Diabolic Candelabra

by E. R. Punshon

  “They’re ever so nice,’’ the junior declared. “If I could make such lovely chocolates I should start for myself. You could work up a nice little business.”

  “That takes capital,” said the senior severely, evidently considering this a most disloyal suggestion, “and very likely lose every penny. Rent and all,” she said. “People only think of profits, never of the overhead.”

  This last Bobby felt sure was a quotation from Mr Crayfoot himself and the junior did not look much impressed and said she believed it was something like that which had caused the quarrel between Mr Weston and Mr Crayfoot. Bobby, asking for details, learnt that Mr Weston, known as a customer and known to be a friend of Mr Crayfoot, had been heard quarrelling with Mr Crayfoot in that gentleman’s private office. Finally Mr Weston had bounced out, looking awful, and Mr Crayfoot had bounced out after him and had shouted to him never to come near the place again and had ordered them, the staff, not to serve him if he did.

  “Only, of course,” said the senior assistant, “you can’t do that, can you? Because a shop’s a shop, isn’t it? And a customer’s a customer, isn’t he?”

  Bobby, impressed by the profound truth of these observations, agreed, and remembered, too, that it was a Mrs Weston who had spoken of the chocolates to Olive. He decided that it would be as well to have a talk both with Mr Weston and with the red-headed gentleman, if, that is, he could be traced. He might, Bobby thought, be far away by now, laying his plans to launch on the market a new brand of chocolates, flavoured according to the analysis made of the contents of the hermit’s bottle.

  From the Walters’s shop he drove to the village of Barsley Forest where he knew from his talk on the Sunday with Sergeant Turner that the hermit occasionally made purchases. His inquiry there told him that these purchases were rare, that the chief article purchased was paraffin oil, and that payment was always made in gold. An interesting detail was that the sovereigns produced were always of the date of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee—1887.

  Bobby’s next visit was to the ‘Rawdon Arms’ where Mr Crayfoot’s car was still garaged. The landlord, a Mr Baker, knew Mr Crayfoot slightly, as a fellow business man of the neighbourhood, and remembered having exchanged a few words with him. He had been alone, his manner had been perfectly normal. Afterwards he had been seen walking towards the forest. It was, of course, quite common for people to leave their cars there while they themselves went for a forest stroll. Only when later on it was found that the car had not been claimed was any surprise or uneasiness felt, and then it had merely been supposed that Mr Crayfoot had gone home with friends and that his car would be sent for in due course. The landlord’s opinion was that Mr Crayfoot had met with some accident in the forest and that it ought to be searched forthwith. A big job, considering the extent it covered. But there were always the boy scouts, said the landlord hopefully. He agreed, though, that Crayfoot was the very last man in all the world he would have expected to go rambling in the forest or get himself into difficulties there.

  Nor for that matter did this idea that the missing man might have got lost in the forest or met with an accident there, much appeal to Bobby. Crayfoot had presumably reached in safety the hermit’s hut since his card was there; and there seemed no reason to suppose that he would have had greater difficulty in finding his way back, or any reason why he should have met with any accident during what was no more than an afternoon’s stroll. Nor did Bobby think it probable that in this tangle of half-seen motives, half-hinted secrets, there was likely to be thrust the additional coincidence of an unrelated accident. In some way he felt sure Crayfoot’s disappearance was linked with the obscure happenings whereof he was securing such vague and tantalising glimpses as of figures seen through a drifting, changing haze of fog.

  Since apparently there was no more to be learned from the landlord, Bobby went out to have a word or two with the garage attendant—an attention to detail that earned him a rich reward. The garage attendant always tried to remember which car belonged to which driver. Better tips were often forthcoming if the right car were produced the moment its owner was seen approaching or if the owner were allowed to see it receiving an extra rub up. All trades have their tricks and a smart man could easily double the amount in tips normally taken. When therefore the attendant saw Mr Crayfoot emerge from the inn he became busy on Mr Crayfoot’s car but had been disappointed to see Mr Crayfoot walk away towards the forest. And he had noticed that a gentleman who had not been lunching in the inn but had been sitting outside with a glass of beer, had left his beer to follow Mr Crayfoot towards the forest. No, he had not joined him, he had merely walked in the same direction some distance behind. The garage attendant would probably not have remembered or even noticed so trivial an incident but for the fact of that desertion of a perfectly good and practically untasted glass of beer. Bobby was inclined to guess, however, that that beer had not been entirely wasted.

  “Would you know him again?” Bobby asked.

  The garage attendant thought so.

  “Fat man, middle aged, hairy hands, red hair?” Bobby asked hopefully.

  The garage attendant shook his head.

  “Youngish chap, dark, small moustache, big nose?” Bobby tried again and again the garage attendant shook his head.

  He was fairly certain he would know him again but he was quite incapable of providing any sort of verbal description. Bobby gave it up and went back into the inn to interview the waiters. He had not much hope of success. Casual guests come and go and are forgotten the moment their tips have been pocketed, their hats and coats handed to them. They are indeed no more to the busy waiter than the raw material of a livelihood, neither worth nor requiring a personal recollection. But this time Bobby’s inquiry met with unexpected success. It was the red hair that did it. One of the waiters had red hair himself, a drawback in a profession in which it is a merit to be inconspicuous. But the fact had made him notice a red-haired stranger who was having lunch with Dr Maskell.

  Bobby rewarded this piece of unexpected information with a tip and went outside to think it over. Not with much success. An odd little incident but he did not see how it was likely to fit into the puzzle of the Crayfoot investigation. Very likely there was no connection for that matter. Possibly the red-headed stranger had asked Maskell to make the analysis of the bottle of flavouring stolen from Mary Floyd. The doctor might be asked about that but the questioning would have to be done very tactfully and discreetly and casually. He had the kind of temperament that would probably enjoy refusing to give any information in his possession. Not at all likely to go out of his way to help other people, least of all to help police. Nor could questioning be pressed with authority for there was at present nothing to suggest any connection with the Crayfoot disappearance. He and his guest—or host—had come in late and been almost the last to finish their meal, staying long after Crayfoot’s departure. There was indeed nothing to show that the doctor and Crayfoot had even noticed each other.

  Discouraging, Bobby felt, even though one little disconnected fact after another kept turning up, and it was just possible that in their totality they might make up something like a coherent whole. Nothing to suggest at present, though, what that picture would be like, if and when it reached completion. He went into the bar for a glass of beer he did not want and from the barmaid learnt that she remembered quite well the incident of the customer who had hurried away, leaving behind an untasted glass of beer. She had in fact caught the garage attendant in the act of drinking it to save waste, as he explained, and she had given him ‘what for’ for his impudence. Oh, yes, she knew the gentleman quite well, Mr Weston was his name. Her father kept a small shop in Tombes and Mr Weston was an occasional customer.

  CHAPTER XV

  BARSLEY ABBEY

  ONCE AGAIN A glass of beer remained untouched as Bobby sat there on the bench before the inn, wondering what to do next; oddly excited too, by the thrill of the hunt as in this strange, disconnected way one small significant
detail after another came as it were slowly into being, presently to form, he hoped, the background against which in time a coherent pattern could be framed. Already it seemed to him that the faint outline of such a pattern was growing into visibility, and yet he was not sure. It might well be, he knew, that what he saw was but illusion, built by too swift imagination out of a misinterpretation of the facts.

  Over and over again he considered the things he knew; and once, when he lifted his eyes towards where a few hundred yards away the outward surge of the forest was checked by the open fields whereby men held back the march of the trees, he had the illusion that he saw emerging from the mystery of their green shelter the lost Crayfoot, the missing hermit, arm in arm and laughing together at the thoughts of death and tragedy, past and to come, that had forced their way into his mind.

  “All the same,” he found himself muttering, “there must have been an axe once—and now there isn’t.”

  Again he began to go over mentally what he knew.

  There was the red-haired unknown with his stolen bottle of flavouring and his lunch with Dr Maskell; there was the vanished Crayfoot and his wife’s fears and the portrait on his drawing-room wall; there was Weston, his quarrel with Crayfoot and his pursuit of him into the forest; there was Dr Maskell, his grudge against the hermit, his statement that the earth from the floor of the hermit’s hut contained human blood, his possession of that print of an El Greco picture he had apparently been studying; there was young Dick Rawdon with his visits to Crayfoot and to the hermit; there was the other unknown, he of the dark complexion and the big nose who had removed himself so quickly from the vicinity of the hermit’s hut and who, he also, had been in possession of an El Greco reproduction. Then in the background; firstly Sir Alfred Rawdon, trying to break the entail that he might sell his land and so clear the burden of debt weighing down the estate and also the original owner of the lost El Grecos, indeed presumably the present rightful owner if they could be found; secondly, the hermit himself round whom it seemed so much revolved. Finally, the two young girls at the Coop cottage, so gentle and quiet in manner and appearance, so ruthless in action; together with their stepfather, Coop himself, of the doubtful character.

  “Direct action there all right,” Bobby reflected, remembering an old political catchword much loved by hotheads.

  Again he went over the names one by one, ticking them off on his fingers, trying to assign to each one the probable part each played in this drama of which as yet neither the purpose nor the plot was apparent.

  The first idea that came to Bobby was to seek out Weston, since he was the last person, who, as far as Bobby’s knowledge went, had seen Crayfoot. Then he reflected it might be better to wait to see if Weston came forward voluntarily. If he did so, a waste of time to seek him out. If he failed to do so, then a presumption of guilty knowledge would be established. A point of departure that might be useful!

  On the whole Bobby thought it would be best to try to have a talk with young Dick Rawdon. It might be useful to know why he had paid that visit to Crayfoot. Also Bobby felt he would like to know the name, and, if possible, the address, of the dark young man who presumably had given the first, if not both, when making his call at Barsley Abbey told of by Dick Rawdon.

  It was growing late in the afternoon now with blackout time beginning to loom in the distance. So leaving on the bench his still untasted beer—once again the garage attendant was in luck and once again he had to pay for his luck by submitting to a ‘telling off’ from an indignant barmaid—Bobby started for the Abbey, a short drive of a couple of miles along a lonely road.

  It was a handsome, well proportioned house of the early Georgian period, of medium size, only the name remaining of the original building. According to the records, the monks and their tenants had attempted to offer armed resistance to the King’s Commissioners at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. They had had some success at first and had remained in possession of the Abbey till, on the approach of overwhelming forces, abbot and monks had fled to a secret refuge in the forest. So much was history; and legend added that this secret refuge had been discovered, and abbot and monks slain to the last man. The Abbey, too, had been set on fire and burnt to the ground. On its site the new owner of the Abbey lands had erected a dwelling that in its turn had been burnt down, to be succeeded by the present building.

  Sir Alfred was at home, Bobby learned, and he was shown into a small, plainly furnished apartment, evidently one used chiefly for business interviews. Sir Alfred, a tall, thin, untidy looking man with a long narrow head and long narrow face, appeared presently, nor was it difficult to see that he was ill at ease. Bobby explained that he had met Mr Richard Rawdon the previous evening in the forest and would like, if possible, some information about a man living there as a hermit and understood to be a tenant of the Rawdon estate. Sir Alfred listened in gloomy silence, leaning against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets, looking down distrustfully at Bobby, whose six feet of height he overtopped by three or four inches.

  “I don’t know anything about the fellow,” he said. “No one does. He just squatted there, as far as I know. I believe he claims to have a letter from the estate, leasing him the bit of land he occupies. Whether that’s so or not, I’ve no idea. We’ve never bothered. Maskell wants me to clear him out.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “No. I don’t think so. No. Why should I? What’s he been doing, anyway? Getting into trouble? He has once or twice. Harmless if left alone but if he’s interfered with likely to go charging about with an axe. At least, so I’m told,” he added hastily.

  “Well, I hope no one has been interfering with him this time,” Bobby said; a little startled by this fresh reference to an axe, the axe that certainly had once been in the hermit’s hut and now was there no longer.

  “I’m not going to, anyhow,” declared Sir Alfred. “Maskell can say what he likes. I don’t even know that I could turn him out. Very likely the old man has something he could call a lease. Anyhow, I can’t give tenants notice simply because Maskell doesn’t like them.”

  “The doctor does seem to take rather a strong line about it,” Bobby observed.

  “Calls the old man an unlicensed murderer,” agreed Sir Alfred. “I said I supposed doctors were the licensed sort. Made Maskell ratty. Anything makes Maskell ratty. Clever chap. Pulled me through a bad spell once. But he doesn’t go the way to make himself popular. Was it Maskell put you on our old man of the woods?”

  “Oh, no,” Bobby answered. “It’s not really the old man I’m so much interested in. We’ve nothing against him. No harm in his giving—or selling for that matter—his stuff to people who think it does them good. I believe you deal with Walters, the baker in Tombes, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I think so. Why?”

  “The business belongs to a Mr Crayfoot. He has disappeared from his home and his wife is naturally anxious and has appealed to us. The connection is that Mr Crayfoot’s card was in the hut—the hermit’s hut, I mean—so presumably Mr Crayfoot himself had been there. I saw Mr Richard Rawdon there, at the hut. Perhaps he mentioned it to you?”

  “He did say something,” Sir Alfred admitted but with hesitation. “I didn’t take much notice. Nothing to do with me.”

  Bobby reflected that this nervous baronet seemed very eager to insist on his own complete detachment from recent events. Nor did his nervousness seem in any way to diminish as they talked. Rather he had more and more the air of one more and more disquieted by the course the talk was taking. Bobby said slowly:

  “The hut had the appearance of having been deliberately wrecked.”

  “Yes. I know, Dick told me,” Sir Alfred admitted again. He was rubbing his hands together nervously and Bobby, watching his feet, where nervous movements often show more quickly because people think less of controlling them, noticed how his toes were twitching and working inside the patent leather slippers he was wearing. He said abruptly: “You don’t think anythin
g can have happened to the old man, do you?”

  “Something certainly happened,” Bobby said. “A general knocking about of the contents of the hut. It might have been malicious. Or drink. Or some one might have been looking for something.”