The Doomsday Carrier

by Victor Canning

  “How can he possibly stay free up to anywhere near that point? With all this publicity he’s got to be spotted and caught. Damn it, he’s not loose in some great jungle—this is England.” Grandison, tempted to indulge himself in the comment that England, too, was a jungle of a kind, said, “Because it doesn’t need a miracle now to keep him free. Just consider it this way—religion, politics and a love of animals produce more fanatics in this country than anything else. In any body of dedicated people there’s always some who go over the limit. Somebody may pick Charlie up and keep him hidden, thinking they are saving him from a fate worse than death. That’s why right from the start the truth should have been told, that Charlie’s a potential plague or, at least, a serious disease carrier. There’d have been a terrific outcry—but, by God, you’d have had the public on your side and against Charlie. High principles, cocking a snook at authority, fanaticism would be forgotten. Not a soul in this country would risk plague on Charlie’s behalf.”

  In the House of Commons late that afternoon, a junior minister for the Ministry of Defence made an announcement that unfortunately owing to an administrative misunderstanding it had been stated that Charlie had escaped while on his way to Fadledean whereas, in fact, it now transpired that he had escaped from Fadledean where he had been the subject of a routine series of studies in animal behaviour.

  Every press agency, every news editor of newspaper, radio and television knew then that the Charlie story was not just a summer gift from the gods to wither in a few days. Charlie was hard news, a rich vein that could be mined, perhaps, even after he was recaptured, and knew also that it was far too late for any government interference to hamper them in their duty to the public, their papers’ circulations or their audience ratings.

  * * * *

  When Charlie woke that morning it was raining softly and steadily. After leaving Harry Swinton he had wandered along the smooth flank of a long line of downland feeling ill and occasionally attacked by bouts of shivering until he had come to a large, horseshoe-shaped chalk cutting which bit back into the slope of the hill. Chalk had long ceased to be taken from the cutting and along its top curve had grown up a tall standing of beech trees. Thick thorn growths matted the sides of the great pit and between them grew a thin covering of rabbit-bitten grass, bright now with flowering scabious, milkwort and yellow bedstraw. The floor of the quarry was littered with abandoned junk, old prams, bicycles, derelict motor cars, broken boxes, rusty cans, twisted sheets of corrugated iron, piles of builders’ plaster, brick and stone clearings, old sacks, old clothes, all the sad and sorry and ugly cast-offs of careless mankind which, as it crumbled, rotted and rusted away, was being slowly mantled by a tall growth of hog-weed, nettles, thistles, burdock and wild mallow. His head aching, whimpering to himself in his distress, Charlie had, with the last light, clambered into the body of an old saloon car and curled up on the ripped leather of the back seat. He had shivered and complained his way through a night of constantly broken sleep and two more attacks of vomiting.

  Waking he found his throat and mouth dry and the need for drink urgent in him. He clambered weakly out of the car, drank from a scum-covered pool in a choked ditch just outside the quarry, and then sat in the rain. Listlessly with his fingers he combed and groomed at his pelt but soon gave up and wandered back into the quarry. His natural instinct, ill though he was, for cleanliness and dry bedding took him away from the car in which he had passed the night to find another. He finally bedded down in the body of a wrecked van which held a litter of old newspapers and paper sacks which were dry. He slept on and off, shivering but no longer vomiting, chattering and moaning to himself in his sleep as well as his waking periods. He lay there all day, undisturbed, while the soft rain moved away to the east and left the skies clear. Then at night, with the new moon passing now into the thinnest nail-paring of its first quarter, Charlie left the van, still far from well, but moved by the stir of a faintly reviving hunger.

  He worked his way weakly up the side of the cutting, pulling at the hawthorn leaves to make a wad on which he chewed without relish. Under the row of beech trees at the top of the quarry he found a growth of puff-balls and one or two wrinkle-topped morel fungi and ate them. Then, crossing the crest of the down, he found in a field bordering a small road a crop of cabbages. He squatted among them and ate for a while without appetite. He crossed the small road after midnight and, climbing through a gap in the broken-down wall which had once been the boundary of a large estate, moved downhill through rough pasture land to find himself in the bed of a twisting valley through which ran a small stream. He drank his fill and, beginning to feel better, waded across the shallow stream and curled up in a patch of tall new bracken on the far side. Two hundred yards down the valley the stream flowed into a small lake, its surface plated with water-lily growths, its verges flanked by tall banks of meadowsweet, mace reed and yellow irises.

  Looking down over the lake and separated from it by a rough sloping lawn was a large, red-brick Tudor house, called Deanfinch Hall, the family home of the holders of the once large estate through whose broken wall Charlie had scrambled, and the home of a member of that ancient family—Lady Cynthia Chickley, who now occupied one wing of the large, rambling mansion.

  At eight o’clock Lady Cynthia was having breakfast in the morning room, whose mullioned windows looked down across the rough stretch of lawn to the lake. The lawn was rough and starred with flowers not because Lady Cynthia was so hard up that she could not afford a gardener. She had plenty of money, far more than she needed, in fact, but she hated trim, barbered lawns and she acclaimed the beauty of flowering weeds with the same delight as she did the splendours of the blooms at the Chelsea Flower Show. Except for the Deanfinch walled fruit and vegetable garden, the rest of the nine-acre estate had been allowed to grow more or less naturally into a path-cut wilderness of rhododendron thickets and copses of specimen and wild trees. No more than a little light pruning and the removal of dead or fallen trees and shrubs was ever done. In the lake at the foot of the lawn twenty-pound mirror carp and great golden orfe would come to her hand to be fed. She loved cats for their individuality and self-reliance and kept six of different breeds. But she would tolerate no dogs on the estate, considering them to be sycophants and disturbers of the peace. She was a charitable, far from gullible, unmarried lady in her late forties, who spoke her mind and had no fear of defending her principles with vigorous action. She had been in love once, when she was thirty, but her fiance, a titled barrister of great promise, had slipped to his death while climbing in Switzerland. She was a tall, rawboned woman with straight, pale straw-coloured hair, soft grey eyes and a long, plain face with a slightly hooked and prominent nose. The clothes she wore tended to be plain, durable and many years out of fashion. She liked good plain food which was provided by her good, plain and elderly cook, kept a good cellar, had a knowledge and appreciation of wines and port which had come to her from her noble father, and she drank her whisky straight and enjoyed a good cigar or cheroot.

  Finishing her breakfast, she poured herself another cup of coffee, lit a cheroot and went on reading the Daily Telegraph. After a while her cook, Mrs Paget, came into the room. Lady Cynthia had three servants, Mrs Paget and her husband, Tom Paget, the gardener, and also Lily Harkness, a quiet efficient widow of fifty, childless, who had been at Deanfinch Hall for fifteen years. All these were devoted to Lady Cynthia and lived on the estate, the Pagets in their cottage close to the drive entrance and Lily in her own rooms at the top of the occupied wing.

  Mrs Paget, a round-faced, plump woman of sixty said, “If you please, me lady, Paget says could he have a word with you?”

  “Of course. Tell him to come in.”

  A few moments later Paget came in, a hard-bodied, roundshouldered, elderly man who, like all good gardeners, never hurried, never got flustered and matched his rhythms to those of nature.

  “What’s the trouble, Paget?” asked Lady Cynthia.

  “Well, ma’am,
I don’t rightly know as it’s trouble, but there’s a kind of monkey thing in the walled garden.”

  “Monkey thing?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I see. Well let’s go and have a look at it.”

  Lady Cynthia walked down through the shrubberies to the high-walled garden. The iron-barred gate of the arched entrance was closed.

  “When I saw ’im in there, ma’am, I shut the gate and come right up to you.”

  Lady Cynthia opened the gate and went into the garden which Paget kept immaculately, sublimating here the instinct for order and neatness denied him in the rest of the garden. Each plot was edged with low, neatly trimmed box edging, the dark soil showed no weeds.

  Charlie was sitting in the middle of a strawberry bed next to a large netted section under which grew raspberries and gooseberries. He had eaten his fill of strawberries and sat now sucking at a length of com stalk which he had taken from the straw layering which Paget had put around the fruit plants. Although he looked bedraggled and unkempt, he was feeling much better and recovering fast. Seeing Lady Cynthia coming towards him he raised his head, thrust out his chin and gave a few friendly pant-hoots. Charlie liked company. Slowly he rose to his feet and waddled upright across the bed to Lady Cynthia.

  Lady Cynthia knew all about Charlie. She had followed the first news of his escape with interest and, only a few minutes before, had been reading the latest information about him in the Daily Telegraph. She knew a great deal, too, about places like Fadledean and had little tolerance for such establishments.

  As Charlie came up to her, she bent and reached out a hand to him and said gently, “Well, Charlie—fancy you coming here.”

  Charlie, sensing her friendliness, took her hand in his as he had often done with Jean Blackwell and many of his other keepers, and drawing back his lips gave a soft waa-waa-waa. “He seems friendly enough, ma’am,” said Paget.

  “Of course he is. After all we are distantly related.”

  Lady Cynthia turned and began to walk back towards the gate and Charlie, holding her hand, went with her.

  Paget, following behind, knowing that even after all his years of service with Lady Cynthia he could never be sure what she might or might not do, said, “What’s to be done about him, ma’am?”

  “That’s a good question, Paget, and I’ll have to think about it. But for the moment he’s our guest and must be treated as such. He looks as though he’s spent a few rough nights out.”

  “Papers were full of him this morning, ma’am. I suppose we ought really to let someone know.”

  Over her shoulder, and a little flattered at the friendly way in which Charlie seemed to have taken to her, walking along at her side chattering happily to himself, Lady Cynthia said, “It’s much too early to start supposing anything, Paget. For the time being we’ll put him in the old billiard room.”

  Half an hour later Charlie was installed in the old billiard room in an unused wing of Deanfinch Hall. The room, an Edwardian addition to the house, had been built originally as a conservatory projecting from the side of the wing into a small, yew-hedged garden and had later been converted into a billiard room, leaving only the glass roof intact. The place now held only broken furniture and packing cases and a miscellany of the odds and ends of household junk which had accumulated in a family with a reluctance to throw things away which might at some time or other come in useful. Paget brought in two bales of straw and broke them open to cover the floor and make a bedding place for Charlie. A large tin bowl was found for water and an old feeding trough for food. While Paget prepared the place, Lady Cynthia brought Charlie fruit to eat and when he had taken some of it, she squatted alongside him and, talking quietly to him, she gave him a good grooming with an old hairbrush, a service for which Charlie showed his appreciation by chattering and calling, beating his hands together and occasionally rolling away from her to do a quick somersault before returning for more brushing.

  When she had finished she sent Paget to the kitchen to get a bowl of warm milk, saying, “Tell your wife to put a few drops of her cooking brandy in it.”

  Coming back with the bowl Paget said, “Well, me lady, he certainly looks a different chap from what he did a little while ago. Seems to have a nice nature, too.” Then, as he watched Lady Cynthia hand the bowl to Charlie, who took it and drank, pausing now and then to grin at her, his lips rimmed with a white beard of milk, Paget—who after years of service could read his mistress’s mind sometimes faster than she could make it up—said reflectively, “Course, if he was going to be staying a while, I could clear this place out and rig it up proper. Hang a few climbing ropes from the roof beams and get in a few bits of old dead tree like for him to scramble about on. That’s if he was going to be here any time.”

  Lady Cynthia, watching Charlie who was now moving around in a tight circle in his loose straw to make a bed, smiled to herself and said, “I don’t know that we could do that, Paget. He’s government property.”

  “So he might be, ma’am. But he wasn’t anybody’s property but his own when whoever it was pinched him out of his jungle. So I think he’s—”

  “Paget . . .” Lady Cynthia shook her head at him. “So you think he’s nobody’s chimpanzee but his own?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it. In the meantime I’d like you to stop trying to make up my mind for me.”

  “Yes, me lady.”

  When Charlie had settled down and showed signs of going to sleep, Lady Cynthia went to the drawing-room, poured herself a large glass of dry sherry, lit a thin cheroot, and settled down to think about Charlie. God, she thought, in Whom she believed but with Whom she had only an irregular nodding acquaintance in any formal way through the offices of the Church, would instruct her in her proper duty. But first He would expect her to try and sort things out for herself before He made any clear sign. So while she smoked and sipped her sherry she considered the case of Charlie. Outside, while she considered, Adonis blue and large white butterflies moved across the rough lawn, a spotted flycatcher that nested in the thick Virginia creeper tangle that grew up the face of the house made darting, hovering forays to take flies for its young, the mirror face of the far lake was shattered by the sudden leaping of a shoal of young dace as a pike chased them, and the kitchen tabby cat moved up the gravel path carrying a young rabbit in its mouth. Birth, life and death, thought Lady Cynthia, the lot of all God’s creatures. But of all God’s creatures only man had developed the habit of imprisoning his own kind and the rest of God’s kind. Maybe, she thought, this was what God intended should happen. Well, if he did, then it was up to Him to tell her so because she couldn’t believe that he really approved of places like Fadledean and the way—if all the stories were true, and why would there be smoke without fire?—they used animals and had used or intended to use Charlie. She gave the matter a great deal of thought and had another glass of sherry and another cheroot. Then with her own mind quite firm decided to refer the judgment to a higher authority. From the walnut bureau at the side of the window she fetched a well-thumbed pack of cards which she had used many times before for the same purpose. She shuffled the pack well and then began to deal the cards out before her face upwards. If God wanted her to save Charlie from Fadledean all He had to do was to see that a red ace turned up before a black one. And it did. The ace of hearts.

  Ten minutes later she stood in the kitchen addressing her staff who, knowing her so well, and having already discussed the matter between themselves, were not surprised when she told them that she was going to keep Charlie until she had decided the right thing to do with him to make sure that he never went back to Fadledean. Until then they were to tell no one that he was at Deanfinch Hall, and if there should be any subsequent trouble about this she would accept full responsibility. Each of them readily gave their word.

  After she was gone Paget said, “I could have told you this would happen the moment Charlie took her hand and began to trot alongside
her.”

  Mrs Paget said, “She should have married—no matter the first upset—and had children.”

  Lily, whose mind often worked obliquely, said, “You don’t always have children even when married—and not from want of trying because if anyone was a real trier, my dear old Fred was. Nothing wrong with either of us, too, the doctor said.”

  Mr and Mrs Paget said nothing. They had had three children and they had all emigrated to Australia which, they often felt, was the same as not having children.

  Meanwhile in the morning-room Lady Cynthia was speaking over the telephone to Horace Simbath in his London flat. On the telephone her voice—particularly when she spoke to Horace—tended to become a shade imperious and commanding.

  “Horace,” she said, “I would like you to come down as soon as you can to discuss a very important matter with me . . . No, I can’t discuss it over the telephone, but I can say that it is something which will be very much to your advantage. When can you come? . . . Tomorrow—that’s good. And drive carefully. No daydreaming.”

  * * * *

  That night, before going to bed, Jean sat at the small table before her open bedroom window and re-read the letter from George which Rimster had brought her the day before. The night was still, the air warm and heavily scented with the perfume from a bed of stocks which grew along the inner edge of the terrace below. Now and again a little owl screeched down by the river and once a falling star scored a slash of pastel blue and gold across the pale midsummer sky.