Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Pray do not be alarmed by our Spanish friend. I am sure he means well, and is an honest and hardworking man.”

  “He has nine children, if that means anything,” said the elder lady severely. She had allowed herself to be assisted from her animal, and the Spaniard, putting down his food, came forward, with native politeness, to help the younger lady to dismount.

  “Well, I suppose this is as good a place for lunch as any other,” the elder lady observed. She, too, rummaged in the panniers, and produced some packets of food and a bottle of wine.

  “Here, Luis,” she said. “Your cup. Copa.”

  “Muchas gracias, señora,” said the muleteer, pulling out his cup from his pocket. Before he drank, Harben bowed to the ladies. The muleteer crossed himself piously, muttered, “A Dios”—although whether to the deity or to the wine Harben was not able to discover—and drained his cup at a gulp.

  “He likes wine,” said the elder lady to Harben, “although, really, they’re very abstemious. We’ve done the dangerous part of the journey this morning, so I don’t mind him having it now. We decided not to have lunch until after we had reached the sea-level. It is so much safer.”

  “Look here,” said Harben, “he, tells me you want to get back to England. Is that true?”

  “Get back?” said the elder lady. “We came for six months, and that six months expired some weeks ago. But there are no liners to England, so here we shall stay, unless Spain should enter the war. It is all rather tiresome.”

  “You will certainly find it difficult to get back while the war is on,” agreed Harben. “How much money have you?”

  “Oh—” The elder lady looked at him closely. “Oh, plenty of money,” she said. “Why, in particular, young man?”

  “I want you to buy or hire a small fishing boat,” he said. “If you do, I’ll engage to get you back to England, whenever you wish.”

  “Crazy!” said the elder lady, sharply. “How do we know that you can even steer?”

  Harben did not reply. He assisted the ladies to mount, and they all went along the road by the way he had come out that morning. The small debt to El Piojo he was soon in a position to discharge, for the muleteer (well-tipped by the ladies, who, apparently, were usually something niggardly) had given him five pesetas under the impression that Harben’s presence on the homeward journey had brought him increased prosperity, as, indeed, there was no doubt it had.

  “Go with God, señor,” he had said, when they had parted. “And come out with us another day. They like you. But a word in your ear. They are old. Even the younger one is fifty.”

  “They are rich,” said Harben, “and, you know the saying—Caballo grande … ande o no ande. A big horse, whether it goes or not.”

  The grinning Spaniard slapped him on the shoulder.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Voyage Home

  Having committed themselves to the expedition and to his care, the English ladies proved to be surprisingly enterprising and adaptable. They made no secret of their preparations and bought the fishing boat recommended by Harben with a rather pathetic (although, as it happened, a well-founded) faith in his judgement.

  She was a clumsy old boat, but Harben had decided that her defects were not such as would, of themselves, seriously prejudice the safety of his passengers. She was overhauled, patched up, given a life-boat and a new set of charts, a compass fitted with an azimuth mirror, a sextant, and a pair of dividers, and set out upon her fourteen-hundred mile passage on the first of April—a suitable date, thought Harben, for beginning the hazardous project.

  One tremendous piece of luck had been his. Two Englishmen, one man of fifty-four, the other his son, aged twenty-two, had expressed the wish to go with him. They were accustomed to sail their own boat from island to island of the Canaries, had been across to the African coast in her, and north-west to Madeira.

  Thus he was able to command the services of a valuable crew, and the women, although he intended that they should take their turn, if only in the galley or as deck-hands, would not be called upon for engine-room duties.

  They went nowhere near Madeira itself, but ran in past Lanzarote and tiny Allegranza and then steered by dead reckoning directly northward for the first few hundred miles, and then a point or two east to bring them abreast of Finisterre, from which they could check their position.

  Watches were not easy to keep with so very small a ship’s company, but the women, true to their blood, proved as effective on deck as in the galley, and the general rule laid itself down that they took watch and watch with the men. The only difference was that they always kept watch together, whereas in the case of the men it was possible only to have one man on deck in addition to the man at the helm.

  Rations were fairly short and so was water, since it was considered impracticable to put into port, even in Portugal or Spain.

  But the adventure never entered the heroic class, although it afforded two elderly ladies conversation and glory right to the end of their days. The ship made Finisterre on April thirteenth, having been buffeted, but not unduly considering her size, and from there it was, except for colder weather and choppy seas, an easy passage. They kept wide of the Bay of Biscay, and then made north-east for Ushant, but left it, they reckoned and hoped, at least eighty miles to starboard. They gave the Channel Islands as wide a berth as they could, and then turned into the Channel itself, and kept a strict watch for aeroplanes.

  But these were the days before the blitz; before Dunkirk; before the capitulation of the French or the invasion of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg; before the threat of an invasion of England. All seemed calm, even normal, and out in France an English Field Security Officer[*] stationed at Croise Laroche, just north of Lille, was still keeping fit by doing “the steeplechase course … occasionally in the evenings, on foot, taking all the jumps except the water-jump, while the French A.A. gunners …” jeered at his incomprehensible antics.

  When the ship reached a point about fifty miles from Start Point, as near as could be reckoned, a council was held while the ship lay hove to. There was no reason why the identity of the ship and her crew should not be known to the coastal patrols of ships and aeroplanes, but if re-entry into the country of their birth could be made without official interference, so much the less bother. This was the general view, including that of the women, therefore it was agreed that the ship should creep coastwards under cover of the night and the crew should get ashore as best they could from the little boat they had taken on board at Santa Cruz.

  The women, with the genius of their sex for leaving what Harben referred to as “the stickier part of the arrangements” to the men, proved remarkably docile and obedient. The ship flew the Spanish flag until she was within the territorial waters of the British Isles, and then this was changed for the Union Jack. Although several aeroplanes were sighted, and two warships passed at a distance of less than a mile, no interference was made and no signals had to be answered.

  “Good thing we’re a fishing boat. Disarms criticism,” said Harben. “We’ll have a try at running in tonight. I think I know the best place, but, of course, I can’t guarantee we won’t step straight into sentries or coastguards when we land.”

  The voyage had been so uneventful as to prove, after the first few days, rather boring. The ship’s company were inclined to welcome the prospect of excitement. Plans were made to scuttle the fishing boat in twenty-five fathoms of water just south of Portland Bill, so that she could not constitute a danger to shipping; then they would take to the small boat, and get ashore as best they could.

  “No minefields along the south coast,” said Harben, hopeful that the information he remembered having acquired from a war atlas during the first few months of the war was still correct, “and our contraband control ends approximately at the Isle of Wight, I believe. We can land on the Dorset or Devonshire coast and no questions asked, if we’re lucky.”[*]

  “Army minefields,” said the older of the men.

/>   “We shall have to chance them if we’re going to land this way,” said Harben cheerfully.

  “Barbed wire,” said the elderly man.

  “Same answer. There are almost bound to be gaps. We must pull the boat in as far as we can, and then lie offshore until the dawn breaks.

  “Every man for himself, and the devil help the ladies, you mean?”

  They turned and surveyed, with chivalrous misgivings, the thin and elderly backs of the patient women.

  “They’ve done all right so far,” said Harben, on the defensive. “They’re agreeable to scuttling the ship. They say they don’t want her any more. And they’d never have got back without us.”

  “I’m not arguing,” said the older man. “Have you arranged for the scuttling?”

  “Yes. Raymond and I have everything ready down below. She ought to fill in about a couple of hours. Plenty of time for all of us to get well away before she goes.”

  “Pinta. It’s an unlucky name,” said Raymond, the younger man, referring to the fishing boat they had brought so far and so favourably.

  “It won’t be, for us,” said Harben. They abandoned ship at the very first gleam of the dawn. The Pinta had been filling for about half an hour before they left her. The engine-room was by that time completely flooded. The women, who had been very nervous all night, were helped into the bobbing boat down a rope ladder which they declared, at first, they could not possibly use. They had no portable possessions to speak of, but each lady had put on three sets of clothes, and they had stowed a considerable amount of money—all that they had left—about their persons.

  “We may have to climb cliffs,” Harben warned them. The men took turns at the oars. There were two pairs, fortunately, for otherwise the boat would have been exceedingly heavy to row.

  The day came slowly to birth. The tide was setting strongly towards the land, and washed the boat in. The soft April day unfolded, disclosing a sandy beach, cliffs, but not high ones, and, on a distant headland, the misty, pinkish haze of the early morning.

  They beached the boat and landed. It had been arranged that they should separate as soon as they had disembarked, but the two women showed an instinctive inclination to keep abreast of the men and to follow their tactics.

  Harben’s first thought was to get away from the beach, which he felt quite certain would be mined. Fortunately this impression was not put to the test. They all reached the cliffs and scaled them—it was an easy climb up—and at the top encountered wire, but so sagged and fallen with the pressure of winter weather that it was not difficult to cross it and gain the short turf of the land at the top of the cliffs.

  The father and son were together, and as perhaps was natural, since, beside being unattached, he was, in a sense, their pensioner, the women remained with Harben, following him up the cliff and accepting his assistance to make the last wild stride which brought them, sprawled on hands and knees, to the top.

  He accepted his responsibilities cheerfully, and suggested that it would be as well to follow the footpath near which they found themselves, in the hope that it led to a village.

  It led, as it happened, not to a village but sharply downhill to a small shallow lake on the shore of which was drawn up a little boat. Harben stepped into the boat, helped the women aboard, and then pushed off with the boat-hook he found across the thwarts.

  He ferried across to the opposite shore, and then, bidding the ladies turn their backs, he stripped, rowed the boat to her moorings, and, splashing into the lake, which had a temperature somewhere (it seemed to him) around freezing point, swam vigorously back to join them.

  He dried himself on his shirt, put on his other garments, and, hanging the shirt round his neck in the hope that it would soon dry, he led the way to a broad and sandy beach. Behind it were dunes and scrubby, long, yellowish grass, half-a-dozen bathing huts, a lean-to shed whose faded and washed-out notice-boards indicated that refreshments might be obtained there. There was also a notice put up by the military authorities to point out that the beach was dangerous, and that soldiers were forbidden to bathe there.

  The travellers passed inland, still following their path. It led almost back to the lake, skirted a patch of tall reeds, and came out by the banks of a river.

  The river wound for a couple of miles across fields, and then passed beside a ruined church. A little further on was a bridge, and, carried by the bridge across the stream, a fairly wide metalled road.

  “Looks a little more like home,” said Harben cheerfully; and suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, for, coming out of an inn on the farther side of the bridge, and dressed in ordinary civilian clothes and a soft felt hat, was his erstwhile acquaintance the sardonic and handsome Spanish captain.

  Some instinct caused Harben to dart back behind the shelter of the bridge and go to ground there. He could not afterwards find any explanation of this behaviour. He had no reason to fear the Spanish captain, yet his instinct was to avoid him.

  The ladies, naturally surprised at Harben’s extraordinary conduct, remained on the bridge, and leaned over, gazing at the water, and hoping that their protector had not gone mad. When the road was clear again, they approached him cautiously.

  “Did that fellow have anyone with him?” Harben enquired.

  “Yes, he was followed by a short, dark man. They looked like foreigners,” said the older woman, staring at him curiously.

  “I owe them money,” said Harben, believing, with some confidence, that this explanation would suffice to explain his conduct. “It would be awkward to run into them now.”

  “Mr. Harben,” said the older woman, “I know this place where we are. I believe it is not far from Bournemouth. There should be a bus. Shall we say good-bye now, and relieve you of further responsibility?”

  “Why, as to that—” said Harben. But she was conducting a search among her too ample clothing, and paid no attention until she had found what she wanted.

  “Will you accept a hundred pounds, and our gratitude, Mr. Harben?”

  “Good God no!” said Harben. He laughed. “After you paid for the ship and the stores, and fitted me out with new clothes? No, really, I’ve plenty of money. I’ve still four pounds which I saved by bargaining for the fittings. I shall pay these fellows directly I get back to town. Really, now we’re in England, I’m not in the slightest need—But—here comes the bus. Look here—in case I don’t see you again—”

  He took the older lady by the shoulders and gently kissed her thin cheek.

  “You’ve been bricks,” he said. “Really you have. It’s been a privilege and pleasure to serve you.”

  “Well!” said the lady. The bus drew up. The two women boarded it. He wondered, watching the bus out of sight, how they would manage for money to pay their fares. Their wealth, he believed, was all in Spanish pesetas and English pound notes. He did not know that the other lady, in finding the hundred pounds to present to him, had, at the same time, brought out the quantity of English small change which, with the spinster’s habit in such important matters, she had had secreted ever since her first landing on the Canaries.

  He tramped a couple of miles, came to a little village, got on a bus to Bournemouth, and there, having breakfasted, took a ticket for Waterloo. He also bought cigarettes, matches and a newspaper. The date was the nineteenth of April. Altogether he had been absent for more than five months.

  “Pretty work,” said Pirberry, grinning. “What fraction or part of the yarn is true, ma’am?”

  “I cannot say. I have not checked it,” said Mrs. Bradley mildly. “The dream, to a psychologist, was interesting.”

  “Cleverly worked out, you mean, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Bradley chuckled.

  “Mr. Harben is a clever man,” she said. “What do you make of the Spaniards and the English ladies?”

  “Phony, ma’am,” said Pirberry, without hesitation. “But what did you do when you found the young fellow had disappeared? Did you have a look for him at all? Apart from bring
ing Sir Beresford into it, I mean, and the little bit we did later.”

  “You shall hear all,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  * * *

  [*] Who knows? Pray to God, and keep on hammering.

  [*]Captain Sir Basil Bartlett (Baronet), My First War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940).

  [*]“There was the case, a few months later (i.e. later even than October, 1940), of a Middlesex man, week-ending at Torquay, who was swept out to sea in a hired dinghy which capsized. He clung to the boat all night and at daybreak drifted close to the shore. He climbed on to the beach—and no one challenged him.” Michael Joseph, The Sword in the Scabbard (Michael Joseph, 1942).

  BOOK FIVE

  Sleuth’s Alchemy

  Why grass is green, or why our blood is red,

  Are mysteries which none have reached unto.

  In this low form, poor soul, what wilt thou do?

  When wilt thou shake off this pedantry,

  Of being taught by sense and fantasy?

  Thou look’st through spectacles; small things seem great

  Below; but up unto the watch-tower get,

  And see all things despoiled of fallacies

  John Donne

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Familiars

  To say that Mrs. Lestrange Bradley was perturbed by the disappearance of her guest would be an over-statement. It was Sister Mary Dominic who perturbed her, for Sister Mary Dominic fretted over his absence, and even that relaxed and cheerful person the humorous and placid Sister Mary Sebastian, O.P., said that she felt no good could come of “this running about at nights.”

  “It is not as though he were a depraved young man,” she naïvely added. Mrs. Bradley agreed, although she thought it possible that her own definition of the word might not coincide exactly with that of the nun.

  She had made a sufficiently accurate estimate of Harben’s character, however, to believe him to be capable of ill-considered and impulsive conduct which might readily lead him into danger. This belief was not in any degree lessened by the telephone call which she had received from her Kensington house, for the faithful and unforgetful Woods had done exactly as Harben had asked him to do, and had rung through in the morning. Mrs. Bradley’s servants had then transmitted the message to The Island.