The Big Six: A Novel

by Arthur Ransome

  “We’d better begin at once,” said Dick. “While the clues are fresh.”

  “We couldn’t find out anything about Potter now,” said Bill.

  “But at Ranworth,” said Dick. “If the villain was casting boats off there last night he may have left clues all over the place.”

  “Let’s go and look,” said Dorothea.

  “We dursn’t go back to Ranworth,” said Joe.

  “We can,” said Tom. “That’s it. You get along to the Wilderness with the Death and Glory and we’ll take Titmouse to Ranworth. We’ll see Rob and find out something anyway. Well come straight back. And I say. Mother sent a pie for dinner.”

  Dorothea handed it across.

  “Don’t you go and get in bad too,” said Bill.

  “We won’t,” said Tom, glad at last to have something to do instead of just waiting for worse to follow on bad. “Hop aboard, Dick.”

  A few minutes later the Titmouse with her crew of detectives was out of sight.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE FIRST CLUE

  THERE have been changes in the last few years along the bank of the river above the Ferry, and one or two neat bungalows have been built on what was once the Wilderness, a marshy bit of land with an old wind-pump on it, a lot of osier bushes and a narrow dyke running through it from the river to the road. The Wilderness was divided from the road by a wooden fence with a padlocked gate in it that no one used. It was also possible to get to it from Dr. Dudgeon’s by going through Mr. Farland’s garden and on along the river bank. The dyke was rather wider than the one in which Tom kept his Titmouse. There was plenty of room to bring the Death and Glory into it. It was not quite straight, and a boat in there was screened by the osier bushes and could not be seen from the river.

  Joe, Bill and Pete brought their old ship round the bend by the Ferry, downed sail and paddled and poled her far into the Wilderness dyke. There they moored her, to the northern side of the dyke, so as to be handy when they wanted to slip along to Tom’s.

  “Anyone see us come in?” asked Joe.

  “Not as I know,” said Bill.

  “Anyways,” said Joe, “there ain’t no boats in the Wilderness to be cast off.”

  They left the Death and Glory and went back to the mouth of the dyke to watch for the return of the detectives. Pete took his fishing rod with him, and the worms, and caught four perch, three good ones and a small one, which settled the question of supper. But this success, though it cheered Pete, did not lift the gloom from Joe and Bill who had begun to think that if people were accusing them of stealing boat-gear even their fathers would think it best to make them lay up the Death and Glory at once. Bill whittled away at a willow stick, just for something to do. Joe played tunes on his mouth organ so slowly that he turned even cheerful ones into dirges. He played them slower and slower till Bill said he couldn’t stand it and Joe put the mouth organ in his pocket.

  At last the Titmouse came into sight. Dorothea saw the waiting Coots as soon as they saw her and eagerly waved the exercise book that was Volume Five of The Outlaw of the Broads. Tom, who was steering, waved too, and Dick seemed to be trying to show them something, though he was much too far away for them to see what it was.

  “All right for them,” said Bill. “Nobody’ll turn Tom Dudgeon off the river.”

  “They’ve found something,” said Joe. “All of ’em waving like that.”

  Pete hurriedly took his fishing rod to pieces. The Titmouse came alongside. Joe steadied her, grabbing at her gunwale while Dorothea passed the anchor to Bill.

  Dick held out a small bit of rubber tubing.

  “That’s from a bike pump,” said Bill.

  “It’s the first clue,” said Dorothea.

  “Jolly good thing we went there,” said Tom. “That young idiot Rob thought you’d been playing the fool with those boats.”

  “And he tell the others,” said Joe bitterly. “I know he tell ’em when I see him there pointing. The young turmot.”

  “I told him you hadn’t touched them,” said Tom. “But they’d already sent someone off on a bicycle to tell Tedder, and the chap came back while we were there.”

  “He helped like anything without meaning to,” said Dorothea. “He came and leant his bicycle against the fence above that green place where some of the boats were yesterday. They’d brought the boats back. Well, you know where that green bit ends by the fence and the gate into the wood. There’s a bit of bare earth there and yesterday’s rain had wetted it. Dick was looking about all over everywhere. He’s awfully good at seeing things. Lots of people had been trampling about, pulling the boats up, and I said it wasn’t any good looking for footprints when there were such lots of them. And then Dick asked the man to move his bicycle a bit, and he did, and then Dick asked if anybody else had been there with a bicycle, and nobody had. And then Dick made a drawing of the track left by the man’s bicycle. I gave him a blank page out of The Outlaw.”

  “I thought he’d gone dotty,” said Tom. “But he hadn’t.”

  Dick had come ashore and was polishing his spectacles. “I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for that rain yesterday,” he said.

  Dorothea went on. “Then he grovelled again … The Admiral won’t be awfully pleased … I say, Dick, don’t rub it in now. We must wait till the mud’s dry before we try to get it off … He grovelled again and made another drawing. And we could see it was a different sort of tyre.”

  “IT’S A DIFFERENT TYRE”

  Joe jumped into the air. “Gee whillykins!” he said. “Someone come on a bike to cast them boats off.”

  “He found out much more than that,” said Dorothea. “Some of the tracks of that other bicycle were funny and wide with hardly any pattern and a groove each side. And some of them were narrow and the pattern as sharp as anything. And Dick said that someone came there on a bicycle last night and had a puncture and pumped up his tyre before he rode away again. And we hunted along with our noses to the ground and we lost the tracks and found them again on the road to the Ferry, on a damp patch, two lots of them….”

  “Coming and going,” said Dick. “And there were the man’s tracks as well, quite different.”

  “Then we went back to the place by the gate,” said Dorothea. “We started hunting again and I found the tube from a bicycle pump. It was trodden in the mud and I expect the villain couldn’t find it when he dropped it in the dark.”

  “I bet he trod on it himself,” said Tom.

  “Let’s see them tracks,” said Bill, and Dick opened his pocket-book and took out a folded sheet of exercise paper on which were the two drawings.

  “Dunlop, that one,” said Bill. “Same as mine. What’s the other?”

  “John Bull,” said Dick. “But that one doesn’t matter. That’s the track of the Ranworth man. It’s the other that had the puncture and was there in the night and lost his pump-tube.”

  DICK’S DRAWING OF THE TYRE-TRACKS

  “There’s lots of chaps got Dunlops,” said Joe. “Bill’s got ’em.”

  “So have I,” said Tom.

  “Ours are Dunlops too,” said Dorothea.

  “Don’t see as we’re much better off,” said Joe.

  “Oh yes, we are,” said Dorothea. “We know it wasn’t Tom’s bicycle, or Bill’s, or one of ours. It was someone else’s. And Dr. Dudgeon himself said that if boats got cast off at Ranworth while you were there he’d begin to believe it wasn’t you but someone trying to make people think it was. And now we’ve got real proof that someone else was there in the night.”

  “How far did you follow them tracks?” asked Bill.

  “We found them on the road to the Ferry,” said Tom, “but we couldn’t follow them far.”

  “Might have come from anywhere,” said Bill.

  “Anyhow there they are,” said Dorothea. “And we know now what to look for. We’ve got to find a man with a bicycle with Dunlop tyres who’s lost the tube from his bicycle pump. Now we’ve got one clue we�
�ll get lots more. And we’re going to turn the Coot Club shed into Scotland Yard. And we’re going to show Mr. Tedder he’s wrong and everybody’s wrong. Let’s go along to the shed now….”

  “What about that pie?” said Tom. “It’s long after dinner-time.”

  “All right,” said Dorothea. “Let’s have dinner and then go there.”

  “We got her well stowed away,” said Joe. “And there’s nothing to cast off here, only her.”

  “Come on,” said Tom.

  They left the Titmouse moored at the mouth of the dyke and went along to the Death and Glory, to eat Mrs. Dudgeon’s pie. Dick’s photograph had dried and peeled off the window, and Dick put it in his pocket-book and sat on it during dinner to flatten it. After dinner he gave it to the Death and Glories who pinned it up on the cabin wall, between the pictures of a coot and a bearded tit that had been given them by a friend in the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society. They had just agreed that they had got it straight when Dorothea asked a question.

  “Does the Ferry run at night?”

  Five brother detectives looked at her with admiration.

  “It don’t,” said Joe. “But anybody who knowed it could work it for himself.”

  “And its chains clank,” said Dorothea. “Somebody may have heard them.”

  “Bill’s Aunt Alice work at the inn there,” said Joe.

  “Let’s go and ask her at once,” said Dorothea.

  They went through the osiers to the head of the dyke and climbed over the fence into the road, and were well on their way to the Ferry Inn when Bill pulled up short.

  “What is it?” said Dorothea.

  “I better go ask her myself,” said Bill. “Aunt Alice work there and she won’t say thank you for all six of us crowding in.”

  Tom backed him up at once. “You go along, Bill. We’ll wait for you.”

  They sat in a row on the fence while Bill went on. He was back in a very few minutes. He had walked there but came back on the run.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “She hear them chains rattle last night. She wake and she hear them and she wonder who’s going so late.”

  “Did she hear them twice?” asked Dorothea.

  “Only once,” said Bill. “And she don’t know which way that old ferry were going. She say if that chap were crossing from this side she never hear him come back, and if he were coming back she never hear him go across.”

  “She must have been asleep one of the times,” said Dorothea. “But it’s good evidence anyhow. We know now that somebody did use the ferry in the middle of the night.”

  “He’d be wheeling his bicycle on the way back,” said Dick. “His tyre had gone flat quite when he pumped it up, and with a puncture it would soon go flat again and the next time he wanted to pump it he found he’d lost the tube of his pump.” Dick looked again at the little bit of tubing, but it did not tell him any more.

  “Hope he walk all the way home,” said Joe.

  “And a nail in his shoe,” said Pete.

  Tom and Joe climbed the fence into the Wilderness to fetch the Titmouse to the Coot Club dyke. The others went slowly along the road past Mr. Farland’s house and in at Dr. Dudgeon’s. They found Mrs. Dudgeon in the garden just as Tom and Joe, after tying up the Titmouse, came to meet them round the corner of the house.

  “What?” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “Back already? I thought you were going to lie low at Ranworth.”

  “They can’t,” said Tom. “There were boats cast off there last night, and they had to bolt for it. But Dot and Dick and I have been there and Dick found a clue.”

  “Boats cast off at Ranworth?” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “Well, you wouldn’t be so silly as to do that as soon as you got there.”

  “Even Dad will agree now that it’s someone else doing it on purpose,” said Tom. “And we’re going to find out who. Dick’s a jolly good detective. It was somebody who went there on a bicycle and had a puncture while he was there. We’ve got a bit of his bicycle pump.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t take you very far,” smiled Mrs. Dudgeon.

  “It’s only the beginning,” said Dorothea. “And we know something else. It was someone from here. He was heard crossing the Ferry in the middle of the night.”

  “We’ll get him all right,” said Tom. “Coot Club shed’s going to be Scotland Yard, and we’re going to stir the Coots up everywhere.”

  Mrs. Dudgeon laughed. “Plain-clothes men in every port,” she said. “Well, good luck to you. By the way, you do know they’re talking of something much more serious than casting off boats?”

  “I told them,” said Tom.

  “They can’t patch stealing on us,” said Joe.

  “I’m sure they can’t,” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “And I hope they find the thief quick. It’s a horrid thing to happen. But you know you are not the only detectives? Mr. Tedder was here again today.”

  “He think we cast off them boats,” said Bill.

  “I told him I thought he was wrong,” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “But if you’ve got any clues or get any you’d better hand them over to him.”

  “But they never do that in the books,” said Dorothea. “We’ve got to find it all out for ourselves and then, just as the judge puts on his black cap …”

  “But he don’t put it on, only for murder,” said Bill.

  “Well, whatever he does put on,” said Dorothea impatiently. “Somebody gets up in court and shows what really happened, and the judge leans out of the dock … no, that’s where the prisoners are … anyway, he leans out and shakes hands with the prisoners and there are cheers and the judge gets a pair of white gloves after all.”

  Mrs. Dudgeon turned to go into the house. “I’ll ask cook to let Scotland Yard have a jug of tea a little later on … And I suppose detectives can eat cake.”

  CHAPTER XV

  RIVAL DETECTIVES

  THE Coot Club shed did not look very much like Scotland Yard when the six detectives trooped in. It was a lean-to against the side of the Doctor’s house just above the dyke where Tom kept his boats. There were oars and a spare sail with its spars propped up in one corner of it. A couple of fishing rods hung from nails on the walls. There was a small table with a vice fixed to it that served Tom as a carpenter’s bench. There were two chairs, one of which was a safe one. The other needed care. There was also a low bench along the wall under the window, but it was piled with junk of all kinds. There was a big wooden box with a primus stove on it, partly taken to pieces for cleaning. On the walls were a lot of pictures of birds cut out of newspapers. There was a big map of the Broads that was really in two parts which had been fastened together so as to have it all in one. There was another map on a much larger scale, made by Tom, showing just the reaches of the river near Horning and marking with numbers the nests the Coot Club had found and watched over in the spring.

  “Oh gosh!” said Tom, as he came in. “I never finished cleaning that stove.” He grabbed up the burner that was lying loose and screwed it in so that it should not get lost. “Go on. Sweep everything off that bench. Shove it into the box. All right, Joe … on the floor in the corner. We’ll have it all ship-shape in a minute…. Blue pencil? On the window sill, I think. There you are, Pete, behind those tin tobacco boxes … No … You give it to Dot….”

  On the main wall, to the right of anyone coming in at the door there had hung a large card with THE COOT CLUB printed on it in big blue-pencilled capital letters. Dorothea had noticed it at once, had taken it down, and now with the stump of pencil Pete had found for her was printing SCOTLAND YARD in big letters on the back of it. She hung it again on its nail.

  “Fine,” said Tom.

  The shed was already looking different. The bench was clear for anybody who wanted to sit down. Tom took the doubtful chair and gave the loose leg a bang or two with a hammer. Pete was stowing things away in the box, and even if there was a huge pile of all kinds of junk in the corner the box more or less hid it and anyhow people need not look unless th
ey wanted.

  “I’ll get that vice off the table in a minute,” said Tom.

  “Can I have the hammer?” said Dick.

  “What for?”

  “The clues.”

  He drove two nails into the wall side by side and spiked the drawing of the tyre tracks on one, while Joe, seeing what he wanted, took a bit of string and with a neat arrangement of a bowline knot and a clove hitch hung the tube from the villain’s bicycle pump on the other.

  Dorothea sat herself down at the table and suddenly jumped up again. “Oh bother,” she said. “I left The Outlaw in the Death and Glory.”

  “But you don’t want it now,” said Dick.

  “We want lots of paper,” said Dorothea.

  “I’ll get some,” said Tom, bolted out and was back in a moment with a pad of prescription forms.

  “It’s a pity they’ve got Dad’s name on them,” he said.

  “Disguise,” said Dorothea. “All the better, if anybody happened to see our notes. They’re just what we want.”

  The map of the Broads caught her eye and gave her a new idea. “Pins,” she said. “And, I say, Dick, you know those black envelopes your printing out paper comes in…”

  Dick rummaged in his pocket and pulled one out.

  “What for?” he asked, while the others waited to see what was coming next.

  “Flags,” said Dorothea. “We’ll make little black flags and stick them in the map at each of the places where boats have been sent drifting.”

  “Good,” said Tom, and rattled one small tin box after another to find the one with the thin noise of pins among all the boxes that made the noise of screws or nails. He found it at last. The pins were rather rusty, but Dorothea said that did not matter.

  Joe opened a scout-knife and cut the envelope into small oblong strips of black paper. Dorothea put each pin twice through the edge of a black strip.

  “Now,” she said, when a dozen little flags lay in the lid of a tin. “Let’s stick them in.”