After about thirty yards they reached the end of the adit. It simply petered out in the thin end of a funnel – as if Brindley had drilled in a last flagging foot or two in his despairing search for an outcrop. There was no sign that he had been, in Potter’s words, a little naughty. But Potter was apparently not satisfied. There was nothing perfunctory in the way in which he began to examine the contours of the roof, working back slowly and painstakingly towards the entrance.
‘What are we looking for particularly, Albert?’
‘I still think that Brindley sunk a winze to get into someone else’s working.’ A winze was a vertical shaft dug to connect two levels.
‘And you think he went upwards? You said sunk.’
‘He didn’t go upwards. I’m looking for an eye and an egg.’
This command of the jargon was superior to Brunt’s. Five minutes later, Potter found what he was looking for. He called Brunt to look. Two notches, clearly artificial, had been cut into bosses of the stonework, about five feet apart.
‘He’d have had a stemple wedged across from here to here – a stout wood beam—’
‘I do know what a stemple is.’
‘He’d have used it for a pulley, to haul up his kibble. But not necessarily through a hole in the floor. He may have worked down one of the sides.’
He began to examine the rough-hewn walls.
‘Here we are!’
Potter had his hands on a boulder that was cradled in a depression between two larger stones. It rocked slightly to the pressure of his weight.
‘Yes – and look: it’s been moved recently. You can see the difference in the weathering.’
Potter held his lamp close to the stone. There was a difference in the line of discolouration where a half-inch band of rock that had not been exposed for centuries was now visible. Whoever had moved this had not succeeded in settling it back exactly in its original position.
‘Go and fetch the crow-bar, Tom.’
Potter giving orders? Neither of them appeared to notice the anomaly. Brunt went back, stooping, and brought the iron bar from where they had left it. He handed it to Potter.
‘I shall need a hand, Tom.’
Potter worked with the bar over the top of the boulder, finding leverage for it from behind. After a slip or two he had the implement firmly placed, and though he had called on Brunt for stand-by assistance, the stone came away, once he had found its centre of gravity, as smoothly as the lid of a box. It fell with a thump into the loose toad-stone of the mine floor. Potter leaned over with a lantern into the hole that was revealed. About seven feet deep and twice the width of a man’s shoulders, it led down, as far as one could be certain amongst the exaggerated shadows, to a firm base of scree.
‘Hold the lamp for me, Tom. Then when I’m down, lower both lanterns on twine, and I’ll light your way for you.’
He swung his legs over the top of the shaft and let himself down it in stages, his back against one wall and his feet against the other. When the operation was complete and they were together at the bottom of the hole, Brunt saw that they were at the top of a slope strewn with huge irregular slabs of rock, falling away at an angle of some forty degrees to a natural cavern below. What had happened was a not altogether uncommon experience in the history of the Old Man – Brindley, and perhaps other miners working in from different levels, had tapped their way into a honeycomb of geological origin. Here, clearly, was a continuation deep into the guts of the hill of the same fault which had formed the fissure where Brindley had first struck his pick. Seepage and flood in the cracks where the strata had side-slipped had swilled out this hollow in the soluble limestone. Up in the roof there were cupolas, inverted potholes where the torrents had swirled. But now the system was dry; perhaps because the waters, finding a lower level, had now deserted this branch; or perhaps, when the winter snows were melting, the spot where the two policemen were now taking their bearings was over head-deep in an icy cascade.
There was plenty of room now in which to move about. The recesses in the roof were in some places beyond the reach of the light from their lanterns. They picked their way over boulders into the still larger chamber at the bottom. Sometimes a stone slipped, and once a displacement threatened to start a small avalanche. All movement was dangerous: above them a slab of rock weighing tens of tons was wedged halfway across a crevice, no more secure than one of the Old Man’s stemples, held between an egg and an eye. It had hung thus balanced for hundreds of thousands of years.
The terminal chamber was in a state of primeval desolation. And it was terminal. Though the general pattern was of a slope away to one corner, there was no sign of any egress from the cavern – not even a gulley in sight from which the waters might once have made their escape. It was like looking at a vista that no man had seen since Brindley’s day: except when one remembered that someone had recently shifted the stone at the head of the winze. Nor was there anything to suggest that Brindley’s efforts had ever been worth his while – no sign of any seam in the rock-wall, no clandestine entrance into another man’s pocket. Unless—
The line of the fault was clearly visible here: in one place you could see the slope of the way-board, the narrow seam of clay between the layers. But mostly rock had slipped against rock, leaving unstable surfaces where anything might still happen. Sometimes, an aeon after the cosmic event, a whole wall would explode into fragments at the touch of a miner’s pick. Slickensides, the Old Man had called the phenomenon.
And there was evidence that this might have happened here. In the furthest corner, where the extremity of the cavern tapered away into the roof, was a tumble of stones that could have happened yesterday – or a million years ago. Perhaps it was through some gap up there, now stopped up with debris for evermore, that Brindley had pursued his nefarious progress.
And the whole of it might come thundering down – in a million years’time – or tomorrow – or within the next ten seconds. Whenever Brunt had been in a mine of one kind or another, he had always been conscious of the urgent desire to be out of it again the moment the task in hand had been completed.
He moved his position from one uneasy stone to another, to take in the chamber from a fresh angle, ready to nod resignedly to Potter that it was time they were back on top.
And then the corner of something caught his eye – an alien object that did not belong amongst this ancient rubble: the corner of an oblong shape: the end of a light traveller’s hold-all, in woven cane, still secured by its buckled leather strap.
Brunt opened it with fingers clumsy with excitement, Potter holding their second lamp over his shoulder: a collection of young woman’s underwear, indistinguishable, give or take a darn or two, from the garments with which Mildred had belaboured the pair of them yesterday. Brunt fingered briefly through the pathetic pile: the sum of Amy Harrington’s possessions, and not an article amongst them of interest or value. He strapped up the hold-all.
‘We’ll leave this here, Albert, for the time being. I’d rather not be seen carrying it out of the hillside today. We won’t share this piece of information with Piper’s Fold just yet.’
They searched the chamber high and low for any other relic or remnant of the girl, found not a trace – nor of the passage of any other human.
‘She didn’t shift that stone off the winze herself,’ Brunt said. ‘And it’s time we were back in daylight, Albert.’
They began to clamber back to the bottom of the shaft.
‘Tom!’
Potter had put his hand on something that they had missed on the way down, since it was partly hidden by the overhang of a stone. He passed it to Brunt: it looked at first like a twist of dirty rag, but when Brunt unrolled it and spread it over the back of his hand, he saw that it was a triangle of ornate lace, stained with mud and other substances that would probably reward expert analysis: the sort of cap that a superior parlour-maid might be expected to wear when dancing highly specialised attendance on a man like Captain Kingsey.
Potter chimneyed laboriously up the winze, raised the lanterns after himself then, hand over wrist, hoisted Brunt over the lip into the entrance adit. They had a difficult task getting the crow-bar under the stone to lever it back over the pit, but managed at last to get it into place though not as neatly lodged as they had found it. An even more sharply delineated discolouration of the rock would now be visible to a sharp-eyed viewer.
Then warm, clean sunshine again: a contrast even more marked and gratifying than Brunt had experienced the first time he had ventured into the mine. A jackdaw, petulant on a crag outside the fissure; a bed of parched nettles; and Kingsey, watching them from a few yards’distance, leaning on his stick, patiently arrogant.
Brunt picked up the traps which they had retrieved and left lying under the arch of the mine. He carried them over and offered them to Kingsey.
‘I think perhaps you ought to have these, sir, since we found them set on your property.’
‘Where on my property?’
‘The warren, above here.’
But Kingsey deprecated the find.
‘They belong to a man called Beresford. He thinks he is robbing me. I live and let live. It would spoil it for him if he knew I knew about it. The man likes to think he’s an outlaw.’
He declined to accept the traps.
‘Would you put them back where you found them, Sergeant, please? As long as Beresford is taking nothing more precious than rabbits, I have no objection. He likes to think he is breaking the law. The least I can do for a neighbour is to leave him his illusions. I’m not a game-taking man myself.’
That depends, of course, on what you understand as game—
But Brunt did not say it.
‘And then there’s this, sir.’
Brunt unravelled the lace cap, which had falled back into its twists.
‘I wish I was in a position to give you orders, Captain Kingsey.’
‘Why? What have you in mind, Sergeant?’
There was no doubt that Kingsey was shaken by the sight of the object. He was even forgetting to be a bully.
‘I’d send you round to deliver it,’ Brunt said. ‘At the door of a terrace house in Tapton. At bath-time.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘So perhaps,’ Brunt said, ‘you’ll now allow me to talk to the lad who cleans your knives and boots.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kingsey answered. ‘That won’t be possible. His mother has been taken suddenly ill – somewhere up on the moors near Harrogate. I have sent him home, of course – governess’cart to Macclesfield and fast train via Manchester.’
A moment ago, he had seemed shocked and anxious. His recovery was sudden. The man’s resilience was something to be reckoned with.
‘It may not be necessary to bring the lad back,’ Brunt told him. ‘Whatever he knows, you can guarantee he told them all in the kitchen. Fletcher, now – he’s a different matter. Fletcher I must talk to.’
‘Sorry again. Fletcher’s away, too. Business.’
‘A remarkable man, Fletcher. He certainly shares your tastes.’
‘He’s learned, over the years. There was a time when he spent my money on things that I sometimes was glad to throw away. But last year he came up with two minor Jonathan Richardsons of whose existence I wasn’t even aware.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of pictures, Captain Kingsey.’
‘Of what were you thinking, Sergeant Brunt?’
‘Of girls.’
‘What man isn’t – ever?’ It had the quality of a cynical stage aside.
‘We are talking, Captain Kingsey, about a girl who is probably dead.’
And another change came over the Captain – a controlled seriousness, transparently a pose. It was not the involuntary impression of vacancy that had been his first reaction to the sight of the lace cap.
‘I think we had better go into the house to talk, Sergeant.’
‘I’d like to go in through the kitchens,’ Brunt said on an impulse, wanting to catch an unguarded glimpse of the servants.
‘Very well, if that will make you feel more at home, Sergeant.’
Kingsey knew, of course, that Brunt wanted to let his eyes wander. The buxom, human-looking cook was drinking tea between one task and another. Mrs Palfreyman, dignified as ever, but off duty, was sharing this moment at the corner of a table littered with bowls and baking-dishes. The two girls – Emma, who, Brunt thought, might be playing the current lead – and Elizabeth, the one who on his previous visit had described Amy Harrington as a bit simple – were giggling at something they were looking at together in an old copy of the Illustrated London News. But their activities stopped forthwith the moment Kingsey pushed open the kitchen door. Cook and Mrs Palfreyman leaped to their feet. The girls guiltily stopped laughing. But what did they think they were guilty of? They were entitled to their relaxation, weren’t they, when the master was out and the work was in hand? The state of the house was a credit to any corps of servants. So what else was the attitude of this quartet except sheer fear – fear of the very presence of the man?
But he gave no indication now that anyone had anything to be afraid of. He spoke to none of them, but to each in turn he inclined his head, as if in suppressed courtesy.
Kingsey took the policeman to his study. The room looked much smaller now than it had done the previous morning; the staircase and landings less spacious, the expanse of floor about Kingsey’s desk, even the desk itself, less vast. There even seemed to be less alcoves and fewer landscape paintings. But all this was an illusion, Brunt knew: any road seems shorter, once its landmarks have become familiar.
He knew that they must look an oddly assorted trio: himself even less of a showpiece than ever, with mud from the mine on his boots and damp patches over the knees of his trousers. Potter was stolid and red-faced from their trudge down the hill, black bearded and displaying no reaction at all. One might be excused for thinking that he did not even know what was going on. Kingsey was wearing a well fitting Norfolk jacket and knee-breeches: uneccentric, unflamboyant – as Brunt had never seen him before. Involuntarily, Brunt’s eyes found the painting by Peter de Wint, of which Mildred had spoken.
‘Paid for,’ Kingsey said. ‘I can show you a bill of sale for every item in the house.’
Brunt did not want to be drawn into any discussion of art treasures. They could wait, and it was safer that they should. Somewhere, upstairs, but it would take a dozen men to do justice to the search, there must be exhibits that were locked away for nobody’s delight but Kingsey’s. And sooner or later, when he saw the jaws of the trap ready to snap down on him, he would have to make a frenzied attempt to dispose of the evidence, most probably to destroy it. Something that the world might have treasured would disintegrate in a stink of burning oily canvas: the whole irrevocable operation triggered off, stage-managed as it were, by a newly promoted sergeant. But it surely wouldn’t happen until the very last moment. Brunt felt sure that in the matter of his collection, Kingsey would delay the irreparable until the last ditch. And Brunt wanted that hopeless moment postponed until other things had been regularised. He had hoped to stay away from the subject of art and paintings; but Kingsey had given him no alternative.
‘Bills of sale, yes, I’m sure,’ Brunt said. ‘I wouldn’t insult you by asking to see them. Some of them, though, are bound, are they not, to have been made out under the printed heading of one Isaac Mosley, Dealer, of Derby?’
‘Naturally. Any collector in this part of the world has to rely heavily on Mosley. You have told me that there appears to be a dishonest side to his business – that is as may be. A substantial proportion of his transactions are transparently honest and orthodox. And those are the only kind that I have ever had with him.’
‘Yet he was in possession of your entire Turkish pedlar’s collection.’
‘You are in a position to make the assertion. I cannot therefore deny it. But I am at a loss to understand how it came about. You and your colleagues are more likely to
find a solution to that problem than I am, Sergeant.’
‘You assumed that Amy Harrington had made off with the things.’
‘What else could I assume? They disappeared the same day as she did.’
‘So how did she find her way to Mosley? Had she heard his name from one of the other servants – from Fletcher perhaps?’
Kingsey put on an expression to show that his patience was strained in a most friendly manner.
‘You leap easily into a hostile attitude towards Fletcher. He is a man whom I trust implicitly; and by no means simply because I lean on him as heavily as I have to. He was my Colour-Sergeant, promoted on the field in Kaffraria. Each of us owes his life to the other, on this occasion and that. We faced Macomo and Sandilli together.’
‘Tight corners,’ Brunt said amiably.
‘Macomo and Sandilli were not corners, Sergeant. They were native chieftains. But to return to Fletcher. You were saying before we came indoors that he is a man who understands my tastes. He has to. He is my peripatetic major-domo. He has my comfort in the palm of his hand: also my aesthetic well-being, my personal efficiency and my peace of mind. I set exacting standards, as I have the right to, since I also settle the accounts. But I am not an unreasonable tyrant. I acknowledge that any hard-working man in his life-time is likely to make a few mistakes. Fletcher’s only bad one to date has been Amy Harrington.’
His tone was bland, but he was not at his ease. He picked up a carved ivory paper-knife, tapped his finger-nails with the edge of the blade, then put the thing irritably away from him.
‘You will appreciate, Sergeant, that the tenor of a man’s existence in an outpost such as this rests heavily on the equilibrium of his domestic staff. They must be easily contented: a cup of tea must be an event in their lives. They must find ready entertainment in a back number of a London periodical, and they must know to stop laughing when I come into the room. They must be unambitious, otherwise they will quarrel over precedence and preferment. Yet at the same time they must be intelligent. If a girl comes into this study with a slice of cake for me on a plate, I expect her to be articulate enough to comment on my latest acquisition. I do not expect her to dissert upon the latest philosophy from Germany, but she must be wise enough not to deride things merely because they are beyond her comprehension. Also, she must look pleasant. Why should I be depressed by rounded shoulders and filmy eyes? She should wear her clothes as if she were proud of them, and for this reason she shall have clothes of which she has the right to be proud. Those are a few of my essential requirements, Sergeant Brunt. To put it briefly. Amy Harrington fell down on almost every count.’
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