The Dancing Druids (Mrs. Bradley), page 14
“You ought to have those four trees cut down,” she said, when they reached the front door.
“What four trees, madam?” the man enquired, giving her again his teakwood smile. “Oh, you mean the dead trees!”
“That’s what I said,” said Laura.
“Yes, madam, but, you see, we need them at the moment. There may be shooting to-morrow or the next day.”
“Shooting? Oh, you mean shooting the film!”
“What other kind of shooting could I mean, madam?”
Laura did not answer this question. She walked towards the gate feeling like a person caught in a dream which he knows is a dream and from which he cannot awake.
“Crazy,” she muttered to herself, as she came to the little culvert over the ditch.
“I don’t think I’ve done the slightest good,” she confided to Mrs. Bradley when she returned, “but I have been inside that house, and it doesn’t seem particularly sinister.”
“You have done bravely, child,” her employer cordially responded. “You have established, I think, that Mr. Concaverty, under his pseudonym of Cassius, is still at the hotel at Slepe Rock, and that is exactly what we wanted to know. Did they promise you any helpers?”
“I don’t really know,” said Laura, looking and feeling perplexed. “Do you think they’ll send us an answer?”
“I expect so, if you left an address.”
“I didn’t! And they didn’t ask for one.”
“Excellent, child. And now for your smugglers’ cave. We hired a sea-going cruiser from Welsea Beaches, and from there we shall go to the cave and explore its interior. I have very great hopes of that cave.”
“I say!” said Laura, enthralled. “You didn’t tell me! How decent! It’ll clear our cobwebs away! Who’s going to handle the navigation, I wonder? I can’t, because I don’t know the coast.”
“We are taking a boatman from Welsea.”
“Won’t he wonder what on earth we’re up to exploring a cave? I mean, it’s kids’ stuff, really, and if he sees you…!”
“Geology knows no law,” said Mrs. Bradley complacently. “We shall take our little hammers and a specimen or two, and then we shall chip rocks and collect bits and pieces, and place them with tender discernment in little bags discreetly but obviously labelled. It won’t be scientific, but it will pass. At least, I hope so.” She cackled with great enjoyment.
Laura giggled. She spent the evening helping to prepare for the “great camouflage” as she herself termed it, and early on the following morning, she, Gascoigne, O’Hara and Mrs. Bradley set forth in a motor cruiser, a chunky, sturdy, seaworthy affair in charge of an old man and a boy of fifteen, with the geological apparatus well displayed.
They stood out to sea to avoid the shore-setting currents around the headlands, and arrived off Slepe Rock at lunch-time. They had lunch on board, and then the motor cruiser ran in, slacked off when it came almost opposite the cave, and took advantage of the tide to back cautiously under the cliffs.
The dinghy was soon lowered from the cabin top where it had been slung, and its little outboard motor, with full pivot reverse for driving sideways or astern (a very necessary feature for the kind of work which the dinghy might need to perform in the cave) having been started up, away went Mrs. Bradley, Laura and O’Hara, whilst Gascoigne remained on board with the man and boy.
Laura, who was skilled in such matters, edged the dinghy into the cave, keeping just enough way on her to avoid her stern being swept round on to the rocks.
The cave was dark and cool, and smelt of seaweed. The water into which they nosed with such circumspection and finesse ran deep, as might have been expected, and was wonderfully smooth once the yard or two of surf at the mouth of the opening had been crossed, but it had been a tricky little passage, on the whole, and Laura felt that she merited the congratulations offered by her crew and passenger.
“Well, anyway, we’re in,” she said modestly. “I should think we’d better have lights.”
Mrs. Bradley and O’Hara, who were already well forward, switched on powerful electric torches which lit up the glistening walls and indicated the dark distances of the cave. Laura cautiously started the engine again, for the cave was too narrow for oars.
“Good heavens! This cave must run inland for several hundred yards!” exclaimed O’Hara. This estimate proved to be an exaggeration, but the tunnel was fully one hundred and fifty yards long, and in a few minutes the young man, who had given Mrs. Bradley both torches and was using the boathook as a lead-line, announced shoal water.
Laura cut out her engine, which, in any case, was barely functioning, took the second boathook, and helped to fend the dinghy from the side. The cave had widened into an almost circular end, but on the port side of the boat was the natural shelf which Laura had noticed on her first visit. Moreover, as they reached shoal water, they came upon a pinnacle of slimy rock which stood up like a pointing finger.
Laura caught at it with the boathook, but the metal hook slipped off the weedy surface and the dinghy, answering the pull, began to heel. She drifted stern in and bows out, but, being well fended, she did no more harm to herself than to bump her port quarter gently against the side. At this, she tried to head herself towards the opposite wall, but Laura, leaning out boldly, caught at the slimy finger of rock, and held on long enough to arrest the drift of the boat and bring her head-on again. O’Hara came to the rescue with the deft dropping of a mooring rope over the pinnacle. Then he stepped ashore and made fast.
“Take care how you come!” he said, offering Mrs. Bradley a hand. “It’s beastly slippery up here.” He was on the rocky shelf, which now formed an unsafe but possible path.
The elderly lady, disdaining assistance, landed without mishap and shone an inquisitive torch all over the walls before she led the way onwards. The cave, now an upward-sloping passage, still ran on into the hill.
It seemed a long way to walk, and the rock had changed to a damp and crumbling landslide of chalk, trampled and marked by footprints, before the smell of the seaweed was out of the venturers’ nostrils, and a strong reek of petrol took its place.
“Stop!” said Mrs. Bradley, speaking quietly. She had returned one of the torches to O’Hara, and Laura had a small one of her own. “Put out the lights. I think I know where we are! I took a compass bearing at the mouth of, the cave, another as soon as we had tied up the dinghy, and a third one minute ago.”
Suddenly from over their heads came a noisy and terrifying rumble. O’Hara and Laura instinctively ducked their heads, but Mrs. Bradley, more knowledgeably, remained bolt upright and smiled into the petrol-scented darkness. She explained that she had no doubt whatever, from her compass bearings and from what rough estimate she had been able to make of the distance the three of them had travelled since the dinghy had entered the cave, that they were now below the concrete floor of the pull-in for coaches, and that the noise was that of a motor coach driver or a lorry driver racing his engine.
“We can go back now,” she added.
Laura, entranced by what she termed “the boys’-book atmosphere of the proceedings’, was in favour of repairing forthwith to the pull-in and finding the trap-door or other aperture which opened on to the cave.
“What we need,” said O’Hara, “is a car that wants repairing. They’ve a pit for repairs at that place. I’ve seen it. I should think it is bound to be the opening we want. If the cave is used in the way Mrs. Bradley thinks, they wouldn’t risk having a suspicious-looking opening into it. Nobody would think of looking at an inspection pit in a biggish garage, which the pull-in certainly has. If we could only manage to get hold of a damaged car, we could gather round the inspection-pit while they dealt with it.”
“We will see what can be done. George will know about things like that,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“One thing,” said Laura, as they reached the tied-up dinghy, “it looks fishy about those people in that yacht.” Mrs. Bradley did not question this statement.
“I shall again appeal to the Chief Constable,” she said. “He is so angry with me already that one more red herring—if it should turn out to be that—can scarcely annoy him more.”
This refreshing point of view appealed to her hearers, and it was with gusto that they climbed into the dinghy and reversed her out of the cave.
“Well, you found plenty in the hole to interest you,” said the boatman encouragingly when they rejoined the cruiser, and the dinghy, after some trouble, had been hoisted aboard. For answer, Mrs. Bradley peered with an expression of vulpine rapture into one of the little linen bags she had taken with her, and produced for the boatman’s inspection one or two specimens which she had had the forethought to borrow from her archaeological friend before she had returned from her visit to London.
“Ah,” said the fifteen-year-old mate, coming up and peering politely over Gascoigne’s left elbow, “if you found them there in that ’ole, it’s where somebody must have dropped ’em.” To the horror of three of his hearers, the stupefaction of the fourth and the cackling delight of the fifth, he continued, pointing, “That there be a bone of bos longifrons; that be part of the blade of a Stone Age sickle; and that un be a bit of the turnover top of a Neolithic collared urn. I don’t hardly reckon none of they would be found in a hole like that un, but maybe they would.”§
“Well, here they are, anyway,” Mrs. Bradley briskly replied, for she neither could nor would give the erudite child the lie.
The motor cruiser took up her anchor and moved off on her return journey to Welsea Beaches. The short passage was as uneventful as her crew and passengers could desire, and the latter were back at the hotel in time for dinner. They did not return to Slepe Rock. Mrs. Bradley feared for O’Hara’s safety there, although she did not give that as her reason for remaining in Welsea.
“But when can we take the damaged car to the pull-in?” asked Laura. “That is, how soon can we get a damaged car? George won’t let us mess up our own.”
“Soon; I can promise that,” said Gascoigne, looking at Mrs. Bradley. “You’ve simply got to say when. If we can’t find some legitimate means of getting into that pull-in and using their garage without exciting suspicion, I shall be surprised and will eat my hat.”
“Yes, but I don’t think you wear a hat.” observed Laura. “By the way, what about our film extras? I don’t think it’s much good depending on those people, somehow, at the house with the four dead trees. But perhaps you don’t want any now?” she added, eyeing Mrs. Bradley narrowly.
“Oh, yes, I do want them, and we shall get them,” Mrs. Bradley responded. “My nephew Denis knows someone who is in film circles in some managerial capacity, and this man rang up the Gonn-Brown company and the extras will be sent to us on loan at the usual rates.”
“Good,” said Laura. “I shall sleep soundly to-night. Hope I don’t dream of our cave!”
“And I that I do not dream of that terrifying child on board the cruiser!” said Mrs. Bradley.
* * *
§ This boy afterwards became Assistant Keeper in the Department of Archaeology in the University Museum at Padmancaster, and wrote a standard work on Bronze Age survivals in Britain.
Chapter Fifteen
“…where they say the great Emperor Frederick Barbarossa still holds his court among the caverns.”
THE BROTHERS GRIMM (Peter the Goatherd)
Mrs. Bradley, as always, was as good as her word. By nine o’clock in the morning she and her host of extras were in full swing. The stone circle presented a lively spectacle and was, as the now refreshed Laura expressed it, positively crawling with ant-like archaeologists, almost all of whom had been hired for the occasion, although not by Laura.
The work was in charge of Mrs. Bradley herself and a tall young man in disreputable shorts who turned out to be one of her many nephews. The expert upon whom Mrs. Bradley had been counting was suffering, it transpired, from lumbago, and could not come. He had, however, been responsible for providing the reason for hiring the helpers, for the excuse for all the activity (if anybody asked any questions) was that a “dig” was to be filmed for educational purposes.
“And if we can’t outshine Charley’s Aunt,” announced Laura darkly, “in competing for the educational hogwash, I shall be gloriously surprised. By the way, how come Denis? I thought he only played the violin!”
“I remembered Denis just in time. He helped to excavate some hut circles in Wiltshire last year. He will make it look as though we know what we’re doing, and will also prevent us from doing any damage,” said Mrs Bradley, waving an explanatory claw. “The great thing,” she added, gazing benevolently round upon her ant-heap, “is to have enough people busy. It disarms suspicion. And the Chief Constable, as I told you yesterday, is not pleased with me. I have kept him out of his bed and caused him to creep in the lee of hedges and get the knees of his trousers dirty. It will be as well to demonstrate our own continuing zeal.”
She concluded this peroration with a startling yelp of laughter, and then called up her nephew and presented him to the other young men.
“Denis does play the violin,” she added, waving a skinny claw again as though to excuse this idiosyncrasy on the part of her nephew. “You will have much in common.” She walked off, hooting mirthfully.
“Aunt Adela is very full of beans to-day,” said Denis. “She feels she’s up to mischief, and that, in my experience, always makes old ladies very cheerful.”
O’Hara and Gascoigne, who had taken to him at sight, would perhaps have liked to know what his experience had been, but they did not ask that, but only what was the plan of campaign on the site of the digging.
“We have to fool about as long as possible without doing any actual digging,” Denis replied. “So if you two wouldn’t mind taking this measuring tape and this fairly large protractor, and assing about over there for a bit without doing anything in particular, but just looking busy and intelligent, it would be handy. We lunch at twelve and shall spin the picnic out until two-thirty. Then we resume the fooling until four. By that time we hope to have attracted a fair amount of attention, and to have demonstrated our fat-headed innocence. Then we can push off home. At least, so Aunt Adela says.”
Gascoigne and O’Hara accepted the implements presented to them, retired to the north-west segment of the circle, and began a series of elaborate measurements. O’Hara produced a notebook and a fountain pen, Gascoigne a few unpaid bills and a pencil, and the two young men wrote down records and calculations of distances, angles, direction and length of shadows, and such other data as occurred to their yeasty intelligences or were suggested by the circumstances of the survey.
They also named, for their private satisfaction, all the nine stones, beginning with the names of the eight great planets, but as it was a matter for argument how then to name the ninth stone, they compromised by deciding to call all the stones after the most eccentric dons at their University. This exercise in ingenuity took some time, as it seemed necessary to relate each stone in some way to the person after whom it was to be called, and the time passed pleasantly enough.
At last there was a halt for the picnic lunch. A firm of caterers from Welsea Beaches, suborned or intimidated by Mrs. Bradley, appeared at ten minutes to twelve with lorry-loads of excellent food and a sufficient number of crates of bottled beer, and drove cautiously through the open gateway on to the site of the dig.
The archaeologists knocked off work at once, and, with completely comprehensible enthusiasm, unloaded and fell on the provisions. Laura sat between two of the film extras, a young man in velvet trousers and a young woman with hair so thoroughly bleached that it had turned white. Laura was an expansive, friendly person, and was soon conversing with the extras and listening with great interest to what they had to say about the cinema.
They were on location, she learned, to shoot half a dozen sequences involving a background of open hill-country, some pasture and a Tamworth boar.
“Although what a Tamworth boar looks like, unless our producer,” said the velvet-trousered one frankly, “beats me, what I mean to say.”
Laura agreed, although she knew perfectly well what a Tamworth boar looked like. She had not, so far, met their producer, however, and so reserved judgment on the aptness or otherwise of the velvet-trousered comment.
“I suppose you’ve got digs down here?” she said. “I mean, if you’re staying some time. How do they put you up?”
“If you call it that,” said the silver-haired one. “Digs, I mean. We’ve been given the attics in that house by the golf links. I suppose it’s all right if you’re not choosey, but being seventh lead, as you might almost say, I did think I ought to get something better. But it’s no use talking. Anyway, it’s dry and fairly clean, and the food’s not bad, and they give you a drink occasionally. Free, I mean.”
“Iced?” enquired Laura, upon what she hoped was a casual note; for she felt sudden excitement at the news that these people were actually housed in Cottam’s, of the four dead trees, a mansion which, she was still certain, contained a corpse.
“Iced? Oh, I suppose so, if you like them that way. Personally, a gin is all I care for, and you don’t want that iced, do you?”
Laura said that she supposed not, and, the conversation showing signs of languishing, she was moved suddenly to enquire:
“What sort of man is Concaverty?”
The silver hair and the velvet trousers exchanged glances which indicated indecision and a certain degree of embarrassment.
“Oh, well,” said the velvet trousers, “he’s an old so-and-so, actually. Too big for his boots. In fact, too big altogether. But, look here, don’t say I said so. I don’t want to get the wrong side of him. He rents us the house, you know. The Gonn-Brown pay him five hundred a week, and, even then, he doesn’t much want us, we’ve been told.”
