Uncoffin'd Clay (Mrs. Bradley), page 4
“Is it all right to take the path through those woods?”
He looked round.
“Who wants to?” he asked.
“I’m out for a stroll,” I said, “and the footpath on the other side appears to lead into some woods.”
“Spring guns and man-traps,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t want to go in there. They’ll kill you.” He looked down at the water again. “Not really deep enough, do you think?”
“Deep enough for what?”
“Drowning yourself.”
“I’ve no idea,” I said, “but if you wouldn’t mind letting me pass…”
“Oh, that! Sorry.” He came off the bridge on my side. I raised my hand in acknowledgment and crossed over. When I looked back before I entered the woods, he was on the bridge again, staring down at the water.
My woodland path soon began to climb. The dead leaves underfoot were thickly-fallen and damp. The trees were mostly oaks, but as the path mounted the oaks thinned out and gave place to hazels. Near the top of the rise it was bare except for coarse grass, and when I reached the summit of the ridge I could see below me a large house and, in the far distance, the squat tower of a church.
Coming towards me was a man with a gun and a dog, a rough-coated retriever. I wondered whether I was trespassing, but he gave me a perfectly civil, although perfunctory, “Good-day” and, with a word to his dog, passed me and went downhill and into the woods which I had left behind me.
I stood still and looked about me. It was fresh and breezy in the upland air, but my climb to the ridge had warmed me and I was not averse to standing and gazing and feeling the wind in my face. Now that I was able to give it full attention, I could make out that the house I had seen was not much more than a shell. I wished I had brought my binoculars, but they have something in common with my camera in that they are never to hand when they are most needed.
From where I stood the downward track was a lot steeper than the path by which I had mounted, and my calf-muscles were beginning to resent their duty of acting as brakes by the time I reached the bottom of the hill. The path swung to the left, for the forward track was barred off by a wired-up wicket gate, reinforced by two posts much higher than the little gate itself and also strung with wire, two or three strands of which were barbed. Beyond the gate a path led into more woods.
However, there was nothing to prevent my following the path to the left. It broadened out and ran between hedges and, about half a mile further on, one of the hedges was broken by wide entrance gates and, to the side of them, there was a cottage which obviously was the lodge to an estate. Calculation indicated to me that the lodge must be in the policies of the ruined mansion I had spotted from the ridge. A woman was hanging out some washing in the little garden which surrounded the cottage.
I walked forward and wished her good morning, this for the sake of getting into a conversation which I hoped would tell me something of the history of the house and how it had come to be in such a sad state of decrepitude. I began by asking her whether she would tell me where I was.
“Fell Bottom,” she said. “This be the lodge to Fell Hall and over yonder ’ee’ll come to Fell Church if ’ee go fur enough. You be a stranger in these parts, then?”
“Yes, from London. I’m staying in Strode Hillary.”
“Oh, ah.” She began to peg out a sheet, but had difficulty with it in the wind, so I put down my ashplant and went to help her.
“That must have been a very beautiful house,” I said.
“Oh, ah, one time, before the fire.”
“Who owns it?”
“There’s a lawsuit on. My man and I, us do be acting as caretakers, like, under Mr. Okeford, who have the job of sorting things out between them as claims the property and them as wants to buy it, but there’s a lawsuit on, been on for years, on and off. That foreign gentleman who bought Paine’s place want the first option on it, but until they know who it belong to, Okeford can’t let Winters sell. You take a look round, if you want. A gentleman like you won’t do no harm. I never go up there myself. My man see to all that.”
“I’d very much like to look round,” I said, “but I have to be getting along. Where will this path bring me out?”
“In Breedy’s farmyard if you goes fur enough. Mind as how his dogs ent loose. They’m none too friendly with strangers, though all right if you know ’em.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I saluted with the ashplant, which I had retrieved, and strode on. It occurred to me to wonder whether Breedy had been the man with the gun and the retriever, but there was little point in surmising. I also wondered whether a description of the young man on the bridge would have brought any information about him, but it was too late to think of that. The woman had gone indoors and, in any case, I had told her that I must be on my way. As I walked on, I tried to explain to myself my reluctance to explore the old house. I certainly was not pressed for time, for I had told Mary that I should not be in for lunch, so I had the rest of the day before me, and the chance to poke about in a fine old place such as Fell Hall was not to be missed.
I passed a tumbledown hovel which must have been another of the lodges. Two stone pillars which had served as gateposts were still standing, but the gates had been removed. I walked past the crumbling lodge and entered the drive. There was still a chance of looking over the house, and this time I decided to take it. If I encountered the caretaker again, I would explain my reappearance on the plea that I had lost my way, but, with any luck, I should not run into her again, for the two lodges were at least half a mile apart.
The drive was bordered on either side by rhododendrons. They grew wild everywhere in the county, although variety of colour was only to be found in gardens. There were no flowers so early in the year, but fat buds gave promise of plenty of blossom to come in a few weeks’ time.
Where the rhododendron hedges gave out, the drive curved past lawns and then across the front of the house and took a long slant back (I supposed) to the lodge where the caretakers lived. Tyre marks, which I had noticed already, were deepest in front of the house, as though a lorry had stood there, and the tracks looked fresh.
The house no longer had a front door, but the opening was sheltered by a pillared portico beyond which it was unlikely that rain would penetrate. I glanced around, and then went up the steps and entered the house.
The traces of the fire were evident everywhere. Cracked and blackened walls and ceilings bore witness to the devastation which must have occurred. It seemed likely that the mansion had been uninhabited at the time. That being so, it was difficult to imagine how the fire had started, unless it had been the work of vandals or village boys out for mischief or a tramp who had lighted a fire which got out of his control.
I wandered from room to room, but it was the same story everywhere I went. Beautiful plasterwork, painted niches, massive doorways by which the downstairs rooms opened out of one another were all defaced, blistered, or partially or even totally destroyed. The blaze must have been visible for miles around, but the fire brigade, if it had been called out at all, had been called out too late to save the interior of the house.
The floors, of course, were bare and there was no furniture, but sets of muddy footprints, still fairly fresh, which skirted blackened floorboards and appeared again on the stairs, seemed to indicate that the staircase itself had suffered less damage than some other parts of the house and was safe enough to bear my weight, so, exercising caution, I mounted. I could think of no reason why anybody should have wanted to climb the stairs unless he was actuated by the same curiosity as my own, for a tramp, surely, would have been content to doss down on the ground floor. The visitor could have been the caretaker himself.
The bedrooms seemed to have suffered less damage than the downstairs rooms, although the floors here and there were perilous and I began to test my steps before venturing further. The muddy footprints were fainter on the first landing I came to, but I noticed slight traces of them on the narrower staircase which mounted to the second storey.
“Why not?” I said to myself. “If somebody else could get up there safely, so can I.” But before I mounted I explored the first-floor rooms. Some, I deduced, had been bedrooms originally, but one of them was so grand that it must have been the ballroom. The ceiling, scorched and blackened though it was, still showed traces of elaborate plasterwork not to be matched even by the ornate ceilings down below, and the fireplace was a masterpiece of variously patterned marbles, ugly in its grandeur, but impressively conceived and executed.
There were loose floorboards and some holes. I trod carefully and did not venture very far into the room. Then I climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor and here a surprise awaited me. One of the rooms was locked and the padlock, which was on the outside of the door, was new. I examined it closely and wished I had a bit of wire with me, for it would have been easy enough to pick such a lock. It was of an everyday simple type and as a romantic boy I had made myself an expert in picking locks just for the fun of it.
I went down the stairs and looked round when I reached the pillared portico, but there was nobody about, so I took to the drive again. Suddenly I heard the sound of a vehicle. At this, I dived in among the trees and took cover to watch it go by. Rightly or wrongly, I knew not which at the time, I connected it with the locked room. It was an estate car, but I could not read the number plates because they were, front and back, plastered with thick black mud. There were two men in the car. I wondered whether one was my suicidal friend of the plank bridge, but the car went by too fast for me to recognise anybody in it.
To team up the estate car with the locked room may have been a foolish and ill-conceived connection to make at the time, but it turned out later to be entirely reasonable. At any rate the locked room fascinated me. I thought about it all the way down the long drive and wondered what secret it hid and whether the woman at the lodge knew about it.
When I was back on my track I soon found that it wound steeply upwards. I took it slowly until I was looking down on the farm that the woman had mentioned. It lay at the bottom of a narrow valley and on the other side of it there was another steep hill.
I thought of a further climb. I thought of the farmyard dogs who were all right if you knew them. I wished I had the one-inch map with me. Without a map to guide me, there was no choice except to go through the farmyard and take a chance with the dogs or to turn back. I was doubtful about the former, but disinclined for the latter. For all I knew, the young man on the bridge might have decided by this time that the stream was deep enough for his purpose. I had no mind to be the person who discovered and was obliged to report his demise.
I was still standing there, looking down on the farm buildings, when sounds behind me caused me to turn round. Over the crest of the hill came a small pack of beagles and, running with them, a bevy of boys in running-vests and shorts and a couple of young men—their schoolmasters, I supposed—who were acting as whippers-in and bringing up the rear.
“Safety in numbers,” I thought; and, as they passed me, I joined discreetly in the hunt at the rear of the runners. There was no sign of the farmer’s dogs as we all streamed past the farmhouse and a battered car which stood outside it, and when the beagles and their foot-followers had veered off to the left across a field, I dropped into a walk and continued along my track, toiling up and over the hill and dropping down through woods until I reached a main road and a signpost.
The signpost was of the helpful kind and gave the mileage as well as the direction, and I found that I was only two miles from Strode Hillary. I quickened my pace and in just over forty minutes I was in the market square and opposite the Stag hotel in time to get my lunch there. It was steak and kidney pie that day, and until I began to tuck in I had not realised how hungry I was. I had a pint of their special brew with my meal and left the inn greatly refreshed.
I felt I had done enough walking for one day, so headed for Innes’s house. I hoped he had finished his writing, for I was anxious to give him and Mary the story of my walk and particularly to tell them about the locked room at Fell Hall and the prospective suicide on the bridge, but in case Innes was still busy I did not ring the front-door bell, but went along the side of the house in the expectation of finding the back door unlocked.
It was unlocked, as somebody else appeared to have discovered, for I almost collided with him as he attempted to make his exit and I my entrance. I could hear Innes’s typewriter clacking away as I opened the door and as there was no sign of Mary or the charwoman I assumed that Mary was upstairs with him and that Mrs. Platt had finished the chores and gone home.
I cannot say that I registered these things consciously at the time, any more than that I asked myself why a young workman, whatever his business, was under no sort of supervision. However, I remembered that I was a townsman and that they do things differently in the country.
I did notice that the young man was wearing a knitted affair which we used to call a Balaclava helmet and that it hid most of his face. I began to ask what he was doing in the kitchen, but he spun round as soon as he saw me, blurted out (in a thick voice muffled by the Balaclava which covered his mouth) something about the sink and the cooker, as he snatched up a large bag and sped out into the hall. The next thing I heard was the front door being slammed.
I rushed into the hall, but by the time I got the front door open a car was half-way down the road and too far off for me to get the number. Mary came to the top of the stairs.
“That you, Mike?” she called down. “We’ve nearly finished.”
“You’ve had a visitor,” I said. She came down the stairs.
“A visitor? Oh, that would be Wally Halstock,” she said. “Tidying up the garden, was he?”
“No, he was in your kitchen.”
“That doesn’t sound like Wally. Of course he’s often been in the kitchen, but only when I ask him in to give him a cup of tea and a piece of cake. I shouldn’t have thought he would ever come in on his own. He isn’t quite right in the head and he’s very shy. For the first week or two he wouldn’t even come inside the kitchen for his tea. We used to give it him outside the back door.”
“He said he had come to look at the sink and the gas cooker. Then he made a dash for it out of the front door and I think he made off in a car.”
“None of it sounds like Wally. What did the man look like?”
“Young, I would say, and sturdy. He nearly knocked me down when I opened the kitchen door.”
“It sounds as though he panicked. That would fit Wally, but so it would fit an unauthorised intruder,” she said. “You know, Mike, I still don’t believe Wally would have come into the kitchen unless I was there and asked him in. When the man spoke to you, could you understand him?”
“Oh, yes. He mumbled a bit through a knitted helmet, but what he said was quite clear, although it hardly made sense. Surely, even in these parts, the same chap doesn’t look at sinks and gas ovens, or does he?”
At this moment Innes came down, carrying a large envelope.
“I can catch the post if I take this to the post office at once,” he said. “Hullo, anything cooking between you two?”
“We think we’ve had an intruder,” said Mary. “Mike found a man in the kitchen.”
“Wally Halstock?”
“We don’t think so, and you know, Innes, there have been several burglaries around this part of the country lately.”
“Only at the stately homes.”
“Well, you have to go near the police station on your way to the post office. When you’ve sent off your article I wish you’d just call in and have a word with the Superintendent. Tell him it may only have been Wally, but we’re not sure. You know Hallicks pretty well, so he won’t mind being bothered. I don’t much like the idea of an intruder, and Wally has an impediment, whereas Mike says this man spoke clearly.”
“All right, then, I’ll just take a look round if it will ease your mind, but I still think it was Wally. He was probably looking for something to eat.”
“If he was, he had collected it in a pretty large bag,” I said. Innes remained unimpressed. He had a good look around the kitchen, came back, and said:
“Nothing disturbed in there, so far as I can see. If there was an intruder, Mike caught him in time. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Well, I’ll be off, or I shall miss the post. I’ll have a word with Hallicks on my way back.”
However, after he had gone, we found that there was something to worry about, after all. We carried the tea-things into the dining-room and Mary missed a good set of prints. She rushed into the drawing-room and found that her Meissen mirror had gone. Shocked and dismayed, she said:
“I’d better see whether anything else is missing. I wish Innes had had a proper look round before he went.” She went upstairs, but soon came down again. “They didn’t find my jewel case and your necklace and earrings, or the ring my godmother gave me,” she said. “There was some silver in the sideboard, mostly modern, but we had an eighteenth-century teapot and a set of slip-top spoons. Innes’s bronzes were in there, too. You’ve never seen them because he bought them quite recently. He was going to show them to you after dinner the other day, but your present to me rather took the wind out of his sails. He said he’d save the bronzes until they could have the glory all to themselves.”
She went to the sideboard cupboard. I went with her. She opened the cupboard door, shut it again, and straightened up. In silence we went back to the kitchen for the rest of the tea-things. She filled the electric kettle and then we sat side by side on the settee in the drawing-room and waited for Innes to come back.
“But who would have known we had anything worth stealing?” she asked. “All the silver has gone, and the bronzes, too.”
“You will have shown people the prints and the mirror, and I expect the silver comes out on state occasions, doesn’t it? People talk about these things and the information gets to the wrong ears. What are these bronzes you mentioned? Anything special?”
