Sheer Folly

by Carola Dunn

  With care, Alec went down on one knee on the rubble. His best suit must be past praying for by now, he reckoned. Crouched there, feeling blindly, he could find no way round or through the barrier. He stood up. Stretching upwards, he could touch all but the topmost curve of the arch, but the slope of the rock fall made it impossible to reach to find out whether it met the ceiling.

  He lowered his handkerchief mask. Either there was less dust in here or it was settling. He sniffed.

  No stink of gas.

  “Bincombe, can you smell gas?”

  A brief silence, then, “No,” followed by a sneeze. “But I can’t claim my nose is reliable just now.”

  Alec put his hands round his mouth like a megaphone and made a hooting noise towards the top of the obstruction. The sound returning to his ears seemed to him to have bounced off a solid wall.

  “What the deuce? Was that you, Fletcher?”

  “Yes. I’m pretending to be an owl. It’s impossible to be sure without light, but I don’t think there’s any way through. I’m coming back.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Over Lady Ottaline’s limp body, Daisy and Julia exchanged a glance.

  Julia giggled. “I don’t know what she’d say if she knew you were using spit to clean her face.”

  “Not couth,” Daisy agreed, “but I had to do something after she was sick. She’s a mess. It’s a good job she passed out again.”

  “I’ll go and wet my hanky in the stream.”

  “Here, take my scarf, too, and hurry. I’m running out of spit.”

  Julia returned in a couple of minutes. “Daisy, the stream has practically disappeared! The source must be blocked.” She knelt opposite and started to dab with a dripping handkerchief at the cashmere jacket the victim was wearing in default of her soaked furs. “Do you think they’re all right? Suppose it breaks through while they’re up there?”

  “Your Charles must have noticed the drop in water level. He’ll have warned them and they’ll watch out for any changes.”

  “But—”

  “Julia, stop it! I know you’re not used to having a sweetheart to worry about, but if you carry on like that you’ll give me the jitters, too.”

  “Sorry. After so many years of one day being just like the day before, I don’t know how to cope with the unexpected.”

  “You’d soon learn if you married a police detective. I don’t suppose it’s a skill much required of the wife of a university lecturer, though. Oh, blast, it’s beginning to rain! She shouldn’t lie here in the cold, getting wet again. I wonder whether she does have concussion.” Eyes dilated by drug use didn’t react properly to light. Unequal pupils were a symptom of concussion, she vaguely recalled, but she didn’t feel like messing about with Lady Ottaline’s eyelids to take a look. “She must be in shock, at least.” Would that, or the drug wearing off, account for the vomiting?

  “I wish someone would come.”

  “Do you think we can carry her between us?”

  “We can but try,” Julia said with determination. She stood up. “Oh, thank heaven, here comes a man. It’s Pritchard’s chauffeur.”

  The chauffeur, Madison, like his employer, was a small man, but he was wiry. “You help me get ’er ladyship up on me shoulders, madam, and I’ll get ’er to the house all right. Little bit of a thing like ’er. What ’appened to ’er?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” said Daisy. “I should think she must have been outside the grotto when the explosion happened and got blown down. But that’s pure guesswork.”

  As she spoke, she and Julia lifted Lady Ottaline by shoulders and ankles. Madison ducked underneath and they deposited her face down across his shoulders. He grabbed her skinny legs round the knees on one side, and one brittle wrist on the other, and set off back down the path. Very undignified, Daisy thought, thankful again that Lady Ottaline wasn’t aware of the pickle she was in.

  When they came to steps, Daisy and Julia had to steady Madison in his descent, but he never faltered beneath the weight.

  “I suppose there are other advantages than fashion to being slim,” Daisy remarked to Julia with a sigh. “Carrying me would be another story altogether.”

  “The possibility of being blown up is hardly a good reason to go on a Banting diet.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. After what Howell said about the new safety features of the hot water geyser, if it can blow up, anything might blow up any minute.”

  “I don’t think that can have been what did it,” Julia said doubtfully. “He was talking about a steam explosion. That would happen if the gas was lit and the water wasn’t running through. It would be dangerous to anyone nearby, and it would cause some damage, but would it be so huge? There could only be a very limited amount of steam, I’d have thought, just from the water left in the machine after the last time it was used.”

  “I’m afraid I sort of lost track of his explanation in the middle. These safety thingummies wouldn’t prevent a gas explosion, then?”

  “Not if I understood correctly.”

  “I expect you did. Technical things tend to muddle me. Or at least to make my mind wander. It must have been a leak in a gas pipe, and poor old Rhino wandered into it waving his cigarette about as usual.”

  “But what on earth was he doing there? He wasn’t any more interested in the grotto than you were in the workings of the geyser.”

  That was a question to which Daisy considered the answer obvious, given Lady Ottaline’s presence following Rhino. However, she’d much prefer to save the elucidation for Alec. To her relief, the chauffeur had reached the last steps and called to them. They had fallen behind, not wanting him to hear their discussion.

  “Madam, miss, I c’d do with a hand ’ere, if you’d oblige. Don’t want to drop ’er, do we.”

  As they came up with him, a horde of gardeners—at least, a head gardener, an undergardener, and two gardener’s boys—appeared on the scene. Each had a spade on his shoulder. In addition, one carried a pickaxe, one a crowbar, and one a coil of rope.

  “Good,” grunted Madison. To the younger boy, small but wiry, he said, “ ‘Ere, Fred, or whatever your name is, you can carry ’er ladyship to the house.”

  “I’ll thank you not to give orders to my lads, Mr. Madison,” said the head gardener icily.

  “You planning to stand there all night argufying while the pore lady freezes to death?”

  “That will do,” said Daisy, who was quite capable of putting even more ice into her voice than the head gardener. The “servant problem” was between servants almost as often as between servant and employer, she reflected. “Mr. Madison has already carried Lady Ottaline a considerable distance. Fred—. Is your name Fred?”

  “Billy, miss.” Billy was clearly delighted by the row between his superiors.

  “With your permission, Mr . . . ?”

  “Simmons, madam,” the head gardener sulkily. He gestured at the undergardener and the other boy. “You two lift her ladyship onto Billy’s shoulders. Careful there, you oafs!”

  Billy’s face fell. He obviously wanted to go with the others to the scene of the disaster.

  “You can go after them as soon as we get Lady Ottaline to the house,” Daisy consoled him as the others went on up the slope, Simmons and Madison stiff with indignation.

  “She’m a real lady? ’Er don’t seem like nuthen but a bit o’ bone and hair. Fair dicky, ben’t en? ‘Er ben’t dead, be en?”

  “No, but she soon will be if you don’t take more care.”

  “Oi bain’t agoing to flump, missus,” the boy said, injured, “nor yet drop the lady. This yere rain, ’er’ll be shrammed for sure ifn Oi don’t peg it.”

  Daisy gave up. She and Julia hurried to keep up with him.

  Rain drifted down, soft, gentle, but persistent, seeping insidiously into every crack and crevice. Daisy hoped it would not hinder the rescue effort and make it more dangerous.

  Towards the mouth of the grotto, a Scotch mist drifted in, permeating the
air and beginning to clear the dust. Alec and Bincombe took off their handkerchief masks.

  “Whew, bliss to breathe!” Bincombe exclaimed, then issued a final sneeze and blew his nose.

  “Bliss to see,” Alec retorted. “Even though you look like a ghost. A pretty substantial ghost.”

  “So do you.”

  They were both powdered from head to foot with grey dust. The all-pervading dampness was rapidly turning it into splotches of plaster, but there wasn’t much they could do about it at present.

  Alec approached the open edge of the cave and looked down. To his right water trickled over a lip of inset granite and down a vertical rock wall into a small pool. Mud and stranded reeds round the margin showed that it had very recently been larger. A slight overflow still gave a semblance of life to the stream, shrunken in its bed at the bottom of the steep-sided gorge.

  To his left, perhaps a third of the distance down from the grotto to the pool, he saw the platform where he had found Lady Ottaline. Backed by a solid cliff, it faced the grotto and the defunct waterfall. Armitage stood there, looking up.

  “What do you think happened to Lady Ottaline?” Bincombe asked.

  “I’d guess that, when the inner cave blew up, the blast was funnelled out through that archway, through the grotto, and threw her against the cliff.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I doubt it would have been strong enough by then to do you or me much damage, but she’s a scrawny little thing. I think she was down there. If she’d been up here she’d have had the fall as well as the impact. She’d probably be dead. All the same, she must have been heading up here. Why?”

  Under the blotchy coating of damp chalk, Bincombe’s face turned red. “Hmm, well, none of my business, don’t you know.”

  Gentlemanly reticence added to natural taciturnity was a strong mix. Alec forbore to press him. Time enough for that if he couldn’t get the information—or rumours—from Daisy.

  “Right-oh. We’ll have to try and get to the site of the collapse. I hope Armitage can direct us.”

  He started down the steps, treading carefully on the rain-slick stone.

  “Here come the troops,” said Bincombe.

  Four men loaded with digging implements came tramping along the path. Pritchard’s servants, Alec assumed. One carried a rope he could have done with a few minutes ago. He considered sending a couple to try to break through the barrier.

  No, too dangerous. It would be better to have everyone working at the site of the hillside’s collapse. He had little hope of pulling anyone out alive, but it had to be tried. It was always possible that Lord Rydal had found shelter in some crack or cranny.

  Rhino, Bincombe had called him. An odd sort of a nickname, but this was not the time to ask about it. Alec reached the bottom of the steps and faced a barrage of questions from Armitage, while the others waited to be told what to do.

  “Nothing doing there,” he said briefly to the former.

  Armitage looked relieved. “Fletcher, this is Simmons, the head gardener, and a couple of his chaps. And Madison, chauffeur. He took over carrying Lady Ottaline from me.” He turned to the men. “Mr. Fletcher is in charge.” He looked a bit puzzled, as if he hadn’t considered the question before and couldn’t quite work out why Alec should be so definitely and obviously in charge.

  “Thank you for helping Lady Ottaline, Madison.”

  “My second lad’s carrying her ladyship now, sir,” Simmons said with inexplicable belligerence.

  “Only because Mrs. Fletcher—”

  “I’m glad to see you’ve brought spades, Simmons.” Alec cut short their wrangling, wondering how on earth Daisy came into the matter. “Good thinking. Now we need to make for the spot where the hillside subsided. I hope you can lead us there, quickly.”

  NINETEEN

  As Daisy and Julia and Billy, with his burden, reached the terrace, Pritchard hurried out of the drawing room, hatless in the rain, and Barker swung open the side door. They had obviously been watching out anxiously.

  “Lady Ottaline?” said Pritchard, very upset. “Bring her in! Lay her on the sofa.”

  “She’ll ruin the sofa!” objected Mrs. Howell, standing at the open French window. “And look at the boy’s boots!”

  “It’s my sofa, Winifred. What’s more, it’s my fault the poor lady is in this condition. Though leaks will happen, you know, no matter how careful you are. Come in, come in.”

  “I’m no nurse,” said Daisy, “but I think she ought to be taken straight to her bed. Billy, you’d better go with Barker. Is a doctor on the way?”

  “Yes, madam,” Barker assured her. “Her ladyship’s maid and the housekeeper are making preparations upstairs to receive her ladyship. Not that we expected anything quite so. . . .” At a loss for words, he looked with some dismay at Billy’s boots, but ushered him in through the side door.

  Regardless of the rain, Lady Beaufort came out, stately as a galleon in her brown tweed skirt and white blouse. She laid her hand on Pritchard’s arm and said, “Don’t distress yourself. I’ll go up and make sure everything that can be done is done properly.”

  “Would you? How can I thank you!”

  “I expect I’ll think of a way,” Lady Beaufort promised. “Julia, go inside at once, before you catch your death of cold.” She sailed off in Barker’s wake.

  Daisy and Julia, conscious of their muddy shoes and knees, were all for going in through the side door, but Pritchard insisted on taking them into the drawing room.

  Mrs. Howell glared at their feet.

  “Darlings, you are a mess,” Lucy greeted them.

  “Aren’t you glad you didn’t come?” said Daisy, gravitating to a radiator.

  Lucy shuddered. “Very. What happened to Lady Ottaline?”

  “We don’t know,” said Julia. “We met Charles carrying her and he left her with us, to go back to the others.”

  “Then the chauffeur arrived and carried her until we met the gardeners and Billy took over.”

  “This is beginning to sound like one of those endless fairy tales,” Lucy complained.

  “It did seem endless at the time,” Julia agreed.

  Meanwhile, a maid came in to light a fire in the fireplace.

  “I didn’t order a fire,” Mrs. Howell told her.

  “Mr. Barker said to, ma’am.”

  “Who’s orders do you obey, mine or the butler’s?”

  The maid looked nonplussed, the butler clearly as great a figure in her eyes as the lady of the house.

  “I think we might have a fire, Winifred,” said Pritchard mildly. “Mrs. Fletcher and Miss Beaufort are damp and chilled.”

  “Oh, well, if Barker is more important—”

  “Barker is doing an excellent job under unusual and difficult circumstances.”

  Emboldened, the maid said, “If you please, sir, Mr. Barker said as how he’d ’preciate a word with Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “I ought to change, so I’ll go and find him.” Daisy reluctantly abandoned the radiator. “It’ll be marvellous to come down to a real fire.”

  “I’d better change, too,” said Julia.

  “Mrs. Fletcher,” Pritchard begged, “isn’t there something else I can do to help? I’m afraid I’d only be in the way out on the hill.”

  Daisy hesitated. There was one thing she felt should be done as soon as possible, which no one else seemed to have thought of yet. The trouble was, she suspected Alec would prefer to do it himself, in person. She reminded herself that gas leaks happened all the time. She had absolutely no reason to suppose the explosion was anything but an accident—nothing, at least, beyond the character of the apparent victim. But she didn’t even know that Rhino was a victim.

  She made up her mind. “Someone’s going to have to tell Sir Desmond that his wife’s been hurt. As their host, I’d say you’re probably the proper person. Can you telephone him at the factory?”

  Pritchard paled. “How could I have forgotten? Yes, of course, I’ll do it right
away.” He squared his shoulders and followed Daisy and Julia out to the hall.

  Lucy was left with Mrs. Howell. Her manners were too good to desert their hostess, though whether she’d bestir herself to make conversation was another matter. Daisy wished she could watch and listen invisibly.

  The butler was waiting in the hall.

  “You wanted to see me, Barker?”

  “Thank you, madam, yes. I merely wished to inform you that I fear I did not follow your instructions to the letter when I telephoned the police. There was not time to advise you, but being acquainted with the constable in the village, I could not feel it desirable to notify him of Mr. Fletcher’s profession and rank.”

  “Oh?”

  “A man easily flustered, madam, by matters outside his usual purview. Very competent, I understand, where poachers, tramps, boys scrumping apples, and Saturday night fights outside the Spotted Dog are concerned, but apt to lose his head in more complex circumstances.”

  “Oh dear. Yes, I quite see your point. A Scotland Yard detective added to an explosion might be altogether too much for the poor man. Thank you, Barker.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  “Did you tell the doctor? About my husband, I mean.”

  “No, madam. As I recall, you suggested telling the police only. I should perhaps also inform you that, after consulting Mr. Pritchard, I telephoned the landlord at the Spotted Dog and asked him to round up a few able-bodied men and bring them to assist in the digging if required.”

  “Barker, you’re a regular Jeeves,” Daisy said warmly.

  “Thank you, madam. Excuse me, madam,” he added as the doorbell rang. “I expect that’s Dr. Tenby.”

  “Jeeves?” asked Julia.

  “A fictional butler who’s a genius at dealing with extraordinary circumstances. Your reading has been altogether too serious.”

  “Jeeves sounds like the Admirable Crichton. You can’t say that’s too serious. Come on, what are we waiting for? I’m dying to get out of these wet clothes.”

  “You go on up. I want to have a word with Dr. Tenby. I’ll take him up to Lady Ottaline.”