When the pans were clean we lit the oil lamp and closed the door against the sweet dusk, and went again through all the papers Connor had given us—the photographs and the typed notes, the interviews with the parents, statements from witnesses on the mountain and from the senator’s staff in London, a glossy photograph of Jessica taken the previous spring, grinning gap-toothed in a studio with its painted backdrop of a blooming arbour of roses. Page after page of the material, and all of it served only to underline the total lack of solid evidence, and the family’s coming financial emasculation, and the brutal, staring fact that all too often kidnappers who receive their money give only a dead body in return, a corpse who can tell no tales.
Holmes smoked three pipes and climbed silently into his bunk. I closed the file on the happy face and shut down the lamp, and lay awake in the darkness long after the breathing above me slowed into an even rhythm. Finally, towards the end of the short summer’s night, I dropped off into sleep, and then the Dream came and tore at me with its claws of blame and terror and abandonment, the massive, shambling, monstrous inevitability of my personal hell, but this time, before its climax, just short of the final moment of exquisite horror, a sharp voice dragged me back, and I surfaced with a shuddering gasp into the simple quiet of the gipsy caravan.
“Russell? Russell, are you all right?”
I sat up, and his hand fell away.
“No. Yes, I’m all right, Holmes.” I breathed into my hands and tried to steady myself. “Sorry I woke you. It was just a bad dream, worry about the child, I guess. It takes me that way, sometimes. Nothing to be concerned about.”
He moved over to the tiny table, scratched a match into life, and lit a candle. I turned my face away from him.
“Can I get you anything? A drink? Something hot?”
His concern raked at me.
“No! No, thank you, Holmes, I’ll be fine in a minute. Go back to bed.”
He stood with his back to the light, and I felt his eyes on me. I stood up abruptly and went for my spectacles and coat.
“I’ll get some fresh air. Go back to sleep,” I repeated fiercely, and stumbled from the caravan.
Twenty minutes down the road my steps finally slowed; ten minutes after that I stopped and went to sit on a dark shape that turned out to be a low wall. The stars were out, a relatively uncommon thing in this rainy corner of a rainy country, and the air was clean and smelt of bracken and grass and horse. I pulled great draughts of it into me and thought of Mrs. Simpson, who had called it breathing champagne. I wondered if Jessica Simpson were breathing it now.
The Dream gradually receded. Nightmare and memory, it had begun with the death of my family, a vivid re-creation that haunted and hounded me and made my nights into purgatory. Tonight, though, I had Holmes to thank for interrupting it, and its aftermath was considerably lessened. After an hour, cold through, I walked back through the first light of dawn to the wagon, and to bed and a brief sleep.
In the morning neither of us mentioned the night’s occurrences. I cooked porridge for breakfast, flavoured with light flecks of ash and so lumpy Mrs. Hudson would have considered it suitable only for the chickens. We then walked up towards the described campsite, taking a roundabout route and a spade to justify our presence.
The site was unattended when we arrived. The tent was still standing, slack-roped and flabby-sided, with a blackened circle and two rusting pans to one side where Mrs. Simpson had cooked her meals. The area smelt of old, wet ashes, and had the forlorn look of a child’s toy left out in the rain. I shuddered at the image.
I went up to the tent door and looked in at the jumble of bedrolls and knapsacks and clothing, all abandoned in the scramble to locate the child and now compulsively preserved in situ by police custom. Holmes walked around to the back of the tent, his eyes on the trampled, rain-soaked ground.
“How long have we?” I asked him.
“Connor arranged for the constable on guard to be called away until nine o’clock. A bit under two hours. Ah.”
At his expression of satisfaction I let the canvas flap fall and picked my way around to the tent’s back wall, where I was met by the singular vision of an ageing gipsy stretched full out between the guy ropes with a powerful magnifying glass in his hand, prodding delicately at the tent’s lower seam with his fountain pen. The pen disappeared into the interior of the tent. I turned and went back inside, and when the bedding had been pulled away I saw what Holmes had discovered: a tiny slit just at seam line, the edges pushed inward and the threads at both ends of the cut slightly strained.
“You expected that?” I asked.
“Didn’t you?” I was tempted to make a face at him through the canvas, but refrained; he’d have known.
“A tube, for sleeping gas?”
“Right you be, Mary Todd,” he said, and the pen retreated. I stood up, head bent beneath the soggy canvas roof, and looked at the corner where Jessica Simpson had slept. According to her parents, the only things missing from her knapsack or the tent had been her shoes. No pullover, no stockings, not even her beloved doll. Just the shoes.
The doll was still there, feet up beneath the tangle of upturned bedding, and I pulled out the much-loved figure, straightened her crumpled dress, and brushed a tangle of yarn hair from her wide painted eyes. The once-red lips smiled at me enigmatically.
“Why don’t you tell me what you saw that night, eh?” I addressed her. “It would save us a great deal of trouble.”
“What was that?” asked Holmes’ voice from a distance.
“Nothing. Would there be any objection if we took the doll with us, do you think?”
“I shouldn’t think so. They only left these things here for us to see; they have their photographs.”
I pushed the doll into my skirt pocket, took a last look around, and went outside. Holmes stood, back to the tent and fists on his hips, looking down the valley.
“Getting the lie of the land?” I asked.
“If you were kidnapping a child, Russell, how would you get her away?”
I chewed my lip for a few minutes and contemplated the bracken-covered hillsides.
“Personally, I should use an automobile, but no one seems to have heard one that night, and it’s a goodly hike to anywhere with three and a half stone of child on one’s back, even for a strong man.” I studied the hill and saw the trails that wandered over and around it. “Of course. The horses. No one would notice one more set of prints with all these here. They came in on horseback, didn’t they?”
“It’s a sad state of affairs when, being confronted by a hillside, the modern girl thinks of an automobile. That was slow, Mary Todd. Overlooking the obvious. Theological training is proving as destructive to the reasoning abilities as I had feared.”
I cringed away and whined at him.
“Aw, Da’, it waren’t me fault. I war lookin’ a’t’evidence.”
“Harden your t more,” he corrected absently. “So, which way?”
“Not towards the road; there’d be too much chance of being seen.”
“Down the valley then, or over the hill?” he considered aloud.
“A pity we weren’t here a week ago; there might have been something to see.”
“If wishes were horses…”
“Detectives would ride,” I finished. “I should go further away from the nearest village, I think, along the hill or over it.”
“We have an hour before the guard is back. Let us see what there is to find. I’ll go up the hill; you take the base of it.”
We zigzagged along and up the hill in increasingly wide arcs out from the tent. Half an hour went by with nothing but aching backs and stiff necks to show for our scrutiny. Forty-five minutes, and I began to listen nervously for the Welsh equivalent of “Oy, what’s this then?” from the campsite behind us. The two of us reached the furthest points in our arcs and turned back toward the middle. Something caught my eye—but it was nothing, just a gleam of bare stone where a hoof had scraped
a rock. I went on, then turned back for a second look. Would an unshod hoof actually scrape into stone? On the whole I thought not.
“Hol—Uh, Da’!” I called. His head came up, and he started across the hillside at a long-legged trot, the spade bouncing on his shoulder. When he came up he was barely winded. I pointed and he dropped down with his glass to look more closely.
“Well done indeed. That excuses your lapse earlier,” he said magnanimously. “Let us see how far this might take us.” We continued in the direction we had come, walking slowly on either side of the clear path cut by generations of hoofs. An hour later we passed the limits of the police search.
Holmes and I spotted the white patch at the same moment. It was a small handkerchief, nearly trampled into the mud. Holmes worked it out of the soil and held it outspread. In one corner was an embroidered J.
“Was this an accident?” I wondered aloud. “Could she have been awake enough to drop it deliberately? Might a six-year-old do that? I shouldn’t have thought so.”
We continued, and in a few minutes my doubts were stilled, for to one side of the path a narrow strip of blue ribbon hung limply from a patch of bracken. I held it up triumphantly.
“That’s my girl, Jessie. Your hair ribbon.”
We walked on, but there were no further signs. Eventually the path split, one going up and over the hill, the other dropping down towards some trees. We stood looking at the two offerings expectantly, but no ribbons or signals caught our eyes.
“I’ll take the uphill again.”
“Wait. Down near those trees, is the ground scuffed up?” We went down, and there, in a little hollow, were indeed signs of some flurry of activity. Holmes walked around it carefully, and then bent down quickly, reaching for something invisible to me twenty feet away. He continued his scrutiny, picked up another object, and finally allowed me to approach.
“She jumped off the horse,” he said, running his fingertips back and forth an inch above the trampled ground. “She had bare feet, although they had taken her shoes; they had not bothered to put them on her. Her hands were not tied. Here,” he said stabbing a finger at a clod of turf, “you see the short parallel lines? Her toes. And here, the longer lines that draw together? Her fingers made those as she gathered herself off the ground and sprinted towards those bushes.” Once he had pointed out the signs I could see them, clear despite the intervening rains. He rose and followed the marks left by hoofs and heels. “She made it this far before they caught her, by her night dress, which popped a button,” he held out the object he had picked up earlier, “and by her hair, which was of course loose from having the ribbon removed.” He held up several mud-crusted strands of auburn hair.
“Dear God,” I groaned, “I hope they didn’t hurt her when they caught her.”
“There’s nothing on the ground that tells one way or the other,” he said absently. “What was the moon doing on the twelfth of August?”
I was quite certain he did not need me to tell him, but I thought for a moment, and answered. “Three-quarters full, and it had stopped raining. She may have been able to see well enough to tell when the path split, or perhaps she was trying to make it to the trees. In either case, we know where she’s come. Quite a child, our Miss Simpson. But I doubt there will be any further signs.”
“It is unlikely, but let us be thorough.”
We followed the horse trail for another hour, but there were no more signs or marks of shod hoofs. At the next trail fork we stopped.
“Back to the caravan, Mary, my girl. A bite of lunch, and the gipsies will resume their itinerant musicale.”
We got back to the wagon to find company, in the form of a large constable with a very dark expression on his face.
“And what might the two of you have been doing on this hillside?” he demanded.
“Doin’? We been stayin’ the night, I’d a thought that obvious,” retorted Holmes, and walked past him to store the spade in its niche.
“And where have you been gone to all mornin’?”
“Out diggin’ for truffles.” He jerked his thumb at the implement.
“What?”
“Truffles. Little roots, very expensive in the shops. The Lords and Ladies like ’em in their food. Find ’em sometimes in the hills.”
“Truffles, yes, but they use pigs to find them, not spades.”
“Don’t need pigs if you’ve got the gift. My daughter here, she’s got the gift of sight.”
“You don’t say.” He looked at me with skepticism, and I smiled at him shyly. “And did this daughter of yours with the gift of truffles find any?”
“Naow, not today.”
“Good. Then you’ll not mind moving on. Within the hour.”
“Want m’dinner first,” said Holmes sulkily, though it was closer to teatime than the noon hour.
“Dinner, then. But gone in two hours, you’ll be, or it’s in a cell you’ll find yourselves. Two hours.”
He stalked off over the hill, and I sat down and giggled in relief. “Truffles? For God’s sake, are there truffles in Wales?”
“I suppose so. See if you can find some food while I dig out the maps.”
Holmes’ maps were of the extremely large-scale topographical sort, showing the kinds of vegetation, the rights-of-way, and small black squares indicating houses. He folded the table up out of the way and chose a series of maps from a shallow drawer beneath my bunk. I handed him a sandwich and a tin mug of beer, and we walked across the paper floor-covering in our stockinged feet.
“This is our route,” he pointed out. “The campsite, here, and the trail going away, roughly along this contour line.” The tip of his brown finger followed the contour of the hill, dropped down into the hollow on the next map, and stopped at the Y junction on the edge of the third. “From here, where? She had to be inside, Russell, before light. In a building, or a vehicle.”
“But not…under the ground?”
“I think not. Had they intended to kill her, surely they would have done so when she tried to escape, to save themselves further trouble. I saw no indication of blood there.”
“Holmes!” I protested in dismay.
“What is it, Russell?”
“Oh, nothing. You just sound so…callous.”
“You prefer a surgeon who weeps at the thought of the pain he is about to inflict? I should have thought you had learnt that lesson by now, Russell. Allowing the emotions to involve themselves in an investigation can only interfere with the surgeon’s hand. Now, assuming the child was taken as early as midnight, and it is light by five o’clock; without an automobile, that would place the limits they could have ridden approximately here,” and he drew a semicircle, using as its center the Y where the trail had disappeared. “Within this area; a place where a telephone is to hand; a large enough village for the delivery of The Times out of London to go unremarked. You won’t overlook the significance of the agony column?”
“Of course not,” I hastened to reassure him.
He reached back onto his sheaf of maps, withdrew half a dozen of the very largest scale, and fitted them together. We puzzled over the lines of streams and roads, footpaths and houses. I absently wiped a smear of pickle from the map and brushed off some crumbs, and thought aloud.
“There are only four small villages in that direction. Five, if we count this furthest, though it would have forced them to ride very fast. All are near enough to the road, they might have a telephone line. These two villages seem rather more scattered than the others, which might give whatever house they’re in more privacy. I can’t see that we’ll make them all by tomorrow.”
“No.”
“We have only six more days before the ransom is to be paid.”
“I am aware of that,” he said testily. “Get the horse in the traces.”
We were away before the constable returned, but it was nearly dark before we came to the first village. Holmes trudged off to the pub, which looked to be on the ground floor of someone’
s home, while I cared for the horse and tried to concentrate my brain on conversation with the children who inevitably appeared at our arrival. I had found that there was usually one who took responsibility for communicating with this strange visitor. In this case the representative was a dirty girl of about ten. The others kept up a running commentary, or perhaps a simultaneous translation in a Welsh that was too fast and colloquial for me to grasp. I ignored them all and proceeded with my tasks.
“Are you a gipsy then, lady?”
“What do you think?” I grunted.
“My Dad says yes.”
“Your Dad is wrong.” Shocked silence met the heresy. After a minute she plucked up her nerve again.
“If it’s not a gipsy you are, then what?”
“A Romany.”
“A Romany? There’s foolish, there is! They carried spears and they’re all dead.”
“That’s a Roman. I’m Romany. Want to give this to the horse?” A small boy took the oats from me. “Is there anyone in town who’d like to sell me a couple of suppers?” My crowd silently consulted, then:
“Maddie, run you by there and ask your Mam. Go now, you.” The tiny girl, torn between the desire to keep watch and the undeniable honour of providing service, reluctantly took herself down the road and disappeared into the pub.
“Have you no pan?” asked a small person of one sex or another.
“I don’t like to cook,” I said regally, and shocked silence, deeper than before, descended. If the other was heresy, I could be burnt for this. “Is there a telephone in town?” I asked the spokesman.
“Telephone?”
“Yes, telephone, you know, the thing you pick up and shout down? It’s too dark to see any wires. Is there one in town?” The puzzled faces showed me this was the wrong village. A child piped up.
“My Da’ used one once, he did, when the Grand’ died and he had to tell his brother by Caerphilly.”
“Where did he go to use it?”
An eloquent shrug in the light of the lamps. Oh, well.
“What for do you need a telephone machine?”
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 13
