The Chinese Egg (29 page)

“Where would you go?”

“I said. Anywhere it seemed possible we might find. . . Caroline Ann.”

“If those children told you, would you? You mean you'd believe what they said?”

He hesitated.

“You see? You wouldn't do anything. I would. I'd do anything. I wouldn't care if it seemed stupid, I'd try it. It wouldn't matter if I felt silly doing it. That's why I went with the money. It seemed just a chance.”

“It didn't help,” Andrew said.

“But it might have.”

Andrew remembered what Price had said. He might have lost Sally as well as Caroline Ann. He said, “I'd do anything too.”

“Anything those two said?”

He said, “Yes. Now. I'd do anything, even if there wasn't anything more than their story to go on.”

Sally said, “Thank you, Andrew.” Her frozen face quivered and she tried to smile at him. He sat down beside her and put an arm round her. She leant her head on his shoulder and they sat there, side by side, not speaking, for a long time.

Walking on Hampstead Heath that Sunday afternoon, Vicky and Stephen were playing Twenty Questions. Stephen thought of the sea. It was mineral, he thought. Or was it abstract? Not manufactured, something that no one owned. Vicky floundered, she couldn't get it at all, she gave up. Stephen told her.

Her turn. She thought of St. Paul's Cathedral. Stephen got it in sixteen.

Stephen thought of something that was animal. Vicky got it in five. A wren. Too obvious.

Vicky thought of a prince. In her mind's eye she saw him, a fat elderly prince, she didn't know why. She'd said “Animal” and Stephen had started as usual asking, “Can you eat it?” when the flash came. The flash stopped their walking, and when Stephen could see Vicky again she was shaking.

“What is it? It must've been different from what I saw. . . .”

“Something's gone wrong. They couldn't have. . . .”

“What? I saw the girl and the baby. . . .”

“I saw a place. It wasn't England.”

“You mean. . .? When we saw them yesterday they were leaving? Of course! The sea! They were going to get the cross-Channel ferry.”

“We must tell the Super. Now. At once.”

“But Vicky! How do you know it wasn't England? Did you see a signpost or something? Or hear. . .?”

“Come on! I'll tell you while we go. There's a call box in South End Green.”

Price picked up the telephone before the second ring.

“Stephen? News? I can't tell you how much we need it.”

“We had another just now. About a quarter of an hour ago.”

“Tell me quickly, and then if need be perhaps you could come over.”

“We didn't see the same thing. We don't always.”

“Go on.”

“I saw the girl. The Maureen girl. You were right, her hair's been cut. She looks awful. Someone's been punching her on the face.”

“Where are they?”

“I'm afraid I don't know. Inside a sort of room. Very dark. I could only just see her.”

“Night was it?”

“I don't know. It's all so quick. I just saw her in this tiny room.”

“Anything else? What about Vicky?”

“That's what's so extraordinary. Vicky saw a place.”

“Go on,” Price said impatiently.

“She says it wasn't England.”

“How does she know? Language?”

“By the buildings. She says.”

“You mean she recognized some place abroad?”

There was a slight pause.

“Go on. Did she recognize it?”

Stephen said miserably, “She said it looked like pictures of Moscow.”

Price's voice changed. “Is this supposed to be a joke?”

“I knew you wouldn't believe it.”

“Is Vicky there? I'd like to speak to her.”

Vicky said, “It's me,” in a small voice.

“What's all this about Moscow? Do you realize you're playing with a child's life?”

“I'm not playing. I did see it.”

Price sat at his desk and faced the horrible possibility that Andrew Wilmington and the others might be right and that the whole thing was a put up job. That he'd trusted in these two and now they'd let him down. That he'd wasted precious time and taken a risk which was turning out unforgivably high. Vicky had never heard his voice as grim as when he said, “What exactly did you see?”

“It was a sort of palace. Green and blue and goldy. With a round thing and spires. No, not spires exactly. It was like that building you see in pictures of Moscow. Not a bit like England. Truly.”

She sounded distressed. Price saw suddenly in his mind's eye her bony, pointed, intelligent face. He'd liked the child. So had Sally Wilmington. He groaned.

“You'd better come over at once. And Stephen. Take a taxi. We'll pay here.” He rang down and gave the order. Another hope fading. And no time at all. If it had all been play-acting he'd flay them so they'd never do it again.

When they arrived he was prepared to grill them. But again they didn't feel like impostors. Perhaps his intuition was all wrong. Perhaps they had just that quality which he'd met once or twice in a long career of dealing with criminals, of persuading themselves of their integrity. There was nothing so misleading as that; the story then came out with the clarity of truth because for the moment it was the truth to the teller. He was tired, too, and he couldn't be sure whether through dulling the edge of his intellectual processes the fatigue heightened his perception, or if all his faculties were less acute. Whatever the reason he found himself again believing Stephen, from whom he'd demanded the first story. He took him through it, asking about every detail. The ragged hair. The swollen face. The size of the tiny room. Where the light was coming from. What was she wearing? What colour was the jumper? What colour were the trousers?

“I couldn't see very well because she had the baby on her lap.”

“The baby! The baby was there? You saw the baby?”

“It was on her lap. I told you, she was sitting on a sort of. . . .”

“Why didn't you say at once you'd seen the baby?”

“I don't know. I just thought if she was there of course the baby would be too.”

“You mean you think it was there? You didn't actually see it?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Are you absolutely certain? What was it doing? Was it. . . alive?” He heard Vicky gasp.

“She was giving it a bottle.”

“You're sure? You couldn't have mistaken a bundle of clothes or anything else for the baby? Did you see its face?”

“No, but I saw its hand.”

“Moving?”

Stephen thought, then said, “Sort of waving about.”

It had to be true, Price thought. He turned to Vicky.

“Now then, let's hear exactly what you saw.”

She told him again what she'd said on the telephone. Price put her through some sort of third degree too. At the end of twenty minutes she was on the edge of tears, but her story hadn't varied by a hairsbreadth. She'd seen a street, people, all quite ordinary, then this fantastic palace, floodlit. It didn't make sense. Price began to wonder if one of them was hallucinating. Even if the couple had somehow managed to evade the watch that was being kept on all ports and had slipped across the Channel, how could they have possibly got as far as was suggested by the Eastern look the girl had described?

The telephone rang. Price said into it severely, “I told you not to disturb me unless there was something really urgent.”

“Inspector Drinkwater thinks you ought to hear about this one, sir.”

“What is it?”

“Description of a van seen parked last night in Brighton, sir.”

The duty sergeant was surprised by the roar with which the Chief Superintendent greeted this. “Brighton! My god, what a fool I've been! Yes, send it up, Sergeant. It could be important.” To Vicky he said, “Here's a pencil and there's a pad. Draw what this building was like.”

“I'm not much good,” Vicky said.

“Never mind. Just to give me a rough idea.”

While she was drawing, the message came, in. A Mr. Mackenzie had found the parking space outside his house in Messenger Street, Brighton, occupied when he'd got back from the pub on Saturday night. It wasn't one of his neighbours' cars, he knew them all. It was a van. He couldn't be sure of the registration, he hadn't bothered to look. It had gone now.. He thought it was a green van, but he couldn't be sure of that. He'd gone out to look at tea-time because of hearing the police notice on the radio, and
his wife said he should. Why had his wife said he should? Because she said she'd heard a baby crying early in the morning and there weren't any babies near that she knew of. He hadn't heard any baby, but then he was a bit on the deaf side.

“Follow it up. Ask all along the street if anyone put up a couple with a baby last night. And the two streets next to it. Anywhere near where they could have lodged. House-to-house inquiry. Put out notices for a green van, probably going west from Brighton. Say the girl has short hair and has the marks of injury on her face. Get someone to examine this Mackenzie chap and see if he can't remember a bit more about the van. He'll probably come out with the make, even if he didn't notice anything else. And hurry. The baby's still there. We've got to get to it soon.”

“It's nothing like it. I told you I can't draw,” Vicky said.

Price looked.

“Have you ever been to Brighton, Vicky?”

“No. Been to Eastbourne, though.”

“Wait a minute,” Price said. He rang downstairs again and made an unlikely request. Five minutes later a grinning sergeant brought in a handful of picture postcards, sent back to the staff-room by officers on holiday to excite envy in those left working. They came from all over the world. Many from Spain, several from France, one or two from America, a sprinkling from Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, some from neglected England. The first one from the south coast was the usual fat-lady-knickers type. The next showed a pier, the third chalky cliffs. The fourth Price laid in front of Vicky, covering the place name with his hand. “Is that your Kremlin?” he asked.

The Pavilion jumped at Vicky with its impossible pale un-English colours, its ridiculous, frilly, superb, extravagant form. She said, “Where is it then?” and Price said, “Where it should be. Where it was built, for a Prince. And the baby's still there. We might catch them yet.”

Sunday evening

Vicky didn't get home till nearly nine. Her mother would certainly ask questions too difficult to answer if she stayed out any more of the day. But she was possessed by a sort of feverish impatience
which made it impossible to sit still, to eat, to talk normally. She wanted all the time to be doing something. While she tried to conceal from her Mum's quick eye the fact that she had hidden most of her tinned salmon under her knife and fork, while she tried to listen to the others' conversations and to make appropriate replies, she wasn't really in the kitchen at home at all. In her mind she was scanning the southern coast of England for the van. She was cowering with the girl away from being hit all over her face. She was remembering Sally Wilmington and the way she'd said to Mr. Wilmington, “You won't let them hurt Caroline Ann?” and then that girl's voice saying, “You said you wouldn't hurt her.” She remembered the Super saying to Stephen this afternoon, “Was it. . . alive?” It had been alive in Stephen's picture, but they didn't know just when that was. It could still be tomorrow, it could be today. She had caught Price's fear and she shivered. Mrs. Stanford saw it.

“Vicky! What's the matter? And you've not eaten anything either!”

“I'm just not hungry, Mum.”

“Do you feel ill? You've hardly said a word all through tea.”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't feel well, though?”

If she said No, it would get her out of having to explain. But then she wouldn't be allowed to go out and meet Stephen tomorrow, and if they couldn't meet they might not be able to save the baby. She said, “I'm all right. Truly, Mum. I'm just tired, that's all.”

Mrs. Stanford waited until she and Vicky were washing up alone, then she said, “There's something wrong, Vicky. Want to tell me?”

Vicky shook her head. She found she was surprisingly close to tears.

“Have you and Stephen fallen out?”

Vicky shook her head again.

“You're seeing a lot of him, aren't you? Considering you told me it's nothing serious.”

“I did tell you, Mum. We keep on having to see the police about that kidnapping.”

“I thought you'd told them what you'd heard. Why do they want to go on and on about it?”

“There's lots more questions they think of to ask us all the time.”

“It isn't they think you had anything to do with it?”

“Oh Mum! Of course not”

“I can't see why you and that Stephen boy have to be at their beck and call all the time, for all that.”

Vicky said, “They're frightened about the baby.” Her voice broke.

“Is that what's worrying you, love?”

It was such a relief to say, “Yes,” and to allow the tears to come. Mrs. Stanford abandoned the washing-up. She sat herself down and took Vicky, great grown-up, nearly sixteen-year-old Vicky, on to her lap. Vicky cried wetly and almost enjoyably. It was wonderful to sit on Mum's lap like this as if she was six, and simply let go. She cried with great choking sobs, not trying for the stiff upper lip or being a big girl now. She didn't think. She melted.

Mum was fantastic. She simply held Vicky and allowed her to cry. After a time Vicky lifted her head from that comfortable shoulder and said, “I must look awful.”

“If you're thinking that you must be better.”

“It was just. . . Mum, that baby!”