“ ‘What thee’s afraid of? Evil Eye?’ I says.”
Mrs. Bradley smiled, but only dutifully. It had occurred to her more than once that young Tom stood in some danger. Although the Dark Gentleman might be prepared to brave the inspection of most of the people in the village, there was always the chance that, if he found out that Tom had been the person to find him “dead,” then he would conceive it part of his duty to make it impossible for Tom to report to the police what he had already reported to his mother.
Once the “dead” Mr. Lancaster were suspected of being also the very much alive Mr. Frere, the game was up. The empty grave—and Mrs. Bradley devoutly hoped that Ferdinand could persuade the Home Office to dispense with a little of the red tape, which so often strangled its best efforts—would queer Mr. Joshua’s pitch, to say the least. Immediately enquiries began, his visit to Mrs. Bradley, Gillian’s story about Geoffrey, the reincarnation of the East Bierley business, and the singular death of Mr. Graham Ker would bear a sinister complexion, and one as dark as that of Mr. Frere himself.
Once the identity of Graham Ker was established—as it could be, very readily, by his Uncle David—the whole story would unwind itself, Mrs. Bradley surmised, like the India-rubber core of a golf ball once the hard outer covering is removed. But there was plenty of time for that, and it was of no use being fanciful with a jury. Mrs. Bradley, who had once written a monograph upon the psychology of juries, sighed as she remembered cases in which the jury, confronted by evidence, which it did not understand and by emotions, which it did, had given a verdict not at all in conformity with the former, but wholly on the strength of the latter. The fact that, in most cases, the verdict turned out to be exactly the same as it must have been if the evidence alone had been the deciding factor, was none the less distressing to the detached, judicial, and scientific mind, which, after all, she possessed.
She sent for Tom after they had returned from visiting the grave, and conferred with him upon the advisability of her sending a messenger to the north.
She felt fairly certain, from what she knew of his character, that Mr. Joshua was more likely to have followed her to the marshes than to have remained in Scotland. It was interesting and important that Gillian and Lesley had actually seen him visiting the scene of the crime, but he was not likely to remain in its neighbourhood whilst the police were still there, and he would be anxious to know what she herself was up to, for he must have realised, Mrs. Bradley sorrowfully admitted, that by this time she could no longer be regarded as a benevolent neutral, far less a potential ally. She was the enemy in person.
Young Tom was willing enough to be a messenger, and, his mother raising no objection, since she could easily manage the bar without his assistance, the first arrangement was that that he should be hustled on to the best train of the day at the last possible minute, carrying a dispatch to the inspector at Newcastle.
The contents of the package, which Mrs. Bradley had prepared for him would have surprised and disgusted the youth if he had been made aware of them, for all that they amounted to was a plea to the inspector to keep the bearer safe until Mrs. Bradley should require him.
The necessity of taking measures for Tom’s safety was amply illustrated that same night. Mrs. Bradley, in the barn-like bedroom again, her revolver at hand and her consciousness only very thinly veiled in sleep, was awakened at about midnight by the sound of stealthy scramblings on the roof of the woodshed outside.
She rose quietly (having stipulated for a bed whose springs did not creak, and, wonderful to relate, having got it) and crept to the window. Tom, she knew, had his bedroom opposite the woodshed. Her own was at right-angles to it.
Hidden in the blackness of her room, with her gun cocked and her dressing-gown belted about her, she watched and listened. The night was extremely dark, for the moon had set earlier and cloud—the first indication of thunder—was obscuring the stars.
Mrs. Bradley breathed noiselessly. For about five or six minutes—a long time to a watcher in the darkness—there was nothing more to be heard, and certainly nothing to be seen. Then, from the woodshed roof again came faint sounds indicative of some presence bulkier and heavier than that of a cat.
Young Tom liked fresh air by day but not by night, and Mrs. Bradley could not help wondering what the attackers, kidnappers, or whatever they had set out to be, would make of the sealed window against which their next efforts were almost bound to be directed.
She had, in this one instance, underestimated, however, the intelligence and psychological insight of the enemy. It soon became apparent that not young Tom’s but her own window was to be the aperture selected by the marauders in order to gain entrance to the inn.
She was first made aware of this when an electric torch, injudiciously switched on, made a ring of light on the west wall of her chamber. There was a muffled remark, apparently on a level with her windowsill, followed by a slight scraping sound. Then the torch was switched off, or pointed in another direction, and a branch of ivy, up which, she presumed, somebody had swarmed or was swarming, began to tap against the glass.
The muffled voice joined issue with the sound, and, in a fierce undertone, insisted that it ceased. Thereupon there was the uncomfortable silence of someone attempting to maintain a noiseless but precarious balance.
Mrs. Bradley crouched low and circumambulated the room, keeping close to the wall the whole time, until she reached the side of the window.
It was open at the top and the bottom, and, reaching into the deep pocket of her dressing-gown for her torch, she waited to find out what the next move might be. She thought she could anticipate it, and her plan, simple, as befitted a great general, was quickly made.
After the interval apparently considered suitable by the housebreakers, the scraping sounds began again. They were extremely faint, and care was being taken this time, it seemed, to avoid the tapping noise occasioned by the jigging branches of the ivy.
In another moment fingers gripped the sill. Mrs. Bradley flashed her torch directly into the eyes of the intruder, then, dropping it on to the upholstered seat of a wicker-chair at hand, she slammed down the window with all her force on to the clinging fingers.
There was a shriek of agony, followed by the sound of a heavy body dropping on to the bushes below.
At the same moment both the dogs of the inn commenced to bark their loudest, another window of the inn was flung up, and the voice of the landlady announced that if anyone was there she was coming to let the dogs loose.
A scrabble of flying feet, an oath, and a tumble, were the lasts sounds heard of the kidnappers. From a short distance down the road a car began throbbing and choking. In another half-minute it was half a mile from the inn.
There was a tap at Mrs. Bradley’s door. It was Tom.
“Be thou all right, like?” he enquired. “Who was it, and what did that want?”
“That wanted thee,” replied Mrs. Bradley, grinning. In her brilliantly dragon-bestrewed dressing-gown, she looked more like a witch than ever, or perhaps like a gargoyle, which has gathered to itself a body and clothed it with raiment to its taste.
“Why didn’t thee call I, then?” young Tom demanded. “Come to that,” he added, becoming more widely awake, for the noise of the barking dogs, the shriek, and the sound of the engine of the car, had penetrated his dreams and confused him thoroughly before they aroused him from slumber, “how did that come not to be knocking at door, like proper-bred folks?”
“Ah,” replied Mrs. Bradley, “thereby hangs a tale. Let us descend to the private bar, Tom, where, unless I am mistaken, we shall be completely surrounded by panelling except for one window too small to admit anything larger than a boy of ten, and when we have locked the door I will tell you all.”
At this moment the landlady arrived, in curl-papers and a flannel dressing-jacket, and demanded to know what was toward.
“Go thee back to bed, our mam,” said Tom. But Mrs. Bradley protested. It was time, she said, that h
is mother should be in their confidence.
So the three went down to the private bar, after the landlady had added a coat of many colours, in the form of a patchwork quilt, to her ensemble, and there Mrs. Bradley locked the door, the curtains were drawn snugly over the tiny window, from which they sat as far away as they could and not in direct line with it (for fear, Mrs. Bradley said, of draughts, when she meant for fear of shots), and, when the light was on, she began to tell her tale.
“Tom knows too much,” she concluded. “But he’s going away from here, so that won’t matter. The only thing is that I think he ought to go now. Those who came to kidnap him tonight will go back to their masters, Mr. Joshua and Mr. Frere, and will receive, I imagine, fresh instructions. Now I find that there is a train to London at six, tomorrow morning, so I suggest that Tom catches it. In the meantime, let him make his bed down here, and I will sit up and guard him.”
“So will his mother,” said his mother fiercely. So the two women gathered their wraps about them and sat, like two Wives of Usher’s Well, guarding the sleeping boy.
But no further attempt was made that night, and at six Tom, with full instructions from Mrs. Bradley, was en route for London. From London he was to go north, where Mrs. Bradley promised that she would very soon join him. Newcastle, after all, was to be out of his itinerary.
Her own task, as she saw it, was to discover how many persons were likely to be available if Mr. Joshua planned a further attack on the inn. What his next move was to be in respect of his Uncle David was another question to be answered. She decided upon a bold reconnaissance.
Her first move was to telephone the young doctor to come and meet her in his car. Full of curiosity and goodwill, he arrived soon after breakfast, proposed that they should take in his round of patients (three old ladies and a child with a broken leg), on their way to the house in the marshes, and then added that she was wasting her time. The house was up for sale, and there was no one but the caretaker there.
“And who is the caretaker?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.
“Oh, the gamekeeper. He took it on.”
“The sinister gamekeeper,” Mrs. Bradley said, with a chuckle.
“Is he?”
“Well, he isn’t a gamekeeper, and I call that sinister,” Mrs. Bradley replied.
The doctor took the car round a couple of wagons, which seemed determined to occupy the centre of a narrow road, and by the time he had skidded past a dyke, which, even at that time of year, was brimmed almost level with its banks, he had lost the thread of the conversation. Mrs. Bradley was not sorry for this.
The doctor drove up to the iron gates, but they were locked. A side-gate was partly open, and so past the long-deserted lodge they walked, the doctor on the lodge side.
This precaution (since the doctor could be in no danger of receiving a bullet from a possible sniper hidden in the shuttered lodge) Mrs. Bradley thought it just as well to take. With the same object she took care to walk just in front of him, and lead the way to the house, since she thought it unlikely that she would be sniped directly in front, with the doctor a material witness of her murder. Mr. Joshua, so she argued, had so many mouths to close already that he would scarcely be anxious to add one more to the list. In this, he proved later, she misjudged him.
They gained the house without incident, and rang the jangling bell. Footsteps, firmer and more rapidly-moving than the shuffling tread common to caretakers of empty houses, argued the approach of the ex-gamekeeper.
She had not calculated upon the effect, which her unheralded appearance would have on him. He became chalk-white, and seemed to be going to shut the door in her face. Mrs. Bradley forestalled him, however, by smiling graciously, like a boa constrictor after a meal before it settles down cosily to sleep off the effects, and by recalling herself (obviously unnecessarily) to his memory.
“I’ve come to look over the house,” she added. At these words the man’s mouth opened. Then it closed. Then it opened again, this time in speech.
“You can’t do that without an order to view.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Mrs. Bradley, elbowing her way past him without ceremony. “You know me, and the doctor will vouch for me. I am neither an incendiary, nor do I propose to commit suicide from a top-floor window.”
The doctor removed his hat and followed her in, the caretaker tramping behind them. It was clear that he was feeling that a situation had arisen with which it was beyond his power to deal. Except that he followed them about all over the house, he seemed to have no plan for coping with what was obviously a move outside the scope of his instructions.
Mrs. Bradley turned suddenly on him and fired at him the unnecessary and idiotic question:
“Pourquoi Monsieur le Noir, n’est pas ici pour nous donner le clef?”
“Eh?” said the caretaker, taken aback. Mrs. Bradley repeated the question slowly and with the pronunciation, she supposed, of the school of Stratford-atte-Bow.
“No compris,” said the caretaker. Believing that he really did not understand her, she turned to the doctor, and said rapidly in French:
“Do you speak French?”
“Slowly and with difficulty,” said the doctor in the same language.
“Good,” said Mrs. Bradley. Then she said, very slowly indeed: “We are going to fight with this man. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I think so,” the doctor answered. “We are going to fight with this man. Why?”
“Never mind,” replied Mrs. Bradley in English. “Sufficient unto the moment are the lawless deeds of self-styled civilisation. Now the view from this window is good. Caretaker, what is the house I see there, across the marshes?”
Incautiously the caretaker placed himself between them. With the utmost gentleness they twisted his arms behind him, and, whilst the doctor held him pinioned, Mrs. Bradley secured his wrists, and then, with the doctor’s assistance, his ankles, and gagged him delicately.
They stood off from the result of these labours, and the doctor then observed:
“And now, what is all this about?”
“Help me to place him in the largest attic cupboard, where he will have air but will be out of the way,” replied the organiser of the assault, “and I will explain.”
So, the young male doctor taking his shoulders and the elderly female doctor his heels, the caretaker was carried up the next flight of narrow, uncarpeted stairs with an awkward bend at the top, and, the largest attic cupboard having been located, inspected, and even dusted by the thoughtful Mrs. Bradley, therein he was placed with his head slightly raised upon a pillow, which she went down specially to get for him, and there he was left, whilst the other two went downstairs to the hall, where Mrs. Bradley briefly explained the situation.
“But you’re not going to leave him like that?” the doctor enquired. “Who’s going to find him, and when?”
“What I want to know,” said Mrs. Bradley, brushing aside these immaterial queries, “is why he was left here at all, and what has happened to the women.”
“Oh, the girl went to her mother, and the housekeeper has taken another situation, so I heard,” the doctor replied.
“And what about the niece?”
“I never saw a niece. Was there supposed to be a niece?”
“I shall be sorry if the niece is entirely fictitious,” Mrs. Bradley said, seating herself on the monks’ bench portion of the hatstand, and taking out her notebook. “Now, our plans for the future. First, yours: I want you to go back to your house, and go on with your duties as usual. Forget all about this little episode for, say, the next five hours. That will bring us—” she glanced at her watch, “to between three and four o’clock this afternoon. By then I shall be in possession, I hope, of the information I want, and you can come to the house and release the fellow’s hands. He can get his legs free at his leisure. It shouldn’t take him long.”
“And what do I say when he sets the police on me?”
“He will not set the police on you, chi
ld.”
“Well, I shall give you away with all the power and length of my tongue if he jolly well does.”
“All right. Then that’s settled. Good-bye. If anything upsets my theories between now and three o’clock I will let you know.”
She watched him drive off, and then closed the front door quietly and went upstairs to the attic cupboard in which they had left the prisoner.
“Now,” she said, addressing his furious eyes. “I am going to take you downstairs and into the garden. If you remain quiet I can carry you. If you struggle I fear that I shall be obliged to drag you downstairs feet first, in which case you will bump—quite gently; I shall not hurry you—from step to step in a way which I fear would jar your whole system. What do you think?”
He was not a big man, nor a heavy one, but there were four flights of stairs to come down, and in the hall she allowed herself a short rest. Then she carried the helpless man through to the kitchen, where, from the appearance of the table, it seemed that he had just concluded a meal when he let them in. There she set him down whilst she opened the kitchen door. Then she took him into the garden.
Not far from the door there was a wheelbarrow. Jettisoning its load—some hedge-clippings, weeds, and a pair of gardening shears—she loaded the caretaker on to it, and pushed her human Guy Fawkes towards the lake.
His anguished expression when he perceived her objective caused her to remark compassionately:
“No, no, my poor fellow. I am not going to drown you. You were not born to be drowned.”
Her opinion that he had been born to be hanged she thought it kinder, as well as more prudent, not to express at that juncture.
Tied up under a willow there was a flat-bottomed boat, which was used, Mrs. Bradley deduced, as a kind of hopper barge when weeds were cut in the lake. In this boat she placed her captive, and then went back to the house for a cushion for his head and blanket in which to wrap his feet, so that he should not be able to make a drumming sound, which might later direct his friends to his retreat.
Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 19
