Diabolic Candelabra

by E. R. Punshon

  “Interesting detail,” Bobby remarked thoughtfully when Sergeant Turner told him this. “One might draw deductions. Snobbish, though, and not very safe or certain, either.”

  Turner looked puzzled but Bobby did not explain. Too imaginative an idea, he felt, to appeal to stolid, matter-of-fact police sergeants, drawing near a pensionable age. In fact, he did not know that it appealed very strongly to him himself.

  “It’s because of this Crayfoot gentleman being missing,” the sergeant remarked. “It makes people take notice of no one having seen the old chap lately. Over at the Rawdon Arms there’s some as were saying last night as maybe they had done each other in. Pub talk, of course.”

  “Pub talk is worth listening to sometimes,” remarked Bobby, a little startled, though, to find thus repeated the theory Dr Maskell had so recently put forward. “Only if there are corpses lying about the forest, surely we ought to have found one by now?”

  “That’s what I told them,” declared Turner mendaciously, for in point of fact no such difficulty had occurred to him. “If they’re both deaders, I said, where are they, I said? But then, they said, how about one being done in and the other done a bunk?”

  “Yes, but which?” Bobby asked.

  “Ah,” said Turner, “there’s that. One of ’em, only which?”

  “Which do you think?” Bobby asked.

  The sergeant pondered, not much used to thinking. For he was of those who prefer that others should perform that tedious and difficult task, communicating to him the result in the shape of orders he had only to obey. Finally, with effort, he came to a decision, and said:

  “Well, sir, in my humble opinion, it’s either one or the other.”

  “Eh?” said Bobby, who had been deep in his own thoughts. “What’s that? Oh, yes, yes, I daresay you’re right. It often is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, greatly pleased by this official approval.

  “Only perhaps it isn’t,” Bobby added. “You can never be sure till you know.”

  “Very true, sir,” agreed the sergeant, greatly impressed by a saying he forthwith adopted as his own and was never tired of repeating feeling indeed that if only he had known it before very likely he would have become an inspector himself.

  “Difficult, though,” Bobby continued, “when you don’t know whether you are after Crayfoot as victim, as murderer, as runaway, or as what. Officially, we have no reason to be interested in your old man of the forest. He may have merely thought he would like a change of residence and smashed up his things before leaving. Or—or anything,” he concluded, somewhat weakly.

  He subsided into silence then, rubbing the tip of his nose, looking very worried, and presently accepting with alacrity the sergeant’s suggestion that he should share the dinner Mrs Turner had managed to let her husband know was ready, in danger of spoiling, and did he, or did he not, intend to waste good food?

  Over the meal Bobby learnt of the general belief in the neighbourhood that something very queer was going on. It was an opinion Bobby fully shared. Apparently there were even rumours in circulation that it was Sir Alfred himself who was responsible for Mr Crayfoot’s disappearance, since otherwise what was he doing in the missing man’s own house and how had he got in? Mrs Turner let it be plainly seen that she disapproved of these stories. One should not, she implied, be too ready to entertain such ideas about a man in Sir Alfred’s position. Now if it had been young Mr Rawdon, for instance, young men being young men, and, in the opinion of the sergeant’s wife, generally up to no good.

  “It is a fact,” Sergeant Turner admitted, “that he’s been hanging about Coop’s cottage a lot, and what’s a young gentleman like him keeping company with a bad character like Coop for? Done a spot of burglary in his time, too, if all tales be true, has Coop,” added the sergeant, “though given it up since he married, along of Mrs Coop and the girls not standing for it.”

  “Do you mean Mr Richard Rawdon and Coop have been seen in company?” Bobby asked.

  “I saw them together with my own eyes,” Mrs Turner declared, and nodded her head twice in confirmation.

  Bobby did not pursue the question of how the good lady could have seen all this with anyone else’s eyes. But he looked worried and began again to rub the tip of his nose with even more energy than before.

  “I didn’t report it, sir,” the sergeant said, a trifle uneasily. “Not being a police matter.”

  “No. No. It wasn’t, was it?” agreed Bobby absently. He asked: “Has Coop ever been charged with burglary?”

  “There’s no record,” the sergeant answered. “He started the talk himself with his boastings when the beer was in. I wouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t true though, in spite of him being the liar he is in a general way.”

  “Mrs Barnes as is Mrs Coop’s nearest neighbour,” added his wife, “saw Mr. Richard yesterday and mentioned it because of him acting so queer like. Walked right up close to the cottage, he did, and then away again. When she came back he was still there a-roaming.”

  “Paid for his beer with a pound note that night, Coop did,” the sergeant continued the story, “and was remarked on, for it’s not so often he has the likes.”

  “If it’s Mary Floyd that he’s hanging round after,” Mrs Turner said suddenly, “and her as decent, respectable, hardworking a girl as you could wish for, only weak with that queer little sister of hers she lets keep away from school, which I do not hold with, but you know what young gentlemen are and likely to turn any girl’s head, which it did ought to be stopped,” and she stopped herself to fix each man in turn with a challenging stare.

  “Not a police matter,” said her husband sternly.

  “Well, it did ought to be and why isn’t it?” came the prompt and unanswerable retort.

  “Was the hermit ever at Coop’s cottage?” Bobby asked. “He was rather friendly with them, wasn’t he?”

  “With Loo Floyd he was pals, like she was with him,” the sergeant agreed. “But he never went anywhere and in a general way he didn’t like it if anyone came to him.”

  “He went to visit people sometimes,” Mrs Turner said. “If they were ill like Morris’s.”

  “Yes,” agreed the sergeant, “but only if you had some of his medicine and he wanted to see how it was acting. There’s many think he knew more about herbs and plants and such-like than all the doctors put together, only he would never tell. Said it was all there in the forest for those who like to look, and what was the good of talking to people like doctors with their heads all stuffed so full of what they learned at school and college there was no room for more. Hated doctors he did, just as they hated him.”

  “Didn’t these Morris people,” Bobby asked, “expect him to come back? They haven’t seen him again, have they?”

  “No,” answered the sergeant. “Jimmy Marriott, what works over Edgeton way, says he saw a fellow making off in a hurry from the old man’s hut and the old man shouting after him and waving a hatchet, like as if he was chasing him off. But that was Wednesday or Thursday, Marriott says, though not sure which, and so could have nothing to do with Mr Crayfoot being missing. And the hermit has been seen since, too, so that’s nothing to count. Unless,” the sergeant added, a trifle uncomfortably, “the man came back again some time.”

  “Yes, there’s that,” agreed Bobby. “Would Marriott know the fellow again?”

  “No, sir, said he was a stranger and he only had a glimpse of him as he bolted down the path like a rabbit with a terrier hot on its tail. Fattish he said, and looked like he came from the city.”

  “Not youngish and darkish with a big nose?” Bobby asked.

  The sergeant shook his head.

  “Did Marriott say anything about the colour of his hair?” Bobby asked again, and again the sergeant shook his head.

  “I think I do remember he said he was a bit bald,” he answered. “Marriott noticed that because the chap hadn’t any hat,” and Bobby supposed that all this meant the stranger was neithe
r Mr Sammy Stone nor yet the elusive Mr Smith.

  The sergeant, noticing that Bobby looked worried, searched his memory and added:

  “Marriott said the chap cleared out in such a hurry he dropped his cigar he was smoking. Marriott picked it up and finished it.”

  Bobby remembered the cigar ash he had noticed in the hut. That was now explained apparently. Not much help there though. He wished very much that he knew who was this stranger thus suddenly appearing and whether he played any part in the affair or was merely an accidental and irrelevant intruder.

  Important to be sure which, but he did not know how he was to find out.

  “I didn’t report it, sir,” Turner said, a little uneasily, for he feared the inspector might think he should have been told of all this before. “I didn’t think much of it, the hermit being like that for chasing ’em off. Nor no complaint received and so not a police matter.”

  “That’s all right,” Bobby told him; for Bobby was never inclined to grumble unnecessarily at subordinates, even though he could be severe enough when there was real neglect of duty.

  Officially, the hermit, his ways and manners, his disappearance if he had disappeared, all that, was not, as the sergeant put it, ‘a police matter’. The only official reason for trying to get in touch with him was to ask, as so many others had been asked, if he knew anything of, or could give any information concerning, the missing Crayfoot.

  “The whole thing’s like looking at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that most likely isn’t there,” Bobby said dispiritedly. “I don’t know whether I’m investigating the murder of the hermit by Crayfoot, or of Crayfoot by the hermit, or of both of them by someone else, or of neither of them by anyone at all.”

  “In my humble opinion,” declared Turner, “Mr Crayfoot’s had a row with his missus and gone off to give her a scare like, and scared she is, and Sir Alfred got his from trying to go after a burglar on his own, instead of letting us know,” and Bobby was inclined to agree that this was the most reasonable and the most likely explanation.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  UNEASY BEES

  SOME CONSIDERABLE TIME had next to be devoted to completing the arrangements for the search of the forest to take place the next day. If it were unsuccessful, then another, more thorough and more extensive, would have to be organized for the following Sunday, when more help would be available and more ground could be covered. Yet Bobby could not help feeling, as he remembered the great, far-stretching green wilderness, vast and distant and secret, he had watched from Dr Maskell’s window, from the windows of Barsley Abbey, that to find there anything the forest wished to keep concealed was but a hopeless task. The sea guards its secrets well. The forest, too.

  He drove away then and came soon to his next place of call, Coop’s Cottage. As he drew up and alighted, Mary came out of the cottage, grave and serene and quiet as he remembered her. A little, he thought, like the forest in which she lived, still and silent and withdrawn, both of them, and watchful, too. Nothing, he fancied, would ever be likely to disturb that deep tranquillity to which her spirit and her surroundings seemed alike attuned. So, he guessed, she had looked when locking up her stepfather in the cellar where at one time she had kept him imprisoned; so, he knew, she had looked when facing threats and anger with the counter-threat of a cauldron of boiling soup.

  Silent, she stood, waiting his approach. When he was near, she said:

  “I thought it was the doctor. I wasn’t sure that he would come, but when I heard your car, I thought he had.”

  “Have you sent for him?” Bobby asked. “I hope your mother isn’t worse?”

  “It wasn’t for mother,” Mary answered. “Peter made us promise not to let her have any more doctor’s stuff. Peter always said doctors were licensed murderers, and policemen ought to get after them instead of worrying other people.”

  “Perhaps he and the doctors are both wrong,” observed Bobby, smiling as he remembered how vehemently Dr Maskell had expressed his opinion and rather wishing for a chance to tell him the hermit’s. But probably Maskell knew it, and in any case had too deep a contempt for any unqualified man’s attainments and beliefs to be annoyed by any opinion he might express. “Oh, well,” he said, “I suppose you don’t feel quite like that or you wouldn’t have sent to ask him to come.”

  “It was mother wanted him for stepfather,” Mary explained. “He has been knocked down by a car. He came in looking dreadful, his face all bleeding and he said he thought his ribs were broken and his back, too, and he wasn’t likely ever to get over it. Mother was frightened.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bobby, very interested.

  He made no further comment, however, as he followed her into the cottage. Inside, in the kitchen, Dick Rawdon was sitting. He did not look too pleased at seeing Bobby, but made no remark, though he nodded a greeting. He had apparently been talking to Mrs Coop. It seemed that Loo had not been home all night and Dick had been offering to go out and look for her. He thought, he said, that the very early morning before dawn would be the most likely time, when Loo might be expected to begin to move after her night’s rest. Mrs Coop was explaining that it would be quite useless. No one could find Loo if she wished to remain hidden. So well she knew the forest she could make herself almost, as it were, a part of it, swallowed up entirely in its immensity.

  “Is it so very unusual? Doesn’t she now and then spend a day all alone, wandering about in the forest?” Bobby asked, a little surprised at the uneasiness Mrs Coop was displaying. “I thought I remembered your telling me that?” he added to Mary, who did not answer.

  “She came back in the night,” Mrs Coop said. “She took a loaf of bread and went away again. Why did she do that?”

  “How did she get in?” Bobby asked.

  “The door wasn’t locked,” Mary said. “It never is when Loo is out.”

  “If she was here last night, she was all right then,” Bobby said.

  “I’ve been telling them that,” Dick said.

  Neither Mrs Coop nor Mary said anything. But Bobby felt that for reasons they did not wish to explain this midnight visit had only increased whatever uneasiness they felt.

  “It’s the bees,” Mrs Coop said abruptly. “They know.”

  “Mother thinks,” Mary explained when Bobby looked at her in a puzzled way, “that the bees know something has happened.”

  “Are you worried, too?” Bobby asked her.

  “Yes,” Mary answered. She said: “Loo came back in the morning first and there was something she had seen that had made her afraid. I asked her what it was, but she would not tell me. She went back into the forest, but she did not want to. She has never been like that before. It was almost more her home than here, and why should she be afraid of her home? I asked her but she would not say, and then she went back although she was afraid.”

  “I’m sure there’s something,” Mrs Coop said. “The bees, too. They expect to be told when there’s a death.”

  “Is there a death?” Bobby asked, startled.

  “Coop came back all over blood,” Mrs Coop said. “He said a car had knocked him down. He said he wasn’t likely to get over it.”

  “He has said that before,” Mary remarked.

  “The bees came,’’ Mrs Coop said. “This morning, flying and flying round and round, past my window. Very early it was. All day they’ve done no work. They know. They always do, but they have to be told as well.”

  “It may be the weather,” Mary said. “Sometimes they all come flying back in a terrible hurry. You can see them trying to get into the hive all at once in such a hurry they block up the entrance. Like a traffic block. They know long before you about the weather. Sometimes there’s nothing you notice yourself and then you read in the paper there’s been electricity storms.”

  “This isn’t the weather, the weather doesn’t frighten Loo,” Mrs Coop said obstinately. “There’s something Loo’s seen and it made her afraid, and the bees know, and they are upset and angry b
ecause no one has told them.”

  “Well, if they know,” Dick interposed, looking half amused, half impressed, “what’s the good of telling them?”

  “They have to be told,” Mrs Coop repeated as obstinately as before. “If they’re not, they’re angry and it brings bad luck. Sometimes they all just fly away and after that you can never keep any any more.”

  “We can’t tell them what we don’t know ourselves,” Mary observed in her tranquil way.

  “They rather went for me,” Dick remarked. “I was near the hives and they all came buzzing round.”

  “I called him in,” Mary explained. “When they are so upset they are quite likely to attack any stranger. You never know what bees are thinking. They won’t let stepfather come near. Once they chased him nearly half a mile and he had to run as hard as he could all the way. But they let him alone if he doesn’t go near. With bees you can never tell.”

  “Do you ever get stung?” Dick asked her curiously.

  “Oh, no,” she answered, surprised at the question.

  “If they go away because they haven’t been told,” Mrs Coop said, “there won’t be any more honey.”

  “No,” agreed Mary. To the two men she explained: “Their honey helps us to live. It is very good of them,” she added gravely.

  “Oh, well,” said Dick, considering this.

  “What I really came to ask you about,” Bobby said, “was whether you had seen or heard anything of the man you call the hermit. I don’t know his name except Peter.”