John Wyndham - The Chrysalids

He did not seem reassured.

‘There’s Rachel,’ he suggested. ‘She was pretty much knocked by her sister’s suicide. Do you think she—?’

‘No,’ I said confidently. ‘Quite apart from the fact that she couldn’t do it without involving herself, we should have known if she were hiding anything.’

‘Well, then, there’s young Petra,’ he said.

I stared at him.

‘How did you know about Petra?’ I asked.’ I never told you.’

He nodded in a satisfied way. ‘So she is. I reckoned so.’

‘How did you find out?’ I repeated anxiously, wondering who else might have had a similar idea. ‘Did she tell you?’

‘Oh, no, I kind of came across it.’ He paused, then he added:

‘Indirectly it came from Anne. I told you it was a bad thing to let her marry that fellow. There’s a type of woman who isn’t content until she’s made herself some man’s slave and doormat — put herself completely in his power. That’s the kind she was.’

‘You’re not — you don’t mean she told Alan about herself?’ I protested.

‘She did,’ he nodded. ‘She did more than that. She told him about all of you.’

I stared at him incredulously.

‘You can’t be sure of that, Uncle Axel!’

‘I am, Davie boy. Maybe she didn’t intend to. Maybe it was only herself she told him about, being the kind who can’t keep secrets in bed. And maybe he had to beat the names of the rest of you out of her, but he knew all right. He knew.’

‘But even if he did, how did you know he knew?’ I asked, with rising anxiety.

He said, reminiscently:

‘A while ago there used to be a dive down on the waterfront in Rigo. It was run by a fellow called Grouth, and very profitably, too. He had a staff of three girls and two men, and they did as he said — just as he said. If he’d liked to tell what he knew one of the men would have been strung up for mutiny on the high seas, and two of the girls for murder. I don’t know what the others had done, but he had the lot of them cold. It was as neat a set-up for blackmail as you could find. If the men got any tips he had them. He saw to it that the girls were nice to the sailors who used the place, and whatever they got out of the sailors he had, too. I used to see the way he treated them, and the expression on his face when he watched them; kind of gloating because he’d got them, and he knew it, and they knew it. He’d only got to frown, and they danced.’ Uncle Axel paused reflectively. ‘You’d never think you’d come across just that expression on a man’s face again in Waknuk church, of all places, would you? It made me feel a bit queer when I did. But there it was. It was on his face while he studied first Rosalind, then Rachel, then you, then young Petra. He wasn’t interested in anybody else. Just the four of you.’

‘You could have been mistaken — just an expression…’ I said.

‘Not that expression. Oh, no, I knew that expression, it jerked me right back to the dive in Rigo. Besides, if I wasn’t right, how do I come to know about Petra?’

‘What did you do?’

‘I came home and thought a bit about Grouth, and what a comfortable life he’d been able to lead, and about one or two other things. Then I put a new string on my bow.’

‘So it was you!’ I exclaimed.

‘It was the only thing to do, Davie. Of course, I knew Anne would reckon it was one of you that had done it. But she couldn’t denounce you without giving herself away and her sister, too. There was a risk there, but I had to take it.’

‘There certainly was a risk — and it nearly didn’t come off,’ I said, and told him about the letter that Anne had left for the inspector.

He shook his head. ‘I hadn’t reckoned she’d go as far as that, poor girl,’ he said. ‘All the same, it had to be done — and quickly. Alan wasn’t a fool. He’d see to it that he was covered. Before he actually began on you he’d have had a written deposition somewhere to be opened in the event of his death, and he’d see that you knew about it, too. It’d have been a pretty nasty situation for all of you.’

The more I considered it, the more I realized how nasty it could have been.

‘You took a big risk for us yourself, Uncle Axel,’ I told him.

He shrugged.

‘Very little risk for me against a great deal for you,’ he said.

Presently we came back to the matter in hand.

‘But these inquiries can’t have anything to do with Alan. That was weeks ago,’ I pointed out.

‘What’s more, it’s not the kind of information Alan’d share with anyone if he wanted to cash in on it,’ agreed Uncle Axel. ‘There’s one thing,’ he went on, ‘they can’t know much, or they’d have called an inquiry already, and they’ll have to be pretty damn sure of themselves before they do call one. The inspector isn’t going to put himself in a weak spot with your father if he can help it — nor with Angus Morton either, for the matter of that. But that still doesn’t get us any nearer to knowing what started it.’

I was pressed back again into thinking it must have something to do with the affair of Petra’s pony. Uncle Axel knew of its death, of course, but not much more. It would have involved telling him about Petra herself, and we had had a tacit understanding that the less he knew about us the less he would have to hide in case of trouble. However, now that he did know about Petra, I described the event more fully. It did not look to us to be a likely source, but for lack of any other lead he made a note of the man’s name.

‘Jerome Skinner,’ he repeated, not very hopefully. ‘Very well, I’ll see if I can find out anything about him.’

We all conferred that night, but inconclusively. Michael put it:

‘Well, if you and Rosalind are quite satisfied that there’s been nothing to start suspicion in your district, then I don’t see that it can be traceable to anybody but that man in the forest.’ He used a thought-shape rather than bothering to spell out ‘Jerome Skinner’ in letter-forms. ‘If he is the source, then he must have put his suspicions before the inspector in this district who will have handed it on as a routine report to the inspector in yours. That’ll mean that several people are wondering about it already, and there’ll be questions going on here about Sally and Katherine. The devil of it is that everybody’s more suspicious than usual because of these rumours of large-scale trouble from the Fringes. I’ll see if I can find out anything tomorrow, and let you know.’

‘But what’s the best thing for us to do?’ Rosalind put in.

‘Nothing at the moment,’ Michael advised. ‘If we are right about the source, then you are in two groups; Sally and Katherine in one, you, David, and Petra in the other; and the other three of us aren’t involved at all. Don’t do anything unusual, or you may cause them to pounce, on suspicion. If it does come to an inquiry we ought to be able to bluff it out by acting simple, as we decided. But Petra’s the weak spot; she’s too young to understand. If they start on her and trick her and trap her, it might end up in sterilization and the Fringes for all of us….

‘That makes her the key-point. They must not get hold of her. It’s possible that there’s no suspicion attached to her — but she was there, so she’s liable to be suspected. If there’s any sign of interest in her it’ll be better to cut your losses and get her away — if they do start on her they’ll have it out of her somehow.

‘Very likely it’ll all blow over, but just in case it does get sticky, David will have to be responsible. It’ll be your job, David, to see that she isn’t taken for questioning — at any cost. If you have to kill someone to prevent it, then you must. They’d not think twice about killing us if they had the excuse. Don’t forget, if they move at all, they’ll be doing it to exterminate us — by the slow method, if not by the fast.