Adders on the Heath (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Come on,” said Syl, beginning to step out.

  “Prepared to sell your honour dearly, dearie?” asked Judy, falling in behind her.

  “Don’t know what you mean. Old Towne ain’t that sort.”

  “I’ll tell you what sort he is. He’s a stinking murderer. I reckon he was out to get us. That swerve was no accident; no, nor it wasn’t careless driving, neither. And he isn’t sozzled. I got a very keen nose for that sort of thing, and there wasn’t no smell to his breath.”

  “You’re cuckoo! Why would he want to get us? We ain’t done nothing!”

  “We’ve turned down that offer to watch out for them roaming ponies, haven’t we?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I don’t exactly know. What say we crash the hedge? I don’t want him having another go at us. He might be lucky the next time.”

  “You got the jitters? Well, all right then, if you want to. One thing, I’m in such a perishing mess already, I can’t look much worse than I do. Hope it’s not that fresh conductor-boy on the bus. If it is, he’s bound to pass remarks. He always do, give ’im half a chance!”

  “Half a mo! There’s a gate a little way ahead. Let’s trot. He’ll be back any minute.”

  They trotted, found the gate and tumbled over it. They walked uncertainly on the rough ground but were immediately screened from the road by a high hedge of hawthorns.

  “Duck down, and let him go by,” said Syl, as they caught the sound of a car. It passed them at less than twenty miles an hour as they crouched in the shadow of the hedge.

  “Looking for us,” said Judy. “We can get on now.” They hurried on as fast as they could. “Don’t suppose he’ll turn the car again. Let’s get back on to the road. It’s quicker that way. Cor! These thorns!”

  “Don’t try it. We’ll get torn to pieces. There’s sure to be another gate further on.”

  The bus conductor proved to be not the youth they dreaded, but a cultured, quiet West Indian, who might have been surprised by their dishevelled appearance, but who was far too courteous to appear to notice it. The bus stopped at the comer of Judy’s road. Syl had further to walk.

  “Come in our house. Mum’ll give us a hot drink. Then me and my dad’ll see you home,” said Judy kindly.

  “Shall you tell them about Mr. Towne?”

  “I better. Towne’ll guess we will, anyway, and it’s protection to tell. He won’t dare do nothing to us if he thinks other people know.”

  “You don’t really think he done it on purpose, do you? Tried to run us down, I mean.”

  “I’m not taking any chances, I know that. I shan’t go to the stadium any more for a bit. I’m going to stay in the bright lights and walk on a proper pavement. What’s more, I’m going to phone that Mrs. Gavin in the morning. The shop steward has arranged so we girls can phone up our hair appointments in the tea-breaks, and this is a damn sight more important than a hair-do, although I shall tell Len Parker that’s what I want the phone for.”

  “Nothing’s more important than a hair-do, but you’re lucky to be able to phone from the factory. I can just see our old cat’s face if anybody suggested it to her!”

  There was a short silence until Judy said,

  “I s’pose you noticed he cottoned on at once when I said (naming no names) about Bert Colnbrook and that there Bunt? He didn’t need no telling what I meant.”

  “I don’t think that’s much to go on. You sure your mum won’t mind if I come in for half a tick? I don’t want to go home alone.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hamish Rides Again

  Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

  Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,

  Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

  The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

  Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

  William Wordsworth

  Laura was surprised and pleased when she took the telephone call at half-past ten on the following morning. It was only by chance that she had stayed in the hotel, for the young men had invited her to accompany them to Christchurch and she had debated with herself as to whether she should go. Dame Beatrice had urged it and this had released Laura’s natural fund of obstinacy. When the post arrived, however, she felt that she had done well. A letter from her son Hamish clinched the matter and reinforced her decision.

  “Coming down for the week-end,” wrote Hamish. “I thought I was to ride a New Forest pony, but you have said no more about it, so I am going to gate-crash you. Daddy took me out on Rotten Row. It is rotten all right and I saw lots of ladies. None of them could really ride.”

  Laura passed the letter over to Dame Beatrice, who chuckled over it and remarked that Hamish was a braw wee laddie. Laura winced, and proferred the dictum that braw wee laddies were the curse of the universe.

  “I am awful at Latin,” Dame Beatrice read aloud, “and the vicar says I am terrible at Greek, so I shall study Russian when I go to school next autumn, also Chinese and American, with an eye to my future, so I am sure to be all right except for an unlucky atomic bomb or two. You will be dead by then, so there is no need for you to worry. Love, Hamish. P.S. School will be good. Shall exterminate the masters.”

  “Good Lord!” said Laura. “Why did I have to bear and rear such a monster?”

  “Hamish shows a fund of common sense well beyond his years,” said Dame Beatrice. “The child has put the present-day problem in a nutshell. We shall survive or we shall not. It is just as simple as that. When do you expect him to arrive?”

  “Goodness knows! Anyway, he’s quite capable of finding his way to this hotel, whether Gavin is with him or not. What really interests me is not Hamish but these girls who’ve telephoned me.”

  “Yes?”

  “They think they’ve been attacked. They say that Campden-Towne’s car tried to run them down. It could be possible, I suppose. Of course, they had been got at to take the place of Colnbrook and Bunt and had turned the issue down. So much I gathered from the talk I had with them when I met them on the common. There is something beyond the actual theft of those ponies, you know.”

  “I know it well, child, but, so far, we do not know what it is. Have you any ideas on the subject?”

  “So far, no,” said Laura regretfully.

  “Well, we await the arrival of your son. I must say that I enjoy the company of Hamish. He is a most refreshing child.”

  “He gives me cold feet,” said Laura. “I hate the sight of him.”

  That this was not altogether a misjudged view of the situation was apparent when Hamish, lugging a medium-sized suitcase, appeared at the hotel on the following morning.

  “I’ve come,” he announced at the office window, “because my mother needs help. Have I a bedroom or something?”

  “What name?” asked the office, a trifle suspicious of the youthful, would-be guest.

  “Gavin, of course. You’ve a Mrs. Gavin staying here, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, we have. Are you her son?”

  “What else? My key, please.” The office dangled the key, but did not hand it over. “And another thing,” said Hamish, “I don’t want early morning tea. It vitiates the membranes. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No, indeed. Thank you for the information,” said the office, inwardly amused.

  “Oh, somebody has to take the mickey out of someone, so you’ve done it out of me,” said Hamish, tolerantly, “but I believe in my own beliefs. Somebody has to stand up for these angry young men, you know. They can hardly be expected to stand up for themselves, can they? For one thing, you have to know how to do Judo, or, even better, to have all those Commando tactics. Personally, I always find it better to jump on a person’s feet and then uppercut him, if he tries any funny business. Did you ever try that?”

  “Your key,” said the office, defeated. Hamish accepted the key in an attitude of doubt, and then foiled the intention
of the porter to carry his bag upstairs.

  “I don’t tip,” he said, “so I can’t expect you to worry.”

  “Part of my duties, sir,” said Barney.

  “You shouldn’t have to wait on children, anyway.”

  “I assure you it’s a pleasure, sir, but just as you wish.”

  “All right. I’ll carry it upstairs myself. You see, I shall be an Independent when I’m an M.P.”

  “The Independents are a small body, speaking numerically, sir.”

  “Little snow, big snow. Big snow, little snow,” said Hamish. “I think that’s a North American Indian proverb, but, whether it is or is not, it contains a beautiful and fundamental truth.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If iddy is umpty, then what is iddy umpty iddy?” asked Hamish.

  “You’re too young for girls at your age,” said the porter, hitting back, “and you need a wash and brush up, sir, before you meet your mother.”

  Hamish studied him.

  “Do you know, I think you’ve won,” he said. “All boys are dirty. I am a boy, therefore I am dirty. Any argument about that?”

  “Certainly not, sir,” said the porter. “That would make a syllogism, no doubt.”

  “Yes, you have won,” said Hamish. “Right. I’ll take a bath. I suppose it isn’t an extra?”

  “We like the guests to be clean and neat about the place, sir. There is, therefore, no charge for a bath.”

  Hamish regarded his vanishing back with reverence. Laura regarded her son less affectionately, when sleek, clean, and shining, he presented himself before her.

  “Well,” she said, “what have you come for?”

  “To ask why I can’t go to school in January. I’ve read all about it. Frozen wash-basins, so that you can’t wash, dreadful grub, so you think you’re in a foreign prison, underground form-rooms hundreds of degrees below zero, sadistic prefects…”

  “They can’t be sadistic enough to suit me,” said Laura.

  “It sounds a most inviting prospect,” said Dame Beatrice, producing, as though out of a hat, chocolates, potato crisps, and liquorice all-sorts.

  “You know,” said Hamish, reaching out for the goodies, “you’re the only person who really understands me, Mrs. Dame.”

  “But, back to the subject of those two girls,” said Laura to her employer, “what do you think we ought to do?”

  “The one thing we cannot do is to take Mr. Towne to court. The car was large, the lane is very narrow, there was a bend around which he could not possibly have seen the girls approaching, and the evidence against him rests on their word alone.”

  “Well, then, what can we do?”

  “At present, nothing. Hamish would like his lunch early, then he can have a rest before you hire a pony for him.”

  “He’s the complete human cormorant, certainly,” Laura agreed, looking at her son with the fascination of horror. “All right. I’ll push him into the dining-room while we have a civilised drink and then, as you say, he can sit still for a bit while we have our lunch. I’d better ring up the stables right away.”

  “You do just that, and hurry up about it,” said Hamish. Laura clouted him, a gesture which he accepted with the greatest of sang-froid.

  “May I have a tomato juice, please?” he asked. “One gave up lemonade when one was seven. With grandfather in Scotland I was allowed a dash of whisky. He said new dogs learn old tricks, whereas old dogs don’t learn new tricks. Interesting, and not altogether true. Look at politicians.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Laura. “Go and get yourself that tomato juice and then for goodness’ sake have your lunch.”

  “Will they serve me in the bar? I shouldn’t wish to be embarrassed by a refusal because I’m under eighteen.”

  Laura went out and returned with the tomato juice. Hamish gulped it down and then headed for the dining-room. Laura sighed. Dame Beatrice cackled.

  “You will trust him to ride alone, after the gipsy’s warning?” she asked. Laura looked surprised.

  “Did you never read Mr. P. G. Wodehouse on the subject of the page-boy Harold and the chance of his being bitten by a snake?” she demanded.

  “I don’t think I ever did.”

  “Well, when Jeeves’s views were canvassed, he contended that, in such an emergency, his anxiety would be entirely for the snake. If Hamish runs into trouble, my anxiety will be entirely for the other person.”

  Laura accompanied her son to the riding-stables at half-past two, saw him mounted, and then walked back to the hotel, but not before he had asked her to tell him the number of the car which had tried to run down the two girls. They knew it, and had given it to her over the telephone. Laura, who knew that she would be plagued by Hamish for days if she did not repeat it to him, confided it hastily, fairly sure that he would forget it once that his curiosity was satisfied.

  Hamish owed his almost boundless self-confidence and his overt personality to two factors. One of these was his heredity. Neither Laura nor Detective Chief-Inspector Gavin lacked personality. The other factor was that everything the child had been taught had been taught him extremely well. He was, at the age of ten, a daring and accomplished diver and swimmer, his batting and fielding were, for his age, first class, and he rode like a prince. He was a tall boy, extremely well built and yet also graceful. He had given up dancing classes (at his own urgent request) and was learning judo, which Laura much preferred to boxing, and the piano, which he intended to give up in favour of the organ, which made, he said, a great deal more noise.

  His estimate of his prowess at Greek and Latin was more modest than was justified by the facts. Like most intelligent children of his age, he learned easily and had no objection to being taught. Besides, he got on well with the scholarly, kindly vicar and showed him always his best side. Laura and Hamish themselves were in conflict only because both enjoyed the fight for power. Laura respected her son, and in her he found an opponent worthy of his steel.

  “She leaves me alone. I can manage my own affairs,” he had said, at the age of seven, to his father. “I suppose not many mothers are like that.”

  “She leaves me alone. I am allowed to manage my own affairs,” Gavin had replied. “Very few wives, and even fewer mothers, are capable of so much self-control.”

  “So it ought to be thank God kneeling for a good woman’s love. I’m not so sure that she exactly loves us, you know.”

  “Well, it’s probably a bit difficult,” Gavin had said, with a grin. Father and son understood one another perfectly, a fact which Laura recognised with a mixture of irritation and gratitude.

  Hamish, on this occasion dismissing all thoughts of his mother, rode the pony at an easy pace on to the Lawn. There were a number of the Forest ponies about, but they took not the slightest notice of him or of his mount, but continued their quiet grazing. Hamish reined in his pony and studied them before he moved on. He was following a narrow path, without being on it, which led, between a ditch and the open grassland, straight across the Lawn towards some woods.

  He skirted the woods when he came to them, and branched off to the left towards a rough, almost unmade road. Without his knowledge, he was on the track which led to Campden-Towne’s house. He kept his pony on the grass, but, hoping that the road would lead to something interesting, he followed its course. The pony plodded on until Hamish decided upon a gallop. This soon ate up a couple of hundred yards of the flat but rather uneven surface of the ground and brought them on to the common, but at a point where the rough road crossed a bridge which Richardson would have recognised.

  Hamish, always interested in streams, rode on to the bridge, dismounted, slung the reins over his arm and walked the pony to the parapet so that they could look at the running water. A toot on the horn of a car caused the boy to look round. A large limousine drew up and the driver leaned out.

  “You’re trespassing here,” he said. “This is a private road.”

  Hamish raised his cap.

  “I�
��m extremely sorry,” he said. “Do you mind if I just go on? I haven’t ridden on your road until now.”

  “Oh, carry on,” said the man ungraciously, “but remember that, once you’ve crossed the bridge, you must take yourself off on to the heath. I don’t have roads made up at my own expense for any casual strangers to make use of.”

  “Quite,” agreed Hamish. “I do see your point. That’s a very good car you have there, sir. A Kent number, I believe.” He stared hard at the number plate, to the man’s obvious annoyance.

  “Oh, go and write down some train numbers, can’t you?” he snarled. “Now get along with you.”

  Hamish mounted his pony, raised his riding crop in an ironic gesture unusual, perhaps, in so young a boy, and rode on. The car, imitating its owner’s angry snarl, drove off. When it had rounded the bend, Hamish solemnly recited to himself its number and then remarked to the pony that it was the car which had attempted to run down two girls. As soon as he had crossed the bridge, he rode off on to the grass and continued upon its uneven surface until he came out on to the heath and found himself facing, albeit at some distance, an important house partly hidden among trees.

  Hamish possessed the original and slightly dare-devil mentality of his mother, combined, although not so strongly, with his father’s sense of civic responsibility and duty. He rode up to the house, hitched the pony to a convenient bit of trellis, and thundered on the front door. The dim-witted maid, who had once refused to allow Richardson to use the telephone, opened a crack of perhaps eight inches and said,

  “Well? Master’s out.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Hamish. “He’s in trouble. He ran down two girls—well, anyway, he tried to run them down.”

  “What of it?”

  “Nothing. I just thought I’d mention it, that’s all.”

  “Oh? Oh, well, perhaps you’ll wait a minute. I’ll see if the mistress can see you.”

  But an interview of this sort was beyond Hamish’s scope. As soon as she had gone, he unhitched the pony, mounted it, and galloped away. His subsequent adventures had no particular history. He rode back to the hotel. Laura walked beside him to the stables, paid for his outing, and took him back to the hotel for tea.