And that being so, Fen reflected as he rang off, she ought certainly to have arrived there by seven; the distance between the two places was not great. But no doubt Eleanor Crane’s explanation was the true one: she had simply lost her way… Fen confabulated with his soul and discovered that his indistinct anxiety on Judy’s behalf derived in the long run from nothing more subtle and altruistic than the desire to do something. It was largely a sham, a pretext—all else having failed—for purposive action of some sort. That fact elicited, he felt a good deal easier in his mind. Judy had probably arrived at Lanthorn House by now, but there was no reason why he should not drive over there and make sure of it, and the excursion would keep him occupied for a while. Having dressed himself for rain, he left his rooms and went out to his car.
It was a small red sports model, exceptionally strident and dissolute-looking, which he had purchased from a cashiered, impoverished undergraduate years before. A chromium nude leaned forward from the radiator cap, and the name LILY CHRISTINE was engrossed in large white letters across the bonnet. A leaky hood shielded the car’s seating rather perfunctorily from the elements. Fen ascertained that he had enough petrol for the eighteen- or twenty-mile journey and noisily set forth.
It was completely dark, and raining hard, when at a quarter to nine he drove in through the Lanthorn House gates; and he came upon the body of Nicholas Crane so suddenly that only the gleam of the knife’s haft in the headlights prevented him from running over it. He stopped the car, climbed out, and made a brief, melancholy examination. “Poor devil,” he muttered. “But I don’t suppose he had time to be much afraid.” To judge from the flaccidity of the limbs, death was still only somatic—which meant that it had probably not occurred earlier than four hours ago; but it was not possible, he thought, to make a more definite estimate than that. He took a torch from the car and by casting about discovered with its aid a crumpled, muddy handkerchief lying near-by, with the initials J.A.F. embroidered on it. And at that his anxiety was abruptly renewed. From what he knew of Judy he thought it very unlikely that she had killed Nicholas Crane, but it looked as if some time this evening she had been on the spot, and if by any chance she had witnessed what happened… Fen’s investigation of the area became notably swifter and more purposeful as soon as this possibility occurred to him.
And it did not take him long to find what he was looking for; Judy’s reckless pursuit was imprinted in mud as plainly as any zealot for footprints could desire. The small, sharp impression of the shoes were superimposed on the impressions made by the person she had followed—and that showed that at any rate she had not gone with him under duress. But there was more: both persons had been running fast, since the impression of the heel was consistently deeper than the impression made by the ball of the foot and the anterior edge of the sole was in every case prominently etched. And since Judy had been running, she had been tracking the other person not by his footprints—to follow footprints in tangled undergrowth while continuously running fast is an impossibility—but by his actual presence; in other words, she must have been chasing him close behind. More yet: by comparing the amount of water which had collected in the footprints with the amount which had collected in the natural hollows of the ground, it was feasible to make a rough guess at how long ago the chase had taken place; not more than an hour previously, Fen estimated, and probably rather less…
These observations occupied him for scarcely more than half a minute, and they left him seriously alarmed; much as he admired the girl’s courage, he could scarcely commend her wisdom, and what the issue of the chase might have been he did not at all care to imagine. He began to follow the tracks, taking care not to tread in them and moving as rapidly as he could. And until he came out of the trees and bushes on to an open slope, he made good progress. Here, however, he was obliged to pause uncertainly, swinging his torch this way and that, for at this higher level the turf was springy and porous, and in spite of the rain one’s steps, as an experiment speedily proved, left no marks on it. Without much optimism Fen walked slowly upwards; at this stage the only thing he could do was to look about at random. And presently he came to the terrace of flat ground where Judy had tripped and fallen, and where he was able to make out the scanty, ground-level remains of a dismantled or ruined house. He paused irresolutely, listening, but apart from the steady hiss of the rain the silence seemed absolute. A moment later, however, his eye was caught by a dull metallic gleam in the torch-light, and he stopped to pick up a small automatic pistol from which, as the contents of its clip demonstrated, a single shot had been fired. Though admittedly equivocal, it was not, he felt, a very reassuring discovery, except in so far as it indicated that he was still on the right track; and there remained the problem of what direction he should take now. For a few minutes he walked in continually widening circles centred on the spot where he had come on the gun, but without finding any trace that would help him. And he was just setting off in the upward direction, on the not specially cogent but unimprovable grounds that this would be a direct continuation of the line that Judy and her quarry had taken thus far, when he heard the scream.
It was not a loud scream, or a long one, but it was enough to indicate the way he must go, and a few moments hard running through ruin and darkness brought him to the Maze. With the help of his torch he was able to make out immediately what it was—the more immediately in that he already knew that such a place existed in the Lanthorn House grounds; but for all that, his fears for Judy’s safety were so intense that he needed the exercise of all his will-power to restrain him from the idiotic course of plunging heedlessly in. He must go in, of course: here the footsteps were visible again, and like the spoor of the animals in Aesop’s fable they pointed exclusively inwards—they did not emerge again. Other ways of egress were a possibility, but he would have to accept the likeliest hypothesis, that Judy was still in the Maze, and hope that it turned out to be correct. Should he call out? If he did so, it might have the effect of scaring Judy’s assailant away from her (supposing that she was being attacked, which at the time seemed probable), but on the other hand it might conceivably provoke him to an even greater ruthlessness. Fen decided against it. Stealth and surprise were useful weapons; if the intention was to kill Judy his bawling would hardly impede it, and if that intention were absent he would simply be giving the enemy warning of his presence, a needless handicap. So he kept silent—and in the meantime the thing to do was to devise some means of marking his route into the Maze so that when the need arose he might readily get out of it again.
All this takes long to tell, and, moreover, savours of cold-blooded calculation in the face of another person’s peril. But in fact it occupied only a few seconds’ thought, and even that necessary delay Fen bitterly grudged. Then, blessedly, he remembered something. In the pocket of his raincoat was a huge ball of thin string, bought the previous day, and that, plainly, was exactly what he wanted. He tied one end of it rapidly to a sapling which grew just outside the Maze’s entrance and then, unrolling the ball as he went, strode forward into the warren of damp, rank, weed-cluttered alleys. The string would almost certainly not last out to the Mazes centre, but it would be useful as far as it went. He was in two minds as to whether to keep his torch alight or not. It would infallibly mark out his progress, but that would help the girl as well as the murderer, and in the end he elected to keep it on. In an affair like this, he reflected grimly, there arrived fairly early on a point at which reasoning became valueless and one simply had to trust to luck.
Fen was well-read in the more interesting by-ways of human activity, and he knew a certain amount about labyrinths—knew, for instance, that their basic plan is always very simple and that in almost every case their centre can be reached by the application of some brief, straightforward formula. He was not, accordingly, so much at a loss as a less-informed person would have been, and his preliminary explorations were of a methodical sort, aimed at eliminating the more palpable blind alleys and false trail
s. Unreeling his string, and rewinding it whenever a cul-de-sac obliged him to go back on his tracks, he fairly quickly whittled the possible routes down to two, and on noting that one of them involved a symmetrical plan—first right, second left, first right, second left—-while the other did not, followed it unhesitatingly. By choosing his turns according to this prescription he would probably be working towards the perimeter of the Maze, which his initial survey had told him was rectangular; at some point, therefore, he would have to vary the formula—or, more accurately, deduce for it a second part—so as to be able to move back towards the centre. And since mazes arc essentially no more than large-scale toys, it was tolerably obvious that the second part of the formula would be significantly related to the first-—second right followed by first left, for instance, as against first right followed by second left. The devisers of such places, having thoroughly bewildered their victims, had liked to be able to point out how extremely simple it was once you knew. And although Fen was aware of the grave warning against over-confidence contained in the adventures of Mr. Jerome’s Harris at Hampton Court, he did not believe that this particular maze would turn out to be any exception to the overall rule.
He had, of course, no reason for supposing that Judy would be at the Maze’s centre when he got there; she might be anywhere. But the route from the entrance to the centre, once established, would provide a point of reference from which lateral excursions could be made, and prevent him from roaming about at random and getting lost himself; moreover, even his errors constituted a part of the search which had to be made. He has confessed since that he was far from liking the atmosphere of the place, and that although for obvious reasons he was not so strongly affected by the story as was Judy, Dr. James’ ill-advised jewel-hunter kept incongruous company with the egregious Harris in the literary quarters of his mind. He was, however, methodically active, and this kept his imagination in check, as also did the much more tangible danger of an assault by X. To proceed soundlessly was, he soon discovered, quite impracticable, and he therefore abandoned caution in favour of speed. This made him unpleasantly vulnerable, but there was no help for it. Often he stopped still and listened before pressing on again between the interminable high hedges; twice—in view of the fact that his presence must long ago have been perceived—he called Judy’s name. Silence alone answered him; and he grew sick with misgiving.
Though he attempted to apply it too soon, and was temporarily led astray in consequence, his guess about the second part of the Maze’s formula proved to be correct, and in due course he came to the centre. Against all expectation, the string had lasted wonderfully—there seemed to be miles of it, and Fen blessed the ironmonger who had pressed it on him with sophistries about the most expensive being always the cheapest in the end. He was, indeed, negligently blessing the ironmonger at the moment when, on the point of investigating the Maze’s centre, he was struck down by a blow on the back of the head.
He estimates that he was probably unconscious for between five and ten minutes. In retrospect his view of this episode is cool and detached, but he is not the man to suffer pain stoically, and there can be little doubt that at the time he was mightily aggrieved. When he came round, dazedly and painfully, among the soaking brambles and weeds, his first coherent thought was for his life-line, and he was not much surprised to find it gone: X had beaten a retreat and taken it with him to delay pursuit. He was not, however, excessively upset by this circumstance; it was an eventuality which he had all along considered possible, and having grasped the principle on which the Maze had been planted, he was confident of his ability to get out of it again. His torch remained, and after collecting it he got dizzily to his feet, fondling the back of his head and noting with a certain sour gratification that there was no blood. In another half-minute he had found Judy.
She was lying unconscious, her face muddy and paper-white, but as far as he could see she was not injured in any way. Presently, having sat down beside her for a minute or two in order to give his head a chance to spin itself to a standstill, Fen put her across his shoulder and tottered away with her. Before searching for her he had taken the precaution of marking, by means of a handkerchief tied to a twig, the particular alley by which he had come to the centre, and with that initial signpost there was, as he had anticipated, no serious difficulty in finding the way out. The Maze behind him, he was guided back to the drive by the headlamps of his car, which he had left burning.
And by a quarter to ten he and Judy were in sanctuary at Lanthorn House.
All that night the windows of Lanthorn House blazed with light, and there was a confused, interminable coming and going of doctors, policemen and, in the last stages, newspaper reporters. Fen, having made sure that Judy was safe and unharmed, grew irritable at the inconclusiveness of what was being done, and departed in Lily Christine shortly after midnight; his adventure had left him feeling distinctly unwell, and his interest in the case was submerged in an overwhelming desire to go home and to bed. But the routine of investigation went on until daybreak. At the start, Humbleby was in charge of it; he had been summoned from London and had driven to Aylesbury with all possible speed. Latterly, however, he was absent, since at two in the morning a distraught Inspector Berkeley telephoned through from Doon Island to tell him that Madge Crane was dead.
At five o’clock on the afternoon of the following day, which was the Wednesday, Fen sat and drank tea with Humbleby in Humbleby’s room at New Scotland Yard.
It was a small room, solidly but austerely furnished. Its windows, high up in a corner of the building, looked towards Parliament and the river. A small but vehement gas-fire warmed it. Humbleby was in the swivel-chair behind the broad oak desk, and Fen, his head bandaged in a needlessly dramatic and elaborate fashion, was in the chair reserved for visitors, his long legs resting irreverently on a corner of the desk. Fen is exigent in the matter of sympathy for his afflictions, but he knew that at the moment it was Humbleby who deserved commiseration, and he did not, therefore, as in minor discomforts he normally does, adopt the air and hollow tones of a man precariously convalescing after a severe operation. Instead, he eyed Humbleby compassionately, noting the pallor of his face, the strained lines of his mouth, the blue suffusions of sleeplessness under his eyes, the dishevelment of his usually neat grey hair and the soiled, creased condition of his clothes. Humbleby had laced their tea with rum, and he drank greedily, exhaustedly, gazing out over sooty roofs into the grey March afternoon.
“I’ve just been to see the A.C.,” he said. “He was extremely pleasant, but now Madge Crane has been murdered the case will be front-page news until it’s solved”—he nodded towards the heap of evening papers in front of him—“and in those circumstances I quite realised they’d have to take it away from me. Nothing less than a Chief Inspector will do now. Chichley. Do you know him?”
Fen shook his head.
“A nice fellow, and very able. Still, it’s disappointing. The A.C. made it clear that the transfer didn’t constitute any criticism of me; as he said, I simply haven’t had the time to get down to anything yet. But just the same—”
“Dispiriting, yes,” said Fen; he was fond of Humbleby and thought it a great pity that because of Madge Crane’s stardom he should have to be elbowed out. “How long have you got?”
“Before Chichley takes over? A few hours, I dare say. I really can’t discuss the details with him till I’ve had some sleep.”
“It might,” said Fen, “be possible to wind up the case today.”
“I wish I could believe that, but I’m afraid you’re too optimistic.”
“Perhaps. But shall we make the attempt? Or are you too tired to discuss things for half an hour or so?”
“No. I’m not too tired. We’ll do that. And if you can throw any light on this business, I’ll be eternally grateful. It’s not a question of promotion—I could have had that years ago if I’d wanted it. It’s just that I detest leaving any job half-done.”
Fen nodded
. “Understandable,” he said briskly. “Let me get my information up to date, then. Nicholas first, and then Madge.”
“Right.” Humbleby finished his tea, leaned back and lit a cheroot. “As far as I can see, I’ve uncovered all the really important facts. I left Doon Island at midday today, you understand, and called in at Lanthorn House before coming back here.”
“And you talked to the girl?”
“To Miss Flecker, you mean? Yes, I did.”
“How is she?”
“Quite recovered, I’m glad to say. And very anxious to see you and thank you for rescuing her. She’s gone back to her flat, and a woman friend is going to sleep with her for a few nights, until she’s recovered from the shock.”
“Her unconsciousness was just a faint, I take it.”
“Yes. She must have been horribly overwrought, so it’s not surprising. Brave of her to chase after this fellow, but scarcely sensible. However… she hasn’t, I’m afraid, the smallest notion who it was.”
“And Eleanor Crane—did you talk to her?”
“Not a chance of it. The doctors were—um—adamant. Extraordinary, the way she collapsed when she heard Nicholas was dead.”
“She was very fond of him, then?”
“Doted on him, it seems, though she took care never to show it. And the consequence is that now she’s a dangerous hysteric.”
“Yes,” said Fen. “Let’s get down to business, then. I gather that Nicholas returned to Lanthorn House shortly after eight. Where had he been?”
“Getting an early dinner in Aylesbury. Apparently he travelled there and back by bus. Eating out, you realise, was one of the precautions he was taking against poison.”
“Quite so. And now, the murder and the business in the Maze. Alibis, to start with. How about the people at Lanthorn House?”
Frequent Hearses Page 18
