He stopped for a moment whilst he straightened out his recollections.
“Yes. They were frightened. It gave me a sudden shock of pleasure,” and Crottle’s face cracked with grin more blissful than any which Hanaud could remember. “Their hands shook. They spoke too quickly to be understood, as if the hangman were at their heels.”
Again the old man’s voice dropped to a whisper. “When I could see nothing, nor speak, they were busy with the room. There were nails torn out of the shutters and the shutters folded back. The mattress was pulled out of the room. It all took a few minutes I think the room was dismantled Then I was take down to the car. They spoke in whispers. We drove off quietly and slowly. Then we drove faster and for hours. But whether we went backwards and forwards, or straight, is more than I can tell. They turned me out about seven o’clock — a little later perhaps.”
He stood for a moment. Mr. Ricardo was looking at his diary. Summer time would end in a couple of days now. The dawn would just be showing when Septimus Crottle was pushed out of the car at the edge of the common.
“Yes, we passed about eight,” Mr. Ricardo declared but Hanaud did not answer.
“That’s all I have to tell you,” said the old man.
Mr. Ricardo sprang to his feet and went with him to the door. There Mrs. Ffennell, the housekeeper, and Thompson awaited him and led him to his room.
“That was interesting,” said Mr. Ricardo as he came back into the room. He saw Hanaud still seated in his chair, his face troubled and perplexed.
“Yes,” he continued, “a terrible story. Did you follow Crottle’s reactions? Now that old fear was at the top of his mind, now the mishandling, the affront to his dignity.”
Mr. Ricardo was excited. He was living great deep moments. He took a glance at the window. Outside, in the Square, men and women were going about their ordinary business, unaware of all that was happening up here just above their heads. An old man telling a story of cruelty, and Hanaud and Maltby and himself launched out to catch the criminals.
“A strange, grim story, my friend,” he cried with pride. He almost added, “Find its equal in France, if you can!”
But, before he could utter so outrageous a boast, Hanaud quietly interposed.
“Do you know what I find most curious? They were frightened. The man and the woman. In the middle of the night they must take the old fellow away, dump him somewhere along an empty road and fly off. They were frightened. Why? No one challenged them. Why?”
He was still pondering this question when the door was flung open. Maltby came back into the room and his face was alight.
“Mr. Crottle?” he asked.
“He has gone to bed.”
“Good. There will be a plain-clothes officer in the house to-night. He will run no danger.”
Hanaud looked up at him.
“You have news?”
Maltby nodded his head. Mr. Ricardo could have shaken him. He had no vivacity, no emotions? But at last Maltby spoke.
“The Western Air Company flies a nightly service from Heston. It stops at Taunton, Exeter and Plymouth. It leaves Heston at eleven. On the night of the fourteenth of October the engine failed a quarter of an hour after it had taken off. It was able to return to Heston. There was no service to Plymouth that night.”
CHAPTER 26
TWO OF THE LITTLE ACCIDENTS
THERE WERE NOT many travelling by the Airway on that night, and the three men at the back of the car could talk and watch without interruption. Two nights had passed since the moon was full, but the black curtain was rolled back from the sky now, and more and more clearly the tranquil countryside reached out below, great trees and their shadows on fields of silver-grey, long rounded ridges of turf and rock which sprang high and broke off, rivers like glistening highways. And now and then they sank low enough to imagine that by holding their breath they could hear the lowing of cows.
“We could hear of no other service which missed a beat, as you might say, on the night of Thursday, October the fourteenth,” Maltby declared in answer to a question from Hanaud.
“Ten minutes now,” said Mr. Ricardo looking at his watch, and Hanaud fetched out of his pocket the clumsy silver chronometer of Septimus Crottle. He laid it face upwards on the table between them, and all three bent their heads over the white face.
“Twelve minutes, by the old man’s repeater,” said Hanaud.
Mr. Ricardo was regarding his friend with awe. He looked round suspiciously. There were three naval officers on their way to Plymouth, a journalist bound for Exeter, and a couple of holiday folk for Cornwall. But they were all to the front of the car. He turned back to Hanaud.
“I should never have thought of that,” he said, reproaching himself, “if I lived till I was a hundred. You actually borrowed the watch from Mr. Crottle?”
Hanaud shook his head.
“I took it when he wasn’t looking.”
Whether borrowed or taken, the watch was an advantage. It gave them an absolute precision for their arrangements.
“If you, Monsieur Hanaud, will watch on this side of the plane, Mr. Ricardo and I will look after the other.”
Maltby moved across the aisle and drew back the curtain. Ricardo placed himself in the seat in front and both stared down through the moonlit air. The aeroplane was travelling along a big whale-backed ridge like one of the Berkshire Downs. Here and there the smooth turf was broken by a black outcrop of rock; here and there in a scoop of the sides there grew a little spinney of larches. Below and along the three men watched with a concentration which spread through the car and provoked the curiosity of the other travellers, so that their conversation ceased and they, too, began to look downwards, but for what they did not know.
On the table in front of Hanaud the monstrous watch of Septimus ticked, it seemed to Ricardo, louder and louder with each second. He saw now, beside the surface of the down below him, flat meadows to his right, with cut ditches in which water gleamed, and a long way forward and to his right a sprinkling of lights which betokened a town. Bitter thoughts came into his mind “We are on the wrong air-line. There will be another company running a different service. Perhaps, if Maltby hadn’t booked us as ordinary passengers! In front there, in the pilot’s cabin, a man would see more clearly.” Why was it so important to hide their movements? Secrecy — hush, hush — there could be too much of it.
Mr. Ricardo was beginning to boil with exasperation, when suddenly Hanaud’s finger closed upon a spring and the clear, yet tiny chimes, chimes of the little people, tinkled with a strange incongruity through that most modern of carrier wagons.
“We shall miss it,” Ricardo cried, and even as he cried he saw it, just ahead, just before the down broke off abruptly in the plain. It stood in the open upon a slope of ground, with a break like a quarry in the side of the down behind it, a farm-house without a light in any window, and not another house visible its neighbourhood. Ricardo turned excitedly towards the Superintendent. “Do you see? Do you see?” he asked in a whisper, and the rudder of the aeroplane gave a wriggle. The machine was turning, so that it would move straight over the house towards the grouped lights of the city. In a second Hanaud would see it upon his side. Mr. Ricardo rushed across the cabin. Hanaud was sitting with his face at the window and his hands curved about it to shut out the light above and behind him.
“Look! Look!” And the aeroplane swung clear of the down and swept across the fields and dykes of Sedgemoor to the airport on the edge of the city.
“Did you see?” asked Ricardo.
Hanaud picked up the watch and tucked it away in his pocket, a little embarrassed by his friend’s excitement. But Maltby cleared the air with a most unveracious story.
“The house was probably not that house, but one of an earlier date. But certainly Monmouth was taken there. His men had broken before Colonel Kirke’s pikes on this flat land. Monmouth, I think, was found under a truss of straw in one of the outbuildings.”
Maltby noticed the
other passengers turning away with a smile from these historical enthusiasts, and the aeroplane took the ground.
As they dismounted a big man in a blue suit advanced towards them. “Superintendent Maltby? My name’s Lance. Inspector Lance.”
The two men shook hands.
“There are rooms for your party engaged at the hotel,” said Lance, “and I would rather talk there.”
A car was waiting, and a few minutes afterwards Inspector Lance, in a comfortable sitting-room warmed by a bright fire, with a hot grog at his elbow, was administering, not without a certain pleasure, the coldest of cold douches to his colleague from the Metropolis.
“I am afraid that you have wasted your time, Superintendent. If I had only known before,” and he sighed as he looked into the coals.
“You couldn’t, because we didn’t,” Maltby answered.
“Yesterday, for instance,” said Lance slowly.
Maltby smiled.
“If we had known yesterday, I should have been able to give you a much more complete account of how much we needed your help than I could over the telephone this afternoon.”
Inspector Lance admitted by implication to have had his plumage a trifle ruffled.
“The call sounded a little abrupt.” Nobody could be humbler than Maltby when something was to be gained by humility.
“It must have,” he agreed remorsefully. But there had been no time for the courtesies. He had only just that moment learnt what air service failed on the night of October 14th. “But perhaps now you will, over another glass of this excellent whisky, allow me to tell you a little more particularly of our need.”
He rang the bell, and on the appearance of the Boots — for it was then half an hour after midnight — said “Repeat!”
The Boots looked at Hanaud, and, whether he was naturally sympathetic or just wished to spare him an unnecessary journey up and down the stairs, pointed out: “The foreign gentleman has drunk nothing.”
“I want nothing,” Hanaud snapped. As if he couldn’t pass for an idiomatic Englishman anywhere!
Maltby was suddenly afraid that here again the proper courtesies had been neglected.
“This is Monsieur Hanaud of the Sureté in Paris,” he said, addressing the whole room. He tried to gather a few bouquets from his recollections, but once again the notice was too short, “of whose activities you will not need me to remind you.”
It was not very good, no, and Hanaud was justly annoyed.
“You will not join us, monsieur?” asked Lance, and Ricardo seized the moment gleefully.
“Hanaud is partial to a peppermint frappé, which he is unlikely to get at this hour of the night in the west of England. So perhaps a glass of Porto or a cup of coffee?
“Ah! Coffee!” cried Hanaud, and the Boots went away upon his errand.
Meanwhile Maltby filled in those details of the history of Septimus Crottle which he had not had the time to give over the telephone. When he had finished, Inspector Lance threw his hands up in the air.
“The luck of the thing! Of all the unchancy businesses,” and he swung round, now thoroughly mollified, to his companions.
“Arkwright’s. That’s the name of the place. A farm once, and not so bad. But the owner, old Mrs. Destries over to Bridgewater, sold off most of the land, and the house stood there unlet for a long time.”
In the end a man, Frank Barnish, with his wife, had hired it. It had a few acres of grazing land, which they let, and made do with a vegetable plot, a small orchard, a couple of pigs and some chickens. He had been a sailor, it seemed, but they made no friends; he, a hulking big fellow, cantankerous and sullen, and she a good match for him. They gave no trouble but, nobody liked them; they never fitted in. They were just solitary people in a solitary place. They had some money of late weeks, and had bought somewhere in London an old motor-car.
“A battered old blue thing to look at,” said Lance. “But once I saw her coming into the town, and she could go.”
He looked straight at Maltby and added: “So it’s just your bad luck, Superintendent.”
Maltby was tired by now of vague assertions that his luck was out. He answered shortly: “What is?”
“That you didn’t come yesterday.”
“They have gone?”
Inspector Lance nodded. He got up and offered a cigarette to Maltby, began to offer one to Monsieur Hanaud, but, seeing what he was smoking, fell back aghast, and was offered and accepted a cigar for himself by Ricardo.
“Yes. Upon receipt of your message — sounds like old days, doesn’t it, Superintendent? — in accordance with instructions, I proceeded, etcetera, etcetera..”
“The people who put through the message to you from the Yard don’t seem to have used very much tact, I am afraid,” Maltby replied dryly.
“Oh, that’s all right. Urgency and good manners have different patterns,” said Lance. He conveyed to everyone in the room a pleasant sense of enjoyment. Here were two important officials from London and Paris and a tertium quid all of a flutter, who had flown down to teach the West Country yokels their business, whereas if they had only talked with reasonable clarity over the telephone...
“You see, we sent out a police-officer upon the receipt of your message to keep an eye upon Arkwright’s, and he reported that there was no one about.”
“When was that, Inspector?”
“About seven o’clock.”
“And where did he report from?”
“Arkwright’s.”
The Barnishes had a telephone in a living-room which they never used, except perhaps for telephoning. The police-officer had found the door on the latch and not an answer to a cry.
“I told him to hold on and I would send him another man to keep him company. Empty houses at night are creepy things. We shall find the two men there in the morning. There’s obviously nothing more that we can do until then.”
Inspector Lance picked up his hat and threw the stump of his cigar into the fireplace.
“No, indeed,” said Hanaud, at his sweetest, “and should ever fortune send you on the air to Paris, may I do no less for you!”
Inspector Lance looked a trifle doubtfully at Hanaud, as though he were not quite sure how to interpret that sentence. He bowed, however, and remarked: “I hope that you’ll all be comfortable.”
He was just opening the door he came to a halt. He clicked his tongue several times against his palate in annoyance, shut the door, and marched back into the centre of the room.
“It is by our mistake, perhaps, that the Barnishes have escaped you. I hope not. We had our local duty to do, and no word from you earlier, I think, than four.”
Hanaud leaned forward. What little pellet of discomfort was the Inspector now going to discharge upon them? One fairly potent in aroma, Hanaud gathered from the slow-savouring smile of penitence which waited upon his speech.
“We knew nothing until then,” Maltby declared. “We telephoned as soon as we knew.”
“Yes, but what a pity! You see, a farmer who grazes his sheep on the down at the back of Arkwright’s sent in the morning before a shepherd to complain of a dog which had killed some of his ewes. The man thought that the dog was an Irish wolf-hound. Well, you gentle men of the Yard will know that an Irish wolf-hound’s like a German. He can’t be cured. So, naturally, we got to work and, naturally, Arkwright’s was the first objective.”
“Oh!”
Hanaud jumped from his chair.
“Arkwright’s was the nearest house. Also, Barnish was a morose, unfriendly man. It might, perhaps, give him a sullen sort of pleasure to injure a neighbour, especially with some cruelty added. Moreover, if he had a dog, he hadn’t something else which went with it — a dog licence.”
“And when did you send your officer?” Hanaud asked.
“Let me see. The shepherd reached us about twelve. We sent Cox out — yes — as soon as he had had his dinner. He went off upon his bicycle at two o’clock or thereabouts.”
“Yeste
rday?” said Maltby.
“Well — conveniently but incorrectly,” Inspector Lax replied, and he looked at the clock on the mantel “It’s getting on towards two o’clock in the morning — yes, we’ll call it yesterday. Cox bicycled out to Arkwright’s at two o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” said Mr. Ricardo with approval. He did not mean to be a cipher in these agreements and explanations, even though, whenever he did put in his everybody else turned and stared at him as though had only at that moment materialised in the room. “Tuesday afternoon at two.”
“Barnish was at home,” Lance continued. “It’s a curious old house, shingle and bricks and little windows. There’s an archway through to the yard at the back and the front door, as you might say, is on the right-hand side under the arch.”
“Then Cox got off his bicycle,” Mr. Ricardo suggested, to help a rather lame story on to its climax, and met the thoughtful glance of the Inspector.
“Ah, now, did he?” the Inspector asked. “Did he get off his bicycle? Or did he just stop at the door, like, with one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal? We’ll have to consider of that. It didn’t occur to any of us that you gentlemen would think the point important.”
There was only one action for Mr. Ricardo to take, and he took it. Hadn’t the Duke of Wellington once gone on his knees to a ridiculous Spanish General who had felt himself insulted? “The matter being important — down I plumped,” wrote the Duke and, fortified with that example, Mr. Ricardo grovelled.
“I won’t interrupt again. I apologise, Inspector, on my knees,” he said meekly.
Inspector Lance was mollified.
“He did get off, I think, for as he was propping his bicycle against the wall, the house door being a bit open, he heard a chair flung back and a dish clattering on the floor, as if the Barnishes had been fairly startled, and in a second Barnish was blocking the doorway, with a face like thunder. He began with a quarrelsome, ‘What do you want?’ and then saw Cox’s uniform. Cox said he turned quite sickish in colour, but looked better when he was asked whether he had an Irish wolf-hound or any sort of dog.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 170