All her life Char had believed in Luck. She had followed the Luck unremittingly, and although it had taken her into strange places and guided her at times down to the nethermost hell, she still trusted it, still had an undivided faith in that will-o’the-wisp which deceived so many and finally disappointed all who depended upon it.
But Luck was Char’s god, and Luck to her had become identified with Mona. When she discovered that Mona had escaped her at Luxor, she had made herself ill with rage. Only the knowledge that she was penniless and must somehow get her money back from Sadie had prevented her from drinking herself into a coma and taking no further interest in what went on around her.
When her mind cleared a little, she looked back over her life and over the past, an account of which Mona had so successfully avoided receiving in confidence and realised vaguely – for Char was not skilled in introspection – that Mona’s attraction lay partly in the fact that she was the complete opposite to herself, and was, therefore, all she had always longed to be.
Char, most inappropriately christened Charmian, had been born of Anglo-Indian parents. Her father had a small government post at Cawnpore and, as soon as Char was a few years old, she was sent back to England to live with her cousins. They were a large family, rough, improvident and always on the verge of bankruptcy. They found Char – an unprepossessing child – both a nuisance and an expense. She had an unhappy childhood and the trouble lay partly in a sensitive reaction to being teased incessantly about her looks.
She was unaccountably ugly with no redeeming feature. She was also ungainly, awkward, and delicate in health. Her female cousins being attractive and boisterously healthy, the contrast between them was always there to taunt Char, and she was made bitterly conscious of her own-deficiencies.
When she was seventeen she went back to her parents in India. Her mother, by this time, had turned into a shrew who nagged incessantly and complained both at the country in which she lived and at the prospect of a retirement that would enforce their return home.
Char had looked forward to India as an escape from the miseries of her life in England. She soon found that life for her was much the same wherever she went. She had none of that commodity which was to be labelled in later years ‘sex appeal’. Men shunned her, even in India, where it was conventionally assumed that any girl, however unattractive, could find a husband.
She found herself partnerless at dances and excluded or forgotten from the numerous parties with which the Anglo-Indians filled their days. She grew bitter. She found it some solace to be able to jeer and sneer at people, to repeat and even invent unkind things about them. Consequently, people avoided her more than ever, but this only spurred her on to greater indiscretions. Finally, when she was twenty-four, she got married. She married an acquaintance of her father, a man nearly three times her own age, who was a tea planter in Ceylon.
He lived on the estate, which was twenty-five miles from the nearest white neighbour. He drank, he was a rotter, and he had a brutal streak in him, but still he was a man. Char married him gratefully. In later years, she used to look back and wonder if, had she known what she was going to, she would have refused her one and only proposal of marriage.
Even then, with the marks of where he had bruised her still sore on her thin body, she was doubtful whether she would have had the courage to say no. It had meant so much to have the status of a married woman, to salve her pride with the knowledge that one man had wanted her – even if he were a man like her husband. He had got what he had set out to get, a housekeeper, but he made no bones about the fact that he found her physically unattractive and preferred to seek his amusement with local girls.
When he died, Char found herself with a few hundred pounds, much experience of vice and debauchery, and not a friend in the world. Two places she disliked – one was England, the other Cawnpore, otherwise the world was open to her. She decided that somehow she would manage to enjoy herself. If men were not going to seek her out because she was a woman, there were yet other ways in which she might arouse their interest.
There were plenty of bars and cheap hotels in the East that cater for just such dregs of humanity as Char Strathwyn became. Sometimes when she was fortunate, she moved amongst a higher stratum of dregs, but always she lived by the same methods, the same ideas. She had one ambition – money. She wanted money not only to live, but also because it gave her power.
Every penny she could wrench unwillingly out of a man or woman gave her the satisfaction of feeling that she was getting a little of her own back on a humanity that had treated her badly. She knew quite well that people pointed her out as being undesirable, that young men and women were warned against her, and that the authorities had, on more than one occasion, debated the desirability of deporting her from British possessions.
But even in her wickedness, Char was not really effective. She was that strange mixture of rogue and fool that displays sometimes the astuteness of the rogue, at others the weakness of the fool. She was human, after all, human because the vulnerability of her youth had never quite forsaken her, it was there, a tender spot, and it would catch up on her unexpectedly so that she lost her grip and many of her victims drifted away from her, thankful to escape and not realising quite why or how they had been so fortunate.
Deep down inside, Char had a longing for the peace and comfort that financial security could have given her. Her fevered search for money was unsatisfying because in reality, although she did not know it, she was still seeking the affection she had lost in her childhood. She was pathetic – but only to those who could see through the hard veneer of vice and self-seeking that had accumulated over her character through the years.
It had been only by chance that Char had learnt of Mona’s return to England. She had been having a drink in one of the small bars in the West End of London and she had heard a man standing next to her say to his companion,
“Do you know anything about Hughes?”
“I met him once when he was training for Ned Carsdale,” the other had replied. “Not a bad fellow, although he never got a winner for poor old Ned.”
The first man had laughed.
“Ned never could back a winner in anything. He was born to lose money. They tell me that he left his wife with a packet of debts and not a penny to meet them with.”
“I shouldn’t think that worried her with a face like hers.”
“Yes, she was a good-looker all right,” the first man agreed. “Funnily enough, I saw her a month ago getting out of an aeroplane at Croydon. She didn’t recognise me, so I didn’t speak to her. I think she’d come over from Lisbon.”
“I’d like to see her again,” his friend said. “By Jove, she was worth looking at! Remember how mad old Ned was about her – it was ‘Mona this’ and ‘Mona that’, but I will say there was every excuse for it.”
“All the Vales are good looking,” the first man asserted. “I was at school with one of them, best-looking chap you’ve ever seen, but he was killed at Passchendaele.”
Char had started by listening to the conversation idly, then she had become alert and made an excuse to join in. When she left the bar she had learnt all she wanted to know and she went straight back to her lodgings and wrote to Mona. Not only was she wildly anxious to see Mona again – as usual she was in need of luck – but she also knew that she could fit her into a scheme that she had on hand at the moment.
It seemed to her providential that Mona should come back into her life at this particular moment. For, of course, she was scheming. She wouldn’t have been Char if she had been able to sit quiet and not work on something or somebody. Her whole life for the last twenty years had consisted in spinning webs round people and forcing them to fit like bits of a jigsaw puzzle into a pattern that would be to her advantage.
Since her return to England she had attached herself to a man called Jarvis Lecker. Char had met him on the ship in which she returned from abroad when war started. She had realised immediately that here was one of her own sort, someone as calculating as she was herself, someone to whom she could be useful and who would prove inconceivably useful to her in return.
Jarvis Lecker was a self-made man, clever and shrewd, with the faculty of being in the right spot at the right time. He had started by working in a bicycle fitting shop in Coventry – his grandfather had been a German Jew, his father a somewhat ne’er-do-well engineer. When Jarvis Lecker was thirty-five he owned a motor company, which was experimenting with a new type of engine. Fifteen years later this engine proved itself to be excellent in the air, and just before the war started Jarvis Lecker had gone into the aeroplane business in a big way.
He was middle-aged and, although very rich, had not yet begun to make for himself a place in the social world. But like many men of his type, he was socially ambitious. Money, once he had got it, seemed unimportant in that it could only buy him things from shops and none of the things which he now felt were important.
He wanted a position, he wanted power – not only in financial circles but in that section of the community which has always counted in England, the section labelled ‘Society’. Char, with her usual uncanny instinct, sensed Jarvis Lecker’s need long before he brought himself to tell her about it. She had managed with some cleverness to make an impression upon him. He was a fool where women were concerned, and Char, with her abrupt manner, her bitter tongue, and her disdain of all her fellow passengers, both amused and intrigued him.
To a certain extent he was also impressed that Char had travelled, had seen a great many things in the world for which he had never had time. When she talked to him, he appreciated the shrewd sharpness of her brain which found some parallel to his own. He, too, had lived by his wits as he soon realised Char lived by hers. It was Char who told him frankly what he wanted.
“A wife,” she said. “Someone who will spend your money well and introduce you to the right people.”
“She’s got to be the right sort of woman then,” Jarvis Lecker growled, and Char had agreed with him. The chance conversation in the bar had given her an idea. She had been very anxious not to lose Jarvis Lecker and she knew that, sooner or later, it was inevitable he would see through her bluff of making herself his social cicerone. She was desperately anxious to make him think she was essential in his life.
She knew there were a lot of pickings round Jarvis Lecker, but she also knew that he was ruthless. The moment he found she was of no further use to him he would throw her out as he would discard an inefficient employee. The thought of Mona was like a glowing torch in the darkness of fear and desperation. There was, of course, Mona herself to be considered, but Char knew why she had come home, or at least she had a very good idea. That night in Paris when she had seen her across the crowded restaurant and realised that she had not wanted to be seen, had told Char all she wanted to know. That, then, was the man.
She had always known that there must be a man hidden away somewhere. Char’s deductions about people worked on simple lines and usually her conclusions proved the right ones. She had gone to endless trouble in Cairo to discover what was the mystery concerning Mona and had drawn a blank – the seclusion of the little villa on the banks of the Nile had eluded her even as it had eluded other curious people.
She had bribed the servants in Mona’s hotel to no avail – they could tell her nothing, and when Mona had disappeared from the boat at Luxor, Char knew as little about her personal affairs as she had known when she first came into her life. It was one of her few failures.
But those fleeting seconds in a Paris restaurant had given her the clue she sought. She had found out who Lionel was. That wasn’t difficult as the head waiter knew all the distinguished people who visited his restaurant. Lionel’s career was in books of reference for all to read – Paris, Egypt, Vienna. Char had noted the dates. There was no need to tell her then why Mona had disappeared from Egypt just about the same time as Lionel’s appointment to the Embassy at Vienna was listed.
Char made inquiries in London after she had learned of Mona’s return. She found out that Lionel had died in America. That was what she wanted to know. Mona was at a loose end, living in the country, perhaps bored, maybe anxious to see her old friends. Char had almost hoped that she might have been welcome, but the look of fear on Mona’s face when she mentioned Lionel had told her quite plainly why she had been invited. Mona was afraid.
That, Char thought now, was all to the good. She was used to dealing with people who were frightened of her, used to getting her own way when she could use fear as a weapon, and yet in some ways she was still bewildered. Of what was Mona afraid? The man in question was dead. What harm could she, Char, do him now? When she met Mrs. Vale she understood. Mona’s devotion to her mother was obvious and her mother’s adoration of Mona was palpable. Within three minutes of entering the Priory, Char knew that she held a trump card in her hand.
She was so excited that it was with some difficulty that she restrained herself from rushing to the telephone and telling Jarvis Lecker to come over at once. She had already described Mona to him in glowing terms. It was satisfactory to find that she had not exaggerated. The house, a description of which she had conjured up out of her imagination, was just as old and solid with tradition, respectability and heredity as she had made it out to be.
