “So they’ve sacked you, have they?”

  “No.”

  “You seem awfully thick with that girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “That secretary creature.”

  “Oh, her. Yes. She’s an intelligent girl. And very good-looking, don’t you think?”

  “If you like that type.”

  “I do.”

  “I say, I believe you’ve fallen for her,” Sally exclaimed with vast animation. “Paul Pry has fallen for a skirt! Wonders never cease!”

  “Now, Sally, you mustn’t tease. Don’t mind her, Mr. Pry,” said Mrs. Thistlethwaite comfortably.

  “Perry is the name.”

  Mr. Thistlethwaite delivered a short homily on the emancipation of women. The Modern Girl, he claimed, while taking her place beside the male sex in the great march of progress, yielded nothing to her grandmother in point of femininity. He approved this emancipation as consistent with democratic development. Sally herself, he said, was going through a secretarial course. He understood that the post of secretary to an author was very much sought after, and hinted that Mr. Perry might consider his daughter in that capacity.

  “Oh, Paul doesn’t want a secretary. What he wants is a harem of high-brows in horn-rimmed goggles,” announced Sally, rudely and alliteratively. Her father’s protests were cut short by the sound of the gong, and Paul was left alone to draw up his plans.

  Half an hour later he sat back and reviewed what he had written.

  (i) Why did you choose Wonderland for a
visit? (a) Saw an advertisement. (b) Heard of it from friends. (c) Other reasons.

  (ii) Why did you prefer a holiday camp to ordinary lodgings at a holiday resort? (a) Greater facilities for gregariousness. (b) Luxury and cheapness. (c) Snob-appeal. (d) Novelty. (e) Other reasons.

  (iii) (a) Is the luxury of this place likely to dissatisfy you with your normal home and work environment? (b) Does it create envy of those who can afford such food, recreation, etc., all the year round? (c) Or do you accept such differences of income as in the nature of things?

  (iv) Which do you find the chief attraction of the camp? (a) The natural surroundings. (b) The luxury. (c) The company of other people. (d) The entertainments and recreations.

  (v) (a) Do you like your pleasures to be organised for you to the extent they are in Wonderland? (b) At other times do you prefer to be a spectator or a player of games? (c) Do you ever, while at the camp, feel a desire for solitude?

  (vi) What is your opinion about the Mad Hatter? Is he (a) a practical joker? (b) mad? (c) more than one person? (d) a stunt on the part of the management? (e) a person with a grievance against the Wonderland Co.? (f) Any other theories.

  (vii) Does the Mad Hatter’s presence (a) make things more exciting? (b) incline you to leave Wonderland and never return? (c) leave you indifferent?

  (viii) Do you think the management ought (a) to invite the co-operation of the visitors in discovering the Mad Hatter? (b) call in the police? (c) look after the affair themselves?

  (ix) Give your name, age, sex, occupation, address, income, length of stay.

  After reading it through, Paul ate the two lumps of sugar in his saucer, crossed out “gregariousness” in question (ii) and substituted “getting together with people,” crossed out—reluctantly—“snob-appeal” and wrote in “More variety of entertainment,” deleted “income” from question (ix).

  He and Miss Jones had finally agreed that it was impossible to insert any questions which might give them information about the Mad Hatter, without making a direct reference to him. They had also decided that this part of the survey, as far as Paul was concerned, should take the form of a questionnaire rather than a series of interviews: he could be certain of getting a larger mass of material thus, a wider basis for further investigation, while it would give the management a fairly coherent picture of the way in which their visitors were reacting to the Mad Hatter. The idea was that, if Captain Wise passed the questionnaire, Miss Jones should duplicate five hundred copies of it, and these should be distributed at dinner to-night.