Untimely Death

by Cyril Hare

  “Jock Blackadder’s. It’s only five miles away, but he’s pretty sure to be out with the hounds. I’ll ring him up and make sure, though.”

  She was away for a few minutes, during which Eleanor became more conscious than ever of the remoteness of Minster Tracy.

  “No go,” Hester reported. “I’ve just remembered something, though. The odd-job man at the Manor will be coming in about now to give the pigs their afternoon feed. He’s a wizard with machinery. Let’s toddle up there and ask him to come down.”

  Wearily Eleanor set off with her in search of the odd-job man, but they did not need to go so far. They were barely in sight of the Manor gateposts when a green tradesman’s van swung out of the drive, turned in their direction and stopped in response to their wavings. A familiar face looked down from the driver’s seat.

  “Mr. Joliffe!” Eleanor exclaimed. “This is a bit of luck!”

  Mr. Joliffe’ expression was usually serious. On this occasion it was positively melancholy.

  “If you say so, Mrs. Pettigrew,” he remarked. “It’s certainly a chance my being here to-day. It’s not often I come this way.”

  “Mrs. Pettigrew has broken down outside my front door,” Hester explained.

  “I can’t give her a lift home, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Joliffe. “I’ve got to get back to the shop before closing time. Saturday is a busy time for us. But I’ll see if I can do anything to put the trouble right. I’ll give you a lift down.”

  There was barely room for three in the front of the van, but they contrived to squeeze themselves in. Hester merrily proposed that she should sit in the back among the joints of meat, but Mr. Joliffe was conspicuously not amused at the suggestion.

  “Have you been visiting the sick at the Manor?” Hester asked. “How did you find Gilbert?”

  “Poorly,” said Mr. Joliffe with mournful satisfaction. “He’s not long for this world.”

  “Jolly good of you to come all this way, with petrol the price it is,” Hester went on. She pinched Eleanor as she spoke, so that there could be no doubt that a joke was intended.

  “Obviously it wouldn’t have been worth the petrol to make a special journey just to see how Gilbert Gorman was,” said Mr. Joliffe seriously. “But it so happened that the Staghunters Hotel rang up this afternoon to say they had three coach parties come in unexpected and would be out of meat for the weekend if I couldn’t give them a special delivery. I thought I might as well come this way and look in on the Grange while I was about it.”

  “And do some courting of Louisa at the same time,” Hester suggested.

  Eleanor felt acutely uncomfortable. Hester’s bucolic humour was even more painful than the pinches that punctuated it. But Mr. Joliffe seemed to have a skin that was quite impervious to her blunted shafts. He did not so much as change colour. Fortunately, before any further witticisms could be uttered, they had reached the car and to this Mr. Joliffe now turned his grave attention. In rather less than five minutes he diagnosed and cured the trouble, while the helpless females looked on in uncomprehending admiration.

  “A choked jet,” he explained, wiping his pink, plump fingers on a piece of cotton waste. “You won’t have any more trouble.”

  Eleanor was profuse in her thanks. “You are a genius, Mr. Joliffe,” she said.

  Mr. Joliffe was as insensible to flattery as to raillery. “Just a hard-working man,” he said. “I reckon to save twenty pounds a year by doing my own running repairs. Good day, Miss Greenway. I shall see you this evening, I hope, Mrs. Pettigrew.”

  He drove off, and the atmosphere felt lighter for the removal of his solid, overpowering presence. Jeannie, who had removed herself to the back premises at his approach, celebrated his departure by rushing out with a paroxysm of barking.

  “That man always brings out the worst in me,” Hester observed. “He’s so worthy. I wish he would marry Louisa Gorman, though. She’s about the one woman I know who could keep him under. Goodbye, Ellie. Come again soon.”

  *

  Eleanor’s homeward route took her across Bolter’s Tussock. The westering sun was in her eyes as she came out on to the open moor at the top of the slope. Thus it was that only at the last moment did she put on her brakes in time to avoid a pale-faced mud-splashed man who tottered out into the road in front of her.

  “Frank, darling!” she exclaimed. “What have you been up to now?”

  CHAPTER IV

  The Find

  Pettigrew watched the car out of sight round a bend in the road, and then set himself to climb the short but steep slope in front of him. He was walking here on thin, wiry grass, made slippery by a month’s drought, and it was more of an effort than he had bargained for. He told himself very firmly that it was delightful to be walking again on Exmoor. He repeated it—rather defiantly—when one foot sank ankle deep in a boggy patch that mysteriously maintained itself on an otherwise arid hillside. After stopping to admire the view for the third time, he qualified it by the admission that for a man of his age Bolter’s Tussock was a good deal too far from the nearest road for comfort.

  Then, as he gazed up towards the heathery plateau which seemed scarcely nearer than when he had started, something appeared momentarily on the skyline and was gone again with a gleam of sun on glass. It was so unexpected that it took him an appreciable time to recognize it. But there could be no doubt. It was a motor car, or rather the upper half of one, travelling on a road which must be lying just beyond the crest of the hill, a place where no road should have been—or at least where none had been when Pettigrew was last there. To prove that it was no optical illusion, two packed coaches followed in its wake a moment later.

  His first reaction to the discovery that Bolter’s Tussock was in fact now about the most easily accessible spot on the moor was one of blind, irrational rage. A road! A highway across Bolter’s Tussock! The thing seemed a sheer indecency. Was nothing sacred nowadays? He stood there, fuming impotently, while several more vehicles crossed and recrossed the once hallowed spot, until the absurdity of the situation struck him, and he laughed aloud.

  This was what happened, he told himself, when an elderly crock revisited the scenes of his childhood, and was naïve enough to think that he could revive, unchanged, the emotions that the child had experienced. First he discovered that his legs and lungs were barely equal to what had once been an easy walk; then that a very sensible piece of road engineering had made the walk unnecessary. He was a fool to have expected anything else, and a sentimentalist to regret it. All the same, if changes there had to be, he wished that they could have come anywhere else than to Bolter’s Tussock. As a boy, even before it had become associated with the first genuine fear that he had known, the place had had for him a quality of loneliness and mystery. He remembered how he had prided himself on the fact—real or fancied—that the name was a purely local usage and did not appear on the maps, so that only the truly initiate could even utter it. Now it was probably scheduled as a fare stage for buses. It was ridiculous to be upset by such a thing, but he felt upset, none the less. Rather melodramatically, he allowed himself the luxury of a deep sigh.

  The sigh was echoed loudly from somewhere close at hand. He looked round in surprise but saw nothing to account for it. The noise was repeated, and followed this time by a throaty gurgle that, like so many things he had seen and heard that day, seemed to belong to the past. Then over the curve of the hillside above him appeared a face—an innocent, enquiring face, topped with a dark forelock that tumbled over a narrow forehead between two mild brown eyes—a long narrow face, terminating in the light-tan muzzle that is traditionally held to mark the Exmoor pony.

  Pettigrew stared at the newcomer, who stared back at him, and then began haltingly to advance in his direction. At first glance it seemed remarkably like the pony whose odd characteristics he had been recalling shortly before, but he realized almost at once that it must be larger, several—what did they call them?—hands larger, in fact, unless he, Pettigrew, had myster
iously shrunk to the size of the small boy who had once ridden that pony. In other respects, the illusion was singularly complete. Like its predecessor, this was a half-bred Exmoor pony—always supposing that such a thing as a pure-bred Exmoor existed, as to which he seemed to recollect some controversy. This animal had thrown its rider, just as the other had been wont to do. It was stumbling because one fore leg was caught up in the trailing reins—a phenomenon which Pettigrew had had occasion to observe before. And as he had done more than once in those distant days, Pettigrew was now advancing upon it, uttering deprecating sounds.

  The pony displayed no reluctance to be caught, thereby showing another marked distinction from the one that bulked so large in Pettigrew’s memory. Not only that, but it actually consented to stand stock still while he clumsily lifted one fore leg and released it from the reins. Either the breed had become noticeably milder with the years, he reflected, or this particular specimen must be too exhausted to resent handling. He slipped the reins over its head and examined his capture. To judge from its condition, it had been down in a bog recently, but it showed no signs of distress, although it was sweating freely. He patted its neck, and the beast responded by nearly knocking him over with a gesture of its head that was apparently intended to be friendly. He found an apple left over from lunch in his pocket, and their relations became positively affectionate.

  “Well, Dobbin, and what do I do with you now?” Pettigrew asked.

  The only reply that Dobbin could think of, apparently, was to thrust his nose in the direction of the now empty pocket and sneeze damply over Pettigrew’s coat. It was well-intentioned, but not particularly helpful.

  He looked about him. The moor, which so recently had been alive with horsemen, horsewomen and not a few horsechildren, was now to all appearances deserted. There seemed little point now in going back to the road as he had intended. Even if after this delay he got there in time to cut off Eleanor, he could hardly abandon Dobbin to his fate. The better course, and the kinder one, seemed to be to press on up the hill in the hope of finding his late rider. Looking at the saddle and bridle and still judging this pony by the one that he remembered best, he came to the conclusion that they must have parted company fairly recently. Had it been otherwise, he reasoned, Dobbin would by now have shed a stirrup leather rolling in a bog-hole, if not burst his girth and got rid of the saddle altogether. At the very least, he would have trodden on the reins sufficiently hard and often to snap them. Yet the harness was in perfect order, though as worn and ancient as the equipment of hireling animals is apt to be. Warm with the conscious rectitude of a good Samaritan, Pettigrew took Dobbin by the bridle, turned him round and began to walk him back in the direction from which he had appeared.

  The pony came willingly enough—from Pettigrew’s point of view a thought too willingly. It was the old difficulty of trying to accommodate the paces of two animals of very different natural gaits, and, willing as he might be, accommodation was not Dobbin’s strong point. He walked uphill about twice as fast as Pettigrew was prepared to go, and when checked threw his head about in a most uncomfortable and alarming fashion. Moreover, he had a disconcerting habit of monopolizing the only semblance of a track that there was and pushing his escort off it with a broad, hard and very smelly shoulder. The walk soon showed every sign of degenerating into a thoroughly undignified contest, in which Pettigrew got the worst of every round.

  He pulled angrily at the bridle and Dobbin consented to stop. After giving Pettigrew a glance which might be interpreted as pitying or contemptuous according to fancy, he put his head down and began to munch contentedly at the very unattractive-looking herbage. Pettigrew formed a desperate resolution. There was, after all, only one suitable method of getting about on Exmoor, and, aged as he was, he proposed to employ it—at least, as far as the top of the hill. He gathered up the end of the reins in his hand, contrived to get his toe into the stirrup iron and laboriously heaved himself on to the pony’s back.

  Dobbin’s reaction to this performance was reassuringly placid. He continued with his meal as though nothing had happened, until Pettigrew drew his attention to the change in affairs by hauling on the reins. He then consented to raise his head and, stimulated by a kick in the ribs, began to walk sedately up the hill.

  For the next few minutes Pettigrew was fully occupied in keeping the pony’s head in the right direction. Dobbin now began to display a tendency to veer away down the slope, and when thwarted in this objective was apt to stop and resume his interrupted grazing. Pettigrew recognized with regret that his control of his steed was not all that it might have been. He was unprovided with a stick. His legs, the means by which, he seemed to remember, the true horseman could always convey his intentions to his mount, seemed quite inadequate to their task—possibly because the stirrup leathers were too short. As to the reins, he felt that they would have been more effective if the bit to which they were connected had not been a plain snaffle bar and Dobbin’s mouth not been so uncompromisingly hard. None the less, by cajolery, diplomacy and persistence, he contrived to achieve his purpose. Gradually the slope grew easier, the grass gave way to bracken, the bracken to ling, and he had arrived.

  Pettigrew pulled Dobbin to a standstill and looked around him with deep satisfaction. This was the Exmoor of half a century ago—unchanged, unspoilt. By some trick of the landscape, even the offending road had disappeared behind a fold in the ground, and only an occasional murmur betrayed the passing of traffic from time to time. For the rest, there was—not silence, but a background of sounds appropriate to the scene—the constant murmur of water from below, the mew of a buzzard floating high overhead, and, once again, and not so very far away, the horn.

  The pony evidently heard the horn, too, for he threw his head in the air and showed a disposition to move on. Pettigrew restrained him, and took the opportunity to lengthen his leathers by a couple of holes. With his legs in a normal position, he began to feel at ease in the saddle—astonishingly so, considering how long it was since he had last crossed a horse’s back. Riding, like swimming, was presumably one of the things that one did not forget, even after the passage of years. The feeling of confidence was altogether delightful. He clicked his tongue, plucked at the bridle, and found himself moving forward at a smart trot.

  It did just pass through Pettigrew’s mind, as he set off, that somewhere on the moor there was wandering, dismounted and disconsolate, a man—or woman—to whom in due course he would have to surrender his mount. He even remembered that when that time came, the leathers would have to be shortened to their former length. But for the moment, there was nobody in sight, and almost at once he ceased altogether to give any thought to the hapless unknown whose misfortune had presented him with his ride. It might be said, indeed, that he ceased to have any rational thought at all, for from the moment that Dobbin began to step out he was in the full grip of the obsession that had been haunting him all day.

  With one half of his mind he was perfectly well aware that he was an elderly, retired lawyer, quite unsuitably dressed for equestrian exercise—the silly pompous phrase floated before him, as plain as print—who was going to be extremely stiff next day if he continued to canter over rough ground in that fashion. (Exactly when the trot had turned into a canter he could not say. It must have been when he was thinking of something else.) With the other half, he was re-living intensely and vividly the experiences of half a century before. At intervals throughout the afternoon he had been doing no less; but now it was with a difference. For whereas then he had been eagerly snatching at every scrap of the past that memory brought back to his mind, consciously and pleasurably building up the vanished scene, now he found the images of the past pouring in upon him unbidden—and unwelcome. Back once more on Bolter’s Tussock, on horseback, he positively did not want to be reminded of what had happened the last time he had been there. The experience had been altogether too violent and too unpleasant. It came back to him now in extraordinary detail.

  It wa
sn’t a hunting day, he remembered, just an ordinary afternoon towards the end of the holidays. He had been out on some errand or another and was on his way home to Sallowcombe, taking a short cut across the Tussock, cantering casually along with loose rein and looser legs, thinking of nothing in particular. Certainly not thinking of where he was going—the pony knew that without being told—nor of how he was riding. And then, in a flash, it had happened. The pony’s smooth gait had been violently broken as he propped out his fore legs and stopped, for all the world as though he were refusing at a jump, sliding forward the last foot or two with his neck extended outwards and downwards for what seemed an immense distance. And the boy on his back had slid too, down that endless neck, almost to the ground. Somehow he had saved himself, somehow struggled back eventually into the saddle, but in recollection it seemed that he had hung suspended there for a long time, head downwards, his face within a foot or two of another face, blindly staring up at him from the heather. It was in this guise that Francis Pettigrew had encountered death for the first time.

  It is usually inadvisable to think about one thing while doing another, unless the thing being done is so familiar that its performance is virtually automatic. Riding, to someone completely out of practice, is best treated as a full-time occupation. Pettigrew in a normal mood was perfectly familiar with these truisms, but his mood at this moment was anything but normal. The pony’s violent shy took him completely by surprise. It was only by the narrowest margin that he saved himself from going over its head. As he strove to recover himself he saw out of the corner of his eye what it was that had frightened it. He had time for a glimpse only, but it was enough. As in a nightmare, he realized that once more there was a dead man on Bolter’s Tussock. The next instant he was at grips with another emergency. History repeated itself remorselessly. The pony bolted.