“Interesting. Did they appear to be looking at anything else, besides the lie of the land?”
“Oh, yes, of course. They studied the ponies, but, then, anybody would, you know. They’re so picturesque and charming.”
Dame Beatrice left at five o’clock and returned to the hotel to find Laura enjoying a late but very substantial tea.
“Oh, hullo, Mrs. Croc., dear,” said her secretary. “Did you have a good time? I’ll ring for some tea for you.”
“I had a very beautiful tea at Miss Caine’s,” said Dame Beatrice, “and that means I had a good time. Besides, Miss Caine, having had, I suppose, a certain training in such matters, is an observant and reliable witness. How did you enjoy your afternoon?”
“Very much indeed. Having collected the horse, I rode eastward towards Beaulieu and turned off soon after I had passed that little pond with the geese and things. You know, I still can’t make head or tail of the local geography. I was certain I was headed towards Lymington, but, by the time I thought of branching off again, I realised that I was coming back on to the common here.”
“Yes, the roads make the shape of a letter Y.”
“Then the maps are wrong! Never mind. I went along on the ambling nag (as somebody says somewhere) until I came to a path which led up and down, and here and there, but always giving a view that I could recognise.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I didn’t recognise personages by name, so to speak, but I did spot some lassies all got up regardless, in vests and running shorts, out for a training spin.”
“Indeed?”
“So I rode over, always anxious to push along any kind of physical effort, and stopped to chat with them.”
“I see. And the upshot?”
“Well, a bit of evidence which may lend colour to our view.”
“This is most interesting. I hesitate to prophesy, but are you not suggesting that there has been an attempt to recruit successors to Mr. Colnbrook and Mr. Bunt?”
“I don’t know how you knew, but that’s a fact. Shall I tell you all?”
“Please do. So far, all I know of the Scylla and District club is what I have learned from Miss Calne, Mrs. Bath, and from the secretary and the unhelpful doer of good works—all this apart from what Mr. Richardson has told us, of course. How did you know that these girls were members?”
“Well, I didn’t, but I thought it was worthwhile to take a chance, so I rode athwart their tracks, as I could see they were slowing down, and asked the way to Boldre. I then offered them cigarettes and we fell into conversation. The subject of the murders, sponsored by me, came up, and then we all adjourned to the local, less than a mile away. To show goodwill, I dismounted and trotted beside the nag while they spread out and jogged alongside. All girls together, if you take my point.”
“You have the enviable gifts of friendliness and tact, dear child.”
“Take it as read. When we got to the pub it was too early, of course, for drinks, but the landlady was awfully good and let us into her own part of the house for coffee and lots of beef, cheese, sardine, tomato and ham sandwiches, so we had those and then some hard-boiled eggs and some pickled onions.”
“Good heavens, child!”
“Oh, we enjoyed them, you know. Then it was—after we’d had the pickled pork and piccalilli—that I began to get the gen.”
“It is not often,” said Dame Beatrice, “that I feel faint but pursuing. Pray go on.”
“Stay with me. The pursuit won’t take all that long. Anyway, to retrieve our mouflons—for I feel we’ve gone over the top and are a very long way from the common or garden sheep—what I learned was as follows. Far from Colnbrook and Bunt being rivals, they were very good friends and were associated in what Dulcie—couldn’t get at any of their surnames, but I don’t suppose that matters—called ‘a sort of a fiddle, only nothing really to do with the club.’ What do you make of that?”
“Just what I made of it before.”
“Yes. Well, I tried to winkle out some more information, but, although the girls were willing to be co-opted, I don’t think they knew very much. They spoke of one Corinna, Dulcie’s particular team-mate. They’re the first-and-second string hurdlers. Dulcie was inclined to be disparaging about Corinna. Said she had tried hard to be Colnbrook’s ‘steady’ and had pretended to be cut up when she heard about his death.”
“But Dulcie did not believe this?”
“Quite definitely did not. Said she thought Corinna was really a bit scared of Colnbrook, whom Dulcie diagnosed as a nasty bit of work, and that Corinna was more relieved than distressed when she heard he was dead.”
“What did the other girls think?
“Oh, they agreed with her. Anyhow, those mostly concerned were a couple of club milers named Judy and Syl. They had been what they called ‘approached.’ ”
“By whom? Did they say?”
“Well, they giggled a good bit and said ‘no names, no pack-drill’ and that was about as much as I could get out of them. A man was involved—that was obvious—but when girls begin going all girlish there’s not a lot one can do. I didn’t like to suggest any names myself. One needs to be careful about giving that sort of lead. One other thing did come out. There was good money to be won if they fell in with this proposition—whatever it was—and we can guess—but they all agreed that ‘a fiddle wasn’t really worth it.’ I gathered they meant it might endanger their amateur status, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be true. There’s almost nothing you do in athletics that doesn’t endanger your amateur status. An awful lot of rot really.”
“So it was the mile runners who had received this offer,” said Dame Beatrice. “Did the girls know whether any of the male athletes had been approached?”
“I gathered that none of the men had received the offer—at least, not so far as the girls knew.”
“Yet the ability to run a mere mile does not sound to me a sufficiently important qualification for what I suspect was required of the successors of Mr. Colnbrook and Mr. Bunt.”
“Oh, if you run a mile in competition on the track, you’re capable of jog-trotting a considerably greater distance than that in training, don’t you think? Of these girls, one was a hurdler and two were two-twenty sprinters but they were taking the outing with the milers and all seemed in pretty good shape. Cross-country training spins needn’t be all that strenuous. It’s not as though there’s anything competitive about them. I mean, you can slow down and walk, if you want to. Think of Colnbrook and Bunt with their field-glasses.”
“I see. Did you gather why the girls, and not the men, had been approached?”
“No, but I rather thought that the men might have jibbed at the idea of being murdered. May simply be a wild guess, of course.”
“Were the names of Mr. Colnbrook and Mr. Bunt mentioned to the girls when this mysterious offer was made to them?”
“Not in so many words, but there aren’t many flies on the lasses these days. They’d read between the lines all right. There wasn’t any doubt about that. They knew Colnbrook and Bunt had been mixed up in something fishy and they desired no part in it. Now, your turn. What did Miss Caine have to say?”
“Without any prompting from me, she remarked upon the fact that Mr. Colnbrook and Mr. Bunt often trained on the Lawn opposite her house and watched the Forest ponies through field-glasses.”
“Adds up, doesn’t it?”
“I thought so. We had the same evidence from Mr. Richardson and then, of course, there is the discrepancy between the number of motorists known to have run down straying ponies and the number of ponies reported missing.”
“That seems a bit complicated to me. What about hit and run drivers? Such menaces do exist, you know.”
“I should like another meeting with Mrs. Bath. I must get her to introduce me to her sister’s husband.”
“The p.c.? Good idea.”
“I shall also have a word with the Chief Constable.”
&nbs
p; “What would you like me to do?”
“I know what I should like one of us to do, but I fear it would be difficult to manage.”
“Excelsior! Lead me to it!”
“I will tell you what is in my mind, but that, I think, is as far as we shall get. I wish we had some means of contacting the Forest gipsies and of gaining their confidence.”
“Nothing easier. You know that riding-stables I hire from while we’re here? Well, the three girls who run it know a gipsy who owns a lorry and takes the foodstuffs and things for their horses. Lots of the Forest gipsies have settled down now, you know. They live in cottages and have cars instead of caravans, but they’re gipsies all right and very proud of it. The one I’m talking about lives along the same road as your Miss Caine, and you can bet your life that anything she’s seen he’s seen, and he’ll know a whole lot more about it than she does. It’s too late to go over there tonight, but first thing in the morning I will sally forth and find out what I can. I doubt whether I’ll be able to tackle the bloke direct, because they tell me he’s as shy as a fawn and as cagey as an old dog-fox. I shall have to tell the girls what I want to know and why I want to know it. Will that be all right? Mind you, they may not have the information I need.”
Laura’s self-imposed errand on the following morning took her to the riding-stables at just after nine o’clock. The stables were attached to a large, decrepit old house on the edge of a bit of common just beyond the water-splash and Laura reached them after a good ten minutes of rapid walking.
Mucking-out had not begun when she arrived, for the string had not yet left the stables, but two of the owners were swilling down the yard and the scent of breakfast which came from the house indicated that the third and oldest of the three was doing the cooking. Laura offered to man the pump, a welcome suggestion, it seemed, and, with two buckets going instead of one, the job was soon concluded.
“Coming in for some breakfast?” asked one of the girls.
“I’d like to come in and natter, but I’ve just finished breakfast, thanks.”
“Oh, well, come in for a cup of coffee, then. If you want a mount, you can have one at ten for an hour. We’ve got everything hired from eleven onwards, unless you’d like to make it three o’clock this afternoon.”
“All right. I’ll make it three o’clock, then. When I leave here I’ve got to get back to the hotel to make a report to my boss.”
“She isn’t doing a stint for the R.S.P.C.A., is she? If so, you can give us a clean bill. No starvation rations, no over-tiring, no unkind treatment and the vet always on the end of the telephone.”
“No, seriously. I need some information and I don’t know how to get it unless you can help me.”
They went into the house and the two girls took chairs at the table in the shabby dining-room while Laura lounged on the broad, cushioned window-seat. Breakfast was brought in, coffee poured, and when the plates had been cleared by the hungry girls, and cook, helping herself to marmalade, said, “Now, Mrs. Gavin, at your service.”
“Thanks,” said Laura. “Well, you know that ancient lorry which brings your feeding-stuffs and what not from Lymington?”
“We do. It’s driven by a man named Lee. Nobody but a gipsy could persuade that contraption to move. I don’t know why they’re such wizards with worn-out machinery, but they are.”
“Centuries of make-do and mend, I suppose. Anyway, it’s the gipsy I want to talk about.”
“He doesn’t tell fortunes. That’s his mother, old Dosha Lee.”
“He keeps his eyes open, though, I take it,” said Laura, ignoring the lighthearted reference to fortune-telling and forcing a serious note. “Does he take much interest in the Forest ponies, do you know?”
“He daren’t—not in the way you mean.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that, but you’ve hit the target, in a way. We have some reason to think that somebody—a syndicate, perhaps, is more likely—is knocking off some of the ponies and taking them out of the Forest for sale elsewhere. Mind you, we have very little to go on, but that’s what we suspect.”
“Well, but why should you worry? You don’t own any of the ponies, do you?”
“Look here, if I tell you a bit more, will you swear not to breathe a word to a soul unless I say you may? Dorothy? Miriam? Angela? It’s serious.”
They nodded and looked impressed.
“Cross my heart.”
“Till death us do part.”
“See this wet, see this dry.”
“Right.” Laura leaned forward and in low tones told them as much of the story as they needed to know.
“But who do you suppose is at the head of this pony-snatching?” Miriam demanded. She was the cook-house-keeper and the financial genius of the undertaking.
“I can’t tell you that at present. It wouldn’t be fair. We have our suspicions, but proof is hard to get. That’s why I wondered whether your gipsy can help us.”
“It doesn’t seem to me that you’re on very safe ground in thinking that ponies have been stolen out of the Forest,” said Dorothy bluntly. “It would be a frightfully difficult thing to do if you’re thinking in big numbers, as I suppose you are. They’re under all sorts of protection. There are the Commoners who own them, the Verderers, the Agisters—I don’t see how anybody could get away with wholesale stealing. Look here, Mrs. Gavin, Angela’s got a book all about the Forest and the rights of the Commoners and so forth, so we do know what we’re talking about. We’re Commoners ourselves, actually, although we don’t bother much about it.”
“Let me lend the book to you, Mrs. Gavin,” suggested Angela. “When you’ve studied it, you’ll see how next to impossible your idea is. The only person who could get away with it, so far as I can see, would be one of the Agisters, or a very close friend for whom he’d wink the other eye, but, even then, only for a limited time, I’m sure.”
Laura’s enthusiasm was dimmed.
“Then you don’t think it’s much good trying to find out whether Lee has spotted anything suspicious?” she asked. “Anyway, I’d like to borrow the book. I’ll be back for my ride at three.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Liberty Lee
There are plenty of traditional gypsy names in the Forest families; men’s names such as Liberty, Eli, Nelson, Job, Goliath, Freedom, Samson, and the surprising “Dido.” Women’s names often show their Indian origin: Vashti, Dosha and Genti, and they show a preference for the more old-fashioned Britannia, Ambrozina, Lavinia, Urania, Eliza, Harriet and Caroline.
Juanita Berlin
Laura took the book back to the hotel, made her report (such as it was) to Dame Beatrice, and then took the book into the garden and sat in a wicker chair, in the kindly September sunshine, with the intention of putting in a period of intensive study. Dame Beatrice left her to it and made up the dossier of an interesting but not difficult patient from case notes supplied by her London clinic.
At twelve noon the young men, who had been playing golf again, returned to the hotel and lugged Laura into the bar.
“What were you so absorbed in?” Denis demanded. Laura showed him the book. He examined the list of contributors, looked at the illustrations, read the foreword and handed it back. “Made anything of it?” he asked. Laura nodded.
“I think I’ve got a clue from it,” she said. “Mine’s a whisky and splash, please.”
At lunch Dame Beatrice asked no questions and Laura volunteered no information except to state that she had hired a mount from the riding-stables for a three o’clock jaunt and would be back for tea. At two-forty, booted but not spurred, she set off. Her mount was ready for her and she rode at walking pace towards Beaulieu. Then she turned off, still thinking deeply, in the direction of what Miss Calne designated as the Lawn.
Liberty Lee’s cottage was on the way to the Lyndhurst–Boumemouth road. He was at home, as his wife, herself a gipsy, admitted at once.
“Liberty, you’re wanted,” she said. Liberty ca
me in with the careful, carefree tread of the gipsy. He was dark-haired and of a brown countenance which might have been derived from his racial ancestors or merely from an open-air life. He had the high cheek-bones and the air of independence of the true gipsy, took a stance slightly impudent, and asked Laura what she wanted.
“Co-operation,” said Laura.
“Yes, miss?”
“Look, how would you get ponies off the moor unless you were their owner or some other accredited person?”
“Get ponies off the moor? You mean the Lawn or else the common.”
“All right. I know you don’t do it, but how could it be done?”
The gipsy studied her. Suddenly and unexpectedly he smiled.
“That’s telling,” he said.
“Two men have been murdered for taking ponies.”
“Not they. Only for talking in their cups about it, maybe.”
“Quite likely. But how is it done? I had an idea it might be connected in some way with people who can handle the stallions. What’s the answer, Mr. Lee?”
“There’s no answer I can give ee,” said Liberty Lee. “Best you go and ask my mam.”
“I’m asking you. But, if you don’t want to answer it doesn’t matter. I thought you might be able to help, that’s all.”
The gipsy stared at his shoes and Laura realised that, so far as he was concerned, her errand was over. She remounted and rode over the Lawn and beside a narrow path which led to the enclosure in which Richardson and Denis had come upon the body of Colnbrook. She did not open the gate, but took a broad path over a wooden bridge and rode on, giving the horse a loose rein, into the open forest. Giant beeches, interspersed with age-old oaks, made the path a wandering one. The horse took his own way while Laura bent her brains to the task in hand, that of convincing the obviously knowledgeable gipsy that he ought to help her.
A nagging thought, not for the first time, assailed her. Were the missing ponies really worth the deaths of two men? Was there not a piece of the jigsaw missing?
She ambled on, or, rather, the nag did, until they reached an open, grassy stretch bordered by two shallow, natural ditches. Here the horse stopped to graze. Laura slid off his back, looped the reins over her arm and surveyed the scene at leisure, moving as the horse moved, but never checking his enjoyment, until she decided that he had had his share of the herbage and that it was getting on for her own tea-time.
Adders on the Heath (Mrs. Bradley) Page 18
