Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  The girl reached out her arm for an envelope that lay on the floor where she had thrown it last night. It contained the first clues for this afternoon’s treasure-hunt. The system on which the treasure-hunt worked was that each competitor received clues directing him to a certain point, where he would find a second clue hidden to indicate his next objective, and so on. In all, there were six main clues hidden on the Wonderland grounds or the adjacent countryside: to prevent it becoming simply a game of follow-my-leader, the initial clue led in a number of different directions, thus dispersing the company at the start. On reaching your first base, but not before, you were allowed to pair off with any other competitor who turned up there: the clues at all these first bases led to a single second base, and from there all the hunters were working on the same trail.

  Sally had meant to study her initial clue last night—the year before she had only been baulked of victory by a huge and ferocious bull which appeared in the last field between her and the treasure and turned out later to be a cow—but she had dropped off to sleep before looking at it. Rolling over on to her stomach, she opened the envelope and drew out a sheet of paper. As she glanced at the clue, her restless body grew rigid.

  “A hermit lives in a wood,

  His beard is long and white,

  In the old man’s beard by the roadside bush

  I’m hidden out of sight.”

  Sally’s eye fell upon the open window, its curtains stirring a little in the breeze. A waft of panic went through her. Automatically, like a sleep-walker or as if she had felt a sudden chill, she put on her dressing-gown. She took herself by the scruff of the neck and forced herself to go over to the window.

  There was nothing outside. Well, of course, there wasn’t. Nothing but the rhododendron bushes and the birches which stood at the back of this row of chalets: the “sylvan surroundings” so justly celebrated in the Wonderland brochure. There was nothing to be afraid of. They hadn’t crept closer to her window in the night. Sally turned away, knocked at the partition door, went through into her parents’ bedroom.

  Mr. Thistlethwaite was sitting up in bed, meticulously filling in the questionnaire paper while his wife drank her early-morning tea. The scene was so ordinary, so familiar that it broke down Sally’s resistance. Sobbing a little, she flung herself on to the bed.

  “What is it, girlie” asked Mr. Thistlethwaite, startled. She pushed the clue-paper blindly into his hand.

  “He must have been into my room last night. He took the real one away and left this.”

  “Now, now. Whatever——?” Mr. Thistlethwaite read aloud the sinister rhyme. “I don’t understand. ‘He took the real one away’?”

  “Yes. It’s the first clue for the treasure-hunt, don’t you see? It ought to be, I mean, but——”

  “But what’s wrong with this, dear” said her mother. “It sounds just like an ordinary clue to me.”

  “It can’t be. Don’t you see?—it means that the next clue is hidden in the hermit’s beard—that horrible old man who lives in the wood up there—the one who shook his fist at me. Well, it’s absurd. Captain Wise, or whoever makes up these clues—they’d never hide one in the hermit’s beard and expect him to stand about while visitors searched him for it. It’s mad.”

  “It would certainly appear in somewhat questionable taste,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, recovering his equipoise.

  “Well then. If this isn’t one of the genuine clues, it must have been written just to frighten me, and left in my room. Everyone knows I’m scared of that dreadful old hermit, and——”

  “One moment.” Her father raised a fat and imperious finger. “‘Everyone knows?’ Whom have you told about him, apart from your mother and myself?”

  “Golly! That’s quite true. ’S a matter of fact, I was rather ashamed of being frightened. I didn’t tell anyone except Teddy. Or did I? No, I didn’t. Oh yes, Paul Pry overheard me then. He was teasing me about it yesterday morning when we went down to bathe.”

  An expression of vast sagacity flooded Mr. Thistlethwaite’s face. “That is most suggestive. Unless, of course, Mr. Wise or Mr Perry passed on the information to someone else. Mr. Perry and Mr. Wise. Hrrumph. It seems as if one of them must be the, ah, poison pen behind this missive. In which event——”

  “Mr. Wise and Mr. Perry? It’s nonsense,” said Mrs. Thistlethwaite. “They’re both very kind, pleasantly spoken gentlemen. You’ll be telling me one of them is the Mad Hatter next. I can’t think what you two are making such a fuss about.”

  “Oh, but Mummy, can’t you understand——?”

  “My love, surely it is abundantly evident that——” exclaimed Sally and her father simultaneously.

  “This is not such good tea as we have at home, do you think, James?” Mrs. Thistlethwaite mildly poured herself another cup. “What I’ve been trying to say—only you two were so excited you wouldn’t let me get a word in—is that you’re making a fuss about nothing. Show me that poetry. Yes, I thought so. You girls nowadays never seem to learn anything useful at school. You can’t cook. You can’t sew. It’s all French and Science and papier mâché. Now when I was a girl——”

  “Mother, will you please keep to the point?”

  “When I was a young girl—and that was a long time ago, but I still remember some of the things I learnt—they used to teach us botany. Our teacher was a Miss Brown, I recollect. Botany, she always said, was such a lady-like pursuit. I still have some of the pressed flowers I used to collect then. I do believe I won a prize for it once. Oh, where was I?”

  “You were talking about your hectic girlhood, Mother,” said Sally with restraint.

  “Of course. Well, this old man’s beard is nothing to do with a hermit. Hermit indeed! Poof! It’s a plant. Some people call it Traveller’s Joy. Its flowers have four thick downy sepal and in the autumn the styles lengthen into the shape of little white beards. All this poetry you’ve both got so excited about means is that there’s a clue hidden amongst the old-man’s-beard on a bush beside the road. What you two need is a good dose of salts—this Mad Hatter has got on your nerves.”

  “Hum … Chk, chk, chk … Well, indeed,” Mr. Thistlethwaite muttered, avoiding his wife’s eye.

  “And this is the real clue after all?” exclaimed Sally. She bounced over the bed and embraced her mother. “Oh, I’m so relieved Honestly, it did make me windy. Darling, you stay at the top of your class!”

  “That’s my stomach you’re kicking,” complained Mr. Thistlethwaite.

  Sally’s face fell. “Oh, but I’ll still have to go up to that wood to find the clue. Brrrh! I hope the old hermit isn’t at home. I do think it was silly of Captain Wise to choose a place like that to hide it. He knows the hermit hates this camp. And he’ll be livid with a lot of visitors trampling all round his hideout.… Golly, look at the time! I’m due for the P.T. class.”

  Five minutes later, a little out of breath but becomingly flushed, she was on the recreation ground where every morning at 8. 30 the Games Organiser or one of his assistants conducted them in the milder form of physical jerks. To-day Teddy Wise was officiating in person.

  “Hallo, here’s Sally,” he said as she approached. “And all glorious without.”

  “All glorious without what?” Sally gave the regular response to the well-worn gambit, but with less vivacity than usual. Teddy’s automatic facetiousness seemed to-day so very much part of a stock-in-trade: a loud-speaker could do the job just as well. Am I going off him? was the way she put it to herself.

  She took her place in the front rank of the little platoon, whose uniform was shorts, brassière, and sandals; followed the exercises Teddy sketched out in easy, perfunctory movements; vaguely heard the grunts and protests of the older women at the back, whose elasticity was not a match for their earnestness. Doing a trunk-roll, her eyes on Teddy to keep the rhythm, she thought, he’s got a marvellous chest, just like Johnny Weissmuller: and his arms—wish I could tan like that—of course, he’s doing it all
the summer: must be funny, just playing games all the time, queer sort of life—and women yearning at you from every angle and not being supposed to make a pass at any of them, like a clergyman: wonder how he gets on when he’s alone? He came to her with an odd, delayed sensation of surprise, that she could not imagine Teddy alone.

  They paused for a breather. Teddy yawned and stretched. “Got a bit of sleep coming to me,” he said. “Late night.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wise, was you on guard—against the Mad Hatter, I mean?”

  “No fear. Safely leave him to you muscular ladies, what? No, I had to clock in for planting the clues for the treasure-hunt. Moonlight operations. Not so good. I’ve stationed a few bulls along the course, Sally, just to keep you on the hop. Hey, she’s gone off into a trance! Wake up, Sally! What are you staring at?”

  He turned slowly to see what she was pointing at. “It’s Miss—what’s her name?—the schoolmistress one—Gardiner. What on earth is she carrying?”

  For Sally, the moment was a far worse one than when she had been dragged under the water. That had been too sudden for fear: this was so slow that every gradation up to the topmost pitch of horror could be exactly felt. It was like the feet of mourners, moving reluctantly and irresistibly to the open grave. And yet, when she looked back on it later, there was nothing really to account for the paralysis of terror that had come over her. Nothing but a large-limbed woman, in jumper and tweed skirt, walking towards them with steps that neither dragged nor hurried—walking out of the leafy morning and curving crescent of the chalets, holding something in her arms.

  “What the devil’s she carrying?” Teddy repeated weakly. You could see nothing at this distance but a white blur against the strident orange jumper.

  Steadily, almost with the deadly, impersonal intent of some wireless-controlled tank, Miss Gardiner advanced towards them. She carried the thing un-selfconsciously but somehow unnaturally, as a capable spinster might carry a baby. When she got nearer to them, her pince-nez flashing in the sun, she held it out with the gesture of one making a formal offering. It was a dog—a wire-haired terrier, its body arched into a hideous sickle.

  “Mr. Wise,” she said in a voice like doom, “why were no precautions taken? This dog has been poisoned.”

  “Really, I’m terribly sorry, but——”

  There was a scream behind Sally. A woman rushed forward and snatched the dog out of Miss Gardiner’s arms. “It’s Bingo!” she cried. “It’s my little dog! You”—she stared distractedly at Miss Gardiner—“you did it! You poisoned Bingo!”

  VII

  PETS’ CORNER HAD been the brain-wave of a Wonderland director, and part of the company’s policy to go one better than any existing holiday camp. When other camps set their faces against the introduction of domestic animals, the Wonderland brochure’s slogan was: “Don’t leave your dumb friends at home! Bring them to Wonderland and install them in our superbly equipped Pets’ Corner! Give them a holiday too—scampers over the fragrant turf, bathes in the sparkling brine, everything to delight a doggie’s heart!”

  This director, however, had considerably overestimated the pet-mindedness of the Wonderland clientèle. Most of these were young people who lived in towns and evinced none of the upper-middle-class’s morbid cynophilia, while those that did keep pets seemed only too ready to escape from their demands while on holiday. So Pets’ Corner, with its bijou, semi-detached kennels and hygienic drinking troughs, remained for the most part untenanted—a monument to a great illusion. Such dumb friends as did turn up might well have considered themselves double-crossed by the company, moreover; for scampering over the fragrant turf and bathes in the sparkling brine were rigorously confined to the early hours of the morning and late in the evening. For the rest of the day, they had to be taken about on leads or stay moping in their palatial concentration camp.

  Irked by these restrictions, Bingo—a spirited liberty-lover—had the day before vented his feelings on the first available victim, which happened to be Miss Gardiner’s Siamese cat. Bingo wished no part of any cat, and the unnatural aspect of this one was an added offence to him. He himself had been on a lead and the cat curled up on Miss Gardiner’s shoulder, when they met in the course of their afternoon walk. Bingo slipped his lead, jumped at Miss Gardiner, dislodged the cat, achieved a mouthful of its fur, and chased it happily up a tree. It was then that Miss Gardiner had informed Bingo’s owner that, if the lady could not keep her brute under control, she herself would poison it. Accustomed to dealing with classes of twenty to forty infants, Miss Gardiner was presumably no believer in half-measures. Still, spare the rod spoil the child was not quite the same thing as spare the poison spoil the dog.

  Most of the onlookers, therefore, while shocked by the scene and sympathetic towards Bingo’s owner, had no doubt that her accusation was purely hysterical. Looking back on it later Paul Perry, who witnessed the event and went with the group of people that by tacit consent followed the bereaved woman towards Pets’ Corner, was inclined to think that this was the first moment When the Mad Hatter really made his mark. It was noticeable that, for a little, no one mentioned his name at all; and, when they did, it was in uneasy whispers and with a certain closing of the ranks, as though the shadowy creature—a phial of strychnine still in his hand—might be awaiting them anywhere along the chalet avenue.

  They encountered, however, no one more alarming than Mr. Thistlethwaite. He quickly took charge of the proceedings, in default of Teddy Wise who was still heavily engaged by Miss Gardiner: they could still hear her voice, tapping out like a ruler on a desk, as she demonstrated to him the gross inadequacy of the management.

  Mr. Thistlethwaite addressed a few well-chosen words of condolence to the dog’s owner, sent a girl scurrying off to fetch the resident doctor, established the fact that a woman sleeping in one of the outlying chalets had been awoken by a dog barking at twenty minutes past three, deduced that this might have been the hour of the crime, and led the party safely round the wood beyond which Pets’ Corner lay and whose tangled undergrowth was supposed to blanket any disturbance the animals might make at night.

  When they reached the scene of the crime, they found that the other occupants of Pets’ Corner—three dogs and Miss Gardiner’s cat—were unhurt.

  “I wonder why he didn’t poison the lot while he was about it,” said Sally to Paul. “I suppose he threw a bit of poisoned meat over the wire into Bingo’s kennel. What a beastly, dirty trick!”

  “Yes, it’s queer, that. It looks as if he was striking at one person at a time now. And he’s learning the weak spots, too.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, that chap Scripps. The Mad Hatter realised he was of the genus irritabile of singers, so he doped the piano for him, knowing it would make him fly off the handle.”

  “But how did he know Scripps was going to be the first performer?”

  “All the performers were told the order of the programme beforehand, I imagine. The Mad Hatter could easily have found out from one of them. And then this dog. He might have poisoned any or all of the animals, but he chose the one whose death would cause really bad feeling. There’d been a row about Bingo and Miss Gardiner’s cat—but of course you know that. Yes, the chap’s getting his hand in all right.”

  Sally shivered and turned away. They were quite near the rather dilapidated stone wall which marked the boundary of the camp, she noticed.

  “I say, Paul,” she exclaimed suddenly, clutching his sleeve. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “Supposing—no, it sounds too absurd. But look here, will you partner me in the treasure-hunt this afternoon? We’re supposed all to start separately, but nobody’ll notice if we slip off together.”

  “Treasure-hunts aren’t much in my line. Anyway, I shall be going over the questionnaire papers after lunch.”

  She shook his sleeve vehemently. “Oh, don’t be so stuffy, my pet. You know you’d rather be with me than glooming over those dreary pap
ers.”

  “You flatter yourself. And they’re not.”

  “Be human for once. Say you’ll come. Please.”

  “But what’s it all about?”

  “Promise not to tell anyone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you and I are going to hunt for the Mad Hatter.”

  There was a short pause. The wind gave the leaves overhead a little shake, and passed on.

  “All right, then. I’ll come. But I bet it’s a wild-goose chase.”

  At this point the camp doctor arrived. Dr. Holford was a young man, new in practice, who was only too glad to receive a month’s free holiday at Wonderland in return for services which were seldom called upon. Mr. Thistlethwaite came forward from the group of people that was standing, rather aimlessly now, beside the late Bingo’s kennel.

  “Doctor Holford?” he inquired, with a major-domo’s gesture. “You have been apprised, doubtless, of the latest outrage. In order to lay the miscreant by the heels, we must satisfy ourselves as to the exact time when the poison was administered. We already have received some indications on this point, which may be clinched by your own opinion. This way, sir, if you please. There he is. Poor Bingo. The innocent victim of a ruffian, who thereby struck a cowardly blow at the heart of the community.” An easy tear came to Mr. Thistlethwaite’s eye.

  Concealing his bewilderment beneath a professional briskness, Dr. Holford knelt down beside the animal. Presently he said: