by Various
A few moments later we had reached the copse’s further limit and came to an irresolute halt.
‘Well, sir?’ asked the sergeant, in a tone studiously expressionless.
But I had no time for nuances. I was too utterly bewildered. ‘Sergeant,’ I gasped, ‘it – it’s gone.’
Chapter III
There was no doubt that Frank’s body had gone, because it was no longer there; but that did not explain its remarkable removal. ‘I can’t understand it, Sergeant. I know within a few yards where he was: on that straight bit in the middle. I wonder if he wasn’t quite dead after all and managed to crawl off the path somewhere.’
‘But I thought you were quite sure he was dead, sir?’
‘I was. Utterly sure,’ I said in perplexity, remembering how icy cold that clammy, clay-like face had been.
The constable, who had not yet uttered a word, continued to preserve his silence. So also did Gotley. After a somewhat awkward pause the sergeant suggested that we should have a look round.
‘Well, I can show you where he was, at any rate,’ I said. ‘We can recognise the place from the dead matches I left there.’
We turned back again and the sergeant, taking my torch, examined the ground. The straight stretch was not more than a dozen yards long and he went slowly up it one side and back the other. ‘Well, sir, that’s funny; there isn’t a match anywhere along here.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked incredulously. ‘Let me look.’
I took the torch, but it was a waste of time: not a match-stalk could I find.
‘Rum go,’ muttered Gotley.
I will pass briefly over the next hour, which was not one of triumph for myself. Let it be enough to say that search as we might on the path, in the undergrowth and even beyond the confines of the copse, not a trace could we discover of a body, a match-stalk, or anything to indicate that these things had ever been there.
As the power of my electric torch waned so did the sergeant’s suspicions of my good faith obviously increase. More than once he dropped a hint that I must have been pulling his leg and wasn’t it about time I brought a good joke to an end.
‘But I did see it, Sergeant,’ I said desperately, when at last we were compelled to give the job up as a bad one and turn homewards. ‘The only way I can account for it is that some man came along after I’d gone, thought life might not be extinct and carried my cousin bodily off with him.’
‘And your burnt matches as well, sir, I suppose,’ observed the sergeant woodenly.
Gotley and I parted with him and his constable outside the house; he would not come in, even for a drink. It was clear that he was now convinced that I had been playing a joke on him and was not by any means pleased about it. I had to let him carry the delusion away with him.
When they had gone I looked inquiringly at Gotley, but he shook his head. ‘My goodness, no, I’m not going. I want to go into this a little deeper. I’m coming in with you, whether you like it or not.’
As a matter of fact I did. It was nearly half-past one, but sleep was out of the question. I wanted to talk the thing out with Gotley and decide what ought to be done.
We went into the library and Gotley mixed us each another drink.
I certainly needed the one he handed to me.
‘Nerves still a bit rocky?’ Gotley remarked, looking at me with a professional eye.
‘A bit,’ I admitted. I may add in extenuation that I was supposed to have been badly shell-shocked during the war. Certainly my nervous system had never been the same since. ‘I’m glad you don’t want to go. I want your opinion on this extraordinary business. I noticed you didn’t say much up there.’
‘No, I thought better not.’
‘Well, it’ll be light in just over an hour. I want to get back and examine that copse by daylight, before anyone else gets there. I simply can’t believe that there aren’t some indications that I was telling the truth.’
‘My dear chap, I never doubted for one moment that you were telling what you sincerely thought was the truth.’
‘No?’ This sounded to me rather oddly put, but I didn’t question it for the moment. ‘Well, the sergeant did. Look here, are you game to stay here and come up with me?’
‘Like a shot. If any message comes for me, they know at home where I am. In the meantime, let’s try to get some sort of a line on the thing. I thought your cousin was abroad?’
‘So did I,’ I replied helplessly. ‘In fact, I had a card from him only this morning, from Bellagio.’
‘Did he give the name of his hotel?’
‘Yes, I think so. Yes, I’m sure he mentioned it.’
‘Then I should wire there directly the post office opens and ask if he’s still there.’
‘But he isn’t,’ I argued stupidly. ‘How can he be?’
Gotley contemplated his tumbler. ‘Still, you know,’ he said airily – rather too airily, ‘still, I should wire.’
The hour passed more quickly than I could have expected. I knew now that Gotley did not consider that I had been deliberately romancing, he suspected me merely of seeing visions; but he did not give himself away again and discussed the thing with me as gravely as if he had been as sure as I was that what I had seen was fact and not figment. As soon as the dawn began to show we made our way to the copse; for no message had arrived from the police station to throw any light on the affair.
Our journey, let me say briefly, was a complete failure. Not a single thing did we find to bear out my story – not a burnt match, a drop of blood, nor even a suspicious footprint on the hard ground.
I could not with decency retain Gotley any longer, especially as he was having more and more difficulty in concealing from me his real opinion. I made no comment or protestation. His own suggestion of the telegram to Bellagio could be left to do that; for I had now determined to adopt it in sheer self-defence, to prove that there was at least the fact of Frank’s absence to support me. If he had been in Horne’s Copse he could not be in Bellagio and, conversely, if he had suddenly left Bellagio, he could have appeared in Horne’s Copse.
I did not go to bed till past eight o’clock, at which hour I telephoned my telegram.
The rest of the day dragged. Sylvia telephoned after lunch to say that the chauffeur had now put my car right, but I put her off with a non-committal answer. The truth was that nothing would induce me to leave the house until the answer to my telegram had arrived.
Just after six o’clock it came.
I tore open the flimsy envelope with eager fingers. ‘Why the excitement?’ it ran. ‘Here till tomorrow, then Grand Hotel, Milan. Frank.’
So Gotley had been right. I had been seeing visions.
Chapter IV
I sank into a chair, the telegram between my fingers. But I had not been imagining the whole thing. It was out of the question. The details had been too vivid, too palpable. No, Gotley was wrong. I had seen someone – it might not have been Frank.
I hurried to the telephone and rang up Sergeant Afford. Had he heard anything more about last night’s affair? I might possibly have been mistaken in thinking the dead man my cousin. Had any other disappearance been reported? The sergeant was short with me. Nothing further had developed. He had been himself to the scene of the alleged death that morning and found nothing. He advised me, not too kindly, to think no more about the affair.
I began to feel annoyed. Now that it was proved that the body could not possibly have been Frank’s, my feeling towards it was almost resentment. Only by the chance of a defective wire on my car had I stumbled across it and the contact had resulted in suspicion on the part of the police of an uncommonly callous practical joke and the conviction on the part of my doctor that I was mentally unbalanced. The more I thought about it, the more determined I was that the mystery must be unveiled. I resolved to tell Sylvia the whole story that very evening.
Unlike Gotley, Sylvia asked plenty of questions; still more unlike him she accepted what I said as a statement of f
act. ‘Rot, Hugh,’ she said bluntly, when I told her of that young man’s suspicions. ‘If you say you saw it, you did see it. And anyhow, how could you possibly imagine such a thing? Hugh, this is terribly exciting. What are we going to do about it?’ She took her own part in any subsequent action for granted.
I looked at her pretty grey eyes sparkling with excitement and, in spite of the gravity of the affair, I could not help smiling. ‘What do you suggest, dear?’ I asked.
‘Oh, we must get to the bottom of it, of course. We’ll make inquiries in the neighbourhood and go round all the hospitals, oh and everything.’ As I had often noticed before, Sylvia had been able to translate into realities ideas which to me had remained a trifle nebulous.
So for the next few days we played at being detectives inquiring into a mysterious murder and travelled all over the country in pursuit of our ridiculous but delightful theories. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously; but if real detectives got no further in their cases than we did, the number of undetected murders would see a remarkable increase; for we discovered exactly nothing at all. No man resembling Frank had been seen in the vicinity; there was not the vaguest report of a man with a bullet wound in his forehead.
All we really did determine was that the man must have been dead (for that he had been dead I was absolutely convinced) for about four to six hours because, though the body was cold, the wrist I had held was still limp, which meant that rigor mortis had not set in. This information came from Gotley who gave it with a perfectly grave face and then quite spoilt the effect by advising us to waste no more time on the business. Sylvia was most indignant with him.
Perhaps it is not true to say that we discovered nothing at all, for one rather curious fact did come to light. Although we knew now that the man must have been dead at least four hours, must have died, that is, not later than eight o’clock, we found no less than three persons who had passed over the path between that hour and midnight; and at none of those times had he been there.
‘There’s a gang in it,’ Sylvia pronounced with enjoyment. ‘He was shot miles away, brought to the copse and then carried off again, all by the gang.’
‘But why?’ I asked, wondering at these peripatetic activities.
‘Heaven only knows,’ Sylvia returned helplessly.
And there, in the end, we had to leave it.
At least a month passed and my mysterious adventure gradually became just a curious memory. Gotley ceased to look at me thoughtfully and when I met him at the local flower show even Sergeant Afford showed by his magnanimous bearing that he had forgiven me.
At first, I must confess, I had tended to avoid Horne’s Copse at night, although it was much the shortest route between Bucklands and Ravendean. Then, as the memory faded, reason reasserted itself. By 3 July I had shed the last of my qualms.
That 3 July!
There is a saying that history repeats itself. It did that night with a vengeance. Once again I had been dining at Bucklands. Before leaving home my chauffeur had found a puncture in one of the back tyres of the Dover and had put the spare wheel on. I risked the short journey without a spare, only to find, when it was time to go home, that another puncture had developed. Once again Sylvia offered me her own car: once again I refused, saying that I should enjoy the walk. Once again I set out with my mind busy with the dear girl I had just left and the happiness in store for me. That very evening we had fixed our wedding provisionally for the middle of September.
Indeed, so intent was I upon these delightful reflections, that I had got a third of the way through Horne’s Copse before I even called to mind the sinister connection which the place now held for me. It was not quite such a dark night as that other one, but inside the copse the blackness was as dense as before as I turned the last twist before the stretch of straight path in the centre.
‘It was just about six yards from here,’ I reflected idly as I walked along, ‘that my foot struck, with that unpleasant thud, against—’ I stopped dead, retaining my balance this time with ease, as if I had subconsciously been actually anticipating the encounter. For my foot had struck, with just such another unpleasant thud, against an inert mass in the middle of the path.
With a horrible creeping sensation at the back of my scalp, I struck a match and forced myself to look at the thing in my way, though I knew well enough before I did so what I should see. And I was right. Lying across the path, with unnaturally disposed limbs and, this time, a small dagger protruding from his chest, was my cousin Frank.
Chapter V
The match flickered and went out and still I stood, rigid and gasping, striving desperately to conquer the panic which was threatening to swamp my reason.
Gradually, in the darkness, I forced my will to control my trembling limbs. Gradually I succeeded in restoring my brain to its natural functions. Here, I told myself deliberately, was the real thing. As for the other – vision, pre-knowledge, clairvoyance, or whatever it might have been, I had at the moment no time to find explanations; here I was in the presence of the real thing and I must act accordingly.
I suppose it can really have been scarcely more than a couple minutes before, restored to the normal, I felt myself not merely calm but positively eager to investigate. With fingers that no longer quivered I struck another match and bent over my unfortunate cousin. It did not even repel me this time to touch the cold, clammy face, glistening in the match-light with unnatural moisture, as I made sure that he really was dead.
It was with an odd sense of familiarity that I made my swift examination. Except for the dagger in his chest and the bloodstained clothes around it instead of the bullet wound in his forehead, everything was exactly the same as before and my own actions followed more or less their previous course. There was the same outflung arm, cold wrist uppermost, whose motionless pulse I could conveniently feel for; there were the staring eyes, unresponsive to the movements of my match; there was the damp, chilled skin of his face. It was only too plain that he was dead, without it being necessary for me to disarrange his clothing to feel his heart and I was again unwilling to do this, knowing how much the police dislike a body to be tampered with before they have examined it themselves.
But one thing further I did this time. I made sure that the body was, beyond all possibility of dispute, that of Frank himself. Frank had a scar on his left temple, just at the edge of the hair. I looked for the scar and I found it. Then I hurried home at the best speed I could, to ring up Sergeant Afford and Gotley. I was conscious as I did so of a rather ignoble feeling of triumph. But after all, self-vindication is a pleasant feeling.
Sergeant Afford himself was not at the police station, but to Gotley I spoke directly. ‘Right-ho,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘Really has happened this time, has it?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘There’s no doubt this time. I shall want to go into that other affair with you sometime. It must have been a vision of some kind, I suppose.’
‘Yes, extraordinary business. And apparently not quite an accurate one. What about getting the Psychical Research Society on to it?’
‘We might. In the meantime, I’m going back to the copse now. Meet me there. I’m taking no risks this time.’
Gotley promised to do so and we rang off.
As I passed out of the front door I looked at my watch. The time was three minutes to twelve. It had been twenty-one minutes to the hour within a few seconds, when I left the body. I walked back at a good pace and the journey took me about twelve minutes. In all, then, I was absent from the centre of Horne’s Copse for about half an hour. The importance of these figures will be apparent later.
I am not sure what motive prompted my return alone to the spot where I had left the body. I think I wanted, in some vague way, to keep guard over it, almost as if it might run away if left to itself. Anyhow I certainly had the feeling, as I had mentioned to Gotley, that this time I would take no chances.
I had my torch with me now and I turned it on as I reached the copse. It threw a power
ful beam and as I turned the corner on to the straight path I directed the light along to the further end. The whole dozen yards of straight path was thus illuminated, the undergrowth at the sides and the dense green foliage beyond the twist at the end. But that was all. Of Frank’s body there was no sign.
Incredulously I hurried forward, thinking that I must have been mistaken in my bearings; the body must have lain round the further corner. But neither round the corner was there any sign of it, nor anywhere along the path right to the further edge of the copse. Filled with horror, I retraced my steps, sweeping the surface of the ground with my beam. It was as I feared. Again there was not even a litter of spent matches to show where I had knelt by Frank’s remains.
In the middle of the path I halted, dazed with nameless alarm. Was my reason going? The thing was fantastic, inexplicable. If I had had my suspicions about the reality of my former experience, I had none concerning this one. I knew there had been a body; I knew I had handled it, physically and materially; I knew it was Frank’s – Frank who was supposed to be that moment in Rome. I knew all these things as well as I knew my own name, but ... But the alternative simply did not bear thinking about.
But for all that, hallucinations ...
And yet I felt as sane as ever I had been in my life. There must be some ordinary, simple, logical explanation ...
I was still trying to find it when the police and Gotley arrived together.
I turned to meet them. ‘It’s gone!’ I shouted. ‘Would you believe it, but the damned thing’s gone again. I saw him as plainly as I see you, with the dagger in his chest and the blood all round the wound – I touched him! And now there isn’t a sign that he was ever there at all. Damn it, the very matches have disappeared too.’ I laughed, for really if you looked at it one way, the thing was just absurd.
Sergeant Afford eyed me austerely. ‘Is that so, sir?’ he said, in his most wooden voice.
