Frequent Hearses (22 page)

For an instant it flared up brightly. And Judy’s heart sickened at what, in its brief and wavering illumination, she saw.

She was not out of the Maze at all. On the contrary, she was in the clearing at its centre. And a short distance in front of her was the tomb…

Only it wasn’t a tomb. It was a grave, a humped mound with a decaying headstone askew at one end. And something that might or might not have been human was crawling across that mound.

The flame went out.

So then Judy did scream.

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, was restless that Tuesday afternoon. Term was over: for the vacation he had no specific plans, and he felt—which was uncommon in him—very much at a loss for something to do. Moreover, he could not disguise from himself the fact that his criminological amusements were beginning to display the ominous characteristics of an addiction, or at the very least of a settled habit, and in consequence of this he fretted at being kept out of touch with the Crane case by Humbleby’s deplorable uncommunicativeness. Sherlock Holmes, when circumstances omitted to supply pabulum for his febrile intellect, had soothed himself with doses of cocaine, but the Dangerous Drugs Act had put a stop to all that sort of thing, and such lawful alternatives as remained—alcohol, for instance—would be only very doubtfully efficacious. It was not—said Fen, addressing himself to the impassive quadrangle outside his first-floor rooms at St. Christopher’s—it was not that he had any ideas about the Crane case, as things stood; it was simply that he feared Humbleby might have overlooked some clue germane to its solution. And although he knew that the C.I.D. are not fools, and that this was therefore very unlikely, such considerations failed to soothe him. Mistrust of experts, in spite of all that the apologists for technocracy can advance against it, is deeply rooted in the English character, and Fen, whose habit of mind was not cosmopolitan, shared in it abundantly.

His restlessness was accentuated by Judy’s report on the tampering with Nicholas Crane’s Bentley, and its odd sequel. A scrupulous murderer, Fen thought—scrupulous, anyway, where the lives of those he considered innocent were concerned; and that attitude might prove to have its importance… But more facts were needed, more
facts.
A dozen times Fen had examined and analysed the data he already possessed, and he was convinced, by now, that no enlightenment whatever was to be derived from them; but somewhere or other the significant, the vital, indication must be awaiting discovery. Fen had no faith in the absolute dogma that such ciphers as man can create man can also solve, since he was aware that the history of crime exhibits a number of instances to the contrary; but he did believe that in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases mysteries are susceptible of explanation, and that this was the hundredth case he was not at all prepared to assume. So he prowled and pondered and grew peevish, and the afternoon waned into early evening, and still there was no news from Humbleby.

At seven-thirty Fen decided to take the initiative, and telephoned to Scotland Yard. But Humbleby was not there, and they either did not know, or else from policy refused to say, where he might be found. Fen’s irritation increased, and he rang up Lanthorn House. Eleanor Crane, who, answered, was civil and appeared to recognise his name, but no, she said, Inspector Humbleby had not been there since the previous evening, and he had not said when, if at all, he proposed returning.

“Ah,” said Fen. “Well, thanks very much, Mrs. Crane. I thought it just possible that he might be with you. I hope I didn’t interrupt your dinner.”

“Not at all. David’s guest”—the husky voice was ever so slightly sardonic—“David’s guest hasn’t turned up yet, so we’re keeping dinner back.”

A little cloud of obscure foreboding—for the moment no larger, certainly, than a man’s hand—took shape at the back of Fen’s mind.

“I suppose,” he said, “that that would be Miss Flecker.”

“Yes. I didn’t realise you knew her. To judge from my son’s not over-subtle allusions, I’m afraid he may have been pestering her rather.”

“Is she very late, may I ask?”

“It seems that she said she would be here by seven definitely. I hope she hasn’t had an accident. But we’re rather out of the way here, so it may just be that she’s not able to find us. She hasn’t been here before.”

“Just so. Thank you again, then.” Fen said good-bye and rang off.

An accident…But in forty minutes’ lateness there was no reasonable ground for misgiving, and Fen had no cause for thinking that Judy stood in any danger from the unknown X—the more so since X had apparently gone to such trouble and risk to prevent David from driving home, and probably smashing himself up, in Nicholas Crane’s car. None the less, Fen found that he was oddly perturbed, and after a short interval of vague and futile worrying he telephoned the Long Fulton Music Department. He had not much hope that at this time of day anyone would be there, but it happened that Johnny, who was currently engaged in the composition of an immense and vacuous symphony, had decided that the Music Department was a convenient, quiet and sympathetic place in which to score this opus during the evenings, and he was consequently available and able to give Fen the information required. Yes, he said, Miss Flecker had left for Aylesbury, in Mr. Griswold’s car, shortly after six.

And that being so, Fen reflected as he rang off, she ought certainly to have arrived there by seven; the distance between the two places was not great. But no doubt Eleanor Crane’s explanation was the true one: she had simply lost her way… Fen confabulated with his soul and discovered that his indistinct anxiety on Judy’s behalf derived in the long run from nothing more subtle and altruistic than the desire to
do
something. It was largely a sham, a pretext—all else having failed—for purposive action of some sort. That fact elicited, he felt a good deal easier in his mind. Judy had probably arrived at Lanthorn House by now, but there was no reason why he should not drive over there and make sure of it, and the excursion would keep him occupied for a while. Having dressed himself for rain, he left his rooms and went out to his car.

It was a small red sports model, exceptionally strident and dissolute-looking, which he had purchased from a cashiered, impoverished undergraduate years before. A chromium nude leaned forward from the radiator cap, and the name
LILY CHRISTINE
was engrossed in large white letters across the bonnet. A leaky hood shielded the car’s seating rather perfunctorily from the elements. Fen ascertained that he had enough petrol for the eighteen- or twenty-mile journey and noisily set forth.

It was completely dark, and raining hard, when at a quarter to nine he drove in through the Lanthorn House gates; and he came upon the body of Nicholas Crane so suddenly that only the gleam of the knife’s haft in the headlights prevented him from running over it. He stopped the car, climbed out, and made a brief, melancholy examination. “Poor devil,” he muttered. “But I don’t suppose he had time to be much afraid.” To judge from the flaccidity of the limbs, death was still only somatic—which meant that it had probably not occurred earlier than four hours ago; but it was not possible, he thought, to make a more definite estimate than that. He took a torch from the car and by casting about discovered with its aid a crumpled, muddy handkerchief lying near-by, with the initials J.A.F. embroidered on it. And at that his anxiety was abruptly renewed. From what he knew of Judy he thought it very unlikely that she had killed Nicholas Crane, but it looked as if some time this evening she had been on the spot, and if by any chance she had witnessed what happened… Fen’s investigation of the area became notably swifter and more purposeful as soon as this possibility occurred to him.

And it did not take him long to find what he was looking for; Judy’s reckless pursuit was imprinted in mud as plainly as any zealot for footprints could desire. The small, sharp impression of the shoes were superimposed on the impressions made by the person she had followed—and that showed that at any rate she had not gone with him under duress. But there was more: both persons had been running fast, since the impression of the heel was consistently deeper than the impression made by the ball of the foot and the anterior edge of the sole was in every case prominently etched. And since
Judy
had been running, she had been tracking the other person not by his footprints—to follow footprints in tangled undergrowth while continuously running fast is an impossibility—but by his actual presence; in other words, she must have been chasing him close behind. More yet: by comparing the amount of water which had collected in the footprints with the amount which had collected in the natural hollows of the ground, it was feasible to make a rough guess at how long ago the chase had taken place; not more than an hour previously, Fen estimated, and probably rather less…

These observations occupied him for scarcely more than half a minute, and they left him seriously alarmed; much as he admired the girl’s courage, he could scarcely commend her wisdom, and what the issue of the chase might have been he did not at all care to imagine. He began to follow the tracks, taking care not to tread in them and moving as rapidly as he could. And until he came out of the trees and bushes on to an open slope, he made good progress. Here, however, he was obliged to pause uncertainly, swinging his torch this way and that, for at this higher level the turf was springy and porous, and in spite of the rain one’s steps, as an experiment speedily proved, left no marks on it. Without much optimism Fen walked slowly upwards; at this stage the only thing he could do was to look about at random. And presently he came to the terrace of flat ground where Judy had tripped and fallen, and where he was able to make out the scanty, ground-level remains of a dismantled or ruined house. He paused irresolutely, listening, but apart from the steady hiss of the rain the silence seemed absolute. A moment later, however, his eye was caught by a dull metallic gleam in the torch-light, and he stopped to pick up a small automatic pistol from which, as the contents of its clip demonstrated, a single shot had been fired. Though admittedly equivocal, it was not, he felt, a very reassuring discovery, except in so far as it indicated that he was still on the right track; and there remained the problem of what direction he should take now. For a few minutes he walked in continually widening circles centred on the spot where he had come on the gun, but without finding any trace that would help him. And he was just setting off in the upward direction, on the not specially cogent but unimprovable grounds that this would be a direct continuation of the line that Judy and her quarry had taken thus far, when he heard the scream.

It was not a loud scream, or a long one, but it was enough to indicate the way he must go, and a few moments hard running through ruin and darkness brought him to the Maze. With the help of his torch he was able to make out immediately what it was—the more immediately in that he already knew that such a place existed in the Lanthorn House grounds; but for all that, his fears for Judy’s safety were so intense that he needed the exercise of all his will-power to restrain him from the idiotic course of plunging heedlessly in. He must go in, of course: here the footsteps were visible again, and like the spoor of the animals in Aesop’s fable they pointed exclusively inwards—they did not emerge again. Other ways of egress were a possibility, but he would have to accept the likeliest hypothesis, that Judy was still in the Maze, and hope that it turned out to be correct. Should he call out? If he did so, it might have the effect of scaring Judy’s assailant away from her (supposing that she was being attacked, which at the time seemed probable), but on the other hand it might conceivably provoke him to an even greater ruthlessness. Fen decided against it. Stealth and surprise were useful weapons; if the intention was to kill Judy his bawling would hardly impede it, and if that intention were absent he would simply be giving the enemy warning of his presence, a needless handicap. So he kept silent—and in the meantime the thing to do was to devise some means of marking his route into the Maze so that when the need arose he might readily get out of it again.

All this takes long to tell, and, moreover, savours of cold-blooded calculation in the face of another person’s peril. But in fact it occupied only a few seconds’ thought, and even that necessary delay Fen bitterly grudged. Then, blessedly, he remembered something. In the pocket of his raincoat was a huge ball of thin string, bought the previous day, and that, plainly, was exactly what he wanted. He tied one end of it rapidly to a sapling which grew just outside the Maze’s entrance and then, unrolling the ball as he went, strode forward into the warren of damp, rank, weed-cluttered alleys. The string would almost certainly not last out to the Mazes centre, but it would be useful as far as it went. He was in two minds as to whether to keep his torch alight or not. It would infallibly mark out his progress, but that would help the girl as well as the murderer, and in the end he elected to keep it on. In an affair like this, he reflected grimly, there arrived fairly early on a point at which reasoning became valueless and one simply had to trust to luck.

Fen was well-read in the more interesting by-ways of human activity, and he knew a certain amount about labyrinths—knew, for instance, that their basic plan is always very simple and that in almost every case their centre can be reached by the application of some brief, straightforward formula. He was not, accordingly, so much at a loss as a less-informed person would have been, and his preliminary explorations were of a methodical sort, aimed at eliminating the more palpable blind alleys and false trails. Unreeling his string, and rewinding it whenever a cul-de-sac obliged him to go back on his tracks, he fairly quickly whittled the possible routes down to two, and on noting that one of them involved a symmetrical plan—first right, second left, first right, second left—-while the other did not, followed it unhesitatingly. By choosing his turns according to this prescription he would probably be working towards the perimeter of the Maze, which his initial survey had told him was rectangular; at some point, therefore, he would have to vary the formula—or, more accurately, deduce for it a second part—so as to be able to move back towards the centre. And since mazes arc essentially no more than large-scale toys, it was tolerably obvious that the second part of the formula would be significantly related to the first-—second right followed by first left, for instance, as against first right followed by second left. The devisers of such places, having thoroughly bewildered their victims, had liked to be able to point out how extremely simple it was once you knew. And although Fen was aware of the grave warning against over-confidence contained in the adventures of Mr. Jerome’s Harris at Hampton Court, he did not believe that this particular maze would turn out to be any exception to the overall rule.