‘Well,’ said Gascoigne, looking at Laura. ‘We mustn’t be hampered. There’s a club event billed for Saturday which I had not intended to dignify with my presence, but in a good cause… What do you say?’

  ‘We’ve no guarantee that Firman will turn up for the run,’ protested O’Hara.

  ‘He’ll turn up all right, if only to disarm suspicion,’ said Gascoigne shrewdly. ‘Therefore— ’

  ‘In the changing-room when the runners have all set forth,’ said O’Hara, nodding.

  ‘Oh, well, that takes care of that,’ said Laura carelessly. ‘Now, about this house. When do you think we should go there? Before or after Saturday?’

  ‘I think to-morrow would be best,’ said Gascoigne at once. ‘I don’t think to-night would be feasible… not for a first visit, anyway. After all, we may be barking up quite the wrong tree, although…’ he glanced at his cousin’s thin, dark face, deep eyes and proudly-carried head… ‘Mike’s hunches are almost monotonously sound.’

  Laura looked upon the gifted youth with favour.

  ‘Attaboy!’ she observed. But she had sighed with relief when she heard that the two young men did not intend to visit the house that night.

  Laura was bold as a lion, but was as superstitious as a warlock. She was full of dark fancies drowned in primordial deeps. She also believed, with healthy, female instinct, that dangerous and delicate missions were less unpleasant in the daylight than in the dark. With respect to the house itself, she was torn between a frantic desire to visit it and an equally strong determination not to go anywhere near its boundaries. She was, in fact, like a child who both dreads and longs for a ghost-story just at bedtime. The thrill would be worth it, the aftermath definitely not. In other words, although Laura was both practical and hard-headed, and although she was brisk, jimp and daring in all that she undertook, she was also the prey of an inherited belief in the legends, spectres and bogies of a Highland ancestry. It was one of the many reasons for her adherence to Mrs. Bradley, who was legend, spectre and bogie all in one, for she felt, without realizing it, that the greater demon kept lesser demons at bay.

  However, before the three parted that night, they were pledged to visit the house very early on the following morning.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Gascoigne, climbing into the car, ‘boot, saddle, to horse and away!’ The morning was fresh and fine as the car drove off for the house with the four dead trees.

  ‘But I can’t see what we’re going to do when we get there,’ said Laura, when they had left Cuchester and were crawling along a very narrow lane on the east side of the level-crossing. ‘It’s been keeping me awake all night.’

  ‘We’re going to test Mike’s password,’ said Gascoigne mysteriously.

  ‘Has he got a password? Oh, yes, of course! I think I know it. Mrs. Bradley said something.’

  ‘1 bet she did,’ said O’Hara. ‘It must have stuck out a mile to anyone with any intelligence.’

  ‘Ah, well!’ said Gascoigne. As they approached the turning which led to the house, they had to pull over to the right almost into the ditch in order to pass a large lorry loaded with great blocks of ice such as are delivered to fishmongers in the summer. The lorry had broken down, and the two men in charge of it were seated at the roadside smoking cigarettes. The bonnet was raised, and there were tools lying on the edge of the grass verge.

  ‘Lazy devils,’ grunted Gascoigne, as the car crawled round the lorry.

  ‘Ice?’ remarked O’Hara. ‘I wonder where they’re going? They’re coming away from Cuchester, and there’s nowhere much down this way until you get to…’

  ‘Ice!’ exclaimed Laura dramatically. ‘I bet I know where it’s going and what it’s for! Tell you what! When we get to the house we’ll hide and watch it go in.’

  ‘But we don’t know… how do you?… oh, I see what you mean!’ said Gascoigne. He looked amused. ‘I should hardly think so, you know.’

  ‘Well, we could hide the car in that little wood we’re coming to, and snake along to the house, and keep watch for a bit. If the ice is delivered there, it might very well mean what I think it means.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said O’Hara, who took Laura’s suggestion more seriously than his cousin appeared to be taking it, ‘let’s stroll back in a minute, and ask them where they’re bound for. That can be done without arousing any suspicion. Anyway, they won’t know, ten to one, what the ice is to be used for. That is, of course, supposing it is delivered to the house we’re thinking of. Though, for my own part… Oh, well, it won’t hurt to find out.’

  ‘It’s a very good idea,’ said Laura. ‘You two go back and ask, and I’ll keep the engine running, ready to make a dash for it if necessary.’

  Gascoigne seemed doubtful, but O’Hara’s strange experience on the evening of the hare and hounds had predisposed him in favour of wild schemes, for nothing, he felt, could be as wild as his unforeseen adventure.

  ‘Come on,’ he said briefly; and the two young men got out of the car and strolled back towards the ice-cart.

  They returned in about a quarter of an hour.

  ‘Go on,’ said Gascoigne to Laura.

  ‘Well?’ she said, after she had let in the clutch.

  ‘The name of the house is Cottam’s,’ said Gascoigne. ‘And these fellows are down on their luck. They’ve come from Poole Harbour, lost their way after Brandencote, and have been all night on the road. They’ve just about had enough of it. Ought to have been back by now. Nothing but trouble all the way. Never been to the house before, and will take care they never go again. (I’m glad you weren’t there to hear their language!) Anyway, they’ve given us a reason for calling. The ice is wanted urgently, so I’ve promised to say they are coming with it and I’m to swear it isn’t their fault that they’ve been so long upon the road.’

  ‘What do they think the ice will be used for?’ asked Laura. Gascoigne laughed.

  ‘They didn’t say what they thought it would be used for, but they said they could tell the people what to do with it when they got it, which is not, perhaps, quite the same thing. Of course,’ he added, ‘as we don’t know that the house with the four dead trees is now called Cottam’s, it’s quite possible that our destination is not the same as theirs. It was no good describing the house to them, because they only know it by name.’

  ‘But we do know it’s called Cottam’s! Mrs. Bradley and I know. Are the people called Cottam, or only the house?’ said Laura quickly.

  ‘The people are called Gonn-Brown.’

  ‘Gonn-Brown? But that’s a film company! I’ve seen their offices in Wardour Street. Mrs. Bradley vetted the psychiatry in one of their films.’

  ‘Really?’ said Gascoigne. ‘Remind me of that a bit later. Like the heavenly Yvonne Arnaud, (in Tons of Money) I’ve got an idea!’

  ‘Well, here’s the house,’ said O’Hara. ‘Drive past it, Miss Menzies, and we’ll park the car where it can’t be seen from the windows.’

  Laura took the extremely narrow turning very slowly, and the car bumped over a culvert and then over a humped bridge a little farther along.

  ‘About here,’ said O’Hara.

  Laura pulled up, and the three got out. She locked the car, and then they strolled back along the way by which they had come until they reached the gates. These were propped wide open, and the notice board with its terse instruction to keep out was now covered by a piece of paper affixed to the board by four drawing pins.

  The paper read TRADESMEN ONLY.

  ‘This is us,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Look here, you’d better not come up to the door, Mike, in case you’re recognized. And you, Miss Menzies…’

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Laura flatly. ‘A man and a woman are far less remarkable than one or other on their own. Just give the message about the ice-cart, and then we’ll see how they react.’

  Gascoigne did not argue. They walked up to the ecclesiastical door, and Laura stood looking at it whilst Gascoigne pulled at an ancient bell. They could hear this clanging, and then came the sound of footsteps along a stone-flagged passage. A woman opened the door. She was younger than middle-aged (but not at all youthful), full-fleshed, handsome and blowsy. Laura, with the swiftness of a panther, slipped to the outside of the porch.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Gascoigne to the woman. ‘We promised to bring a message. The ice you are expecting is on its way, but the lorry has broken down. They’ll be here as soon as they can.’

  ‘The ice?’ said the woman. ‘I don’t know anything about it. I’ll enquire.’

  She went to the back of the house, leaving the front door open. Gascoigne watched her all the way along the stone-flagged passage until a door closed behind her. Laura made tracks for the gate. The woman returned. She looked Gascoigne over as though she were memorizing his face, and then said :

  ‘Sorry you’ve had your trouble. No ice expected here.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Gascoigne.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve been troubled,’ she repeated, and closed the door very gently in his face, giving him, as she did so, a lustful and conciliatory smile. It was evident she had had no eyes for Laura.

  ‘Thank goodness for your comely face,’ said the latter, when Gascoigne joined her. ‘You could have knocked me endwise! That was the woman from Newcombe Soulbury, that was! Ah, well, let’s wait and watch the lorry drive in. There’s something delightfully fishy about all this—or don’t you think so?’

  She walked beside Gascoigne slowly back to the car. O’Hara was not to be seen. They climbed in, and had scarcely done so when a car came from the opposite direction, slowed down, and stopped. A boy got out from beside the driver, and went forward to open the lodge gates.

  ‘Well!’ said Laura. ‘What do you make of that? That’s the kid from the hotel! The one who threw rocks at me the other morning!’

  The boy pushed the gates back as wide as they would go, and the car drove in past the lodge.

  Of O’Hara there was still no sign. Gascoigne lit a cigarette for Laura and another for himself, and had scarcely put away his lighter when O’Hara dropped over the high brick wall which shut the house off from the road, came down in the ditch, picked himself up and hurried towards the car.

  ‘The boy seems in a hurry!’ said Laura, starting the engine as O’Hara opened the door and scrambled inside.

  ‘That woman you spoke to… I was hiding in the bushes… she’s the one at the farm… the one who told me she was alone in the house. And those people who drove up just now…’

  ‘Are the man and the boy from our hotel at Slepe Rock. Yes, we know,’ said Laura.

  ‘And there goes the ice-cart,’ said Gascoigne, as the lorry drove in at the gates. ‘All liars, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know about liars, but they may be murderers,’ said O’Hara. ‘I heard that man who came with the kid—I heard him speak. That’s the fellow called Con, I’m almost certain.’

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  —«♦»—

  ‘ “Ha!” thought she as she looked at it through the window. ‘Cannot I prevent the sun rising?” ’

  Ibid. (The Fisherman and His Wife)

  « ^ »

  Now what?’ said Laura, full of pleasurable excitement as the car drove on towards the farm. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’ she added, elucidating this query.

  ‘Return, one of us, and suborn that old man with the barrow,’ said Gascoigne readily. ‘We shall find out what he knows of the people from Slepe Rock, and perhaps he can tell us what the ice is to be used for, although I should rather think he can’t. Pull up round the next bend, anyway, and I’ll go back, and see what I can find out.’

  ‘Both of us will go back,’ said O’Hara firmly.

  ‘But you may be recognized, and that would hardly do.’

  ‘It can’t be helped. You stay here,’ added O’Hara to Laura, ‘and be ready to help us make a dash for it if anybody chooses to be annoyed. Good-bye. We will see you later.’

  ‘You’ll see me sooner,’ retorted Laura. ‘What do you think I am? If there’s going to be any fun I’m all for being in the thick of it. None of this women and children business with me! I’m a lot older than either of you, and, furthermore, I’m Mrs. Croc.’s accredited representative. Besides…’

  ‘All right, then,’ said O’Hara, hastily. ‘If you feel like that about it, I think you’d better come. What do you say, Gerry? Shall we take her with us?’

  The handsome Gascoigne assumed a reproachful expression, but did not voice his sentiments, and the car was reversed as far as the nearest gate. Here Laura turned it, and the three were soon near the house with the four dead trees.

  ‘This is about as far as we should go, I think, before we get out and walk,’ suggested Laura.

  ‘And now,’ said Gascoigne, when they were almost opposite the gate, ‘you two had better stand by, I think, whilst I contact our aged friend. He won’t talk to three of us at once.’

  This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and therefore O’Hara and Laura remained under cover of some bushes whilst Gascoigne walked up to the gate. By good luck the aged gardener was not more than ten yards away. He was standing on the brickwork of a tiny culvert which carried the weedy drive across a brook, and was gazing into the water and scratching his mossy-looking thigh.

  ‘That there old water-rat,’ he said, without turning his head, ‘do be rousing his whiskers at all of us. Catch a holt of him I don’t somehow seem to, seemingly.’

  ‘Tough luck,’ said Gascoigne, joining the ancient man, putting his hands in his trouser pockets and peering sympathetically into the ditch.

  ‘Live under that arch, he do, and laugh his way through against all of us,’ the old man continued. ‘And my fowls fattening, and him with his eye on ’em like he had on the chicks last August twelvemonth, was a Sunday night, as I remember.’

  ‘I suppose that was before the new owners took over?’ said Gascoigne. ‘I mean, they haven’t always been here, have they?’

  ‘New owners?’ The old man spat. ‘Tenants, um be, not owners. Film people. Money and no sense. Ice by the cartload for their drinks. If beer wants ice, must be funny beer, says I. And if sperrits wants ice, give me water. Neither Englishmen nor Yankees, them don’t be.’ Upon saying this, he turned his head and gave Gascoigne a long look.

  ‘I suppose they have lots of visitors,’ remarked the young man, kicking a stone from the culvert into the ditch.

  ‘Not so many. Secret proceshesses, they says. Trade rivals, they says. Keep out, they says. Well, there y’are. Mr. Concaverty, round at the lodge, he has his orders, and, being in their service already, before they comes here, no doubt he carries ’em out. But this old water-rat, drat him, ain’t nobody’s business but mine. Mr. Concaverty, he don’t keep fowls. He don’t know this old water-rat like I do.’

  He picked up a bit of stick, and, stepping from the culvert on to the bank of the ditch, poked industriously and with considerable vigour underneath the arch. Gascoigne waited a moment or two. Then he said gently, but with a persistence which Laura would have approved:

  ‘What about some beer that’s not iced?’

  By way of answer, the old man took off his cap and held it up. Gascoigne dropped half a crown into it. The old man scooped up the coin, bit it, nodded indulgently, said that that was a bit of all right, and ambled off.

  ‘Concaverty!’ said Laura, as soon as Gascoigne had told the others the gist of the conversation. ‘We must get to him before the old man gets round there. And, this time, it had better be me! We don’t want them comparing notes, and thinking you’ve been snooping, although, of course, you have.’

  ‘Do you think…?’ began O’Hara. But Laura insisted that her idea was the right one, and Gascoigne was inclined to agree.

  ‘We must get what we can,’ he said gloomily.

  All three young people were conscious of a feeling of slight flatness. If the inmates of the house with the four dead trees were film people, all idiosyncrasies on their part immediately lost any tendency to seem dramatic, improbable, lethal or, in fact, at all exciting, and it was a deflated although outwardly debonair Laura who marched up to the lodge and enquired for Mr. Concaverty.

  An older woman opened the door, and one whom Laura again did not fail to recognize. It was the caretaker from O’Hara’s mysterious farm. Laura, who was not altogether unprepared for this, since some connection between that farm and the house with the four dead trees by this time could be taken for granted, smiled naturally and asked for a bucket of water. She needed it, she said, for the car.

  The woman supplied it without a word. Laura thanked her, took the bucket of water to where she had left her friends, set it down and told them the news.

  ‘I don’t see how to ask again for Concaverty,’ she added. It proved unnecessary to do so, however, for, when she returned the empty pail and made a remark upon the weather, the woman asked curiously:

  ‘What did you want with Mr. Concaverty?’

  ‘Actually, to know whether my friends—a man and his son—a boy of about sixteen—have left the house yet. We know they came, but don’t know how long they intended to stay.’

  ‘Oh, them!’ said the woman. She looked at Laura curiously. ‘Ain’t you the young lady I put on the way to Little Dorsett? Would these here be friends of yours, then?’

  ‘Well, we are staying at the same hotel in Slepe, and hoped to meet them for tea,’ explained Laura, seizing upon the first excuse that came into her head.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25