‘By Jove, you know, it makes you think,’ said Laura.

  ‘This way, I think,’ said Mrs. Bradley. She crossed a bridge of earth at the western end of the ditch. Laura followed, and soon they had cut through the middle of the inner sanctuary of the fortress. They passed the ruins of a Roman temple, by-passed the heights on which the cattle of the Iron Age had pastured in time of war, and regained the track which ringed the fortress. Soon they were in the ditch where O’Hara had turned his ankle. From this they reached the sandy lane where O’Hara had been stopped by the man in the car.

  ‘Well, O’Hara told the truth so far, wouldn’t you say?’ enquired Laura, leaning against a gate. ‘And there’s George. Geo—orge!’

  She waved, and George drove towards them.

  ‘There has certainly been a car up here, madam,’ he said, ‘and only one. I made a sketch of the tyre-tracks in case you should want to identify them anywhere else.’

  ‘Excellent, George,’ said Mrs. Bradley, handing him back his drawing. ‘And very useful. Miss Menzies and I are going to continue our walk. You have directions for finding the farm. You had better keep about half a mile away from it, or, if anything, rather more. You don’t want to seem interested in it in any way whatsoever. There are plenty of things to admire. Be careful to excite no suspicion.’

  ‘Very good, madam.’ He reversed the car towards the main road, and turned it expertly at a gateway.

  ‘Now, then,’ said Laura, ‘on we go! Come on, and I’ll walk your legs off!’

  ‘Done!’ said Mrs. Bradley, accepting the challenge in deed as well as in word. She set such a cracking pace up the sandy lane that even Laura, always in training, had to lengthen an already Amazonian stride in order to keep up with her.

  The countryside was delightful, and Laura enjoying the prospect of bluish downs, the green of the sloping fields and the miles of open country, had forgotten the object of the walk until the road began to darken and they found themselves passing a strange house with an inhospitable legend.

  ‘Keep out,’ said Laura, slowing up and reading aloud these unsociable words. ‘I wonder where the old chap has gone with the barrow? You know, this place looks a bit like a lunatic asylum to me. One of those grim places you read about in Victorian novels. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think at all at present. I merely observe and note,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘This is undoubtedly the Elizabethan manor which has the four dead trees in the park, for, as we turn the corner, there they are! Mr. O’Hara has not, so far, misled us.’ Her tone expressed something more than satisfaction.

  ‘It is a queer-looking place,’ said Laura, gazing in fascination at the trees. ‘How did that notice affect you, by the way? Personally, I have an almost uncontrollable desire to turn in my tracks and Go In.’

  ‘We have not much time to spare,’ said Mrs. Bradley, setting out briskly again. Soon they had left the grim gibbets of the four dead trees. The woods began to show bluish away to the south, and, at last, Mrs. Bradley leading, she and Laura entered a deep, dark tunnel of trees in a small, silent, circular wood, and were at the farm.

  Opposite the ruined cottage Mrs. Bradley stopped, and Laura came up and caught her arm. From a chimney of the farmhouse smoke was coming.

  ‘I say!’ muttered Laura. ‘I don’t like this very much! Did you expect to find the place occupied, after what those lads told us the other day?’

  Mrs. Bradley did not answer, and the two of them moved forward with great caution. They crept up the front garden path and peered in at the window, The room was empty, but flickering flames were being thrown out by a small and lively fire.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what you think,’ muttered Laura, gluing her nose to the glass, ‘but I should say that fire’s not been lighted very long. You know, this is what I should call rummy—very rummy. Those lads said the place was empty. Could it have been sold between Sunday and to-day? Or—oh, of course, they did find the ashes of a fire in this same grate— ’

  Mrs. Bradley drew her enthusiastic secretary away from the window, and they moved quietly round to the side door of the house. This was ajar. To Laura’s surprise, Mrs. Bradley walked in and called loudly:

  ‘Is anybody about?’

  There was the sound of footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs, and an elderly woman came down.

  ‘Did you want anything?’ she asked.

  ‘Can you direct us to the nearest garage?’ Mrs. Bradley enquired. ‘We’ve had to leave the car up the road and are strangers to the neighbourhood.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I can help you,’ replied the woman. ‘How far away is your car?’

  ‘Oh, a mile or so,’ Mrs. Bradley vaguely replied. ‘Somewhere over there.’ She waved a skinny claw in a north-easterly direction.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m only here to air the house. It’s been let because of the film people down at Cottam’s.’

  ‘Really? Oh, well, thank you.’ Mrs. Bradley touched Laura’s arm. ‘We had better go back and try that other little lane, my dear. I don’t envy you if you’re staying the night here,’ she added, turning to the woman. ‘It seems very lonely, doesn’t it? We happened to see the smoke from your chimney. I am so sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t live here,’ said the woman. ‘I’m only here to oblige. The gentleman sent a postcard to ask me to air the house. I live at Little Dorsett, over yonder, up the hill. There’s a short cut. It isn’t very far. You could walk it in half an hour. I’ll put you on the road if you like, but I mustn’t be long, else my old man will be shouting after me.’

  She took off her apron, hung it on the end of the banisters, smoothed her hair with a working-woman’s blunt-fingered hand, and then went with Laura to the gate.

  ‘I shall be slower than you will,’ said Mrs. Bradley to the woman, ‘so I’ll follow behind, and meet you as you come back. You go on, Laura, will you?’

  Laura nodded intelligently and urged the woman along at a pace which was almost a trot. Mrs. Bradley loitered behind them, and, as soon as they had turned into the wood, she darted back to the house, went in, and hastened into the room in which the fire was burning.

  For what purpose it had been lighted she could not determine. There was nothing to show that it had not been lighted to air the house, as the woman had said. There was no sign that documents had been burnt on it. A stout poker lay in the hearth. Thoughtfully impounding this, and holding it in a gloved hand, Mrs. Bradley searched the rest of the house.

  It was getting too dark to see much, so, trusting, that no one would see the glow of it, she switched on her torch. There was nothing to be discovered on the ground floor, so she mounted the stairs, retaining the poker as a weapon.

  Just as she reached the bedroom described by O’Hara, she thought she heard sounds from below. She opened the door of an enormous built-in cupboard and stepped inside.

  ‘Nellie!’ cried a man’s voice. ‘Nellie! Where the plague have ee got to, woman?’

  Mrs. Bradley awaited with interest the next part of the proceedings. She could hear doors being opened and shut, and, as the footsteps grew fainter and the man went towards the kitchen, she emerged, and, switching on her torch again, made a rapid survey of the floor. Except that, unlike the downstair floors, this one had been scrubbed recently, there was nothing remarkable about it.

  The remaining bedrooms were dusty, cobweb-tapestried to an almost incredible degree, unfurnished and undisturbed.

  Mrs. Bradley was leaving the last of them when an angry bellow came up the well of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, there ee be, Nellie, confound ee! Why the devil don’t ee answer when I calls you?’

  Mrs. Bradley slipped into the corridor and came on noiseless feet to the head of the stairs. There was a slight recess in the wall. She flattened herself into this and waited for the man to ascend. She still held the poker. She hoped he would not bring a light, but was ready to knock it out of his hand if he did.

  He had no torch. She could hear him stumbling up the stairs.

  ‘Nellie!’ he bellowed. Mrs. Bradley allowed him to walk past her. Then she slid out of her alcove and descended the stairs. She replaced the poker on the hearth from which she had taken it, came out to the side door and ensconced herself in the shadows. She waited. The man came downstairs as soon as he had searched the upstair rooms.

  ‘Nellie!’ he called desperately. ‘It do be you, don’t it? Answer me, girl! Where be ee?’

  Mrs. Bradley let him get half-way down the kitchen passage, and then she gave an eldritch screech of laughter. She heard a startled oath, and then the sound of a panic-stricken voice shouting:

  ‘Nellie! Nellie! For God’s sake! It do be ’aunted after all! Where be ee, girl? Why the old Nick don’t ee answer?’

  Mrs. Bradley sped down the weed-grown drive and ran for dear life along the lane in the direction the others had taken. Then she slowed down, and, by the time the woman reappeared, Mrs. Bradley was patiently toiling up the long, rutted slope of the hill.

  ‘She’ve got long legs, your grand-daughter,’ said the woman. ‘But you keep all on up along here, and you’ll pick her up in good time.’

  Mrs. Bradley thanked her, and toiled on. Half-way up the hill, Laura emerged with conspiratorial caution from a bush, and, crossing the hill, they made a detour, aided by the map, and reached George and the car without passing the farmhouse again.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to come so far after us,’ said Laura, ‘but I felt bound to go on a bit after she left me in case she turned round and spotted me, and began to suspect us of something. I was worried about you, though I hope you had time to snoop round? It didn’t seem to take you very long.’

  ‘I did nicely, thank you, child. The bedroom floor had been scrubbed, as those young men told us. I think I’ll have a word with the County Police when we get back.’

  ‘Will they think a scrubbed floor enough to go on?’

  ‘Time will show, child. It is the question of the heavy man’s failure to arrive at the hospital which will interest them. There was a man in the house, by the way. I am reasonably certain that he is the woman’s husband, and that they are there to get the house aired or for some innocent and similar reason. When the new tenants are installed we may be able to find another excuse to call. Meanwhile, there are more profitable fields to explore. Did you get very wet in that hedge?’

  ‘Soaking,’ said Laura complacently. ‘Did the man in the farmhouse see or hear you?’

  ‘He both saw me and heard me, child. I gave an eldritch cry, like Tam Lin’s fairy queen, and I am afraid I may have conveyed to him the impression that the house is haunted. It seemed, from what he said, that there is a tale of a ghost. If there is, it might be as well to find out the details. There is scope for many strange things in a house which has the reputation of being haunted.’

  ‘I’d like to have seen the bloke’s face when you screeched in his ear,’ observed Laura.

  ‘I did not screech in his ear,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘But you might screech in George’s, and tell him I want my dinner.’

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  —«♦»—

  ‘ “Heaven rest his soul! … He has lain these ten years in a house that he’ll never leave.” ’

  Ibid. (Peter the Goatherd)

  « ^ »

  I want you,’ said Mrs. Bradley, fastening her brilliant black eyes upon those of the Chief Constable, ’to have your young men look up all the cases in which people have disappeared during the past few weeks.’

  ‘Past twenty years, you mean,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘We don’t go in much for disappearances in these parts except disappearances under ground in the usual regrettable course of events, you know.’

  ‘When was the last disappearance of the kind I mean?’

  ‘In 1939, I think, just after war had broken out—or just before. I can’t remember.’

  ‘None since?’

  ‘None that have been brought to my notice.’

  ‘And before 1939?’

  ‘I’d have to look up the reports.’

  ‘I wish you would. What happened in the 1939 case?’

  ‘Officially we’re still looking for the fellow. He disappeared in what the Irish call “the dark of the moon,” and has never been heard of again.’

  ‘It was a man, then?’

  ‘Yes, I believe it is mostly men who disappear. Debts, or bigamy, or get tired of their homes, I suppose. Crime, sometimes, of course… suicide… drowning. It was rather odd about this chap, though, because, so far as we could tell, he didn’t come under any of the known headings. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even know he’d disappeared until the following-year, when some relatives in London wanted to billet themselves on him during the blitz. He couldn’t be found, so they asked us to try to trace him. We had no luck, and as there was nothing against him, so far as we knew, we gave it up.’

  ‘How old a man was he?’

  ‘Twenty-seven, I believe. Youngish, anyhow.’

  ‘Didn’t you think he might have joined the Army?’

  ‘He had a bad heart, it turned out. According to his doctor, there wasn’t the slightest chance of his having been accepted for any of the Services, or of his having been able to do much good, even for A.R.P.’

  ‘Why did nobody mention his disappearance sooner? A year seems a very long time.’

  ‘Since the death of his father in 1932, he seems to have lived by himself. He was an artist and a bit of an archaeologist. The people who were enquiring for him were his uncle and aunt. They had quarrelled with his father and had lost touch with the son, but when the fun began in London, of course, they wanted somewhere to go, and thought of this nephew, only to find his place deserted.’

  ‘Was there no clue at all to his disappearance?’

  ‘Never a one. I never knew such a case. We began our enquiry according to routine, but beyond establishing the fact that he’d left word with the tradespeople that he wouldn’t want anything delivered after some date or other in March— that was the March of 1939, of course—we got nowhere. As there was nothing criminal about the case, we weren’t particularly worried… after all, a man has the right to shut shop and clear out of his home if he wants to… but there was just one odd thing. The uncle said that his nephew had written to them at the time of Munich, and, after a few facetious remarks about gas-masks, had stated soberly that he was certain war was coming, and that if they ever wanted a refuge he was perfectly willing to put them up at his cottage. ’The uncle even produced the letter. We still have it, and, as it happened, the grocer the fellow used to deal with had kept the note telling him to ease off sending supplies. When we compared the two, though, there was no doubt that they had been written by different people. We got the uncle to write a piece for us, and put the handwriting experts on to all three scripts. There was no doubt that all three had been written by different people. We then recorded the fingerprints on the various documents, and also those in the empty cottage. There were the young man’s prints, of course, all over the furniture, and it seemed, from the comparisons we were able to make, that the letter sent to the uncle was genuine and had come from the nephew. There were other prints in the cottage, but none which corresponded to any of the prints on the scrap of paper sent to the grocer or to those made, at our request, by the uncle and aunt. We got no further.’

  ‘Dear me!’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘And what happened to the uncle and aunt? Did they return to London?’

  ‘No. They were given billets in the village of Little Dorsett, and, for all I know, are still there.’

  ‘What is their name?’

  ‘Allwright. William and Caroline Allwright.’

  ‘Had the nephew the same surname?’

  ‘Yes. The uncle was his father’s brother.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  ‘But he used to sign his pictures with the name Toro. Thought they’d sell better under a foreign label, probably.’

  ‘Did they sell well?’

  ‘He made some sort of living. According to the uncle he had inherited very little from his father, but used to manage to keep the wolf from the door. I saw one or two of his pictures in the cottage, but I’ve no idea whether they were any good.’

  ‘Why didn’t the uncle and aunt take over the cottage? Why have gone to another village?’

  ‘The aunt was an invalid. There’s a doctor at Little Dorsett, and they thought she ought to be within easy reach of one. The blitz had upset her nerves and brought on heart attacks, I believe.’

  ‘Where was the nephew’s cottage?’

  ‘A couple of miles outside the village of Easey. Do you know it? The cottage was in a lane off the Salisbury road.’

  ‘A lonely situation?’

  ‘Yes, although it was very near the main road. A group of trees screen it from that side, and the nearest house is half a mile away. Are you thinking he was abducted?’

  ‘I am wondering whether he was murdered,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘I shall be very glad to have the reports of any other disappearances.’

  She recounted to the Chief Constable the strange story she had had from young O’Hara. It was then the Chief Constable’s turn to ask the questions.

  ‘You’ve consulted your son and he thinks we ought to take it up? Well, so do I, but where do we begin? The young fellow couldn’t say for certain that the man was dead, you say?’

  ‘Nor that his companions were not taking him to hospital. On the other hand, the man, if he was not dead, was either badly hurt or was suffering from severe haemorrhage, and, that being the case, it seems strange that neither of the local hospitals was asked to admit him. Besides, it seems likely, from Mr. O’Hara’s account, that the driver of the car simply drove round about the farm.’

  ‘It does seem strange. Yes, that’s right enough. Can your young man describe the fellow whom he helped to carry the sick man to the car?’

 

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