‘I see,’ said Laura. ‘Well, I don’t much want to be present when these dance. Do you really think anybody would be idiot enough, though, to believe that they do?’

  ‘Place yourself here at twelve on a night of full moon and scudding cloud; when there is mist below in the valleys and the living silence of the windless dark all around you, and I am not at all sure that you yourself would not be idiot enough to believe that they danced,’ said Mrs. Bradley.

  She made a lengthy survey of the circle, looking carefully at every stone in turn, and also closely examining the ground around it. She seemed satisfied at last, and pronounced that it was more than breakfast time.

  Laura, glancing at her wristwatch, was surprised to find that it was past nine o’clock. They returned to the car by the way they had come, and reached home at just after half-past ten.

  ‘A little late to begin exploring, I think,’ said Mrs. Bradley, to Laura’s disappointment. ‘To-morrow might be better than to-day.’

  ‘Oh, but there’s plenty of time!’ said Laura, setting to work upon her breakfast.

  ‘There is more still to-morrow,’ Mrs. Bradley replied; and from this decision not to visit the villages that day she refused to be moved.

  ‘What shall we do, then?’ asked Laura.

  ‘I shall knit,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, producing, as soon as breakfast was cleared away, the shapeless and repulsive length of jetsam which it was her custom to dignify by the name of knitting. ‘You may do anything you please, but don’t be in later than midnight because we shall need to be up in good time in the morning.’

  Armed with a carte blanche, Laura spent what remained of the morning in solitary confinement (as she herself expressed it) completely surrounded by maps. After lunch, looking complacent, important and secretive, she asked whether she might borrow the car.

  ‘Provided you will borrow George as well,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘I distrust that expression on your face. You are going to get into mischief, and George will extricate you. I have implicit confidence in him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind George,’ said Laura. ‘In fact, we can take turns at driving, and he can mind the car if I leave it in funny places.’

  Mrs. Bradley asked no questions, and, at just after two, Laura and George set out.

  ‘You know, George,’ said Laura, settling herself in the seat beside that of the driver, ‘I think sometimes that it’s a mistake, in a way, to work with anybody as clever as Mrs. Bradley.’

  ‘Do you, miss?’ George enquired, negotiating the double gates with care and skill.

  ‘Yes. It saps one’s intellect. One finds that one ceases to use one’s own brains at all. One merely relies upon hers.’

  ‘One could do worse, miss.’

  ‘True. Yet sometimes I think I shall be glad to be married to my comparatively moronic spouse and resume my place in the aristocracy of the non-boneheaded. I used to be quite intelligent, and against a brainless husband I ought to show up pretty well.’

  ‘May I enquire, miss,’ said George respectfully, but with an expression of slight concern upon his broad and sensible face, ‘what this all might be leading up to?’

  ‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘to put all the cards on the table, I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘Oh, dear, miss!’ said George, who had had experience before of some of Laura’s ideas and felt that they got her into trouble.

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d say that,’ said Laura, with great satisfaction. ‘But this one, George, is different. Only, I shall need a bit of co-operation. Are you on?’

  ‘Moderately speaking, miss, certainly. But if you’ll allow me to say so— ’

  ‘Oh, Mrs. Bradley would be the first to admire this great thought that I’m going to place before you, only, you see, I want to surprise her with the fait accompli. Now what I want you to do is this: I want you to take me in the car to where we parked early this morning, and then I want you to meet me at that place called Slepe Rock. Can do?’

  ‘Meaning that you are proposing to walk from the Nine Stones to the sea, miss?’

  ‘Meaning just that, George.’

  ‘But it’s a matter of seventeen miles, miss!’

  ‘I don’t think it is, except by road,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, I’m going to find out. There’s no path marked on the map, but I’ve a hunch that there used to be an old trackway over the Downs. If I can locate it—or, rather, if I can find out how it used to run—I believe I can cut off about eleven of those seventeen miles. What do you say to that?’

  ‘And suppose you lose your way, miss, up on the Downs?—or suppose you find you’re on private land?—or in the middle of a field with a bull in it?’

  ‘Oh, George, don’t be so discouraging! You run me along to the Nine Stones, and I’ll meet you at Slepe Rock as sure as eggs are eggs.’

  ‘Addled, I wouldn’t be surprised, miss,’ said George, with great tolerance and good-humour. ‘But just as you say.’

  The lovely September afternoon was almost too warm for walking, but Laura, full of her project, set off without any misgivings as soon as she had left George. She did not wait to see him turn the car, but climbed the hill at a rapid rate and came out by the stone circle to get her bearings.

  It was sunny enough for the stones to cast firm, dark shadows. Laura took a bearing, decided upon the direction she ought to take, and began to pace carefully forward. Sure enough, at the end of half a mile of downhill walking over the Downland turf, she came to a little copse, and at the entrance to it was a monolith the shape of a spire, just one tall stone in a clearing; and through the clearing (and leading south-east in the direction which Laura wanted if she were to get to Slepe Rock) was a narrow path, white and greasily slippery on the chalk over which it had been trodden.

  ‘Got it!’ muttered Laura in triumph. ‘Attababy! Here I come!’

  She was so pleased with the results of her reading, deductions and terrestrial navigation that she began to run down the path. Downhill it travelled until it was out of the clearing, and then it climbed up to three hundred and fifty feet above sea-level and ran along three miles of a narrow ridge until it crossed a highway which Laura, pausing, recognized as a secondary road which ran between Cuchester and Welsea Beaches.

  The railway then had to be crossed, and Laura hesitated, longing to climb the embankment and see whether her track could again be picked up on the further side of the line.

  She decided against this, however, as being unfair to George in case she should be run over by a train or arrested for trespassing on the railway company’s property, so she was obliged to walk northwards in search of a footbridge or a station.

  Fortunately the road went parallel with the line, and by timing herself she could decide by about how much she had come off her course. By good luck, too, there was a narrow wooden footbridge not more than half a mile along the permanent way, and she soon crossed that and walked south on the other side to pick up her prehistoric trackway.

  She had walked just over four miles by this time, including the extra mile up and down beside the railway. By car, she would have had to go into Cuchester, seven miles by any road along which a car could travel, and at that point she would have been no further east and the whole seven miles further north of her objective.

  She had reason to congratulate herself. The invisible trackway she was following led past three tumuli and then skirted a long, narrow wood. It then climbed steeply to an ancient fortified camp, entrenched and circular, which Laura would have liked to examine. She crossed it, however, and had the immense satisfaction of finding her track dropping gradually but inevitably past an ancient dyke and then shooting upwards again to its last ridge before it reached another stone circle and then came in sight of the sea.

  Laura had walked between eight and nine miles over country as lonely as the grave. She found herself on a headland, looking down at a cross-setting tide which foamed at the foot of the cliffs and thundered below into caves.

  She sought a way down, and went to find George and the car. He had parked almost on to the beach. There was not the slightest doubt of his relief when Laura, very warm and with aching legs, suggested that they should drive home.

  ‘And so it went as you thought, miss?’ he said, as he reversed the car past the path which led up to the cliff-top.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Laura, ‘it did. Wait until I tell Mrs. Bradley!’

  Mrs. Bradley, regaled with an account of the pilgrimage at dinner that night, was interested but seemed doubtful about the usefulness of the discovery except as a matter of (presumably) archaeological interest.

  ‘But you see,’ said Laura despairingly, ‘what I thought—the way I argued—well, you do see, don’t you? There’s this circle of standing stones, and there’s this place called Slepe Rock, from which somebody once disappeared, and I’ve proved you can walk from one to the other in, near enough, as straight a line as you could draw on the map with a ruler or measure off as the crow flies—and, well, don’t you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘Frankly, I do not,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘After all, we knew already that Slepe Rock was on your nine-mile circle, didn’t we?’

  ‘Ah, yes. But we didn’t know you could walk the nine miles,’ said Laura. ‘It seems to me that there must be something different about Slepe Rock from the other places we’re interested in, because you certainly couldn’t walk from Newcombe Soulbury to the Stones, or from Easey. Look at the map, and you’ll see. Don’t you think it does single out Slepe?’

  ‘It is an interesting theory, child, certainly, and one to which we might well devote some thought.’

  ‘Well, I still say that the number nine has something about it. Take the Nine Stones, for example.’

  ‘Very well, child.’

  ‘Now regard them not as themselves, exactly, but as the centre of another and a greater circle, and what do we get, then?’

  ‘The nine stones as a kind of gigantic boss, child, in the centre of the circle you mention.’

  ‘Right. And what do you suppose then?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Mrs. Bradley solemnly, ‘that somewhere or other on the circumference of that imaginary circle with the boss of the Nine Stones as its centre are to be found the homes of all the missing persons.’

  ‘Yes, well, there we are, then!’ said Laura. ‘Now, what’s our next move, do you think? Shall we comb out the circle and try to find out where this fat man lived? It ought to bring results, but it may take a fairly long time. I’ve worked it out, and it means a line of two hundred and fifty miles. You’d hardly think it, would you? Too tall an order, would you say?’

  ‘Not at all, child. I think it a most reasonable distance, and I shall enjoy a tour of the County.’

  ‘Well, when can we start?’ enquired Laura, after a first suspicious glance at her employer. But Mrs. Bradley seemed serious enough, and merely asked, as a reply to this question:

  ‘May I look at the map once more?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll trace out the nine-mile circle on it, shall I? It will give us something to go on. I’ve slewed the compass round but haven’t actually made any marks. I’ll make them now.’

  The circle, so traced, covered a string of villages, cut across six main roads and several farms, and also enclosed some wild country of hills, woods, moorland and little streams.

  ‘Could be in a village, on a road, or on a farm. Goodness knows how long it will take us!’ said Laura, a little despondently, squinting down at the circle she had drawn.

  ‘We have plenty of time before us,’ Mrs. Bradley equably replied.

  ‘Plenty of time? We don’t know how much time we’ve got, do we?’

  ‘If your arguments are correct, child, we have very nearly nine years.’

  Chapter Eight

  —«♦»—

  ‘ “Not for gold or silver; but for flesh and blood.” ’

  Ibid. (The Lady and the Lion)

  « ^ »

  To-morrow morning, however,’ Mrs. Bradley continued, ‘we had better rise early, as we arranged to do, and visit the villages of Easey and Newcombe Soulbury. We will ask silly questions and demand unobtainable information. So many earnest persons do this nowadays, many of them sponsored by the government, that I don’t suppose we shall seem remarkable. What information shall we seek?’

  ‘Let’s fish about with the local history,’ suggested Laura. ‘No! I’ll tell you what! We could be archaeologists, trying to find out where to get permission to dig. That will give us a chance to excavate the corpses if those people really have been murdered. What do you say to that for an idea?’

  Mrs. Bradley gazed at her secretary in congratulatory amazement.

  ‘I don’t know how you think of these things,’ she said. Laura looked at her suspiciously, but Mrs. Bradley added, as though she had taken the suggestion seriously, ‘But I think that digging will be far more useful a little later on, child.’

  ‘Ah! “Plant her where she’ll blossom,” ’ observed Laura. ‘I get it. Right. We become archaeologists (and dig up the corpses) later. Meanwhile we are literary tourists with an insatiable thirst for Hardy-ana. That’s the best bet in this county.’

  ‘No, no. We will seek the birthplace of William Barnes, child. With any luck we shall be able to lunch in Cuchester and can then complete our round before dinner. And you’d better drive. They may recognize George at those places he visited before.’

  ‘Time Marches On,’ observed Laura, feeling slightly guilty at the thought that she had taken George to Slepe Rock that afternoon. However, next day she took the wheel and the car drove off towards what she privately termed The House in Dormer Forest. This was the place from which the young man Allwright, or, as he had preferred it, Toro, had disappeared in 1939. Mrs. Bradley had decided to go first to Easey on the theory that people might remember the events of 1939 more readily than those of 1930 and 1921.

  Thanks to the clear directions supplied by George, Laura found the cottage at Easey and pulled up twenty yards away. It was true that the cottage was concealed in a small wood, but there was nothing either mysterious or sinister about the neat lawn, neat flowerbeds, neat curtains and neat front door. Even the notice-board was neat with its unobstrusive intimation that the property was for sale.

  ‘A great thought strikes me,’ said Laura.

  ‘I thought perhaps it would,’ Mrs. Bradley remarked.

  ‘Headquarters.’

  ‘I thought you might suggest that, but we need not be in a hurry.’

  ‘Shall I go and enquire, or will you?’

  ‘You go. But don’t do anything at present except ask whether we may take a photograph.’

  ‘Mentioning Barnes’ birthplace?’

  ‘Not until you have permission to take the photograph, otherwise they will tell you that you have come to the wrong place and close the door on you.’

  ‘What a Machiavelli!’ said Laura. ‘You ought to have been a lawyer. Well, here goes!’

  The door was opened by a middle-aged woman whose respectable black hat, apron worn under her coat and large shopping bag indicated a charwoman about to return to her own home after having ‘obliged.’

  ‘Photygraph?’ she said doubtfully. ‘I don’t know. I’ll arst, but they’m only holiday folks.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Laura. ‘Well, perhaps if they’d give permission…’

  A girl’s voice said from one of the inner doorways :

  ‘What is it, Mrs. Bird?’

  ‘Nothing, miss, only trippers,’ replied the charwoman.

  ‘Well, they can have some water for their kettle or whatever it is, but we can’t give them cups of tea.’

  ‘They want to take a photygraph of the ’ouse, miss.’

  ‘Oh, they can do that, of course. It doesn’t sound like trippers to ask!’

  ‘We’re not trippers!’ said Laura. The girl emerged. ‘I mean, not in the sense of paper and bottles and broken glass and catching gorse alight and all that. We thought the cottage rather a beauty, actually, and are doing research and that sort of thing, you know.’

  ‘Well, you can take the photograph, of course,’ said the girl. ‘All right, Mrs. Bird, you go home. Did you take the dripping you wanted?’

  ‘Thank you, yes, miss.’ The charwoman left. The girl watched her until she reached the gate and then turned abruptly to Laura.

  ‘You’re not the police, are you?’ she asked. ‘Because we’ve had them all over the house already this week.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Laura, rather blankly. ‘Oh, have you? All we wanted was the photograph and just to ask whether you knew anything of the history of the cottage.’

  ‘No, we don’t. We’ve only been here six weeks. I know the last owner disappeared, but that’s nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Oh—I see. I hope I haven’t been a nuisance. It was only…’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. But my father’s a semi-invalid, and the visit of the police upset him.’

  Laura was longing to know what the police had given as the reason of their visit, but did not care to ask. She took her leave, and realized that she and Mrs. Bradley were being watched from the windows as they took the photograph from the middle of the garden path.

  ‘Hm!’ said Laura, shutting up the camera, waving her hand towards the girl at the window, and following Mrs. Bradley back to the car. ‘Not much to be got out of her! I didn’t bother to mention Barnes’ birthplace. There seemed no point.’

  ‘The cottage was charming,’ Mrs. Bradley remarked. ‘We must find out whether the police have any information about the inhabitants. I anticipate, however, that the girl will be as innocent as she looks and sounds. Yet… police all over the house!’ She chuckled grimly. ’Mr. O’Hara’s story must have impressed the Chief Constable deeply. I wonder why?’

  ‘It sounds as though the police know something,’ said Laura in dissatisfied tones, as though the police had been guilty of sharp practice. ‘Will you be able to find out what it is?’

 

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