“But we’ll let them off this time,” went on the good-natured constable, “seein’ as the road were clear. They were a bit above theirselves, not a doubt. Had the sauce to wave to me as they went by and I stood looking at their number, one of them did. Waved a swell handkerchief, and dropped it, and serve them right, I say, for their sauce. They didn’t come back for it, and if they had I’d have asked ’em what they meant, driving at that pace. Fifty miles an hour, if it was ten. Cost a bit o’ money, a handkerchief like that, I shouldn’t wonder.”
He took from his pocket and with a grin delicately shook out a large striped silk handkerchief. With a gasp Felix snatched it from his hand.
“It’s Nora’s!”
John also had recognized it as one Nora had been wearing that morning around her neck.
“But what does it mean?” cried Felix, white-faced and puzzled.
“I’m afraid it means that she wanted help,” said John unemotionally. “We must turn quickly and follow. An hour ago, did you say, officer? Which way did they take? Did you see?”
“Road to the right,” answered the constable, looking somewhat surprised. “The Forest road. But they’ll be fifty miles away by now, or else tucked up in bed and asleep!”
John thanked him briefly and the little car leapt forward and took the Forest road at a speed that must, after his recent remarks, have struck the policeman as asking for trouble.
He stood in the roadway, mechanically noting the number.
“Well, I’m goshed,” he muttered emotionally, and returned after a minute to his conversation with the kitten.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A TOUCH OF SENTIMENT
They passed not a soul along the road until they came to the tiny village of Rodd lying under the Forest hills. It was too much to hope that there would be a friendly policeman here, but John and Felix kept their eyes open for a sign of human life. And just outside the village, lying uncomfortably on the grassy edge of the road by the hedge, near the burnt-out remains of a little fire, were two young men under a rug. One of them raised a weary head from his rucksack pillow as the car approached. Rampson drew up with a jerk.
“Seen a car go by?”
“Pardon?” said the young man, raising his head a little higher and blinking politely in the headlight’s glare.
“Have you seen a car go by lately?”
“A car? Well, not very lately. Have we, Bertram?”
Bertram, raising his head from somewhere in the vicinity of the first speaker’s feet, shook it gently.
“We’ve been asleep,” he declared, with the pride of the hardy camper who can sleep through anything, even a night in the open air.
“How lately?” asked John.
The two heads considered the question at exasperating length.
“Hours ago,” said the first speaker at last, and added as an afterthought:“What’s the time now?”
“Twenty-past three.”
“Oh, Lord! Is that all? Well, a car went by at ten-past two. It seems hours ago. There hasn’t been one since.”
“How do you know?” inquired the head called Bertram curiously.
Because,” said its twin with the bitterness that comes to campers in the early hours of the morning, “I’ve been bally well awake all night.”
“Oh! I’ve been asleep,” responded Bertram of the superior hardihood, and once more composed himself to slumber.
Rampson drove on. The Forest hills stood all around them now, dark against the paler sky, the long ridges like walls shutting in the road and the long valleys opening and stretching dimly away between wall and wall. There was the gurgle of water running under the road.
“But what can we do?” cried Felix in despair. “Go on? But where? Go up on to the Forest? But what part? It’s hopeless to look for Nora here! John! We can’t afford to lose a moment! Yet searching the Forest we’ll lose hours! Hours!”
“Stop here,” said John to Rampson, and getting out of the car where a track ran up a wild valley he flashed his torch upon the road. There were distinct tyre-marks in the dust where a heavy car had turned off the road on to the rutty track that led, possibly, to some farm sheltering under the hillside in the valley.
“Why,” said Rampson, looking around him. “This is the valley we came to the other day. The waterfall must be up this valley.”
“Yes,” said John, returning to the car. “Follow up this track as far as you can go, Syd, and we’ll try the shepherd’s hut. It’s a chance—our only one. We shan’t be able to take the car far. It’s an awful road.”
“We can go as far as the other car went, I suppose,” said Rampson, bumping over the ruts and tussocks; and about fifty yards up the track they passed a closed car standing in darkness under a group of trees in the damp held that edged the road. Rampson was about to venture over the uneven field towards it, but John stopped him.
“Leave our car here. We may want it for getting away,” he said, and jumped out.
Rampson stopped the engine and turned off the lights while John and Felix went across the grass to investigate the apparently deserted coupe. It was empty, and there was nothing in it to give a hint of its owner. But returning to where Rampson awaited them on the track, holding the torch to light their feet, John saw and picked up something from among the tufts of coarse grass—a cigarette-card. It had not been there long. It was almost dry, and the grass was wet with the heavy September dew. Somebody had passed this way not long before.
They joined Rampson, and in silence the three of them followed the track to where it turned aside towards a small farmhouse lying under the ridge. A foot-track ran on up the valley beside the shallow, pebble-strewn brook that wanly reflected the sky. They crossed the stream by the plank bridge, leaving the high tinkling of the waterfall and the dark woods on their left, and followed the path where it wound up the opposite ridge among waist-high bracken and scattered boulders. A sheep-bell tinkled near at hand and ghostly, and there was the soft scurry of some disturbed stoat or rabbit running through the bracken in alarm. They came in sight of the shepherd’s hut standing against the sky. A blundering moth struck John in the eyes, and he had to bite his lip to repress an exclamation.
A softly spoken word from Rampson brought him to a halt.
“I don’t know what you expect to find, John, but I suppose—something dangerous. Don’t be rash. Remember we’ve got no weapons.”
“We ought to have brought old Clino’s gun,” said John with a pale grin, and then stood transfixed as Felix gripped his arm and whispered:
“Look!”
A flickering light shone in the little square window of the hut, shone like a warning beacon for a second and went out. The three men looked at one another.
“There’s only one thing to be done,” said Felix, white to the lips, but more alert and forceful than John had seen him yet. “It’s no good worrying about having no weapons. We’re three, after all. We must go straight in and rush the situation—whatever it is. Whatever it is,” he added in a low, brooding voice as they pushed on among the brushing bracken leaves.
But when they approached close to the hut a voice spoke from within and brought them all to a standstill, looking at one another’s faces which they could dimly, wanly see now in the cold, grey dawn breaking over the eastern ridges. It was a woman’s voice, and to one at least of the men standing there in that cold autumnal dawn it carried on its light, reedy notes broken thoughts of comradeship and gaiety and sunshine.
“Do you think,” asked the clear little scornful voice that floated out through the open doorway of the hut, “that nobody noticed you driving at about a thousand miles an hour through all the towns between here and London? Do you think no obliging policeman took our number? And you think you’ll be able to get away with this! You silly ass! I tell you you’ll be in handcuffs within a week—within a day!”
A man’s deep voice vibrating with anger answered thickly:
“You’ll see to that, I suppose!”
>
“I’m not sure that I shan’t, if you don’t leave Nora alone,” replied the light voice calmly. “You needn’t look at me like that. I’m not in the least afraid of you.”
“Is this what you call loyalty?”
“Yes,” said the calm voice, and there was the scrape and flicker of a match and a pause as though a cigarette were being lit; and then a candle, for the wavering light remained. “I rather like Nora.”
“Pretty!” sneered the masculine voice. “A pretty touch of sentiment!”
“Yes, it is rather touching. You ought to be grateful to me. If I didn’t like her I’d have let you do as you liked and go your own way—” There was a pause, and then, very deliberately and thoughtfully: “To the gallows.”
“Stop it, you little devil! I’ve a good mind to—”
“Wring my neck,” finished the girl’s voice. “I know. You’ve said it so often.”
There was a silence, and then a sound as if somebody were moving restlessly in the cramped space of the hut’s interior. When the man spoke again it was in a queer, half threatening, half whining tone that grated horribly on the ears of the three men listening outside.
“I believe you’d give me away for twopence. I don’t believe you care a hoot about me.”
“Upon my Sam,” said the girl with a sort of quiet pity in her voice more scornful than laughter, “that’s pretty, if you like. Care for you! You’ll be asking me next if you’re the only man I’ve ever loved. I care for you as little as you care for me. No! Less! Because I’m not afraid of you, and you are a little afraid of me. I said I wouldn’t give you away, and I haven’t, but—”
“Very kind of you, wasn’t it? Weren’t thinking of your own part in that affair, were you?”
“What affair? Oh, that! Pooh! That wouldn’t have hurt me much. I was going to say: but I draw the line at murder, really. Really, I do. You’ll leave Nora alone.”
“So that she can rush off to the police, eh?”
In the pause that followed John could well imagine the graceful shrug of Isabel’s thin shoulders.
“You’ve had your chance. You should have cleared out while there was time.”
“And died of blood-poisoning.”
“It might have saved you trouble in the end. In any case, I’m not going to give you more than another week to clear out in. Then I shall go to the police myself.”
“I don’t think! They’ll have an account to settle with you, my dear, as well as me. You’ll hold your tongue all right.”
The girl began to speak suddenly with a concentrated passion which took her hearers aback, so different was it from the light, cool manner in which she had spoken before.
“Do you really think I’m going to protect you for ever? Do you really think I’ll let that silly old man be brought for trial? Ah, you’re a fool! You’re a fool! You sicken me, you silly, conceited fool that doesn’t know the difference between one person and another and thinks every woman’ll lend you her shoulder to whimper on and her brains to save you from what you deserve! Do you think I care that what happens to you? Do you think it’s for your beauty that I’ve done all this?”
Suddenly the passionate voice dropped, stopped. When the girl spoke again it was quietly, lightly, as if she were conducting a formal conversation at a tea-party.
“No. It was honour. Thieves’ honour, you know. Well, I’ve warned you. But you’re stupid, stupid! Lord! How I hate stupidity!”
There was a silence, as if, in spite of himself, the man had been momentarily cowed by this outburst. Then the woman’s voice came again:
“Listen. I’m going to take Nora down to the car. And I’m going to take her home.”
“Home?” echoed the man thickly. “What? To London?”
“No. To her own home near here. Why not? I can tell them some yarn to put them off for the moment, and—”
“And what about me?”
“You can do whatever you bally well choose. I’m sick of nursing you. I told you to leave Nora alone. You wouldn’t, and you can take the consequences. Clear out, if you can. I won’t give you away for a week.”
“You infernal little—!”
There was danger in the low, thick voice, danger in the pause that followed.
“Good God! It’ll be daylight in five minutes! And you think you’re going to leave me here, do you, you vixen? I know a better game than that! You’re not afraid of me, aren’t you? More fool you, if you’re not afraid of a desperate man! What does it matter to me how many I swing for, if I’ve got to swing? But I’ll make a good run for it, you bet your bottom dollar, and I shan’t leave you and your precious baby-friend to run and tell tales!”
There was the sound of a movement inside the hut. John switched on his torch and prepared for a rush, but Felix was before him. There was a wild, throaty cry, a sharp gasp from Isabel. John, following Felix close, had an instant’s vision of Isabel’s little white face set as a mask of astonishment, and that of a tall, large-featured man with murder in his eyes. Then the candle which had been standing on the earthen floor was kicked over and John saw the barrel of a revolver gleaming in the man’s hand. He switched off his torch and tried to drag Felix from the entrance, where he stood outlined as a target. But Felix seemed to have been turned to stone, as though he had seen Medusa’s head. Oblivious of his danger, oblivious of the revolver that pointed at his chest, he stood frozen there in the doorway and kept saying blankly, in a voice from which all expression had been wiped away:
“It’s Charles. It’s Charles. It’s Charles.”
Unable to move him, John pushed swiftly past him and sprang at the hand holding the revolver in the dark of the hut. There was a report, and a bullet hit the ceiling. Rampson followed his friend and the confined space of the hut became filled in a moment with plunging, struggling human bodies. John fought for possession of the revolver, but could not reach it. God! The man was strong, and slippery as an eel! Even in the stress of the fight John was conscious of Isabel dragging something heavy out of the way of the trampling feet, a human form wrapped in a rug, dragging and tugging it out through the doorway into the air.
Suddenly John felt himself hurled back against the wall, and a dark form rushed past him to the entrance of the hut, out into the open, out among the bracken, where it turned and stood still. There was a terrifying moment when John was conscious of nothing but a revolver taking slow, deliberate aim, and Felix standing like a fool, like a stone, outside the hut, not attempting to move.
There was a sharp report, and involuntarily John closed his eyes. He opened them at once to see that threatening weapon drooping, falling, the man behind it standing very still, then, with the queerest, quietest movement, spinning round a little on his heel and dropping quietly among the waist-high fern.
Isabel stood not far from the hut with a little pistol smoking in her hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A TOUCH OF CANDOUR
For a long, long minute nobody moved or spoke. The silence that settled on that damp hillside in the grey mirk of dawn after the struggle and stress of a moment ago was like a miracle, holding everybody from speech. All eyes were turned on that spot among the bracken where lately had stood a living, cursing man. It seemed miraculous that he did not rise again.
“Well,” said Isabel unemotionally at last, breaking a silence that had something unearthly in it, “you can all bear witness that I didn’t shoot him until I had to.”
She looked with wide, faintly curious eyes at the little weapon in her hand, then laid it down near where Nora, white and dishevelled, lay extended on the grass.
“She’s all right,” said Isabel, still in that cold, far-away little voice. “She’ll come to in a minute. She’s had several little whiffs of chloroform. I didn’t want her to hear what we were talking about in the hut.”
She dropped on to her knees and with the calm precision of a nurse at a blameless bedside, proceeded to feel the pulse of the unconscious girl, to prop her head up
on the rug and to rub her hands.
“Are you sure she’s all right?” asked Felix huskily, looking down at Nora’s ashen, sleeping face.
“Quite,” replied Isabel placidly, and it was not more than a moment or two before the girl lying on the ground moved her head a little to one side, half raised her eyelids and uttered a sigh.
Rampson, who had walked away across the bracken, returned now and joined the little group round the drugged girl.
“He’s dead,” he said quietly. “Shot through the head.”
Isabel looked up.
“Good,” she said, and paused, and added: “Good, for him. And for everybody. Better now, Nora?”
Nora’s eyes opened, heavy and expressionless at first. Then slowly, gazing into the heavy-lidded hazel ones that looked down on them, they filled with an expression of intense fear and supplication that wrung John’s heart.
“It’s all right,” said Isabel in a business-like tone. “I said I wouldn’t let him hurt you. And I haven’t. Like to sit up?”
Nora looked with wide, solemn eyes from Isabel to Felix, to Felix and John. She looked faintly interested to see them there, and after a moment raised her head, struggled to sit up, and was sick.
“Oh, poor angel!” murmured Isabel. “That’s the way. You’ll be all right now.”
And indeed it was not many minutes before Nora, pale and shaky and clinging with damp, cold hands to John’s arm, was on her feet and declaring through chattering teeth that she felt perfectly all right.
She was not that, but she was alive and in no danger. And now that anxiety on her account had passed, a queer, strained silence descended upon the little group standing there under the slowly lightening sky. Felix’s glance was drawn again and again in horror to that patch of bracken where a dead man lay hidden, and John mechanically chafed Nora’s cold hands and looked at Isabel, and Isabel stood with her hands folded before her, looking meditatively at the ground. But Rampson, the practical, who had been busying himself in the hut, stood in the doorway and called them in.
Dead Mans Quarry: A Golden Age Mystery Page 28
