And at the lane’s end a taxi was waiting to take him back. As a dog he would travel, when he had evicted his master from that monstrous counter-changing shape. But as Davy’s whistle sounded again the two watching men became conscious of that smell and an unwonted heat. There came a sudden crackle as of musketry, and a dull light shone up the stairs past the four-armed image. The distended animal seemed conscious of it too, for it redoubled its efforts. And of a sudden, as if tinder had been already prepared down below, up rushed the bright flame, flooding the painted walls with light.
Mickie had seized the bedroom jug, but it might as well have been a teacup. There was a hissing and a cloud of steam. It puffed up like incense, hiding for a moment the four-armed Kali, and in that same moment the creature’s ravings ceased. The stairs were a bonfire, for which an Alsatian dog was making a leap. Mickie’s revolver cracked twice, but Mickie himself didn’t for a moment suppose he had hit. And at Kali’s feet a white-bearded old man lay motionless.
It was next morning, at the Royal Foresters, where Mr Laban had been taken. He had died during the night without regaining consciousness. A mile away the house was still smoking, with half Willowmere standing by, but whether any discovered the image of Kali or not would depend entirely on what that image was made of. Davy had told his portion of the story.
‘I heard Eve and Struddy come back in the car. I knew by the lick they came at there was something doing, and of course I heard all that racket going on. It was when I saw the light I thought it was time to do something.’
‘The fire?’
‘Yes. Down below. The door had seemed closed, but it wasn’t. It was left open a couple of inches. I saw the light through the crack, and dashed down and round by the yard. That was open too, and I saw the car in the drive. I remembered the waterbutt, but of course there wasn’t a bucket, and anyway the stairs were well alight.’
‘You saw it come out?’
‘It dashed right past me, across the yard. I hared after the brute. Saw it in the headlights – saw it take a slash at Eve – Lord, if it had got her! Then it was gone.’
The smoke of the house rose over the sentinelled hedge. All else of the heavens was of morning purity. One blind of the Royal Foresters was drawn, but only an old man lay behind it, perhaps happier than he had ever been. In the aperitif lounge of the hotel policemen were closing their notebooks on written statements. These were unimpeachably correct, and amounted to a surmise that a lamp had overturned in Mr Laban’s quarters. Of Mr Laban’s man the Peckover brothers knew nothing at all.
Along the length of the box-hedge Eve and Struddy were pacing back and forth. The brothers, their statements ended, saw them approach across the lawn. At the open window by which they had dined all met. Struddy was beginning to speak, but Eve said it without words. Beginning with Andy, she lifted her face to each of her brothers in turn. She kissed them. She had always been very, very fond of them. She would be fonder than ever of them now.
But a large, clay-coloured Alsatian dog, probably badly burned, is urgently wanted by the India Office. The Surrey Police have the matter in hand.
Tragic Casements
1
Eustace Corydon had put up his greenhouse during the winter months, and at a cost of next to nothing. A lucky find of second-hand glass, a few flagstones, and the old sections that had been lying in the woodshed for years, and now where the old lobby had been they had a conservatory-lounge to sit in and a look-out over the bird-haunted morfa that stretched away to the estuary and the sea.
It seemed an age since their daughter Patricia’s last homecoming. As she had spent Christmas with Anne, so now she had brought Anne home with her, and they were to sleep in the garden hut up at the orchard’s edge. But they had had a long and exhausting day of it, the morfa-view would keep till the morning, and the best welcome to the pair of them was to give them their supper and pack them off early to their garden beds.
Anne, four years older than Patricia, was a town-mouse. Her garden in London had iron railings round it, and if she heard stirrings after she had gone to bed they were those of the policeman on his nightly round, his light resting on locks and fastenings as he passed. But here the nearest police station was five miles away. It had honeysuckle up its wall, through which hardly once in five years did some disturbing black word like REWARD peep, and to sleep out of doors came as naturally to Patricia as to a fledgling in its nest.
But tonight fitful summer lightning made a tremolo of the sky, and the silver half-shilling of the moon gave the newly-painted sashwork of this greenhouse that she saw for the first time a white and wakeful look. Broken up by the slight irregularities of its panes, it was a moon seen in water, all bits and pieces, that twinkled and played tictac as the half-shilling changed its position overhead. She missed the old lobby and the black water-butt that had always stood there. The hut had roller-shutters, adjustable against wind and rain; she wanted to close them against the moon too, and though at last she slept, at some hour of that dark overlap between moonlessness and the dawn, Anne heard a quavering voice from the other bed.
‘Anne, are you awake?’
‘Yes, I was watching that star.’
‘Stay awake and talk, Anne. I don’t want to go to sleep again and I want someone to talk to.’
‘Paddy! You’ve been asleep for hours!’
‘I’d the most horrid dream. People were moving about the front of the house, and two awful men looked round the shutter at us, and one of them said we were asking for it, and the other said nobody’d hear from the house, and tomorrow I’m going back to my old room –’
Anne’s answer was to slip into the other bed and take the tall schoolgirl into her arms. They might sleep in gardens who wished. She had been awake those two hours, and from Paddy’s bed she could still see her star and think her nightly thoughts of Denzil. He was Patricia’s six-foot soldier brother, and since last Christmas they had been engaged to be married.
Back debts of the night are quickly paid when day comes with its cheerful solvency. After breakfast the next morning the new greenhouse was inspected, its wicker chairs sat in, its view of the morfa through the field-glasses admired. By the old passageway it communicated with the house, a step across the new crazy path, and they were in the garden itself, and what a little pet of a house and garden they were, this pocket-sized estate of Eustace Corydon’s, that twenty years before had been no more than a couple of labourer’s cottages in a field! Passing motorists slowed down involuntarily at the bend of the road that brought it into view. They did so at the sudden picture it made, with its wisteria-plumed white gable, the maroon of its prunus, its boughs heavy with damson and cherry and plum, and its apples ripening against the wooded hillside behind. Ladies from London said they wanted to cut it out to frame it and take it back with them. But Eustace Corydon sold them strawberries instead, and booked profitable mail-orders for its asparagus next year.
And now, with the fruit season upon them, these Corydons had no time for lounging in greenhouses. They were places to pass through, dressed in their oldest clothes, laden with trugs and baskets, to fill them with their ladders set against the trees, their heads not to be seen for leafage as they conversed from tree to tree. Their picnic meals were carried out to them, they spent their days out of doors, and the most constant occupant of their new conservatory chairs was Tiger the cat, sleeping off on some cushion his hunting debauch of the night before. Even the creeping-jinny in its overhead wire basket was removed, because it trailed in their faces every time they passed.
So for a picture of family peace at the end of the day, let the ladies from London cut that out, too, and frame it, supper over and everybody fit to be seen again, the candles in their silver sticks and the firelight upon their faces, more to eke out their scanty electricity than for any need they had of its glow. If no bee droned or wasp buzzed in their new gr
eenhouse they had all the bees and wasps they wanted during the day; if not as much as a blade of grass pushed through the cracks of their crazy-pavement, what were a few hyacinths or shirley poppies that they should miss them? That evening Eustace Corydon had just picked up the newspaper he had had no time to look at all day. At the wireless Patricia had been dashing like a non-stop train through Europe’s stations till she had been ordered to leave the knob alone, but not by her mother. She, gentle soul, must have ear-aid, and her battery was in her lap as she and Anne turned back the corners of a thick book of patterns they had had to send to London for. That gaping oblong at the farther end of the room, just beyond the range of the firelight, would need curtains before the winter came. Then suddenly Eustace Corydon was seen to lower the edge of his paper.
‘Is that wireless properly turned off?’ he asked.
Anne got up to see, but no leakage came from the wireless; she returned to her patterns and Eustace Corydon resumed his reading. But a few minutes later his Times was lowered again.
‘Has Freda gone to bed, or has she got somebody in the kitchen with her?’ he asked.
‘Freda’s gone to bed. I heard her go up twenty minutes ago,’ Patricia sulked. She could read a book and listen to the wireless, too.
But even Mrs Corydon’s head turned at the next. From somewhere inside the house there had come the squeaking scrape of wood on stone and a creaking as of wicker under a weight. The muffled jingling vibration that followed it resembled nothing so much as the dropping of a tray laden with crockery, and snatching a candle from the table, Eustace Corydon had disappeared by the uncurtained doorway.
He was gone some minutes, during which time nobody spoke. Then he reappeared.
‘Who turned Tiger out?’ he demanded.
‘I did,’ and again it was Patricia.
‘Has anybody been in the greenhouse since?’
Nobody had been in the greenhouse since.
‘Then who left the outer door open?’ But Patricia was on her feet, her eyes on the uncurtained passageway, her hands at her heart.
‘Father, I know I didn’t! – I remember locking it. I was careful to lock it –’
So, seeing her agitation, her father said nothing about the rest; the basket-chair he had found overturned, and the hook from which the creeping-jinny had been removed lying upon the floor, with a ball of garden raffia by its side.
2
A War Department jeep with a nosey-parker antenna gave three short staccato pips. A kitbag was set down by the roadside and a tail-light disappeared as the jeep continued on its northward way.
But Anne’s SOS was answered, and with last night’s hearth not yet swept and the seed-pearls of the night still grey on web and twig, she was down in the garden and in his arms.
So entered young Denzil in his battledress with the captain’s stars, Captain Corydon of Field Security (mi5), who asked no more of Command HQ than to be turned loose with his earphoned jeep, and his mobile section of sixteen hand-picked men. And, their first embrace over, she had expected a thousand questions and was ready with her thousand answers, but not a question did he ask. He had come to see for himself; he only laughed, held her back at arm’s-length, drew her close again, and the day was broadening and bird answering bird before he even said: ‘Well, what about a little snoop round before anybody’s awake?’
But a new lock had been fitted to the greenhouse door and a chain to arrest its opening with a warning jar. Its none too clean windows showed only a disorder of baskets inside, heaped on the wicker chairs, with his father’s gumboots on the floor. In the workshop along the alley was a quantity of leftover glass, noticeable among it the lower half of a landing-light of mid-Victorian decalcomania, diapered with cut stars and surrounded by squares of gloomy crimson and deep eye-bath blue. But suddenly Anne stood still, listening, with her fingers at her lips. She didn’t want to be caught by Freda, creeping in the back-way with nothing on but her dressing-gown and pyjamas, and she lifted her face.
‘Quickly . . . then shall I tell them you’re here?’
But the barkings and boundings of Ianto, released from the chain, had already told them that.
* * *
‘Which farm was this, father?’
He might have left the old room only yesterday, and his mother’s ears needed no aid when he spoke from his accustomed place at the breakfast-table. Paddy, at his side, hardly took her eyes off him and his battle-dress. But his father? He showed his years, yet his eyes had a restless, rejuvenated brightness as he described that hilltop auction where he had found his greenhouse glass. He elaborated, dwelt on details, made a regular set-piece of it with its furniture and effects carried out into the yard, and the folk of the region assembled in their nondescript vehicles to buy, and Denzil’s eyes sought Anne’s across the table. ‘Eye-wash?’ they questioned, but there was no stopping his father now.
‘You see, Den, I’d heard there might be a wind-pump going cheap. We can’t depend on this stream of ours, the pump might have given us an extra volt or two, but you should have seen the thing! As old iron I wouldn’t have given half-a-crown for it! So I was coming away again, in a pretty savage temper, when in the cowhouse I spotted this glass –’
And now it was the glass and the state he had found it in, all mired and dropped on by the birds and by some oversight not even in the catalogue –
‘But I doubt if you’d know the farm. It’s up at the back of beyond – you can see Hungerton and half the county from up there – but I was telling you about this glass. The tenant, I forget his name, had died within the month. There were a lot of old flagstones, too; it seemed Roberts had left the cataloguing to his clerk, but he was there to do the best he could for the estate; I got the lot at my own price, and I don’t know what it was about that auction that made such an impression on me. I still can’t get it out of my head; a stranger’s goods and chattels, not like these parts, where they know the pedigree of every chest and corner-cupboard. Even the looking-glasses on the chests-of-drawers seemed to be peering about them, wondering who their next owner was to be, so what about this for an idea? Anne’s been working in the garden like a black. Nobody seemed to know anything about this fellow, and it’s quite a panorama from up there. So take the field-glasses and off you go, the pair of you, and make a day of it.’
So if young Denzil could steal upon his family like a thief in the night others could do the same, and the summer weather always hatched them out like flies, the roadsters with their sacks, the vagrants who came to the door for hot water for their tea and left their chalk-marks behind, the sleepers under haystacks, and the known characters whom the public houses would serve with one drain drink and no more. If poachers were the trouble, set tripwires with cans that jangled. In the house black cotton could be made to tell a tale. It would do those greenhouse windows no harm to clean them, and lest it should be supposed he was watching from his sleeping-hut, make a dummy of his kitbag and watch from somewhere else.
But first the bicycles and a day of it up in the hills with Anne.
3
A day of it! They had made a day-and-a-half of it; tomorrow they would both be stiff as boards, and he had changed his mind about the dummy in the bed, for he lay there himself, scene after scene of that long day still racing through his head.
The miles between farm and farm, but at last the farm they sought, the farm where his father had found his glass, dwelling and barn in one, and little need of a decalcomania landing-window with its doorstep its only stair.
Jaffers, the name of the late tenant had been; a retired police-sergeant from Hungerton, with some idea of bulb-growing in his head; but that was as much as they could tell him, and he would have to go to Hungerton for the rest –
Hungerton through the field-glasses, pale and aerial so far away, but when you got there a county town with its traffi
c lights and studded crossings, its constabulary headquarters and its assize court, its public park and its county asylum, and its garden-city penitentiary where its old gaol had been.
His quick question to Anne – were her legs good for it and chance the train back? Her nodded ‘Yes’.
And what a still night to be recalling it all, with everybody asleep and the gable below glimmering of its own whiteness and the wisteria without shadow –
It was at that moment that the light appeared in the greenhouse and in his plimsolls he was off the bed.
But it was such a light as a night-traveller sees as he scans the breathed-on windows of the train for a seat within. Dimly haloed, it was being raised, lowered, directed now into this corner, now that, and suddenly it grew dim, flickered, disappeared. He stepped back till his feet were on grass, looked up, waited. The light reappeared on the ceiling of his parents’ room, was blown out, and the front of the house was in darkness again.
But now he too heard the sounds that had brought his father from his bed. Suddenly topping the hedge, the moon, a hump-backed orange with its waning, was looking at him like a punch-drunk bruiser’s eye. It made a blackness of the hedge-bottom beneath it, but in the blackness something stirred. As in the whispering-gallery one steps suddenly into the unseen focus of audition, so a voice spoke and a second voice answered it.
‘Tottenham Fields – ’ the first voice said.
‘Ten miles out o’ Bath – ’ said the second.
Then he sprang as suddenly back as if he had been catapulted.
For London had ended at Holborn when last a battered knave-of-spades hat, a mask and a horse-pistol a foot-and-a-half long had been seen in Tottenham Fields. There had been no jeeps with antennae when that second, with his dingy wisp of necklace and the skirted coat too big for him, had taken the night air as far away as Bath. And had he truly seen them? He had felt no contact. For an instant’s flicker only they had passed between him and the moon. Then only the moon was there.
The Dead of Night Page 82