The Dancing Druids, page 15
part #21 of Mrs Bradley Series
‘Why, that’s the fellow!’ said O’Hara. ‘I recognized his voice at once. I wonder what his name is? I’ll go over and claim acquaintance. I’d like to find out what he’s got to say about the body we carried down those stairs.’
‘Do you mean the producer?’ asked Laura, coming up to them.
‘Good Lord, no! I mean that fellow talking to Bradley. Mrs. Bradley’s watching them, do you see? She smells a rat, and no wonder.’
He strolled over to where Denis was in conversation with a thickly-built, tallish man who looked like a professional boxer.
‘Hullo,’ said O’Hara casually. ‘How goes it?’
‘It looks all right to me,’ the man replied, ‘but I don’t know much about… Good Lord!’
‘Yes, exactly,’ said O’Hara, eyeing him. ‘How did our friend get on?’
‘Eh?… Oh! Poor old Chummy! Yes, that was a very bad business! But what possessed you to get out of the car like that? Still, he managed the journey all right, and we got him to hospital. Haemorrhage, too! The most extraordinary thing. I’ve never heard of it accompanying typhoid fever, have you?’
‘I don’t know much about illness,’ said O’Hara slowly, ‘but I knew he was pretty bad. I had an idea he was dead when I left the car.’
‘Of course not! There wasn’t any question of that! He was pretty bad, certainly, but he’s progressing well enough now. We didn’t think much of the local hospitals, so in the end we ran him up to London, and that’s where he is! Well, so long! Be seeing you!’ He turned and strolled away.
‘I wish I’d got that kind of cast-iron nerve,’ said O’Hara, when, at the end of the afternoon, the film extras and all other strangers had gone, and he, together with Gascoigne, Laura, Mrs. Bradley and the useful and decorative Denis, were getting into the two cars to return to Welsea Beaches. ‘He didn’t attempt to put me off. Just said that the sick man was progressing well and was now in London. Looked me in the eye as bold as brass, and asked me why on earth I’d got out of the car that night. Did you ever meet such an example of complete, copper-bottomed cheek?’
‘If we could only find that body, and get it identified!’ said Laura. ‘If only we could find out anything! I hate being kept in the dark.’
‘To-night,’ said her employer mysteriously, generously omitting all reference to the discovery of the smugglers’ cave and the important and entrancing theory that it ended under the pull-in at Slepe Rock, ‘we go on a mysterious quest. You wait and see. I think we have started our hare.’
‘That’s good,’ said O’Hara. ‘What do you want us to do?’
‘I don’t want your company, child. I have something most important for you and Mr. Gascoigne to do. You must all get what rest you can in the next few hours. Matters, if I mistake not, approach their zenith.’
She refused to add to this Elizabethan platitude, but cackled harshly in reply to further questions.
Although she was dogged by the supposition that Mrs. Bradley was indulging in an Indian midsummer madness, or had caught a touch of the sun, Laura agreed to spend the whole time between tea and dinner at rest on her bed at the hotel. She even fell asleep for a time, and did not wake until seven. She dashed in and out of a bath in record time, and hoped that the main dish would still be ‘on’ when she got to table, for at Welsea Beaches, as at most seaside places of the decade, it was necessary to be early unless one was prepared to eat some extraordinary mixture concocted from the remains of food left from the previous day, or something based on sausage-meat or macaroni.
Mrs. Bradley, however, had reminded the waiter to see that Laura received the portion due to her. She advised her young secretary not to hurry over her dinner as there was not the slightest need to do so. Hiccups, she pointed out, would be out of place at that evening’s special gathering at the standing stones, as silence was to be the chief consideration and even the most involuntary sounds taboo. To Laura’s questions she returned no answer except a hoot of laughter.
They set off as soon as dinner was over. The night sky, overcast as it was with cloud, had already brought darkness sufficient, Mrs. Bradley decided, for their purpose, and from the large and fashionable hotel at Welsea their departure would cause no comment, and probably would go unnoticed.
Laura, wide awake and conscious of excitement, noticed that the car, instead of making direct for the objective, went from Welsea Beaches for some miles along the London Road before it turned off at Coshill for Dimdyke, Allis and Hafford. This string of hill hamlets took in a wide oval beyond Cuchester and finished by the south-west border of the county. At last the passengers found themselves on the way (up a long narrow lane of potholes and the old tracks made by the caterpillar wheels of tanks) to the village of Upper Deepening. From there the car dropped gently, and, to an imaginative person, inevitably, to the stile from which they would reach the Dancing Druids.
‘What do we do now?—walk?’ enquired Laura, as the car drew up, and she and her employer got out.
‘There is nothing else to do,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘But please be guided by me. Do not speak unless I speak first, and leave our course of action entirely in my hands, no matter what may be forthcoming.’
‘Right. Do we leave George here again in charge of the car?’
‘We do.’
‘Where are Gerry and Mike? We haven’t seen them since…’
‘They are in position, I hope, by this time.’
‘By the Druids?’
‘Nowhere near the Druids, child. On the shore of the bay at Slepe Rock, if they have carried out instructions. And from now on, no talking, unless I speak first.’
‘Complete silence,’ agreed Laura. ‘Right.’
She and Mrs. Bradley then climbed the stile and walked towards the circle of standing stones. Mrs. Bradley went first, and Laura kept close behind her but left sufficient space between them for Mrs. Bradley to pull up short, if she wished to do so, without having Laura butting into her. They made no sound as they walked, and Laura, in spite of (or, possibly, because of) tightened nerves, began to enjoy the expedition with that kind of tingling excitement mixed with fear which is felt by young children with a sense of adventure when they embark upon the unknown or the previously untried.
The ground rose gradually from the road, for the steeper side of the hill was that which dropped to the farm on the opposite slope. The night, in the classic phrase, was chilly but not dark, and Laura was glad of her tweed coat. The hedge rustled beside them as they walked and gave its customary impression, in the darkness, of being full of eyes.
Laura began to wonder what Mrs. Bradley intended. Nothing so far had been said of the object of the excursion, but Laura connected it vaguely with the ‘archaeological eyewash’ as she herself expressed it, of the afternoon. She gave up further speculation, and began to wonder, instead, exactly how Mrs. Bradley would react if, on this hair-lifting excursion, something, coming out of the hedge, stabbed Laura soundlessly to death in the dark, and Mrs. Bradley found herself, at length, alone with the Dancing Druids. She embroidered this theme until she felt sufficiently terrified to abandon it.
At this point it occurred to Laura that the Druids themselves formed a sinister rendezvous, and that she and her employer were, after all, a very young and a very old woman to be undertaking a night tryst with them, especially in view of the lonely and exposed position in which the Druids stood. She dared not conclude this thought, but the one which followed it was not more comforting. Who knew, she wondered, what ghastly sights and sounds the stones had been witnesses of in long-past times and under the ancient sky? Why, anyway, were they called the Druids, and, again, why should they dance? She saw them, enveloped, like witches, in cloaks of mist. She saw them writhe out of the ground, and, with slow contortions, shuffle towards their victims, avid for blood.
These terrifying images disappeared as Mrs. Bradley turned off from the path through a gap in the hedge, and muttered to Laura to keep low. Dark thoughts forgotten and the fever of wild adventure again in her blood, Laura crouched down. Mrs. Bradley paused for no more than three minutes, and then moved on again. Laura followed with bold and tightened heart, and she and her employer began to creep across the turf towards the stones.
It was a long and uncomfortable trek, but at last the stone circle was reached, and Mrs. Bradley, extending a skinny claw, drew Laura to a halt, and then, without speaking, thrust her gently behind one of the stones.
‘Keep under cover unless I tell you anything different, child,’ she muttered. ‘Our business to-night is to watch. I hope nothing else will be necessary.’
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
—«♦»—
‘Night came fast upon them, and they found that they must, however unwillingly, sleep in the wood.’
Ibid. (The Nose)
« ^ »
Laura, behind her stone, touched its roughly-scored surface. She felt it rasp beneath her fingers. It felt warm. Superstition came flooding back into her mind. The stones, she thought, after all, were alive. They lived some strange, remote life of their own, up there on the barren hill. They were kept alive by human blood… by the innocent blood of murdered men!
She was thinking these wild but archaeologically reasonable thoughts, when Mrs. Bradley leaned over from her own stone and murmured:
‘Prepare to repel boarders! In other words—by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes! Stand firm, child! We have visitors!’
There followed an unpleasantly eerie pause, whilst Laura held her breath and the whole hill seemed to listen. Suddenly, from the opposite side of the circle, someone spoke.
‘This’ll be the one he meant. Curse those idiots and their damned dancing about!’
‘Thank ’eaven they didn’t start digging!’ said another voice. ’That would have torn it proper! Now what about the leanin’ tower of Pisa? Is this the one?’
Opposite Laura, on the north-east side of the circle, was, by daylight, a particularly noticeable stone, for it leaned over away from the rest of the circle as though at some time it might have been uprooted and had been put back carelessly.
‘Yes. Here, where have you got to?’
‘Feelin’ it. Yes, this is it. Easiest to take out of the ground. That’s what he thought, and I daresay he was right. Easiest to describe, too, if it had to be us as didn’t bury it.’
‘Can two of us tackle it, do you think?’
‘Sure. Put the rope round it and carry the slack over the top of the next stone, the higher one.’
‘Right. Carry on, then. Can you find the one you want?’
‘I guess so. I’ll have to have a light for the job, though. I’m not a cat as can see in the dark, and we don’t want to mess the thing up.’
‘Not more light than we can help, then. Sing out when you’re ready, and Ben will bring up the horses to do the pulling. Your job, once you’ve rigged up your tackle, will be to stand by, and see that the rope doesn’t slip.’
‘Oh, that’s the notion, is it? And what about you? I suppose you’re the gentleman, as usual!’
‘Get on, man, for God’s sake! We haven’t all night to mess about. Get that rope round, and look slippy.’
‘O.K. Say when. Here she goes!’
There was a fairly long pause and some sounds indicative of effort.
‘Got it over the second stone yet?’
‘Nope.’ A torch was switched on, but Laura could see little of the men. She knew, from the voices, that one was the man from Slepe Rock. The rougher voice she did not know.
‘All set. Bring up the horses,’ said this unknown man at last. ‘I’ll be glad to be through with this job!’
There was another pause. After a while Laura could hear the trampling of the great beasts as they were brought up the hill from the farm. A man carrying a lantern was with them, and, from his muffled oaths and muted cajolery, he seemed to experience some difficulty in getting them up to the stones.
After great efforts on the part of all three men, the horses were backed and manoeuvred into position, the end of the rope was secured to a pole which dangled from their harness, and which Laura could see in the lantern-light, and the work began of heaving up the stone.
The great horses snorted and blew, the men cursed and grunted, and the work proceeded (grimly and spasmodically, it seemed, from the comments which Laura could hear) until at long last, with an enormous sound of tearing, up came the long, tilted stone.
‘Hold!’ cried the man from Slepe Rock. ‘Wait while we get in the crowbar!’
There was a pause of a second or two, and then the other voice observed, in a high, impatient tone:
‘All right? Get busy and don’t mess about! I’m not breakin’ my back to suit you, as you haven’t even humped yourself yet! All right now?… I can’t hold on much longer. Something’s got to go, and it might be me!’
‘All right so far, but you’ll have to hang on for a little bit longer,’ said the first voice. ‘Come here, Harry, and put your weight on this crowbar. We must relieve Bud. He can’t hang on much longer.’
‘Can’t be done! The horses won’t stand it,’ said the carter.
The man from Slepe Rock became angry.
‘Never mind the horses! You, Bud, hang on a bit longer. We’re doing all we can. Oh, for God’s sake, man! Use your guts!’
‘That’s all very well,’ said the other; and Laura could hear him panting. Suddenly there was a shout which was almost a scream.
‘Oh, heavens!’ said Laura, aloud. Her imagination supplied the rest of the picture, but, before she had finished constructing it, the rope had parted over the top of the stone which was used to take the strain of the lifting, and the tilted stone which the men were raising had bumped down on to the turf.
Mrs. Bradley moved far more quickly than the girl. She was out of her hiding-place and on her knees beside the ghastly wreck pinned by the stone before Laura had collected her wits. The horses, relieved too suddenly of their burden, were stampeding over the hill. They uttered sounds of excitement and fear as they thundered off. The man from Slepe Rock and the carter both went after them, apparently regarding the rounding-up of the animals as of greater importance than the fate of their unlucky companion.
Mrs. Bradley switched on her torch and surveyed the scene of the accident. She knelt beside the fallen stone which had pinned the man underneath it, told Laura to keep off, and soon rose.
‘Quite dead, thank goodness,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing here that I can do.’ She switched off her torch, put her hand into the capacious pocket of her skirt and drew out a flask. ‘Here,’ she said, going over to Laura. ‘Where are you? Unscrew this carefully. It’s brandy. I expect you can do with it.’
‘I’m quite all right,’ said Laura, in the husky tone of shock. But she took the dram and was glad of it. ‘I suppose we get out of here quick?’ She screwed on the cap of the flask.
‘Not until we’ve looked into the hole,’ said Mrs. Bradley, taking the flask and testing its screw cap before she returned it to her pocket. ‘I was pretty sure this morning which stone it was, but they’ve proved it beyond a doubt, as I knew they would if our archaeological bluff came off, and it has! Come along, before those men get back, if you will, and help me look. I think that two witnesses will be more satisfactory than one.’
Laura, with shaking legs, at once followed her over the turf. Mrs. Bradley kept the light from her torch on the ground, although there were no sounds to indicate that the men were returning.
‘Don’t look at him unless you want to,’ she said decidedly, as they approached the fallen stone and the dead man.
‘I’d better look,’ said Laura. ‘I saw air-raid casualties. This won’t be anything more dreadful. I shall only imagine it’s all the worse if I don’t see it.’
It was not, in fact, a particularly dreadful sight. The great stone had fallen across the man’s body and he had crashed face-downward on the turf.
‘Broken back, among other things,’ said Mrs. Bradley, dismissing the incident and concentrating the beam from her torch on to the hole torn in the turf by the lifting out of the stone. It was the thought of what was buried in the hole, far more than the sight of the dead man, which Laura dreaded.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Mrs. Bradley added. ‘Just let’s look. Take your time, and look carefully and closely, for we may need to be able to swear to what we have seen.’
There was nothing fearful in the hole. All that Laura could see was the loosened soil, and, a long distance down, something dark and metallic protruding.
‘What is it?’ she whispered, surprised, for the contents of the hole seemed strangely innocent.
‘A funerary urn, perhaps,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘or, possibly, buried treasure.’ She knelt beside the hole and shone her torch more directly on to the object which it contained.
‘I don’t think the two of us could get it up without assistance,’ she said, ‘yet I confess that I should like to have a closer look at it.’
Laura, thrusting from her mind the story of the Treasure of Abbot Thomas which had chosen this obvious but inconvenient time to obstrude itself upon her memory, rolled up her sleeve and thrust a strong arm into the cavity.
There was a handle on the end of the container, and upon this she took a good grip and began to heave and struggle.
‘Don’t trouble,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘I doubt whether it would be wise, after all to move it.’
‘Thank goodness,’ said Laura subsiding.
‘And now,’ said Mrs. Bradley, snapping off her torch, ‘let us listen intently. It would never do for those villains to find us here, yet I do not intend to move until I know what they are going to do next.’
Laura became the prey to wishful thinking.
‘I wish Gerry and Mike were here,’ she observed. ‘We could hold our own, then, whoever turned up. They’d soon settle anybody’s hash. I wouldn’t even mind a policeman, or Denis, or George. Or even the Chief Constable,’ she added.
