Duncan Kyle - Terror's Cradle

I let Willingham pay off the cab and went into the Daily News building, nodded to the commissionaire, picked up the house phone and dialled Scown's number. His secretary intercepted, then put me through.

`What is it?'

`Bad,' I said. 'Probably very bad. I've got an official circle with me and I'm going to search her desk.' `Want anything?'

'No. If I do, though—'

Scown said, 'Let me know. I mean it. '

He wasn't surprised I was back, but then he wasn't often surprised about anything. I turned and found the commissionaire blocking Willingham's way. A big man. One of two big men who stop undesirables moving beyond the foyer. Both of them ex-Marines, in their fifties perhaps but still formidable. I said, 'Okay Tom, he's with me.' Tom nodded and stepped aside, allowing Willingham to follow me to the lift. Caulfield's office was, as expected, empty. I sat Willingham in it, pointed out which was Alsa's desk and left him. He wasn't happy, but I scarcely expected him to be happy. As I crossed to the desk, his big face was glued to the glass, watching my every step. After a couple of minutes the assistant news editor wandered over. 'Borrowing a lipstick?'

I forced a grin. 'An address Alsa promised me, that's all.' `She doesn't set up dates for me.'

Ì'll speak to her about that,' I promised. He smiled and wandered off. I found Alsa's contact book in the right hand top drawer, where most people keep them, and leafed through it without taking it out of the drawer. No Aggie Waggie. No myopic. No Society for the Short Sighter. It may exist, but it wasn't listed. I began to take out notebooks and 'work through them. There were twenty or more, all dated, all full of the usual miscellany of shorthand notes and phone numbers from Batley to Bognor that fill all reporters' notebooks. After a few minutes, though, it occurred to me that Alsa wouldn't have pointed me in the direction of twenty notebooks. It would be something a damn sight more positive than that.

But what? I sat drumming my fingers on the desk top, wondering. She'd aimed the information specifically at me, no doubt about that. Therefore she intended me to look somewhere specific. Somewhere I'd look because I knew her and knew the way she thought. I glanced round the office. Willing-ham's angry face was still pressed gargoylelike against the glass partition. Telephones were ringing, reporters were typing, gossiping, using telephones. The tea boy was wandering round with a big enamel teapot. A messenger was carrying a cuttings file from the library to the news desk. The library? Surely not. It held literally millions of cuttings and pictures, harvested for half a century and carefully filed away. But there could, I supposed, be a file labelled Aggie Waggie in there. I half rose to go and look, but changed my mind, because an idea struck me then. It wasn't the library cuttings I wanted, but Alsa's own cuttings. That might be it ! She'd kept cuttings of the stories she wrote since she was a beginner – her father's idea, and perhaps a bit old-fashioned these days, but .. . I found them in the bottom left hand drawer. Three fat volumes. I was careful to be casual as I lifted the top one

on to the desk top, careful not to glance towards Willingham. I began to turn the pages, reading each story carefully. After forty minutes or so, I'd worked back in time to the point where she'd joined the Daily News. Before that she'd been on a woman's magazine for a while, doing production, not writing very much except a weekly books' page. All the same, I felt the cuttings book was the likely place. Somehow I was certain the clue lay somewhere among the carefully pasted-in pieces Alsa had written. The reviews were the usual women's magazine stuff, memoirs of a country midwife, flower arrangement, dressmaking, medical and pseudo-medical stuff, how to bring up kids. None of them more than a few paragraphs. There was an office style, a way of setting out the salient details: title, author, publisher's name in brackets, price, in that order.

Perhaps I saw it because the name was unusual. I don't know. Perhaps my senses were just sharply tuned. Anyway, a name suddenly seemed to stand out in a mass of type: Opie. I looked at the book's title : Children's Games in Street and Playground by Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford University Press) £2. I kept turning the pages for Willingham's benefit, but I was thinking furiously. My Opie? Myopie? The word had been handwritten, and c and e are easily confused in handwriting. See myopic made no sense at all; See my Opie might. The intervening capital letter needn't be important. What I needed was a sight of the book. Would there be a copy in the library?

I put my head round the door and told Willingham I was having no luck and that if he didn't mind terribly, I was going to the gents. He scowled at me and watched me go.

`Have you,' I asked the librarian quickly, 'a copy of a thing called Children's Games in Street and —'

He said, Òpie. Up there. The blue one.'

Thirty seconds later I knew about Aggie Waggie. It was, naturally, a children's game. But it was more than that; the game was played all over Britain, under various names. It was called Aggie Waggle is only one place, and a remote

one at that; in the Shetlands.

I returned to Alsa's desk, trying hard to look relieved and frustrated at the same time, and picked up the cuttings book again. There'd been a story in there about the Shetlands, and those islands rang a tinny bell in my mind for another reason. Alsa had taken a holiday or two up there and she always came back shiny-eyed and enthusiastic talking with a kind of laughing provocation about strong, silent Vikings, so somewhere inside me a worm of jealousy had long tunnelled around. In the cuttings book were two pieces she'd done. I read them carefully. The first was about the first impact of the discovery of North Sea oil on an isolated community, the second about a local character who spent his life among the islands' sea birds, climbing wild crags to count eggs and so on. Maybe he was the Viking type, I thought sourly, but it was his name that made my scalp tingle. Anderson. James Anderson. Anderson, Jarlshof. Sandnes G . B .... Norway? But where did Norway come into it? The coincidence of the names was too strong to be ignored, but Norway was completely inexplicable. I looked for a while but the cuttings book contained nothing about Norway and the other two books pre-dated the one I was looking at. Finally I put the stuff away, all except the contacts book, and went back to Willingham. Ànything?' he demanded sourly.

`Not that I can see. Here's her contacts book. Let's see if it means anything to Wemyss.'

He grunted and rose and we walked together to the lift. On the way down I needled him deliberately and hard about his clothes, his manners and his appearance. He didn't reply, but he was visibly fuming. Just as the doors were opening at the ground floor, I kicked his shin hard.

`You bastard!' he said loudly. He was red-faced with pain and anger and Tom the commissionaire looked round interestedly.

`Tom,' I said. 'We're having trouble with this one. Wants to horsewhip Mr Scown. Don't let him through again, will you?'

`Course not,' Tom said. 'This way, sir' He took Willingham's elbow with a large firm hand and blocked the furious Willingham's punch deftly. As I ducked back through the doors, he was saying, 'Now we don't want any trouble, do we, sir?'

I raced downstairs, through the machine room, quiet at that time of day, and out through the despatch bays where the papers are loaded for distribution. Two or three minutes later, I was cutting up Chancery Lane across High Holborn and into Bedford Place, heading for the Holborn Library. I'd have preferred the available resources of the Daily News, but Willingham had been at only a, very temporary disadvantage and the Daily News building would be dangerous for me now.