The Case of the Running Mouse: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  It was typical of Helen that she didn’t take me round the garden but left me to wander about alone. The octogenarian was weeding an onion bed. He was a sturdy old boy with a beautiful crop of white whiskers, and I told him that I hoped when I was eighty I’d be as hearty as he.

  “It’s quite a pleasure to see a beard again,” I told him. “Reminds me of my young days.”

  “There’s still a few about,” he said, but as if his own was a rarity of which to be proud.

  “How many can you think of?” I asked him.

  He frowned for a bit and then began his short list. I recognised only one name, the Mr. Temple whom Helen had mentioned as a colleague on the war savings committee, so I had to resort to subterfuge. Names would have meant little to me in any case.

  “Who was the man with a beard I passed just now?” I said. “A thinnish, elderly man with a limp.”

  “Ah! that’d be Mr. Maddon,” he said. “Him that lives at Five Oaks. Been here about nine years or so now.”

  “Five Oaks,” I said. “That’s an interesting name. Where is it exactly?”

  He said it was very simple. If I went two hundred yards towards Porthaven I’d see a stile on the right-hand side of the road, and a path that would take me straight to it. Used to be a large house there once, hundreds of years ago, but now there was only Mr. Maddon’s cottage. Or I could go a bit farther on and there was a lane that led the same way.

  I thought it best not to ask any more questions. What I did do was to go back to the house and ask Helen if she happened to have a large-scale map of the district. She did have one. It had been the one necessary thing when she arrived in the village, and indispensable for finding her way across field-paths and tracks to collect war savings. Thanks to that experience she knew every short cut in her area, and, what was more, she knew every householder and his family in the whole district north of Ringlands and along the Bycliffe road to the fork.

  While I was having a good look at that map she told me a thing or two that might be useful. Bassetts was the Chevalle house, but if I wanted to see both the Chevalles, then I’d better wait a day or two as Mrs. Chevalle was away on a short holiday in town. Her father was a builder in North London.

  “Didn’t you say that a bit spitefully?” I asked.

  “Not at all, my dear,” she told me, and rather amusedly. “I don’t mind who her father is. Some of the best friends I’ve made in the village are just the ordinary people.”

  “Then what’s the snag about her?”

  “Just her,” she said. “For one thing she simply doesn’t know nowadays what an honest job of work is. She over-dresses and decorates perfectly abominably, and under the veneer she’s just sheer vulgarity. He must have been mad to marry her.”

  “Good-looking?”

  “Well—yes. She’d be better-looking if she made up a trifle less artificially. And, my dear, simply seething with sex. But on very bad terms with him, so they say. And the way she bullies and drives that wretched Mary Carter simply makes me see red.”

  She clicked her tongue and then said we’d better talk about something else. Thora Chevalle was the one person in the village who brought out her worst instincts. Little Foxes, now, just opposite the cross road to Bycliffe, was where Commander Santon lived. One of the most charming men she’d ever met, but a bit of a philanderer.

  “What’s this Five Oaks place?” I asked her.

  “Just a large cottage,” she said. “It comes in Mrs. Chevalle’s area. A man named Maddon lives there. Quite a superior old man I believe, but I’ve never met him.”

  “It looks to me as if you and Mrs. Chevalle share the war saving between you,” I pointed out. “What does the other man, Temple, do?”

  “He does all the outlying places off the main roads, and he’s a sort of reserve if we’re away or go sick.” She smiled a bit spitefully. “That’s pretty often for Mrs. Chevalle.”

  She told me a lot more. That there was an hourly service of buses to and from Porthaven, for instance, and that Bycliffe church was well worth a visit. Bycliffe was six miles from Porthaven and two and a half from Cleavesham. The Wheatsheaf was quite a good pub, she told me, and there were three shops in the village—a post office general stores, another general stores and a butcher’s. And that reminded her. She ought to go along at once before the shop closed and see if she could get anything useful for some of her points.

  I said I’d go with her, and I enjoyed that first glimpse of the village, for I’d arrived via Porthaven. It was a superb afternoon with the scent of hay in the air and the incredible sweetness of a late beanfield. There were hop gardens with the green already well up the poles, and chestnut woods with vistas of valleys between them. Helen said that from Little Foxes one could see the sea, but everywhere else the hills that sheltered Porthaven cut off the sea view.

  There were lovely tile-hung houses and one or two half-timbered larger ones that made my mouth water. Farther along the Bycliffe road, Helen said, there was a bungalow colony, but the main part of the village was not disfigured. The spacious village green was lovely too, even if the cricket pitch was a hayfield, and the grey church stood perfectly placed in the far corner.

  By the church was the post office for which we were bound. As we approached it a man came out, and when he saw Helen he came across. He was about six foot and rather thin, and with a closely cropped brown beard. His manners were far too effusive for my liking.

  Helen introduced him as Temple, and at once he showed me all his teeth in a smile that was perilous for his upper set. But he didn’t hang round our necks. A word or two with Helen about war savings and he said he would be going. A high-pitched voice he had, as if by some special dispensation of providence he had eunuch blood in him.

  “I hope you will like our little village, Major Travers,” he said. “We’re humble people but I’m hoping you’ll like us.”

  “We’ll probably be humble all together,” I told him, and he didn’t quite know what to make of that. But he smiled again in farewell and then bent over Helen’s hand like a shopwalker.

  “Delighted to see you again. Don’t forget next Tuesday’s meeting.”

  He turned back along the Bycliffe road.

  “Where’s he live?” I asked.

  “You can just see his cottage on the left,” Helen told me. “That one with the rose arch in front. Rose Cottage. It’s just beyond the stile.”

  I didn’t go into the shop as there was a seat—erected to celebrate the coronation—under an oak just in front, and I sat there and enjoyed the view. A tractor passed with a load of split-pale fencing, and through the gap between two cottages I could see men haying. Then there was the faint sound of planes and soon I could see a whole packet of ours heading across the Channel. Then Helen came out and we walked round the green for a change of route, and so towards home again.

  “My dear,” she suddenly said, “weren’t you just a bit superior with that poor Mr. Temple?”

  “I know,” I said. “I apologise. I’m sorry, but I just didn’t like him.”

  “He’s rather amusing,” she said. “He does try so hard to make an impression, and he really does do quite a lot in the village besides war savings and being people’s warden. How old would you think he was?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Very near fifty perhaps. Beards are always deceptive.”

  On the rest of the way she told me about other people in the village, the moneyed sort principally. Most of the men were away and the few left did Home Guard jobs or worked in Town and came down only at week-ends. I said she ought to be doing well with war savings with all that dormitory class about, but it appeared that they subscribed on big occasions in big amounts to Santon direct. There wouldn’t be any necessity for me to meet any of them, she said, and that was good hearing. I loathe polite teas and local discourse. I may be public school and Cambridge but neither is very likely to apologise for disowning me, and I loathe particularly those cast in the same mould—the soft-voiced
and discreet, the strong silent men whose taciturnity conceals inanity and whose information is a poor re-hash of the correspondence columns of The Times.

  I’ve got to say this some time, for it’s highly important if we are to understand each other, and so I’ll say it here and now. If Wharton boasted of collecting faces, then I collect characters. Work at the Yard may have got me into the habit and made me a student of humanity, but for me a railway compartment or a tram or a pub has all the excitement that some people find in the theatre. I like to look at people and listen to them and lure them into talk, and so deduce their circumstances, their general make-up and even their counties from their speech. If they are uninteresting or hackneyed types, then they can be discarded at will, and if not, then they can be savoured and enjoyed. It doesn’t matter from what walk of life they come. One of my best discoveries was a chimney sweep and another a Cabinet Minister. And look at George Wharton, a man whom most would pass in the street without a second look. What a rich and fruity personality! No age can wither his infinite—if home-made—variety.

  Well, we reached Ringlands again and I lounged about till the evening meal, which was at seven prompt. We had strawberries, I remember, though very little sugar, and altogether it was just the meal for a sultry evening. Thunder was in the air and Helen thought we should be lucky if we missed a storm.

  “If you don’t mind I think I’ll go for a very short stroll,” I said. “Just enough not to tire me.”

  She suggested just what I wanted, the field-path to Five Oaks, and home by Rose Cottage, which would be just about a couple of miles. I asked if she’d come too, but she said she hadn’t better. When she walked it was always at a furious pace, whereas I would have to go steady and not tire myself. I said we’d compromise but she laughed and said she knew what compromises were, so I set off leisurely and alone. Perhaps of all the walks I’ve ever taken, it was to be the most amazing.

  Published by Dean Street Press 2018

  Copyright © 1944 Christopher Bush

  Introduction copyright © 2018 Curtis Evans

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Christopher Bush to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by his estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1944 by Cassell & Co.

  Cover by DSP

  ISBN 978 1 912574 20 9

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk