Beginner's Luck

by Paul Somers

  Chapter Four

  There was no sign of Mollie when I went down to breakfast at nine next morning. I thought perhaps she was sleeping late, as it was her day off, but it turned out that she’d already breakfasted and gone out.

  I’d asked the hotel to get me the Courier as well as the Record, and they were both beside my plate. I opened my own paper first and looked eagerly through it—but once again not a line of my story had been used. I was disappointed, but hardly surprised. What I’d sent hadn’t amounted to much; and there was a sensational “missing frogman” story on page one that must have squeezed a lot of other things out. I picked up the Courier, feeling fairly sure that Mollie wouldn’t have got much of a show, either. But I was wrong. On page three she had a signed story with the Lodden dateline and a picture of the castle and a caption across three columns. I read what she’d written with mounting dismay. It ran:

  “Mystery broods to-day over the lovely castle of Lodden in Sussex.

  “Ever since Sir Bedford de Courtenay leapt to his death from the battlements after an interrupted tryst with his mistress the Lady Blanche, the inhabitants of this charming Sussex village have believed the castle to be haunted. Strange noises have been heard at night, and there are villagers who refuse to go near the place after dark.

  “But now the question is being asked, Can a ghost carry a stone shot weighing 150 pounds? For that is the object that was mysteriously removed from the inner courtyard two days ago.

  “The castle, which has been closed for repairs since the autumn, was locked up at the time, and Mr. Tom Figgis, the caretaker, told me to-day that the key was in his possession when the theft occurred. The castle is moated, and the walls are 40 feet high, so that entry is virtually impossible except through the main gate.

  “Mr. Figgis himself doesn’t believe in weight-lifting ghosts, and he has his own theory. Four years ago, a key was taken from the lock of the main gate by some visitor. As the castle contains nothing of value, the lock was never changed. Are the two thefts connected?

  “If so, the mystery deepens. For why should anyone return after four years to remove a hundredweight and a half of completely worthless stone?”

  I put the paper down, feeling pretty sick. Obviously, I’d failed again. It was no use telling myself that I’d been unlucky—that if I’d arrived early enough to see Figgis, as Mollie had done, or if Mrs. Figgis hadn’t been in such a hurry to catch her bus, I should probably have heard about the lost key, too. The fact was that I hadn’t, and excuses wouldn’t get me anywhere. Even if I had heard about it, I doubted if I’d have been able to compose such a gem of a story. It was a neat professional job, eye-catching, intriguing, comprehensive, and brief. I’d never felt more of a tiro than at that moment—not even after the fire. It was all very humbling.

  I drank my coffee moodily. It was naïve of me, I knew, but I couldn’t help feeling piqued with Mollie. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to talk about the castle!—no wonder she’d said, “It’s a mystery,” when I’d asked how anyone could have got in! And all that disarming chatter over dinner! There she’d sat, phonily friendly, knowing all the time that she’d done me down and that I was going to look pretty silly in the morning. And I’d detected no toughness! If a light and unimportant story like this could bring out such duplicity in her, what, I wondered, would she be like over a big one? The imagination boggled.

  Well, I’d had my lesson, and it was no good dwelling on it. I went out to the little shop and bought all the other papers that I could get and read through them with a conscientiousness that even Hatcher couldn’t have criticised, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Afterwards I continued to hang around the hotel lobby, feeling pretty sure that the office would be on the blower before long to tear off a strip. And sure enough, just before eleven there was a call for me. It was Martin at the other end, doing the Deputy Assistant News Editor part of his Jekyll-and-Hyde act. His voice was quiet and restrained, as always, but it had an edge to it.

  “Hallo, Curtis,” he said. “Have you seen Mollie Bourne’s story about the castle, by any chance?”

  I said I had.

  “Pity you didn’t get it. All that guide book stuff you sent cuts no ice at all, you know. You’re supposed to be a reporter, not a Baedeker. Blair’s pretty annoyed.”

  I wiped the sweat from the earpiece of the receiver, and said I could imagine it and that I was sorry I’d fluffed the job.

  “Didn’t Figgis tell you about the key?”

  “Figgis has gone to London,” I said. “He left just before I arrived. He’s staying up there.”

  “I see …” Martin’s tone became slightly more amiable. “That was bad luck. Well, you’d better get his address and let us have it and we’ll put someone on to him here.”

  “All right. What do you want me to do afterwards?”

  “Stay down there, I should think, and try to get a good follow-up. Hold on a minute …” There was a buzz of talk, and I caught the sound of Blair’s peevish pre-conference voice. “Yes—Mr. Blair says keep at it.”

  “You mean I’m still expected to look for the stone?”

  “I imagine so. It’s up to you to do what you think best, Curtis—it’s your story.” There was a click, and the line went dead.

  I walked across to Rose Cottage in a very jaundiced frame of mind and got Figgis’s address from his wife. I also asked her about the missing key. Naturally, now that the information was no longer of any use to me she remembered the incident perfectly. She even remembered how it had happened. Apparently there’d been a particularly ghastly motor smash that day, on the main road just above the castle, and her husband had heard it and gone rushing up to the road leaving the castle unattended, and it was while he was away that the key had been taken. As to who had taken it, she had absolutely no idea. In fact, it turned out that she couldn’t add a thing to what Mollie had already written. That seemed to leave me at a dead end. The only thing I could think of was to go up to the castle and have another look round, and I asked her if I could borrow the key again. She said that the other reporter, the young lady, had already borrowed it, and I remembered then about Mollie’s sketching. I went back to the pub and rang the News Desk and gave them Figgis’s address—though I couldn’t imagine what good they thought it would be—and then I strolled up to the castle. There was a new Sunbeam Talbot 90 parked outside the tea-room, a very lush job in cream and sage, obviously Mollie’s, and I wondered just how many thousands a year the Courier paid their spoiled darling. Enough, obviously, to make her fight tooth-and-nail against all comers—even beginners!

  I walked up the field path with reluctantly eager steps. She’d probably be patronising about my poor performance, which would be hard to take—yet I badly wanted to see her again.

  She was sitting on a chunk of fallen masonry in the courtyard, with a sketching-block on a small folding easel in front of her. She was wearing a blouse and skirt—a pink blouse, which I would have expected to clash with her hair, though somehow it didn’t. The tranquil scene, with Mollie absorbed in her work in the foreground, and the ancient grey walls of the castle in the background, made me think of some British Travel Association advertisement in a glossy American magazine. I stepped up quietly, and had a look at the sketch. It was of one of the towers, and by my standards it wasn’t at all bad. She turned and greeted me with a friendly smile.

  “Hallo!” she said.

  “Hallo!” I said, very coldly. I’d made up my mind to be dignified and nonchalant—but I overdid it a bit.

  “What happened to your story? They didn’t use it, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Oh, I didn’t really expect them to …” I stood back, and studied her drawing again with my head slightly on one side as though I were an expert, and said in an off-hand way, “I thought you did a nice piece.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Very pleasant flight of imagination, I thought.”

  Her beaut
ifully plucked eyebrows became a little more arched. “Oh, not entirely.”

  “Haunted castle?” I said.

  “All the best castles are haunted.”

  “Noises in the night?”

  “But there have been noises. Strange knockings and clankings—most weird. Haven’t you heard about them?”

  “And terrified villagers?”

  “Scared to death.”

  “The amours of Sir Bedford?”

  “That’s in the guide book—you shouldn’t skip! And the missing key stuff is certainly true.”

  “Oh, that’s true enough. That’s why you kept quiet about it, of course!” I meant to sound teasing, but my voice came out peevish.

  She looked at me in surprise. “What did you expect me to do—give you a carbon copy of my story? I paid you the compliment of supposing you’d prefer to stand on your own feet.”

  “Quite right. I’m merely admiring your powers of dissimulation.”

  “Well, all’s fair in love and war, you know.”

  “Reporting is war, I take it?”

  “To the knife! That’s the whole fun of it. No quarter asked or given, survival of the fittest, and the weakest to the wall. A glorious, unscrupulous free-for-all!”

  “A hard philosophy,” I said.

  “I don’t think so. After all, no one has to be a reporter. If you are one, you can’t afford to be squeamish. You’ve got to be tough—very tough—or you just won’t last. You’ll soon learn.”

  “I’m learning fast,” I said.

  She drew a few more lines on her sketch pad and then looked up at me again, curiously. “I believe you’re really sore with me.”

  I managed a rather feeble grin. “I am,” I said, “but I know I’ve no right to be. You got a damned good story and I’m envious, that’s all.” It wasn’t quite all, but it sufficed.

  “Well, that’s frank,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your break before long.… What are you doing around here to-day, anyway?”

  “I’m supposed to be doing a follow-up.”

  “Is there one?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so—not unless I can get a line on the chap who pinched the key.”

  “What makes you think he had anything to do with the stone?”

  “It was you who suggested it.”

  “I didn’t suppose anyone would take it seriously. Probably some tourist took the key as a souvenir.”

  “Then we’re back where we were—how did the stone thief get in?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Poor old Record!” she said, “always flogging dead horses. If you find out how he got in, the explanation will probably be quite banal. Why spoil a good mystery?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said, “it’s not my idea. All I know is that I’m expected to produce something good—preferably the stone. I’ve a damn’ good mind to drain the moat and charge it to expenses!”

  “Now that’s what I call enterprise.”

  “How deep is it, do you think?”

  “The water’s eight feet deep, according to Figgis, and there are two feet of sticky black mud at the bottom.”

  “Really? Oh, well, perhaps I’d better content myself with another walk round.”

  I wandered over to the bombard, very much aware that I was merely playing out time until the office came to its senses and recalled me. I examined the grass around the gun like a detective looking for clues. There were lots of marks, but nothing at all helpful. If there had been, I’d probably have noticed them the first time. I moved on, covering all the old ground again. I climbed down into the little dungeon, and up on to the flat roof. I poked about in the empty towers, and examined all the broken masonry that dotted the sides of the courtyard in case the thief should have left some bit of tell-tale litter behind him. But there wasn’t even a cigarette end to be seen. I found two sweet papers and an old sardine tin in a bed of nettles, and that was all. I descended to the basement of the well tower, but there was nothing there, either. At least, I didn’t think there was. Then I wondered. There was a lot of soft wet mud around the well, and it had taken quite a number of footprints. Some were mine from the previous day, some probably were Mollie’s. Some, no doubt, were Figgis’s. The rest might be the workmen’s, though there was no sign of repairs here. There were certainly three different sets of men’s prints, possibly four. Some of them went right round the well. The stone could have been thrown down the well—though it seemed rather unlikely considering how much nearer the moat was to the bombard.

  If I’d been a free man, and not a hag-ridden one, I wouldn’t have given it another thought. I’d have gone and sat in the sun with Mollie till lunchtime. But an imaginary conversation was already running through my mind. It was six in the evening, and I was telling Hatcher that I’d searched the castle without success and he was saying was there a well and I was saying yes there was and he was saying what had I done about it and I was saying “Nothing” and he was saying then bloody well go and do something. So I stayed and pondered, gazing down at the opaque green water.

  It was a big well, at least eight feet across, surrounded by a protective railing but uncovered. I wondered how deep it was, and decided that I might as well find out. I returned to the courtyard, where I’d noticed a few tools of Figgis’s in an alcove. I chose a rake, and took it back to the well and pushed it down into the water as far as I could, but it didn’t reach bottom. I’d have to tie something else to it.

  I searched among the tools for some string but there wasn’t any. Then I remembered that I’d seen a piece beside the parcel of sketching-materials that Mollie had brought with her, and I went over and asked her if I could borrow it. She said, “What on earth are you up to now?”

  “I’m trying to find out how deep the well is,” I said.

  “Ten feet. It’s in the guide book.”

  I thanked her politely, and took the string and found a long pole in the alcove and lashed it to the rake. Then I carried the contraption to the well. After a moment Mollie put her sketch book down and joined me there.

  “Muscling in?” I said.

  “Just idle curiosity. Are you still looking for the stone?”

  I nodded. “This seemed easier than the moat.”

  “You’ll probably lose the rake.”

  I pushed the unwieldy probe down into the water till it touched bottom. Then I began to move it around, cautiously, because the lashing wasn’t very secure. The bottom was soft, but after a moment or two I came up against some hard obstruction.

  “You know, I believe it is here!” I exclaimed. I wiggled the pole, trying to make out the shape of the object, and it seemed to be round, and about the right size.

  Mollie gave me a teasing smile. “It’ll make a wonderful follow-up,” she said. “I can see it now—front-page splash, streamer across seven columns. Byline—‘From Our Special Correspondent, Hugh Curtis.’ And then the sensational facts! ‘To-day I am in a position to reveal exclusively that the stone shot believed to have been stolen from Lodden Castle was in fact dropped down a well …! What a story!”

  “At least I’ll be able to stop looking for the perishing thing,” I said, and continued to wiggle. Mollie leaned over the rail, and helped to steady the rake.

  Then suddenly, horribly, it happened. There was a stir in the water, and a lot of bubbles, and something large came swirling up to the surface and floated there.

  It was the fully-dressed body of a man.

  Chapter Five

  For a moment we gazed down in shocked silence at the white, bloated face. Then Mollie gasped “Oh!” and turned quickly and rushed up the short flight of steps to the courtyard.

  I felt a bit queasy myself, but not for long. I was much too excited. I climbed over the railing to see if I could get the body out. The water was almost level with the ground or I’d never have managed it. As it was I was able to drag it out with a bit of a struggle. It seemed to be the body of a fairly elderly man, judging by the sparse grey hair. The fa
ce, after its soaking, could have been pretty well anyone’s. As I straightened the waterlogged torso, I saw that a length of stout wire had been looped round the waist, and twisted, and then formed into another loop which made a perfect circle about fifteen inches in diameter. The mystery of the stone shot, at least, was solved. It had simply been used as a weight to keep the body under water.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to do next, and I went up the steps to look for Mollie. She was folding up her easel. Her face was a pale shade of green, and for once the colour didn’t go with her hair. She was not, I decided, with an odd feeling of relief, quite as tough as she’d pretended.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “I will be in a minute.”

  “It was pretty nasty.”

  “Strictly between ourselves,” she said, “I never did like corpses. Particularly those that bob up under your nose without warning.… I suppose the stone was holding him down.”

  I nodded, and told her about the wire. She insisted on going down the steps again to have a look for herself. She had got over the first shock, now, and her normal colour was rapidly returning. She examined the wire with cool professional interest.

  I said, “What do we do next? Search the body for some identification? I don’t mind trying.”

  “Better not,” she said. “If the police found out there’d be a frightful row—and we wouldn’t get another thing out of them.”

  “In that case, I suppose we’d better go and tell them.”

  She nodded. “If we play along with them, we may be able to clean up the story before anyone else can get to work on it. Come on!”

  There was a telephone booth near the tea-house. I asked for the headquarters of the West Sussex C.I.D. and was put through at once. It was Mollie’s idea to get the big brass out quickly. I spoke to a sergeant first, and then to a chief inspector, and I told the inspector what we’d found. He said he’d be right over and asked us to stay where we were. He needn’t have worried! We went back to the castle to wait for him.