The Deadly Joker

by Nicholas Blake

  “That’s not what I meant. It was such a childish trick. Embarrassing. Exhibitionist. Not in bad taste exactly, but so—so undignified and bizarre. I can’t think how you and Vera consented to it.”

  Ronald had grown quite stiff with suppressed anger, for some reason I could not yet quite fathom.

  “Well, we were a bit doubtful at first. But—” he could hold it in no longer—” I resent this superior attitude of yours. Who the devil are you to tell me what’s undignified? I suppose you think I lower the tone of—”

  “Don’t shout at me, Ronald. Bluster never impresses me.”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” expostulated Charlie Maxwell.

  “You said yourself you were hesitant about it at first,” I went on, feeling again the dreadful pang of Vera’s loss. “You could only have two reasons for finally agreeing to Alwyn’s little scheme. The first is that you thoroughly disliked him and it’d give you pleasure to see him make a fool of himself in public.”

  I paused.

  “And the second?” Ronald looked icebergs at me.

  “Surely that’s obvious.”

  “You mean he blackmailed me into it, somehow? Be your age.”

  Blackmail was a new notion to me in this context. It flashed across my mind that Alwyn could have blackmailed Vera into it: but not her husband, surely? I said:

  “No. But the police will consider the possibility that you consented to Alwyn’s absurd plan because you saw you could make use of it.”

  “Steady, Mr. Waterson,” Charlie put in. “Watch it. That’s a nasty suggestion.”

  “Oh, shut your trap, Charlie!” Ronald exclaimed, the coarse grain in him coming out. He turned on me: “You can think what you like. To hell with your rotten insinuations!” He pulled himself together. “Sorry, old man, shouldn’t have said that. But it gets me on the raw the idea that I would—you can’t know what I felt for my wife.”

  I couldn’t—so apparently unattached a couple I had never come across before.

  “I’m not accusing you, Ronald. I was only telling you how the police will look at things: particularly in view of what we were talking about before Mr. Maxwell came in.”

  Charlie’s ham-like face seemed to glisten with curiosity. I wondered just what were the relations between him and his employer. Which pack was he hunting with now? His curiosity unappeased, he said:

  “All this is beside the point, gentlemen. Once the inspector has discovered the source of the poison”—he clicked his fingers—“bob’s your uncle.”

  Ronald was staring out of the window: the window through which I had seen Vera passing—how many days ago?—with a baby tortoise held like an oblation in her hands. For what, by whom had she been sacrificed, so horribly, in front of that gaping crowd?

  “That’s the trouble,” Ronald was saying, his eyes withdrawn from us. “You know my works at Alferton uses pure hydrocyanic acid, Charlie?”

  “Prussic acid? No, I didn’t, Mr. Paston.”

  “They combine it with a metal base to make cyanide of potassium, for electro-plating.”

  “I see. A bit awkward that.” Charlie looked ludicrous in his attempt to conceal his anxiety. “You’ve told the inspector, of course?”

  “He hasn’t asked me yet,” replied Ronald pettishly.

  “It would be wise to do so.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t learn this when I sent you up to Alferton last year.”

  “You sent me to deal with an outbreak of pilfering, not with chemical processes, sir,” rejoined Charlie, quite respectfully.

  “Single-minded, aren’t you?” Ronald sneered.

  Some vague memory, from a science colleague or a detective novel, came to me. “Isn’t hydrocyanic acid highly volatile?”

  Ronald nodded absently.

  “You couldn’t carry it about for long in that trick container without its vaporising?”

  “What’s on your mind?” Ronald gave me his full attention now; but I was not prepared to go further till I had thought out the implications.

  “Oh, I just wondered,” I replied.

  “No flies on Mr. Waterson, are there?” remarked Charles Maxwell. “An empty medicine bottle, which had contained prussic acid, was found amongst the debris in a litter bin, in the marquee.”

  Charlie had ceased to be a figure of fun; he had become all too formidable, with this capacity to read my thoughts. The murderer must have transferred the poison, from a firmly-corked bottle to the flower container in which it would rapidly be volatilised, shortly before the crime.

  Looking back on it now, I see that I had the solution almost within my grasp at that moment. But my mind was distracted by Ronald Paston, who said:

  “If it’s the last thing I do, I shall see that he’s for the high jump. If I could have ten minutes alone with him, I’d make him long for the noose.”

  The words were sufficiently melodramatic. But the cold rage in Ronald’s voice gave them a deadly reality.

  “Got to find him first, sir,” said Charlie, cheerfully lowering the pressure.

  “We know damn’ well who did it, Charlie. Just prove it, that’s all.”

  “Who did it, then?” I asked.

  “Good God, man, do I have to draw a diagram? You saw him do it. Alwyn Card, of course. Or he and his brother in collusion.”

  As I walked home, I toyed with the theory of another collusion—Ronald and Charlie Maxwell—at first only to dismiss it. Ronald could indeed have obtained the poison and switched the containers. He might even have written the poison-pen letters. But I could not see him carrying through the more physically active of the practical jokes which had followed the letters. Maxwell might have, but he didn’t arrive until the day after the rick-burning: no, to be precise, didn’t show up in Netherplash till then. Well, even supposing he’d been staying nearby before that, I couldn’t swallow the idea that Ronald had hired a strong-arm man just to play some insensate jokes.

  To commit a murder, yes—I wouldn’t put that past Ronald. But why should he have murdered Vera? Because she had been unfaithful to him? This was altogether too like Jacobean tragedy. And I could not believe that his feelings for her had ever been passionate enough to turn so poisonous. The Cards, not Vera, were his enemies.

  Well, then, leave Maxwell out of the reckoning for the moment: was the whole wretched business an attempt of Ronald’s to implicate one or both of the Cards? an attempt led up to by the practical jokes which would certainly throw added suspicion upon Alwyn? But this brought me to a full stop. Unless Ronald was a coldblooded lunatic, I could not conceive his causing Vera’s death simply in order to create a murder for which Alwyn or Bertie would hang.

  I was at my gate now. As I unlatched it, the problem swept from the surface of my mind by the pleasant anticipation of lunching with Jenny and my dear children, the word “volatile” spoke itself in my inward ear. I put down the latch and leant upon the gate, seeing, not our charming house with the clematis sprawled over its whitewashed front, but an extraordinary new pattern in the kaleidoscope.

  What if Ronald had never meant his wife to be killed? He knew about the volatility of prussic acid. He could switch the containers before the speech-making. He could assume that Alwyn would put the lethal container in his buttonhole, like the other committee-men, just before they trooped out on to the dais. Then he would make his own speech, followed by Alwyn’s, thus allowing Alwyn plenty of time to succumb to the fumes before he reached the point of spraying Vera with what he believed to be Arpège. And it would be assumed later that Alwyn had himself switched the containers, but, unaware of prussic acid’s volatility, killed himself instead of Vera.

  It seemed a magnificent solution. For a moment. Then I was pushed back to where I had started. Ronald must have seen that Alwyn did not immediately put the thing in his buttonhole. Therefore he must know that Alwyn might not succumb before he had squeezed the bulb. And he made no attempt to stop him squeezing it. Therefore he did not mind if his wife was murdered.
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br />   Was poor Vera expendable, then?

  Jenny, waving from the door, broke into this internal monologue.

  “The inspector’s back,” she called.

  13. The Elder Brother

  I remember little of my previous interview with Chief-Inspector Wright—he had arrived the day after Vera’s death—my mind being then in such a turmoil. To-day I could take him in better: a hatchet-faced man, with a habit of using gestures to make his points—to mould them out of thin air, almost—and a feverish brightness in the eyes he kept fastened upon one.

  We went into the study. “Virgil,” he said, glancing at the texts and commentaries laid out upon my writing-table. “Veteris vestigia flammae. That was Dido, wasn’t it? Could it be that?”

  The question did not appear to be rhetorical.

  “But Dido committed suicide,” I protested.

  “Yes.”

  I confess I was taken quite aback by the implications of this.

  “Ronald Paston had access to this poison: therefore, theoretically, his wife did too. She could have worked it herself”—Wright’s hands performed a rapid transposition—” or she could have guessed the murderer’s plan and allowed it to go through.”

  “You’re not serious?” But I thought of Vera’s acquiescent, fatalistic nature. Wright was having an almost hypnotic effect upon me.

  “Why not?” he said. “Rejected by her lover. Nothing to live for.”

  “But why in public—in such a grotesque way?”

  “Dido was vindictive, too. She cursed Æneas when he deserted her.”

  I struggled with Wright’s elliptic conversation. “You mean, Vera might have arranged somehow to be poisoned so as to put the guilt upon her lover? No, it’s too farfetched altogether.”

  “So’s everything else that’s been happening here.” Wright’s eyes came at me like a jet from a flame-thrower. “You knew about her affair with Egbert Card?”

  “Yes. She told me herself.”

  Wright’s eyebrows went up in a parody of astonishment. I told him about the gipsy-boy episode.

  “Just so,” said Wright. “I had to drag it out of Alwyn Card. His brother didn’t deny it.”

  “You can take it from me,” I said, “Vera was not a vindictive woman. Nor was she pining because Bertie had started chasing—had thrown her over.”

  “‘Started chasing?’ Whom?”

  There was no use prevaricating with Inspector Wright. “My wife. And my daughter.”

  “Crikey! Enterprising chap. With any success?—sorry, we have nasty minds at the Yard.”

  “No success,” I replied, perhaps too firmly. Wright, rather to my surprise, dropped the subject.

  “Well, then, if not love, what about money?” He gazed at me with vivacious encouragement, like a schoolmaster at a promising pupil.

  “Money? Did Vera have money to leave?”

  “A modicum. She left it to a nephew and niece in India.”

  “Well, then, that motive doesn’t arise.”

  “No?”

  I felt I was sustaining poorly the role of promising pupil.

  “What do you make of Alwyn Card?” Wright continued.

  “Well, he’s an eccentric,” I said slowly. “A bit malicious, perhaps. Very popular in the village. Inquisitive. A gossip.”

  “A queer?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How did he get on with Mrs. Paston?”

  “Oh, all right, I think. Better than with her husband. He was never reconciled to Ronald’s supplanting him as squire.” I mentioned the episodes of the cuckoo and the Mastership hoax. “But I thought we were talking about money.”

  “The Cards are on their beam ends financially,” suggested Wright.

  “So it seems. But killing Vera wouldn’t—”

  “Fill the exchequer. No. But it could stop the leak in it.” Wright pushed his thumb into an imaginary hole. I stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Who spends the money, such as it is?” he asked.

  “Well, Bertie I suppose. They both run up bills.”

  Inspector Wright gave me a bland look. “So, if one of these gentlemen were hanged or put away, the other would have more money to spend.”

  “That hadn’t occurred to me. But it’s absolutely fantastic to—”

  “Would be saved from bankruptcy, maybe.” Wright paused. “That’s not a negligible motive, Mr. Waterson. And suppose he also had it in for Mrs. Paston—that’d kill two birds with one stone, wouldn’t it? “Wright sketched a catapult shot. “Are you sure neither of the Cards had a personal animosity against her?”

  “Well, she did tell me once that she’d had to repel Alwyn’s advances.”

  “She seems to have told you a lot.”

  “She did. I was very fond of Vera.”

  “Did your wife know of this?”

  “Yes. Good lord, man, you’re not suggesting—?”

  “Before the murder?”

  “I told her about it afterwards.”

  “But she’d have suspected it before then?”

  “Why not ask her?”

  “I have. She rather clammed up on me. What’s she frightened of, Mr. Waterson?”

  “Frightened? Is she? Of course, these practical jokes have preyed on her mind. She had a nervous breakdown not so long ago. And then seeing Mrs. Paston’s horrible death.”

  “That was when she started writing anonymous letters?”

  “How the devil did you know about that?” I exclaimed.

  “Oh, in a case like this we look people up.”

  I felt sick at heart, and could say nothing.

  “Did she worry about this poison-pen outbreak here—whether she might be responsible?”

  “For a little. Fortunately, I was able to reassure her. But I don’t understand what all this could have to do with the murder.”

  Inspector Wright gazed at me ruminatively. “We’ve got quite a problem here. We’ve tried love and money. What about silence as a motive, Mr. Waterson?”

  “Silence?”

  “Did Mrs. Paston know something which would be disastrous to her murderer?” He made a long pause. “She confided in you a lot. I thought you might be able to tell me.”

  “She wouldn’t blackmail anyone—that I’m sure of.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. At present. But suppose she had discovered the poison-pen writer?”

  A dreadful anxiety crept over me. It seemed that Wright was pointing a finger at Jenny. I said, with as much firmness as I could muster, “My wife did not write the anonymous letters we got here. She could not have known about the project to spray scent over Mrs. Paston. Nor did she have access to the poison. Your job is to find its provenance, and—”

  “—and not ask awkward questions?” Wright gave me one of his quick, galvanised smiles. “But that may take some time. And in the meanwhile the murderer may find another victim. Well, there we are. Any other points, Mr. Waterson?”

  “Yes, two. Ronald Paston told me this morning that he suspected his wife was having an affair with Bertie. And, if I were you, I’d think very hard about those practical jokes in relation to the murder.”

  “I shall endeavour to do so, sir, with the aid of Charles Maxwell’s local knowledge.”

  “Is Alwyn Card being kept incommunicado, or may I visit him?”

  “Nobody has been charged yet.” The inspector darted his X-ray eyes at me: I felt they could see into my most guarded thoughts. “You won’t burn your fingers, Mr. Waterson, will you? Murderers are dangerous …”

  The point seemed sufficiently obvious. But, as I walked over to Pydal that afternoon, I could not help reflecting on the equal hazards of evidence. A hundred people had eye-witnessed a murder. They might all give somewhat different accounts of what they had seen, but none would have any hesitation in naming the murderer. Perhaps every eye but mine had been fastened upon the dreadful, moth-like blunderings of the victim, and only I had seen that look of utter stupefaction and horror u
pon Alwyn’s face—a look which I could swear was not feigned, and which made it quite impossible for me to believe that Alwyn was the murderer.

  He was lying on a wicker chaise-longue in the garden, his eyes lack-lustre, his pink cheeks greyish now, with red veins showing. His chubbiness had become puffiness.

  “Good of you to come over, my dear fellow,” he said, shaking my hand limply. “Everyone else treats me as a pariah.”

  “I hope you’re feeling better.”

  “Oh, I shall live, I regret to say. Till they hang me, at any rate.”

  “Come, now, you mustn’t lose heart.”

  “That poor woman!” His eyes glistened. “I simply can’t take it in yet. I feel responsible. Well, damn it, I was responsible.”

  “You were the agent: someone else planted the instrument on you. For what it’s worth, Alwyn, I am entirely convinced that you did not plan the murder.”

  He stared at me hard; then he wrung my hand, dabbed at his eyes, and said brokenly, “My dear chap, I don’t know how to—this means a lot to me.”

  I looked away. A rose-bed, unweeded, put out some yellow blooms. Beyond it, inconsolable as Niobe, a weeping-willow drooped over the stream.

  “But I’m afraid the police will not take your view,” he said presently.

  “The police can take no action till they have traced the source of the prussic acid. So you’ve nothing to fear. I assume you’ve not been buying supplies of the stuff.”

  My feeble joke fell even flatter than it deserved. “That’s the awful thing, John,” he said. “I haven’t bought any. But—I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence—I—we had a few of those cyanide pills—Bertie brought them back from the war, as souvenirs—he had to operate in enemy territory at one time, y’know—with the Resistance.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a facer, isn’t it?”

  “Are they still about, these capsules?”

  “No. You see—” Alwyn’s face was scored with anxiety—“Bertie chucked ’em in the stream. After Vera’s death. Bloody silly of him, I thought, when he told me he’d got rid of them. But his idea was, if the house was searched and they were found, the police would jump at it.”