An expression half fury and half bewilderment crossed the man’s face. He opened his lips, framing words, but no sound emerged. Finally he held out his hand for the cup.
‘It’s nothing to you,’ he muttered at last. ‘You’ve no call to have any business with me. You can get the hell out and leave me here for all I care. I’ll not be catechised by any man alive.’
‘Oh, but surely you have been already,’ said Mr Campion mildly. ‘You should look at your face in a mirror when you get home. Somebody has been scratching it around your eyes—somebody with a sharp knife. Somebody who threatened to blind you, unless you answered questions. Somebody who has killed one man already. Did you talk, Mr Woodrose? Just who did you talk to?’
The big man lowered his head like a cornered bull, moving it from side to side as if he were deciding to charge. Suddenly he shook himself and stood to his full height, so that on the uneven ground he dominated his rescuers.
‘Hold your wind, you wilting blasting knowall,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll get nothing from me. I’ll settle my own scores in my own way. Go on, go to the police if you’re playing their game. But I warn you that if one of them puts so much as a foot on my land he’ll get a backside full of lead. That’s God’s truth and it goes for you, too.’
Campion turned to Morty. ‘He’s still afraid,’ he said. ‘And maybe has good reason to be, so we mustn’t blame him. Next time it might mean a silver bullet.’
Jonah rounded on him, but it was clear that the thrust had been felt. ‘You won’t get me with that sort of birdlime, mister. Keep your nose out of this or you’ll be sorry for it. Now get to hell, the pair of you. I don’t care for your company. I’ll walk.’
He turned his back and took several paces not without dignity, for he was limping and the rutted clay was unyielding. Campion caught up with him and barred his way.
‘Better take a lift,’ he said. ‘As it happens we shall be passing your gate. You know, you’ll have to get used to the idea of new neighbours. Some of them have come to stay.’
In the conservatory of The Hollies which, by common consent, was the pleasantest room in the house, Mr Lugg greeted the returning warriors without any show of enthusiasm. His considerable midriff was covered by a sacking apron which had once graced an Edwardian charwoman but a towel draped over one shoulder suggested that he might recently have stepped out of a boxing-ring.
‘You’ve ’ad visitors,’ he announced. ‘The vicar called to leave ’is compliments and a parish mag. Sergeant Throstle ’appened to drop in as ’e was passing by. ’E left ’is compliments. Mrs Weatherby ’appened to nip in round the back ’arf an hour ago, she left ’er compliments and a little news item. I’ve bin sweeping up perishin’ compliments all the afternoon. And a couple of blokes come to instal the telephone. That’s the lot, except a load of coke, someone trying to flog tea on the cheap and a boy scout who’d like to do the front drive for a bob.’
‘Telephone already?’ said Morty. ‘That was quick. Dido only applied for it a week ago.’
Campion smiled. ‘We have our uses. That happens to be a wire I can pull. I hope they put in two instruments?’
‘Exackly. One is for common persons and the other’s an ’ot line to the Archangel Gabriel as far as I can make out. That’s in the room you’re dossing in. It has a very classy ring, like a ding-dong in an ’orrible ideal ’ome. It’s Mrs W’s news you ought to be interested in by rights. She gets about, does that mechanised scarecrow, I’ll give ’er that.’
He waited to make certain of their attention.
‘Old Mossy Ling’s dead. Dropped off the ’ook, very sudden, some time late last night. The milkman found ’im in ’is shack this morning lying on ’is bed and says he thinks it was natural causes such as old age, never washing, telling lies and drinking too much. Mrs W said to say “Were you interested? She was arskin’ because she wanted to know”.’
‘The ancient mariner in the corner of The Demon?’ enquired Campion. ‘The professional oldest inhabitant?’
‘That poor old guy,’ said Morty. ‘How come you know him? I thought you were a stranger in these parts.’
‘Ours was not an intimate acquaintance,’ Mr Campion admitted. ‘In fact, I only saw him once and that was yesterday morning. I dropped in after returning some lost property. He struck me as being too good to be true but healthy enough. Our conversation was strictly limited because he wished to give me a full account of your exploit and I didn’t greatly care for the topic. I put him off with a pint, so the custom of the country was observed. Foolish of me. I should have paid more attention.’
He hesitated, casting his mind back to the incident. ‘I hope this isn’t one of those mistakes which cannot afterwards be rectified.’
‘If I know Mossy,’ said Morty, ‘he’d spot you for a foreigner from a mile off and therefore a natural sucker. Did he try you out with the Demon story?’
Campion brushed him aside. ‘It wasn’t that,’ he said. ‘I had the preliminaries, of course, but he saw he was unlikely to succeed there, so he switched to your demonstration of judo. At this point he collected the expected reward, which he’d worked pretty hard for. I’m afraid we both lost interest in each other after that and he began to look around for some new source of supply. He found one too—an elderly couple who certainly weren’t local. Oh, my dear Morty, what a curse hindsight is.’
He sat back in the big verandah chair and closed his eyes. It was some time before Lugg broke the silence.
‘You might let us ’ave a basinful of your beautiful thoughts,’ he remarked at last. ‘What was the next item on the song sheet?’
Campion sighed. ‘A swan song as it turns out. He tackled these people with what I took to be a normal opening gambit. They didn’t respond with any great enthusiasm and he began to raise his voice so as to include a larger audience. He was trying to attract attention, to make himself interesting, and he could have been getting at anybody within earshot. I detected a note of simple naughtiness as if he was hinting, or trying to make a joke with a double meaning. Dixie Wishart—the lady with the blue rinse—shut him up as if he’d been using a string of four letter words.’
‘That’s all fine and dandy,’ said Morty, ‘she often does when she doesn’t approve. But just what was the poor old buzzard using for bait?’
Mr Campion paused before answering.
‘His exact words were: “I seen a ghost last week, so I did now. I reckon I weren’t the only one neither. A powerfully strange thing that no one ain’t thought fit to mention it.” End quote. Dear me. I hope he wasn’t signing his own death warrant.’
13
The Moving Finger
THE LETTER CAME by the afternoon post on Tuesday. Morty, returning after an exploration of the odd windings of the little Rattey River inland from the Bowl, found it on his bedroom table in The Demon when he went up to change a shirt, for he had invited Campion to dinner at the excellent hostelry at Nine Ash. It lay prim and unremarkable amongst several others. There was an air mail from the States, full of his mother’s limpid charm which flowed from the page as easily as her especial brand of small talk, a publisher’s circular announcing, inaccurately, the impending appearance of his book and a couple of bills. He left it until the last, since the italic minion type reminded him uncomfortably of a pedantic mentor on his own subject who never corresponded except to demolish theories and to point irrefutably to gaps in scholarship.
The West Central London postmark reassured him however and he opened it with mild curiosity. It was very brief and bore no address or introduction. The typing was competent but not professional.
‘Tell Doctor Jones that she must not come down to Saltey again. Not if she values her sight. Try squirting acid in a dog’s eyes if you want to know what will happen to her.’
He read the message twice before his flash of belligerent fury passed and a chill, which had something of animal panic in its hinterland, took a grip at his heartstrings. Dido walking, swift and graceful fro
m the hospital through the maze of staid streets to her Bloomsbury flat. Dido seized from behind whilst a plastic spray was pressed before her face. Dido blind, screaming, helpless. He began to feel sick.
London was at most two hours distant, far less if he drove with all his wits. He could surely find her before midnight, warn her, tell her that she was the girl he was determined to marry, tell her that she must never return to this God forsaken countryside with its sly venom and its abominable secrets. Plans, pleas, imploring phrases, surging sentences of desperate urgency chased through his mind. Her expression of quiet mockery, the look that he had last seen in her eyes, came clearly to him and he knew that the battle was lost before the opening shot could be fired. She would never give in to threats and entreaties would only show him up as a craven ass. The voice of the man he had assumed to be his correspondent whispered in his ear: ‘Remember that in England the snobbery of Cool is the offspring of the cult of Sangfroid.’
It was not a time for philosophy. He rang every number in London where Dido might conceivably be contacted, but found nothing beyond sympathetic offers to record any message he would like to leave.
‘Go home under escort and await my instructions. I love you.’ What else was there to say? He abandoned the idea.
Mr Campion received his companion in the garden room. He made no attempt to smooth Morty’s brittle nerves beyond supplying a long iced drink of his own devising. He examined the letter carefully but without comment and presently produced the folder which contained the photostats of some of its predecessors. The younger man watched him for some time as he compared one with another, matching or rejecting. Finally he closed the folder and placed the new arrival on top of it.
‘I suppose we ought to be grateful,’ he said at last. ‘At least it keeps matters on the boil and that is rather vital at the moment. Time is our enemy, amongst others, you know. It could be the greatest of them. That thought doesn’t make much appeal to you, I suppose?’
Morty was not pacified. ‘But this is a threat, not a wisecrack. What the hell can I do about it? If I can’t make Dido listen and she goes—’
Mr Campion cut him short.
‘I know it’s a threat, my dear chap, but it has its merits from our point of view. I don’t think the gallant doctor is in any greater danger now than she has been for some time but this is a new departure. It has a little something that the others haven’t got, and that makes it very interesting.’
‘The minion type face?’
‘It’s not important. The letter is very short and anyone could knock it out in a few moments in a shop, whilst pretending to try out a machine. It’s very sharp and clean, so I imagine that was how it was done.’
‘What then?’
‘It introduces an entirely new note. Technically it’s quite different, a new school of thought. Compare it with all the others and you’ll see what I mean. I’m not an expert armed with a computer which is the way to deal with this sort of problem but I can tell a hawk from a handsaw.’
The evening was still golden and the sloping shafts of sunlight made dappled patterns over the ferns, the long low table with its collection of drinks and glasses and the threadbare turkey carpet on which it stood. Midges and tiny black heat flies were dancing in the warm air and outside the swallows were swooping in shallow arcs over the grass. A storm was moving lazily southward from beyond the estuary. When Campion spoke again his tone was mild and almost conversational. ‘You know, I think the time has arrived when we should consult the oracle.’
‘Mrs Weatherby?’
The older man shook his head. ‘No. She’s more inclined to ask than to answer. I mean an expert in the craft of letters. I’ve only seen him out of the corner of my eye but he’s the odd card in the pack. Our resident poet, Hubert Oliver Wishart.’
‘“Beware of me: I cast no shadow when I pass,”’ said Morty. ‘Don’t quote that line to him—he’s rather touchy about it. Some of his later verse has a better right to be remembered, or so he thinks. Dixie is the only one who is allowed to refer to it.’
Mr Campion stretched his legs. ‘The poet and peasant,’ he said. ‘They make an unlikely couple. I’ve been doing some research into H.O. and it’s a curious story. Early success, which after all isn’t unusual, but there’s no sequel of failure—just silence. Silence and a gap. Then one book of verse—a succes intime but no great sale. He was born here in Saltey, got himself a series of brilliant scholarships—school, university, travel, everything a man could wish. He shot up like a rocket and vanished. The spent shaft seems to have fallen back where it started but where did it go in the meantime? From just before the war until about five years ago there is no trace of him. That could mean that he became a literary hack and he’s not proud of it. Then he reappears with a nice wife who could well be a landlady or a landlady’s daughter. He fits into the jigsaw somewhere—the question is: is he a shape which could key the whole thing together, or is he just a piece of the background which is decorative but unimportant?’
‘I doubt if he’ll tell you that,’ said Morty. ‘But he’s open to flattery and he likes the sound of an educated voice. You might try demonology as an opening gambit.’
The poet was not at the inn when they enquired. He had gone out shortly before sunset and Dixie was unhelpful.
‘He took what he calls his staff with him.’ she explained. ‘It’s a tall walking stick. That means he’s going to walk for miles and it could be two in the morning before he’s home. I don’t know what he gets up to but sometimes he has a little drink on the way, so he may go as far as Firestone or Nine Ash. I hope he doesn’t get caught—it’s going to pour in a minute or two.’
She was right. The storm arrived in a flurry of wind with a swift opening tattoo of rain which gave way to a solid downpour. Custom at the inn dwindled rapidly at the first sign of a pause and before the official closing hour the two men had the bar to themselves. Somewhere above them a door banged and Dixie put her head on one side.
‘He’s home,’ she said. ‘He may have been back some time. If you must see him, Mr Kelsey dear, go up to his attic. But knock. It’s his private den and he considers himself off duty when he’s there.’
The long low room under the roof was only unexpected because of its location. The sloping ceiling ran almost to the floor and the space was reduced by bookcases between the dormer windows which made the chamber alternately narrow and wide. Wishart sat at a table heavy with books and papers at the far end, a single green shaded reading lamp emphasising the craggy lines which scarred his face from nose to chin and formed an intricate tracery about his eyes and forehead. A scholar in a scholar’s setting: only the upward glow of light gave his dignity a touch of theatre. A bottle of brandy faced him and there was a glass in his hand. He did not rise as they came in but gestured vaguely towards the shadows. His voice, deep as the G string of a cello, was glutinous and slurred.
‘There are chairs,’ he said and swayed dangerously as if he might slip sideways. ‘Anything on them can be treated as d-detritus—sweep it away. You are late visitors for the country. Do you bring news or shall we sit and tell sad stories of the death of kings? Or speak of cabbages? Ling was no king—nearer a cabbage if the truth were told. But he is dead. Abominably, stupidly dead. Told his last lie, cadged his last drink. Will we consider him for an overture and so work to a conch . . . to an Emperor.’
Morty glanced significantly at his companion.
‘Tomorrow, perhaps?’
‘No,’ said Campion. ‘Tonight.’
He took out the letter, unfolded it and placed it in the pool of light.
‘Intelligence from London, Mr Wishart. I think you should pull yourself together and read it very carefully. We want your opinion.’
The poet’s head with its impressive mane of grey hair weaved uncertainly over the paper. Then he shook himself and groped in a pocket for a metal case from which he produced a pair of steel rimmed glasses. He read the letter slowly, holding it at varyin
g distances to keep the words in focus. Finally he replaced it on the table and peered from Campion to Morty over the top of the lenses.
‘This came to you today?’
Morty nodded. ‘You had one, you told me, last week. Now this. Mr Campion thought you could help.’
The old man gave a long shuddering sigh. He had clearly received a shock which was totally unexpected and the effect was sobering. Drained of colour, his face could have been carved in ivory.
‘What can you tell us. Mr Wishart? Have you no opinion to offer?’ Mr Campion spoke gently but there was no kindness in his tone.
The man at the table rounded on him. ‘Tell you? I can tell you that it is cruel, that it is ugly, that it is the work of a sadist or a lunatic. What more do you wish? It is meant to frighten. I find it frightening. Is that what I am to say?’
‘But different. You have seen one at least of its predecessors. Does nothing strike you?’
It was some time before Wishart answered. He had begun to drum on the table with long dark ribboned fingers. Finally he picked up the tumbler which had been perched on a pile of books, took it half way to his lips and replaced it without drinking.
‘Mr Campion,’ he said at last. ‘You are trying to make a point, or so I suppose. You are proceeding with nods and becks but there is no wreathed smile. You ask for enlightenment. Now I ask you a question: who am I to ease your burden of ignorance? I have already given my advice to this young man and he has chosen to ignore it. I wish no part of his troubles. They are nothing to me.’
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