by Jack Mann
“Gees, Miss Brandon,” he told her. “Take down my address. Hunters’ Arms, Denlandham, Shropshire. Got that down?”
She repeated the words after a brief interval, for checking.
“Right. Now get hold of a file of the Times for two years ago last April—no, I don’t mean get it right away, because I know we haven’t got one. Get it—steal it, borrow it, consult it somehow, even if you have to pay for it, and look up a raid—what’s that? Yes, a raid, I said, on the Peppered Pig club. The Peppered Pig, a night club. You’ll find the name Isabella Carter among the people charged, and her address. Put that down. Then go on to the trial of these people, and you’ll see her as Isabella Curtis, with a different address. Put that down—I’ve forgotten it, but it’s Upper Gloucester Place way somewhere. Got that?”
“Isabella Carter and Isabella Curtis—yes, Mr. Green,” she said.
“Right. Get that done to-night if you can, and charge me overtime. Take it out of petty cash, and any expenses as well—expenses all the way along. To-morrow morning, turn yourself into a private detective, which means don’t look like one. Got that?”
“I quite understand, Mr. Green,” she answered coldly.
“Good! Find out anything you can about Isabella Curtis. Relations, social standing, tastes and habits, history from childhood—any da—anything you can. Make it snappy, Miss Brandon. Write a report of all you’ve got by to-morrow night, and register and express it to me at the Hunters’ Aims. If you don’t think you’ve got everything by then, send the report of what you have, and go on detecting. And remember, if you get caught at it, or anyone suspects you’re inquiring about her, my name is likely to be mud—the unpleasant sort of mud too. Got that?”
“Quite,” she said. “I’ll send the report to-morrow night.”
“Then that’s that. Now what have we in the way of inquiries?”
“Nothing much, I’m afraid. Someone appears to have got hold of your Cumberland case—the grey shapes, as you call it—and people seem to think this is some sort of psychic establishment. A Croydon woman asks if we could recommend her to a good medium, and—”
“Snap that mumps to murder personal ad. into the three principal dailies, alternate days for a fortnight,” he interrupted. “I’ll lam ’em—mediums! And nothing worth following up, apparently?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Green.”
“All right. Providence will send another case when I’m ready for it, and for the present you can get on with that inquiry. I’ve no idea when I shall be back, but will get in touch with you again when things are a bit more advanced. And that will be all for now, Miss Brandon.”
“I’ll send the report to-morrow night. Good-bye, Mr. Green.”
He nodded approval again as he put the receiver back.
“Stout girl,” he murmured, “though not physically, thank heaven. I can trust her to get her nose down to it without sneezing.”
He paid for the call and went out to set off on the return journey. When he reached the garage he had noted on his way to Ludlow, he pulled up before it and waited until a youngish, pleasant-looking man in dungarees came to the side of the car in an active, businesslike way.
“Petrol, sir?” he inquired.
“ ’Fraid not,” Gees answered. “That Daimler there. For hire?”
“Yes, sir, it is,” the man answered, with a look along the bonnet of the sleek tourer as if he wondered why its driver wanted to hire any other car, since that driver looked like owner as well.
“Who’d drive it, on a hire job?” Gees inquired.
“Well, that would depend on the job, sir. I’d either send the boy, or leave him in charge here and drive myself.”
“You’d better drive yourself, for this job. Be outside the Hunters’ Arms at Denlandham at a quarter to two to-morrow. I want you to drive to a farm about two miles beyond the inn, and wait there for further instructions, and here’s two pounds on account. All clear?”
“Delighted, sir. Just a moment, and I’ll get you a receipt—”
“No, you won’t. If you fail to turn up, I shall come back here and hammer hell out of you. Hunters’ Arms, a quarter to two. See you then without fail, and mind it is you, and not the boy.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll make a point of driving myself.”
But, since he addressed the last words to Gees’ rear number plate, he left off speaking, and went thoughtfully back to his garage, pocketing the two pound notes, while the long tourer vanished round a bend.
It came to rest in the stable behind the inn. Gees shooed out the hens which sought to return to their evidently normal abode, closed the doors of the stable, and went round to the front of the inn to stand under the spreading chestnut tree and meditate on his first day’s discoveries, together with all that Phil Bird had told him. He gazed meditatively at the little bit of Denlandham House visible among its trees from this point. Hunter would know by this time that he had arrived in the village, and might be wondering why he had not reported himself at the house. Well, let him wonder: the terms Gees had imposed were clear enough: no conditions or stipulations, but he would conduct the inquiry in his own way, and claim payment only on results. For the present, he did not want to see Hunter again: the man had perverted fact in the course of his recital—naturally enough, but Gees wanted his facts straight and unalloyed; this quest appeared to be concerned with things more vital than protecting the good name of the Hunter family, and even if it meant losing that two hundred and fifty pounds, making nothing at all out of it, Gees would do it in his own way. Not yet six o’clock. He moved out from under the chestnut tree and went slowly along the road toward the church, though with no particular destination in mind. There appeared nothing more to do until H. Jones turned up with the Daimler at a quarter to two to-morrow—Friday, it would be. Gees passed a row of cottages with pleasant little gardens before them, and was aware of faces at windows—the stranger in the village was bound to arouse a certain amount of curiosity, he knew. He eyed the village shop and post office, plate-glass-fronted on both sides of the doorway and showing groceries one side and all things from drapery to ironmongery on the other. J. Jones presided here, evidently. Another row of cottages, neat and well-kept as the first both as to buildings and gardens, and then he came to a small house standing alone behind a neatly trimmed privet hedge, with a solignumed matchboard and felt-roofed shed at its end. Through the window of the shed Gees discerned Phil Bird, in shirt sleeves and evidently busy over something, and, opening the gate in the hedge, he went along the path and looked in through the open doorway of the shed. Phil Bird put down a chisel and strip of whitewood on his small carpenter’s bench, and turned.
“Evenin’, sir. Come in, if you like. I was just amusin’ myself, makin’ a chest o’ drawers for a niece o’ mine to save her buyin’ one. All the stuff you can buy at a reasonable price nowadays is that rotten plywood blown together by mass production, an’ I thought she might as well have somethin’ real. But I was just about to knock off.”
The chest itself stood back from the far corner of the bench, as good a piece of work as any professional cabinet-maker could have turned out. Gees took up the piece of wood Bird had put down.
“Dovetailed corners for the drawers, eh?” he observed. “Takes time to make the joints, doesn’t it?”
“When you’ve got the time an’ love your work, sir, it don’t take too long,” Phil answered. “An’ I’ve nothin’ else to do, just now.”
“Neither have I,” Gees observed thoughtfully.
“An’ how’d you get on with our parson, sir?” Phil ventured.
“Oh, very well indeed. You saw me with him, I suppose?”
“I guess the whole village’s got it that the gent stayin’ at the Hunters’ Arms took a look at the church an’ then went along to tea with the rector,” Phil said, and smiled. “When there’s little to talk about, as there generally is in a place like this, people do all the talkin’ they can abo
ut what there is. You can lay to that, every time.”
“I should have said they had plenty of subject for talk,” Gees objected. “Since—weli, since last November, say.”
“There you’re wrong, sir, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so. Women among theirselves, maybe, an’ men too, but not in a general way. The children might overhear, an’ the fearful sort might get worked up—an’ on top o’ that there’s them who cold-water the whole thing, sneer at it and at anyone who thinks as—well, as I do, say. No, you’re not likely to hear any talk about that in Denlum.”
“I see. Weil, the gent from the Hunters’ Arms did go to tea with the rector, and just saw a very charming girl—and that’s all.”
“That’ll be—you mean the new Mrs. Perivale, sir,” Phil suggested.
“I mean the eldest Miss Perivale,” Gees dissented. “You’d hardly call her stepmother a girl, I think.”
“Ah, Miss Celia: Mother to all the rest, she is, since her own mother died four year back, though Miss Celia was no more’n a child herself, then. No, I s’pose you couldn’t call this Mrs. Perivale a girl.”
“No,” Gees agreed, and left it at that.
“Surprised us all, he did, last September,” Phil Bird pursued reflectively. “I dunno—it’s not for me to say, but—she’s not liked.”
“A stepmother’s position is always difficult,” Gees remarked.
“There’s that—yes,” Phil conceded. “An’ they say she’s got her own money, but when you see the way them children go about, an’ then see her—I’ve seen worse dressed women drivin’ with millionaires along the Avenida in Rio, an’ my niece wears better clothes’n Miss Celia’s. You’d think she—well, I dunno. But they’re bound to notice.”
“But she helps him in the village,” Gees pointed out. “Visiting, and that sort of thing. There’s bound to be prejudice against a stranger, and a very attractive stranger at that, taking his first wife’s place. She’s got to live that down. As for the children, probably she finds it very difficult to interfere, in any way.”
“Visitin’?” Phil echoed scornfully. “All I ever heard o’ that was when she went to visit old Martha Evans, an’ Martha told her straight out to put some o’ her money on to the children’s backs as well as her own, an’ then borrow a hoe an’ scrape that red paint off her lips. I never heard of her tryin’ any more visitin’, after that. Goes off for long walks on her own, noobery knows where, an’
maybe persuades him she’s visitin’ somewhere. Been right away on her own for a week at a time twice—twice, since he brought her here all unexpected only last September! Is that a proper village parson’s wife, sir? No use goin’ by what he thinks of her. The Reverend Perivale is a just man an’ a good man, an’ you’d go a long way to find a better country parson, or one better liked an’ respected in his parish. But over her—well, she’s got him, an’ the Lord above only knows why she did it.”
“Well, heaven save me—and her too—from village gossip,”
Gees said, “though it looks as if there were no saving, in her case.”
“A long-tongued, slanderous nuisance in the parish, Squire Hunter told me I was,” Phil Bird observed, and grinned over it. “He may be right, but Mr. Perivale don’t think so, nor do a good many others. I ain’t afraid to say what I think, because I owe no man anything except respect where it’s due an’ such help as I might ask myself in need. As far as that woman is concerned, I say she’s no fit wife for him, nor is she tryin’ to make herself fit, or tone down to what Denlum would accept. It ain’t altogether barbarous, sir. You may blame the films over some things, but they’ve taught people like there are here to see between class and class—and by that I don’t mean higher and lower in the social scale, but the rank selfish and them worth respect.”
“Squire Hunter doesn’t like you, then,” Gees remarked.
“About the same as the devil likes codfish on a Friday,” Phil said, and grinned again. “Maybe I know too much, an’ he thinks I might tell some of it, though he’s wrong there. But I do know if this place was not my own, I wouldn’t be livin’ in Denlum, because nearly all the rest of it is his, an’ he’d take good care that what ain’t was kept out of my reach if I wanted it. No, I couldn’t call him really friendly.”
He looked up at a large watch hanging on a nail over the bench.
“I dunno—could I offer you a cup o’ tea in my little place, sir?” he inquired rather diffidently. “I’m thinkin’ o’ one for myself.”
“Not now, thank you,” Gees answered. “You’ll be in the inn bar this evening, I expect?”
“Eightish, or a bit later, sir, for a bit.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure to look in. See you then, I hope.”
He returned, as thoughtfully as he had come from the inn. Later, in the dining-room, he removed the cover from the dish Nicholas had placed before him, and disclosed ham and eggs.
“It’s simply got to be kippers or sausages for breakfast,” he told himself, “or I shall sprout feathers and grunt.”
CHAPTER VIII
EXPULSION
THE WORTHIES OF THE HUNTERS’ ARMS BAR, Gees found, while not prepared to accept him as one of themselves or even open converse with him, talked at him this second evening. They showed off, in fact, like children in front of a stranger, and Tom Myers brought out an anecdote when his crony, Jacob Hood, gave him the opportunity by complaining about a pair of boots he had bought from a “chap wi’ a van.”
“Aye,” said Tom, “I don’t howd wi’ dealin’ wi’ them chaps, nohow. These here boots let water then, Jacob?”
“Noo, not yit, but they du most mortal draw my feet, so’s I can’t hardly walk in ’em,” Jacob explained. “I reckon ’t’ain’t good leather to du that. I had to wore the owd uns agin, mostly.”
“F’r everlastin’ moanin’ about suthin’ or other, yu are, Jacob,” observed a third worthy whom Gees had not seen the preceding night.
“Mind me, that du,” said Tom Myers, “o’ owd Noah Lewis, him ’at useter farm Butterkins, that little farm now took in along o’ Cosham’s.”
“What about him?” the third man enquired.
“He’d moan where I’d ’a kep’ quiet about it,” Tom said, with a side glance to assure himself that Gees by the bar was listening—as he was. “One year Noah was terr’ble troubled wi’ turnip fly, an’ he read it advertised in the paper ’at all anyone got to do was to send a shillin’ to some chap i’ Mantchester, wi’ a stamped envelope, an’ he’d git instructed how to kill turnip fly. So Noah got a shillin’ postal order an’ put a stamp on a envelope, an’ sent ’em, an’ all he got back was a letter writ on one o’ these here machines. Galled him dear sir, it did, an’ it said all he’d got to do was to catch the turnip fly an’ put it on a flat stone, an’ hit it wi’ another one—an’ that’d kill it.”
“Well?” Jacob Hood inquired, and at the grave concern of the query Gees almost spluttered into his tankard. “What’d he du?”
“Went an’ moaned all over the place about it, ’stead o’ keepin’ quiet an’ not lettin’ folks know how he’d been had, like I’d done,” said Tom. “Same along o’ them boots—yu ain’t goin’ to see that chap wi’ the van again no more, so it ain’t no use moanin’ about ’em.”
“But Noah coulda got his money back, if he’d gone to law about it,” Jacob persisted, “I’d ’a gone to law, if it’d been me.”
“Then yu better go to law about them boots,” Tom advised calmly.
“Stand ter reason I can’t find that chap wi’ the van!” Jacob expostulated with heat. “Else, yu may lay to it I would.”
“Needier could Noah ’a found the turnip fly man, if he’d ’a looked, I reckon,” Tom pointed out. “That chap knew what he was doin’.”
“Ketch the fly, put it on a flat stone, an’ hit it with another one,”