Miss Quirk had tried the woodshed, but it was empty, and among its contents she could find nothing more suspicious than a hatchet, a saw, a rabbit-hutch, a piece of old carpet and a wet ring among the sawdust. She was not surprised that the evidence had been removed; Bredon had been extraordinarily anxious to leave the breakfast-table, and his parents had shut their eyes and let him go. Nor had Peter troubled to examine the premises; he had walked straight out of the house with that man Puffett, who naturally could not insist upon a search. Both Peter and Harriet were obviously burking inquiry; they did not want to admit the consequences of their wickedly mistaken system of training.
‘Mummy! come out an’ play wiv’ me an’ Bom-bom!’
‘Presently, darling. I’ve only got a little bit to finish.’
‘When’s presently, Mummy?’
‘Very soon. In about ten minutes.’
‘What’s ten minutes, Mummy?’
Harriet laid down her pen. As a conscientious parent, she could not let this opportunity pass. Four years old was said to be too early, but children differed and you never knew.
‘Look, darling. Here’s the clock. When this long hand gets to that, that’ll be ten minutes.’
‘When this gets to that?’
‘Yes, darling. Sit quiet just for a little bit and look after it and tell me when it gets there.’
An interval. Miss Quirk had by this time searched the garage, the greenhouse and the shed that housed the electric plant.
‘It isn’t moving, Mummy.’
‘Yes, it is, really, only it goes very, very slowly. You’ll have to keep a very sharp eye on it.’
Miss Quirk had reached the back parts of the house itself. She entered by the back door, and passed through the scullery into a passage, containing, among other things, the door of the boot-hole. In this retreat, she discovered a small village maiden, cleaning a pair of very youthful boots.
‘Have you seen –?’ began Miss Quirk. Then her eye fell on the boots. ‘Are those Master Bredon’s boots?’
‘Yes, miss,’ said the girl, with the startled look peculiar to young servants when suddenly questioned by strangers.
‘They’re very dirty,’ said Miss Quirk. She remembered that Bredon had worn clean sandals when he came in to breakfast. ‘Give those to me for a moment,’ said Miss Quirk.
The small maid looked round with a gasp for advice and assistance, but both Bunter and the maid seemed to be occupied elsewhere, and one could not refuse a request from a lady staying in the house. Miss Quirk took charge of the boots. ‘I’ll bring them back presently,’ she said, with a nod, and passed on. Fresh, damp earth on Bredon’s boots, and something secret brought home in a pail – it scarcely needed a Peter Wimsey to put two and two together. But Peter Wimsey was refusing to detect in the right place. Miss Quirk would show him.
Miss Quirk went on along the passage and came to a door. As she approached it, it opened and Bredon’s face, very dirty, appeared round the edge. At sight of her, it popped in again like a bolting rabbit.
‘Ah!’ said Miss Quirk. She pushed the door briskly. But even a child of six, if he can reach it and is determined, can make proper use of a bolt.
‘Roger, darling, no! Shaking won’t make it go any faster. It’ll only give the poor clock tummyache. Oh, look, what a dreadful mess Paul’s made with his rabbit. Help him pick up the bits, dear, and then you’ll see, the ten minutes will be up.’
Peter, returning from Mr Puffett’s garden, found his wife and two-thirds of his family rolling vigorously about the lawn with Bom-bom. Being invited to roll, he rolled, but with only half his attention.
‘It’s a curious thing,’ he observed plaintively, ‘that though my family makes a great deal of noise and always seems to be on top of me’ (this was, at the moment, a fact), ‘I never can lay hands on the bit of it I want at the moment. Where is the pest, Bredon?’
‘I haven’t dared to ask.’
Peter rose up, with his youngest son clinging, leech-like, to his shoulder, and went in search of Bunter, who knew everything without asking.
‘Master Bredon, my lord, is engaged at present in an altercation with Miss Quirk through the furnace-room door.’
‘Good God, Bunter! Which of them is inside?’
‘Master Bredon, my lord.’
‘I breathe again. I feared we might have to effect a rescue. Catch hold of this incubus, will you, and hand him back to her ladyship.’
All Miss Quirk’s coaxing had been impotent to lure Bredon out of the furnace-room. At Peter’s voice she turned quickly.
‘Oh, Peter! Do get the child to come out. He’s got those peaches in there, and I’m sure he’ll make himself ill.’
Lord Peter raised his already sufficiently surprised eyebrows.
‘If your expert efforts fail,’ said he, ‘will my brutal threats have any effect, do you suppose? Besides, even if he were eating peaches, ought we, in this peremptory way, to suppress that natural expression of his personality? And whatever makes you imagine that we keep peaches in the furnace-room?’
‘I know he’s got them there,’ said Miss Quirk. ‘And I don’t blame the child. If you beat a boy for stealing, he’ll steal again. Besides, look at these boots he went out in this morning – all covered with damp mould.’
Lord Peter took the boots and examined them with interest.
‘Elementary, my dear Watson. But allow me to suggest that some training is necessary, even for the work of a practical domestic detective. This mould is not the same colour as the mould in Puffett’s garden, and in fact is not garden mould at all. Further, if you take the trouble to look at the flower-beds, you will see that they are not wet enough to leave as much mud as this on a pair of boots. Thirdly, I can do all the detective work required in this family. And fourthly, you might realise that it is rather discourteous of you to insist that my son is a liar.’
‘Very well,’ said Miss Quirk, a little red in the face. ‘Fetch him out of there, and you’ll see.’
‘But why should I fetch him out, and implant a horrible frustration-complex around the furnace-room?’
‘As you like,’ said Miss Quirk. ‘It’s no business of mine.’
‘True,’ said Peter. He watched her stride angrily away, and said:
‘Bredon! You can come out. She’s gone.’
There was a sound of the sliding of iron, and his son slithered out like an eel, pulling the door carefully to behind him.
‘You’re not very clean, are you?’ said his father, dispassionately. ‘It looks to me as though the furnace-room needed dusting. I’m not very clean myself, if it comes to that. I’ve been crawling in the lane behind Mr Puffett’s garden, trying to find out who stole his peaches.’
‘She says I did.’
‘I’ll tell you a secret, Bredon. Grown-up people don’t always know everything, though they try to pretend they do. That is called “prestige” and is responsible for most of the wars that devastate the continent of Europe.’
‘I think,’ said Bredon, who was accustomed to his father’s meaningless outbursts of speech, ‘she’s silly.’
‘So do I; but don’t say I said so.’
‘And rude.’
‘And rude. I, on the other hand, am silly, but seldom rude. Your mother is neither rude nor silly.’
‘Which am I?’
‘You are an egotistical extravert of the most irrepressible type. Why do you wear boots when you go mud-larking? It’s much less trouble to clean your feet than your boots.’
‘There’s thistles and nettles.’
‘True, O King! Yes, I know the place now. Down by the stream, at the far end of the paddock. . . . Is that the Secret you’ve got in the furnace-room?’
Bredon nodded, his mouth obstinately shut.
‘Can’t you let me in on it?’
Bredon shook his head.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he explained candidly. ‘You see, you might feel you ought to stop it.’
‘That�
��s awkward. It’s so often my duty to stop things. Miss Quirk thinks I oughtn’t ever to stop anything, but I don’t feel I can go quite as far as that. I wonder what the devil you’ve been up to. We’ve had newts and frogs and sticklebacks, and tadpoles are out of season. I hope it isn’t adders, Bredon, or you’ll swell up and turn purple. I can stand for most livestock, but not adders.’
‘Tisn’ tadders,’ replied his son, with dawning hope. ‘Only very nearly. An’ I don’t know what it lives on. I say, if you will let me keep it, d’you mind coming in quick, ’cos I ’spect it’s creeped out of the bucket.’
‘In that case,’ said his lordship, ‘I think we’d better conduct a search of the premises instantly. My nerves are fairly good; but if it were to go up the flue and come out in the kitchen—’
He followed his offspring hastily into the furnace-room.
‘I wish,’ said Harriet, a little irritably, for she strongly disliked being lectured about her duties and being thus prevented from attending to them, ‘you wouldn’t always talk about “a” child, as if all children were alike. Even my three are all quite different.’
‘Mothers always think their own children are different,’ said Miss Quirk. ‘But the fundamental principles of child-psychology are the same in all, I have studied the subject. Take this question of punishment. When you punish a child—’
‘Which child?’
‘Any child – you harm the delicate mechanism of its reaction to life. Some become hardened, some become cowed, but in either case you set up a feeling of inferiority.’
‘It’s not so simple. Don’t take any child – take mine. If you reason with Bredon, he gets obstinate. He knows perfectly well when he’s been naughty, and sometimes he prefers to be naughty and take the consequences. Roger’s another matter. I don’t think we shall ever whip Roger, because he’s sensitive and easily frightened and rather likes having his feelings appealed to. But he’s already beginning to feel a little inferior to Bredon, because he isn’t allowed to be whipped. I suppose we shall have to persuade him that whipping is part of the eldest son’s prerogative. Which will be all right provided we don’t have to whip Paul.’
There were so many dreadful errors in this speech, that Miss Quirk scarcely knew where to begin.
‘I think it’s such a mistake to let the younger ones fancy that there is anything superior in being the eldest. My little nephews and nieces—’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘But one’s got to prepare people for life, hasn’t one? The day is bound to come when they realise that all Peter’s real property is entailed.’
Miss Quirk said she so much preferred the French custom of dividing all property equally. ‘It’s so much better for the children.’
‘Yes; but it’s very bad for the property.’
‘But Peter wouldn’t put his property before his children!’
Harriet smiled.
‘My dear Miss Quirk! Peter’s fifty-two, and he’s reverting to type.’
Peter at that moment was not looking or behaving like fifty-two, but he was rapidly reverting to a much more ancient and early type than the English landed gentleman. He had, with some difficulty, retrieved the serpent from the ash-hole, and now sat on a heap of clinker, watching it as it squirmed at the bottom of the bucket.
‘Golly, what a whopper!’ he said, reverently. ‘How did you catch him, old man?’
‘Well, we went to get minnows, and he came swimming along, and Joey Maggs caught him in his net. And he wanted to kill him along of biting, but I said he couldn’t bite, ’cos you told us the difference between snakes. And Joe bet me I wouldn’t let him bite me, an’ I said I didn’ mind and he said, is it a dare? an’ I said, Yes, if I can have him afterwards, so I let him bite me, only of course he didn’ bite an’ George helped me bring him back in the bucket.’
‘So Joey Maggs caught him in his net, did he?’
‘Yes, but I knew he wasn’t a nadder. And please, sir, will you give me a net, ’cos Joe’s got a lovely big one, only he was awfully late this morning and we thought he wasn’t coming, and he said somebody had hidden his net.’
‘Did he? That’s very interesting.’
‘Yes. May I have a net, please?’
‘You may.’
‘Oh, thank-you, Father. May I keep him, please, and what does he live on?’
‘Beetles, I think.’ Peter plunged his hand into the bucket, and the snake wound itself about his wrist and slithered along his arm. ‘Come on, Cuthbert. You remind me of when I was at my prep. school, and we put one the dead spit of you into—’ He caught himself up, too late.
‘Where, Father?’
‘Well, there was a master we all hated, and we put a snake in his bed. It’s rather frequently done. In fact, I believe it’s what grass-snakes are for.’
‘Is it very naughty to put snakes in people you don’t like’s beds?’
‘Yes. Exceedingly naughty. No nice boy would ever think of doing such a thing. . . . I say, Bredon—’
Harriet Wimsey sometimes found her eldest son disconcerting. ‘You know, Peter, he’s a most unconvincing-looking child. I know he’s yours, because there is nobody else’s he could be. And the colour’s more or less right. But where on earth did he get that square, stolid appearance, and that incredible snub nose?’
But at that instant, in the furnace-room, over the body of the writhing Cuthbert, square-face and hatchet-face stared at one another and grew into an awful, impish likeness.
‘Oh, Father!’
‘I don’t know what your mother will say. We shall get into most frightful trouble. You’d better leave it to me. Cut along now, and ask Bunter if he’s got such a thing as a strong flour-bag and a stout piece of string, because you’ll never make Cuthbert stay in this bucket. And for God’s sake, don’t go about looking like Guy Fawkes and Gunpowder Treason. When you’ve brought the bag, go and wash yourself. I want you to run down with a note to Mr Puffett.’
Mr Puffett made his final appearance just after dinner, explaining that he had not been able to come earlier, ‘along of a job out Lopsley way.’ He was both grateful and astonished.
‘To think of it being old Billy Maggs and that brother of his, and all along o’ them perishin ’old vegetable marrers. You wouldn’t think a chap cud ’arbour a grievance that way, would yer? ’Tain’t even as though ’e wor a’showin’ peaches of his own. It beat me. Said’e did it for a joke. “Joke?” I says to ’im. “I’d like to ’ear wot the magistrate ud say to that there kinder joke.” Owsumdever, I got me peaches back, and the Show being ter-morrer, mebbe they won’t ’ave took no ’arm. Good thing ’im and they boys ’adn’t ’ave ate the lot.’
The household congratulated Mr Puffett on this happy termination to the incident, Mr Puffett chuckled.
‘Ter think o’ Billy Maggs an’ that good-fer-nothin’ brother of ’is a-standin’ on that there ladder a-fishin’ for any peaches with young Joey’s stickle-back net. A proper silly sight they’d a-bin if anybody’d come that way. “Think yerselves clever,” I says to Bill. “W’y, ’is lordship didn’t only cast one eye over the place afore ’e says, ‘W’y, Puffett,’ e’ says, ‘’ere’s Billy Maggs an’ that there brother of ’is been a-wallerin’ all over your wall like a ’erd of elephants.’” Ah! An’ a proper fool ’e looked. ’Course, I see now it couldn’t only a’been a net, knockin’ the leaves about that way. But that there unripe ’un got away from ’im all right “Bill,” I says, “you’ll never make no fisherman, lettin’ ’em get away from you like that.” Pulled ’is leg proper, I did. But see ’ere, me lord, ’ow did you come ter know it was Billy Maggs’s Joey’s net? ’E ain’t the only one.’
‘A little judicious inquiry in the proper quarter,’ replied his lordship. ‘Billy Maggs’s Joe gave the show away, unbeknownst. But see here, Puffett, don’t blame Joe. He knew nothing about it, nor did my boy. Only from something Joe said to Bredon I put two and two together.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Puffett, ‘an’ that re
minds me. I’ve got more peaches back nor I wants for the Show, so I made bold to bring ’arf-a-dozen round for Master Bredon. I don’t mind tellin’ you, I did think for about ’arf a minute it might a’ bin ’im. Only ’arf a minute, mind you – but knowin’ wot boys is, I did jest think it might be.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Harriet. ‘Bredon’s in bed now, but we’ll give them to him in the morning. He’ll enjoy them so much and be so pleased to know you’ve quite forgiven him for those other two.’
‘Oh, them!’ replied Mr Puffett. ‘Don’t you say nothing more about them. Jest a bit o’ fun, that wos. Well, goodnight all, and many thanks to your lordship. Coo!’ said Mr Puffett, as Peter escorted him to the door, ‘ter think. o’ Billy Maggs and that there spindle-shanked brother of ’is a-fishin’ for peaches with a kid’s net a-top o’ my wall. I didden ’arf make ’em all laugh round at the Crown.’
Miss Quirk had said nothing, Peter slipped upstairs by the back way, through Harriet’s bedroom into his own. In the big four-poster, one boy was asleep, but the other sat up at his cautious approach.
‘Have you done the deed, Mr Scatterblood?’
‘No, Cap’n Teach, but your orders shall be carried out in one twirl of a marlin spike. In the meantime, the bold Mr Puffett has recovered his lost treasure and has haled the criminals up before him and had them hanged at the yardarm after a drum-head court-martial. He has sent you a share of the loot.’
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