Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  “Why not?” asked Teddy, as he and Nigel cautiously entered the wood.

  “Because Perry shot him. At least, he believes he shot him. That’s why he refused to tell me where he’d been.”

  “But if Old Ishmael really is——”

  “Quiet!” Nigel stopped and listened intently. In the windless, fading evening the wood was still as death. Richly lacquered by the last of the daylight, the leaves hung motionless. Shadows stretched and mutely pointed, as though each tree and bush were an accuser. A rabbit, scuttling suddenly out of a ride, startled them like an explosion.

  “Now I know what the poor little pheasants feel like when a poacher’s around,” whispered Teddy. “We’re a sitting shot, if the old boy’s still capable of lifting a gun. Are you armed?”

  “I have a pair of scissors,” said Nigel absently.

  “Ah! Cold steel. The fellow’ll never stand up to that.”

  Cautiously, keeping several yards apart, they moved through the wood. Brambles reached out and fastened on their clothes: branches whipped their faces. It was slow going. Teddy felt an almost irresistible impulse to shout aloud and go bursting through the tangle of undergrowth—anything to break the silence, the suspense.

  At last they reached the edge of the clearing where the hermit’s shack stood. Its stove-pipe chimney cocked up drunkenly into the air: all the shadows of the wood seemed to have saturated its bulk: shadow welled from it like dark blood. Teddy covered the door with his revolver, while Nigel darted to the back and made his way round.

  The shack was empty. But the bricks beneath the fireplace were scattered about, and the cavity below them was empty, too. Nigel knew now that his theory was correct. It only remained to find the recluse himself. He was convinced that Perry had shot the man, or at least believed he had shot him: but he couldn’t yet risk bringing in the six watchers to help search the wood, for the recluse might only be wounded and still able to evade them on ground he knew so well.

  Summoning Teddy to his side, he began the search again. Presently, on the westward edge of the clearing, they found the bracken trodden down. A zigzag, intermittent trail led them, after many halts and false casts, in a rough circle round to the eastward end of the wood again. Twice they picked up ejected revolver shells, and in another spot the smaller case of a .22 bullet. The train they followed so painfully was crossed at times by another one, also freshly made.

  “This all tells a pretty grim story, doesn’t it?” said Nigel.

  “It’s just so much Red Indians to me. I haven’t the foggiest notion——”

  Teddy was silenced by a loud cra-awk from nearby. A crow, startled by their approach, had flown up with a shattering clap of wings. Or was it they who had startled the bird? Might it not have been some faint movement from the fallen scarecrow beyond that tree, lying on the very spot from which the bird had risen, its black arms outflung and crumpled like the wings of a shot crow?

  “That’s a funny place for a——”

  “And scarecrows don’t usually have grey beards. It’s all right. You can put that gun away. He’s dead.”

  They approached the body of the recluse. In the dead centre of the forehead there was a neat red hole, a little resembling the cast-mark of a Hindu princess. In other respects the corpse was less neat: the crow had founds its eyes.

  Teddy turned away, feeling abominably sick. The nightmare, however, seemed to reach another climax when he heard Nigel say:

  “This is where the scissors will come in useful.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Teddy, quite unable to turn round.

  “Cutting off his beard.”

  Presently Teddy heard Nigel calling to him. “Come and look. Do you recognise the face?”

  Queasily he approached. “Well, I suppose so. But I recognised it much more easily with the beard on.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Why, Old Ishmael presumably. Who the devil else could it be?”

  “Oh no it isn’t—not the proto-Ishmael, anyway. Look again.”

  “Good God!” Teddy exclaimed after a long pause. “I remember now! That snapshot you showed us. It was hard to recognise at first without”—he gulped—“without the eyes.”

  “Yes. We have here the gentleman who called himself Charles Black. And here’s his revolver. And somewhere about him, I fancy, we shall find some aerial photographs, some documents—whatever it was that he surprised Perry taking out from under those bricks. Yes, this looks like it. A waterproof folder. Well, they can wait.”

  “But, look here, where is Old Ishmael then? The real one?”

  “Oh, I doubt if we’ll ever find him. He’s down among the dead men. Very deep down. Maybe in that bog. Hoy!” Nigel kept shouting at intervals to guide the six watchers towards them. When they had arrived, the body was carried to the shack. Two of them would stay on guard there till the police arrived.

  On his return to the camp Nigel was told that a call had come through to him from London: he was to ring back Sir John Strangeways at once. He asked if there had been any other calls. No, they told him. Well, it was something that the Mad Hatter had not taken advantage of his absence to communicate with the Applestock Gazette; anyway, the Gazette and the Daily Post might soon have a story that would push the Mad Hatter right off the front page.

  “Where the devil have you been, boy?” exclaimed the usually imperturbable Sir John, when Nigel rang him up.

  “Just out for a walk, uncle.”

  “Well, you’ve no business to go out for walks when—that snapshot you sent me, we’ve identified it at last. It’s a German agent our secret service had been watching for years. He disappeared about eighteen months ago. Our people couldn’t find any trace of him, and it was assumed he must have slipped out of the country. Where did you get the snapshot? Have you seen the fellow lately?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I saw him in a wood just now. He was——”

  “Where? Don’t you realise this is serious, Nigel? We can’t afford to let him slip again.”

  “You’re quite sure the chap in the photo is this spy of yours?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Look here, you must——”

  “I only asked because it’d look pretty silly if we’d killed the wrong man.”

  “Speak up, boy! You sound as if you were talking gibberish.”

  “I said, the spy has been killed. Shot. Right through the middle of the head, head, head.”

  “SHOT?” Sir John’s voice nearly blistered the wire. “Who shot him? Did you?”

  “No. A young man who’s staying in the camp. He did it with a Winchester .22 rifle. All by his little self.”

  From the other end of the wire came the sounds of a strong man fighting down hysteria. At last Sir John said, pronouncing each word most distinctly:

  “Will you please tell me what you are talking about.”

  Nigel told him … An hour later he was telling it, with a little editing, to the Thistlethwaites in their chalet. Mr. Thistlethwaite tapped judicially on his beautiful drill trousers: Mrs. Thistlethwaite knitted as placidly as if she were listening to a radio talk for housewives: but Sally, sprawled and fidgeting on the bed, was all lit up with excitement.

  “Your theory about Old Ishmael and the mysterious ‘Charles Black’ was remarkably correct up to a certain point, Mr. Thistlethwaite,” said Nigel. “Its weakness was the assumption that the hermit had consented to take on the job of collecting naval information in Applestock. Why should he be offered it? No one lives the life of a hermit nowadays unless he’s a bit wrong in the head: and people must be very much right in the head if they are to make successful spies.”

  “How did you first come to identify this Charles Black with Old Ishmael, sir?”

  “When I heard that Old Ishmael had not been seen for several weeks on end just this time last year.”

  “Oh yes, I remember, Teddy told me that,” said Sally.

  “It seemed odd that a person of such regular habits—you could set your ca
lendar by him, the landlord of the Mariner’s Compass told me—should have lapsed from them like that. And, when he reappeared, the landlord said, he began to turn up in Applestock more frequently than his former two visits a week. These facts fitted the theory that the spy, having found in the hermit an identity he could profitably assume, had struck up an acquaintance with him, learned the part—so to speak—from the living model, then killed the hermit (I wonder did he dispose of the body in that bog across which Sally confronted him?), and hidden—either in the wood or elsewhere—for several weeks till his beard grew and he was weathered to the complexion of the hermit. The snapshot showed him as an elderly man with grey hair. The hermit’s heard was grizzled. So that would work out all right. Sally gave me a hint, too.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember—why, I never thought he was anyone but the real hermit.”

  “No. But you told me you felt there was ‘something artificial’ about him. It was a delicate intuition on your part. That croaky, unused sort of voice you mentioned, too. That deliberate way of speaking. It answered just as well to a man who wished to disguise his voice, to speak like Old Ishmael, as to the voice of a real recluse.”

  There was a pause, broken at last by Mr. Thistlethwaite saying, “What I don’t understand is how our young friend came into it. You hadn’t informed him of the real identity of the hermit.”

  “No. I wish I had. It would have saved him a few pretty grim hours. And yet—— Of course, I had no proof myself then.”

  “What do you mean, ‘and yet,’” Sally said. She lay tense on the bed, chin cupped in hands, her grey eyes blazing at Nigel.

  “Now don’t you glare at me like that,” he replied good-humouredly. “You sent him into that wood yourself.”

  “I sent him? I’d no idea where he was going.”

  “Nevertheless, you sent him. He’d shown up to you twice in rather a bad light. Once, when you and he met the hermit in the wood and his nerve cracked; and again over that little altercation with Teddy Wise outside my chalet. He believed that you thought him a coward. That’s why he’s been so moody and difficult lately—one reason, at any rate. He wanted to reinstate himself with you and prove to his own satisfaction that he was not a coward. It sounds wildly romantic and four-featherish for a person like Perry: but even the sternest anti-romantic will jump in at the deep end if he gets a hard enough push.”

  “We are all heroes at heart,” elaborated Mr. Thistlethwaite. “But to few of us is given, in this modern world, the opportunity of translating our dream into reality. The humdrum city clerk——”

  “Daddy, do be quiet. I want to hear about Paul.”

  “Well,” said Nigel, “the opportunity came to him when he heard your father and myself talking about Old Ishmael. I happened to say that we had no proof the hermit was a spy unless we found, amongst those aerial photographs, pictures of the Applestock naval harbour. So he decided to go and see if they were still there, under the fireplace on the floor of the shack. He took a rifle—that being the only firearm he could get hold of—because he was still genuinely scared stiff of the hermit and suspected, only too rightly, that he might be a dangerous customer. He went up to the wood, broke into the shack and unearthed the waterproof folder. He had not time to open it—this is important—because he heard footsteps approaching. Once again, though it was for the last time, his nerve cracked. He could think of nothing but escape. He threw down the folder in a panic, hid the rifle under his coat again, walked out of the shack. The recluse was standing on the edge of the clearing, still and stiff as a scarecrow, watching him. Just watching him.

  “That was really his worst moment, he told me. He was thoroughly frightened, and at the same time boiling with humiliation—to be scared of an old, ragged man with a beard. He couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘I thought it was going to rain. I went in to shelter. I hope you don’t mind.’ Which, considering there was a cloudless blue sky above, didn’t begin to sound sensible. The next moment the hermit was across the clearing and inside his shack—that ungainly, flapping, yet horribly effective sort of movement——”

  “Don’t!” cried Sally. “I saw it at once.”

  “Anyway, Paul thought this the moment to beat a retreat. He ran off into the bracken. A bullet thudded into a tree beside his head. The spy had seen his waterproof folder lying on the floor, and realised that his visitor must not be allowed to get away. That shot, however, made a new man of Perry. From that moment, he says, though he was still frightened, he had a firm grip on himself. Something primitive shot up to the surface and possessed him: he was not going to stand for any old greybeard chivvying him with a revolver. He got behind the tree, took out his rifle, and fired.

  “That was the beginning of a savage, grotesque sort of duel. There, in the sunlit wood, which seemed to afford so little cover for himself, so damnably much for his enemy, they started to shoot it out between them.”

  “But why didn’t someone hear the shots?” asked Mrs. Thistlethwaite.

  “Plenty of people did. But they were practising at the territorial camp all to-day, and anyone would assume the sounds came from there—unless he happened to be very near the wood.

  “Perry’s first shot had sent the hermit behind his shack. He imagined he was still there, taking cover, till he heard the crack of a twig away to his left. He just managed in time to put the tree between himself and the attacker, whose second bullet hit the air where he’d been standing a second before. He fired back in the direction of the sound, and for an intolerable space of time there was absolute silence in the wood. It gave Perry leisure to realise three things: that the recluse had got between him and the camp; that the recluse knew every yard of the wood, whereas he himself had only been in it once before; and, worst of all, that his magazine might be empty.

  “You see, when he lifted the rifle out of the shooting-gallery, he had not time to see whether the magazine was loaded—it was lying on the counter and someone might have already been firing it. It didn’t really occur to him as at all likely that he might have to use it at all. But there he was now, with a very thin tree between him and a killer, knowing—in two senses of the word—that the next shot might be his last. Even if he had understood how to remove the magazine, so as to find out the number of bullets left in it, he obviously couldn’t afford to do so at this stage of the proceedings.

  “During his brief respite—if we can call it that—he decided that the attacker would be expecting him to retreat out of the wood in the direction he had already taken. He determined therefore to try and make a detour round to the eastward, which I would bring him out on the road leading back to the camp. He found a large bit of dead wood, chucked it westward as far as he could, and as soon as he heard the hermit moving stealthily after it, began his detour.

  “At first, marking each successive piece of cover with his eye, he made for it as fast as he could go. But the noise brought the attacker back after a little, and now Perry moved quite literally one foot at a time. He didn’t have to worry much about whether his magazine was empty, since he didn’t catch a glimpse of the other chap for about ten minutes: the spy was evidently an expert in the use of cover.

  “This went on for some time, with Perry always on the retreat and getting gradually nearer the edge of the wood. He was not far from it when he suddenly heard a noise and saw the muzzle of a revolver thrusting through a bramble bush some fifty yards away, on the edge of a ride he had just crossed. He instinctively flinched aside. It saved his life. The bullet hit his arm just below the shoulder instead of the heart. He fell and lay still. Luckily, falling sideways, he got himself under cover. He managed to prop the rifle barrel silently up on the lowest branch of a bush—his left arm was useless—and hold it there. This meant, of course, that he couldn’t turn round. If the attacker chose to approach him from behind, it was the finish.

  “Luckily, after waiting for what seemed to Perry about an hour, the spy decided he must be dead. The war of nerves was over. The sp
y cautiously peered round the bush behind which he was kneeling. Perry took a long look through the peep-sight. He remembers feeling absurdly petulant because there was a spider’s web hanging right in his line of fire—it nearly made him burst into tears, he told me. Then his enemy moved a little, and the spider’s web wasn’t in the way any longer, and he took careful aim and fired.

  “It was a perfect shot, as you know. Perry, however, what with loss of blood and general nervous strain, immediately, fainted. When he came to, it was half an hour later: he spent more time trying to remember exactly what had happened. It seemed very important to him to get the recent events in their correct sequence. The blood from his wound had clotted: he tied it up after a fashion and went to inspect his late opponent. The man was unquestionably dead. Perry himself was by now a little delirious, and that accounts for his subsequent actions.”

  “But why did he try and hide the rifle? Surely it doesn’t explain that? He hadn’t done anything wrong—I mean, the chap had shot at him first, and he was a spy,” said Sally.

  “Ah, that’s just it, he didn’t know—not for certain—that the man was a spy. He hadn’t had time to examine the photographs in the shack, you remember. When you’re in the semi-delirious state he was in, it’s difficult to think of more than one thing at a time. Some idea or image enters your mind and squats there, puffing itself out like a giant toad, so that nothing else can come into the picture at all. That’s how it was with Paul Perry. I have killed a man: I am a murderer: I could never prove it was in self-defence (yes, the wound in his own arm was proof enough, but for the moment he’d forgotten it): I must put back the rifle where I got it, so that nothing can be traced: camp sports start at 2. 30, the coast will be clear then. That’s the sort of way his mind worked.

  “A hardened campaigner, of course, wound or no wound, would have kept enough reserve of sense and stamina to go at once to the shack and pick up the waterproof folder. But this was Perry’s baptism of fire—and a pretty total immersion, too. He just kept repeating over to himself, I’ve shot a man, they’ll call me a murderer. There had been other suspicions hanging over his head as well, he remembered vaguely. The Mad Hatter. The one thing he wanted was to get out of that damnable wood. We mustn’t criticise him too severely.”