CHAPTER 8
The Bug
DECEMBER 30
ELASTIC, KEPT STRETCHED too long, loses its tension. At the Guest House on Sunday morning there was an atmosphere, slack and sagging, of nervous exhaustion. Elena Wragby had sat at breakfast, stony-faced, eating little, eyes downcast as if to avoid looking at the chair occupied once by Lucy. Her husband was attentive to her, in an absent-minded way, but she could make little response and his ear kept waiting for the expected sound of the telephone. Why hadn’t they rung him since yesterday? The morning dragged on, and still there was not a word. They’d said he’d be getting new instructions from them: but no instructions came—which preyed upon Wragby’s nerve all the more because he had privately made up his mind what line to take when they did come.
The wind had dropped again in the night, and a very severe frost turned the road-surfaces, on which the snow had begun to melt a little yesterday, into stretches of ice. At 10.50 the Admiral and his wife went off to the village church, slipping and supporting each other like drunks.
In the sitting-room, Lance Atterson was strumming on his guitar, while Cherry’s fat little body jerked to the rhythms, unconsciously, like the body of a dog twitching in its sleep. Justin Leake was reading a paper-back with a lurid cover: that is to say, he had the book open in his hand, but he never seemed to turn a page, and the book might just as well be reading him—as Nigel would have liked to, but the man was indecipherable. There could be little doubt what game he was playing here: but was he covertly playing another game at the same time?
Superintendent Sparkes had rung Nigel last night.
‘The Surrey chums have come through at last,’ he said. ‘Sir James Allenby wasn’t at home—called away suddenly to Stockholm, but they interviewed the housekeeper.’ A note of wry amusement came into Sparkes’s voice. ‘Your Cherry—it seems she really is Miss Smith. Frobisher-Smith, to be precise. Sir James’s ward. Aged sixteen years, ten months.’
‘Well, that tidies up that one. You’re going to let it ride for a bit?’
‘I certainly am. If she lays information against our friend, or vice versa, I’ll have to act. Not till then.’
‘Conniving at malpractices, eh?’
‘Just so.’
‘Nothing about Lucy yet?’
‘Nothing. We’ve combed nearly all the likely places hereabouts. It’s getting me down.’
‘What about that telephone call to Wragby from London?’
‘Came from a flat whose tenant is abroad. Can’t trace him yet. Maybe an undercover Party member. Wish you could break through to the contact at this end.’
‘The informer? I think I know who that is.’
‘You do, do you?’
‘Yes.’ Nigel told him a name. There was a long silence. ‘Well, that’d be a turn-up for the book,’ said Sparkes at last …
Nigel and Clare had talked till midnight. He had gone into her room, adjoining his, and sat down on the bed. ‘You look more beautiful than ever, Clare love,’ he said, admiring the magnolia-white skin of her face and shoulders, the gloss of the black hair that cascaded about them.
‘Shall we make love?’ She gazed up at him. ‘No, you want me to do something else for you. Tell me.’
‘This is what comes of living with a witch. Simply can’t have a private thought of my own.’
‘You know you couldn’t live with anyone else, my darling,’ she replied, not possessively, not anxiously—with the affectionate detachment that kept her so charming for him.
‘You could say no. I wouldn’t blame you. It’s a fairly beastly job.’
‘Well, go on.’
‘Like being given a knife and asked to go and twist it in someone else’s wound.’
‘Yes?’
‘And that person may not deserve it, may be quite innocent.’
Clare’s eyes were fastened upon his worried face. In her high, light voice, she said, ‘You mean Elena Wragby.’
‘Clairvoyant again.’
‘No. It’s just that we know each other so well, bless you. Also, I’ve got some brains.’
‘And the loveliest body. Put on your bed-jacket. I want to keep my mind on the problem.’
Nigel began to talk, her hand in his, her fingers stroking his. The problem was the identity of the kidnappers’ accomplice. They had been tipped off about the trap at the G.P.O. How? Either by telephone from Downcombe or by making some sort of contact in Belcaster. The only suspicious call from the Guest House that morning was Mrs ffrench-Sullivan’s. But she had telephoned a wire. You don’t do that unless you are not sure whether the recipient will be at home: if the friend, Mrs Hollins, was in the kidnapping plot, she would certainly stay at home awaiting any message that might come from the Guest House.
‘Neither the Admiral nor his wife left the Guest House that morning. Leake, Lance Atterson and Cherry went into Belcaster. Unless they’re all in the plot together, which I don’t believe, they clear one another fairly adequately for most of the time they spent there. Of course, one of them could have given a warning sign to the kidnappers, unnoticed by the other two. But our X must have thought it more than likely that the police would shadow any of us who went into Belcaster: I don’t believe he’d have risked making any sort of contact there. And remember, he could have nothing more than Wragby’s hints to go on: Wragby said he’d make a fight of it: he did not even hint that the information he was going to deposit in the G.P.O. would be bogus. But the kidnappers knew it was bogus without seeing it.’
‘So you’re left with Elena?’
‘Elena rang some friends after breakfast, from the village call-box. Unfortunately we didn’t have those calls monitored till a little later. There was nothing to prevent her putting through another, and there’s no evidence that she didn’t. But the main point is this—Wragby told her exactly what he and the police had planned. She was the only person here, apart from myself, who knew the details of it.’
‘I see,’ said Clare after a pause. ‘I see, but I don’t believe. She loves Lucy. That I’m sure of. Nothing could induce her to—why, it’s utterly fantastic. And I thought she’d been thoroughly screened by the authorities.’
‘So did they. I’ve been in touch with the department, and they’re bringing out their fine-tooth combs to start all over again. But it’ll take time. And time’s what we haven’t got. It may be too late already,’ Nigel added bleakly.
‘You must assume that Lucy’s alive still.’
‘Or pack it up. I know. I admire Elena. I like her. But we’ve no notion what pressures the other side may not be able to put on her … Tell me again what happened when you broke the news to her.’
Clare told him.
‘Doesn’t it strike you that she overplayed the scene? You knocked at her bedroom door and went in. Before you told her anything, she assumed that Lucy had met with some accident. She looked distraught. If she’d genuinely been so worried about the child’s absence, wouldn’t she have come downstairs, asked if Lucy had returned, gone out to look for her? Her behaviour was that of a woman who knew what had happened, was appalled by it, couldn’t face it. She tried to explain her distraction by telling you she blamed herself bitterly for having sent Lucy down to post the letters. That was clever. It was also genuine. I’ve no doubt her conscience was torturing her about it. She’s not a wicked woman.’
Clare’s eyes opened at him, dark and lustrous as pansies. ‘I see. It’s an intelligent deduction all right. But you say she’s not wicked. What on earth could compel a decent woman to sacrifice a child she loves for a Cause she hates?’
‘That’s for you to find out, my dear.’
‘Me? But, good God——’
‘If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I’ll eat dirt. If Elena’s innocent, it’ll be another turn of the screw for her. I hate the possibility. But Lucy is more important than her stepmother’s feelings.’
After a long silence, Clare said, ‘What do you want me to do …?’
That afternoon Clare went up to the Wragbys’ room with her sketching block and charcoal pencils. Elena had been persuaded by her husband to sit for Clare.
‘It’s very good of you to let me——’
‘I’m honoured. Alfred said it would be—what is the word?— therapeutic,’ Elena replied with a sad, bitter little quirk of the mouth. She sat down as Clare directed, on an upright chair by the window, falling fluently into an attitude of repose which belied the tautness of her face, the nervous tic that now and then twitched the skin at the side of her temples. Clare gazed for a minute or two at the proud, ravaged profile, feeling for the bone structure beneath, trying to clear her mind of everything but the forms it presented, before she took up her pencil. With the instinctive respect of one artist for another’s work, Elena remained silent during this scrutiny. When the pencil made its first bold sweep on the paper, she asked, ‘Do you generally start your portrait heads with sketches like this, my dear?’
‘No. I prefer modelling straight off with the clay, but I haven’t brought any. Raise your chin, just a fraction: that’s it … You must have sat for many painters in your own country.’
‘Ah, yes. In my young days. I was beautiful then. My husband—my first husband—painted me often.’
‘Your face is the kind that will age into greater beauty. Tell me about him.’
‘Oh, he was a wild one. But very talented. Very brave. As an artist he chafed under the regime.’
‘Socialist realism?’
‘Yes. He said such indiscreet things. I was always afraid they would come to the ears of the Party officials. Of course, he was very young—five years younger than me. Well, they killed him in the end. He died in my arms, in a barricaded house. He was angry to die, poor man. You know what he said, dying?—“Just when I was learning to paint. All those pictures—I shall never paint them now.” I never thought I should live to envy him his death.’
Oh, God! thought Clare, I can’t go on with this. Bloody Judas. Damn you, Nigel. She tore off the sheet, scrumpled it up, threw it on the floor, and started again.
‘Do you miss the stage?’ she asked presently.
Elena shrugged. ‘That is all of the past.’
‘“Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead”.’
‘I do not know this.’
‘William Blake. One of the Proverbs of Hell.’
‘Proverbs of Hell? I should be familiar with those. I think I must be one of the people who have doom in them, like a disease. Carriers, you call them?’
‘You mustn’t feel like that. You’ve brought joy and understanding and love to many people too.’
‘Thank you, my dear.’ A tear rolled down Elena’s cheek. Her next words seemed to spurt out of her, uncontrollably, like blood. ‘But not to … my child. I’d have given it all up, gladly—the bouquets, the applause, you know?—for being a good mother. And now they say I cannot be a mother, ever again.’
‘You’re thinking of the baby you lost?’ asked Clare gently.
Elena’s head swung round. Her eyes looked as if a beautiful dream was dying out of them, visibly fading and dying. ‘My baby? Oh yes. That was very sad. But it too is of the past. No, I am thinking of the poor little Lucy. Her too I have failed.’
The agony in the woman’s face was so naked that Clare had to turn her own eyes away. ‘To have to choose,’ Elena muttered. ‘Did I do wrong? I could not help myself. It’s like a cancer eating at me … I am sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. You never had a child, Clare?’
‘No.’
‘You are a creative artist. You make things. I only passed them on, interpreted them. The work of your hands is your children, and they can’t be taken from you.’
Clare was silent. She felt that she and Elena had been on the brink of some revelation, only to step away from it.
‘It is strange,’ Elena resumed, ‘that the children of our bodies should have such power over us. Your works—the children of your mind and hands—you have suffered as much to make them, done much more to make them, and yet when you have made one, you don’t mind what happens to it—is it not so?—you are detached from it as if it were a stranger’s child?’
‘Well, in a way it is.’
‘It cannot be taken from you because it never belonged to you.’
‘That’s also true, in a sense.’
Elena’s eyes stared intensely into Clare’s. ‘But if you saw a man with a hammer raised to beat one of your works into fragments, what would you do? Beseech him to spare its life?’
‘I’d hit him first, with my mallet.’
Elena sighed heavily. There was silence for some minutes while Clare worked on, wretchedly postponing the moment when she must do what Nigel had asked her, more and more conscious that her recalcitrance about doing it had impaired her skill as an artist. Finally, it was Elena herself who took the initiative out of Clare’s hands.
‘Oh, damn it to hell!’ Clare tore the sheet off the block. Before she could throw it away, Elena said, ‘May I see it?’
‘It’s no good. Yes, if you like.’
Elena studied the drawing. ‘No,’ she said at last, ‘it is interesting, clever; but you are not perhaps in form today? Your mind is not on it, perhaps. Why is this?’
Now the crisis had come, Clare found she could not be Machiavellian or equivocal. She must declare herself. ‘Elena, I must tell you. I’m here under false pretences a bit. Nigel believes you were a party to Lucy’s kidnapping.’
Elena stared at her, then she shook her head incredulously, then she rose and stood over Clare in formidable indignation.
‘No! This is beyond everything! Have you gone mad?’
‘I hope Nigel is wrong. I honestly believe he must be,’ said Clare truthfully.
‘He has sent you to spy on me?’ Elena’s eyes looked hard as agates.
‘It’s not a question of spying. I’m being quite open with you. Someone here informed the kidnappers about your husband’s plan to outwit them and trap them at the Post Office. Only you and Nigel and the police knew about this plan,’ said Clare bleakly.
‘Why does not your Mr Strangeways come and make these accusations to my face?’ Elena exclaimed.
‘He thought you might be able to speak more freely to me than to people in an official position like himself or the Superintendent.’
‘Speak more freely? Speak what?’
Clare gazed out of the window at the snow-blossomed trees. ‘Well, for instance, did anyone here put pressure on you to tell him your husband’s scheme for dealing with kidnappers?’
‘Certainly not. If anyone had tried, I would have gone straight to the police myself.’ Elena’s eyes were distracted. ‘But this is madness. Why, why, why should I help the people who took poor little Lucy away? I loved her. Could you not see that?’
‘Yes, Elena.’
‘And even if I didn’t, I love Alfred—how could I bring this sorrow on him?’
Clare turned from the window to face the most difficult moment of all. ‘I’m sure there’s some explanation. But Nigel is worried about—he thinks you must have known Lucy was being kidnapped. When I came up here just after it, before I actually told you, you were overwrought; yet she’d not been missing long, and you hadn’t even come downstairs to ask about her. So, you——’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I do not need every “t” to be crossed. This is typical policeman’s logic. Don’t they understand that a woman, a mother, may have premonitions about a child? Good God, you are a woman, can you not imagine such a state of mind? I felt something dreadful had happened: but my reason told me not to be a fool, not to go chasing after Lucy, like some possessive mother, just because she was a little late.’
Elena was superb in her indignation and grief. It was not, Clare felt convinced, an act: no actress in the world could simulate the inner violence of the conflict which was tearing Elena apart. Never again, she swore, will I do Nigel’s dirty work for him.
There was a silence in the room, where exhausted emotions stirred like bits of rag flapping on a barbed-wire fence. Clare was about to retreat when sounds of altercation came up from the lawn outside. She moved to the window again, brushing past Elena who sat huddled in the chair …
Downstairs, Nigel, hearing the sounds, hurried out and went round the house, to see Lance Atterson thrusting a snowball down Justin Leake’s neck. ‘Stuff it, you crappy old bastard!’ he was yelling. ‘You bug me. Why don’t you go away some place and drop dead. Can’t you get it into your lousy head that Cherry isn’t playing?’
‘Dead right, I’m not,’ said the girl, emerging from behind a bush on the drive’s edge. ‘Let’s pelt the stinker.’
She and Atterson began hurling snowballs at close range at the unfortunate Justin, who at first, seeing Nigel watching him, tried to pretend it was just a romp and flung snowballs back, but soon began to swear at his tormentors. He tried to run past them into the house, but Lance tripped him up and put the boot in. Yelping, Justin Leake wrenched at Lance’s foot, dragged him to the ground and jabbed a thumb into his eye. Cherry hurled herself on Leake as he struggled to his feet, tore at his hair and ran her nails down his cheek.
‘Why don’t you stop them, Mr Strangeways?’ called the Admiral’s wife through a drawing-room window. ‘This is the most disgraceful exhibition I’ve ever——’
‘Don’t worry,’ Nigel called back, ‘they’re amateurs, they can’t do each other much harm.’ He was already running for the house, a certain phrase of Lance’s stinging him on like a gadfly. Without knocking, he rushed into the Wragbys’ room. The two women stared at him in speechless amazement as he loped round the room, subjecting to a close scrutiny the electric light fixtures fastened to the head of the double bed, the ceiling light, the wainscot plugs for the electric fire.
‘What on earth are you doing, Nigel?’ said Clare.
Elena’s voice was shaky, between anger and stark incredulity. ‘I believe the man really is mad.’
‘Sorry. Hope you don’t mind,’ muttered Nigel, tearing open the wardrobe door, pushing Elena’s clothes aside and examining the back of it. Then, to Clare’s increasing consternation, he crawled on hands and knees under the dressing-table and looked upwards, seized the bed, lifted it on end, stared at its underside, let it down again. Finally he pulled a chest of drawers away from the wall, went down on his knees again, uttered a sound of satisfaction.
‘Let this be a lesson to me, Mrs Wragby. I owe you a very humble apology.’
‘I think you certainly do, breaking into my room in this extraordinary way. Will you please explain——’
‘You’ve been bugged.’
‘Bugged? What are you talking about?’
‘Look. Hole bored through the wainscot here. See? And a few fragments of sawdust. Untidy operator, should have swept them up. The microphone was out of sight behind the chest of drawers: the wire ran through this hole into—whose is the room next door?’
‘Mr Leake’s,’ said Elena.
‘The naughty man. So the voice Mrs ffrench-Sullivan heard in his bedroom that morning was yours.’
‘Mine? But I’ve never—what morning?’
‘Friday last. Your husband was telling you how he intended to deal with the kidnappers’ demand when they got in touch with him. You were upset, protesting. Leake in his room was listening in. He must have tipped off the kidnappers somehow in Belcaster, three hours later. After that, he didn’t dare leave the bug in position any longer.’
Elena Wragby’s fine eyes were alight with relief and excitement. ‘Thank God we know this. You will arrest him now?’
‘No. Not yet. We can’t afford to.’
‘But he must know where Lucy is.’
‘I doubt it. And if he does, he’s not going to tell us.’
‘But the police could extract it from him.’
‘They’re not allowed to torture prisoners. If Sparkes finds the apparatus in Leake’s room, it would help: but he’s enough sense to have got rid of it. No, we mustn’t say a word yet to anyone about this discovery . If Leake knows we know about the bug, he’ll not attempt to contact the kidnappers again. We want him to do just that—he’s our only lead to them. From now on, he’ll be watched more closely than ever.’
‘I’ve just thought of something, Nigel,’ said Clare. ‘All telephone calls from the Guest House and Downcombe are being monitored—right?’
‘Right.’
‘And none of us can leave the village without being followed?’
‘Right.’
‘But suppose one of those newspapermen is bogus—I’m trying to think how Mr Leake could get a message out to the kidnappers—’
‘It’s a good idea; but Sparkes has had all their credentials very carefully checked, and confirmed them with their offices. I must ring him now.’ At the door Nigel turned. ‘Mrs Wragby, I have your promise not to breathe a word about this discovery?’
‘But surely I can tell my husband?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘Very well.’
‘And if you’re talking to Justin Leake, behave quite naturally. Don’t let him suspect——’
‘I understand. You can rely on me.’ Elena smiled charmingly. ‘I was trained as an actress to wear a mask.’
‘What they call “a false face” in Scotland,’ put in Clare. ‘I believe I could make a better go of your real face now, Elena. Could you bear to sit again?’
Nigel had a telephone conversation with the Superintendent, the result of which was that Sparkes transmitted orders for the plain-clothes man established in the Guest House to search Justin Leake’s room. It must be done at dinner tonight, when the detective would be sure he would not be interrupted.
When Nigel entered the drawing-room, he found three of the guests there.
‘Finished snowballing?’ he asked Cherry, who sat hunched up by the fire thawing her hands. ‘How’s the victim?’
‘Oh, all right, I expect. He and Lance did each other up a bit. They’re having a lie-down upstairs.’
‘Perfectly disgusting—grown-up people brawling like that—on a Sunday too,’ said the Admiral’s wife.
‘Well, there doesn’t seem anything else to do here on Sundays.’
The Admiral looked up from his book of oriental philosophy. ‘You don’t carry the doctrine of non-violence to extremes, Cherry?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t actually murder Leake. Not actually.’
‘Would you kill a scorpion if you found it on your pillow?’ asked Nigel.
‘Oof, no! I’d run away.’
‘But you don’t run away from Mr Leake,’ said the Admiral’s wife. ‘You three seem as thick as thieves.’
‘A curious expression,’ remarked her husband dreamily. ‘I’ve always understood that members of the criminal classes don’t trust one another an inch.’
‘Hey, I’m not one of the criminal class!’
‘No, no, my dear, of course not. You misunderstand me. I was going to say, if you hold all life sacred, like these fellows’—he gestured at his book, and Cherry interrupted him.
‘Sacred? Why should it be? I think life is a bloody drag. I hate it. What’s it for, anyway?’ Her voice rose. ‘You’re born, you go through the motions of being alive, then you die. You eat, you shit. What a gas! It’s all wasted.’
‘“Thy lot esteem I the highest who wast not ever begot. Thine next, being born, who diest and straightway again art not”,’ quoted Nigel. ‘You’d apply that to Lucy?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You’d say she’d be best off if the kidnappers killed her?’
‘You know I don’t mean that. She’s an angel child’
‘That’s the point, Cherry,’ said the Admiral. ‘One may not see any arguments for being alive oneself, but one feels—knows, without an instant of doubt—the value of Lucy being alive.’
‘Yes. But does she feel it? Is she feeling it now, about herself?’ Cherry’s voice quavered. Mrs ffrench-Sullivan struck in, with the acidity of one who must destroy a mood into which she cannot enter.
‘The trouble with you, my girl, is that you don’t take enough exercise. Makes you morbid.’
Cherry glanced at her. ‘I was always taught not to make personal remarks.’
‘Mrs ffrench-Sullivan is right,’ said Nigel. ‘And you’re coming for a walk with me now.’
Three minutes later they were going down the drive. At the gate Nigel turned right, up the hill. ‘You’d prefer this way,’ he announced.
‘Would I? Why? I don’t care a damn which way we go.’
‘You might meet one of those newspapermen in the village and be recognised.’
Cherry stopped dead, and began scuffling in the snow with a knee-length black boot. Her eyes glanced at him, swivelled away.
‘I don’t——’
‘Yes, you do. Don’t be absurd. And for God’s sake keep walking or we’ll freeze to death. You don’t want it to get to your guardian’s ear that you’ve actually run off with Atterson, or where you’re staying.’
Cherry plodded on at his side, silent.
‘Sir James got wind about your affair with Atterson. He knows the chap’s after your money—I presume you come into the capital when you’re twenty-one, and at present you get an allowance through your guardian. He could apply sanctions. But what he’s really worried about is whether you marry Atterson. Right so far?’
‘O.K.,’ she sulkily replied.
‘He doesn’t want a public scandal, so he hires someone to find you and detach you from the egregious Atterson. That’s what I’m interested in. Oh, look!—there’s a hare. See it?’
Nigel pointed towards a pair of long ears lolloping away over the snow-covered breast of a hillock to their left. They stood a moment, watching. Cherry’s fur-gloved hand stole into his. ‘I’ve never seen a hare before, except hanging up at the butcher’s. It’s lovely. Well, what are you going to do about us?’
‘If you really want to tie yourself up with a heel like Atterson, that’s your affair. The person I’m interested is Justin Leake. What’s he up to?’
‘You could ask him.’
‘I’m asking you. And if you don’t come clean about him, I’ll get in touch with your guardian this evening. Leake’s been trying to blackmail you, hasn’t he?’
Cherry looked up at him, a sly smile on her dead-white face. ‘No comment.’
Seizing the puppy-fat shoulders, he shook her till she felt her teeth were starting from their sockets. ‘Don’t give me that,’ he said, releasing her at last. ‘Leake is blackmailing you. Go on from there.’
‘I rather liked that.’ She grinned at him shamelessly. ‘Yes. The idea being that I should make him monthly payments until I come into my money, and then give him a slab of that. I was to write a statement about me and Lance, which he’d show to my guardian if I double-crossed him about the payments.’
‘But you refused?’
‘Bloody true I refused.’
‘You didn’t care if Leake spilt the beans to your guardian?’
‘Why should I? James can’t do anything to me.’
‘Only break it up between you and Lance.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind that.’ Cherry’s voice was at its flattest and most childish. ‘You see, I’ve just about had Lance. Mind you, I was dead chuffed when he first took me on. But I don’t dig him any more. He’s all right in the sack, I admit: but I get narked with that show-off act of his. He’s phoney to the gills.’
Nigel looked down at the girl trotting by his side like a fat, woolly dog. ‘It must have been a disillusioning moment for our Mr Leake when he found you impervious to his fiendish suggestions.’
Cherry giggled. ‘The really funny thing was him being shocked—I swear he was—at my just not caring what he told my guardian. Fancy a blackmailer being shocked! But he’s such an old square, he simply isn’t with it. You should have seen his face when I said to him. “But all my generation is promiscuous”—it’s not strictly true, I was sending him up a bit—“you’re thinking in terms of damaged goods, a lady’s reputation being ruined for life by a breath of scandal, all that antediluvian stuff. You ought to have stayed in the Ark, my poor Leake,” I said, “your mind’s as jokey as your clothes.” Well, I ask you!’
Nigel cut into the girl’s merry prattle. ‘When did he declare himself? He started off by insinuating things, didn’t he?’
‘Oh yes. Trying to soften us up, scare us, I suppose. He put on the screws—tried to, I mean—the morning Lucy was snatched.’
‘Will you tell me the truth about this? Did he, at that point, try to put pressure on you to do anything except sign a document and start handing over money to him?’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Hinted at nothing else you might do for him? “We might forget about the money if you helped me to”—that sort of thing?’
‘No. Truthfully.’
Nigel frowned in thought. How far could one rely on this extraordinary girl’s evidence? ‘We’d better turn back,’ he said brusquely.
‘All right. Don’t you believe me?’
‘I’d like not to. It complicates things.’
Cherry took off her glove, slipped a naked hand into Nigel’s overcoat pocket, and twined her fingers with his.
‘Are you going to seduce me now?’ he inquired.
‘I’d like to.’
‘Well, you can’t. Tell me, Cherry, if you find Leake such a bore, and you’re so hopelessly unblackmailable, why do you still go about with him so much—you and Atterson?’
The girl’s fingers stiffened round his, then tried to withdraw: he held them firm.
‘That’s not my secret,’ she said at last, head bowed.
‘Shall I ask Atterson, then?’
‘Oh, no! … Well, I suppose I might as well tell you. When Leake found he couldn’t get change out of me, he started putting the bite on Lance. He’d evidence that Lance peddled tea—for reefers, you know. And snow too. I didn’t know about the heroin, honestly.’
‘Leake’s idea was that, if you wouldn’t cough up to preserve your own reputation, you would to protect Atterson? Pertinacious fellow, Leake.’
‘Yes.’
‘But that angle failed too? Because you’ve gone off Atterson?’
Cherry looked uncomfortable: her fat little body wriggled. ‘Well, it’s not as simple as that. We’ve been stringing him along, I know, but—oh, you’d never understand.’
‘You’ve come to realise Atterson is a hollow man, but you still don’t want to see him prosecuted for this drug racket?’
Silently Cherry nodded agreement.
‘Sort of perverted sense of loyalty? You’d pay up for him because it’d make your conscience easier about giving him the pay-off?’
‘I suppose so. I know he’s a shit. But he’s sort of pathetic, underneath.’
‘Oh, God,’ muttered Nigel to himself, ‘when will they ever learn?’—and startled Cherry by bursting into the plangent song with that refrain as they approached the drive gate.