Dead Man's Quarry (36 page)

Yes, a car had passed through the town about an hour ago. Driving faster than it had any business to, even on a clear street. He'd taken its number, a London number. A lady driving? No! This was a large coupe, with two or three people in it and a man driving. No, he hadn't noticed any car driven by a lady pass through the town, and he'd been on his beat since midnight. He was prepared to swear there hadn't been a car with a lady driving, not through the town since midnight. Oh, yes, he was quite sure it was a man driving the coupe. Driving faster than he'd any right to, too. There might have been a lady inside, he couldn't say. A party coming back from a dance, he opined, and a bit above theirselves. They'd feel different if they got summonsed. Nearly run over the kitten, they had.

“But we'll let them off this time,” went on the good-natured constable, “seein' as the road were clear. They were a bit above theirselves, not a doubt. Had the sauce to wave to me as they went by and I stood looking at their number, one of them did. Waved a swell handkerchief, and dropped it, and serve them right, I say, for their sauce. They didn't come back for it, and if they had I'd have asked 'em what they meant, driving at that pace. Fifty miles an hour, if it was ten. Cost a bit o' money, a handkerchief like that, I shouldn't wonder.”

He took from his pocket and with a grin delicately shook out a large striped silk handkerchief. With a gasp Felix snatched it from his hand.

“It's Nora's!”

John also had recognized it as one Nora had been wearing that morning around her neck.

“But what does it mean?” cried Felix, white-faced and puzzled.

“I'm afraid it means that she wanted help,” said John unemotionally. “We must turn quickly and follow. An hour ago, did you say, officer? Which way did they take? Did you see?”

“Road to the right,” answered the constable, looking somewhat surprised. “The Forest road. But they'll be fifty miles away by now, or else tucked up in bed and asleep!”

John thanked him briefly and the little car leapt forward and took the Forest road at a speed that must, after his recent remarks, have struck the policeman as asking for trouble.

He stood in the roadway, mechanically noting the number.

“Well, I'm goshed,” he muttered emotionally, and returned after a minute to his conversation with the kitten.

They passed not a soul along the road until they came to the tiny village of Rodd lying under the Forest hills. It was too much to hope that there would be a friendly policeman here, but John and Felix kept their eyes open for a sign of human life. And just outside the village, lying uncomfortably on the grassy edge of the road by the hedge, near the burnt-out remains of a little fire, were two young men under a rug. One of them raised a weary head from his rucksack pillow as the car approached. Rampson drew up with a jerk.

“Seen a car go by?”

“Pardon?” said the young man, raising his head a little higher and blinking politely in the headlight's glare.

“Have you seen a car go by lately?”

“A car? Well, not very lately. Have we, Bertram?”

Bertram, raising his head from somewhere in the vicinity of the first speaker's feet, shook it gently.

“We've been asleep,” he declared, with the pride of the hardy camper who can sleep through anything, even a night in the open air.

“How lately?” asked John.

The two heads considered the question at exasperating length.

“Hours ago,” said the first speaker at last, and added as an afterthought:“What's the time now?”

“Twenty-past three.”

“Oh, Lord! Is that all? Well, a car went by at ten-past two. It seems hours ago. There hasn't been one since.”

“How do you know?” inquired the head called Bertram curiously.

Because,” said its twin with the bitterness that comes to campers in the early hours of the morning, “I've been bally well awake all night.”

“Oh!
I've
been asleep,” responded Bertram of the superior hardihood, and once more composed himself to slumber.

Rampson drove on. The Forest hills stood all around them now, dark against the paler sky, the long ridges like walls shutting in the road and the long valleys opening and stretching dimly away between wall and wall. There was the gurgle of water running under the road.

“But what can we do?” cried Felix in despair. “Go on? But where? Go up on to the Forest? But what part? It's hopeless to look for Nora here! John! We can't afford to lose a moment! Yet searching the Forest we'll lose hours! Hours!”

“Stop here,” said John to Rampson, and getting out of the car where a track ran up a wild valley he flashed his torch upon the road. There were distinct tyre-marks in the dust where a heavy car had turned off the road on to the rutty track that led, possibly, to some farm sheltering under the hillside in the valley.

“Why,” said Rampson, looking around him. “This is the valley we came to the other day. The waterfall must be up this valley.”

“Yes,” said John, returning to the car. “Follow up this track as far as you can go, Syd, and we'll try the shepherd's hut. It's a chance—our only one. We shan't be able to take the car far. It's an awful road.”

“We can go as far as the other car went, I suppose,” said Rampson, bumping over the ruts and tussocks; and about fifty yards up the track they passed a closed car standing in darkness under a group of trees in the damp held that edged the road. Rampson was about to venture over the uneven field towards it, but John stopped him.

“Leave our car here. We may want it for getting away,” he said, and jumped out.

Rampson stopped the engine and turned off the lights while John and Felix went across the grass to investigate the apparently deserted coupe. It was empty, and there was nothing in it to give a hint of its owner. But returning to where Rampson awaited them on the track, holding the torch to light their feet, John saw and picked up something from among the tufts of coarse grass—a cigarette-card. It had not been there long. It was almost dry, and the grass was wet with the heavy September dew. Somebody had passed this way not long before.

They joined Rampson, and in silence the three of them followed the track to where it turned aside towards a small farmhouse lying under the ridge. A foot-track ran on up the valley beside the shallow, pebble-strewn brook that wanly reflected the sky. They crossed the stream by the plank bridge, leaving the high tinkling of the waterfall and the dark woods on their left, and followed the path where it wound up the opposite ridge among waist-high bracken and scattered boulders. A sheep-bell tinkled near at hand and ghostly, and there was the soft scurry of some disturbed stoat or rabbit running through the bracken in alarm. They came in sight of the shepherd's hut standing against the sky. A blundering moth struck John in the eyes, and he had to bite his lip to repress an exclamation.

A softly spoken word from Rampson brought him to a halt.

“I don't know what you expect to find, John, but I suppose—something dangerous. Don't be rash. Remember we've got no weapons.”

“We ought to have brought old Clino's gun,” said John with a pale grin, and then stood transfixed as Felix gripped his arm and whispered:

“Look!”

A flickering light shone in the little square window of the hut, shone like a warning beacon for a second and went out. The three men looked at one another.

“There's only one thing to be done,” said Felix, white to the lips, but more alert and forceful than John had seen him yet. “It's no good worrying about having no weapons. We're three, after all. We must go straight in and rush the situation—whatever it is. Whatever it is,” he added in a low, brooding voice as they pushed on among the brushing bracken leaves.

But when they approached close to the hut a voice spoke from within and brought them all to a standstill, looking at one another's faces which they could dimly, wanly see now in the cold, grey dawn breaking over the eastern ridges. It was a woman's voice, and to one at least of the men standing there in that cold autumnal dawn it carried on its light, reedy notes broken thoughts of comradeship and gaiety and sunshine.

“Do you think,” asked the clear little scornful voice that floated out through the open doorway of the hut, “that nobody noticed you driving at about a thousand miles an hour through all the towns between here and London? Do you think no obliging policeman took our number? And you think you'll be able to get away with this! You silly ass! I tell you you'll be in handcuffs within a week—within a day!”

A man's deep voice vibrating with anger answered thickly:

“You'll see to that, I suppose!”

“I'm not sure that I shan't, if you don't leave Nora alone,” replied the light voice calmly. “You needn't look at me like that. I'm not in the least afraid of you.”

“Is this what you call loyalty?”

“Yes,” said the calm voice, and there was the scrape and flicker of a match and a pause as though a cigarette were being lit; and then a candle, for the wavering light remained. “I rather like Nora.”

“Pretty!” sneered the masculine voice. “A pretty touch of sentiment!”

“Yes, it is rather touching. You ought to be grateful to me. If I didn't like her I'd have let you do as you liked and go your own way—” There was a pause, and then, very deliberately and thoughtfully: “To the gallows.”

“Stop it, you little devil! I've a good mind to—”

“Wring my neck,” finished the girl's voice. “I know. You've said it so often.”

There was a silence, and then a sound as if somebody were moving restlessly in the cramped space of the hut's interior. When the man spoke again it was in a queer, half threatening, half whining tone that grated horribly on the ears of the three men listening outside.

“I believe you'd give me away for twopence. I don't believe you care a hoot about me.”

“Upon my Sam,” said the girl with a sort of quiet pity in her voice more scornful than laughter, “that's pretty, if you like. Care for you! You'll be asking me next if you're the only man I've ever loved. I care for you as little as you care for me. No! Less! Because I'm not afraid of you, and you are a little afraid of me. I said I wouldn't give you away, and I haven't, but—”

“Very kind of you, wasn't it? Weren't thinking of your own part in that affair, were you?”

“What affair? Oh, that! Pooh! That wouldn't have hurt me much. I was going to say: but I draw the line at murder, really. Really, I do. You'll leave Nora alone.”

“So that she can rush off to the police, eh?”

In the pause that followed John could well imagine the graceful shrug of Isabel's thin shoulders.

“You've had your chance. You should have cleared out while there was time.”

“And died of blood-poisoning.”

“It might have saved you trouble in the end. In any case, I'm not going to give you more than another week to clear out in. Then I shall go to the police myself.”

“I don't think! They'll have an account to settle with you, my dear, as well as me. You'll hold your tongue all right.”

The girl began to speak suddenly with a concentrated passion which took her hearers aback, so different was it from the light, cool manner in which she had spoken before.

“Do you really think I'm going to protect you for ever? Do you really think I'll let that silly old man be brought for trial? Ah, you're a fool! You're a fool! You sicken me, you silly, conceited fool that doesn't know the difference between one person and another and thinks every woman'll lend you her shoulder to whimper on and her brains to save you from what you deserve! Do you think I care
that
what happens to you? Do you think it's for your beauty that I've done all this?”

Suddenly the passionate voice dropped, stopped. When the girl spoke again it was quietly, lightly, as if she were conducting a formal conversation at a tea-party.

“No. It was honour. Thieves' honour, you know. Well, I've warned you. But you're stupid, stupid! Lord! How I hate stupidity!”

There was a silence, as if, in spite of himself, the man had been momentarily cowed by this outburst. Then the woman's voice came again:

“Listen. I'm going to take Nora down to the car. And I'm going to take her home.”

“Home?” echoed the man thickly. “What? To London?”

“No. To her own home near here. Why not? I can tell them some yarn to put them off for the moment, and—”

“And what about me?”

“You can do whatever you bally well choose. I'm sick of nursing you. I told you to leave Nora alone. You wouldn't, and you can take the consequences. Clear out, if you can. I won't give you away for a week.”

“You infernal little—!”

There was danger in the low, thick voice, danger in the pause that followed.

“Good God! It'll be daylight in five minutes! And you think you're going to leave me here, do you, you vixen? I know a better game than that! You're not afraid of me, aren't you? More fool you, if you're not afraid of a desperate man! What does it matter to me how many I swing for, if I've got to swing? But I'll make a good run for it, you bet your bottom dollar, and I shan't leave you and your precious baby-friend to run and tell tales!”

There was the sound of a movement inside the hut. John switched on his torch and prepared for a rush, but Felix was before him. There was a wild, throaty cry, a sharp gasp from Isabel. John, following Felix close, had an instant's vision of Isabel's little white face set as a mask of astonishment, and that of a tall, large-featured man with murder in his eyes. Then the candle which had been standing on the earthen floor was kicked over and John saw the barrel of a revolver gleaming in the man's hand. He switched off his torch and tried to drag Felix from the entrance, where he stood outlined as a target. But Felix seemed to have been turned to stone, as though he had seen Medusa's head. Oblivious of his danger, oblivious of the revolver that pointed at his chest, he stood frozen there in the doorway and kept saying blankly, in a voice from which all expression had been wiped away: