“When I use the word ‘interest,’ Sydenham, I refer to intellectual curiosity, not to mere animal instincts, such as greed. Would you believe it, this is the first holiday Rampson’s taken from his microscope for four years, and I had the greatest difficulty in disinterring him from his dingy lair in the Temple to bring him on it?”
“I hope you like my native country, as much as you’ve seen of it?”
“Wales? We’ve only just slipped over the edge of it. We’ve been wandering through Worcester, Shropshire and Hereford. I should love to go right through to the Welsh coast, but Rampson is getting fidgety about his amoebas and says it’s time we started home.”
“It’s ten days since we left London,” murmured Mr. Rampson reproachfully. “And the idea was only to be away a week altogether.”
“It’s just ten days since we left London,” said Felix. “But we haven’t covered so much of the country as you have. We came by a more or less direct route, and took our time over it.”
“You live in London?”
“Yes. My native Radnorshire is only for holidays,” said Felix with a sigh and a smile. “I’m a photographer by profession and a painter in my spare time. Sometimes I combine photography and art, and bring out a book of photographs of Old English Cottages, or Country Occupations, or some such subject, with a little letter-press to explain the photos. I got rather a good photograph of the Tram Inn that’ll probably go in a book I’m doing on ‘Old Inns and Taverns.’”
“You’ve had jolly weather for your tour.”
“Rather. We’re all sorry it’s over. It was young Lion’s idea. He’s just been given a new super-bicycle, and naturally despises any other method of getting about.”
“Lion? Is that the young windmill who stopped us on Rodland Hill?”
“Yes. Lion Browning. He’s at school near London, you see, and has been staying the first part of his holidays with Nora and some cousins in Sussex. Nora Browning’s an old friend of mine, we go to the same art school. And as Dr. Browning had been staying in London, we thought we’d all cycle up here together. It’s been gorgeous,” added Felix regretfully, reflecting that henceforth a distance of four miles would separate him from that delightful enigma, Isabel. Miss Donne,” he added, “is staying with the Brownings for a week or so. She’s an art student friend of Nora’s.”
“And the vanished cyclist, as Rampson calls him?”
“Oh, he’s my cousin Charles,” said Felix in a worried tone. “But I’ve only known him three days. He came back from Canada about six weeks ago. You see, my Uncle Evan died three months ago, and Charles inherited Rhyllan, and naturally came back to live there. I wrote to him when we started from London, inviting him to hire a bike and join us at Worcester. I thought it’d be a good opportunity of getting friendly with him.”
“And was it?” asked Christmas with a smile.
“Oh, yes,” answered Felix without enthusiasm. He looked with a worried frown out of the window into the darkness. “I do wish he’d turn up. I suppose you think I’m an awful idiot to get nervy about an able-bodied fellow older than myself, just because he doesn’t keep to the time-table. But it really is rather mysterious, because he doesn’t know anybody in the neighbourhood, and doesn’t know his way about yet, and he’s just one of those slap-dash sort of people that do come to grief. I think I’ll ring up Rhyllan as soon as we’ve finished dinner, and see if he’s taken it into his head to go straight home.”
“An excellent idea,” agreed his new-found friend. “Meanwhile, let’s forget him and attend to this excellent mutton. We’ve had mutton for dinner every night for the last week, pretty nearly. And very nice, too.
‘The mountain sheep were sweeter,
But the valley sheep were fatter,
And so we thought it meeter
To bear away the latter.’
The mint sauce, please, Sydenham.”
“‘Meat,’” objected Mr. Rampson, “is not an adjective. I suppose you mean more meaty.”
Christmas looked at him pityingly.
“‘Meet,’ my dear Sydenham, is a word much used by writers of verse to signify seemly, proper or expedient.”
“Verse,” said Rampson indifferently. “That accounts for it. I don’t read verse.”
“Don’t boast of your lack of culture, cousin.”
“You,” returned his cousin with composure, “can quote a line or two of verse about these mountains and valleys. But can you tell me what their geological formation is? Can you even tell me what mineral they produce? No.”
“Yes. I notice that most of the houses in this part of the world are roofed with slate of a peculiarly charming appearance. I imagine, therefore, that these hills produce slate as well as mutton.”
“Talking of slate,” said Felix, “we had tea this afternoon at a small inn with the quaint sign of The Tram, called apparently after the tram-lines that used to run to a quarry nearby.”
“I noticed it,” replied Christmas, “at the top of Rodland Hill, and a very nice little brick-and-timber building it is. The name puzzled me for a moment, but I managed to make the right deduction. Is the quarry still in use? We might go over and see them blasting, or whatever they do to slate. It would improve Sydenham’s mind.”
Felix smiled.
“No, I understand from the girl at the inn that the quarry hasn’t been used since she dunno when. So I don’t imagine that there’s much to see, except some rusty truck-lines and the usual mass of brambles and fern.”
“There’s always something a little ghostly and depressing, I think, about a disused quarry,” murmured John Christmas pensively. “It always looks a little like an old scar. The brambles that grow in the hollow and the rubbish that people throw into it have a sinister sort of look to me.
‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The—’”
Rampson paused in the act of cutting an apple tart and groaned.
“There you go again! In my opinion all this poetry’s bad for the brain. It fills the head with preconceived ideas, and prevents the conception of an original thought. You don’t really think disused quarries are sinister. Very likely you’ve never even seen one. Yet as soon as the word’s mentioned, the wheels start going round in your head and out trots a remark that disused quarries are sinister. As for heath being blood-red, such a comparison would never occur to anybody who’d ever seen heath and blood, no, not if a dozen corpses had been hauled up out of the hollow.”
“It’s a bad comparison, I admit,” said Christmas cheerfully. “In fact, for a long time I imagined that the poet’s heath was literally drenched in gore. It wasn’t till I grew up and began to realize the shifts poets may be put to that it occurred to me he was referring to the natural colour of the heather. . . Yes, waiter? What is it?”
“A phone call for Mr. Price, sir. Would you like me to take a message?”
“I’ll go,” answered Felix, getting up. “I expect it’s Charles,” he added in a relieved tone. “I shan’t be long.”
He left the room. There was a short silence while Rampson helped himself to another slice of apple tart.
“Rather a nice young chap, that,” he observed casually. “He reminds me of a hen who’s lost her one duckling.”
“I suppose he feels responsible for his Colonial cousin,” said Christmas. “But I don’t think he feels any of the hen’s protective love for her duckling. I got the impression that his enthusiasm for his cousin is lukewarm, to say the most of it.”
“I suppose you’ll be suggesting he’s murdered him next,” said Rampson resignedly. “I don’t believe murder’s half so prevalent as you novel-reading people imagine. I warn you, if he’s murdered a dozen cousins, I’m not going to get mixed up in it. As soon as I see you getting interested in a mystery, I go home.”
“How you do run on,” observed John lightly. “You’d better take the first train in the morning, because I’m inter
ested already. Why should one member of a party of six cyclists suddenly vanish within a few miles of home?”
“Oh, Lord! A puncture, a heart attack, a meeting with a friend or a motor-lorry, any one of a hundred things!”
“Exactly. I shan’t be happy till I know which. I’ve promised to go out in the car and look for the missing cousin after dinner. You can come, if you like.”
“Oh, I shall come, but only for the sake of a breath of air. But I don’t suppose it’ll come to that. Our young friend’s probably heard all about his duckling’s adventures over the phone.”
“Probably,” agreed John. “By the way, the Prices are rather a well-known family in these parts. There’s quite a lot about Rhyllan Hall in the guide-books. It was built by Morgan Ap-Rice in the fifteenth century, and extensively added to in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by various Evans and Morgans. The facade, which is in the Queen Anne style of architecture, is a magnificent example of early eighteenth century design, and the park— Hullo! Is the mystery solved?”
With a worried frown Felix entered the room and came across to the table.
“That was Dr. Browning ringing up,” he said in a depressed voice. “He wanted to know whether Charles had put in an appearance yet. Of course I said he hadn’t. And he seemed to think something should be done about it. You see, nobody knows him in these parts yet. If he had an accident, we might not hear for some time.” He sighed. “It is tiresome, because from what I’ve seen of Charles it’s quite likely he’s just taken it into his head to go off somewhere on his own, and there’s no means of finding out where until he chooses to turn up, if that’s the case.”
“Did you ring up your home?”
“Yes,” said Felix moodily, filling his pipe. “He’s not been seen there. Blodwen—that’s his sister, my cousin—says that my father’s been out all day with his car and not come back yet. It’s just possible they may have met and gone off somewhere together. But it’s most unlikely, I should think. They’d have come here, if anywhere.”
He looked despondently out of the window, as if still hoping to see the light of Charles’s bicycle approaching down the winding street.
“Well,” said John briskly, rising from the table, “the best thing we can do is to take out the car and run back to the Tram Inn. Possibly the people there can give us some information. And it’s a lovely night for a run.”
It was indeed a lovely night, perfectly windless and clear, with a starry sky and dim, pale mists lying over the low fields. But Felix did not take much pleasure in the nocturnal beauties of the landscape. John drove slowly, and Felix peered anxiously along the hedge-rows, still obsessed with a fear that his cousin had crashed and injured himself and was lying unconscious at the side of the lonely road. They passed nobody between Penlow and the Tram Inn, which they found closed. The door was opened to them by the pale girl who had served tea to Felix and his friends that afternoon.
“I’m afraid I can’t serve you, sir,” she said in a civil but decided tone before John could speak. “It’s gone ten o’clock nearly a quarter of an hour ago.” Recognizing Felix, she gave him a dubious smile, and added:“I’m very sorry, sir.”
“That’s all right,” said Felix, and proceeded to ask whether one of the gentlemen who had been of the tea-party had returned to the inn later, and whether she had noticed in which direction he had started. But no information was to be got from her. She had been working in the kitchen at the back of the inn, she said, at the time, and could not say who might have entered the bar. On this she seemed disposed to shut the door, but Felix persisted.
“Who was serving in the bar? Can’t we see someone else?”
“My father was in the bar, sir,” said the girl dubiously. “But he’s gone up to bed, and I don’t hardly like to call him, sir. If you’d call again in the morning ”
“I can’t do that. It’s important. My cousin may have had an accident. Please ask your father if he’d kindly come down for a moment.”
The girl looked rather frightened. Her natural reluctance to offend a customer seemed to strive with a wholesome awe of her parent. She hesitated, looking over her shoulder up the stairs, and shook her head.
“I couldn’t do that, sir. He wouldn’t like to be disturbed.” Her voice took on a faintly injured tone. “It is after closing-time, you know, sir.”
“Don’t be silly,” said John in tones of fatherly reproof. “It’s an important matter. Come, run along, there’s a good girl. I’ll make it all right with your father.” He faintly and suggestively clinked some coins in his trouser-pocket. But the girl seemed deaf to the alluring sound.
“It is after closing-time,” she repeated with an access of obstinacy, and jumped with a little cry of alarm as a protracted guttural screech split the still air, and was repeated again and again. John smiled. The resourceful Rampson was serenading the inn with his motor-horn.
His efforts soon had the desired effect. There was a heavy thump overhead, and the tramping of feet on the stairs. Then a gruff but lusty voice shouted:
“What the hell’s going on, Ada?”
The owner of the voice and inn appeared on the lower stairs, clinging to the hand-rail, a burly figure attired in a night-shirt and mackintosh, with ruffled hair standing on end behind a high bald forehead and an eye filmed with sleep or beer.
“Oh, Father, these gentlemen—” began the girl timidly, but John interrupted her and explained the situation.
The innkeeper, drawing his mackintosh majestically round his corpulent waist, heavily descended to the bottom stair but one. From this vantage-point he explained at picturesque length his view of the ultimate destination of such abandoned persons as couldn’t wait till morning for their drinks.
“We don’t want drink,” said John patiently.
“Eh?”
“I say, we don’t want drink. I keep saying it, but you won’t listen. We never drink. We’re total abstainers. We advocate strict temperance and the abolition of the public-house. Now!”
“Eh?” repeated mine host owlishly. “Wellim-damned.”
Words failed him. He sat down suddenly and heavily on the stairs.
“Then,” he said ponderously at last, with surprising moderation, “what you come knocking public-house up after closing-time for? That’s what I wants to know. Everybody got a right to opinions, no doubt. But want to bolish public-house, keep way from it. See?”
“Oh, let’s go,” said Felix impatiently. “We’ll never get any sense out of this fellow.”
But a renewed explanation from the more patient John elicited the information that at about half-past five that afternoon mine host had served a young man answering to Charles’s description with a double whisky, and that the same young man had stood drinks to him and to two or three loungers in the bar.
“Friend o’ yours?” inquired the landlord, endeavouring to cover his bare ankles with the flaps of his mackintosh. “He bain’t no total abstainer, not be a long way.”
“I dare say not,” said Felix dryly. “Can you tell us which way he went when he left the inn?”
The landlord looked at him dreamily, and as Felix was about to repeat the question, said with some asperity:
“Shut the door, young gentleman. My ankles be cold.”
Felix rather irritably did as he was requested, and the innkeeper, pointedly addressing himself to the more sympathetic John, went on:
“In a manner of speaking I did see which way the young gentleman went. He went into the quarry field, just across the road.”
“Into the field!” exclaimed Felix. “But surely he came back again?”
“I doesn’t know, I’m sure, and that’s why I said in a manner of speaking. I didn’t see he come back.”
“Had he his bicycle with him?”
“Ah!” assented their host. “He took his bicycle, and an elderly gentleman.”
“An elderly gentleman! What elderly gentleman?”
“Ts, ts, ts! Please to take it easy, y
oung man. How can I say what elderly gentleman? An elderly gentleman as happened to be outside with his car.”
“What kind of car?”
“What kind o’ car? A large car,” replied the landlord, measuring a distance of about a yard and a half between his hands. “Yes, a large green car. And very nice too,” he finished abruptly, on a penetrating hiccough.
“Did the other man, the old one, come back, do you know?” asked John.
“Not as I saw him. But in a manner of speaking I suppose he must a done. Because half an hour arter-wards the car’d gone.”
The girl, who had been hovering anxiously in the passage during this conversation, here broke in timidly:“I saw the gentleman with the car come back from the field, Father. He didn’t have nobody with him. It looked like Mr. Morris Price of Rhyllan Hall, I thought. As soon as I saw the car I thought, that’s Mr. Price’s car, I expect.” She turned to John. “My boy’s sister works up at Rhyllan, you see, sir, and having been up there once or twice with him I’ve noticed Mr. Price’s green car. And sure enough, when the gentleman come back from the quarry field, I saw it was Mr. Morris. Or so I thought.”
“You girls thinks too much,” remarked her father ponderously. “The supper’s spoiled and the chickens starves while you stands about and thinks.” He winked laboriously at John.
“It sounds like my father’s car, certainly,” said Felix in response to John’s look of inquiry. “Well—in that case it’s all right, I suppose. Probably my father gave him some business message that sent him out of his way. We’ll find him at the Feathers when we get back, no doubt.”
He looked and felt extremely relieved. The vision of Charles, deserted by his friends, lying injured by the side of some lonely lane, vanished from his mental horizon.
Before they turned to go, John inquired:
“Where does the footpath over the quarry field lead to?”
The old man laughed.
“Depends which way you takes, master. You might take the right to Upper Ring Farm, or you might go straight over the common on to the Wensley Road. Or you might fall over the quarry edge and get a broke neck. I should say your friend’s took the Wensley Road. You can get to Penlow that way. In time.”
Dead Mans Quarry: A Golden Age Mystery Page 4
