He had had, from his point of view, a damnable stroke of bad luck, caught out by his innocence not by any carelessness. His Undine ought to have foreseen that Miss Filk was likely to become suspicious about her mysterious absences. Perhaps she did foresee it, didn’t care, even welcomed it. After all, she could not know that the looking round corners was deadly serious.
And so Miss Filk, after jealously trailing Undine to Bristol station and skulking behind a barrow load of fish boxes or racing pigeons or whatever was handy, had been doubly shocked to find that her secret rival was a man and that the man was the missing Fosworthy. I take it that her first action was to warn Aviston-Tresco or some other associate that she had sighted him on the London train, and that later in the day she had such a flaming row with her ‘ward’ that the girl walked out on her.
Even so Fosworthy’s trail could never have been recovered if they had not been so obsessed by his connection with me. The gaps were now easy to fill in. Somebody had obtained my address, cautiously watched my flat and spotted Fosworthy’s first visit. That gave time for Aviston-Tresco to arrange the front seat of his van and to organise whatever simple trick would be enough to fool Fosworthy. It was a hundred to one that after his second visit to me he had again been put out of circulation.
‘Miss Filk, I’m not going to pretend to you,’ I said. ‘I am sure you are well aware of the circumstances in which I met Mr Fosworthy.’
‘He is quite mad, you know.’
‘He is certainly eccentric when he talks about your ward. Otherwise I find him reliable for so quixotic a person.’
‘You believe what he has told you?’
‘He hasn’t told me anything except that he suddenly found his feeling for Miss Carlis getting in the way of some personal creed of his.’
It was only then that I noticed an unsteady brilliance in her eyes. I warned myself that I had better be careful. Whether she had come to negotiate or not, she was in a savage temper and more likely to blow up than to listen.
‘Then why have you financed him?’
‘I have not exactly financed him. I lent him money because he was obviously in trouble and I couldn’t help liking him. I am very sorry that he can’t keep away from your ward, but it was not my primary intention to make things easier for him.’
‘I am quite sure it was not.’
She said this slowly and contemptuously, and I thought it was time to give her something which could be passed back.
‘I’m a working mining engineer, Miss Filk,’ I assured her, ‘and I know the geology of the Mendips and what one can or can’t expect to find there without being told by Mr Fosworthy. Really you can leave him out of it.’
As I see now, I could not have said anything worse. It looked as if I had learned all that Fosworthy could betray, and was making a futile attempt to protect him by admitting it.
There was an awkward pause, so I leaned forward to scratch the ears of the supercilious dog. I have a faint recollection of raising my head in alarm. Probably the blow was already on its way downwards.
The next thing I knew was that I lay on the floor of a van with a pillow under my head. To my newly opened eyes it seemed to be quite dark. This worried me until, through the back window, I saw lights flashing past. I stayed quiet, except for slightly shaking my head to see that it belonged to me.
It was a fair guess that I had been coshed by Miss Filk. Never having been coshed before, I could not tell how efficiently she had done it. I felt more drowsy than ill so that I knew she could not have hit me hard enough to lay me out for more than a few minutes. Without actually knowing what happened, I assume that Miss Filk had come provided with a syringe to keep me quiet. As a breeder of sleek, expensive Dobermans she was probably quite accustomed to using it.
How they carried me out of my flat after Miss Filk had telephoned that she had got me I do not know, but again it is not difficult to guess. I lived only one floor up. and most of the other tenants were out all day at their places of business. No one was likely to see my removal from flat to front door. For the short passage from front door to van—well, it wouldn’t be beyond Aviston-Tresco’s powers to provide an official-looking stretcher and a couple of St. John’s Ambulance caps.
My wrists and ankles were firmly tied. I was not gagged, but it was pointless to start yelling and be forcibly suppressed when I could not be clearly heard from any passing car. On the other side of the van was a bundle, snoring. I could just make out the untidy mass of fair hair at one end. I regarded the drugged Fosworthy with mixed feelings. I was sorry for him. I was glad of his companionship. But I was certain that if he could make matters worse, he would.
I must have dozed off again, for the next thing I remember is Fosworthy sitting up and looking at me. He had something soft stuffed into his mouth and held in place by a scarf tied behind his neck. He made a complicated, indignant gesture with his head, which I took as meaning that this was an outrage and that he would declare my absolute innocence. Soon afterwards the van bumped along a field track or unmetalled lane. Fosworthy evidently recognised the uneven motion, for he nodded to me as much as to say that he knew where we were. I can’t see what comfort he got from it.
We stopped, all lights off, on a concrete yard outside a farm building. Aviston-Tresco and Jedder got down from the front seats and opened up the van. I could dimly make out some water troughs and a clamp of silage. I had the impression of a lonely barn in some outlying part of the estate.
‘I do not want to cause you unnecessary pain,’ Aviston-Tresco said to me, ‘but if you shout I shall gag you at once.’
I said nothing. Anyway I doubted if there were a living soul within earshot. The south-west wind carried the softness of the Bristol Channel, and I could sense that it was sweeping over bare downland without trees or buildings, for it was steady as at sea and silent except for the whispering through grass. Everything suggested that we were on the Mendips, almost certainly on some desolate hill pasture of Jedder’s farm.
The pair of them carried me in, dropped me gently on a hard floor and went back for Fosworthy. As soon as he, too, was safely inside the building, Jedder locked the door and switched on a light.
The place appeared to have been fairly recently converted from an old stone barn. There were glass lights in the roof, but no windows. The double door through which we had come was new and fitted closely. There was a second door—an ordinary house door—opposite. Along one of the side walls were piled bales of hay. The other was occupied by old, disintegrating cow stalls. On a floor of rolled rubble were some agricultural implements, an aluminium ladder, a disused tractor, a discarded dynamo and bits and pieces from former days when horses had been used on the farm.
Yet the barn was plainly for more than shelter and storage, since there were two twelve-volt batteries to provide light, and an iron stove with a stack of wood alongside it. As I learned afterwards, Jedder’s farm-hands were aware that he and his friends visited the place for picnics or meetings; but eccentricities were none of their business so long as their wages were paid.
When Fosworthy’s gag was out, he let loose his indignation as if Aviston-Tresco and Jedder were a couple of impudent trespassers. He showed not a sign of fear, though whether that was due to his beliefs or his anger at being humiliated I could not tell.
‘I protest against your treatment of my generous and kindly friend, which is intolerable,’ he declared. ‘The position in which he finds himself is entirely my fault.’
‘It is,’ said Aviston-Tresco.
‘But I have told him nothing! I merely explained to him, as I have to you, that I consider a number of our basic tenets need restating.’
He might have been a sacked commissar defending himself before his interrogator—except that I doubt if any political fanatic could be so romantically self-sufficient.
‘You threatened us,’ Jedder reminded him.
‘Certainly I threatened you! I said that if you refused to listen to me I should make the whole o
f our controversy public.’
They were of the same height and roughly of the same colouring, though Jedder must have weighed half as much again. The two crests of fair hair jerked at each other.
‘And then you went straight to Yarrow.’
‘I had never seen him before in my life.’
‘Frankly, Barnabas, I don’t know,’ Aviston-Tresco said. ‘But when you did talk to him he realised that what you were proclaiming in your usual excitable way could be worth a lot of money to a man looking for a hotel site.’
That absolutely beat me, for I had been certain that they distrusted me as a former mining engineer. It was beyond imagination that Fosworthy could know anything of interest to the catering industry except a recipe for dandelion leaf sauce.
‘I give you my word that I have told him no more than I had to in order that he should understand my intellectual predicament,’ Fosworthy replied in a tone which suggested that his word could not possibly be disbelieved.
I must have smiled. He was an incredible man. What he said was quite true, but his intellectual predicament was the last thing I took seriously.
‘Then why did he lend you money?’
‘Because I had to escape. I have now a great deal to live for.’
‘I had no intention of violence, only of confining you again until you came to your senses and we could decide what to do with you. But just look what your emotional idiocy has landed us in now!’ Aviston-Tresco exclaimed. ‘Yarrow must dissolve and you, my poor, dear Barnabas, as well.’
He sounded exasperated. Nothing more than exasperated. That revealed to me more clearly than any of Dunton’s or Fosworthy’s attempts at explanation how sincerely these people believed that death was an unimportant incident. Aviston-Tresco’s manner did not belong to anything so serious as murder. It was that, say, of a creditor telling us that we were such incompetent fools that there was nothing left for him to do but to take legal proceedings.
‘What earthly chance do you think you have of getting away with it?’ I asked from the floor. ‘You must have left enough clues for the stupidest of policemen.’
‘They will not find any motive for your dissolution, Mr Yarrow, or any body either. The only clue is a car with false number plates from which you were transferred to my van.’
I kept my mouth shut about the doctor who stitched me up, because it seemed unfair to set these lunatics on him. For the same reason I did not mention Dunton. In any case neither of them would be surprised or suspicious if they never saw me again. But if I had realised that I was within seconds of what they chose to call dissolution, I should have shouted at him that he was not as safe as he thought.
‘Again I tell you that I am very sorry,’ he said with a smile that was an obscenity in his gentleness and confidence.
‘Again?’ Jedder asked.
‘He is doomed already. But we won’t wait for it.’
‘When? Why?’
Aviston-Tresco was embarrassed and evidently did not know what to reply. It was an eye-opener that he had never told Jedder—and that went for Miss Filk too—of his first attempt on me.
The order of events became a little clearer. What he had hoped was that after the prick I would accompany him to his club for a drink and go home unsuspecting. The fact that I knew all about his Apology badly shook him. He panicked. He had never tried to watch my movements when I bolted for that public lavatory and had cleared out as fast as he could. It was not surprising. Hundreds of animals he had kindly and graciously put out of pain, but this was the first human being.
Then he had to improvise a plan for silencing me before I was removed to hospital. I might also go to the police. No doubt Miss Filk had been warned to take no action if I showed the slightest sign of having set a trap. But, by and large, he was confident that I was a man of independent character who would be most unwilling to make accusations without a scrap of sensible evidence.
It did not look as if he had even examined my backside in the hurry of kidnapping me. If he had, he must have spotted that I had never cleaned and sewed up the wound myself. He took the sciatica which Miss Filk must have reported as the beginning of the end.
While I lay tied up, wondering whether my dissolution would be by syringe, knife or what, all this raced through my head, all logically following from the fact that Aviston-Tresco had deceived his associates. I would never claim to have thought it out. My analysis was more like a continuity of street scenes passing before the eyes.
Alan Jedder did not like Aviston-Tresco’s admission at all, for he realised that there might be other evidence lying about to be picked up besides false number plates.
‘You’d better tell me the whole story,’ he said. ‘They will be all right here.’
The pair went through the door into the next room or compartment, and I could faintly hear their voices. Jedder’s confidence that I would be ‘all right’ was justified. I am always inclined to accept a situation which I cannot alter, and the aftermath of the sedative made me more so than usual.
But one could not bind Fosworthy’s flame with ropes. So long as this world held Undine, he was not prepared to be dissolved into another. He rolled over on to his side and started to propel himself across the floor like the non-existent broken-backed pussy. He wriggled his shoulders up against an old plough-share which was leaning by the wall and began to saw his wrists back and forth. I was terrified lest he should knock it over; but for once he had single-minded control of his clumsiness. Then he untied his feet and released me.
We were locked in and Jedder had pocketed the key of the outer door, so there was nothing for it but violence. I grabbed Aviston-Tresco’s powerful electric torch, which he had obligingly left on the bonnet of the tractor together with his hat and a sinister instrument bag, and picked up a pitchfork with a broken handle. It was a frightening weapon, for the two prongs had rusted away to fine points. A man would have to have his anti-tetanus injections up to date after a poke in the belly with those.
‘I apprehend that you mean to take life,’ Fosworthy whispered.
‘I shall duly apologise,’ I said.
But I was far from happy about it. The Law allows one to use reasonable force. How much was reasonable for a person who could establish that he was kidnapped, but might have difficulty in proving that his life had ever been in danger?
Fosworthy told me that there was another way out of the building, earnestly explaining that he considered his first duty must be to protect me. I replied patiently that I wholly agreed and that we should run for the nearest police station as fast as we could.
‘I greatly fear there will be no chance of that as yet,’ he said. ‘Can you hold the door for a minute or two?’
I doubted it. My own unaided efforts, while still dopy from Miss Filk’s cosh and a sedative, were not enough to hold the door against two healthy men. Any attempt to drag something heavy across the floor would be heard. However, there was always the pitchfork.
Fosworthy started to lift bales of hay from the centre of the stack against the wall. With his height and long arms, he had just the build for the job, and he worked like a demon. In less than a minute he had made a considerable bay, and was down to the two bottom layers. The bales were a helpful protection for the door. I was silently building them into a wall when the main stack collapsed inwards with thuds which were loud enough to hear.
Aviston-Tresco and Jedder at once charged the door. My wall of hay was little use. There was nothing solid I could get my feet against, and no doubt I instinctively spared the muscles of my left thigh. Meanwhile Fosworthy had cleared away the fallen bales and was heaving at the bottom row.
The door gradually opened. Aviston-Tresco got his right arm and shoulder through, and there was nothing for it but the pitchfork. I was savage enough to hope that it had last been used for shifting manure. It went in at his wrist, the tine reaching as far as the elbow. I tried to withdraw it and twisted the curved tine in the process. His scream appalled me. I wouldn�
�t have thought that such a noise could come from a man’s throat.
I slammed the door shut. Fosworthy shouted to me to come over quick. He had cleared the floor and opened a thick, wooden hatch set in rough brickwork. I saw him hang on to the rim of the shaft and drop. The hole was immediately flooded with light. I dashed across to it and let go into space. Fosworthy tried to break my fall, with the result that we were both shaken and bruised. Jedder, yards behind me, did not attempt to follow. He slammed the hatch shut.
The passage into which we had crashed was a gallery driven through earth and loose limestone, shored in a very amateurish way. To my professional eye the roof looked most unsafe. The gallery extended for over thirty feet, lit by two naked bulbs, and ended at a steep, nearly vertical slope which was clearly not artificial though the stone had been hacked about to remove projections. Down this led a flight of stairs—obviously a brow or companion ladder from a ship—with stout brass-mounted steps and a teak hand-rail.
We were now in a small, irregular cavern. It was partly furnished with a table and a few chairs. Along the wall was a rack on which were hanging some sheepskin coats, fleece lined. There were even a mirror and a washbasin, showing that this was a sort of cloakroom or changing-room. In a horizontal cleft was a range of storage batteries for the light. Since they must have been charged from the surface, it was plain that the dynamo and tractor in the barn were not so unserviceable as they had been made to appear.
‘I must hope that the cry was due to surprise rather than extreme pain,’ Fosworthy said, breaking the silence. ‘I trust this is all worth the trouble. If only you could see her!’
One could hardly imagine a remark less appropriate to the situation. But I had to take him as he was. I answered that I had seen her, that there couldn’t be two.
‘Where?’ he asked eagerly. ‘What did you think?’
I shrank instinctively from telling him of my visit to the Pavilion and of Miss Filk. He would be overcome by fear for his Cynthia and remorse that his innocent ecstasy on Bristol station had betrayed me. She and I must have been the only close friends left who returned his affection—one of us with complete, if exasperated, sincerity; the other with, at any rate, pity. So I merely mentioned Dr Dunton and the dance.
The Courtesy of Death Page 6
