‘How do you suppose M. Fouquet came to overlook this?’ Blowgrave asked.
‘Naturally enough,’ was the reply. ‘He was looking for an Egyptian inscription. But this is not an Egyptian inscription. Does he speak English?’
‘Very little. Practically not at all.’
‘Then, as the words are English words and imperfectly spelt, the hieroglyphics must have appeared to him mere nonsense. And he was right as to the scarab being an imitation.’
‘There is another point,’ said Blowgrave. ‘How was it that Harold made that extraordinary mistake about the place? The directions are clear enough. All you had to do was to go out there with a compass and take the bearings just as they were given.’
‘But,’ said Thorndyke, ‘that is exactly what he did, and hence the mistake. He was apparently unaware of the phenomenon known as the Secular Variation of the Compass. As you know, the compass does not – usually – point to true north, but to the Magnetic North; and the Magnetic North is continually changing its position. When Reuben was buried – about 1810—it was twenty-four degrees, twenty-six minutes west of true north; at the present time it is fourteen degrees, forty-eight minutes west of true north. So Harold’s bearings would be no less than ten degrees out, which of course, gave him a totally wrong position. But Silas was a ship-master, a navigator, and of course knew all about the vagaries of the compass; and, as his directions were intended for use at some date unknown to him, I assumed that the bearings that he gave were true bearings – that when he said “north” he meant true north, which is always the same; and this turned out to be the case. But I also prepared a plan with magnetic bearings corrected up to date. Here are the three plans: No. 1 – the one we used – showing true bearings; No. 2, showing corrected magnetic bearings which might have given us the correct spot; and No. 3, with uncorrected magnetic bearings, giving us the spot where Harold dug, and which could not possibly have been the right spot.’
On the following morning I escorted the deed-box, filled with the booty and tied up and sealed with the scarab, to Mr Blowgrave’s bank. And that ended our connection with the case; excepting that, a month or two later, we attended by request the unveiling in Shawstead churchyard of a fine monument to Reuben Blowgrave. This took the slightly inappropriate form of an obelisk, on which were cut the name and approximate dates, with the added inscription: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return after many days’; concerning which Thorndyke remarked dryly that he supposed the exhortation applied equally even if the bread happened to belong to someone else.
The House in Goblin Wood
John Dickson Carr
In Pall Mall, that hot July afternoon three years before the war, an open saloon car was drawn up to the kerb just opposite the Senior Conservatives’ Club.
And in the car sat two conspirators.
It was the drowsy post-lunch hour among the clubs, where only the sun remained brilliant. The Rag lay somnolent; the Athenæum slept outright. But these two conspirators, a dark-haired young man in his early thirties and a fair-haired girl perhaps half a dozen years younger, never moved. They stared intently at the Gothic-like front of the Senior Conservatives’.
‘Look here, Eve,’ muttered the young man, and punched at the steering-wheel, ‘do you think this is going to work?’
‘I don’t know,’ the fair-haired girl confessed. ‘He absolutely loathes picnics.’
‘Anyway, we’ve probably missed him.’
‘Why so?’
‘He can’t have taken as long over lunch as that!’ her companion protested, looking at a wrist-watch. The young man was rather shocked. ‘It’s a quarter to four! Even if …’
‘Bill! There! Look there!’
Their patience was rewarded by an inspiring sight.
Out of the portals of the Senior Conservatives’ Club, in awful majesty, marched a large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman in a white linen suit.
His corporation preceded him like the figurehead of a man-of-war. His shell-rimmed spectacles were pulled down on a broad nose, all being shaded by a Panama hat. At the top of the stone steps he surveyed the street, left and right, with a lordly sneer.
‘Sir Henry!’ called the girl.
‘Hey?’ said Sir Henry Merrivale.
‘I’m Eve Drayton. Don’t you remember me? You knew my father!’
‘Oh, ah,’ said the great man.
‘We’ve been waiting here a terribly long time,’ Eve pleaded. ‘Couldn’t you see us for just five minutes? – The thing to do,’ she whispered to her companion, ‘is to keep him in a good humour. Just keep him in a good humour!’
As a matter of fact, H.M. was in a good humour, having just triumphed over the Home Secretary in an argument. But not even his own mother could have guessed it. Majestically, with the same lordly sneer, he began in grandeur to descend the steps of the Senior Conservatives’. He did this, in fact, until his foot encountered an unnoticed object lying some three feet from the bottom.
It was a banana skin.
‘Oh, dear!’ said the girl.
Now it must be stated with regret that in the old days certain urchins, of what were then called the ‘lower orders’, had a habit of placing such objects on the steps in the hope that some eminent statesman would take a toss on his way to Whitehall. This was a venial but deplorable practice, probably accounting for what Mr Gladstone said in 1882.
In any case, it accounted for what Sir Henry Merrivale said now.
From the pavement, where H.M. landed in a seated position, arose in H.M.’s bellowing voice such a torrent of profanity, such a flood of invective and vile obscenities, as has seldom before blasted the holy calm of Pall Mall. It brought the hall porter hurrying down the steps, and Eve Drayton flying out of the car.
Heads were now appearing at the windows of the Athenæum across the street.
‘Is it all right?’ cried the girl, with concern in her blue eyes. ‘Are you hurt?’
H.M. merely looked at her. His hat had fallen off, disclosing a large bald head; and he merely sat on the pavement and looked at her.
‘Anyway, H.M., get up! Please get up!’
‘Yes, sir,’ begged the hall porter, ‘for heaven’s sake get up!’
‘Get up?’ bellowed H.M., in a voice audible as far as St James’s Street. ‘Burn it all, how can I get up?’
‘But why not?’
‘My behind’s out of joint,’ said H.M. simply. ‘I’m hurt awful bad. I’m probably goin’ to have spinal dislocation for the rest of my life.’
‘But, sir, people are looking!’
H.M. explained what these people could do. He eyed Eve Drayton with a glare of indescribable malignancy over his spectacles.
‘I suppose, my wench, you’re responsible for this?’
Eve regarded him in consternation.
‘You don’t mean the banana skin?’ she cried.
‘Oh, yes, I do,’ said H.M., folding his arms like a prosecuting counsel.
‘But we – we only wanted to invite you to a picnic!’
H.M. closed his eyes. ‘That’s fine,’ he said in a hollow voice. ‘All the same, don’t you think it’d have been a subtler kind of hint just to pour mayonnaise over my head or shove ants down the back of my neck? Oh, lord love a duck!’
‘I didn’t mean that! I meant …’
‘Let me help you up, sir,’ interposed the calm, reassuring voice of the dark-haired and blue-chinned young man who had been with Eve in the car.
‘So you want to help too, hey? And who are you?’
‘I’m awfully sorry!’ said Eve. ‘I should have introduced you! This is my fiancé, Dr William Sage.’
H.M.’s face turned purple.
‘I’m glad to see,’ he observed, ‘you had the uncommon decency to bring along a doctor. I appreciate that, I do. And the car’s there, I suppose, to assist with the examination when I take off my pants?’
The hall porter uttered a cry of horror.
Bill Sage, either fro
m jumpiness and nerves or from sheer inability to keep a straight face, laughed loudly.
‘I keep telling Eve a dozen times a day,’ he said, ‘that I’m not to be called “doctor”. I happen to be a surgeon—’
(Here H.M. really did look alarmed.)
‘—but I don’t think we need operate. Nor, in my opinion,’ Bill gravely addressed the hall porter, ‘will it be necessary to remove Sir Henry’s trousers in front of the Senior Conservatives’ Club.’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’
‘We had an infernal nerve to come here,’ the young man confessed to H.M. ‘But I honestly think, Sir Henry, you’d be more comfortable in the car. What about it? Let me give you a hand up?’
Yet even ten minutes later, when H.M. sat glowering in the back of the car and two heads were craned round towards him, peace was not restored.
‘All right!’ said Eve. Her pretty, rather stolid face was flushed; her mouth looked miserable. ‘If you won’t come to the picnic, you won’t. But I did believe you might do it to oblige me.’
‘Well … now!’ muttered the great man uncomfortably.
‘And I did think, too, you’d be interested in the other person who was coming with us. But Vicky’s – difficult. She won’t come either, if you don’t.’
‘Oh? And who’s this other guest?’
‘Vicky Adams.’
H.M.’s hand, which had been lifted for an oratorical gesture, dropped to his side.
‘Vicky Adams? That’s not the gal who …?’
‘Yes!’ Eve nodded. ‘They say it was one of the great mysteries, twenty years ago, that the police failed to solve.’
‘It was, my wench,’ H.M. agreed sombrely. ‘It was.’
‘And now Vicky’s grown up. And we thought if you of all people went along, and spoke to her nicely, she’d tell us what really happened on that night.’
H.M.’s small, sharp eyes fixed disconcertingly on Eve. ‘I say, my wench. What’s your interest in all this?’
‘Oh, reasons.’ Eve glanced quickly at Bill Sage, who was again punching moodily at the steering-wheel, and checked herself. ‘Anyway, what difference does it make now? If you won’t go with us …’
H.M. assumed a martyred air.
‘I never said I wasn’t goin’ with you, did I?’ he demanded. (This was inaccurate, but no matter.) ‘Even after you practically made a cripple of me, I never said I wasn’t goin’.’ His manner grew flurried and hasty. ‘But I got to leave now,’ he added apologetically. ‘I got to get back to my office.’
‘We’ll drive you there, H.M.’
‘No, no, no,’ said the practical cripple, getting out of the car with surprising celerity. ‘Walkin’ is good for my stomach if it’s not so good for my behind. I’m a forgivin’ man. You pick me up at my house tomorrow morning. G’bye.’
And he lumbered off in the direction of the Haymarket.
It needed no close observer to see that H.M. was deeply abstracted. He remained so abstracted, indeed, as to be nearly murdered by a taxi at the Admiralty Arch; and he was halfway down Whitehall before a familiar voice stopped him.
‘Afternoon, Sir Henry!’
Burly, urbane, buttoned up in blue serge, with his bowler hat and his boiled blue eye, stood Chief Inspector Masters.
‘Bit odd,’ the Chief Inspector remarked affably, ‘to see you taking a constitutional on a day like this. And how are you, sir?’
‘Awful,’ said H.M. instantly. ‘But that’s not the point. Masters, you crawlin’ snake! You’re the very man I wanted to see.’
Few things startled the Chief Inspector. This one did.
‘You’, he repeated, ‘wanted to see me?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And what about?’
‘Masters, do you remember the Victoria Adams case about twenty years ago?’
The Chief Inspector’s manner suddenly changed and grew wary.
‘Victoria Adams case?’ he ruminated. ‘No, sir, I can’t say I do.’
‘Son, you’re lyin’! You were sergeant to old Chief Inspector Rutherford in those days, and well I remember it!’
Masters stood on his dignity. ‘That’s as may be, sir. But twenty years ago …’
‘A little girl of twelve or thirteen, the child of very wealthy parents, disappeared one night out of a country cottage with all the doors and windows locked on the inside. A week later, while everybody was havin’ screaming hysterics, the child reappeared again: through the locks and bolts, tucked up in her bed as usual. And to this day nobody’s ever known what really happened.’
There was a silence, while Masters shut his jaws hard.
‘This family, the Adamses,’ persisted H.M., ‘owned the cottage, down Aylesbury way, on the edge of Goblin Wood, opposite the lake. Or was it?’
‘Oh, ah,’ growled Masters. ‘It was.’
H.M. looked at him curiously.
‘They used the cottage as a base for bathin’ in summer, and ice-skatin’ in winter. It was black winter when the child vanished, and the place was all locked up inside against drafts. They say her old man nearly went loopy when he found her there a week later, lying asleep under the lamp. But all she’d say, when they asked her where she’d been, was, “I don’t know.”’
Again there was a silence, while red buses thundered through the traffic press of Whitehall.
‘You’ve got to admit, Masters, there was a flaming public rumpus. I say: did you ever read Barrie’s Mary Rose?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it was a situation straight out of Barrie. Some people, y’see, said that Vicky Adams was a child of faerie who’d been spirited away by the pixies …’
Whereupon Masters exploded.
He removed his bowler hat and wiped his forehead. He made remarks about pixies; in detail, which could not have been bettered by H.M. himself.
‘I know, son, I know.’ H.M. was soothing. Then his big voice sharpened. ‘Now tell me. Was all this talk strictly true?’
‘What talk?’
‘Locked windows? Bolted doors? No attic-trap? No cellar? Solid walls and floor?’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered Masters, regaining his dignity with a powerful effort, ‘I’m bound to admit it was true.’
‘Then there wasn’t any jiggery-pokery about the cottage?’
‘In your eye there wasn’t,’ said Masters.
‘How d’ye mean?’
‘Listen, sir.’ Masters lowered his voice. ‘Before the Adamses took over that place, it was a hideout for Chuck Randall. At that time he was the swellest of the swell mob; we lagged him a couple of years later. Do you think Chuck wouldn’t have rigged up some gadget for a getaway? Just so! Only …’
‘Well? Hey?’
‘We couldn’t find it,’ grunted Masters.
‘And I’ll bet that pleased old Chief Inspector Rutherford?’
‘I tell you straight: he was fair up the pole. Especially as the kid herself was a pretty kid, all big eyes and dark hair. You couldn’t help trusting her.’
‘Yes,’ said H.M. ‘That’s what worries me.’
‘Worries you?’
‘Oh, my son!’ said H.M. dismally. ‘Here’s Vicky Adams, the spoiled daughter of dotin’ parents. She’s supposed to be “odd” and “fey”. She’s even encouraged to be. During her adolescence, the most impressionable time of her life, she gets wrapped round with the gauze of a mystery that people talk about even yet. What’s that woman like now, Masters? What’s that woman like now?’
‘Dear Sir Henry!’ murmured Miss Vicky Adams in her softest voice.
She said this just as William Sage’s car, with Bill and Eve Drayton in the front seat, and Vicky and H.M. in the back seat, turned off the main road. Behind them lay the smoky-red roofs of Aylesbury, against a brightness of late afternoon. The car turned down a side road, a damp tunnel of greenery, and into another road which was little more than a lane between hedgerows.
H.M. – though cheered by three good-sized picnic hampers from Fortn
um & Mason, their wickerwork lids bulging with a feast – did not seem happy. Nobody in that car was happy, with the possible exception of Miss Adams herself.
Vicky, unlike Eve, was small and dark and vivacious. Her large light-brown eyes, with very black lashes, could be arch and coy; or they could be dreamily intense. The late Sir James Barrie might have called her a sprite. Those of more sober views would have recognised a different quality: she had an inordinate sex appeal, which was as palpable as a physical touch to any male within yards. And despite her smallness, Vicky had a full voice like Eve’s. All these qualities she used even in so simple a matter as giving traffic directions.
‘First right,’ she would say, leaning forward to put her hands on Bill Sage’s shoulders. ‘Then straight on until the next traffic light. Ah, clever boy!’
‘Not at all, not at all!’ Bill would disclaim, with red ears and rather an erratic style of driving.
‘Oh, yes, you are!’ And Vicky would twist the lobe of his ear, playfully, before sitting back again.
(Eve Drayton did not say anything. She did not even turn round. Yet the atmosphere, even of that quiet English picnic party, had already become a trifle hysterical.)
‘Dear Sir Henry!’ murmured Vicky, as they turned down into the deep lane between the hedgerows. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t be so materialistic! I do, really. Haven’t you the tiniest bit of spirituality in your nature?’
‘Me?’ said H.M. in astonishment. ‘I got a very lofty spiritual nature. But what I want just now, my wench, is grub. – Oi!’
Bill Sage glanced round.
‘By that speedometer,’ H.M. pointed, ‘we’ve now come forty-six miles and a bit. We didn’t even leave town until people of decency and sanity were having their tea. Where are we goin’?’
‘But didn’t you know?’ asked Vicky, with wide-open eyes. ‘We’re going to the cottage where I had such a dreadful experience when I was a child.’
‘Was it such a dreadful experience, Vicky dear?’ inquired Eve.
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