Let Him Lie (29 page)

“I feel just the same, Peter. One can't paint in the country, anyhow. There are too many distractions. I'm going back to London to look for a studio.”

“And I'm going back to look for a job, then. When shall we go?”

“As soon as all these inquests are over. Oh Peter, do you realise there are going to be
three
inquests?”

“I do.”

They walked up the sloping, rabbit-mined side of the great tumulus. The chill sun of an October afternoon shone red upon the boles of the tall pines, and below in the fields to the south mists were rising as once they had risen over the swampy forests when the tumulus was first raised.

“But no inquest on Mr. Grim,” said Peter. “Mr. Grim lies undisturbed.”

“Let him lie. I sympathise with Mr. Fone. I used not to, but I do now. There's been too much death and digging and inquests. The thought of digging up Mr. Grim makes me feel quite—quite—”

“It may sound egotistic,” said Peter, smiling, “but it makes
me
feel very glad that we're alive.”

Jeanie considered a moment.

“Yes, that's what I really meant, Peter. Let's leave Mr. Grim's bones to Mr. Grim, and think about studios, and jobs, and London, and being alive.”

THE END

Ianthe Jerrold was born in 1898, the daughter of the well-known author and journalist Walter Jerrold, and granddaughter of the Victorian playwright Douglas Jerrold. She was the eldest of five sisters.

She published her first book, a work of verse, at the age of fifteen. This was the start of a long and prolific writing career characterized by numerous stylistic shifts. In 1929 she published the first of two classic and influential whodunits.
The Studio Crime
gained her immediate acceptance into the recently-formed but highly prestigious Detection Club, and was followed a year later by
Dead Man's Quarry
.

Ianthe Jerrold subsequently moved on from pure whodunits to write novels ranging from romantic fiction to psychological thrillers. She continued writing and publishing her fiction into the 1970's. She died in 1977, twelve years after her husband George Menges. Their Elizabethan farmhouse Cwmmau was left to the National Trust.

The Studio Crime

Dead Man's Quarry

There May Be Danger

Amid the danger of World War Two's London, Kate Mayhew is returning from another hopeless round of the theatrical agents. She is about to take a job in munitions when a poster about a missing child prompts her to help the war effort in a very different way. Obsessed with finding out what has happened to young Sidney Brentwood, Kate journeys to rural Wales where the boy was last seen.

Aided by land-girl Aminta and the dashing young archaeologist Colin Kemp, Kate stumbles upon clandestine activities unknown to the War Office. The mystery of Sidney's disappearance is the key to a plot that may vitally endanger the security of Great Britain itself. Kate must both solve the conundrum, and act before it's too late.

There May Be Danger
was first published in 1948, and was the last mystery novel by Ianthe Jerrold. This edition features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

On a sunny October morning, the stucco-fronted houses of London are a symphony in off-white tones, the brick cliff-sides of the new blocks of flats discover charming shades of pink and apricot, and even in the smoke-grimed brick of mid-Victorian warehouses, the yellow under the encrusted black responds to the long soft rays of the low sun.

Even the Edgware Road, on such a day, looks charming.

Even Kate Mayhew, though she was out of a job and saw but small hope of getting into another one, felt the powerful charm of the autumn sun as she left her bus at the corner of Chapel Street and strolled along towards Maida Vale. The sky was blue, and almost cloudless. True, an arabesque pattern of thin white vapour trails hung, slowly dispersing, over the Metropolitan Music Hall. But this was not caused by a disturbance in the weather, but by a recent encounter high in the heavens between eight Dornier bombers and seven Spitfires.

Kate was returning, for the second time this week, from a hopeless round of the theatrical agents. Business in her suburban theatre had been pretty poor since the beginning of the war. And when the first bombs dropped on London, and the West-end theatre rocked to its financial foundations, even a little theatre in a northern suburb had felt the jar. There had been a great rushing about and making of adjustments, but it did not help matters for long. The West-end theatre shut down. And a few weeks later, after a brave struggle by a company which had waived first its salaries in favour of shares, and then its meals in favour of cups of coffee, the Northern Heights Repertory Theatre also closed its doors.

Kate had not at first been able to believe that the receding tide of theatre-going might well have swept stage-management out of her reach, until, some day, the tide came in again. But she believed it now. For the last month she had been trying to find herself a job, and it had been a grim business. She had determined, if she failed this morning to get on the track of a job, to abandon the vain struggle and wait for the tide to come in again.

What she would do instead, she was not yet quite sure. She had a friend, Aminta Hughes, working on a farm in Radnorshire, who was continually writing and exhorting her to join the Women's Land Army. There was, in fact, a letter from Aminta in Kate's handbag now, all about the threshing of oats, a cow with a sore udder, sunrise over the mountains, and foot-and-mouth disease. Skimming it over her toast and apple at breakfast, Kate had practically decided to go in for munitions.

She paused outside a modest café to reflect on her situation, and to consider whether she would have a sandwich first and go to the Labour Exchange afterwards, or the other way round, when a handbill pasted to the window of the small modiste's shop next door caught her eye. “PLEASE HELP! PLEASE HELP!” Below these words, which were in inch-high letters and stood out with a quite painful urgency at the top of the folio sheet, was the photograph of a boy.

“Missing,” ran the smaller letterpress below, “since October 1st, from his billet in Hastry, Radnorshire, Sidney Brentwood, aged 12½, height five feet four inches, well-built, fair hair, blue eyes, fresh complexion. Wearing grey flannel shorts, brown corduroy wind-sheeter, green stockings and brown shoes. It is thought he may be trying to make his way to London. Anybody who is able to give any information, or to help IN ANY WAY to trace this boy, PLEASE communicate immediately with his aunt, Miss Brentwood, at 105 Tranchester Terrace, W.2.”

“October the 1st!” thought Kate mournfully, studying the photograph. “Nearly three weeks ago! Some hopes, poor kid!”

She looked carefully at the boy's photograph, with the usual remote hope that she might recognise him as someone she had seen. It was a round, candid face, still infantile in shape, with eyes wider apart than they would appear later after the full development of the jaw, a good broad forehead, hair tending to curl, short, straight nose and easily smiling mouth. It was the face of a nice, candid, not very clever, adventurous boy, decided Kate. Whether he ever returned to his aunt or not, Kate hoped very much that his adventurous spirit had caused his disappearance, and not some miserable accident. Poor aunt, responsible for the boy, and now helpless, distracted, dependent upon the machine-like, slow, impersonal help of the police. She wondered whether he had been happy, or unhappy, in his billet in far-off Hastry, Radnorshire. Queer that it should be Radnorshire, where Aminta dwelt among the sunsets and udders. Perhaps Aminta knew Hastry?

Kate started to move on, but those urgent, touching words seemed to follow her, draw her back. Please Help! Please help! But how can one help? One could go and look for the child, I suppose... but the police will have been looking for him for three weeks.

A member of this force happened to pass at this moment, and on an impulse Kate asked him:

“Can you tell me where Tranchester Terrace is?”

“Tranchester Terrace?” He paused and cast about, for he was a reserve policeman, new to the beat, and not as yet an encyclopaedia of West London streets. “I think it runs between Westbourne Grove and Talbot Road—Notting Hill way. I should take a bus down Praed Street if I were you, and get out at Bradley's.”

Above the sound of traffic stole a thin eerie streak of sound, mournful, uncertain, high-pitched, slowly gathering certainty and volume as new streaks of the same sound joined in from all round the sky over London.

“All clear,” remarked the policeman cheerfully, moving his gas-mask, which he had been wearing as a chest-protector, round to his back.

“Oh, was the warning still on?” said Kate, as was said by many at one time and another that morning, for it was one of those mild, blue autumn days of 1940 when the warbling and the sustained notes of the air-raid sirens were heard so frequently and at such short intervals that people going in and out of buses and shops and about their business in the streets were often surprised to hear a sustained note when they did not know there had been a warble, and a warble when they were happily anticipating a sustained note.

Kate walked back, and soon found herself in Praed Street waiting for a bus. She had all the day before her, and she might as well go and look at Tranchester Terrace. Of course, she wasn't going to do more than just look at it. She might write and ask Aminta if Hastry was anywhere near her place, and whether she had heard about the disappearance of a boy billeted there. If she knew Hastry, Aminta might even know the people the boy had been billeted on. How terrible, to be responsible for someone else's child, and to lose him, to have to write to his parents and say, your child is lost! Sidney Brentwood seemed to have no parents, though, only an aunt. Please Help! Please Help!

The bus swung round a diversion into Norfolk Square, for a bomb which had fallen at the entrance to a little barber's shop opposite the Great Western Hotel had made empty shells of many little shops, piled the roadway with heaps of masonry, and turned that end of Praed Street into a one-way traffic alley.

Your Children Are Safer in the Country! ran an L.C.C. poster on one of the hoardings Kate's bus passed in its cautious journey into unfamiliar streets. All except Sidney Brentwood. What had happened to Sidney Brentwood? I shall probably never know, said Kate to herself philosophically. But not so philosophically as she intended, for almost in the moment of formulating the words, her vague stirrings of curiosity in pity crystallised into a firm determination to find out.