Diabolic Candelabra

by E. R. Punshon

  “No one does,” Mary said, “except Loo. He told her once but she promised not to tell. He hasn’t been here, but then he never does go anywhere.”

  “Do you think it is anything to do with him that is keeping Loo away?” Bobby asked. “Is that why she looked frightened?”

  Neither Mary nor her mother answered. Bobby felt that that was in fact what was troubling them. He asked:

  “If she took a loaf away with her, would it be for herself or for someone else, do you think?”

  “She doesn’t generally take anything to eat,” Mary said. “Sometimes I gave her fruit or honey. She said there was plenty to eat, the forest was full of things to eat. Peter told her about some and some she knew herself. If she took any bread, most likely she gave it all to Henry George or the birds.”

  “Who is Henry George?” asked Dick.

  “A squirrel,” Mary explained. “They are friends.”

  Dick looked bewildered but said nothing. Bobby walked across to the inner door of the kitchen and opened it. A sound of scuffling hurried retreat above told him he had not been mistaken. Mary said to him:

  “It was only stepfather listening. He always does when he can.”

  “Not too bad to get out of bed, then,” Bobby remarked. “Did he really look very badly knocked about?”

  “His face was dreadfully bruised, he could hardly walk,” Mary answered. “He said he didn’t suppose he would get over it. He really was bad,” she added. “He said the car that hit him threw him into the ditch by the side of the road.”

  “I see,” said Bobby. “Well, you might tell him that if he likes to come and see us, he can. Just as he likes, of course. Only if he wants to come at all, he had better be quick about it. Or he may find it’s too late.”

  “I will tell him if you like,” Mary answered, “but I think he heard you and I think you meant him to and that is why you spoke so loudly.”

  Bobby smiled faintly.

  “You are a clever young lady,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she answered. “But I do like everything to be quite simple and plain and straightforward.”

  “If everything were, there would be no job for me,” Bobby said.

  He bade them good-bye then, but when he shook hands with Mrs Coop she held his for a moment and would not leave hold. He guessed she wanted to say something to him and bent down so that she could whisper. Dick had drawn Mary aside and was saying something to her to which she was listening with her habitual gravity. Mrs Coop murmured in a voice only he could catch:

  “Why does that young man come here? The night before last he and Coop, they were whispering together—whispering and muttering together and I heard Coop laugh.”

  Bobby had a feeling that when Coop laughed those who knew him best felt there was probably mischief afoot. He made a few reassuring remarks and then took his leave. That Coop was the burglar interrupted by Sir Alfred and guilty of the shooting, Bobby felt pretty certain. But he had no evidence. It would be difficult to disprove Coop’s story of the car that had knocked him down. No evidence as yet on which an arrest could be made, though observation and inquiry might produce something. An attempt could be made, for instance, to find out if he had been seen at the relevant time in the vicinity of the Crayfoot residence. In the meantime the message Bobby had left for him might have results. That the wicked flee when no man pursues is still as true as ever it was, and if they are left to themselves their own sense of guilt often drives wrongdoers to offer excuses and put forward statements that in the end help to provide the necessary evidence against them.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE SEARCH

  THE SEARCH THAT was carried out the next day had small success. Whatever secret the forest held, it guarded well. Aloof and unconcerned it seemed, untroubled by the noisy trampling, the loud shouting from one group to another, the intrusion into its most hidden glades where seldom had any penetrated before. Traces of picnics in unexpected places, an ancient motor car years before disposed of by running it over a high bank into dense bush, the remnants of a burnt-out caravan remembered as an occasion on which careless holiday-makers had barely escaped with their lives, a brown Homburg felt hat of good quality and little worn, an apparently semi-permanent camp for gipsies or tramps, though it showed no signs of recent occupation, the axe that Bobby had missed from the hermit’s hut and that a boy scout had now found in the heart of a bramble bush, these made up the total of the day’s discoveries. Of the vanished hermit himself, or of the missing Crayfoot, no least trace anywhere.

  Bobby took no part in the search. There were too many things he had to attend to that his absorption in the case had forced him to neglect for the time. He spent the day clearing up such matters, and in the evening drove out to Barsley Forest to see Sergeant Turner and to have a look at the objects found. Turner, it seemed, had always known about the deserted camp which at one time had often been used during the summer by gipsies and tramps. Then there had been some sort of quarrel with the hermit, from whose hut the camp was distant but a bare mile or so.

  “After that, they all cleared out,” Turner explained. “The old man fair put the wind up them. One of the gipsy women came to us. Scared she was. Said there would be murder done. She didn’t explain why, but if you ask me some of her lot had got hold of the story that the old man had a store of gold sovereigns hidden, and he caught them poking about his hut, looking for it, and chased ’em off. With that hatchet of his. What the woman said was that some of them were planning to get back at him and she didn’t want any trouble. So I went along next day just to warn them like. There was no one there. Not a soul. So I asked the hermit. Sitting outside his hut he was, and when I asked about it, all he said was most likely they were running still. So they were, too, in a manner of speaking. Talked about in the neighbourhood it was, how they had been seen making off fast as they could and never came back neither. What the hermit did, only the good Lord knows. Anyhow, whatever it was they didn’t wait for more.”

  “Formidable old boy apparently,” commented Bobby. “He seems to have known a lot and kept it all to himself.”

  “That’s right, sir,” agreed the sergeant. “Let no one know a thing and best not meddled with.”

  “When did this happen?” Bobby asked.

  “Last year,” the sergeant told him; and Bobby said it wasn’t likely there was any connection with recent events, but for additional assurance it would be best to make certain, by a general inquiry, that no strange tramps or gipsies had been reported recently in the neighbourhood.

  As they talked they had been busy packing with great care the hatchet recovered from the brambles near the wrecked and deserted hut, in order to send it to Wakefield for expert examination.

  “Not that I suppose they’ll find much,” Bobby remarked as he applied the final seals, “not after such a long time.”

  “No, sir,” the sergeant agreed, “though you never know. Almost anything those experts are liable to find, anything at all.”

  “So they are, aren’t they?” agreed Bobby in his turn, though not quite sure that this wasn’t a somewhat double-edged compliment.

  “Looked like blood to me, those stains, I mean,” the sergeant went on, and added: “I told Jimmy Marriott, the boy that found it, to come round and there would be a shilling or two for him.”

  “Half-a-crown, I think,” Bobby said. “Worth it.” He added thoughtfully: “A violent old gentleman, rather too fond of swinging that hatchet of his.”

  “Inoffensive if left alone,” the sergeant said. “Only he couldn’t bear visitors, and in especial not doctors or lawyers or journalists. Fair set him raving.”

  “I know he and doctors disliked each other,” Bobby said. “Rivals. Bitter about it, too. But why lawyers specially? Or journalists?”

  “One of the papers started putting in pieces about him,” the sergeant explained. “Very nice pieces, too, but it set him raving when people came to look and brought their cameras with them. We had to bring hi
m in when he started going for them with that hatchet of his. I warned him. Nothing to get mad about, I said. I said anyone who wanted could come and take pictures of me and I wouldn’t turn a hair and why should he, I said. Very nice pictures, too, could be took of me in my garden, as I know, for a nephew of mine done it.”

  “What did he say to that?” Bobby asked.

  “You never knew which way to take him,” answered the sergeant, his good-tempered countenance clouding over. “He might have been wanting to go for me with that hatchet of his from the way he glared at first and then he started to laugh, as if all at once he had seen something funny. Not quite right up here,” explained the sergeant, touching his head significantly, “seeing there was nothing to laugh at.”

  “Nothing at all,” agreed Bobby.

  “No, sir. After that, he always seemed more friendly like. But I had to bring him in because of his taking no notice of a summons over a complaint by some of them he had chased off. He asked very particular and earnest not to be put in a cell, because he said it would drive him mad to be shut up like. I didn’t want to make him more balmy than he was so I took a chance and let him sleep out in the tool-shed with the door wide-open. He had a name for always keeping a promise once he made it, though I reckon I chanced my stripes.”

  “It was a bit of a risk,” agreed Bobby, “but better, I think, than risking making him balmier still.” He gave the sergeant a friendly smile. “No man deserves his stripes,” he said, “unless he is prepared to risk them. Anyhow, it was all right?”

  “Yes, sir. Though I had a bit of a shock when I found the shed empty in the morning. But there he was in the garden, grubbing away at a flower-bed where he said he had found something. Told me a lot, he did. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about plants and herbs and such-like. Surprising things he told me and talked a lot that morning though silent as if dumb with most. It was like he was so used to never talking that once he started he couldn’t stop—like turning on a rusty tap you can’t turn off again. Told me a lot about cancer.”

  “Cancer,” repeated Bobby, startled.

  “Yes, sir. Something he was brewing from roots and flowers and such-like he thought might be a cure once he had it right. That’s why he was so excited over whatever it was he found where he was rooting in my flower-bed. Said it was rare and he had only just noticed it, but it might be just what he wanted to finish off his cure.”

  “What was it?” Bobby asked.

  The sergeant shook his head.

  “I didn’t notice rightly, sir,” he said. “I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “I daresay not,” remarked Bobby. “Could you show me which of your flower-beds it was?”

  “Well, yes, sir,” answered the sergeant, “but I dug it all up last year and laid it down in potatoes when they started to tell us to dig for victory. Cleared out everything in it on the rubbish heap. Potatoes did well, too,” he added with satisfaction. “As fine a crop as ever you saw.”

  “Need potatoes all right,” agreed Bobby. “Need a cure for cancer, too. I wonder if it was any good?”

  “Well, sir,” the sergeant said. “They do say there was Mrs Miller died after taking it.”

  “Not too good,” observed Bobby.

  “No, sir. Only the doctors had given her up and anyhow she had no pain after she started taking the hermit’s stuff. Then there’s Aggie Hunt as well to-day as ever she was, though the hospital said she must have an operation or die for certain. But she took what he gave her and didn’t; and now the doctors say it was all a mistake and she never had cancer at all. And old Mr Morris sticks to it it’s doing him good, but Dr Maskell took on awful and said it was his death he was taking and clear murder, like Harriet Abbott.”

  “Was that someone who died?”

  “Yes. Dr Maskell blamed it on the hermit’s stuff, but the hermit said she hadn’t been let do what he told her, so no fault of his, seeing she didn’t take it proper. So there you are, sir, and hard to tell.”

  “So it is,” agreed Bobby; and wondered if in fact the old man had really hit upon some distillation from herbs and plants that was in some sort a remedy or even a relief in cancer cases. If so, and if the old man could be found and persuaded to give up his secret, he might come to rank among the greatest of human benefactors. An odd thought. One never knew. A pity, he told himself, that doctors weren’t trained in detective work. Then they would know that even the smallest clue presenting itself from even the most humble, the most unlikely quarters, ought to be followed up with the utmost diligence.

  “That’s another grouse he had against the papers,” the sergeant added. “He said someone wrote a book to prove cancer came from using gas for cooking and it ought to be stopped. But the papers wouldn’t notice it because of losing the gas advertising if they did.”

  “Did he think so too, that cooking by gas had something to do with cancer?” Bobby asked.

  “No, sir. Said it hadn’t, but if you thought so, then you were on the right track. He said it could have been followed up and maybe made a success, if only the papers had printed about it instead of being afraid of losing their advertising.”

  “Food for thought,” Bobby remarked. “Do the papers need the advertisers more than the advertisers need the papers? Question for the B.B.C. Brains Trust next week.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, “only would they answer it? Hand-picked, them questions, if you ask me. I wrote up once to ask why men had nipples, that being a puzzle to me and seemingly not needed. But they never took any notice.”

  “Probably broke down under the weight of their own blushes,” Bobby suggested, and then they were interrupted by the arrival of Master Joe Marriott, a nephew of the man who had reported the swift flight from the hermit’s presence of the stranger who in his haste had apparently left behind his hat and abandoned his cigar.

  CHAPTER XXX

  PICTURE OF A HERMIT

  JOE PROVED TO be a bright, intelligent youngster, but had not much to tell. The troop of boy scouts to which he belonged had been allotted a special area to search. This had been divided up between the lads, to each so much, each section carefully marked off by string and stakes, so that not an inch should be missed. The portion allotted to Joe had contained a good many bramble bushes; and in the midst of one of these, so hidden that only sharp eyes would have seen it, he had found the axe. Bobby asked him if he could show them the precise bush. The boy explained that following the instructions of his scout master he had made a circle of stones around it and consequently would be able to point it out as and when required. Bobby arranged to meet him early next morning, soon after dawn, so that school should not be interfered with, and then sent him off with half a crown and a promise of another shilling for the morrow.

  The sergeant very plainly thought this would be a waste of time, since surely the exact spot where the hatchet had been hidden was of no importance. But Bobby said you never knew. He said:

  “You know I’ve heard a lot about the hermit and I know his name was Peter, but no one seems to know his other name and you seem to be about the only person he has ever talked to. Except little Loo Floyd. What sort of idea did you get of him?”

  The sergeant looked worried. Ideas were not much in his line. Then with relief he remembered a comment his wife had made.

  “Well, sir, he did give you the idea that he hadn’t had a bath since the one they gave him when he was born. Fair scrape the dirt off the back of his neck with a knife, so you could.”

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Bobby observed, though it had hardly been the sort of idea he meant. “Seems to go with his reputation for always keeping his word.”

  The sergeant blinked, wholly unable to see any connection between the lack of a bath and keeping promises.

  “What I meant more,” Bobby continued, “was how did he strike you as a man?”

  The sergeant perpended.

  “Queer like,” he pronounced finally.

  Bobby decided the going w
as too difficult and gave it up. The sergeant seemed to feel he was disappointed and made a fresh effort.

  “What he said was as flowers and herbs were good and birds and animals did no harm, but men and women were bad in the lump, especially women. Birds and plants and animals never murdered or lied or betrayed each other like men and women did, he said, especially women.”

  “Bit of a misanthrope and misogynist as well,” commented Bobby.

  The sergeant shook his head in a non-committal way, thinking, though, how fine it was to be educated and know such nice long rolling words. Then, to be on the safe side with a superior officer, he said:

  “That’s right. That’s him, that is.”

  “Did you think he talked like an educated man?” Bobby asked.

  The sergeant shook this time not so much a non-committal as a doubtful head. He began to look worried. He was so evidently thinking so hard that Bobby waited, hoping something might come of it. Presently he said:

  “Now you mention it, sir, maybe it was that worried me and the wife, too. What we thought was it was all along of him being not quite right in the head. But maybe it was because of him being a gentleman.”

  “Interesting,” said Bobby. “Very.”

  “Once a gentleman, always a gentleman,” said the sergeant.

  “Something in that,” agreed Bobby, much impressed by this aphorism so unexpectedly offered.

  “Only why should a gentleman go living like that?” inquired the sergeant and answered his own question by adding thoughtfully: “But there, I reckon the gentry can go dotty just like anyone else.”

  “Or even more,” agreed Bobby; and grew silent, as he tried to put together in his mind the picture there forming of the forest recluse.

  A contradictory picture his impressions seemed to present. Passionate, eager, and recklessly impatient, or why these sudden fierce outbursts of anger that seemed to flare up in him so readily? Careful, patient, and gentle, or else how could he have secured this wide, intimate knowledge he seemed to possess of the life of the forest? A fugitive from his fellow men he seemed to condemn and despise, and yet not insensible to human contacts as shown by his friendship with little Loo and by that outburst of chatter to the sergeant in which Bobby found something pathetic, something of humanity breaking through a crust of misanthropy and long-maintained reserve. An educated man, that is one who owed his knowledge and training to books and teaching, and yet one who while still carrying on his studies had cut himself off entirely from all such aids. Living in physical dirt and squalor, and yet apparently preserving a mental refinement which made him regard a promise given as sacred. Possessed of such strange powers as could set a band of gipsies into panic-stricken flight, but yet falling back on the flourishings of an old hatchet wherewith to frighten away unwanted, unwelcome visitors.