Jenny’s father joined them for lunch: a gentle-mannered man of sixty who liked surprising his neighbours, whose occasional speeches in the House of Lords were too academic for most of his fellow-peers to understand, and who in the previous season had been fourth in the list of winning racehorse owners. He cultivated eccentricity to hide his toughness; he had nearly doubled the large fortune his father left him. He had spent the morning rubbing ointment into a labrador, writing a vitriolic letter, in German, to a Swiss botanical periodical, arranging nominations to stallions for some of his brood-mares, trying a dozen dry-flies of his own pattern (a body dubbed of pekingese-fur with a gold twist, a dark blue bantam-hackle) and buying, by telephone, a controlling interest in a firm of city wine-merchants.
He asked Nigel, with convincingly simulated interest, where he had been at school.
‘School,’ said Jenny softly.
‘A word,’ said her father affectionately, ‘which I gravely doubt if you can even spell, you grubby little illiterate.’
The elusive memory Jenny had chased in the morning was suddenly pinned on a big white board in her mind. It was necessary to check up on it at once.
‘I must visit Wapshott Castle,’ she said.
‘To what end? To enrol yourself again? You were not a success five years ago.’
‘It’s only twenty miles. Nigel, will you take me?’
‘Of course,’ said Nigel, mystified but anxious to please.
‘Is that why you came?’ said Lord Teffont. ‘To visit your dear old Coll?’
‘No,’ said Jenny. ‘This is a scheme which I have this very second hatched.’
‘Then why did you come, darling?’ asked her mother.
‘To pack, Ma. Clothes for warmer climes.’
‘How lovely it would be if just occasionally we had the least idea what you were doing.’
‘I’m a big girl now.’
‘Yes, such a shame.’
After lunch Jenny packed a few clothes for Italy (she assumed Sandro would send her to Italy) and they left in Nigel’s car by the back drive.
They passed the buildings of the home farm and the neat rectangle of the stud. In a white-railed paddock a group of disconsolate barren mares were being allowed to enjoy the frosty sunshine.
‘Poor loves,’ said Jenny. ‘Probably the stallions’ fault.’
Between a field of winter wheat and a hillside planted with young larch Jenny had a sudden and deeply disquieting thought.
‘I wonder if we’re not being terribly stupid. So far their intelligence has been pretty good.’
‘What?’
‘They linked me with that bloody slipper via my car number. They didn’t take long finding my flat. Two more seconds with a reference book and they know this is where I live.’
‘Yes.’
‘They want to kill us. So we must assume they’ll come here.’
‘If you’re not here does it matter? They won’t assassinate the household.’
‘But, love, I am here. Suppose they started early, rightly guessing where I’d come today. Suppose they looked at the map. Dropped a couple of gentlemen at each lodge. Let’s think. We can’t assume they never have guns. Would they expect me to leave? More to hole up safely in the cellarage, guarded by mastiffs . . . Rifles with telescopic sights is what I’d have, if I was them. Oh dear. They might shoot a maid. We shall have to draw them off or something.’
Nigel looked frightened. But he obediently turned the car and drove back past the stud and the barns and cowsheds.
Jenny tried to think what the enemy would do. She imagined rifles behind the farm buildings. These people were ruthless. They had a lot at stake. It was not yet clear what it was they had at stake; it was clear that it was a lot. Rifles behind the farm buildings were possible. They were even probable.
‘Faster,’ she said to Nigel.
Soon they rolled into the huge paved yard behind the West Wing. Dogs barked at them cheerfully from kennels; other dogs slobbered over them; Old English game bantams stalked about like dandies in a disorganised minuet.
They went through a small door and along miles of stone passage. Larder, still-room, bakery, creamery, laundry; then, nearer the heart of the house, flower-room, rod-room, gun-room, a dog-room or two. They came at last, by a baize-covered door, into the domed immensity of the hall, which was floored by a Roman mosaic plundered from a dig in Tunisia in 1880.
A black 3-8 Jaguar (property of a Lewisham estate agent, as it happened, who was wondering what his son had done with it) had just drawn up. Two nondescript men got out of the back and wandered idly away in different directions. The driver stayed where he was. A fourth man came to the front door, and a bell boomed along the stone passages.
The man at the door had a broad, pink, shiny face and a bald skull. He looked as though he had been shaven too close, by a keen apprentice barber, a few minutes before.
Huxtable, the butler, could be heard ponderously approaching.
‘Oh dear,’ murmured Jenny. ‘Too late. I ought to have briefed Huxtable.’ She pulled Nigel into an alcove behind a tapestry screen.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Huxtable at the door, his voice rising with a stately note of interrogation.
‘I have an urgent message,’ said the shiny man, ‘for Lady Jennifer Norrington.’
‘I’m afraid, sir, that Her Ladyship has this moment left.’
‘She was here?’
‘Yes, sir, for luncheon.’
‘Where has she gone?’
‘May I ask, sir, who wishes to know?’
‘Of course, old boy,’ said naked-face bluffly. ‘Quite right to check.’ He produced a note-case with a cellophane window. ‘Sergeant Reilly, Salisbury C.I.D.’
The card must have looked genuine, at least to Huxtable. Jenny guessed it was genuine.
‘Will you come in, Sergeant?’
‘No thanks, old boy. Just tell me which way Lady Jennifer went.’
Nigel glanced at Jenny, small and silent beside him. He was surprised to see that she had a gun in her hand.
‘Her Ladyship,’ said Huxtable, ‘announced her intention of visiting Wapshott Castle. A school. Thank you, Sergeant.’
This name had a visible, though momentary, effect on the Sergeant. His face seemed to flame for an instant. He was immediately under control again. He thanked Huxtable, and in a few seconds the Jaguar spun its wheels in the gravel and rocketed away down the front drive.
‘That solves one problem,’ said Jenny, ‘but at the same time creates new ones. Of course they’re going the long way round. But quickly.’
‘What we can do is go straight back to London!’ said Nigel.
‘No, love. I absolutely must chat to old Winnie.’
‘Winnie . . . ?’
‘Miss Olivia Winstanley, M.A. Cantab., teacher of history at Wapshott Castle, the greatly overpriced seminary for the daughters of the nobility and gentry.’
‘We can’t go there!’
‘It’s only twenty miles, pet.’
‘But they’ll be there!’
‘Come along.’
As they drove, Jenny said: ‘Did you recognise that bogus Sergeant?’
‘No,’ said Nigel. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure. Did you?’
‘I’m not sure either,’ said Jenny crossly. ‘Vexing. If we could only tail him—’
‘Tail him?’
‘But we can’t. Do go faster.’
‘Here,’ said Jenny, ‘my local knowledge is going to be lovely and handy. I do hope I can remember.’
Nigel drove past the Victorian gates of Wapshott Castle and up a bone-rattling track of frozen and bumpy mud, and berthed the car in the lee of a tangle of yew and rhododendron.
‘Loathsome shrubs,’ said Jenny, ‘but at least they keep their leaves.’
‘Do you always carry a gun?’
‘Not always. Let’s think a minute. They’ll have got here. They’ll have asked and been told we haven’t arrived. They’ll wait. Where? Three of them not counting the driver. Some here, some there.’
We can’t get in!’
‘Hush, love. Fright is right but panic is manic. Original, yes? Think more . . . They’ll want me going in if possible, rather than coming out, if what I guess is true. The great thing is, they don’t know we know they’re here. Yes. It won’t be difficult at all. How’s your head for heights?’
‘Fair.’
‘It better be. Come on.’
She led Nigel through a long and winding tunnel of shrubbery. In warmer weather it would have been boggy; even in this hard bright weather it squelched and stank.
They rounded a fallen willow, branches tangled with brambles and dead briony. Jenny gestured Nigel to caution and silence. They peered through a lattice of twigs.
The house loomed thirty yards away – a crenellated Victorian pile with whimsical towers and stained glass in some of the windows. Smart, incongruous modern additions of glass and blond wood stuck out at the flanks; there were bicycle-sheds and tennis-courts, and bleak playing fields laid out in the park beyond.
No Jaguar.
It suddenly seemed to Nigel that they were behaving like idiots. The men had gone away. They could walk up to the school and go in. He was about to say this to Jenny, in a sensible normal voice, when he suddenly smelled tobacco. Surely even Jenny, if she seriously thought they were in danger . . . He saw by her face that she smelled it too. She sniffed, turning her head. She looked like a hind on a Highland hillside, aware of danger but uncertain of its direction; and she looked like a beast of prey.
In this close woody place, and in a valley between hills, the light wind eddied and shifted. But the smoker was close.
A twig snapped, a few yards to their left front.
Jenny’s face cleared. She took out her gun. Then she put it away again and took out a vicious little flexible cosh. Her movements were confident, stealthy, unhurried. Her expression was abstracted and serious: she wore no face Nigel had ever seen her wear before.
She gestured to Nigel to stay where he was, then slid without sound behind an unkempt yew. She moved slowly. The cosh hung from her wrist by a loop.
Nigel’s heart pounded loudly in his throat.
He thought he heard the chunk of cosh on skull; he certainly heard the rustle and thud of a body falling in dense undergrowth.
Jenny was beside him again. On her face was her normal expression of tranquil silliness.
‘He didn’t see my face,’ she murmured. ‘And I’ve never seen him before. We might do something with this . . . ‘It was a heavy, blued revolver with a short barrel. ‘Do you fancy it, love?’
Nigel recoiled and shook his head.
‘Probably wise. Clumsy great thing, and they do go off with such a bang.’
She thrust it, with a small and contemptuous foot, into a muddy crevice among leaves and brambles. ‘I wonder where the others are?’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘It occurred to me. I’m probably wrong, but I decided not to. So horrid for the school, stiffs all over the pleasure-grounds.’
‘Would you have?’
She looked at him without expression. ‘Yes, love. Come on.’
Some birches and brooms covered them to a bicycle-shed which ran up to the wall of the house.
‘Here’s where we creep discreetly in,’ said Jenny chattily.
‘How?’ asked Nigel in a sick voice.
‘Up. Watch. Move quick.’
Jenny slid from the oily gloom of the stacked bicycles to the base of a fat drain-pipe. She went up it like a cat and swung over the mock battlements of a squat tower.
Nigel gulped and followed. The drain-pipe was square and hurt his hands. The uneven stone of the wall made the climb quite easy, but his skin crawled with imagined firearms in the woods behind him. He climbed and climbed, hand over hand, clutching the drain-pipe, toes finding the deep gaps between the stones. The drain-pipe curved into the wall, to serve a gutter behind the battlements. There were two full feet of bare stone above its top. Nigel gulped. He was streaming with sweat in spite of the cold. A small dirty hand thrust down and caught his arm and he tumbled over the battlements on to a flat lead roof.
‘I wonder who saw us? I don’t think they’d watch this side at all. No doors. Anyway, the next bit’s in cover.’
The next bit was a ledge at the edge of a sloping roof; it bordered a well, gaping to the left, which lit the basements.
Jenny sped across and turned and stood waiting.
Nigel started more slowly. He glanced involuntarily to his left and down: to emptiness, and to granite and concrete and glass a very long way down.
He stuck. His body swayed and his eyes swivelled. He began to tremble violently.
He felt himself somehow pulled and steered to the solidity of gently sloping leads.
His head cleared. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.
‘Vertige, pet. Nothing in the world to be ashamed of. I ought to have thought. I’ve done that crossing a million times, on little expeditions while I was here. In fact that’s why they sort of expelled me, too humiliating. Coming back from Salisbury races. It was worth it, I made eighteen bob . . . Actually, love, I don’t quite know why you’re here. Lovely to have you, of course, but you could perfectly well have stayed in the car.’
Nigel was speechless.
Jenny led him through an open window and they jumped down into a room. It had several beds, with chests-of-drawers and teddy bears. A number of half-dressed thirteen-year-olds were changing for outdoor exercise. They screamed and giggled. Nigel eyed with interest a naked redhead who was pretending to have hysterics. Her little breasts shook; in two years’ time she would be a menace.
Jenny saw this, and laughed, and pulled Nigel out into a passage.
The rickety attic stairs widened as they descended and the plasterwork became formal. The corridors grew broader and had higher ceilings.
‘Will that pink man come in?’ asked Nigel.
Jenny had asked herself the same question. ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘On what excuse? He’s banged on the door once and they told him we hadn’t got here. So they’ll sit and wait. They could go all stone-age and grab a few girls as hostages, but I don’t think they will. They’ll wait for us to come in, or if they saw us go in they’ll wait for us to come out. I somehow feel they don’t want a huge stink. I somehow feel their boss wouldn’t like it.’
‘Small-head.’
‘Yes. No guns when we had our little motor-race. A niminy-piminy master criminal. How I dislike him.’
‘How do we get out?’
‘Good question. But premature, pet. Let’s get what we came for first.’
‘Which is what, for God’s sake?’
‘A bit of background information.’
They were now in a land of broad passages with carpets. Jenny knocked on a heavy mahogany door.
‘Come in.’
Miss Winstanley was rising sixty, small, sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed. She wore a mid-calf tweed skirt and a heavy woollen twin-set. Gold-rimmed spectacles were a little askew on her nose. The arrangement of her grey hair was old-fashioned and apparently done in the dark.
She was sitting at a desk correcting exercise-books.
‘Jennifer,’ she said sharply, ‘there is no reason for you to come and see me with such dirty paws. How lovely to see you, darling. Go and wash them this second. Who is your friend? Do sit down, Mr Er— There is nowhere, I’m afraid, in this part of the building, where I can encourage you to wash your hands.’
‘I’m afraid,’ began Nigel.
Jenny scurried away, in manner as in appearance no older than the scandalised girls in the upstairs dormitory. She giggled as she went along well-remembered passages to the dim cream paint of a well-remembered bathroom. She loved contradictory people. Sandro, who pretended aristocratic languor and was a dynamo. Colly, who pretended torpor and was a terrier. And Winnie, who pretended to be meek and shockable and was an unshockable latent Mafiosa.
She scrubbed her hands, sniffing the well-remembered smell of wholesome school soap. She found a gap-toothed comb and combed her hair.
When she got back to Winnie’s room Nigel was refusing cocoa.
‘What about that girl who disappeared?’ she asked abruptly.
Miss Winstanley’s face became wooden.
‘It’s important, Winnie. The one who ran away and nobody could find her.’
‘There was,’ Miss Winstanley said carefully, ‘some two or three months ago, a child who very ungratefully deserted from our little community here.’
‘Charlotte something.’
‘Caroline Harper-Clarke. Her parents were quite abusive.’
‘Could she have been kidnapped?’
‘Her parents, as far as I know, never received any note from anyone. Any ransom demand.’
‘Where and how was she found?’
‘She never was,’ said Miss Winstanley heavily. ‘I have stopped brooding about it as often as I used.’
‘There must have been quite a teeny hue and cry?’
‘Yes and no. Yes, I know Sir George Harper-Clarke spent a great deal of money. At the same time they were terrified of publicity.’
‘Publicity is how you find missing persons. Little blurry snap in the News of the World. Then when someone goes to a strip-club and on dances the birdie . . . ’
‘Of course, darling, as I told them. But no, it all had to be discreet. Sir George is Chairman of a number of companies, Lady Harper-Clarke frequently appears on the social page of The Times . . . ’
‘Oh dear.’
‘So lots of private detectives came and asked impertinent questions – odious little men in macintoshes, costing I believe the earth.’
‘Was she a nice girl?’
‘Difficult. Not evil. Self-willed, over-indulged, an only child.’
‘Beastly for her parents.’
‘Difficult people. Her mother had been a beauty, oh, I well remember . . . ’
‘So Caroline is pretty?’
‘Far too pretty. Old for her age. Dreadfully spoilt.’
‘Bad habits?’
‘I don’t think I understand you.’
‘Do you think she ever tried taking drugs?’
‘Quite inconceivable. She was not a degenerate.’
‘Why do you say “was”, Winnie?’
‘Whatever became of the child, Jennifer, it would be foolish to assume that she is continuing her education or living according to the principles by which we govern our lives here at Wapshott.’
‘Would anybody have her measurements?’
‘The sewing-room maids might have kept them. Whatever for? Besides, Caroline was still growing.’
‘Why really did she do a bunk?’
Miss Winstanley shrugged. ‘She was bored and restless. Girls nowadays mature so fast . . . I sometimes wonder if we get through to some of them at all. We seem irrelevant to them. Caroline . . . Caroline, I think, simply felt it was time she started to live.’
‘Yes. Poor little beast.’
‘Jennifer – what is your concern in this dreadful affair? How is Mr Heywood involved?’
Jenny glanced at Nigel before she answered. ‘Another girl we know has just disappeared. Kidnapped. I slightly feel, some weeny instinct tells me, there might be a link.’
‘You were always, Jennifer,’ said Miss Winstanley drily, ‘more inclined to rely on instinct than on the academic and intellectual disciplines.’
‘Horribly true. I used to bleed for you all.’
‘What do you think happened to Caroline?’
‘I think girls of a certain type, meeting some bizarrely precise specification, are being popped into bottles and used for something.’
‘White slaving,’ said Miss Winstanley instantly.
‘Yes of course, Winnie. But I think there must be more to it. The trouble they take.’
‘Can I help?’
‘Yes. Now and later. Later I’m not sure how, but I’m groping towards a scheme—’
‘Oh Lord,’ groaned Nigel softly.
‘I bleed for you too, pet.’ Jenny turned back to her old history mistress. ‘What you can do now is somehow smuggle us out of here.’
‘Out past whom? The Head?’
‘Yes, there’s no need to worry Miss Trimingham. But also out past some gentlemen in the woodlands.’
‘Who followed you here?’
‘In a sense.’
‘Right.’ Miss Winstanley addressed herself, without visible surprise or shock, to the immediate problem. ‘You offer no difficulty, darling. You can join a group of girls on a run.’
‘In bloomers? Heavens what camouflage.’
‘As to Mr Heywood . . . ’ Miss Winstanley frowned. ‘He would not be convincing dressed up as a mistress.’
Jenny gurgled with laughter. ‘Then a master? Music-master? Like Figaro?’
‘Yes. A thick scarf. A bicycle. A music-case. A pair of my spectacles.’
‘I won’t do it!’ said Nigel.
‘You wouldn’t be happy here, love.’ Then Jenny remembered the vibrating redhead. ‘Or perhaps too happy.’
‘It is not to be contemplated,’ said Miss Winstanley primly.
‘Couldn’t we wait until it’s dark?’ pleaded Nigel.
‘I’m not wild about their finding our car.’
‘Oh.’
Jenny’s appearance, among a mauve-legged party of girls thought to need exercise, did not excite much surprise. Old girls who visited the school often, nostalgically, joined in at netball or hymn-singing.
The party was formed up in a back passage by a strap-pig young games-mistress who had been non-committally briefed by Miss Winstanley. They ran, in a close-packed group, out of the back, past the bicycle-sheds, and down the drive. Jenny, anonymous in borrowed bloomers, kept between a sixteen-year-old called Daphne on her left and Samantha, slightly older, on her right. Daphne’s enormous bust jounced up and down as she ran. Samantha’s cheeks crimsoned like Canadian apples.
Jenny was vividly aware of hard, imagined eyes looking out from the dense rhododendrons. She kept her own eyes to the front and tried to run with the wobbly self-consciousness of a teenager.
At the foot of the drive she peeled off from the party and ran warily, just off the road, to the hidden M.G.B.
She got into the car, lit a cigarette, and sat waiting for Nigel.
Nigel’s disguise was a little more trouble but not much. Miss Winstanley conducted him downstairs; he was saluted, without suspicion, by an elderly mistress and a nice little matron.
At a side-door he clambered on to an elderly bicycle (it belonged to the night-watchman). Miss Winstanley said goodbye and wished him luck.
He pursued a snipe-like course over the gravel sweep in front of the house. The bicycle’s steering was odd. Then he grew more confident and bicycled briskly down the drive.
He passed close to a tangle of laurel. A stick was thrust out, into the spokes of his front wheel. The bicycle toppled forward and sideways and Nigel fell over the handlebars on to his head. A blaze of fire filled his brain and he was out cold.
‘Bring him round,’ said a large dark man. ‘He can take us to the girl.’