“Well, I shan’t do it, so it doesn’t unnerve me.”
“Then he’ll lay an information against you,” said Jock.
James frowned at them. There was a time for levity, and there was a time for business. He considered that they should stick to the business in hand. He said so.
“We’ve got away from the point. I’d like to get back to it. You say there’s evidence hidden in this house. You’ve rather pooh-poohed it up to now—at least that’s the impression I got from Sally. I want to know what has made you change your mind, and I want to know, firstly, did you ever finish reading your Aunt Clementa’s letter, and secondly, how much of it do you remember?”
“Very well put,” said Jocko. “Now attend and listen, both of you. I don’t know what I did about the letter. Sally tells me I read out a bit at breakfast, and she remembers that bit. Say your piece, child.”
Sally recited: “Dear Jocko, I’m going to die, and I’ve left you this house. I want you to find what I’ve hidden here. I’ve had to hide it because of them—”
“That’s where she stopped me, and perhaps just as well. Then I took the now famous toss, after which the mind was a complete blank on the subject of letters from Aunt Clementa. Sally reports the letter a total loss. She went through my pockets for it, but it wasn’t there. Her original theory was that the enemy had it. But if they had it, why didn’t they use it, find the incriminating evidence, and sit back with loud cheers of relief? Instead of which they continue what seems to me to be a futile search and go about the country murdering innocent Jacksons and trying to assassinate our blameless James.”
“You don’t assassinate people with lorries,” said Sally.
“We will now stick to the point, my child. As I was saying, the mind was a total blank. But after a good long time I began to remember things—things about the letter. They used to come and go like a flash. The minute I tried to remember, they went away altogether. I used to write them down, on my cuff, on anything handy.” He laughed. “I’ve written them in some queer places. And then I began to see pictures—when I was just falling asleep or just waking up. I used to see the cliff, and someone pushing me, but I never could see who it was. And I used to see myself reading the letter. I’d be standing by the window reading it, and when I’d read it I’d put a match to it and let it burn itself out on the window-ledge, and then I’d crush it with my hand and let the ashes blow away. The pictures were always exactly the same, so I expect that’s what I did. And I think the reason I burned the letter was that I thought the poor old lady was raving, and that it wasn’t the sort of stuff to leave lying about for the hotel servants to read. I don’t remember, but that’s the sort of feeling I’ve got about it in my own mind.”
“And how much do you remember of what was in the letter?” said James.
“Ah!” said Jocko. “Now we’re really getting to it. That is the point. When I see myself standing by that window and reading the letter, well, I really am reading it—it’s all quite clear, and I know everything that’s in it. That’s between sleeping and waking, but as soon as I’m wide awake I don’t know anything any more. I’ve only got odds and ends, and bits, and they don’t make sense. But yesterday—”
“What happened yesterday?” said Sally.
Jock’s impudent smile flashed out.
“I went to sleep before dinner in our dear guardian’s study. ‘Late last night, late the night before.’” He sang the words to the tune of the Soldiers’ Chorus. “Comfortable fire, comfortable chair. ‘Snug as a bug in a rug or a pea in a pod, I was one of the little orphins of the storm.’ Everything being propitious for a picture, it came along—a particularly clear one, because I was reading the letter out loud, and I’d never done that before. And all at once I woke up with a most frightful jerk, and there was dear Hildegarde bending over me and looking exactly like a human vampire bat—she’s got a black dress with sleeves like wings, and I give you my word. So I grinned from ear to ear and asked if I’d got to give her a pair of gloves, and she said no, I’d waked up just in the nick, and better luck next time. There was some more light badinage, and then she went away. But when I came to think it over, what I thought was this. Suppose I was really reading that letter out loud—I was doing it in my dream, but suppose I was really talking out loud in my sleep—You bet Hildegarde wasn’t trying to kiss me. Not much! She hates me like weed-killer, and if she was stooping over me, it was for something else. I’ve got an idea that it was to hear what I was saying. One generally mutters a bit on these occasions. And if that is so, the question is, how much did I say, and how much did she hear? I thought I’d better come along down here and do a little intelligent anticipation. If I’d given the show away, it seemed a good plan to get going before the enemy could, so I bought Beatrice and some bully beef and came along. And that is why we’re not going to a pub, dear James. We stay here and we hold the fort.”
“Jocko,” said Sally suddenly and earnestly, “when you dreamt you were reading that letter out loud last night, you said it was clearer than it had ever been before. Don’t you remember any of it? You must.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I do. But it doesn’t seem to get me any forrader. The whole thing was absolutely clear when I woke up, but the idea of being kissed by Hildegarde broke my nerve a bit. By the time I’d pulled myself together and got down to paper and pencil all I could do was to pick up the fragments.”
“You’d better come across with the fragments, J.J.,” said James.
Jocko nodded, dived into a pocket, and produced a crumpled sheet of paper.
“The first bit is quite plain—the piece about leaving me the house, and wanting me to find what she’d hidden there, and, ‘I’ve had to hide it because of them.’ That came at the bottom of the page, and the next bit, at the top of the next page begins, ‘It is hidden in—’ and then there’s a blank that I can’t fill. I thought if I didn’t try to force it, the blank would fill of itself, and I thought coming down here would help it, so I came. I’d been here about two and a half hours when you rolled up, and I’d spent them rummaging in all the really likely places and drawing a series of blanks. Then Sally and I spent the afternoon going over Aunt Clementa’s bedroom a square inch at a time, because Sally has an idea that the thing, whatever it is, is in the old lady’s room. So I didn’t say anything about the letter or the bits I remembered. I thought we’d better work along the lines of her impressions first and then start on mine. Well hers are a wash-out, so we’ll have to get back to what I’ve remembered out of the letter.”
“Oh, you do remember something then?” said Sally.
He nodded again.
“Top of the page—grey-blue paper—very black ink—lines all running away down hill. First line, ‘It is hidden in—’ dash and blank. Next line two thirds blank, then, ‘bats.’ Third line all blank. Fourth line, ‘It opens quite easily, so do not pull or try to force it.’ That runs over into the fifth line, and from there to the bottom of the page is a complete blank. Then page three begins brightly, ‘They will try to get it back. You must be very careful.’ And lower down on the page, ‘Very wicked people.’ And right down at the bottom, ‘Don’t let anyone know, because we’ve always kept it a secret for the sake of the family name.’ Then turn over again, and the fourth page is as clear as print—‘I hope all this will not be very troublesome, but you are a Rere, though not in name. Your ever affectionate great-aunt, Clementa Tolhache.’”
Sally made an exasperated face.
“Well, you’ve managed to forget everything that would be of the very slightest use.”
“Not everything, my child. There remains the pregnant word ‘bats.’ See page two, line two. At the end of that line I could see quite clearly the word ‘bats.’ Let us consider these bats. This council of war, I may say, has been called for the express purpose of considering them. They may have been bats in Aunt Clementa’s belfry, in which case she’s got the laugh on us, or they may be heraldic bats—the reremice of t
he Rere coat of arms. Personally I plumped for the latter, and I began by thinking that the shield over the fireplace in the hall would be a good starting-point for the treasure-hunt. You would probably have to pull the middle bat’s tail while punching the left-hand one on the nose, or something tricky of that sort.”
“Bats don’t have tails,” said Sally. “And I suppose you realize that the hall panelling absolutely crawls with them. It’s roses and reremice all the way.”
“I made up my mind to pull all their tails.”
“What was the next bit in the letter, J.J.?” asked James.
Jock recited in a leisurely sing-song, “‘It opens quite easily, so do not pull or try to force it.’”
“It sounds like a door,” said Sally.
“Or a cupboard,” said James.
Jock laughed mockingly.
“Or a box, or a basket, or a buttery, or a belfry, and there’s always a B in both.”
“Look here,” said Sally, “it can’t be the shield in the hall, because Aunt Clementa couldn’t possibly have reached it. Even if she had climbed on a chair she couldn’t, and I don’t see how she could have got up on to a chair.”
“No one thought she could get out of bed. The fact is she foxed everyone. She may have been quite capable of climbing anything.”
“I don’t believe it. Jocko, she couldn’t—she was frightfully tottery.”
“What other bats are there in the house?” asked James.
Jock produced another piece of crumpled paper.
“I made a list of them this morning. The hall, as Sally says, is simply crawling with them. But I’ve about exhausted the possibilities of the hall. Short of tearing the panelling up by the roots there’s nothing more I can do. There are some on the ceiling, but I refuse to believe that Aunt Clementa crawled like a fly to get at them. I couldn’t do anything with the shield at all. I spent a good half hour over it, and couldn’t find a join anywhere. The coat of arms is painted on a single wide panel. If it opens at all, the whole panel must open, and I don’t see how the bats can have anything to do with it, because they’re nothing but dabs of black paint. Well, besides the hall, there are quite a lot of bats all over the house. There’s one on a piece of panelling between the windows in Aunt Clementa’s bedroom, but it’s all by itself, and the letter said bats with an S. Then there are three, as per coat, carved on the headboard of the four-poster in Giles Rere’s room, and three more over the chimney-piece in the Headless Lady’s room. These are in the oldest part of the house. That’s about as far as I’ve got.”
“It opens quite easily, so do not pull or try to force it—” said James in a meditative voice. “Let’s go and have a look at those bats in the bedrooms, J.J.”
The Beatrice stove had certainly raised the temperature of the pantry. Coming out into the passage was like going out of doors on a winter night. As they went up the big gloomy stair, each carrying a candle which made practically no impression upon the dark, Sally slipped a hand inside James’s arm and said,
“We’ll have a little, new, jerry-built house. I feel an urge for the sort where you can talk from one room to another and hear everything that’s going on in the kitchen.”
James squeezed the hand against his side and asked why.
“I feel as if it would be cheerful,” said Sally wistfully. “I don’t ever want to see an ancestral mansion again. I don’t like bats, and I don’t like ghosts, and I don’t like Cellars. I do hope we shan’t have to go down into the cellars. I want electric light, and central heating, and a stainless steel sink, and lots and lots and lots of windows, so that it can’t ever be dark anywhere.”
James said, “Shall have.” He shifted the candle into his left hand and put his right arm round Sally. “Why do you mind cellars?”
“Slugs!” said Sally with a shudder. “I once saw a most revolting yellow slug in a cellar, and if I trod on one, I should probably die.” She shuddered again. “James, don’t let Jocko go down into the cellars. It’s not only the slugs—I used to have a perfectly dreadful dream about being buried where no one could find me, and the cellars here always bring it back. There are two layers of them, one under the other. Don’t let him go down.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to stop him,” said James, and with that they came to the top of the stair.
A black corridor ran away to the right and to the left. Jock turned left, and they followed him. There was a second turn almost at once. Even by candle-light it was easy to see that this was the old part of the house. Floor and walls were of stone. They passed the head of a winding stair. Jock lifted his candle to show the sloping, uneven steps.
“That’s the way the Queen’s necklace went, and Giles after it. It comes out on the far side of the hall. Daphne had it all wrong. This is the room where Giles was sleeping, so of course they took this way. The great stair would have been miles round. No, the thief came up this little stair, and they both hared down it in the dark.”
He turned from the stair and flung open an oak door with an arched top. The room inside was small. The big fourpost bed almost filled it. There was some old panelling upon the walls, but the roof was of stone. There was one small window high up in a corner. A mouldy smell hung upon the cold air. James decided that nothing on earth would persuade him to sleep in that damp, forbidding bed. The hangings might have been there since the days of Giles. They were of a dark damask which had once been red but was now all gone away to a brownish colour like rust or long-spilled blood. The mattress reeked, and pillows and bolster were clammy to the touch as he and Jock pulled them away from the bed head. In so small a space three candles gave light enough. It showed the Rere coat deeply carved with its three bats.
“Well, there they are,” said Jock, “but I don’t know what we’re going to do about them.”
They all looked at the bats. The head-board, very massive, was about two inches thick. The carving cut into an inch of it.
“There simply wouldn’t be room to hide anything there,” said Sally.
“Not in the head-board—at least I shouldn’t think so. Let’s get the mattress off.”
There wasn’t anything under the mattress, and after feeling and poking it all over they came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything in the mattress either. There might be a hiding-place in the panelling. If there was, they failed to find it.
“It may be simply anywhere,” said Sally in a despairing voice. “A hundred people might search this place for a hundred years and never find it.”
Jock laughed.
“Three very persevering people have been doing their damnedest ever since Aunt Clementa died. If they had found what they were looking for, they wouldn’t still be trying to murder our James. Or would they? I dunno. The criminal mind is a very odd thing. Anyhow I believe Giles is a wash-out. Let’s try the Headless Lady. Her proper name, by the way, was Eleanor Rere, and she lost her head in the reign of Edward IV—I don’t remember why.”
“Her husband did it,” said Sally. “He was jealous, and he had a very hasty temper. He did it with a battle-axe, and then went into a monastery to repent.”
Eleanor Rere’s room was, if possible, colder and mouldier than Giles’s. It was the same size and shape, but without the panelling. The stone walls stood stark, and there was no bed. There was no furniture of any kind. Across the chimney breast, three in a row, were the Rere bats carved in the solid stone. They gazed at them with a helpless feeling. What could you do to a carved stone bat—push it, poke it, bang it on the head? And when none of these things produced the slightest impression, stand helplessly back and look at it again.
“I believe this is a wash-out,” said Jock. “Of course you could hide almost anything up the chimney, but I don’t see Aunt Clementa climbing chimneys, and it doesn’t fit in with the bit about the thing opening quite easily and not to force it.
“No,” said James.
There was a silence.
“We’d better go and have another look at t
he bat in Aunt Clementa’s bedroom,” said Sally. “It’s so much the most likely place—yes, Jocko, it is. And it’s no good your saying it was ‘bats’ in the letter, because she might quite easily have written ‘One of the bats—the one in my room,’ or something like that.”
They went back to the stair head and along the right-hand corridor to an immense room with a Brussels carpet, a mid-Victorian wall-paper, and cumbrous mahogany furniture, but instead of the large bed which should have gone with dressing-table, wardrobe and chest of drawers, a plain iron bedstead painted white stood small and lonely against the long wall.
“They made her have it,” said Sally, “because of having to lift her and wash her, but she did hate it so, poor old pet. She used to go on and on about her old bed and all the Reres who had died in it.”
“Where is it?” said James. “And are there any bats on it, Sally?”
She shook her head.
“Oh, no. It wasn’t really old, you know—just a Victorian mahogany affair like the rest of the furniture. And anyhow they’d got it away from her long before this hiding business cropped up. Now I say that this is the place where she hid the book or whatever it was. It’s an obvious hiding-place, and all we’ve got to do is to find out how to open it.”
The room had two large windows hung with dark red curtains.
“Look!” said Sally, holding up her candle. “You see all the rest of the room is papered, but here between the windows there’s a piece of panelling, and there’s the bat right in the middle of it. This part of the house is early seventeenth century, and it was all panelled once. I expect the old panelling is there somewhere behind the paper still, but when they covered it up they left this bit untouched, and what I say is, they must have had a reason for not papering it over. I’m quite sure the panel opens, and that is why it was left. And the most natural place for Aunt Clementa to hide anything in would be her own room.”
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