The China Governess (24 page)

Luke was thinking, his brows raised and the long furrows deep on his forehead.

‘This evacuees' bus,' he began cautiously. ‘where did it go? Suffolk?' The Councillor interrupted him. ‘Oh, my dear good chap,' he said, ‘don't think that I haven't been wondering about
that
possibility. Ever since that woman Flavia Aicheson – a type I hate on principle – told me the story of Timothy this morning I've been trying to prevent myself regarding it as a revelation.'

‘Why?' Luke spoke in astonishment. ‘Why prevent yourself? It could so easily be the other half of your story. It's worth exploring, surely?'

‘No!' The exclamation was vehement, and at the sound of the tone Luke's experienced ear pricked up and his eyes became wary once more as he recognized the point at which their views were due to separate.

‘One could make it fit!' The Councillor said. ‘One could want it to fit so much that one could deceive oneself and everybody else. Anyone would rather have a splendid, intelligent, decent, good-looking, honest boy than – well, than what I have.'

The man was lashing himself with a bitterness Luke could just understand but which he was far too old a hand to believe he could cure. ‘I haven't told you about Barry yet,' Cornish went on. ‘It's the thing I came to tell you and I still haven't brought myself to do it. He's abnormal, Superintendent. It was apparent when he was a child. That was why I felt I couldn't ask Marion to take him into our home and why I left him with the nuns.'

Luke was very serious. The pattern was unfolding before his knowledgeable gaze like the symptoms of a familiar illness before a physician.

‘Is he what they call a mongol, sir?' he murmured, his gaze on his notes.

‘Not quite. But he's not right. Yet he's not a fool. I wish he were. In some ways he's damnably intelligent. Horribly so.'

Luke sat rubbing his chin. All his training and experience shied at the pitfall which he saw opening before him, and yet his human
judgement told him it did not exist and that the man, however misguided, was at least honest.

‘Sons tend to take after their mothers,' he began slyly.

‘The ward-maid? Agnes Leach? Of course I've thought of that.' Cornish dismissed the inference with a gesture. ‘The nuns thought of it. They suspected me and insisted that they brought the woman while they watched us to see if there was recognition there. I could have been lying. All the story of my first wife could have been a fiction. I admit that.'

‘No, no sir,' Luke was laughing softly. ‘Come. That isn't what
I
was saying at all. There's an old English word which isn't often used nowadays but it's still useful on occasions, and that's “changeling”. Mothers have been known to do that before now.'

‘No.' Cornish shook his head with a martyr's obstinacy. ‘I've thought of that. With longing. It would be a nice, easy, soft way out, wouldn't it? But life isn't like that or I haven't found it so.'

Luke leant back. He knew he was going to waste his time but couldn't help having a shot.

‘My official life hasn't exactly been what you might call sheltered,' he said, ‘but I've never found it anywhere near as consistent as the cynics do. “Surprise, surprise!” That's the message of life in my opinion. Look here, sir, what makes you think that your first wife and you would have produced the sort of child you describe to me? No. Don't answer yet. But then tell me what sort of kid you
would
expect this subnormal Agnes Leach to mother?'

The Councillor shook his head. ‘You mean very well, Superintendent,' he said. ‘I should like to believe you, but aren't you overlooking something? What sort of chance has a child whose mother, my first wife, came from the most dreadful of slums (and believe me, there's nothing in England today to match Turk Street when I was a boy) and was then, almost on the day after he was born, thrown to a half-wit, hysterical girl who dragged him through the countryside in terror? Wouldn't that account for him, whatever he's become?'

‘No sir.' Luke spoke briskly. ‘Not if he's what you describe.'

‘But don't you think so?' There was a masculine naïveté in the
man's face and all the passionate ignorance of the unscientific mind on a deeply emotional subject.

‘No sir.' Luke was a father too but also a practical man. ‘As long as he was properly fed (and he must have been to survive), not dropped on his head, and kept reasonably warm, it wouldn't hurt him at all.'

‘I think you are wrong.'

Cornish spoke simply and his weakness was revealed like a man uncovering a wound. ‘It was my fault. I ought to have known the child was coming and I ought to have been there to take over when my wife died. It was a duty I failed in. The R.A.F. was reasonable in such matters. Don't you agree?'

‘No sir.' Luke was wooden.

Cornish smiled at him and his mouth twisted.

‘You think I'm clinging to a cross,' he said.

Luke's sudden grin was disarming.

‘Well, if you set it up yourself it's nothing much to cling to, sir, or that's what the Holy Sisters taught me, but I take it we're not having that kind of discussion. What exactly are you trying to tell me about this boy of yours, Mr. Cornish? You're thinking of the fire and the flat-wrecking, aren't you?'

Cornish looked up gravely and sighed.

‘I don't know anything, mind you. But as soon as I realized that the probable reason for the attack on the flat was an attempt to frighten a private detective off an inquiry into the history of a baby evacuated from Turk Street on the first day of the Second World War, I thought of my son Barry. It's the sort of interference which might make him very excited. Agnes Leach keeps in touch with Ebbfield gossip. He would hear about it from her.'

Luke's glance grew bleaker.

‘Who did you think had employed the detective?'

‘I knew. The police told me. Alison Kinnit. I associated her with Miss Aicheson and I thought she had done it in an attempt to find out something to discredit me.'

‘Really?' Luke sounded amazed and a touch of colour appeared in the Councillor's thin cheeks.

‘Now I've met her socially I see that's unlikely,' he admitted.
‘But you've no idea what she's like in committee: she gives you the impression she'd fight with no holds barred.'

Luke's smile escaped despite himself, but he made no comment.

‘When this boy Barry gets excited, is he liable to do dangerous and even criminal things, sir?' he inquired.

Cornish nodded. It was an admission which he had prepared himself to make but he still found it difficult. ‘All his life he has been frighteningly awkward. The Nuns of the Good Shepherd passed him on to the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul who specialize in caring for that sort of case. He became too much for them and he went to some Brothers who wouldn't keep him at all.'

Luke began to understand very clearly. ‘Has he got a record?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh well,' the superintendent made it sound a relief, ‘don't distress yourself, sir. I'll look him up. We probably know more about him than you do. Does he live alone in the normal way?'

‘No. I should have felt more guilty still about him if he had, but this Mrs. Leach . . .'

‘The ward-maid?'

‘The ward-maid, Agnes Leach, has been quite touchingly faithful to him. Through all his vicissitudes she has always been about. Actually I pay his allowance to her, now, so that he keeps it for at least a day or so.'

‘And yet you really believe. . . . ?' Luke bit back the rest of the sentence. ‘She's good to him, anyway,' he said instead and made a note.

The Councillor had risen and now stood looking at him with a stern dignity which was yet homely enough not to appear absurd.

‘You know what you're forgetting, Luke,' he said, using the name as if they were friends for the first time. ‘You're overlooking the facts, man. The boy
is
my son. He's got written proof. He's got his papers.'

The superintendent was taken aback. It was an aspect of the situation, a purely legal one, which had indeed escaped him entirely in the emotional problem.

‘Who is to judge the age of a youngster?' Cornish asked. ‘Is a squinting, backward baby four years or three? Or a gangling
teenager twenty or nineteen?' He held out his hand. ‘Well, there you are,' he said. ‘I shall do what I can for him as I always have. You must be prepared for that, but these dreadful acts of destruction must be stopped. I see that. Look up your files and I'm afraid you'll find him, under “Cornish” alias “Leach”. He always uses his own name when he's in trouble. He has his papers, you see?'

As soon as Luke got back to his own room he told his clerk to find Mr. Campion. ‘Wherever he is,' he said, ‘and get him on the line. Meanwhile I want details of a youngster called Barry Cornish. There'll be a juvenile record if nothing else.'

Twenty minutes later he was talking over the telephone to his old friend.

‘Campion, I want to see you right away. Quicker than soon. It's quite a story and quite a development. I think we've got our delinquent. He has a record like a horror-comic strip. Campion?'

‘Wait a minute.' Mr. Campion's light voice, which still had its characteristic streak of vagueness, came gently to him over the wires. ‘I'm at the Well House. The Kinnit's home you know. There's a bit of a flap on. The nurse I told you about, Mrs. Broome, has just come in with the story that she has again met the woman who brought Timothy to Angevin with the other evacuees all those years ago. What? Oh yes. She says she knew her at once. She was in the cemetery snooping round the governess's grave.'

‘
COME, MISS JULIA.
You sit in the old basket chair while Mr. Tim and I get supper ready. Shall I make you a little fire in the hob-grate and you can pretend you're Cinderella?'

Mrs. Broome's ever-young voice tinkled gaily in the low-ceilinged cavern which was the kitchen of the Well House. As a sample of conversation in the world of today it had to be heard to be believed, and Tim and Julia exchanged secret glances. Julia was still slightly emotional and her eyes were wet as she laughed and turned to look at the carefully restored chimneypiece hung about with iron spoons and skillets.

‘You're wonderful, Nanny Broome,' she said. ‘I don't think that thing is meant to light though, do you? Eustace would be horrified.'

‘Very likely, but he'd get over it. If we put up with all his antique bits and bobs he must give way to us sometimes.'

Mrs. Broome was making noises rather than talking and her glance was running over the details of the fireplace as she weighed up the difficulties of the project.

‘I do like a flare,' she said. ‘And there are some wine boxes through there we could break up, but it's warm enough with all these pipes. I just want to make you feel at home, miss. After all, as I said to Mr. Tim when you rang up so upset, you've been such a good little girl over all this engagement business we ought to make a fuss of you or he'll lose you.'

‘Nan! This will do!' Timothy was embarrassed and, as usual, Mrs. Broome bridled dangerously at any reproach from him.

‘You still show you've been fighting, especially when you colour up, young man,' she said spitefully. ‘Come along: there are four places to be laid on the kitchen table. We'll give Mrs. Telpher something down here with us, shall we? Poor thing, she won't want to eat alone even if she is so rich! It was a great shock to her
losing that little Miss Saxon and she was worried enough before, what with the kiddy-widdy and being so far from home.'

Julia stirred in the creaking chair. She was laughing but yet grateful for the mothering, which was comforting, however absurd.

‘I hope you're right that Miss Alison won't mind me coming to stay,' she said. ‘I was dreading the evening at home alone but it seems rather an imposition to move in on you when I live reasonably near.'

‘Oh, rubbish! Miss Alison always lets me settle little things like that when I'm here. If Mr. Tim wanted to bring a school friend home for a match or the Boat Race he only had to ask me. I do the extra work, you see!'

Mrs. Broome was trotting round the kitchen with her little steps swinging her seat and conveying such ecstatic happiness as could alone excuse her. ‘One of these days you'll be the mistress and we shall be the poor old things all very glad that you've got something to be grateful to us for.'

Tim put his arm round her and lifted her gently off the floor. ‘Shut up!' he said.

Mrs. Broome squeaked with delight like a musical-comedy soubrette. ‘Giving away secrets, am I?' she inquired contentedly. ‘I'm always doing that. Never mind me. We must get a tray for the gentlemen. I shall give them theirs in the study. Then they won't come and bother us down here.'

Tim stood for a moment absently caressing his ear lobe.

‘Poor Campion,' he said. ‘Eustace has frozen on to him as if he was the only spar in an angry sea. I've got a terrific admiration for your father, darling. This deft introduction of an expert instead of bungling about in it himself is masterly.'

The girl looked up quickly. ‘I like Mr. Campion, though, don't you?'

‘Immensely. I don't know why. He's on our side anyway, perhaps it's that. I'm afraid he's having a depressing day. Alison gave him some dreadful lunch and now he's going to be asked to share Eustace's boiled milk and bickies.'

‘No. I shall make him a nice little omelette and he'll eat it with a
glass of wine and a roll and butter and like it.' Mrs. Broome was beside herself with happy home-making. ‘I shall put a pretty tray cloth on and find a bit of cheese and he'll enjoy it. They're very busy talking about something
I
was able to tell them, Miss Julia.' She was bursting with her news and carefully avoided Timothy's warning glance. ‘I happened to go out today and I . . .'