There May Be Danger

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “I’ve got one of my own, my dear.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was most unlike Colin to be going about with a pistol of his own, and at any other moment Kate would have been considerably surprised. But there was no time now to pursue hidden tracks of speculation into the oddities of one’s friends’ characters and habits. Kate could hear Morrison coming down the attic stairs. Evidently he had satisfied himself that she was not lurking in that dusty wilderness of posts and tie-beams. Her heart beat fast, but now that Colin’s arrival had momentarily tipped the odds in her favour, worry about the children, rather than alarm about her own situation, obsessed her mind. She could dodge Morrison. Colin and she together could outmanoeuvre the whole gang: but they could not leave the Veault while the children remained in hiding there, and they could not hope, so far as Kate could see, to get the children away without being discovered.

  Kate regretted now that she had allowed Ronnie to choose such a damned silly place to hide in—a place out in the open, a place from which they could not quickly extricate themselves, a place in which they were, should suspicion light there, utterly trapped, defenceless. The fact was, Kate had become weak at the knees for a moment, and had submitted to the judgment, not, as her weakness allowed her to imagine, inspired, but merely reckless, of a child. No good to blame herself now. But, if any harm should come to those two kids—

  These useless and agitated reflections which flickered about Kate’s mind while she stood tensely on the alert listening to get the direction of Morrison’s approach, were brought to an end by the sudden realisation that she and Colin had taken no precaution against Mrs. Morrison returning, once she had worked her hands free of the net they had tied behind her, to the contest. There was no sound from that quarter, and the timber upright stood massive and motionless as if it were indeed the framework it appeared to be: but they could not rely on their prisoner remaining in her safe seclusion.

  Kate was, in the circumstances, very much averse from making a noise: for Morrison must by now be beginning to feel apprehensive of the possible failure of his cornering stratagem, and Kate would have preferred to keep him in ignorance of her whereabouts as well as of his wife’s. But even more important than to keep Morrison in ignorance, was to prevent the re-emergence of Ellida.

  Kate cast the light of her torch quickly round the room. In the wide ingle-nook stood a small iron coffer, much nailed and banded, with large iron handles at the sides and an immense lock. This stood not more than eighteen inches in height, and yet its weight should serve to prevent an, movement of the hinged wall-timber. Gosh, though, what a noise it would make being dragged over the stone floor!

  Gosh, what a noise it did make! Kate had to force herself to finish the job when she heard that grating and squeaking. The coffer was satisfactorily heavy, though. She heard footsteps on the landing overhead. Jamming the coffer against the wall and switching off her torch, she fled, lightly and quickly as she could go on her stockinged feet, out of the room and into the kitchen, where she stood listening.

  The back stairs led up from the passage the other side of the kitchen. Thank God that Rosaleen had shown her round the house!

  One of the kitchen windows was uncurtained, and allowed Kate to find her way around the table without knocking anything over. A grandfather clock—Kate could see its big white face like a dim moon on the dark wall near the window— clacked loudly in the silence. Kate switched on her torch for a second, and the white painted face, blooming momentarily into a spray of roses and the picture of a ship, announced that it was ten minutes to five. The beginning of daylight was not so very, very far away, but much too far to be relied on to bring help. Ronnie would not be missed from his bed for an hour-and-a-half yet, probably. Aminta was already up. It was strange to think that Aminta was placidly at her milking while Kate, in peril of her own and others’ lives, stood in the darkness here, less than a half-a-mile away, and clutched an automatic pistol—

  But where was that pistol? Kate’s hand, unused to clutching such things as pistols, had not missed it till now. Oh, she had put it down when she moved the iron coffer, and had not picked it up again! Should she go back to the hall for it? No, most definitely not! Footsteps were descending the staircase. A light went on. Morrison’s voice said urgently and softly:

  “Ellida! Ellida!”

  Kate held herself tense for flight. The back door still stood open. There was a good chance that Morrison would believe that Kate and Ellida had gone out again into the open, and that he would follow. But Kate did not welcome this chance. She could not bear the thought of that defenceless bracken cart being approached again by this desperate and ruthless man, while she hid in temporary security in the house. As his foot-step fell on the hall flags, she deliberately gave a push to the kitchen table. Its legs squeaked on the stone floor. She fled through to the back stairs and bounded up them.

  “Ellida, is that you?” hoarsely whispered Morrison, and, as no answer came, followed.

  It was Kate’s intention to go straight through the long gallery, or the string of four little bedrooms that lay behind it, and down the front stairs again. If Morrison followed, she would repeat the performance. If he did not, she would wait below for a sign from him. So long as she kept well ahead and out of the light of Morrison’s torch and the line of fire of his pistol, she did not see why she should not go on playing this simple kind of hide-and-seek with him until Colin returned to the house.

  As she passed up the narrow oaken staircase where, on a previous occasion, she had seen a tool-bag lying, she thought of Gwyn Lupton, and wondered that that craftsman, with his opportunities, should have remained in ignorance of the existence of the secret passage.

  The long-gallery door seemed to be locked, so she tried the door of the bedroom behind it. But that also was fastened. The latch would not rise. She struggled with it a moment, and tried the long-gallery door again. But both were locked. Her heart gave a nasty little thump, and she fled on up to the second flight. Morrison was already coming up the first. On the second landing the ceiling was lower, and no gleam came through the tiny window or reflected up from the floorboards. Kate flung herself eagerly at the nearest door. It was locked! It was locked! And the farther door was locked!

  For a moment, heart thumping, trying to ward off terror, Kate stood with her thumb on the latch. Morrison, as he came through, had locked these doors. Was there no escape? The window? No, impossible! It was tiny, it was two storeys up, it did not look as if it even opened. Once more, only the stairs remained, the stairs to the attic this time, and Kate ran on up, in her mind the cold desperate dismay of one whose plan has failed and who now has no plan and can fix on none. Should she attempt to break a window in the attic—if there were a window—and escape? Should she seize up a weapon from among the lumber and attack Morrison over the well of the stairs as he came up? Should she put on her torch so that she could see him? Or creep about in the dark, hoping he would not see her? Oh, Colin, Colin! Kate found herself whimpering. Should she shout to Colin for help? Or should she rely on silence to gain a little time? Oh, what a fool she had been to put down Ellida’s pistol!

  But as she emerged into the vast long attic where a coppice of great timber uprights, grey with dust and age, supported the high-angled roof, a square of light sky broke on her eyes, and with a renewed jump of hope she saw that the brick wall by the back chimney-stack was still out. She remembered that there was scaffolding around the chimney outside. This was her chance, her only one. That pale grey square of sky was her one hope.

  Kate scarcely noticed the violent bump she gave to the back of her head as she ducked, carelessly, under a cross-beam. The glow from Morrison’s torch already illuminated the cobwebs of the stairhead rail.

  Kate’s knee was already on the oak frame, the blessed moon shone, tranquil and reassuring as a goddess, upon her face, when a voice from behind her said quite pleasantly:

  “If you move, you’ll sure get a bullet in your back.
If you don’t move, lady, you might not.”

  Had Morrison spoken threateningly, Kate would probably have risked a scramble out. But his voice, gentle, sub-humorous, with a flattering, teasing intonation, arrested her almost against her will. It was the voice of the detached and humorous American family-man who had come down the hall-stairs to make her acquaintance on that first sunny afternoon. For a second it even made her feel that there was some fantastic misunderstanding, and that a word or two between them might put it right: so utterly divorced from the meaning of the words it uttered was that voice.

  Kate paused, and it was too late to attempt flight. She moved, but only to slip down to the floor again, to turn and face him. She was conscious of his broad, sallow face wearing a smile that curiously tightened the nostrils, the lock of grey hair falling across one eyebrow, the thick, creased collarless neck, the whole burly formidable body. But what focussed and held her eyes was the muzzle of the pistol he held in his right hand. The torch in his left dazzled her, and he politely lowered it.

  “Now, Miss Mayhew, calm yourself! I’m real sorry if I’ve scared you, but I’m scared myself. I’m scared for myself, I don’t mind admitting, but also I’m scared for those two kids. They gotter be found and brought to safety. There’s things going on around here you don’t know about, Miss Mayhew—”

  Kate interrupted, with the courage of despair, for she did not see why Mr. Morrison should have a monopoly of words as well as of weapons:

  “So I’d guessed!”

  He wagged his head sympathetically. His features were good, with something of the cut about them of a Red Indian run to fat. He looked no more ruthless, no more cruel, no more likely to shoot a defenceless fellow-creature in cold blood, than any other man. Kate had, with a sort of incredulity, to remind herself that he was desperate, afraid for his own life, and that he truly intended to shoot both the children and herself.

  “Things,” he went on, “that make it very, very unsafe for li’l kids to be out in the fields in the dark.”

  “Safer than they would be here, by a long way!”

  “Now, Miss Mayhew, it’s this gun of mine makes you say that, I know. You think I’m a desperate character, and so, sure enough, I am. But I ain’t so desperate I can think of two li’l kids running into terrible danger without wanting to help them. We’re on opposite sides of the fence in some ways, sure enough, Miss Mayhew, you and me. But where those kids are concerned we’re on the same side. We both want their safety. You let me know where they are, so’s I can give orders they come to no harm.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Miss Mayhew, what can you do for them, as things are?”

  “I can hope they get safely away to Llanhalo,” said Kate, bluffing. Where was Colin? Would he ever find her here?

  “You know as well’s I do one of those kids is sick. You want to help him, and I want to help him. Why can’t we co-operate?”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” asked Kate slowly, playing for time.

  “That’s more reasonable! I want you just to take me to those kids, so’s we can co-operate to see they’re put in a safe place. You’ve guessed it, young lady. We’re not on your side in this war, and it looks to me as if we’ve come to a pretty sticky jam, thanks partly to you. But we’re not fighting kids. We must get the kids safe before Joe comes back, or he’ll put a bullet through them soon’s look at them.”

  “If he can find them, whoever he is.”

  “Oh, you’ve hidden them somewhere, have you? Let’s go find them while there’s still a chance.”

  Nothing was going to induce Kate to go out into the open at the point of Mr. Morrison’s pistol. She did not trust that flimsy bracken cart not to shout its secret in the moonlight. She did not trust Ronnie’s capacity to lie hidden through all temptations. Leaning against the open frame of the panel, that beckoning but hopeless exit to freedom, the moon above the chimney reminding her of many, many romantic, peaceful and lovely night scenes, Kate folded her arms and shook her head. Oh Colin, Colin, how will you know that I am here?

  “You think I wish the kids harm?” said Mr. Morrison, and for the first time there was a hastier, grating undertone in his smooth, reasonable voice. “You don’t trust me?”

  “Right in one.”

  “Now, would I have kept that kid Sidney here all this while if I hadn’t meant well by him? Wouldn’t I have put him out of the way if I’d been the monster you think me?”

  “It was Ellida’s mother-complex stopped you,” said Kate in a dry, daring voice.

  For the first time an angry and dangerous look came over the man’s smooth broad face.

  “What?”

  “It’s no use your talking like Dr. Barnardo to me, Mr. Morrison. I heard all you said when you came into the house just now. And I haven’t any intention of telling you where the boys are!” Kate felt cold, but her cheeks were burning. As she spoke she thought she heard a cautious footstep below in the courtyard. Colin! Would he look up? Would he see the light in the attic, if he did? Or did the scaffolding and chimney hide the opening in the wall-frame?

  “Now see here,” said Morrison, approaching slowly closer to her, and as he slowly approached, his eyes seemed to become slowly narrower, his lips thinner, his nostrils turned into white slits, and curious lines to develop at each side of the bridge of his broad jutting nose, so that his face seemed simplified into a stage mask. Kate drew back, flattened herself against the wall. Would she have spoken so bravely, had she foreseen the result of her speech? She was, for a moment, terror-stricken at the change in the man’s face, and could have screamed for help, had her voice remained with her. With parted lips and constricted chest-wall, like one in a dreadful dream whose effortful cries emerge as faint, stifled moans, she stared at him.

  “Now see here. You waste my time.”

  He was so close to her now that the scents that hung about him were as real to her as the sight of him and terrifying, at such a moment, in their commonplaceness, the scents of strong tobacco, soap, menthol, and warm human breath. He made a sudden quick movement and she felt the hard barrel of the pistol against her ribs.

  “You take me to where those kids are. Make a move! Or I shoot you dead before you can count twenty. I’m not bluffing lady, don’t you bank on it. I’m at that crisis in my history where it’d mean nothing to me to stretch out a dozen like you. Now!”

  Oddly enough, the feeling of the hard pistol against her side braced Kate. This was reality, no kind of nightmare, and terrifying as was Morrison’s hate-filled aspect, she knew that he was more terrified than she.

  “All right,” said Kate. “I’ll show you.”

  “Ah!”

  “No need to go down, though. I can show you from here, if you’ll let me use my torch.”

  She saw a look, first doubtful, as though he perceived a trap, then thoughtful, cross Morrison’s face.

  “It’d be quicker,” said Kate, with false carelessness. To flash a light from the open panel was her one hope of attracting Colin’s attention. “I don’t suppose the A.R.P. wardens will notice it, at this hour.”

  “Okay,” said Morrison slowly.

  “And then you’ll let me go?”

  “Sure, I’ll let you go—when I’ve got the kids,” said Morrison at her shoulder. Kate already had her torch on and directed over the cross-beam into the night and was moving it about as though to find her bearings, praying that Colin was within sight.

  “And you’d better not try to fool me.”

  “I shouldn’t be so silly,” said Kate lightly, with a hammering heart.

  “No? I reckon I won’t risk much on your sagacity, just the same, Where are they?”

  “You see that gate in the field?”

  “Well alongside it, just up the slope behind the barns, there’s a kind of dingle,” said Kate, who had noticed this as she drove away yesterday in Major Humphries’s car. “They’re there...” She spoke slowly, drawing time out. Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see anyon
e coming? No one coming, nothing coming, not even the morning.

  The light of Kate’s torch did not really reach to the dingle she was romancing about. She wondered that Morrison did not draw his own conclusion from this, and ask why she needed a torch to tell him the children were in the dingle, but he did not. He leant by her shoulder and let her move the feeble yellow light here and there, now illuminating sharply a patch of lichen on the stone chimney-stack so close to the wall and the pale coarse rope that fastened together an angle of the scaffolding around it, now flitting ineffectually across the weather-boarded barns beyond the farmyard, now vanishing to a little haze in the far field, now flashing past a farm cart loaded with bracken that stood with supine shafts resting on the ground, while Kate listened with all her ears for even the tiniest sound in the house to show that Colin was on his way to her: but nothing came, not even the creak of a stair under a stealing foot.

  “Half-a-minute!” said Morrison at her ear. “This bird’s-eye view of the premises you’re giving me has put an idea into my head, young lady. What’s in that demure-looking bracken cart out there—besides bracken?”

  He had turned his own torch on as he spoke, but used it not to augment the light of Kate’s but to study at close hand the change in her face. Her face did change—she knew it, she could not help it. A sort of stony indifferent look fell upon it which was not the true look of surprise. But something seemed to have hit her hard in the centre of her being, and she was not an experienced enough actress to show no sign of it.

  “Aha!” said Morrison softly, switching off his torch and turning from the window. “I thought if I let you have your way, your torch would show me what you wanted to hide. It was as good as a lie-detector, lady, the way it jumped away whenever it got near that bracken cart. Thought you’d send me off on a chase down the dingle, didn’t you? It was a good idea, but not such a good one.”

  He stood and faced her with a tight and narrowed smile of triumph on his face. Kate brought her torch in and turned it on him. Had she really ever thought that face a friendly and a pleasant one? She looked at it with a thoughtful and solemn air, but she was not really thinking now. There was nothing left for her to think about. Was this then really the end of the adventure upon which she had so recklessly set out? And nothing she could do to avert the end? Nothing, except say brokenly and uselessly: