She herself had in her head a bird’s-eye map of the journey between the house and the tower, so, making a slight detour, she found the culvert, which carried a small, unwilling, skittishly-winding track across the water. Then she waited for Mr. Joshua and tailed behind him again, this time not five yards away.
So they made their way to the castle, and there Mrs. Bradley received a considerable shock. At one moment, it seemed, Mr. Joshua was, for she heard a faint scraping sound against the wall of the castle, but the next moment, more certainly, he was not. She took out her gun, and switched on her torch. Of Mr. Joshua there was no sign.
She waited, listened, and then walked all round the keep. It was very small; a shell, in fact, of what it had been when it was built. It was open to the wild moor on the side by which they had approached it, but on the other three sides were remains, in fair condition, of a thick stone wall, which, as late as the early eighteenth century, had enclosed the bailey of the keep. Unless Mr. Joshua had climbed this wall—a pointless proceeding, and one which the evidence of her own acute sense of hearing informed her he had not followed—she could not think where he could have gone, except inside the keep itself.
She had never under-rated Mr. Joshua. The mistakes, which had been made in his wild elimination of everyone who stood between him and the family inheritance had been the result of his collaboration with lesser intellects. He himself had made no mistakes, so far as Mrs. Bradley could tell, except the capital error of entrusting his plans to confederates, especially to the unfortunate Geoffrey who, through Gillian, had brought her into the case.
She waited for a quarter of an hour—an endless vigil it seemed in the silent darkness—and then switched on her torch again and began to take stock of the keep into which, it seemed, Mr. Joshua had contrived to disappear.
She tried to judge at what part of the wall she had heard the scraping sound, which was the last she knew of him, but it was difficult to do this, for noise by night is deceptive.
The wall, which she was inspecting had no opening below the first-floor window of what she supposed must be the great hall of the keep. Opening off the hall was a small chamber probably used in medieval times as a solar. The window, which she could see, was no more than a slot. Even supposing that Mr. Joshua could climb like a cat (and even that Mrs. Bradley did not regard as impossible in a man so obviously talented) she did not believe that he could possibly have squeezed his body through it.
She shone the torch up at the window, but its beam did not penetrate, or else there was no one there, or else the occupants were asleep, for no response came, although she held the light steady whilst she counted slowly to a hundred.
• CHAPTER 15 •
“ ‘O I hae lost my gowden knife;
I rather had lost my ain sweet life!
And I hae lost a far better thing,
The gilded sheath that it was in.’ ”
Failing, so far, of her object, Mrs. Bradley walked up to the front entrance of the keep and was about to secure admission by a special rhythm of knocking, which had been arranged previously between herself and Elspat, when she was aware that the keep was again the object of a person carrying a lantern.
She withdrew strategically below the level of the castle floor, and suddenly, as she descended the mound towards the burn, which ran at the foot of it like a moat, she solved the problem of Mr. Joshua’s interesting disappearance.
She remembered that below the hill on which it was built the castle had a water-gate. Mr. Joshua, with an animal sixth sense, must have been aware that he was being followed, or, more likely, had merely felt the nearness of some undefinable danger, and had done the one thing, which at first she believed he could not have done, that is, climbed the bailey wall and dropped over on to the moor behind the castle.
From here all he had to do was to run, behind cover of the wall, around two sides of the tower to reach the water-gate.
The course of the burn had altered during the centuries. Where once had been an entry for little boats there was nothing now but the steep dry bank on which the tower was built. The burn was some six yards away.
Mrs. Bradley wondered what the approaching stranger had seen of her torch, but it was too late to worry about anything of the sort, and so she concentrated upon slipping away and making her way to the water-gate to discover by what means Mr. Joshua had used it to get inside the castle.
It then occurred to her that possibly Mr. Joshua was not inside the keep, but merely in hiding in the archway formed by the water-gate. She approached it carefully and suddenly switched on her torch. The water-gate hid no one. On the other hand, it appeared to be bricked up. She advanced to it, switched off her torch and listened.
There was no sound of footsteps, but if the newcomer—she thought that the man approaching the keep was most probably Mr. Frere or another of Mr. Joshua’s gangsters—was aware of a secret entrance, she had no time to lose.
Risking discovery, she switched on her torch again, but the archway appeared to offer no possible means of entry to the castle. She put away her torch, and began to feel carefully all over the new, tight brickwork.
The unknown man was now approaching. Mrs. Bradley crept out from under the archway, lay in the heather, and waited. She could hear the man slipping and slithering as he descended the steep bank, and she could hear him cursing as he lost his footing, regained it, lost it once more, and finished up by rolling down the last six or seven feet of the mound.
Mrs. Bradley moved quickly and with characteristic dash and determination. It was the action of a couple of seconds with her to leap on the man, push her gun into his ribs and order him, in a horrid whisper, to remain absolutely still.
The man obeyed without a word.
“Now,” said Mrs. Bradley, “in with you.” She switched on her torch again, kept the gun pressed against his body for a moment, and then removed it whilst he got up, but kept a spotlight on him.
The man had no option but to obey her. He crawled into the archway.
Gillian, racking her brains, had hit upon a subject of conversation, which seemed to amuse Mr. Joshua. It was an account of the trouble she had been at to find out where Geoffrey had gone when he had left her in her seat at the music hall.
That the account itself was exaggerated and misleading was not appreciated by Mr. Joshua, who, although he did not in the least under-rate Mrs. Bradley and her powers, thought the girls vapid and absurd, and this in spite of his experience of Gillian as a rugby football player.
Mr. Joshua, the girls soon realised, was willing to be amused, for he was waiting for something or somebody. The hints, which had been passed from sister to sister could not be put into practice, as Lesley had immediately foreseen. Mr. Joshua might despise the girls for a couple of unintelligent hoydens, but his little green eyes were watchful, and, of course, he was armed.
So, in point of fact, was Gillian, but she doubted her ability to shoot Mr. Joshua before he shot her. In any case, she could not face the thought of firing at him unless he commenced the attack.
About a quarter of an hour passed, and then followed a curious scraping. Mr. Joshua turned to look up at the picture through which he had gained entrance to the room. The instant’s hiatus in his watchfulness and preparedness was sufficient for both the girls. Gillian snatched up her coat and fell on him with it. Lesley, with the movement of a dancer, neatly kicked the revolver out of his hand.
There was a Kiplingesque mêlée of a sumptuous kind, during which the candles went out. At the end of it, Gillian, with the beginnings of a black eye, and Lesley, with two badly bruised, stamped-upon fingers, sat up, as the candle-light spluttered into being again, to find Mr. Joshua gone, the picture disappeared in favour of a yawning gap in the wall, and Mrs. Bradley, metaphorically licking her whiskers, grinning in the midst of the débris.
Lesley, holding her crushed fingers tenderly in the palm of her other hand, looked at Mrs. Bradley without surprise.
“My dear gir
ls,” said Mrs. Bradley, “you are wounded.” She rose and looked at the hole where the picture had been. She clicked her tongue before she turned away. Then she said: “Our friend’s hasty departure has ruined the mechanism, I fear. Gillian, point your revolver at that hole, and if anyone enters, or even shows his face, shoot, and do not hesitate. Lesley, you come with me.”
She took Lesley down the stone staircase to the guardroom on the ground floor in which the bodies had been found. Here she produced a first-aid outfit and dealt tenderly and skilfully with the crushed fingers.
“Badly bruised, and hurt, I know,” she said. “But the bones are all right. More comfortable?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Lesley, in the gruff voice of one who suffers very considerable pain and hopes that she does not show it. Mrs. Bradley patted her kindly upon the shoulder. They returned to Gillian, and Mrs. Bradley did what she could (without raw beef) to a rapidly darkening eye.
“And now, what happened?” asked Lesley. Mrs. Bradley described her dramatic entry by means of the water-gate in the wake of Mr. Frere.
“Some people have luck,” said Gillian. Mrs. Bradley acknowledged this back-handed compliment with a cackle.
“I thought Mr. Joshua must have some scheme for entering the tower,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But it was necessary for us to leave the house. We never could have defended it.”
“Bit of a risk, though, if he knew he could get in here,” said Lesley critically. Mrs. Bradley agreed, but Gillian suddenly broke in.
“What I’m most anxious to know,” she said, with some vehemence, “is how we get the tabs on Mr. Joshua. I mean, how long is he going to be able to make himself such a pest, and go on murdering his relations?”
“He will not murder David Ker,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and because he doesn’t, he will give himself away I fancy. Our Mr. Joshua is not only a clever criminal. He is a monomaniac.”
“Certifiable?” asked Gillian.
“Certainly not. But, all the same, a man of one idea, and that one dangerous.”
“Then you mean we’ve no more evidence against him than we had before Geoffrey’s death?”
“We have no more evidence that we could offer a jury,” Mrs. Bradley agreed, “but, all the same, we make progress. One end of the very long string, which we have to unravel is at the house in the marshes. I feel strongly—and have left the inspector there to carry on his investigation along the lines I have indicated to him—that we still have a corpse to discover.”
“Oh, no, Aunt Adela! Who?”
“The original Mr. Lancaster. I think that pressure brought to bear upon Mr. Frere, who has been impersonating Mr. Lancaster for about three years, may have a strange and, to us, a satisfactory result. Even Mr. Frere may not be the original Mr. Frere, but another impersonation.”
With this the girls had to be content, for Mrs. Bradley insisted upon going into the great hall of the keep and waking David Ker. Elspat had never even dozed. She had made a great fire of logs in the centre fireplace, and then had retired to her original seat, and was there, bolt upright still, her strong hands clasped, her petticoats up to her knees—a habit she had from being accustomed to a chimney corner—and her calm face passionless and at peace.
She looked up as Mrs. Bradley entered. She recognised the brisk, light footfall.
“Aye, ye’re here,” she remarked. “I ken na how ye came ben, but I’m glad to see ye.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I came in by way of the water-gate, if that’s what it is.”
Elspat shook her head.
“I dinna ken. Whaur’s your man George and whaur’s James Alexander Musgrave?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. They’ve the boy with them, too—or so I hope. We’ve to block the secret entrance from the water-gate. I must wake David. He’ll know more about it, likely, than anyone else.”
David knew nothing about the water-gate. He did not believe it had ever been a water-gate. Most likely it would be the entrance to the cellars.
Conducted by Mrs. Bradley and the two girls he inspected the hole in the wall. Gillian and Lesley volunteered to explore it, and did so. The mechanism behind the picture could not be located, but the short steep ramp, which had been built up from a flight of steps above the water-gate to this first-floor room formed a ready means of ingress.
To block it up seemed impossible until Elspat, called into consultation, suggested filling the opening with coal and coke.
A fatigue party, consisting of the two girls, Elspat, and David, thereupon carried up coal and coke from well-stocked cellars opening out of the guard-room used by old Joshua as a kitchen and living-room, and shot it through the picture-hole down the ramp, which was shut off from the flight of outer steps by a stout door. It was clear that the whole formed one of the original entrances of the keep, for the door was three inches thick, nail-studded, and capable of withstanding any shock short of an explosion.
The coal and coke were brought up in pails, an old zinc bath, cooking pots, David’s hat, and in bags formed by loading the fuel on to thick table-covers and blankets and dragging them upstairs by the four corners.
Fortunately old Joshua seemed to have found warmth a necessity, for there were about two tons of coal and half a ton (according to Elspat’s computation) of coke. By the time they had cleared out all this and shot it down, the entrance was satisfactorily blocked, and nothing but dynamite would have blasted open the door against which the long heap was piled.
“Still plenty of room,” said David, putting his head in at the aperture, which remained. He was as black as though he had been coaling ship, and so were the two girls. Elspat, although, she had worked harder than anybody, was reasonably free from grime, and retained her usual dignified appearance.
“They’ll no force an entry that way,” she observed with satisfaction. “I have the copper heated,” she continued, “and when I will have scoured a bucket, the lassies and all of ye can wash.”
“What about the outside doors?” asked Mrs. Bradley.
“There’s na but twa,” Elspat responded, “and they’ll not break down in a hurry.”
Mrs. Bradley went with her to inspect them. It appeared that she was right. The keep had taken on its original aspect of fortress.
The time was now three in the morning. It would be light in a couple of hours.
“They must attack us today, and soon, if they’re going to, surely,” said Gillian. “They daren’t wait very much longer. Surely we’ve got a case against Mr. Joshua now?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And, in any case, we’re in a state of siege. Nobody is likely to come by here. We are not on the telephone, and even if we could get back to David’s house, the wires there are cut. As for having a case against Mr. Joshua, what has he done? Certainly he broke into this place tonight, but he did no damage, he brought nobody with him (so far as we could prove) and, after all, he is related to the owner of the building.”
“But aren’t we ever going to be able to get him arrested?” asked Gillian.
“Time will show,” Mrs. Bradley replied, “and probably that time will condense itself into the next two hours. Before we go into further details, however, I have something here to show David.”
She drew out a bulky document, stiff, crackling, and ornamented with the decorations of that romantic institution, the law.
“Those are the missing deeds, I think, David,” she said. “You remember the hint about good Saint Rosalie? Well, when we discovered the entrance from the water-gate, thanks to Mr. Joshua and Mr. Frere, it seemed to me that the hole behind the picture made quite a good crevice in itself. As for our burn, above which this castle is built, the Ordnance map indicates that it joins a tributary of the Clyde.”
David examined the deeds.
“I’ll have to let Braid see these. Meanwhile, Beatrice, I’ll be obliged if you will keep them in your possession,” he said.
“I shall be very glad of the opportunity,
” said Mrs. Bradley, “to examine them at my leisure.”
Her leisure, to the amazement of the girls who were waiting in feverish excitement now for the promised attack on the keep, seemed to commence at once. She settled herself comfortably in the solar, now swept clean of coal dust by the indefatigable Elspat, and examined the deeds with every appearance of absorption.
At the churchyard where the coffin of Mr. Lancaster-Frere had been interred with the usual ceremonies some time previously, there was mild, restrained, but genuine, interest and excitement. The coffin, taken up from the grave by order of the Home Secretary, had been opened, and Mrs. Bradley’s hints and prophecies had proved true. The coffin was nothing but an empty, silk-lined husk.
What followed next day is historic, for it appeared in all the newspapers and was absorbed, along with Sunday breakfasts, in greater detail, by most of the British public three days later.
The house in the marshes was searched, and the garden was quartered and dug over by the police. The search went on for two days. At the end of the second day the remains were found of an elderly man and of a woman. This discovery was made at about the time that David Ker, the two girls, and Elspat were leaving David’s house for the castle, so that by three o’clock next morning, when Mrs. Bradley had settled herself to peruse the deeds of the Clydesdale property under which, presumably, there was a deposit of coal, the news was not known to anybody but the police. The besieged party in the castle did not even know what must have been known by that time throughout the length and breadth of England, that is, of the discovery of the empty coffin. As Mrs. Bradley, however, had deduced that both discoveries must be made, it was the same to her as if she had been in direct receipt of the information, and made no difference at all to her plans.
Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 23