Green for Danger (2 page)

“Of course all the nonsense went on for three or four years afterwards, the doodle-bugs and the huge, silent, terrible rockets and the lot; but
Green for Danger
had been launched by then.”

And what a launch!
Green for Danger
was to become a major success, both for her and for the British film industry when Alastair Sim brought Inspector Cockrill to vivid life. Not quite the Inspector Cockrill the author had visualized, but “done so beautifully … a marvellous film …” that she was able to forgive the discrepancies. And, of course, the real Inspector Cockrill was still hers—and went on to fresh triumphs, appearing in many subsequent books and short stories.

But it is the Inspector Cockrill—“Cockie”—of
Green for Danger
that we remember best as he begins his thoroughgoing investigation, perhaps from slightly less than worthy motives. (“The sirens broke belatedly into their unearthly howl; a flare dropped slowly over the downs, out towards Torrington, splitting the early winter darkness with its gradually brightening gleam—and where there are flares, there are very soon going to be bombs. Inspector Cockrill was interested in bombshells and he did not like bombs; and there was a fifteen-mile drive home in the general direction of those flares. ‘I'll stay,' he said briefly.”)

For the war itself is the motivating force of this entire mystery. Were it not for the war, most of these characters would never have met. They would have continued living their peacetime lives, many miles apart—both geographically and socially—never to have met at all.

But the war came, people were conscripted, volunteered, went into active military and medical duty—and met other people and situations they would never have encountered in their normal peacetime lives. Still, life went on, disrupted though it might have been. Still, people found time for laughter, love … and murder.

Despite the mass murder raining down from the skies, the forces of law and order swung into action when an individual was murdered on the operating table; horrifyingly, by one of the people dedicated to saving and preserving life. How? The operation was a routine one, the patient in good health apart from the fractured femur due to be mended—but the patient died.

Until this, Business as Usual had been the order of the day, but the blitz was one thing, and deliberate murder in their midst was something else. That did what the bombs had not been able to do—disturbed them, upset them, frightened them. As Cockie pointed out, “‘You can take the blitz in your stride; but a couple of unexplained deaths, and you all get the jitters.'”

Not unreasonably, the reply was: “‘“Unexplained” is the operative word.… I'm much more petrified of the blitz on the nights that it
does
n't come; once it's there, it's there, but I don't like the uneasy waiting for it to begin; and I don't like waiting to be murdered—or to have my friends murdered.'”

For the second murder had rapidly followed the first: a nurse who had claimed to know the identity of the killer had been stabbed—with a scalpel. There had also been an unsuccessful attempt to kill another nurse by gassing her as she slept. Nerves were fraying, rumors abounded, and the main suspects found themselves not quite ostracized, but definitely set apart from the rest of the staff. (“‘I suppose it's all right to let her give the injections? After all she
is
one of “them” …'” … “‘My dear, the inmates of our shelter have petitioned that when there are air-raids, I shall sleep somewhere else; they think I'm going to rise up in the night and set fire to their palliasses with oil from the paraffin lamps!'” … “‘The Mess was sitting around uneasily, jiggling their teaspoons in their saucers and jumping whenever we spoke to them, so we made ourselves scarce.'”)

Opening in truly classic style, Chapter One introduces us to two victims and a clutch of suspects—all such pleasant and charming people that it seems impossible to imagine any of them in such roles. And yet … buried deep in the life of each of them is a private tragedy, a secret each would rather not have revealed.

Some secrets, of course, were open. Everyone knew that a girl had recently died under the anæsthetic administered by Lieutenant Barnes during one of his last operations as a civilian. He had been attacked by the girl's mother and had even been sent an anonymous letter about it. Sympathy had been on his side—until the fractured femur died under the anæsthetic he was administering.

Kindly Major Moon made no secret of the fact that he had lost a young son in a hit-and-run road accident and now found sad irony in the fact that the war had brought him an unexpected comfort. (“‘Well, well—I can find it in my heart now to be grateful, I suppose; now that the war's come, I mean. He'd have been of age, you know; I'd have had to send him off, to see him go off to France or the East or somewhere.… I'd have had to wait and hunger for news of him; he might have been posted missing, perhaps, or killed, and without any news of what had really happened. It's that telegram business.… I don't think I could have borne that.… Who would have thought in all these years that I could ever have found it in my heart to say that I was glad that my boy had been killed?”')

Everywhere they turned, the war and its effects were inescapable. If it hadn't been for the war, all those tablets of morphia wouldn't have been in such wide circulation. But, during the blitz, it seemed a simple and necessary precaution to medical people, who had no difficulty in acquiring such pills. (“‘Most of us keep a small dose handy in case of being buried in an air-raid.… If you were trapped and in pain, it would be comforting to have some, and might save another person risking their lives to give you a shot of something.'”)

With consummate skill, the author weaves her web of pain and deceit, deadly deeds and twisted motives, catching the reader at every turn. Once you've read it, go back and reread it and see how cleverly all your assumptions have been used against you, how smoothly and inevitably you have been fooled.

Today Christianna Brand lives with her surgeon husband in a beautiful Regency house in the Maida Vale section of London and is a proud grandmother. She has served on the Committee of the Crime Writers' Association and was chairman from 1972 to 1973. Ever mindful of her early struggles, she is endlessly helpful to new authors. Friends who find themselves in hospital (or in jail) are the recipients of a constant flow of cards, verses, and little notes, thoughtfully spaced to keep boredom at bay and ensure that said friend is not lying alone and neglected when the mail is given out. At the monthly meetings of the Crime Writers' Association, just follow the sounds of hilarity and you will find Christianna Brand holding court, the center of a lively and appreciative group of colleagues.

I told her once that I didn't write fan letters—this is the exception that proves the rule.

—Marian Babson

*
Actually, bread was not rationed until after the war.

CHAPTER I

J
oseph Higgins, postman, pushed his battered red bicycle up the long ascent that leads to Heron's Park, three miles out of Heronsford, in Kent. It had been a children's sanatorium before the war, and now was being hurriedly scrambled into shape as a military hospital. Its buildings stood out big and grey and bleak among the naked winter trees and he cursed them heartily as he toiled up the hill, his bicycle tacking groggily from side to side on the country road. All this for a mere seven letters! Six miles out of his way for a handful of letters that would probably not even be looked at till the morning! He spread them out, fanwise, in one hand, his elbow resting heavily on the handle-bar, and examined them resentfully. The first was addressed to the Commanding Officer. One of the new medicos, guessed Higgins shrewdly, holding it up to the light. A nice linen envelope and a Harley Street postmark; and doctors' handwriting was always illegible.…

Gervase Eden had also cursed as he sat in his consulting-room, confirming to the C.O. at Heron's Park that he would report for duty, ‘forthwith'. The last of his lovely ladies had just tripped off down the steps in a flutter of cheques and eyelashes and invitations to dinner, and already feeling miraculously better for her
heavenly
little injection (of unadulterated H
₂
O). He could not flatter himself that the pay of a surgeon in His Majesty's Forces was going to keep him in anything like the luxury to which he was rapidly becoming accustomed; but there it was—one had put one's name down during the Munich crisis, and already it was becoming a tiny bit uncomfortable to be out of uniform.… At least he would be free of the lovely ladies for a spell. For the thousandth time he looked at himself in the mirror, looked at his ugly face and greying hair, at his thin, angular body and restless hands—and wondered what on earth women saw in him, and wished they wouldn't. He rang the bell for his pretty little secretary and asked her to post the letter. She immediately burst into tears at the thought of his going, and after all it was only common charity to spend a few minutes in comforting the poor little soul.

Higgins shuffled over Eden's letter and turned to the next in the bunch. A huge, square envelope, covered with a huge, square handwriting; a woman's handwriting, vigorous, generous, splashed across all the available space; one of the nurses, he supposed.…

Jane Woods had written two letters, one to an address to Austria, the other to Heron's Park. She finished off three sketches of delicious, though impractical, syren suits and posted them to Mr. Cecil, of Christophe's in Regent Street (who paid her three guineas apiece for them, and thereafter presented them as his own); and, consigning the rest of her work to the waste-paper-basket, she rang up the circle of delightful riff-raff who constituted her friends, and summoned them to a party. “Eat, drink and sleep together, my loves,” cried Miss Woods, “for to-morrow we join the V.A.D.s!” She stood, glass in hand, before the low mantelpiece of her elegant little, modern, one-roomed flat, a big, dark woman of about forty, with a plain, rather raddled face, an enormous bust, and astonishingly lovely legs. “Jane, darling, we
told
you not to go in for those fantastic lectures!” cried the riff-raff, who were all going in for fantastic lectures themselves; and, “Woody, darling, I simply can't imagine you, sweetie, I mean
bed
pans and everything!” and, “Woody, darling, what on earth made you
do
it?” She treated them to a tender little sketch of herself in the character of Florence Nightingale, hanging over the truckle bed of some suffering V.C. (“Is that you again, Flo, with that bloody nightlight?”): and, when at last she was alone, sobbed off her eye-black on to her pillow, because her intolerable conscience had driven her to this tremendous sacrifice; the sacrifice of all the fun and gaiety and luxury of her successful career, in blind atonement for a sin not even of her own commission; a sin, just possibly, not even committed.

The next letter, also, was in a woman's handwriting, a girlish hand, sloping downwards a little at the end of each line. “Sign of depression,” said Joseph Higgins to himself, for he had read about that only a day or two ago in the Sunday paper. “Another of the nurses, I expect, and doesn't want to come, poor girl!” But here he was wrong, for Esther Sanson did, very badly, want to go to Heron's Park.

She stood with the letter in her hand, looking down at her mother and laughing, for Mrs. Sanson was deep in the latest drama of the Heronsford Women's Voluntary Service. “… but Mummy she
could
n't! I mean, not
all
that baby wool into sailors' stockings for going under seaboots! I don't believe a word of it, darling; you're making it up!”

“On my word of honour, Esther, every spot of it, one pair pale pink and the other pale blue. I couldn't believe my eyes when she showed them to me. ‘But Mrs. Huge,' I said to her …”

“Not Mrs. Huge, Mummy—her name
could
n't be Mrs. Huge?”