Death Devil's Bridge

by Robin Paige

  Lawrence looked up, surprised. “The brake, sir?”

  “Yes, the brake, Lawrence. The left brake.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” Lawrence said emphatically, shaking his head. “I didn’t touch the brake, ‘cept to tighten the bolts as ’old it to the lever mechanism, sir. All I did was siphon out the petrol. O’ course, when I ’eard about the crash, I thought sure—” He stopped and swallowed.

  “You thought that the motorcar had stopped partway up the hill on the far side of the bridge, and run backwards down the hill. Is that right?”

  Lawrence felt himself among the lowest of men. “I did, sir,” he said at last. “All last night, I felt a mortal fear as I’d caused the wreck an’ killed ’im, sir. It was a pure misery, sir, not but wot I deserved it fer wot I done.”

  “I’m sure it was a misery, Lawrence,” Sir Charles said gently, and Lawrence heard the understanding in his voice. There was another silence, and then Sir Charles walked to the rear of the vehicle. “Well, then, let us get started. Let’s see—where is the left rear fender?”

  Lawrence sprang to attention, feeling a great relief. “ ’Ere, sir,” he said eagerly, and lifted the fender from a pile of loose wreckage. It was a curved piece of light metal four inches wide by eighteen inches long, designed to deflect mud thrown up by the turning wheels. It had been torn from the Daimler’s body upon impact, and Lawrence had pulled it from the thorny coppice where it had been flung. “ ’Tis all over dents, sir,” he said with regret, thinking how, freshly polished, both fenders had gleamed.

  “Put it on the floor here and let’s have a look,” Sir Charles said, taking a magnifying lens out of one of his capacious pockets. He began to examine the top surface of the fender, then turned it over to inspect the underside, which was coated with a fine, flourlike gray dust. After several moments, he stopped, moved the lens, and turned the fender toward the light for a better view.

  “If ye’ll pardon me, sir,” Lawrence said, “wot are we lookin’ for?”

  “We are looking for some means of identifying the person who might have tampered with the brake, Lawrence,” Sir Charles replied. He took out a small leather case, opened it, and extracted a glass microscope slide. With a pearl-handled penknife, he scraped a dab of a greasy substance from the underside of the fender and deposited it onto the slide, then topped the smear with a circular glass cover.

  “What sort of grease,” he asked, holding the slide to the light, “might this be, Lawrence? Something you regularly use on the vehicle, perhaps?”

  Lawrence looked up at it. With the light shining through, he could see that the substance, whatever it was, was decidedly red and contained minuscule bits of something—grass, perhaps, or leaves.

  “Don’t b‘lieve so, sir,” he said doubtfully. “The grease I use on the wheel bearin’s is yellow, like, an’ ’asn’t got ‘ny leaves in it. I can show it to ye, if that would ’elp.”

  “Yes, that would help, later,” Sir Charles said, bending over the fender again. After a moment, he said, “There’s something else I want you to see,” and handed Lawrence the lens.

  Lawrence looked at the underside of the fender. He saw a long smear of reddish grease, dusted over, and a smudged and dusty fingerprint, with a pattern of ovals and whorls resembling one that Sir Charles had once shown him, enlarged, in a photograph. On that occasion, Sir Charles had said that the print, which had been left by the tip of a man’s finger, could be used to distinguish that particular man from any other individual in the entire world. Lawrence was unclear as to the details of the process, but that Sir Charles understood and could practice it, he had no doubt.

  “Ah,” Lawrence said, straightening up. He wanted to say more, but could think of nothing to add.

  Sir Charles took out another leather case from a different pocket—a fingerprint kit, it proved to be, containing a small inking pad and several small white cards. “Let’s see your fingers, Lawrence.”

  Instinctively, Lawrence put his hands behind his back, momentarily disconcerted. What if the print were his? What if he had inadvertently placed a fingertip in that smear of grease while he was polishing the upper side of the fender, or tightening the brake? If it were his print, would it incriminate him?

  But Sir Charles was standing before him, the fingerprint kit in his hand, and there was nothing for it but to assent. So Lawrence wiped his fingers with a clean cloth, then allowed Sir Charles to roll each one first upon the inking pad and then upon the card. Then Sir Charles spent several interminable moments comparing the impressions thus obtained with the print on the fender. After a while, he glanced up.

  “No, Lawrence,” he said, “I do not think the print is yours.”

  Lawrence gulped. “You ain’t sure, sir?”

  “Unfortunately, the print on the fender is smudged. I believe I can ascertain enough points of comparison to rule you out as its maker, however.”

  “Well, sir,” Lawrence said, with some relief, although he could wish that the comparison had been more definitive.

  Sir Charles put Lawrence’s fingerprint card into an envelope and the envelope into his pocket. “So, Lawrence,” he said sternly, “you emptied the petrol tank. I suppose that explains why the vehicle did not explode when it hit the trees.”

  “I s’pose, sir.” Lawrence could feel the weight of Sir Charles’s disapproval. “By the time the Daimler got to Devil’s Hill, it wud’ve bin nearly out o’ fuel, like. Not much left to explode, sir.”

  “Then it was providential indeed that you removed the petrol, Lawrence.”

  “Excuse me, sir?” Lawrence blinked, thinking he had not heard aright. “Prov’dential, sir?”

  “Exactly so. If the fuel tank had been full of petrol, as it should have been at that point in the chase, the open flame of the hot-tube igniter would certainly have caused the wreck to explode into flames. The driver, poor fellow, would not have survived to offer a clue to the cause of the crash, and the vehicle, together with any evidence of brake-tampering, would have been destroyed.”

  “Well, sir,” said Lawrence with circuitous logic, “it cud not ‘o bin me ’oo mucked up the brake, fer I knew that the tank was empty.”

  Sir Charles’s mouth relaxed into a rare smile. “I may not praise you publicly for what you did, Lawrence, but I will tell you privately that I am damned glad of it.” He clapped Lawrence on the shoulder. “Damned glad of it, indeed.”

  Lawrence felt himself almost overwhelmed. “Yessir.” He gulped. “Thank ye, sir.”

  “Right,” Sir Charles said, putting his fingerprint kit into another pocket. “Now, all we have to do is find the match of that print under the fender and the law shall have its man.”

  But the look on Sir Charles’s face gave away his apprehensions. Finding the man would not be quite so simple as that. And Lawrence suddenly realized that if the man behind this crime were not discovered and brought to justice, he himself might remain forever under suspicion, not in Sir Charles’s eyes, perhaps, but in the eyes of others—and of the law.

  20

  When the cook and the steward fall out, we hear who stole the butter.

  —Dutch Proverb

  “Ere’s the list, ‘Arriet,” Sarah Pratt said, giving the daily garden order to the kitchen maid. “An’ mind ye don’t let Thompson gi’ ye any backchat. This is wot’s wanted, no more an’ no less, an’ if ’e’s got any problem wi’ it, ye kin tell ’im to kindly come an’ speak wi’ me.”

  “Yes, Missus Pratt,” Harriet said demurely. She went off with a spring in her step, for today was Sunday, and she was to have a half-holiday that afternoon. Lady Kathryn preferred light meals for the household on the Sabbath, so the order was not large, only a basket of French beans and a bunch of New Zealand spinach for the upstairs dinner, and two collards and a basket of broad beans for the servants’ hall. When Harriet had collected the vegetables from Thompson, she would carry them in baskets suspended from a yoke across her shoulders into the vegetable pantry, where she would place
the beans and greens into their appropriate slats and replenish the wooden bowls of water that kept them fresh until it was time to prepare them.

  When the girl had gone, Sarah poured herself a cup of tea and sat down with it at the scrubbed pine table. Tranquillity had been restored to her kitchen with the return of her cherished iron range, and she was comforted by the fragrant pot of soup stock that simmered congenially on the back of the vast stove and the three pigeon pies bubbling in the oven and the trough of dough put down before the fire to rise.

  But peace had not been restored to Sarah’s spirit. She was in possession of two rather important mysteries—at least she thought that they might be important, no, that they must be important—and she was much troubled as to what to do with them. At household prayers that Sabbath morning, she had offered up a special petition for help in resolving these matters, and now she sat at the table with her tea and waited for help to come to her.

  One of these mysteries involved her friend Bess Gurton. On the way home from her sister’s birthday supper on Friday night, Sarah had encountered Bess, wrapped like a Pharaoh’s mummy in a black shawl and skulking around Lord Marsden’s motorcar like a common thief. Questioned, Bess had stammered out that she’d come to see the balloon before it flew away the next morning and had stopped to peek at the motorcar to see whether it was every bit as dangerous as she had remembered. “I meant to put me ’ead in at the kitchen door,” she had added, “but the light was out an’ I thought ye’d already taken yerself off to bed.”

  Sarah had not believed a word of this voluble stream of protestations. She and Bess had both grown up along Black Brook, playing together in the strip of garden that separated their two cottages, shooing the hens off their nests in the little shed at the foot of the garden to steal their eggs, and spending hours on their stomachs lying under the bushes at the mill, watching the fat corn sacks being hauled up by a pulley from the great yellow four-horse wagons.

  But as they grew older, Bess had gone her own independent and willful way, neither marrying nor going into service but supporting herself by her own wits and gaining a reputation in the village for all sorts of sinister nonsense. Witchery nonsense, that is, like that practiced by Bess’s Grandmother Gurton, who was reputed by some of Dedham’s older inhabitants to have been adept in the black arts. If those old folks spied Gammer Gurton lingering too close to a cow or a sheep that had happened the next day to fall ill or injure a hoof upon a stone, they knew exactly who and what to blame.

  And Sarah, while she was not very superstitious, firmly believed that Bess Gurton had been up to something wicked on Friday night—something that had to do with the balloon and Lord Marsden’s motorcar, and perhaps with the pig’s blood that Bess had begged of her several weeks back. At the time of the request, Sarah had surmised that Bess might be planning to employ the blood in some sort of charm or bit of magic, and wondered whether it was right to give it to her. But Sarah did not really believe that Bess could do any damage with her spells, and Bess was a friend. In the end, Sarah had reluctantly obliged her.

  Now, however, in light of what had happened to both the balloon and Lord Bradford’s motorcar, Sarah thought she should not have been so quick to assist Bess in her mischief, whatever it was. Sarah was not very superstitious, indeed, but one had to keep an open mind on such matters, and it was still whispered among the village oldsters that Bess’s grandmother had been seen, now and again, to fly. Bess might not be to blame for what had happened to the balloon and the motorcar, but then again she might. And some might even argue that Sarah herself was to blame, for giving Bess what she asked for.

  But Bess was not the only friend with whom Sarah had had a falling out. The other was Squire Thornton—not a friend, exactly, but someone of whom Sarah had thought highly. She had grown up on one of the outlying farms of Thornton Grange, and her mother and father had been tenants of Squire Thornton’s father, and his own tenants until their deaths some few years before. The present squire, while not by nature a generous man, had allowed the old people to stay in their cottage for a month or two without the payment of rent, and Sarah had been grateful. What she had seen him do at the time of the balloon launch had therefore filled her with great shame.

  She was even more shamed, and angered, as well, when she reflected that someone else had gotten the blame for the squire’s actions. Tom Whipple, who had courted Sarah when she was still a girl, before she had lengthened her skirts and put her hair up, who had sworn to love her forever even though she refused him and married Pratt instead, worse luck. Whipple, who, though headstrong and impetuous, was a just man, and true as steel. Whipple had been blamed and Sarah knew for certain fact he was not at fault, for she knew who was. Should she tell? Who should she tell? And how could she tell it without the squire hearing that she was the one who had revealed his deception?

  Sarah was turning these matters over in her mind when Lady Kathryn opened the courtyard door and came into the kitchen, bringing with her the chill, fresh air. Ladies, Sarah had been taught, never used the courtyard door, but dismounted from their carriages and came through their fine front entrances. But her ladyship (an American, and Irish) stood on no ceremony where doors were concerned, leaving every door in the house standing ajar so that air might circulate from room to room, and using whichever door she pleased, even the courtyard door that led from the garden and stables into the kitchen, and the green baize door that divided the house into upper and lower. Miss Ardleigh—Lady Kathryn, as she was now, following her marriage to Sir Charles—had been headstrong and individual since her arrival at Bishop’s Keep, and no amount of remonstrance was likely to change her.

  To tell the truth, Sarah Pratt admired her ladyship’s progressive, not to say radical, ways, her American practicality and lack of pretense—and her stories. For Sarah was fully aware that her ladyship regularly occupied herself as an authoress, and that she concealed her work under the name of Beryl Bardwell, whose numerous detective stories featured fascinating, fearless women and whose reputation was virtually certain to someday equal that of Conan Doyle and his precious Sherlock Holmes.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Pratt,” Lady Kathryn said, taking off her woolen hat and dropping it on the table. In the way of hats and garments, too, her ladyship differed greatly from other fine ladies, preferring a modest hat without frills, or a woolen cloche, and insisting (even for Sunday services) on sensible boots and rational dress that allowed her greater freedom of movement, like the shorter, narrower skirt of the brown suit she was wearing.

  “Good mornin’, yer ladyship,” Sarah said.

  Lady Kathryn cast a look in the direction of the kitchen range. “I am glad to see that things are back to normal once more, Mrs. Pratt. If you like, I shall speak to Sir Charles about leaving your iron range where it is and installing the gas cooker somewhere else. In the pantry, perhaps?”

  Sarah beamed. “The pantry will do very well, ma’am,” she said gratefully. “Thank ye, yer ladyship.”

  And then, like a flash, it came to Sarah that the help she had hoped and prayed for might be standing before her, in the very flesh, as it were. For who was Lady Kathryn but Beryl Bardwell, the solver of insoluble mysteries? And who better than Beryl Bardwell, the female Conan Doyle, to give her the answers she was seeking?

  “I wonder, ma’am,” she said, “if ye’ve time to give me a word or two o’ advice.”

  Kate’s drive from the village back to Bishop’s Keep had taken her through a very pretty lane, where the frosty air presaged an early autumn. The coming weeks were the time of year Kate loved best, when the woods garbed themselves in a kind of contradictory magnificence, at once splendidly gaudy and quietly somber. The birch and oak would soon be wearing bright yellow, while the beech and larch on the hill would blaze a deep copper and orange. The edges of fields would be frilled with the sweet pink of campion and the more modest flush of willow-herb, and the brash magenta of loosestrife might still enliven the brookside. Charles would take her thro
ugh the woods and show her the wonders of English fungi—some the size of the tiniest pearl buttons and some bigger than a basin, and magnificently colored white, black, cream, purple, yellow, scarlet. And the prickly chestnuts would come showering down around them, their cream-colored cups opening to show the chestnuts like shiny dark pearls inside.

  While Kate was thus happily anticipating the coming autumn, she had also been turning over in her mind the information she had gleaned that morning. Having concluded that she could do little to help Lawrence—that was up to Charles, who seemed to have the investigation fully in hand—she turned her attention to Squire Thornton, who figured mysteriously large in the course of the last few weeks’ events.

  The new gig and splendid bonnet were Thomton’s gifts, and he had insisted that the Jessups give the credit for them to Charles Rolls—thereby making it seem to any who heard of it that Rolls had assumed responsibility for Old Jessup’s death. The squire had also stood bail for Whipple, who was thought to have pulled the grapnel from the gondola. Knowing him to be a hard man, Kate did not for a moment believe that the squire had acted out of the generosity of his heart where either the Jessups or Tom Whipple were concerned. Why, then, had he acted? Why had he been so eager to part with his money?

  Kate was still mulling over these questions when she arrived at Bishop’s Keep. She had handed Macaroni’s reins to Pocket and entered the house the most convenient way, encountering Cook in the kitchen. A few moments later, she found herself seated at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, listening with some surprise as Mrs. Pratt poured forth her mysteries. The first, which had something to do with pig’s blood and witchcraft and a friend of Mrs. Pratt’s who had been seen lurking about on a dark night, was rather too incoherent to be easily teased out. The second, however, brought her at once to attention.

  “Squire Thornton?” she exclaimed. “You saw Squire Thornton pull the grapnel out of the gondola?”