CHAPTER 11
Confession
DECEMBER 31
NIGEL CARRIED ELENA Wragby upstairs and laid her on the bed, where Clare attended to her. The plain-clothes man was on guard again outside the door.
Elena had made one last attempt, on recovering consciousness. ‘I’m sorry to have been so stupid, giving you all this trouble,’ she whispered, looking up at Nigel. ‘The relief of knowing it was not Lucy——’
‘No, Elena,’ he answered gently. ‘It’s too late for that. Ivan was your child, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ she muttered at last, and broke down into dry sobbing, which seemed as if it would never end, and shook her whole body in spasms like an electric current. Clare held the woman’s hands, giving her what little comfort the human contact could give: she herself was quietly crying.
It had to be Elena, Nigel was thinking. The way she had received the news of Lucy’s disappearance; the fact that other sources of information to the kidnappers had been virtually eliminated. But above all, there was the hole in the wainscot by which she deceived him for a little. When she realised how grave was the suspicion that had fallen on her, Elena borrowed the auger from the proprietor’s workshop and made that hole. She was a resourceful woman, who kept her nerve under the most acute strain: she had resisted the temptation to ‘find’ the hole herself and show it to Nigel. The notion of a bug was allowed to enter his mind, with no forcing from her. But, once it was established that it had been Cherry’s voice, not Elena’s, which Mrs ffrench-Sullivan had heard from Leake’s room, the device of the imaginary bug had recoiled upon her: nobody else could have had a conceivable motive for boring that hole. In any case, it could only be a desperate and temporary expedient. She needed to delay her unmasking, to gain a little time for her employers.
Here, sobbing on the bed, was a woman who had helped in the kidnapping of her own step-daughter, and very possibly wrecked her husband’s life; yet Nigel could feel no disgust, no hatred, no contempt for her. Elena, like some heroine of Greek tragedy, had been caught in a dilemma of fate, the victim of impersonal forces which had exploited her deepest instincts to further their own ends, and ruined her in the process. There was no doubt in Nigel’s mind that Ivan had somehow been used to put an intolerable pressure on Elena, as Lucy was being used to coerce her father.
Presently the sobbing ceased. Elena sat up, encircled by Clare’s arm, and sipped the glass of brandy Nigel had sent for.
‘You must despise me,’ were her first words.
Nigel gazed at the once beautiful face, haggard now and racked almost out of recognition. ‘No, Elena, I do not despise you. I can guess what happened. You must tell us all about it. But first, do you know where they took Lucy?’
‘Oh, if only I knew, I would tell you! Do you believe me?’
‘Yes. You can’t even guess?—whether it was to London, or somewhere near by?’
‘No. I’m sorry. Oh, my God, why did I trust them!’ Elena wildly exclaimed.
‘Because you had to. For the chance of being reunited with Ivan.’
‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘You are understanding. Perhaps if I could have had another child. I tried to love Lucy. I did love her. But she was not my own. My life is quite finished now. If I could get Lucy back for Alfred—but I’m afraid she is dead too. And I’m responsible.’
There was a distant jangle. The church bells were being rung up to herald the New Year in. It only needed this, thought Nigel bitterly.
‘Tell me how it started,’ he asked
‘They got in touch with me, last September. I thought I’d left all that behind me when I escaped to this country. I should have known better.’
‘They told you Ivan was alive, after all?’ asked Clare.
‘Yes.’
‘And you believed them?’
‘Not at first, oh no. I did not trust them; I am not a stupid woman, and I’d had experience of their methods. Too much experience. Even when they told me about the medallion: it’s a family heirloom of my first husband’s—he was called Ivan too—and about a birthmark the child had on his body: even then I did not quite believe them. But I wanted to. I wanted so badly. Can you understand?’
‘Yes, my dear,’ said Clare.
‘I thought, they would have found these things out after they’d shot the man who was carrying him to the frontier. It was snow then. I tried to run back to my baby, but my friends stopped me. They told me he too was dead. That was to make me feel better for not going back to him. He was quite silent, in the snow in no-man’s-land. I expect he’d been stunned by the fall. My little Ivan! And now he is dead. In a snowdrift.’
Elena choked on the words, glaring sightlessly at the atrocious picture in her mind.
‘But they convinced you at last?’ Nigel prompted.
‘Yes. The frontier guards who had shot at us picked up the baby and found it was alive. One of them took him to a farm, where he was warmed and fed. Now it happened the farmer was a secret sympathiser with us: we had hidden in the farm the day before we made our dash across the frontier. He and his wife kept Ivan for nearly a year, but they had no way of communicating with me. After that year, the regime decided Ivan must go to a State Orphanage. The man who contacted me last autumn, when he saw I did not believe him that Ivan was alive, arranged for me to get in touch with this good farmer. He also arranged that the farmer and his wife should visit Ivan in the orphanage, and assure themselves—by the birthmark—that he was the baby they had taken in. So at last I believed.’
There was a long silence in the room, while gusts of wind tossed the sound of pealing bells against the window-pane.
‘And now we come to the difficult part,’ said Clare, chafing Elena’s cold hands. Touched by her sympathy, the woman gave a wan smile.
‘Yes. Please remember, I am not trying to excuse, only to explain. I had never forgiven myself for abandoning Ivan; but when I learnt he was alive—learnt I had left him to have his childhood in that orphanage, and be indoctrinated, turned into a little automaton—then I suffered worse than ever. You see, when my husband died in my arms, during the rising, his last words were committing little Ivan to my care. It was a sacred trust … Oh, why do those bells keep ringing?’
‘They’ll stop soon. They’re ringing in the New Year.’
‘New Year! It can only be worse than the old one. They should toll for death, not ring for life—in this accursed world.’ Even in her extreme anguish, Elena showed unconscious touches of the histrionic.
‘You must see, please. I was fond of Alfred, and the poor little Lucy. They helped to heal my spirit. But Ivan was my first husband and the greatest love in my life. It only comes once. Perhaps never it comes. But if it does, nothing afterwards can compare with it—not for a woman at any rate. When I heard the little Ivan was alive, nothing else mattered except to save him—try to give him back the years he had lost, and keep my faith with his father.’
‘Yes,’ Nigel sighed. ‘So they said they’d let you have him if you did what they asked. And because they had told you the truth about Ivan’s being alive, you felt you could trust them about this too?’
Elena shaded her eyes with one hand. “I had to trust them. I could not let slip even the slightest chance of getting Ivan back. Alfred’s formulas—what did they matter to me compared with my own flesh and blood? These scientists and their great inventions!— why should I care which side overreaches the other? Let them fight amongst themselves for their filthy secrets—how to destroy humanity most efficiently! I am a mother.’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘but there was Lucy.’
‘You have a right to reproach me. I am not hard in my heart about the little Lucy. Since I helped them to take her away, I have lived in such a hell no preacher, no religious picture could express. But they promised me she should come to no harm. And again I believed them. I was foolish, wicked, yes. But it was Lucy against Ivan. There was no choice for me.’
‘When they had your husband’s secret, Lucy would be returned to him, and you and Ivan would——?’
‘I was to meet Ivan in London. They would smuggle us back to Hungary. I could think of nothing but to have him in my arms again.’ Elena’s face seemed to splinter with agony. ‘Why did they bring him down here? Why? If they meant to double-cross me, why bring him out of Hungary at all?’
‘The answer’s easy, I’m afraid. To stand in for Lucy.’
‘Stand in? I don’t know what you are saying.’
‘Ivan and Lucy were rather alike?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him all these years, or a photograph of him even.’
‘But he took after you, didn’t he?’
‘Why yes, as a baby people thought he was just like me.’
‘And you happened to remind people of Alfred’s first wife?’
‘Yes. But——’
‘And Lucy takes after her.’
Elena’s great haunted eyes lit up with intelligence. ‘Ah! I see. That is why I had to hide away the photograph of Alfred’s first wife. So that it would not give your agents a clue—put into their minds the idea of a likeness, and a substitution. You mean Ivan was brought down here so that Lucy could be substituted for him?’
‘It’s the only possible inference. I imagine the kidnappers must have taken a house in the neighbourhood—somewhere near Longport, probably. They’d bring Ivan, so the neighbours knew there was a child in the house. What colour hair had he?’
‘Sandy. Like mine before it went white.’
‘When Lucy was kidnapped, they’d dye her hair, put boy’s clothes on her, let the neighbours see her but not talk to her. If police inquiries were made, there’d be perfectly good evidence that the child in the house was the same one who’d been there before the kidnapping. No suspicion could attach to the house.’
‘And, when they’d used Ivan, those devils killed him and left him in the snowdrift?’
‘But he hadn’t been injured,’ Glare put in.
‘They have ways of killing that do not show.’
‘He had the return half of a ticket to London in his pocket,’ said Nigel. ‘If they’d intended to kill him, they wouldn’t have bought a return. No, my guess is that they meant to put him on the London train, and something went wrong on the way to Longport. They’d move him by night of course, so that neighbours wouldn’t notice his departure. Perhaps they found the road blocked at some point and had to walk the rest of the way, and the poor little chap couldn’t make it.’
‘Then they did murder him. As surely as if——’ Elena broke off, her face hardening into the stony look of an avenging goddess.‘They left him to die there.’
‘It’s a gentle death,’ murmured Clare; but Elena made no response, sunk in her own thoughts.
The sound of bells clamoured round the house, like ghosts crying to be let in.
Nigel waited for a little, then began a series of questions about the agents who had first contacted Elena. She answered without reluctance, but such information as she could give was limited to a few facts—the initial telephone calls, two rendezvous with a large, bear-like man in a London tea-shop, and the method by which she was enabled to communicate with the farmer who had taken in the baby Ivan. It soon became evident that Elena’s memory for these transactions was weak: no doubt she had wanted to forget their detail, and the horror of the last week had wiped many things from her mind. Unfortunately, it had obliterated, amongst them, the most crucial fact of all.
‘You had to tell them how your husband was reacting to their demand for information. You put through a second call from the telephone booth here last Friday morning, to tell them he intended to leave false information at the G.P.O., and the police were laying a trap for the collector—right?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, almost inaudibly.
‘What number did you have to ring?’
Elena looked up at him with an expression of despair. ‘I’m afraid it has gone from my head. No, please, you must believe me. I have been trying, trying to remember, since I heard what they did to Ivan. They told me I must memorise it: but I have a bad memory, so I disobeyed them and wrote it on a piece of paper, which I destroyed after making the call.’
‘But you can remember if it was a local one, surely?’
‘Oh yes. It was the Longport exchange, and there were three figures in the number. A four and a nine, I think—479 was it? 497? No, it’s hopeless.’
‘Never mind. It may come back. Who answered you?’
‘It was a woman. I had to say “Millie here”. And if the person answered, “Hallo, how is Ingham?”—that’s my husband’s birthplace—I would give the message. Only a few words. If all was clear for them, I would say, “Much better, thank you”. If my husband was not consenting, I’d say, “About the same”. If a trap was being laid, “Not so well, I’m afraid”. Oh, if only I could remember that number!’ Elena beat her fists against her temples, frantic with the frustration of it.
‘Please try not to worry,’ said Clare consolingly. ‘They surely wouldn’t have taken Lucy to the same house whose number you were to ring. I mean, they’d not trust you not to change your mind after Lucy was gone, and tell the police the number.’
‘Well, we’ve got a little nearer, anyway,’ said Nigel. ‘Clare darling, would you fetch my ordnance map and the railway timetable.’
When she returned, Nigel spread the map on the table. ‘Here’s Longport. Their exchange serves this whole group of villages—’ he pencilled a rough circle on the map. ‘Your contact was in one of them, or in Longport itself. Now this is where Ivan’s body was found, on the hill going down to Longport’—he made a cross. ‘I’m sorry if I’m being rather brutal about this, Elena.’
‘My feelings do not matter any more. Nothing matters except to find Lucy.’ Elena stared at the map, as if a vision of Lucy might spring from some spot amongst its colours and contours.
‘Lucy was taken to a house somewhere here, and substituted for Ivan. A house whose nearest main line railway station is Longport. The last train to London leaves Longport at, let’s see—six twelve. So, unless the kidnappers have two cars, they could not have taken Ivan to the station till the following evening, Friday. Of course, there may have been a whole gang of them with a fleet of cars; but the arrival of so many in a country house would set the neighbours talking. I’d guess there were only two or three of them—two perhaps, masquerading as Ivan’s parents.’
Clare broke in. ‘Surely we can narrow it down a bit more? Look, you said they’d not smuggle Ivan out till after dark. They’d want to make sure of his catching that train, and they knew some of the roads might be blocked. Now they got Ivan to within half a mile of the station. Even if they were able to drive all that way more or less straight, starting after dark and aiming to reach the station in good time, six o’clock say, they’d not have much over an hour’s driving time. How many miles an hour could one average over hilly, snow-covered roads? Twenty-five? Thirty at the very most. So the house is within a radius of thirty miles from Longport. Doesn’t seem to help much. But think of the conditions that night. They may have had to get out and walk some way to the place where Ivan was found. That narrows the distance they travelled.’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘it’s a fair inference. And I think we can take it further. We can find out tomorrow which roads were blocked on Friday night. But the point is, they had to make sure of getting Ivan to the train—otherwise there’d be two children in the house instead of one. They could not know how many roads were being blocked by the blizzard that evening. They’d have to allow for a number of detours. Under those conditions, they couldn’t risk the chance of doing a thirty-mile journey in the hour they had at their disposal: but they could be reasonably certain of accomplishing a journey of say, ten miles as the crow flies.’ Nigel drew a small circle on the map. ‘I believe Lucy is somewhere inside that circle.’ He did not add, ‘If she is alive.’
‘May I say something?’ asked Elena. ‘You are assuming that Ivan would not be removed till after dark. But he could be hidden at the back of the car, in a rug perhaps. They might have started earlier.’
‘It’s possible of course. But look, there are two other main-line stations, at which that train stops, in thirty miles. But it was Longport they aimed at. Longport must be the nearest one to the hide-out. That roughly checks the ten-mile radius.’
‘But, Nigel, didn’t the police search every house in that area?’ said Clare.
‘They were looking for a girl, not a boy. We warned them that Lucy’s appearance might be altered. We didn’t at that time allow for the substitution of a kidnapped child for a bona fide one. I wouldn’t be surprised if some village bobby set eyes on Lucy during the search—she’d be drugged maybe, they’d say she was ill and mustn’t be woken—and padded off quite satisfied that she was the little boy who’d been seen about the place for a week.’
‘I wonder,’ said Elena. ‘Perhaps Alfred’s there now.’
‘They picked him up in a car, you think?’ Nigel’s pale blue eyes regarded the woman steadily. ‘You knew he was going to meet them?’
‘He did not tell me much. I believe he did not quite trust me any more. Why should he?’ Elena added remorsefully. ‘He just said one thing: we were talking about Lucy—whether she was alive or dead—and he said he’d know soon, one way or the other. Oh, yes, and then he asked would I despise him if he gave them what they wanted.’
‘In exchange for Lucy? Would he do that?’
‘I just don’t know. He is a good man, and a strong man. He is a little inhuman sometimes—it’s the nature of his work, perhaps. But he loves Lucy very dearly. No, I don’t think he would give them anything till he could assure himself Lucy was alive, and saw them let her go. After that——’ Elena shrugged.
‘So the chances are he’s now in the same house where Lucy is, or soon will be, if the road to it is not blocked.’
‘Well, then, why do we sit here doing nothing, talking?’ she exclaimed. She started pacing the room, with those long dipping strides, like an animal in a cage. ‘The police must start searching that area again, at once. Or do you have to get permission from some bureaucrat in London first? Oh, you are so slow in this country.’
Nigel smiled wryly at such imperiousness from a woman who had lost all right to command. Yet it was impressive: her figure, as it must often have done in the theatre, seemed to add a cubit to its stature.
‘Elena,’ he said patiently, ‘I can’t just press a button and start the whole operation. It’s dark. There are drifts everywhere. I’ll see that Sparkes moves his men in as soon as it’s light. If Lucy is still alive, they’ll certainly not do anything to her now that your husband is with them; and he’ll be playing for time. Maybe he’ll be able to get a message to us.’
‘But he’s in deadly danger! Please! I’ve done him so much harm already, I can’t bear——’
‘He’d be in still deadlier danger, and so would Lucy, if we went off at half cock,’ Nigel broke in firmly. ‘If their captors knew we were so close on their heels, they’d shoot them both and make a bolt for it. The road blocks are out again: they’d not get far if they tried to take Lucy and her father out of the county.’
Elena was silent for a little. Then she said decisively: ‘Very well. I will try to sleep now. In the morning you will take me to the Superintendent and I will make a statement. Ah, the bells have stopped.’
‘It is 1963,’ said Clare. ‘Good luck to it.’
Elena turned to her. ‘Good luck to Alfred and to Lucy. My dear, you have been very kind to me. Will you do one thing more—sit up a little longer with me. I cannot bear my own company.’
It was said with a pathos that brought tears to Clare’s eyes: but it was also like a royal command.
Nigel left them, told the plain-clothes man outside the door that he must treat Elena as under arrest, and rang Sparkes’s home number. He gave him a rapid résumé of Elena’s confession.
‘So what we have to look for,’ he went on, ‘is a house, probably within a ten-mile radius of Longport, where a boy answering to the description of the boy found in the snowdrift, was staying for some days before the kidnapping—a boy who was a stranger in the neighbourhood, with two or three grown-ups looking after him. They’d probably be strangers too: rented a cottage, perhaps, for the holidays—an isolated place, or quiet digs in Longport itself. Main thing is, if you find the place, don’t alarm the customers.’
‘I’ll wake Up every bloody member of the Force now.’
‘Happy New Year, and good hunting.’
Sparkes spent the next two hours dragging his men out of bed to the telephone. He rang Longport first, then worked outward from village to village. And it was all quite fruitless. For it so happened that Bert Hardman, the village constable at Eggarswell, had been carried off to Belcaster hospital that morning with an acute attack of pleurisy.