Diabolic Candelabra

by E. R. Punshon

  “Not the murderer of his victim, surely?” Olive interposed.

  “Maskell’s not an ordinary type,” Bobby answered. “You can never tell. Then there’s the lawyer and the story of his hat, but the explanation he gives is—well, acceptable. I don’t happen to believe it, but I can’t prove anything. The cigar business is suggestive, but again proves nothing. My own idea is that he was trying to find out on his own who the old man really was—ex-footman or rightful baronet. Meant to play his own hand if he could make sure. Most likely with a twitching nose for the El Grecos as well. A small fortune waiting to be picked up, those El Grecos—and either footman or baronet might have them. Coop was certainly the burglar that night at the Crayfoots’. He heard the nephew come and lay low. Then he heard him go and tried to get away himself, but ran straight into uncle’s arms. Which suggests he had some idea of what was going on and an eye on the paintings for himself. Or he may have been hired by someone else. But until we can get a statement from Sir Alfred there’s not much we can do. The attack Coop made shows he is ready enough to kill, though probably only when worked up to it by panic. What we do know is that he and Dick Rawdon have been seen talking and we don’t know what about. Maybe Dick was hiring him for a job—burglary. Come next to Mary Floyd—”

  “I simply won’t believe—” interrupted Olive with some heat, but Bobby shook his head at her.

  “It doesn’t matter what you or I believe,” he said. “We’ve got to know, not believe. And it’s no good saying she’s a girl and girls don’t kill people, because sometimes they do. Remember Lizzie Borden.”

  “She was acquitted,” Olive retorted.

  “Yes, I forgot that,” admitted Bobby. “And I don’t know that it matters. Acquittal doesn’t always mean innocence. Look at—but I had better keep off slander. Anyhow, if you remember, we both heard Mary and her mother say there was only one way to save Loo, only one way to stop the old man’s encouragement of Loo’s craze for wandering in the forest. Perhaps there was only one way and perhaps they took it.”

  “Oh, Bobby, don’t,” Olive said. “It’s not possible,” she said and looked deeply troubled.

  “Then there’s Loo,” Bobby went on. “She’s quite incalculable, but it is a fact that she alone knew where the old man’s body was hidden. How did she know it?”

  Olive did not answer and Bobby went on:

  “What I said about Mary applies to her mother as well.” He paused, and after a long silence Olive made no attempt to interrupt, he said slowly: “One has to think of everything, consider everything. Nothing is impossible when you are dealing with men and women.”

  CHAPTER XLI

  BOGGART’S HOLE

  OLIVE LOOKED AT the clock.

  “It’s nearly three,” she said. “We had better get to bed.”

  “I must go out instead,” Bobby answered; and when Olive looked a question, but did not speak: “To Boggart’s Hole,” he said.

  “To watch the trap close?” she asked. “Oh, must you?” He did not answer, for he knew she knew already the reply. She said: “Not alone? Bobby, if you’re right, not alone. You’ll take some of the men with you?”

  “I’ll knock up Sergeant Turner and take him along,” Bobby promised. “Poor chap. He won’t like it. Resign on the spot most likely if he could.”

  Olive went to make him a small packet of sandwiches and to fill a thermos flask. Years before, when he had been a raw beginner, a senior man had warned Bobby that a good detective never forgot his sandwiches, advice Bobby had always remembered for himself and had on occasion passed on to others. He provided himself, too, with a revolver. But though he put some cartridges in his pocket he did not load the weapon. A policeman’s business is not to kill, but to bring before the Law those it is the affair of the Law to judge, either to condemn or to set free. Then he started off and, according to his promise, stopped at Sergeant Turner’s house, where he found that worthy, not only in bed, as was natural at that hour, but also with a temperature and something more than a threat of approaching influenza.

  So it was alone that Bobby drove through the night, slowly and with caution, for blackout regulations had to be observed and indeed once he heard a ’plane overhead. It might be an enemy ’plane, he supposed, and he remembered how old John Bright had cried out during the Crimean war that almost could be heard above the land the beating of the wings of the angel of death. Well, that phrase had justified itself now in unexpected ways. He was too far away to hear the sirens if they went, but there were no searchlights jumping to and fro about the sky, no flares floating down, no distant clamour of the guns. So he continued on his way and coming presently to a convenient spot, he left his car and alighted.

  Switching on now and then the strong electric torch he carried he made sure as best he could that he was on the right path. Presently he thought that he was at or near the spot where he and Olive had paused that Sunday for a while by the unprotected edge of the old, deserted quarry. He wondered if he could assure himself of his position by finding that tree on which he remembered showing Olive bruises caused by what seemed the pressure of a rope.

  A hopeless task in the dark, he decided; and he drew aside under bushes that gave some shelter, but not much, against the heavy, falling dew. He had brought a rug with him from his car, as Olive had instructed him to be sure to do, but he did not find it much protection. Indeed its clammy folds seemed only to serve to collect tiny pools of dew and to intensify the chill dampness of this black hour before daybreak.

  He had had no sleep. No wonder that he dozed in spite of chill and damp and his own high-keyed expectations. He woke, startled into consciousness by an approaching sound, that of cautious steps nearby. It was still dark, but in the east a faint hint was showing of a promise of the light to come. He strained his eyes to see whose were the footsteps that had roused him. He could distinguish nothing save vague shadows near that were those of trees. A tiny scratching sound came, a tiny light sprang up, magnified so by contrast with the surrounding darkness that it flamed like a torch, and by that struck match he saw clearly the face of Mary Floyd. The next moment the light had vanished again, and she also into darkness into which it was hopeless to attempt to follow her. He wondered if she had seen or guessed his presence. Impossible to tell and yet he did not think she had, for the circle of light made by her match had been but small, and for himself he did not think he had made any movement. Anyhow, now she had gone; and nothing for him to do but to renew his patient vigil.

  Again he strained his eyes, his ears. The light was stronger now, or, rather, the darkness was less intense. The trees nearby were beginning to appear as trees, and not merely as splashes of deeper shadow in the night. Not but that beneath them the night still lay as blackly as ever. He thought he heard a noise behind, a tiny noise, some creature of the forest returning to its lair or about to start out upon its daily search for food. A low, quickly ended chattering told him it was a squirrel and made him think of Loo. When he looked again towards the quarry, he was just able to distinguish a figure, whether of man or woman he could not tell, outlined there by the edge of the quarry against the eastern sky where rays of the sun were beginning to dart upwards, like fingers searching to release the earth from the dominion of the night.

  He got to his feet and began to move forward, slowly, cautiously. In that dim half light with the day not yet come and the night still lingering, one incautious step, one stride too far forward, one unlucky slip, and a fall of fifty feet clear was waiting. His attention was on where he trod and when he paused to look again that figure he had seen, or thought he saw, by the quarry’s very brink, was no longer there. Vanished completely and without sound, so that he was half inclined to think he had been tricked by his own imagination. Difficult to be sure with trees and shadows all around all indistinguishable. He found he was standing now on the very edge of the quarry. Below him lay a pit of unimaginable blackness, as though he stared down into the very heart of the night. Behind him a breath o
f wind that had sprung up with the coming of the dawn moved almost imperceptibly through the bushes and the trees. In front the light of the coming day grew stronger. For prudence sake, since here the ground sloped to the quarry’s edge and was crumbly and unsafe, Bobby lay down and wriggled forward on his face and belly, so that he could look over the brink of the quarry into that tremendous pit of night.

  Half-way down the sheer descent he could distinguish, as he had half-expected, a small faint light, less than a light, the reflected glow perhaps of a reflected glow. Perceptible but no more. Strange to see that tiny glow there, half-way down the face of a precipice. He took his torch from his pocket and threw the beam on the bare cliff-like wall of naked stone that stretched for a sheer fifty feet up and down without so much as a crack or a crevice or patch of moss to afford foothold or handhold save for one thin ledge on which a few lost shrubs and a stunted tree had somehow managed to find sustenance for growth.

  Impossible to reach that ledge though, without at least some aid of rope or ladder whereof his torch showed no sign.

  Though he was not sure he thought he could distinguish what seemed a faint, distant, muffled sound of voices. Another and a nearer sound made him look round. Loo was at his side, Henry George on her shoulder, his small beady eyes fixed malignantly on Bobby. Loo said:

  “They are down there. I think we ought to leave them there, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER XLII

  HIDDEN LADDER

  BOBBY KNEW WELL what care was needed in talking to Loo if her confidence were to be won, if she were not to slip away into those recesses of the forest she knew so thoroughly, where she seemed as much at home as any spirit of the forest and the trees, any faun or dryad of ancient tale and legend. So he gave her merely a casual glance, made no answer beyond a careless, uninterested ‘Hullo, Loo’ and then resumed his contemplation of the pit below as if forgetting she was there. After a time she said:

  “Peter said I must never tell, never.”

  “Tell what?” Bobby asked. “How’s Henry George?”

  “Very well indeed. Thank you so much for asking,” replied Loo primly; and Henry George, who always seemed to know when his name was mentioned, chattered what was very clearly meant as ‘Mind your own business’.

  “I don’t think Henry George likes me,” Bobby observed, and Henry George endorsed this opinion by more chatter of evidently deliberate and intentional insult.

  “Be quiet,” Loo rebuked him; whereupon he jumped down from her shoulder and ran up a nearby tree, wherefrom, perched on a branch, he watched them from small, malignant eyes. “I’m sorry he is so rude,” Loo apologized, “and I try to teach him to be better, but it’s very difficult. He always hates everyone except me, because he thinks they want to put him back in a trap. He was caught in one when I found him and took him out.”

  “Is it you,” Bobby asked, remembering something, “who sets off the rabbit traps?”

  “When I find them, I do,” she answered. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Bobby did not attempt to reply to this searching question. Instead he said:

  “Down there, over the edge, is where Peter used to go sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “He said I wasn’t ever to tell,” Loo answered. “He said I was to promise I never would and a promise was ‘poinonour’, so everyone always had to keep it.”

  “I wish they always did,” Bobby remarked. “‘Poinonour’—point of honour,” he translated. “Well, what’s that?”

  “It’s awfully, tremendous important,” Loo told him, rather evading the point, however.

  “There’s someone down there now, I think,” Bobby observed, “but how did they manage to get down I mean? Even Henry George couldn’t by himself. Much too steep.”

  “Peter had a ladder,” Loo explained. “He climbed down and then he took it inside with him. I saw a man climb down just now. He had a ladder, too. I took it away. Peter said I must and then tell him. But I can’t now, can I? Now he’s gone to be dead in the tree.”

  “How did you know he was there?” Bobby asked.

  “That was Henry George,” she answered. “He told me.”

  “Well, who told him?” Bobby said, but this time got no answer and Loo only looked puzzled.

  Then she said:

  “I expect it was fairies.”

  This, however, was so clearly an effort of the imagination that Bobby did not attempt to pursue the subject. Instead he asked:

  “Who was the man you saw this morning?” And when Loo did not answer, he added: “Was it Mr Dick?”

  But Loo was still silent and he guessed she did not wish to answer. Useless to try to press her and he had no time to coax. He said instead: “What did you do with the ladder when you took it away? Did you hide it somewhere? What was it made of? Rope? Will you show me where you put it?”

  “No,” said Loo.

  It was uncompromising and left Bobby wondering what to do next.

  “I don’t think that’s very nice of you,” he protested. “If I hid anything anywhere, I would always show you.”

  But even this moving appeal failed, though Loo did so far relax as to answer:

  “Peter said I wasn’t to, not ever.”

  “Well, I’ve got to get down there somehow,” Bobby explained, and Loo’s uninterested expression showed clearly that this was his affair and nothing to do with her.

  They were both silent then for a time. Loo’s attention plainly wandered. Bobby found himself wondering what was going on there beneath their feet, in this secret cave that had for so long been the old hermit’s second dwelling. At any rate no one could leave it now without his knowledge. Henry George descended from his branch and sat at the foot of the tree, evidently prepared to welcome any attempt at appeasement. Bobby said presently:

  “Have you seen Mary? I have.”

  Loo gave a low laugh, a laugh so natural, so happy, so childlike, that Bobby was startled, for he had come to think of Loo more as a wanderer from some remote spirit world of her own than as human child.

  “She’s trying to find me,” Loo gurgled, “but she never can, no one can, not unless I want them to.”

  Evidently she had no intention of being found just now. Abruptly she vanished from his side. The moment before she had been sitting quietly there and now in a moment she had flashed away, and Henry George with her. Perhaps she had gone to find Mary herself or perhaps she wanted to be sure of not being found. Bobby returned to the problem of what to do next. It was clearly impossible to reach the mouth of the cave without a ladder or rope of some kind. Precautions would have to be taken, too, since the vanished Loo might be somewhere in the vicinity, still on the look out and ready to play again her old trick of removing any such rope or ladder. Thanks to the sergeant’s inopportune attack of influenza—thanks also to his own impatience and too great self-confidence as he now ruefully admitted—Bobby was alone. No one he could leave on guard when he made the descent he contemplated. He supposed he ought to have rung up headquarters to send help, but at the time it had seemed desirable to avoid delay. Nor had he wished to risk a premature alarm by summoning men to whom he would have had no opportunity of giving the necessary instructions and explaining the need for care and concealment.

  The sun was up now, the light stronger. Peering down over the precipitous edge of the quarry, Bobby could see plainly the narrow ledge of rock on which at one end grew a few bushes and a stunted tree. Without satisfaction, he observed that a rope, dropped from where he lay, from the only spot available since only here grew a tree strong enough to hold securely rope or ladder made fast to it, would fall on that end of the ledge where it jutted first from the quarry face and was scarce wide enough to afford foothold.

  “If the old boy alighted there—and he must have done—and wriggled along that narrow edge of rock, he had Blondin beaten at his own game,” Bobby told himself uncomfortably; and then told himself again that perhaps the ledge was wider than it looked and at any rate, if an old man had been able
to use it, then so could he.

  At the farther and wider end of the ledge there grew the few bushes and the stunted tree that veiled, he supposed, the entrance to the secret cave whose existence he felt was now certain. The drop from the ledge to the floor of the quarry was something under twenty feet. An active man, under the spur of necessity, could risk that, especially as the fall would be broken by undergrowth coming close up to the foot of the cliff. A torn shirt or belt or something of the sort tied round the stunted tree on the ledge would further diminish the distance of the drop, and Bobby wondered why Loo’s trick of the removal of the means used in the descent should seem so effective. Not difficult, Bobby thought, for anyone so trapped in the cave to effect an escape.

  Presumably the hermit had preserved the secret of this hidden habitation of his by using for access some sort of ladder-like contrivance he made fast to the tree up here and could at will disengage from below. Then he could use the same means for effecting a descent to the quarry floor, disengaging it afterwards in the same way, and observing simple precautions to avoid making any noticeable track or path.

  Bobby rubbed the tip of his nose a little ruefully as he remembered that when he originally noticed the bruised tree, his not very intelligent comment had been ‘Not bird’s-nesting’, and then had promptly forgotten all about it. At the time, certainly, there had been no reason for him to be on the watch for any suspicious signs, but he felt the incident need not have passed as completely as it had done from his recollection.