The Bulldog Drummond Megapack

by H. C. McNeile

  CHAPTER XI

  In Which I Go to Friar’s Heel by Day

  Up to this point the telling of my story has been easy, even if the manner of the telling has been crude and poor. But from now on it becomes more difficult. Things happened quickly, and we were all of us scattered in a way we had not been before. In fact, for the greater part of the time, the only member of the bunch who I was able to talk to was Toby Sinclair. But I will do my best to make clear the happenings that led up to that last astounding dénouement, which even now seems like some fantastic nightmare to me. And if some of those happenings are boring I can only crave pardon, and assure my readers that it is necessary to write of them for the proper understanding of what is to follow.

  I arrived then, at the Amesbury Castle in time for a late lunch. It was a typical hotel of the English country town, relying more, I should imagine, on lunches and dinners to pay its way than on people taking a bed. The food was of that grim nature which one associates with hotels of the type—plain and tough. An aged waiter, with most of yesterday’s ration on his shirt front, presided over the dining-room, and looked at me in a pained way as I came in.

  “Very late, sir,” he remarked.

  “And I am very hungry,” I answered cheerfully. He polished a menu card morosely on his trousers.

  “Mutton hoff,” he said. “Beef, ’am, tongue—and pertaters. Been a run on the mutton today,” he added confidentially.

  I gazed at the flies making a run on the beef and decided on ham and tongue.

  “Many people staying here?” I asked.

  “Full up for lunch,” he said. “And the hotel be fairly full, too. A bunch of people came last night. Lumme! ’ere’s another.”

  I glanced at the doer to see Toby Sinclair coming in.

  “Splendid,” he cried, in a high voice that nearly made me laugh. “Food, waiter, for the inner man, and then to resume my search. Tell me, have you seen a Phragmatobia fuliginosa?”

  The waiter recoiled a step.

  “A’ow much,” he demanded. “There’s beef, ’am, tongue and pertaters.”

  “And only this morning,” went on Toby, “I am convinced I perceived a Psecadia pusiella. Members, my dear sir,” he said to me, “of the great family of lepidoptera. In other words butterflies.”

  “Beef, ’am or tongue,” said the waiter resignedly. “The mutton’s hoff.”

  “Ham, waiter, with a fragment of chutney. You are, sir,” he turned again to me, “on a walking tour perhaps?”

  “That is my idea,” I said. “But I propose to make this hotel my headquarters.”

  “You may possibly care to come out with me once or twice. My name is Stanton—Professor Stanton.”

  “Mine is Seymour,” I told him.

  “Well, Mr Seymour—” He broke off suddenly. “Waiter, I asked for ham and chutney, not the mummified sole of a shoe covered with glue.”

  “The tongue is worse,” said the waiter drearily. “And that there chutney has been here two years to my certain knowledge.”

  “As far as I am concerned it will remain for another two years. Give me some bread and cheese. Dixon,” he said to me urgently, as the waiter left the room, “there’s a man in the lounge outside I want you to have a look at. I only got a glimpse of him that night at the Mere, but I believe it’s the bloke who was with the woman. Anyway he’s got his hand bandaged up. No Mr Seymour, a lifetime is all too short for my entrancing hobby. Bless me! waiter, I think this cheese must have been here for two years also. Get me a pint of ale, will you? Yes, sir—a lifetime is too short. Nevertheless I hope to capture the Cyligramma fluctuosa before I die. Are you doing anything this afternoon?”

  “I thought of going over to Stonehenge,” I remarked.

  He nodded. “We’ll go over to Stonehenge. I wonder if one can hire a car.”

  And at that moment a man passed through the lounge. He looked in at the door, gave us both a casual glance and then disappeared.

  “It is certainly our friend of the Mere,” I said. “I’d know him anywhere. Now what the devil is he doing here?”

  “Why shouldn’t he be here?” said Toby. “This is the centre of activity at the moment.”

  “It may be,” I agreed. “But don’t forget that Darrell and Co. know him just as well as we do, and they might come at any moment as far as the enemy knows.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “Still, their intelligence work is probably good. We’ve got to watch him, Dixon. Waiter,” he called out, “is it possible to hire a motor car? Mr Seymour and I were thinking of visiting Stonehenge.”

  “There be a Ford down at the garage,” answered the waiter. “You might be able to get ’old of that if no one eke ain’t already. Be you staying ’ere or do you want the bill?”

  “Staying,” said Toby. “Room 23. Well, Mr Seymour, shall we go and see about this Ford? I have an idea that I might perhaps see a Cerostoma asperella if my luck is in. Ah! pardon, sir—pardon.”

  He had bumped into a man just outside the door—the man we had both recognized.

  “I trust I have not hurt your hand at all,” he went on earnestly. “So clumsy of me.”

  The man muttered something and sheered off, whilst I followed Sinclair into the street.

  “The gentleman was suspiciously close to the door, Dixon,” he said quietly.

  “Still, I don’t think he suspected us,” I answered.

  “Not as us, perhaps. But I think the whole bunch of them suspect everybody. When you boil down to it, they’re tackling a pretty dangerous proposition. If the police did get hold of them, abduction and attempted murder form a nasty charge.”

  “That is the very point that has occurred once or twice to me,” I said. “One can understand the lady risking it: she has the best of motives—revenge. But I’m blowed if I see where these other fellows come in. There’s no question of revenge with them. So what the devil are they doing it for?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Money. I’m told that in Chicago you can hire a gunman for a dollar. And I haven’t the very smallest doubt that you can do the same in England if you know where to look. We heard that bloke at the Mere mention two hundred pounds. And there are scores of swine who would murder their mothers for that. Good Lord!”

  His voice changed suddenly to that of the Professor.

  “And so, my dear Seymour, if we can get this car I will try and show you some of those beauties of nature which I feel sure are as yet quite unsuspected by you.”

  A man brushed past, favouring us both with a penetrating stare.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, when he was out of earshot.

  “Just for a moment I thought the dead had come to life,” said Sinclair. “You saw that man who passed us?”

  “That thin-lipped blighter who stared? Yes: I saw him. Is he one of them?”

  “I haven’t a notion,” he remarked. “Look here, I’m just going to drop a line to Hugh, and I’ll tell you the rest when we get in the car. Here’s the garage.”

  The Ford turned out to be available, and I got in and waited for Sinclair, who was scribbling a note in the office.

  “We’ll post it in some pillarbox as we go out,” he said as he joined me. “Better than leaving it at the main post office. Stonehenge, please, driver.”

  “What did you say,” I asked, when we’d started.

  “I told him about the man at the pub,” he answered. “And also about that other bloke. Of course there may be nothing in it, but the likeness is really so astounding to a man we once had dealings with and who was one of the leaders of this very gang, that for a moment I thought it was him.”

  “Is there any reason why it shouldn’t be?”

  “Every reason. He died most substantially three or four years ago. Hugh killed him.”

  He grinned suddenly.

  “Of course this is all Greek to you, so I’ll tell you about it. When we first bumped into Carl Peterson—now defunct—and the lady you saw at the Mere, it
was at the instigation of Mrs Drummond—before she was Mrs Drummond. It’s altogether too long a story to tell you the whole thing; but in a nutshell, they were engaged in a foul criminal plot. Assisting them was one of the biggest swine it has ever been my misfortune to run into—a man called Henry Lakington. He was a mixture of chemist, doctor, thief, murderer and utter blackguard. But clever—damned clever. He wasn’t as big a man as Peterson because he hadn’t got the vision—but he was a far more ineffable swab. Peterson, at any rate, at times had the saving sense of humour: this man had none. And in the course of our little contest Drummond fought him and killed him. It was one or the other, and that’s a bit dangerous for the other, if the one is Hugh. Now that man who passed us is the living spit of Henry Lakington; he might be—and for all I know is—his twin brother. And the coincidence struck me as so peculiar that I thought I’d mention it to Hugh. Of course, there’s probably nothing in it.”

  “You are convinced,” I said, “that this man Lakington was killed.”

  “Absolutely certain of it,” he answered. “On that point there’s not a shadow of doubt. But if there’s anything in the theory that certain types of mentality have certain types of faces that man would steal the bird seed from a pet canary’s beak. Hullo! here we are.”

  It was years since I had been to Stonehenge, and emphatically the impressiveness of the ruin had not been increased by the military buildings that had sprung up around it. Equally emphatically the difficulty of playing any monkey tricks there either by day or night had considerably increased.

  At the time we arrived several empty char-a-bancs were standing on the road, and crowds of trippers were wandering round the huge stones escorted by guides. And having paid our modest entrance fee we joined a group.

  “There, ladies and gentlemen, you have the slaughter stone on which the victim was sacrificed as the first rays of the sun, rising over the Friar’s Heel, touched his body. Inside you perceive the altar stone.…”

  The guide droned on, but I paid scant attention. My thoughts were concerned with the present, and not with the past. Was Drummond right in his surmise, was this place—the scene of so much death in the dawn of history—to be the setting for murder as merciless as anything of old? What he had said was correct in one respect certainly; if Darrell, or any of them, were done to death it would be, to the world at large, a crime without motive. And the instant those three were disposed of, the end would come for Mrs Drummond.

  It had been sound generalship on his part, leaving them in London. But the crux of the whole matter was whether, if there really was a clue to be obtained, we should get it. True, that we saved them the risk of being murdered, but did we not also prevent any possibility of getting information? Granted that our disguises held, what reason was there for us being told anything? To get a short cut to our goal, as Drummond hoped, presupposed our obtaining the necessary clue. And as far as I could see at the moment, the only connecting link we possessed was the man with the wounded hand.

  To the other who, Toby Sinclair said, was like this dead man Lakington, I attached no importance whatever. Chance likenesses are frequent, and the mere fact that he bore a striking resemblance to a dead criminal was no proof that he was a criminal himself. No, the man with the damaged finger was our only link, and I began to wonder if we hadn’t been foolish in losing sight of him.

  I glanced round: Toby Sinclair had wandered off and joined another group. And it suddenly occurred to me that it could do no harm to make a closer inspection of the Friar’s Heel. It was a perfectly ordinary and normal thing to do, and would not cause any suspicion even if our opponents had spies in the crowd. And there was always the bare possibility of finding a clue.

  I wandered over to it, to find a big man in rough seafaring clothes staring at it curiously.

  “Rum old pile this, guv’nor, ain’t it? I’ve seen the same sort of thing at Stornoway up in Lewis. Though I reckons the stones there ain’t as big. This Friar’s Heel as they call it is a big ’un all right.”

  “You’ve been to the Hebrides,” I said casually.

  “Been there! Lor’ bless you, there’s not many parts of this little old globe that I ain’t been to. And with it all I guess there are as curious things and as beautiful things in England as anywhere else. Only people don’t know it, or else they’re too lazy to go and look.”

  I looked at him curiously out of the corner of my eye. Could this be another clue? If it was it meant we had been spotted. And then I took a pull at myself: I was beginning to suspect everybody and everything.

  “Stopping in these parts?” he went on.

  “For a few days,” I said.

  “Funny sort of country,” he remarked. “Good for the soldiers, I suppose, but it’s a bit too bare for me. I like it with a few more woods and trees. Still—it’s fine, especially at night. I reckon that these pebbles would look grand with the moonlight shining on them.”

  Once again I stared at him thoughtfully.

  “Yes, one could imagine all sorts of terrible things happening here at night,” I said quietly. “Ghosts of old Britons who had been sacrificed: and violent deaths, and—murder.”

  He laughed. “You ain’t half got an imagination, guv’nor, have you? But I take it you’re one of the townbred lot—meaning no offence. Put you down in the country at night and you begin to see things that ain’t there—and hear things that ain’t real. Murder! Who’s going to murder anyone here?” He laughed again. “I don’t suppose anyone ever comes to a place like this at night,” he went on. “And yet it’s a rum thing. I was bicycling along that road late last night—been seeing some friends of mine—and it seemed to me as if there was something moving about the place. Round this very stone. Of course it was dark and I may have been mistaken, but there ain’t generally much wrong with my sight.”

  Last night, I reflected. Had the clue been guessed at once, Darrell and the other two could have been at the Friar’s Heel by then. Had there been someone here in readiness? To give them a further clue, or to deal with them—otherwise?

  “You didn’t investigate?” I asked casually. “See if you were right?”

  “Not me, guv’nor. None o’ my business. And one of Ben Harker’s rules in life has always been to mind his own business.”

  He produced a well-used old briar from his pocket, and proceeded to fill it from a weatherbeaten leather pouch.

  “Have a fill?” he said. “Ship’s tobacco; the best in the world.”

  “A bit strong for me, I’m afraid, Mr Harker,” I thanked him. “We miserable city clerks are hardly used to that sort of smoke.”

  “You prefer them damned fags, I suppose,” he grunted. “Ah! well, everyone to his own taste. Personally…”

  He paused, and I glanced at him. His fingers had ceased filling his pipe, and he was standing absolutely motionless staring over my shoulder. Only for the briefest fraction of time did it last, and then he continued his interrupted sentence.

  “Personally, I can’t ever get any taste out of a cigarette.”

  As I say the pause was only for a fraction of a second—a pause which I might quite easily have missed had I not happened to have been watching his hands. But I hadn’t missed it, and I knew that he had seen somebody or something behind me that had caused it.

  “A match at any rate, I can offer you,” I said, and as I spoke I turned round casually. Coming slowly towards us was the thin-lipped man who resembled Lakington.

  “Thanks,” he answered, lighting his pipe in the unmistakable method of a man used to the wind. Then he handed me back the box. “Well, good day to you,” he said. “Maybe if you’re staying in these parts we shall meet again.”

  He strolled off with the slight roll of the seaman, and I lit a cigarette. Certainly nothing he had done or said connected him in the slightest degree with the game, and yet I wasn’t quite sure. Why that sudden pause in the middle of a sentence? And then it struck me that there was nothing to connect the man who had caused it with the
game either except a resemblance to a dead criminal.

  I sat down on the ground, and proceeded to study the huge stone, acutely conscious that the thin-lipped man was standing just behind me.

  “You are interested in this sort of thing?” he remarked politely.

  “As much as a bank clerk who knows nothing about it can be,” I answered.

  “It has always been a hobby of mine,” he said. “The past is so infinitely more interesting than the present. One admits of imagination; the other is bare and brutal fact. These motor cars; this crowd of terrible people peering in their asinine way at the scene of age-old mysteries. Doing the place at high pressure, instead of steeping themselves in the romance of it.”

  He talked on, and there was no denying that he could talk. His voice was pleasant and well modulated, and after a while I began to listen entranced. Evidently a widely travelled and well-read man, with the rare gift of imparting information without becoming a bore. And after a while I began to keep up my end of the conversation.

  It was when he happened to mention the Zimbabwe Ruins in Mashonaland, ruins that I had broken my journey at Fort Victoria in order to see; rams, as many believe, of a vanished civilization, which had fascinated me at the time, that I became really interested.

  He, too, knew them, and we started an argument. I maintained that they were an ancient legacy from some civilized people dating back, perhaps, to before the days of Solomon: he inclined to the theory that they were only the work of local natives and, at most, mediaeval.

  “Evidently,” he said at length, “you have studied the matter more closely than I have. Did you spend long there?”

  “I was actually in South Africa for about six months,” I told him. “And I used to collect opinions from those qualified to express them.”

  “A fascinating country. Though perhaps for any big scheme of emigration which would cover all classes of our countrymen Australia is more suitable.”

  “I’ve never been there,” I said. “As a matter of fact I’m thinking of going next year. And to New Zealand.”