by David Case
“The blacksmith’s son tried to protect his mistress by throwing himself over her, and the horses passed over them, but the heavy carriage rolled on and crushed them both under the churning wheels with the squire whippin’ away at the horses the whole time. You could hear the both of them screaming all the way to the bridge, so this book said. They were lying there all crushed together, holding each other like lovers except that their insides had skidded out along the stones and they were all jellied. It was an awful sight. The squire jumped from his carriage and rushed back to the arch. He stood over them with his face all white and his eyes black and his hands clenched at his sides. His wife looked up at him and tried to speak, but only a death rattle came out. The squire didn’t say a word. He waited until she was dead—although the blacksmith’s lad was still twitching—and then he walked back to where the horses had come to a halt by the stables. They were snorting nervously and pawing the ground, their flanks white with froth. The squire drew a revolver from his pocket and very deliberately shot the horses in the head, one after the other. They fell dead on the spot, their corpses steaming. The squire threw his gun down and sank to his knees, pressing both hands to his face and uttering horrible curses.
“Well, there was an inquest, of course, and the verdict was that it had been an accident. None of the locals believed that, though. The squire was a cunning old bugger, you see, and it had been a stroke of genius, shootin’ the horses the way he did, as if it had been the poor dumb brutes who were responsible. That carried a lot of weight at the inquest. They were very valuable horses, you see. And no one thought to ask why the squire had his gun with him at the time.”
I was staring at her.
“You all right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Why, I had no intention of upsetting your stomach with such a story, Mr. Ashley,” Mabel said. But there was nothing wrong with my stomach; it was my mind that shivered and my flesh that turned cold as I remembered the sounds which had echoed under that very arch. I managed to affect a smile and took a long swig of beer. It fell violently into my belly as if cascading into a void.
Wonder does not demand thoughtless belief in the supernatural, and the supernatural becomes natural with knowledge. As Mallory had said, what was magic to the past is science to us, and by projection, what seemed magic to me now could be science in some distant future. Nevertheless, the chill of the unknown was not dissipated by a rational attitude. I reasoned that the sounds I had heard under the arch—and in the pyramid, for that matter—must have some explanation within the laws of the universe; yet, knowing this, the limitations of the language of thought still held me captive—I knew, despite reason, that I had heard a ghostly sound. Perhaps some abnormality in my aural structure was responsible; perhaps my ears were somehow attuned to the wavelengths of the past and could draw them out from where they still faintly trembled at the very core of the naked stone. Or, if Mallory were right, I may have experienced the simultaneous transmissions of another dimension, parallel to my own within eternity. I considered these possibilities in a rather vague fashion, sitting at the medieval bar and feeling links with the past even as the jukebox bubbled through the present and the dart players chatted with the barmaid. The clock moved slowly on, registering time as we experienced it.
Presently, through the side door, a man entered. I glanced at him, then looked closer. I believed that I knew him. He stood beside me at the bar and asked for a brandy, and at the sound of his voice, recognition dropped into place.
“John Cunningham!” I exclaimed.
He turned toward me. His face had become hardened and thinned, and his shoulders were stooped as if under a burden. But I’d not seen him in years, since before I’d been in Egypt, and such changes are natural with age.
“Ashley?”
We shook hands.
“What are you doing in this godforsaken place?” he asked.
Mabel placed his brandy before him and sniffed.
“Godforsaken, indeed,” she said.
“Sorry, Mabel.”
“Plenty of God around here,” she added. “It’s the cities that are godforsaken. Where they got all them immoral youngsters and immigrants and criminals. ’Course, we had a murder here, but I’ll wager the killer comes from the city. That’s plain, nobody around here is a killer.”
“I daresay you’re right.”
“I’m stopping here for a day or two,” I explained. “I’ve some business to attend to. But I might ask you the same thing.”
“Oh, I’m living here,” John said.
“In Farriers Bar?”
“Right here at the Red Lion, in fact.”
“How remarkable. I thought your house—”
“Oh, I’ve closed up the house, Ashley. It was—” he paused, then said, “The house was too big, living alone.” He acknowledged this as though nibbling at the perimeter of fact.
“Is Arabella married then?”
John was regarding his brandy contemplatively, as if seeking the answer to my query in the reflecting amber. He took a drink and winced. Whatever reflection he’d seen there continued to radiate in his stomach.
“No, she’s gone elsewhere,” he stated quietly.
“I suppose she’s quite grown up now,” I said, realizing this wasn’t a point to be pressed. I had remembered John as a cheerful, outgoing sort, rather older than I but retaining a youthful vigor. No more. Something more tragic than age seemed to have altered him to a depth more basic than appearance. Arabella was a lovely girl—a fine young woman by this time, I guessed—and John had cared for her greatly. His wife had died when Arabella was a mere child, and John had raised the girl on his own, his life directed by the process.
“Yes, they all grow up, don’t they,” he said.
“Well, it’ s good to see you again.”
He nodded absently. His glass was empty, and he turned it about in his hands for a moment, then pushed it across the bar and raised his eyebrows. Mabel frowned.
“You know what Dr. Plum told you,” she said.
John looked pained.
“Why don’t you have a nice pint of beer instead?”
“Mabel, be a good girl and give me a brandy.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s not my concern, you care to drink yourself to an early grave.”
John winked at me.
“Mabel worries about her lodgers,” he said. “Can’t say if she’s concerned with my health or my custom, though.”
Mabel snorted and refilled his glass with a shrug, then said, “Rots the brain, brandy does. It’s the grape, you know. A bit of the malt or the grain does no harm, but the grape is wicked poison. They say that’s what’s wrong with the Frenchies. All that grape.”
“Who says that?”
“Well, they all say that.”
“Oh.”
A telephone rang faintly in the background. I was pleased to note that the phone wasn’t in the bar, for in combination with the jukebox it would have been formidable. Mabel moved down the bar but turned back to say, “It causes the body to rot, that brandy. It gets right into the tissues. A man as drinks too much brandy has already started to waste into corruption even while he’s still alive. You might as well drink embalming fluid and have done with it.” She went out, shaking her head. John smiled after her.
“A kindly woman,” he said.
“Have you really been drinking too much?” I asked, quite aware it was none of my business.
“Ah, the local doctor is as insular as Mabel. It’s not the drink. They’re simply suspicious of foreign tinctures. He wouldn’t object to Scotch.”
“Tinctures? You make it sound like medicine.”
John smiled.
“Venerable medicine,” he said. “Man relied on the grape long before miracle drugs.” He shrugged. “You’re a student of the past, Ashley. Who first
ate some rotting fruit and discovered the benefits of alcohol? What worthy ancestor of man suffered the initial hangover?”
“I’m afraid that event long preceded anything open to my translations.”
“And will terminate long beyond, eh? When the weird descendants of man have forsaken language and communicate by mathematical symbols? Or longer yet. When the next inheritors of the earth—what, the cockroach? the dragon fly?—discover the arts of fermentation and zymurgy? Which will last longest, Ashley, religion or alcohol?” He downed his drink. “Granted both are bores, give me the drunkard over the zealot.”
Before I could reply, Mabel Sinclair returned. She was obviously distraught. Her face had paled under its generous layer of powder, and her eyes flicked nervously about. It was evident the telephone call had shaken her. She poured herself a large whiskey and took a sip, coughed and drank again. Then she leaned across the bar and, in a hushed voice, said, “They’ve found another dead one.”
The dart players gathered around, eager for the news, and Mabel cleared her throat. She looked at each of her customers in turn, determined that she held all interest, and announced, “That was Emma on the phone. Emma is the postmistress,” she told me. “She’s a terrible gossip and is calling everyone on the line so as to be first with the dreadful news. Can’t say I blame her, in this instance, for she feels her responsibility. She’s all cut up over it.”
“How’s that?” John asked.
“Why, it was the Brooke lad, you see. Little Raymond Brooke. Not hardly more than seventeen he was. Such a terrible thing. It was awful enough when they killed that city bloke, but why would anyone want to harm little Raymond. You must have known him, Mr. Cunningham?”
“I believe I’ve seen him about.”
“His father is the tobacconist down the corner.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And he was so pleased with his new bicycle, too. That makes it all the worse. Why, I remember his father gave it to him on his birthday, must be two, three months ago now. Must have been his seventeenth birthday, I reckon.”
“What has the bicycle to do with it?” John inquired. “Was it an accident?”
“Accident! Not likely. It was murder, right enough.”
“But the bicycle?”
“And why should the postmistress feel responsible?” I asked.
“Why, he was the messenger for the post office, don’t you see? Emma had sent him out to deliver a telegram yesterday afternoon. Well, he never came home that night and they’ve been looking for him and they just found his poor little body beside the road. It must have happened while he was bicycling out with the telegram. They say he was all broken up like the other fellow. Emma said he was all crushed up together with his bicycle, so that you couldn’t even separate the two. They had to haul the body and the bike in together, and the doctor will have to cut them apart. Or maybe they’ll just bury them together, I wouldn’t know about that. He was so proud of his new bike. It was green. British racing green, he said.”
“That sounds rather as if it were an accident,” John muttered. “Some hit-and-run driver. If the body was mangled that much and found beside the road—”
Mabel shook her head vigorously.
“No. It was the madman, no doubt of that. The authorities have ways of knowing such things.”
“The authorities, perhaps. But Emma—”
“Well, a postmistress is an authority, sort of.”
An unpleasant idea already had occurred to me, for I didn’t suppose there were a great many telegrams directed to Farriers Bar. Mabel was looking at everyone in rotation. When she turned to me, I asked, “I don’t expect she told you to whom the telegram was sent?”
“Matter of fact, she did. That was an important point, you see. Wouldn’t have happened if the telegram had been for someone in the village, so quite naturally she told me. It was addressed to the new resident out at The Croft. That’s the old Hammond place—”
“My God,” I said.
“What’s the matter, Ashley?” John asked.
“I sent that telegram!”
John looked sharply at me, frowning slowly.
“What a dreadful sensation,” I said. “It makes me feel, well, indirectly responsible.”
“Just like Emma,” Mabel said. “Maybe even more than Emma. Not that I hold you responsible, I don’t mean that, but Emma didn’t really have a choice. It was her official duty to send the telegram on once it arrived. But you didn’t really have to send it in the first place, did you? I’m not blaming you, understand, but I can see how a man would blame himself.”
“Why on earth were you sending a telegram to Mallory?” John asked me.
“You know him?”
With his teeth clenched, he said, “I know the man.”
“It was a matter of some hieroglyphs he wished translated. I’d wondered why he hadn’t met me at the station. Now it seems he never received my wire.”
“And little Raymond is dead,” Mabel added.
“Mallory is a scoundrel,” John said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“You can hardly blame this on him.”
“No, no. I didn’t mean that. But you’d be wise to have nothing to do with him.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mabel was staring at John with sympathy. He glanced at her, and she quickly averted an embarrassed expression. John grimaced and hunched over the bar. Over the chiming of the clock Mabel announced, “Time, gentlemen,” nodding at the dart players. “Drink up before Chive comes poking around.” They tipped back their glasses as the front door opened and a heavy-set man with an official demeanor came in, stamping loudly. Mabel took the empty glasses from the dart players, glancing at the clock. The dart players were regarding the intruder with that wonted apprehension which honest men reserve for the authorities. They began putting on their coats. The newcomer approached the bar, and Mabel gestured toward me and John.
“These gentlemen are registered here,” she said.
He grunted curtly, without interest.
“Cunningham?”
John nodded.
“I’m Inspector Peal.”
“I know who you are.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, sir.”
John did not reply. Mabel was busily washing glasses. The dart players departed, staring back over their shoulders. Mabel crossed the room and drew the bolt on the front door. She unplugged the jukebox, and the purple lights stopped bubbling with a strangled gurgle. She switched out the exterior and the overhead lights, closing up very thoroughly in deference to the inspector, who couldn’t have cared less about licensing laws. The room darkened, illuminated only from behind the bar in long shadowed cones of light. I had the impression that our chamber had suddenly been catapulted back into the Middle Ages; that the inspector represented the Inquisition. Perhaps these are natural attitudes for an innocent citizen confronted by the presence of the law, for just as descriptive laws are excepted by magic, so are ordained laws invested by execution. Then Peal relaxed. His taut face loosened, and he sighed as he settled onto a stool. He was merely human, then, and rather weary, a man performing an unpleasant job.
John waited for him to speak.
Peal was seated obliquely to the bar, one elbow on the surface, so that only half his face was discernible. Some interplay of light and position made this a perfect bisection, the division running straight down his brow and the bridge of his nose and cutting his wide chin. It made him seem a figure playing dual roles—man and policeman, perhaps—but I wasn’t sure which side was which. John was between us, facing the light but with his head down so that he too was divided, but laterally, an incandescent forehead shading a dark jaw. He presented a sullen appearance. Peal was gazing at me, past John, but registered no particular interest in my presence. It suddenly dawned o
n me that he was embarrassed; that he looked at me to avoid confronting John. For a confusing moment I actually thought the inspector had come to arrest John for the murders. But that was absurd. Strange circumstances stamp remarkable patterns on the mind.
“Perhaps I’d better leave,” I suggested.
I made to depart. Peal didn’t seem interested one way or the other, but John touched my arm.
“No, stay, Ashley.”
I raised my eyebrows at Peal, and he granted permission with a nod.
“The inspector will probably want to interview you, too,” John said. He looked at Peal. “I assume you’re making the rounds of all the strangers and new residents?”
“That’s right, sir. Just routine, you understand.”
“I have an alibi, I’m afraid,” said John, smiling faintly.
“I’m sure.”
“But I suppose you’ll be wondering why I decided to move here? Something of that nature?”
“I believe I already know that, sir,” Peal replied. I sensed a disturbing undercurrent running between them; a significance deeper than the words. “I’ve already made inquiries about that.” He turned to me and, as if to lessen the weight of the circumstances, added, “I’ll probably be checking on you, too, sir. As I said, it’s a matter of routine.”
“Of course.”
“Get on with it then,” John said.
“Well, sir. I assume you moved here to be near your daughter?” Peal stated this hesitantly, almost delicately. John glanced at me, then nodded. Peal continued, “I was wondering, sir, if you could tell me anything about Mr. Mallory?”
“Mallory?” I said, speaking from surprise.
“I’m afraid, Ashley, that my daughter has gone to live with the man,” John said. “Now you see why I call him a scoundrel. But no, Inspector, I know nothing about him.”