Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  “Thanks very much. It sounds just the thing.”

  “Oh, and by the way,” said Paul abruptly, “I’m sorry I attacked you at lunch like I did. I can’t imagine why—well, I suppose one’s nerves are getting a bit jangled—it’s the utter pointlessness of these practical jokes. One feels it must be a lunatic at work.”

  “A schizophrenic, perhaps? That’s quite possible.”

  “Let’s hope they stop, now that you’ve arrived. The chap may think better of it.”

  “Yes. Unless he’s a schizophrenic. When your left hand doesn’t know what your right’s been doing——”

  “I say, it’s nearly dinner-time. I suppose I ought to put on a suit in honour of this leg-show we’re being treated to tonight.…”

  The ladies’ cabaret was generally voted to be one of the greatest successes of the week. Many of the performers belonged to amateur dramatic or operatic societies at home: there was one genuine comic actress; a torch-singer, if you liked that kind of thing; a sketch or two performed by visitors who had been at the camp for long enough to allow rehearsals; while the chorus of South Sea maidens made up in agility and tunefulness for what they lacked in looks or professional polish. Not that any great merit was required to ensure the little show’s success. For the audience had evidently come prepared for intervention on the part of the Mad Hatter, keyed up to a more than normal state of excitement; and, when it seemed more and more likely that nothing untoward would happen, they let themselves go in relief and a kind of vicarious triumph.

  After the show, Captain Wise invited Nigel up to his own quarters. Nigel gave a discreet account of his discoveries during the afternoon, deliberately conveying the impression that he still kept an open mind—as indeed he did—on the question whether Phyllis Arnold’s injury had been a matter of accident or not. It was thin ice here, for the manager would surely realise that, if the injury was not accidental, it must point to those who had made up the clues. Captain Wise, however, seemed to skate over it easily enough. He pressed Nigel to drinks, and even accompanied him back to his chalet.

  As the manager said good night, Nigel sat down on his bed to take off his shoes. The next instant he had leapt up again with an exclamation that swung Captain Wise sharp round again.

  “There’s something in my bed!”

  He flung back the sheets, to disclose the dead body of a rabbit. A very dead rabbit.

  “God’s truth!” exclaimed Captain Wise. “What the devil—it’s the Mad Hatter again!”

  “Yep.” Nigel was much more interested in the manager than in the rabbit.

  “Well, I’m damned! The fellow’s got a cheek. In your bed, of all places.” A faint smile showed at the corners of his mouth. “That’s a direct challenge, Mr. Strangeways, if ever I saw one. In a way I can’t help feeling glad he chose your bed and not one of the ordinary visitors’. They’ve had quite enough——”

  But Captain Wise spoke too soon. He was interrupted by a suppressed scream from the next chalet. They ran outside, to meet a girl emerging with a dead rat held gingerly by its tail. The rat had been dead for some time, too. The commotion brought several more visitors to the spot, and a general searching of beds took place.

  It was, all in all, probably the most bizarre scene Nigel had ever witnessed. The fairy-lights were still shining above the length of the chalet avenue, red, green, blue, white, yellow—giving just enough light to show the grotesque collection of corpses that were brought out one by one from the beds of the adjacent huts. Their stink began to permeate the air, as they lay in a row, the fairy-lights giving an iridescence to their shabby decay—two blackbirds, a stoat, a jay, three magpies, and a few shapeless bundles of fur or feather that had corrupted and shrivelled beyond recognition. Round these squalid remains pressed the little group of visitors, augmented each minute by fresh arrivals drawn hither on the strength of the rumour that was already flitting through the camp. They stood for the most part in silence, their nostrils wrinkled with disgust, and when they spoke it was in whispers and asides. One or two of the women still wore their cabaret costumes.

  Nigel looked down at the dead creatures. Before long he realised what it was they reminded him of—the corpses you can see strung up in a line on a gamekeeper’s “gallows,” a warning to other marauders of nature, in some wood. In a wood …

  XII

  WAKING AT EIGHT o’clock the next morning, Nigel’s mind took up unbroken the thread of the night’s activities. The Mad Hatter, he reflected, had certainly timed his last blow well. He must have smuggled the dead creatures into the various beds either at dinner-time or during the cabaret show, for otherwise their smell would have been detected by his victims while they were getting ready for dinner. At the same time, the fact that most of the visitors did not usually go to bed before midnight could be calculated to delay the ensuing investigation, since Captain Wise and Nigel Strangeways could not reasonably go inquiring all over the camp at so late an hour.

  So, indeed, it had happened. The manager, after seeing that the victims of the outrage were supplied with fresh bed-clothes, had firmly vetoed Nigel’s suggestion that they should begin making inquiries among the visitors straight away. “They wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. And Nigel had to admit the common sense of it. In any case, Captain Wise was paying for his services, so he had some right to call their tune.

  It was after the group of onlookers had dispersed and an attendant had removed the animal corpses that Nigel hit upon the first clue. Captain Wise happened to comment upon the similarity of these corpses to the selection of dead things you find hanging on a gamekeeper’s gallows.

  “So you noticed it, too?” said Nigel. “It might be worth asking Perry if he came across such a gallows when he was in the hermit’s wood.”

  “Well, you could try,” the manager said doubtfully. “But that wood isn’t preserved as far as I know, so you wouldn’t expect to find a gamekeeper about there.”

  The two went along to Paul’s chalet, and Captain Wise tapped on the window. He was still up, copying some material from one note-book into another. Nigel told him what had happened but he replied that he had not seen a gallows in Old Ishmael’s wood. As they were conversing through the open window, Nigel’s foot touched some object underneath the chalet, which was raised on brick piers a foot above the ground. He bent down idly and picked it up—a piece of thin wire a little rusted, about six feet long, with some tiny, dark bits of substance adhering to it.

  “Nasty litter,” said the manager, taking it from him and throwing it into a litter-basket that stood nearby. “Some of these people are incorrigible.” He scratched the bridge of his nose with an irritable gesture. The next instant he was sniffing his fingers.

  “I never touched any of those dead brutes, did I?” he said. “I seem to have got the smell on my fingers somehow, thought——”

  Struck by the same thought, he and Nigel both moved for the litter-basket. Nigel took out the wire, smelt it, held it up against the light from the windows to examine the adhering particles.

  “Well,” he said at last, “here’s the gallows anyway.”

  Paul Perry was still looking out at them, his elbows on the window-sill.

  “What on earth did the chap put it here for?” he now asked, a touch of nervous defiance in his voice.

  “Possibly one of the Wonderland staff saw him when he’d just finished planting the corpses, and chased him this way, and the chap thought he’d better get rid of the wire.”

  “I’ll go and find out who was on duty near those chalets during dinner and the cabaret,” said Captain Wise.

  While he was away, there was a certain constraint between Nigel and Paul Perry. Finally the young man blurted out:

  “Damn it, if I’d done the thing, I shouldn’t have hidden that wire under my own chalet, should I? At least, I’d have put it somewhere else as soon as the coast was clear.”

  “I’d imagine so myself,” replied Nigel non-committally.

  Presently
Captain Wise was back. Jameson, one of the staff, who had been keeping an eye on the chalets earlier in the evening, had noticed a figure going round to the back of Nigel’s hut during the period when the cabaret show was on. He had assumed it to be Nigel—he was too far away to see clearly—and had, therefore, taken no steps beyond calling out “good evening.” The figure had then disappeared.

  “In what direction, did he see?” asked Nigel.

  “Well, in this direction actually,” the manager said, a little hesitantly.

  “Go on! Why not say it? It must have been me.” Paul Perry’s voice, aiming at jauntiness, failed dismally.

  Nigel, who had borrowed Captain Wise’s electric torch, was shining it under the chalet.

  “Why leave the wire there, and not the sack?” he muttered, dusting his knees.

  “Sack?”

  “Well, he must have had something to carry those corpses about in. He wouldn’t march round the camp dangling them on this bit of wire.”

  Paul Perry reached out of the window and took the wire from Nigel’s hand. Captain Wise made an instinctive step forward, as though to rescue this important exhibit, then halted. They were both gazing at Paul’s face on which, unless the dim light deceived them, a very curious expression had come.

  “Well, Strangeways, I’ll be off. This is your pigeon, eh?” said Captain Wise at last, trying to conceal his irresolution under a light, dismissing tone. “Good night. Good night, Perry.”

  When he was out of earshot, Paul spoke. There was no longer any defiance or jauntiness in his voice, which now held nothing but the plaintive appeal of a child who wishes his mother to rescue him from a pain he cannot understand.

  “Perhaps I did do it,” he said, fingering the wire, staring at it as if painfully striving to remember whether he had seen it before. “A schizophrenic, you said. I thought of that, at the beginning. Well, how am I to know if I’m not the split personality? Suppose I’ve been doing all these vile, stupid things—my other self? … I had a nervous breakdown at Cambridge once. Overwork. I’ve been afraid ever since …”

  Lying in bed this morning, Nigel considered the discovery of the wire and of Paul’s weak spot. They must mean one of three things, he concluded. Either Perry was in fact schizophrenic, and the Mad Hatter his second personality: or Perry was sane, had been carrying out these practical jokes for some reason as yet to be discovered, and had thrown out the schizophrenic theory in a sort of self-defence when he found the chase so uncomfortably near his own doorstep: or the wire had been planted under his chalet so as to throw suspicion upon him.

  But in that case why plant the wire only? Why not the sack, too? No, the wire alone would be a more subtle touch: if Perry was to be made appear the criminal, X might argue that Perry would never have left anything under his chalet so large and incriminating as the sack. Or perhaps it was because there was something about the sack, or whatever the receptacle had been, which would incriminate X. Yes, and this answered the question—why did Perry not get rid of the wire in the same way and at the same time as he had presumably got rid of the sack? Oh no, it didn’t, though. Suppose Perry had disposed the animal corpses, heard the attendant hailing him from the distance, lost his head, run towards his own chalet, dived underneath it to hide—in the belief that the attendant was still following him? He would not dare hide for long, because presumably he’d have arranged some sort of alibi involving the cabaret show, and must get back to the concert hall as quickly as possible. So, in his haste to get rid of the sack, he might easily have overlooked the piece of wire: in fact, it might have slipped unnoticed out of the sack, which would be the natural place for him to put the wire after the corpses had been slipped off it.

  This outline would fit the facts, always provided that Perry could not prove his presence in the concert hall throughout the whole of the cabaret show. But, if he was the Mad Hatter, how had he contrived to post up that notice on Sunday morning and yet be one of the last to leave the bathing-beach? Could he have slipped away so as to reach the notice-board after twelve o’clock, when the secretary had posted her notices, and got back to the beach unobserved? Nigel studied the paper on which Teddy Wise had jotted down for him the approximate times of the duckings. Sally Thistlethwaite, 11.15 a.m.; Albert Morley, 11.30; Mortimer Wise, 12.15. It was soon after this last ducking that the bathers had started returning to Wonderland, with Teddy taking down their identity-disc numbers or names as they left the beach. There was just time for the Mad Hatter to have put up his notice after twelve o’clock and got back for the ducking of Captain Wise. But surely somebody would have noticed him coming or going up the cliff path?”

  Nigel gave an irritable exclamation. Why hadn’t the management made more extensive inquiries? After this lapse of time, you couldn’t trust people’s memories. Of course, Captain Wise had not realised then how wide the Mad Hatter’s campaign was to be, and he had to exercise great tact with his visitors. But surely——

  At this moment the management, in the person of Captain Wise himself, knocked at Nigel’s door. He was evidently in a state of ill-repressed indignation.

  “Look at this. This has torn it properly,” he exclaimed, planking down a copy of the Daily Post on Nigel’s bed. An inside page carried big headlines:

  OUTRAGES AT HOLIDAY CAMP

  MALICE IN WONDERLAND

  Who is the Mad Hatter?

  “How the devil did they get hold of it, that’s what I want to know. We took every precaution to see that nothing came out. I even made a public appeal to the residents. I can’t believe that any of them would—the managing director has just rung me up and pretty well taken my skin off.”

  “If none of the residents sent up the story, it means you’ve had a reporter here.”

  “But I gave particular orders that no pressmen should be admitted, without being sent to me first.”

  “You’d need a few companies of the Guards to keep the Press out of this place. No, I expect you’ll find it was that chap who was chased off the premises yesterday morning: he seems to have had a good talk with Miss Thistlethwaite and the other Mad Hatter victims.”

  “By Jove, yes, you’re probably right! I’ll put a call through to the Daily Post at once, and find out. Wish we could sting ’em for libel, but those big papers look after themselves too well nowadays.” Captain Wise made for the door, but suddenly halted on an afterthought. “I say, though, how did the Post hear about all this in the first instance?”

  “The story is by ‘our local correspondent,’” said Nigel, glancing at the paper. “Presumably somebody from here rang up the local paper—what is it?”

  “The Applestock Gazette is the nearest.”

  “—and spilt the beans. The Gazette sends a reporter, and he passes it on to the Daily Post or some news agency. I must say, whoever did this story made a very nice job of it——”

  “Here. Wait a minute. D’you mean one of the residents gave the show away? But why should he?”

  “Cash perhaps. They might offer him a guinea or two for the information. Or quite possibly it was the practical joker himself who rang them up. He’s got his publicity now, all right, if that’s what he was after.”

  “And just about put the Wonderland company down the drain, too,” said Captain Wise ruefully. “I’ll get on to that blasted local rag now.”

  “I should wait till after breakfast. The editor isn’t likely to be in the office till about ten o’clock.”

  Breakfast at Wonderland that morning was a feast of excitement. Those who possessed copies of the Daily Post, which had scooped the Mad Hatter story, were besieged by their fellow residents. The same interest that makes one read every word of the account of a football match, which one has witnessed only the day before, gripped alike the Mad Hatter’s victims and those who had merely been spectators of his work. Even Mr. Thistlethwaite kept glancing aside from his copy of the Times towards his wife’s Daily Post. At another table Miss Gardiner was triumphantly pointing out how correctly she had
analysed the psychology of the practical joker: “A strong but suppressed sense of display is characteristic of the type,” she repeated; “you mark my words—it was the Mad Hatter himself who sent this information to the paper; it’s what he’s been aiming at all along, to get recognition, to see himself in print.”

  “I see they’ve got my name in,” said Mr. Morley with pride. “I must buy a copy of the paper. Something to show the fellows in the office. Bad thing for the camp, though; very bad: don’t you agree, Mr. Perry?”

  “D’you think so? I should have thought any publicity was better than none for a place like this.”

  “Oh, indeed no, if you’ll excuse my contradicting you. As a business man, I can assure you that——”

  “What I find interesting,” Paul interrupted, “is the way everyone is taking this story as a kind of personal triumph. And incidentally, the general assumption that the Press is omniscient, like God: everyone takes the story for granted, I mean, without asking how the paper came to hear of it.”

  “I bet it was that man who rubbed my back with oil on the beach,” Sally exclaimed. “I wondered why he asked all those questions, and he’s got down some of the things I said—in almost the same words.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if you were right,” said Nigel.

  “But that doesn’t answer the question——” began Paul.

  “Ooh, I’m glad it wasn’t the Mad Hatter! I’ve been expecting to come up in boils ever since.”

  “Which would certainly have spoilt the South Sea effect.”

  “Did you like our dance last night? I thought it went much better than in rehearsal.” Sally smiled at him. It was obviously an overture of peace.

  “I didn’t see it. Once was quite enough,” said Paul stonily. Sally’s mouth quivered as if he had struck her. Then she controlled herself and replied, in tones that matched his:

  “That’s funny, my pet. I should have thought you and your Miss Jones would have taken the opportunity of another hearty laugh.”