Adders on the Heath (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  She remounted, stirred him into action, and they had retraced about three hundred yards of their outward route when she had to pull up to allow a lorry to turn out of the gates of another enclosure on to a broad path which led across a bridge on to the common. Before she got going again, she saw the gipsy. He was riding one of the Forest ponies, whether his own property or not Laura was in no way able to determine.

  Laura challenged him.

  “Hey, where do I find mushrooms?”

  The gipsy smiled.

  “Anywhere you like, lady, once you get on to the common. The Forest mushrooms be all about there.” He rode on. Laura knew better than to follow him and attempt to resume conversation. She returned her horse to the stables, satisfied that, whatever was in the wind and whatever he knew or guessed, the gipsy was not prepared to talk.

  “How did you get on?” asked the girl to whom she handed over the horse.

  “Only so-so,” Laura replied. “I came away nearly as wise as I went. No comment. I thought we were going to get somewhere, but we didn’t.”

  “Too bad. Didn’t he say anything at all?—not that I really thought he would. Although he’s no longer a traveller—very few of the Forest gipsies are—he’s a true Romany still, and they don’t give away anything to strangers.”

  “So I believe. He did say one thing, but I couldn’t tell whether he was serious or merely pulling my leg.”

  “If there was likely to be any money involved, you can bet he was serious. The gipsies don’t beg, but you can count them in if there’s any chance of making any sort of a sale.”

  “Well, I suppose you could reckon it as such. He advised me to go and see his old mother. I suppose he wanted me to have my fortune told, and that would mean crossing her palm with silver, if nothing more.”

  “I should go, if I were you, Mrs. Gavin.”

  “You would?”

  “Certainly I would. It’s the only way to get any information out of the gipsies, unless they really get to know you and trust you. Start with two bob, and see how you get on. She’s sure to want more, if she’s really got anything to tell you.”

  “I met Lee again while I was out riding.”

  “Was he on foot? I’ll bet not!”

  “No, he was on a Forest pony.”

  “He’s a genius at catching them. He’s got the knack of talking to them. He can do anything with our horses, too. Never known him have the slightest difficulty with any of them. We had to get rid of a biter last year, but he’d literally eat out of Lee’s hand. It was quite fantastic, if you knew the horse as we did.”

  “Where do I find this old lady?”

  “Oh, she lives with her son and his wife. Go back there, when you’ve got time, and ask Mrs. Lee about her, if Lee is not back home.”

  “Would it be all right to go there after I’ve had my tea? I’m absolutely starving.”

  “Sure it will be all right. His wife’s name is Eliza. She isn’t out of the Forest. She comes from Dorset and he says she misses the travelling, especially when her family comes roving over this way. His mother, old Mrs. Lee, is named Dosha.”

  “I see. Well, thanks very much. I shall certainly seek her out.”

  She returned to the hotel to find Dame Beatrice and the two young men in the television lounge, where most of the guests took tea. It was a large, pleasant room, partly formed by having had an extension built on to the original house. This extension had an enormous window overlooking the garden and it acted as a sun-lounge during the day and could be heavily blacked out when the television set was turned on during the evening.

  As soon as Laura had washed and changed, Denis rang for tea. Richardson asked her how she had enjoyed her ride. The fact that he was still at liberty, and was also free of the Superintendent for a while, had restored his spirits, and he listened attentively while Laura described her afternoon. He shook his head, though, when she said that she had hopes of obtaining information from a gipsy fortune-teller.

  “They just make the stuff up,” he said. “My mother went to one once and paid the usual two bob and was told she had the usual ‘lucky hand’, and then the gipsy said that if my mother would fork out another five shillings there was plenty more she could tell her, all of it very important indeed. Well, of course, Ma didn’t fall for that one, so I’m blessed if the gipsy didn’t pick up her hand again and tell her that she had a mean, cheese-paring nature, and no sympathy or kindness in her heart.”

  Laura laughed. She did not linger over her tea, excused herself to the others, went upstairs for a coat and then strode off to the gipsy’s cottage. Lee was not at home, but Eliza, a dark-skinned girl in a red satin blouse and wearing enormous earrings, asked her to come in when she heard her errand. The cottage was clean and smelt of stew, and old Mrs. Lee was in the room in which the family lived and ate. There was a well-scrubbed kitchen table in the room, supporting a bird-cage containing two budgerigars. Two little boys, bright-eyed and dirty-faced, were having a wrestling match on a brilliant hearthrug made from “pieces” and an elderly woman in a rocking-chair stirred them occasionally with her elastic-sided boot while her brown fingers were busy weaving a basket.

  The girl spoke to her in a mixture of English and Romany, and the old lady, who was dressed in a dark-grey skirt and a black blouse with an orange-coloured scarf at the throat, looked Laura over and, shaking her head, made an assertion in the Romany tongue and, getting up out of the rocking-chair, motioned Laura to take a seat at the table.

  “I’m sorry, lady,” said the girl. “I want she should take you into the front room, but she says there’s no fire in there, and no more there isn’t. Nelson, and you, Goliath, out of the way.” The boys took not the slightest notice of this command, so she picked one up in each arm, bundled them into the garden, and bolted the back door. “That way you will have some peace,” she said.

  Laura took the seat indicated, a wooden chair, the old gipsy sat at right-angles to her in a similar one, and the girl settled herself in the rocking-chair. The fortune-teller extended an earth-coloured palm, Laura laid on it a two-shilling piece, the gipsy bit the money and put it aside, and then reached out for Laura’s hand.

  “Right-handed, keck-handed?” she asked. Laura admitted that she was right-handed by nature, but was ambidextrous in everything except writing. It was her right hand which the gipsy had grasped. She put it down and took Laura’s left hand instead. For a full minute she stared at it, then she reached out for the other hand and silently compared the two. “Yes,” she said at last. “You have a lovely nature. You are faithful and true. You have a good husband. His work often takes him away from home. You have no home of your own, but you share two homes with another woman, a woman much older than yourself. She loves you very much, but she never speaks of loving, either to you or anyone else. You have a beautiful child.”

  Laura, who would have thought this the last adjective to employ in describing her son, laughed loudly.

  “You wouldn’t think so, if you knew him,” she said, “but the rest of what you’ve told me is quite right.”

  “Yes. Why have you come?”

  “You know as well as I do. Two men have been murdered in the Forest and an innocent man has been under suspicion—still is, so far as I know. I want the real culprits brought to book, and you must help me.”

  “Must? I don’t take orders.”

  “It wasn’t an order. It was a cry from the heart. Won’t you help me?”

  “Yes. You have a hold over me.”

  “Indeed, Mrs. Lee? In what way?”

  “You come from the north. I see mist and mountains. I see islands and lakes and the sea. I see an old woman, much like me, who can foretell the future. I see life and death in her eyes.”

  “My grandmother had the Gift. We call it that in the Highlands. What else can you see?”

  The old woman looked at her and held out her hand, dropping Laura’s in order to do so. Laura, who considered that she had received very good value for her
two-shilling piece, produced a pound note. The gipsy shook her head. Laura returned the money to the handbag she had laid upon the table and took out a five-pound note. The old woman drew it towards her.

  “I see you are serious. I knew you were,” she said. “Put the twenty shillings beside it.” Laura obeyed, although she felt that she was being mulcted of more money than the séance was probably worth, but the gipsy’s next words reassured her. “When I have finished, you will give me one or the other. You have a generous heart.”

  “I must have, mustn’t I?” said Laura, grinning. “Can’t I tell you what it is I want to know?”

  “My son has told me what you want to know. You want to know why two men died because of the ponies. If I tell you, you will be in great danger, although it may be not yourself, but your beautiful son.”

  “That will be a change, at any rate.”

  “You still wish to know?”

  “Of course. My second name is Tammas Yownie. Nothing will be allowed to fickle me.”

  The gipsy smiled politely, but did not ask to have the reference explained. She said,

  “You should ask the policeman to explain himself. The ponies are not destroyed on the roads.”

  “So he was right! He said that more were missing than had ever been destroyed on the roads. But why would a rich man need to steal ponies?”

  “Because,” said the gipsy, “he could buy them only in August, September, October, and then he would need to buy too many. Also, they would still have to run in the Forest until he needed them, because he has nowhere to keep them. That is all I can say, and I do not know the man’s name.” Her fingers closed over the five-pound note. “You will know more when the danger threatens, so—beware!”

  “I see. Well, thanks very much, Mrs. Lee.”

  “The stallions roam. Nobody can name the father of a Forest foal. When the mares are in labour, the sires are far afield. They roam. If it was not for their markings, nobody would know whence they come. The gentlemen know their own, but only because of the markings.”

  “Tell me one thing,” said Laura. “Is anything involved besides the ponies?”

  The old woman stood up, claimed the rocking-chair by a gesture to her daughter-in-law, sat down in it, and stowed away the five-pound note. Her daughter-in-law stood by the table beside Laura and then picked up the pound note. Laura nodded. The young woman opened the back door and the two gipsy children rushed in and immediately fell upon one another like a couple of warring fox-cubs. At the same moment the front door opened and Lee came straight through into the room where the others were assembled. He said, straightway, to Laura.

  “Did you get what you wanted, my miss?”

  “I’m not sure,” Laura replied.

  “How much did you pay?”

  “Six pounds, altogether.”

  “Foolish, very foolish,” he said softly. “And what is there in it for me?”

  “You’ll have to ask your women-folk. I’m cleaned right out, I’m afraid.”

  “Good enough. Good night to you, then,” Politely he escorted her to the front door. Laura was surprised to find that it was half-past six by the time she got back to the hotel. She went into the bar, expecting to find the others at their favourite table in the window, but they were not to be seen. She went up to Dame Beatrice’s room and found her employer playing a complicated game of Patience on the little writing table.

  “What-ho, Mrs. Croc., dear!” she said. Dame Beatrice looked up.

  “I hope your mission was more successful than mine,” she said.

  “Your mission?”

  “Yes, I went to visit Mr. and Mrs. Campden-Towne, but the servants reported that they had gone away, leaving no address and giving no indication of a possible date for their return.”

  “Guilty conscience, do you think?”

  “It is not possible to say. How did your session go?”

  Laura described the séance.

  “I can’t say it seems to have been much good, and I did rather feel I’d paid through the nose,” she said, “but I suppose it was rather interesting. The old lady isn’t entirely phoney, but I wish she could have been a little more explicit. Still, we mustn’t grumble. What do you make of it all?”

  “I think we must see the Superintendent again and suggest that he interview your young policeman, and, in view of the gipsy’s warning, my dear Laura, I am in mind to deport you to London, and Hamish too.”

  “Over my dead body!” said Laura stoutly. Dame Beatrice cackled.

  “But your dead body is the one thing I wish to avoid,” she said. “Perhaps we will all go home.”

  “Leaving the case in the air?”

  “The case is not in the air. The gipsy has supplied the last clue. One thing I did while you were gone. I advised the Superintendent of Clive’s disappearance and got him to check the Maidstons’ story. It would never do for harm to come to the child. Once they know the police are suspicious, the boy should be safe enough. The Superintendent has promised, in your favourite phrase, to leave no stone unturned in looking for the child, so I think we may set our minds at rest concerning Clive.”

  Second Interlude

  Discourse of the Unnatural and Vile Conspiracie.

  King James VI of Scotland

  “Cor, look!” said Judy, as she and Syl plodded around a rather ill-equipped indoor arena. “Marlene done five foot four.”

  “Them bars sags,” said her friend. “Don’t suppose it was a bit more than five two and a half, actually. What did you make of that Mrs. Gavin?”

  “Her? Might make the half-mile if she trained.”

  “No, but her herself, I mean.”

  “No idea. All I got was that she was no sort of a square. She’s got what it takes, whatever that is. Sticking her neck out, though.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Look,” said Judy, changing stride as three of the other women athletes challenged their possession of the track, “what I mean is, she’s got on to something. You can’t get away from the fact that them two boys was done to death.”

  “Nothing to do with Mrs. Gavin. Couldn’t have been.”

  “It’s none too healthy for amachers to go about digging into cases of murder. Much better leave it to the police. It’s their job, anyway.”

  “Let’s shove up a couple of hurdles and have a bash. I’m sick of jogging. My heels is getting sore. What do the club have to pay for the honour and privilege of being allowed to use this ruddy old dump?”

  “Dunno. Got to pay our own bus fares to get here, anyway.”

  “Oh, well, it’s only one night in the week. The men gets two.”

  “That’s three nights out of seven for me and Sid. I don’t see why they boys and we girls can’t train together.”

  “The boys would hog the whole track and all the fixings. We wouldn’t get a look in.” They put up three low hurdles and conversation died as they took turns at going over them. Members of the city club which owned the indoor track began drifting in, dancing on their toes and giving obvious signs to the visitors from the Scylla and District that time was up and that they required their premises to themselves.

  “I bet the showers are cold,” said Judy, as they stacked the hurdles and then went off to change.

  “I’m not going to bother. Have a bath when I get home,” said Syl. “I haven’t done enough to get really sweated. An hour’s not much at a time. The bus ride takes longer than that, counting here and back, not to speak of that walk up the lane.”

  They left the premises at a quarter-past eight and had three-quarters of a mile to walk to the bus stop, back in the town. They traversed a narrow, lonely, tree-lined road which had no pavement, and were about half-way along it when they heard the sound of a car. They had been walking side by side, but, as there was scarcely room for two cars to pass, Syl slipped in behind her friend as they approached a bend in the road.

  Suddenly brilliant headlamps glared into the girls’ eyes. Completel
y dazzled, Judy fell into the ditch. The car tore at her. Syl screamed and jumped into the hedge. The car swerved, the brakes squealed, the driver pulled up. The girls picked themselves out of hedge and ditch. A man got out of the car and came up to them.

  “You’re lucky,” he said shortly. “Keep your eyes skinned another…why, hullo! It’s Miss Gammon and Miss Crimble, isn’t it? Sorry, girls, but you were rather all over the road, you know. Any damage done?”

  “I’m wet and muddy, Mr. Towne,” said Judy. “Lucky no more damage.”

  “I’m all over scratches and I’ll bet my nylons have had it,” said Syl. “And we wasn’t all across the road, Mr. Towne.”

  “Oh, well, I’ll take your word for it. Thought any more about what I asked you? The pay’s not bad, you know.”

  “Still thinking,” said Judy. “Well, we’d better be getting along. Catch my death in these wet things.”

  “I’ll give you a lift in my car.”

  “No, thanks all the same. We better keep moving. Anyhow, you ain’t going our way.”

  “Oh, there’s certain to be a gate where I can turn the car. You carry on, and I’ll pick you up and drive you home, if you tell me where you live.”

  “Thanks a lot, but nothing doing. Good night, Mr. Towne. We’ll keep on thinking about your other offer. We might accept if it wasn’t for what happened to you know who.”

  “But, my dear girl, that was nothing to do with me, or with the job they were doing for me. What on earth silly ideas have you got in your heads? Whatever they are, you’d better get rid of ’em pretty damn’ quick! Think it over.”

  “Didn’t mean anything personal, Mr. Towne. You know that. Well, good night again. If you want to turn the car, you’ll have to go near enough up to the sports club place, I reckon.”

  “O.K.” He walked back to his car.