Grimble had at least one visitor, one house-guest, at the vicarage. At least one person had arrived unobtrusively, locked away a car in a hurry, bolted into the house, and thereafter remained invisible. Miss Bostock had been aware of Gadberry’s own call at the vicarage. She had enjoyed, in fact, at that time, precisely the same close-up and telescopic view of the place as Gadberry himself had just been doing. She had seen that odd arrival too. It was what she had been further exploring, with characteristic enterprise and resolution, when she had slipped (like a sheep into the fold, so to speak) through that upper window.
Were the present a narrative conducted upon philosophic principles, or dedicated to the unravelling of intricate states of mind, it would be necessary to pause at this point in an attempt to determine whether Gadberry, as he contemplated these facts, became – obscurely, subliminally, subconsciously, or unconsciously – possessed of a substantial part of the true state of the case. Certainly a great deal was going to happen – and happen very soon – which was to have the appearance of surprising and confounding him utterly. But the possibility cannot be excluded – and one need say no more than this – that in some confused part of his head he was not hopelessly behind the reader in his sense of what was really going on. If he appears – again at this point – to be distinctly on the thick side, we may (if we want to be charitable) attribute this to the obfuscating effect of a further and utterly obliterating fall of snow. Down it came again – and much as if it had hardly been in earnest until this moment. Far from finding his way securely through his appalling predicament, he had a good deal of difficulty in even finding his way back to the house. At one point, indeed, he walked straight across the fishpond – and almost fell through one of the holes that would have companioned him with the pike.
This new blizzard had one important consequence. By the middle of the afternoon, it became absolutely clear that the call upon the Shilbottles could not take place. Indeed, Lady Arthur was thoughtful enough to ring up with the news that her drive was totally blocked, and that it would remain so until snowploughs had operated in a big way. This telephone call was the last that came through to the Abbey. Nor could any more go out. As was customary in that part of Yorkshire under these disagreeable climatic conditions, the lines were down.
But if one couldn’t drive to the Shilbottles, one could certainly walk to the Fortescues. Any resolute lover would have been convinced of this, and Gadberry was certainly a resolute lover. It would take a certain amount of time, and quite a lot of effort. If he didn’t arrive exhausted, he would at least arrive looking pretty adequately exercised. And this ought to gain him merit – he couldn’t help thinking – when he did that job of sinking down on his knees by the bedside of his beloved.
So he set off down the drive. He was almost at once surprised by how heavy the going actually was. Every step forward involved tugging a foot out of from six to eighteen inches of snow, and quite soon the effort appeared to be telling not only on his legs but right up his back as well. He slowed his pace. To stride in breathed and glowing would be one thing, to stagger in puffed and sweating would be quite another. It was a further instance of the formidable character of Miss Bostock, it occurred to him, that she had made her own reconnaissance of the vicarage in face of these conditions.
It had stopped snowing, and the sky was blowing clear. With surprising speed the solid and louring cloud-ceiling had broken up, and now great chunks and streamers of it were in rapid movement. The effect of this was to make Gadberry’s own progress appear yet more plodding. But the effect was exhilarating as well. It was some time before he noticed how much the snow was in answering movement. It was being blown – preponderantly in his own direction, but in whirls and eddies as well – across its own surface like a fine smoke. If this went on, there would be tremendous drifts by morning.
Eventually he reached the spot where he had heard Evadne’s anguished cry. Eager though he was to press forward, he nevertheless paused, scrambled over the familiar dyke, and reverently surveyed the sacred ground. It was rather, of course, the sacred snow – and so much more had fallen that no trace remained of Evadne’s ski-tracks or her recumbent form. The skis, he supposed, were still buried here. They must be rescued – for were they not to be his cherished possession forever?
Heartened and refreshed, he went on his way. It was still daylight, but he wasn’t going to have very long with Evadne if he was to get back to the Abbey before dusk – and under present conditions being overtaken by the deeper shades of evening, let alone by darkness, mightn’t be fun. So he pushed up the pace again, and soon he had only a few hundred yards to go.
Hitherto the only sound had been his own breathing and the crunch of his boots. But now the snow was beginning to whistle and whisper as it sifted beneath the wind. He was listening to this when he suddenly realised that he was listening to something else too. There were voices ahead of him – excited voices – and then shouts of laughter. He turned a corner, and the house was before him, beyond a small paddock in which the snow was everywhere trodden vigorously underfoot. Three young people were skylarking in it: a boy whom Gadberry recognised as Evadne’s younger brother; a second boy of about the same age, who looked as if he might be the gardener’s son; and a rather older girl. All three were racing about madly, bombarding each other with snowballs, joining or separating in strategic rushes, and yelling at one another like fiends. The girl took a tumble as Gadberry watched. She was up again and running in a flash, making a grab, as she did so, at a little fur hat which had fallen from her head. It was a head that now showed in a glory of golden hair. The girl was Evadne herself.
For a single and unspeakable moment Gadberry’s heart was filled with joy. Evadne’s injury had vanished, miraculously cured. And then – in a single answering instant – the truth rushed upon him and overwhelmed him. No sprained ankle ever behaves like that. Evadne Fortescue was a fraud.
You see, Evadne’s a – The embarrassed voice of Captain Fortescue on the telephone, beginning thus before seeming to lose the will to communicate, came clearly back to Gadberry now. You see, Evadne’s a little bitch. Perhaps the completed sentence would have been that. Or perhaps bitch would have been fraud or schemer of even fortune hunter. It didn’t much matter which. The ski accident had been a fake. The girl had lain in wait and rigged it, knowing that Gadberry was coming that way.
Had Gadberry been a moral giant, he might himself have filled his arms with snowballs, and advanced laughing upon the guilty scene. As it was, he turned and stumbled blindly away. His passion had been instantaneous and romantic. His disillusionment was instantaneous too, and very bitter indeed. He might be compared (entirely adequately) to one of those unfortunate heroes of Thomas Hardy’s, whom some ingenious irony of circumstance clobbers pretty well into the dust. Gadberry, of course, was clobbered into snow. The stuff seemed twice as deep as it had been only a couple of minutes before. In no time at all, he felt that he had been walking round and round in it for hours.
Later, this is what he had been doing. His shattered retreat from the treacherous and Circean dwelling of the Fortescues must have been in the wrong direction. There was no track under his feet; there was no landmark within his vision. Had he been disposed to cry out, with Goethe’s tedious Faust, Wohin der Weg? he would undoubtedly have received as answer the Mephistophelean Kein Weg! Ins Unbetretene. Shelter of a sort did, however, eventually receive him. Finding himself sitting before a tolerable fire, and with a glass of whisky in his hand, he dimly concluded that he must have found his way to some lone alehouse in the Yorkshire moors.
It was while thus circumstanced that the scales fell from George Gadberry’s eyes. Evadne Fortescue had pretended to be what she was not: a maiden in distress, and one quite fortuitously succoured by a knight-errant chancing to pass that way. In contriving this imposture, Evadne had inflicted upon a fellow human being outrageous and immeasurable pain. It was clear, therefore, that all deliberate deception must be wrong. And must be quite
absolutelywrong. His own deception had been precisely that.
Gadberry finished his whisky, paid for it, and made careful inquiries about the direction in which Bruton Abbey lay. It was his business to return there, and to confess to Mrs Minton.
24
But Mrs Minton had gone to bed. Realising that it was really as late as that, Gadberry understood that he must in fact have wandered around in a state of shock for quite some time. He was very tired, and he wasn’t at all hungry. Boulter, however, insisted on serving him a meal of some elaboration. It was a succession of depressingly chilly dishes – Boulter referred to it as a cold collation – which Gadberry endeavoured, not perhaps wholly judiciously, to render more digestible by the concomitance of several glasses of claret. There was no need to keep absolutely sober. Mrs Minton had given directions that she was to be informed immediately upon his safe return (his absence, naturally, having caused concern) but that she was not to be otherwise disturbed. He could hardly break into her bedchamber with his shocking avowal, so it would have to keep till the morning. He himself might be in better trim to go through with it then.
‘And now,’ Gadberry said to Boulter, ‘I’m going to bed.’ It is possible that he spoke a little roughly. Boulter’s continuing to keep up a bogus and butler-like distance was coming to annoy him very much.
‘Very good, sir. You will no doubt wish to be called at the usual hour. Before you retire, may I venture to inquire into the nature of your occasions this afternoon?’
‘No. You may not.’
‘Indeed, sir?’ Boulter’s eyebrows hitched themselves slightly aloft on his impassive face. ‘May I venture to suggest the desirability of a relation of confidence continuing to subsist between us?’
‘Go to hell, Boulter.’ Gadberry produced this quite pleasantly. ‘And stay there. See?’
There was a moment’s silence. Boulter replaced the claret jug thoughtfully on the sideboard. Then he took a long look at Gadberry – a look that would have done justice to Miss Bostock herself.
‘Young man,’ he said, ‘you had better keep a civil tongue in your head.’
Gadberry laughed aloud. It was something he had expected never to do again. But at last Boulter was looking ugly, and this was a great satisfaction to him.
‘Boulter,’ he said, ‘you’ve had it. Before you go to bed, I advise you to put in a quiet hour packing your bags. I shall be doing just that myself.’
Boulter – and this was more satisfactory still – turned from pink to purple between his butler’s regulation mutton-chop whiskers.
‘You young twister!’ he gasped. ‘If you think you can–’
‘As it happens, I do. I think just that. And it means you’ve had it. See? You’ve proposed to conspire with a young twister against a generous employer who puts implicit trust in your loyalty.’ Gadberry felt a real access of righteous indignation as he delivered himself of this. ‘You haven’t a chance of keeping your job. Not a dog’s, puppy’s, kitten’s, or furry caterpillar’s chance. Good night.’
And Gadberry rose and walked from the room – wearily, but with the sense of one good job done. With Miss Bostock, he hoped, there would be a repeat performance next day.
The walk – it might almost be called the journey – to his own quarters seemed interminable. In the cloisters a casement window was swinging to and fro on creaking hinges; it must have been blown open by the rising wind. And a rising wind, once more, there certainly was. It was beginning to put on its howling act. Against this, the senior resident owl (as it probably was) had started to complain. Gadberry paused for a moment to listen to this dismal dialogue.
It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern’st good-night…
He was through, thank goodness, with all that Thane of Cawdor stuff.
A staircase, a corridor, a staircase: all empty and very cold. And then his own corridor. He had come to think of it as that. But it was as dreary as the rest of the place. He saw no reason to suppose that any of Her Majesty’s prisons would be notably drearier. Through the long row of lancet windows there came an odd effect as of a very faint lightning operating in slow motion. The sky had continued to clear. There was a gibbous moon in it, and across this the last of the storm-clouds were racing. In the corridor there was no more than a faint light outside his rooms at the far end, so this eerie flickering had it all its own way. His own shadow came and went oddly. In front of him one of the massive cell doors swung half open. He had never seen that happen before, even in as high a wind as the one now rising.
This was the thought in Gadberry’s mind when something black and sweet-smelling was clapped over his face. He felt his legs melt beneath him. And then he passed out.
He came to slowly, and at first to no more than a consciousness that the world was revolving round him as if he were the notional centre of a top. Then with a jar like the sudden application of a powerful brake this sensation vanished, to be replaced by the astonishing discovery that he was tied up. His wrists were bound behind him; his ankles were bound; he was slumped on a floor with his shoulders against a wall.
Gadberry had often read of this sort of thing happening. It is a commonplace in certain types of romance. The victims are invariably confident they will get free again, and they always start using their wits at once. Gadberry found that he hadn’t any wits. He was aware of nothing except terror. In this helpless posture anybody could do anything to him. The thought was unbearable.
‘Well, that’s stage one.’
The voice came as from a great distance. It was cheerful, and might even have been called friendly. Gadberry closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them – suddenly determined at least not to be too frightened to see. He was in a corner of one of the cells. There was some light from a small electric torch in the middle of the floor.
‘That’s right,’ said the voice. ‘Take a good look round. My guess is that it’s tolerably like something you’ll be becoming pretty familiar with.’
Gadberry’s glance had been on an indefinably sinister-looking black bag in a corner of the cell. Now he turned his head painfully towards the voice. Very oddly, somebody appeared to have brought a looking-glass into the place too. That could be the only explanation of the fact that he was staring at his own face. And then, in a flash, he realised the truth. What he was looking at was the face of the real Nicholas Comberford.
He was so astounded that his fear left him. His mind even began faintly to function again. Whatever devilry Comberford was up to, it wasn’t likely to run to unspeakable physical outrage. The man was no doubt in some sense mad. But he wasn’t an absolute maniac. He could even be conversed with.
‘Where on earth have you come from?’ Gadberry asked.
Comberford laughed. He appeared to find this opening amusing.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘at the moment just from the vicarage. You almost saw me arriving there.’
‘I did see you. Only I didn’t know who it was.’
‘That was too bad. It’s a convenient base. And old Grimble is a convenient spy. I know things about him, you see, that he wouldn’t like bruited abroad. Besides, he likes mischief for its own sake.’
‘I know all that. Look here, Comberford, you’d better stop this imbecile fooling, and untie me at once. The whole thing has been utterly idiotic from the start.’
‘Has it? I don’t know that I agree. It’s satisfactory, isn’t it, that the old woman has signed on those dotted lines?’
‘I don’t care a damn for her dotted lines.’
‘No more you should, old boy. They’re no concern of yours now. It’s curtains for Gadberry, you know. Of course, it’s curtains for the old girl too.’
‘What do you mean?’ This time, Gadberry had difficulty in getting the words out. His terror had returned. It was a physical thing, running in cold drops down his spine.
‘I don’t know that I’ve any call to tell you. Still, you might as well know – if only by way of p
assing the time.’ Comberford paused to glance at his watch. ‘Yes, better give them another half-hour. Or even an hour. There’s no hurry. I can’t, in any event, get away until the small hours. You yourself will require my individual attention again round about two o’clock.’
This time, Gadberry felt a horrible sensation at the roots of his hair. Even to repeat ‘What do you mean?’ was beyond him. He stared at Comberford dumbly.
‘Drugs are tricky things,’ Comberford said. ‘Particularly if all we want to suggest is a fellow who has lost his nerve and got hopelessly tight. And we mustn’t, of course, risk your recovering any control of yourself until the cops are on the spot and ready to collect. That means – as I say – giving you the final shot round about two. The snow’s the only worry. It may make things a little awkward. Still, I’m pretty securely in the South of France, you know. So nothing much can go wrong.’ Comberford fell silent. He seemed indisposed to talk more after all.
‘I wonder whether you’ve thought out all the details,’ Gadberry said. ‘Elaborate crimes usually go wrong. If you were as clever as you think you are, you’d have thought of something a damned sight simpler.’
‘I might beguile the odd half-hour kicking you, or something like that.’ Comberford was clearly offended. ‘What about it, old boy?’
‘Don’t be silly. Bruises would wreck your whole crackpot scheme. By the way, I think these cords, or whatever they are, are going to do that anyway. By the feel of them, they’ve raised weals already. What will your precious cops make of that?’
A Change of Heir Page 16