Psyche (7 page)

It was, curiously enough, the threat that must accompany the practical directions that bothered him so much. If he failed to make the child's death the alternative of a safe return for payment received, the whole scheme would deteriorate into a comparatively mild game of hare and hounds, with time no longer a decisive element, and the odds therefore in favour of the hounds. The parents must be frightened into acting at once and without calling in the police. Yet, psychopathically sensitive to the opinion of others, he shrank from branding himself in black and white as a possible murderer. The very word terrified him. He was no baby-killer—merely a man who had been unfairly treated, a man who had Never Been Given a Chance.

With a vision of feminine legs rampant on a heraldic motif of new cars on the one hand, and a very realistic hangman's noose in bas relief against a sea of accusing faces on the other, he was
still struggling in a quagmire of indecision when the opportunity for which he had been waiting presented itself, made to order down to the last detail.

2

The chimes
of
the grandfather clock at the foot of the circular stairway, announcing to the household that it was seven o'clock, coincided with the single deep tone of the dinner gong
.

Sharon put her cocktail glass down on the inlaid table in front of the fireplace, but she was slower in relinquishing the object she had been holding in her left hand
.

With a small, half-apologetic grimace at her husband, she said, “I'll take it up to her after dinner. She would be unhappy if she woke and it
wasn't
there.”

With mock ceremony, she placed the small teddy-bear in the exact centre of the lounge on which she had been sitting. And the firelight caught not only his wise glass eyes, but also the shimmering mass of Sharon's hair as she stooped and then straightened again
.

“You spoil her,” the man said softly, “as much as you spoil me.”

Sharon was tall, but she had to look up to meet her husband's grey eyes. “And why shouldn't I spoil you both just a little?” she asked, smiling. “You can't guess how much pleasure it gives me. Dwight—oh, darling—I think I must be the happiest woman in the world.”

In the shadows of the high box hedge bordering the back driveway to the house, a small flashlight winked once, no more noticeable in the gathering darkness than a firefly. A moment later the gaunt man was striding purposefully up the drive to the back door, while in his mind's eye he reviewed the layout of the house as he had seen it on two previous occasions. Yet, having reached the door, he hesitated at this, the eleventh hour, his hand suspended above the iron door-knocker, while his opposing desires and fears engaged in a last desperate encounter over a battleground of nerves still raw from previous skirmishes.

He could never afterwards recall making the actual decision. His hand, moving apparently without his conscious volition, lifted the knocker and dropped it back into place with a heavy reverberation which rippled across his cold skin like the first deep growl of an approaching storm. From that instant on it was as if he moved in a trance, doing and saying, with a cool precision quite foreign to him, everything he had so painstakingly planned.

It was the stout cook who answered the door, and he could see that she recognized him at once, even in the diffuse light of the small electric lantern above his head.

Taking the initiative with bold assurance, he said, “Sorry, Missis. It's that there special fixture for upstairs.”

“Couldn't you ‘ave come——” the cook began, but she got no

further with her protest, for—a conscientious workman not to be deterred from finishing his job—he was already manoeuvring an over-large tool-box through the open doorway. Almost perforce she moved back to let him pass.

“Won't be but a few minutes,” he told her quietly. “No need to disturb the folks if they're at dinner.”

On the far side of the large, brightly lit kitchen, a swing door opened as a maid came through with an empty soup plate in either hand, and he had a glimpse of candlelight and flowers, and heard a man's deep voice and a woman's laughter.

With a quick surge of elation he realized that he had timed his actions perfectly. Walking neither slow nor fast, he crossed the kitchen toward the door that he knew concealed the back staircase.

The cook, uncertainty written clearly on her broad face, wavered between the necessity to serve a roast at once, and the knowledge that this was no proper time for an electrician to be at work in a private house. The roast won; in part because she took a pride in her cooking; in part because the man's assured familiarity with the house reminded her that he had been given right of entry twice before.

Turning toward a gleaming white stove, she said, over her shoulder, “Greta, tell the master that electric chap's here when you go in the dining-room.”

The young maid, filling silver entrée dishes, nodded her neat dark head. “Hope he don't wake the baby,” she said absently, and, a chap of her own to occupy her thoughts, promptly forgot the “electric chap” completely.

In the upstairs hall the man paused, listening intently. The light from a lamp on a small table against one wall accentuated the razor-sharp contours of a face devoid of all expression, and found no compassion in eyes as dark as the purpose that sent him moving, furtive and silent, into the west wing of the house.

The knob of the child's door turned noiselessly under a hand now protected by a thin cotton glove. The door opened, and closed again behind him.

A tiny night-light, which he himself had installed, showed him blue curtains, patterned with white lambs, billowing softly on a gentle night breeze; a flaxen-haired doll at rest on a blue carpet; a small pink dressing-gown hung over the back of a small chair; small pink bedroom slippers side by side under a low white cot.

“Mum—Mum?” a small voice whispered.

The black bag was set down on the blue carpet. The man's hand went to his pocket. An instant later small legs thrashed beneath blue blankets, and small hands plucked ineffectually at a dark, suffocating terror, while the sweet, sickening odour of choloro-form drifted through the room.

Repressing an almost overwhelming need to cough, the man waited until he felt the small body go limp. He snapped open the lid of the black bag; snatched a down comforter from the foot of the cot, folded it, placed it in the bottom of the bag; straightened
the child's now unresisting arms and legs; rolled her in her blankets, and laid her in the bag. The lid was shut and locked. A grubby envelope was placed on the empty cot. A small pillow was dropped out of the open window—a red herring to confuse a privileged class for whose intelligence he had no respect—and he was ready for the second, and in a sense, most nerve-wracking part of his scheme.

The nursery door opened and closed again. The lamp in the hall at the mouth of the west corridor cast a distorted shadow as he crossed into the east wing. In another bedroom, the black bag between his legs, his fingers working like lightning, he attached a chrome bracket to exposed wires hanging from a hole in a dove-grey wall. Using no tool other than a screw-driver, he completed the task in less than two minutes, but, when he left this room and its justification for his presence in the house, his thin lips were working and his face was a dirty ashen white.

At the top of the back stairs he removed the cotton gloves, pulled his peaked cap low over his forehead, and lit a cheap, strong-smelling cigarette. The first inhalation of acrid smoke steadied him considerably, but its chief purpose was to cover any lingering smell of chloroform. In so far as he was capable of doing so, he had thought of everything.

The cook was alone in the kitchen, and her back was toward him, a circumstance which made it possible for him to cover half the distance to the outside door before she turned and faced him directly.

“‘Night, Missis.” His voice did nothing to betray him, and the hand he lifted to his cap concealed his face adequately.

The cook, affronted by the cigarette, found herself to some extent mollified by the respectful salute, and, outflanked for the second time in fifteen minutes, allowed the black bag to be carried out into the night.

The man was sweating freely by the time he reached his car. The child had appeared delicate, even fragile, and her weight had come as an unpleasant surprise to him.

He wedged the black bag on the floor between the back and front seats of the car, and climbed into the driver's seat. The engine
caught, as it did not always, as soon as he put his foot on the accelerator, and he knew his first flash of triumph, but his supreme moment arrived when he reached the road, and, switching on the lights, rattled away toward his hide-out. Intoxicated by power, as he never had been by whiskey, he felt as though he had defeated the whole world single-handed. His fevered imagination conjuring up visions of barbaric luxury, he almost forgot that he had not yet exchanged his small, unconscious hostage for the thick packets of currency that he thought of as already his.

Sharon rose from the dinner table, and, blowing out the candles, slipped her hand into Dwight's as they walked into the hall
.

In the long living-room the cocktail tray had been replaced by a silver coffee service, and fresh logs had been placed on the
fire.

With scarcely perceptible hesitation, Sharon sat down and lifted the heavy coffee urn with a slender hand much stronger than it appeared to be. But, before she began to pour, Dwight, who missed very little where she was concerned, said, “The coffee can wait.”

Her glance went to the teddy-bear beside her, and then to the man watching her with affectionate amusement. “I——” she began
.

“Never mind,” he interrupted gently. “I can wait, too. Fate made a mistake when she gave us more than a single room where you—cross-eyed, my darling—could watch both members of your family at one and the same time all the time. Run along to your papoose, but don't be long.”

When she had left the room, he sat down, and, content to be idle for a short time after a busy day, waited for her to return
.

As long as he lived he was never to quite get the sound of her heart-breaking, agonized cry out of his ears. Piercing, terrible in its anguish, scarcely recognizable as his own name, it ripped through the quiet house like the knell of all human happiness
.

Until he reached the outskirts of the city, the man forced circumspection upon himself, observing the speed limit, going out of his way to avoid main intersections and the normal hazards of thick traffic, and watching—although reason told him that this was foolish—for policemen. But when pavement gave way to a gravel surface, and the road was flanked not by lighted houses but by a dark expanse of fields and woods, he increased his speed, and the old Ford swayed and bumped noisily along increasingly narrow and unfrequented roads.

His landmarks had been carefully memorized by now. A right turn after passing a broken-down stone stile; a farm-house in a grove of pines; a wooden bridge over a small stream; and then the straggling outposts of the willow bush which surrounded the old cottage and the swamp which extended its own unwholesome welcome, a rank smell of damp and rotting vegetation, more than a hundred yards up the track, which petered out at its margin.

Exercising what should have been an unnecessary caution, he negotiated the last stretch of this forlorn imitation of a road with his lights out. Thus he did not see the car already parked behind the house until he was so close to it that he had to jam on his brakes in order to avoid running into it.

The snapping of his nerve was an almost audible dissonance echoing and re-echoing deep inside him. Padded bills, back-bedroom trysts with other men's wives, and an unfortunate habit of cheating at cards had not been a sufficient preparation for major crime. To have come upon any car at all would have shaken him badly. To recognize, even by starlight, the uncompromising markings of a police cruiser, was to lose his head completely. That its presence there could not possibly have any adverse connection with himself, that as lessor of the property it was his right to question the presence of the police on the premises, rather than the contrary, did not begin to occur to him.

His teeth chattering with terror, his heart threatening to burst out of its bony rib cage, he threw the car into reverse with a harsh grinding of gears, and zig-zagged backwards along the track with a recklessness born of utter, uncontrolled panic. That he should regain the main road without wrecking the car against tree trunk
or boulder was sheer good luck, coupled perhaps with the instinct for self-preservation which, run amok, had precipitated him into a flight as senseless as that of an animal who flees while as yet unpursued.

For nearly an hour, escape his only coherent thought, he drove at breakneck speed through a night which offered no haven and no security.

The knowledge that he was not being followed gradually making an impression on him, his frenzy slackened, and he experienced a return to something approaching reason.

He pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned off the motor. Taking out a grease-stained brown handkerchief, he mopped his face and neck, and then felt in his pockets for cigarettes. His hand encountering the small bottle of chloroform, he pulled it out and threw it from the open car window in one convulsive movement, as if by so doing he could rid himself of everything it represented. Almost crying, he beat his fists against the steering-wheel, while he thought of the fortune which had so nearly been his. I've been robbed, he thought hysterically, robbed —robbed—robbed!

It was frustrated anger rather than courage that led him to consider the possibility that all might not be irretrievably lost. He had derived a sense of security from the slow evolution of his original plan, had felt himself protected by its careful framework, and it took him some time to acclimatize himself to the idea of continuing the undertaking upon an entirely different and much more perilous basis.