The Dancing Druids

Chapter Twenty-Three

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“ ‘Unlucky wretch that I am!” cried he.—“Not wretch enough yet!”said the sparrow.’

Ibid. (The Dog and the Sparrow)

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So far, so good,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘And I confess, child, that your seemingly artless enquiries have produced better results than I myself could have hoped for, had I gone to the art-dealer again.’

Laura glanced suspiciously at her employer, but Mrs. Bradley’s remarks appeared to be made sincerely.

‘Oh, well, I don’t know,’ she said modestly. ‘Only, it seems to be Toro all right. The remains in that iron box, I mean. Is it true that there isn’t enough left to identify?’

‘The body could be identified,’ said Mrs. Bradley judicially. ‘The question is to find someone able to recognize certain features, notably a fracture near the elbow of the right arm. Such a fracture may have caused permanent stiffness of the arm, and, in this case, I should say, had almost certainly done so, because adhesions had formed.’

‘But that means a motive for the murder!’ cried Laura. ‘Don’t you see? He wasn’t any good to them any more, and so they killed him.’

‘I know that, but I am hoping to find an even more convincing motive, child, and I think I am on the track of it.’

‘Such as?’ asked Laura, eagerly.

‘Such as blackmail,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘The fracture is an old one—possibly several years old. This is only theory, I know, but it seems to me that once Allwright became unemployable as a painter (as you suggest) then the probability is that he blackmailed Cassius and Battle in order to make a living.’

‘Could he do that without the risk of giving himself away?’

‘It is possible. He seems to have been an enterprising man in a dishonest way, and I should say that there is nothing to prove that he realized that he was working with a gang of criminals. He would have argued, I imagine (if the police had been brought in), that he had worked on commission as a copyist, or something of that sort, and was in ignorance of the real nature of the trade in which he was employed. I think a good lawyer would be able to convince a jury about that, too.’

‘One thing,’ said Laura, ‘that has puzzled me a bit. Why did they want another artist when they already had the two Battles? It seems to me that every extra person they took into partnership was another nail in their coffins, if it ever came to the police being brought in. They couldn’t be sure that none of their assistants would confess, if it came to the point.’

‘I think it was a question of providing various styles of painting, child, that’s all.’

‘Ah, yes. Various styles. Of course! It wouldn’t do for all the fakes to look alike. I can quite see that. So they murdered Toro because he was blackmailing them, did they? A lovely lot, aren’t they, him included! I do hope we get them where we want them! I wonder how Mike and Gerry are going to get on with Firman?’

Mrs. Bradley wondered this, too, and her thoughts were not unduly optimistic. She doubted whether Firman had been more than a pawn on the maze-like board of play among Battle, Battle, Allwright and Cassius. Little, she believed, could be learned from him respecting the major operations of the criminals, simply because she did not think he knew enough to be dangerous. The likeliest thing was that Firman had found out from his relatives, the Battles, that there was an easy way of making money if one did occasional simple, slightly shady little jobs and kept one’s mouth shut, and the most that Gascoigne and O’Hara could hope for, in her opinion, was that a truthful account of Firman’s movements on the day of the murder of Allwright would lead the police in the direction of the murderers.

One thing perturbed her, however. As she had foreseen, the police, unable to charge Cassius with any crime for which he could not demand bail, had been compelled to release him. The work of cleaning and recognizing the pictures (if any) which had been stolen, and the even slower task of discovering to whom and when the faked pictures already exported had been sold, and under what conditions, made it impossible to charge the man with any indictable offence, or to hold him until the necessarily lengthy and tiresome enquiries had been concluded. Still, all questions concerning the pictures were now out of Mrs. Bradley’s hands.

Once there was any proof of murder against Cassius, however, a very different aspect presented itself. Cassius could be arrested, cautioned and charged. But there was many a slip, she decided. David Battle and Firman, between them or separately, might be prepared to furnish the evidence that was needed, but the chance that they would do so was a slender one; all the more slender because it was extremely doubtful whether Cassius had had any hand in actual murder at all. It was not even Cassius who had cut the head and hands from the body pinned under the stone. That, almost certainly—but for the conditions of moonless darkness and the feeble glow of the artificial lights used that night, she would have said quite certainly had been the work of the bloody-minded and cruel older Battle.

Meanwhile Cassius was at liberty and might or might not communicate with the older Battle, whose identity, incidentally, still had to be proved, for although O’Hara could swear to the man he had helped at the farm, it was not beyond dispute that this man was David Battle’s supposedly missing father.

Mrs. Bradley had often wondered, since the beginning of the adventure, how Battle had contrived to ‘disappear’ and yet go on living in a district where he must be well known. She had come to the conclusion that he no longer lived in the district, but only visited it secretly from time to time. So far there had been no sign of him except at night, so this might mean that he remained hidden during the day—at Cottam’s, possibly—and only ventured out when there was little chance of meeting anybody who might recognize him. The nine-year cycle thus found some explanation and ceased to be a phenomenon. Battle only came back to the neighbourhood to help dispose of the pictures.

Mrs. Bradley was afraid of Battle ; not on her own account, but on behalf of young Michael O’Hara. Of all their party, O’Hara was the only one who could swear to the man, and, what was more important, who could swear to the man who had advised him before he arrived at the farm. He could also swear to the woman, and, this being so, and as Mrs. Bradley herself could identify her as the woman who had been living in Battle’s old cottage at Newcombe Soulbury, it would not be difficult to make out a case against her as an accessory, particularly as she had also been seen at Cottam’s by Laura Menzies.

Once O’Hara had sworn that Battle was the man whom he had helped at the farm, and had sworn to him as having been concerned with the attempted removal of the iron box (or coffin, as it must now be called, Mrs. Bradley supposed), the police would have little difficulty in building a formidable case. Whether their accusations would include Cassius it was not possible to determine, because, although Cassius had also been concerned in the attempt to remove the iron coffin, he might be in a position to show that he knew nothing of its real contents but had assumed them to be some of the more valuable of the stolen pictures.

Battle’s life, it seemed to the elderly lady, depended upon young O’Hara’s shut mouth; and as there is only one way of permanently shutting a mouth, Mrs. Bradley was more anxious than she liked to confess to Laura, and none the happier in that O’Hara so far had not been threatened or attacked.

When Saturday came Gascoigne and O’Hara had their plans ready. They had been supplied with route-maps of the afternoon’s run, and had studied these diligently. They had also compared them with the Ordnance Map, and had even, on the Friday afternoon, walked over the course.

‘And now all we want is a fair field and no spectators,’ said O’Hara.

‘And to be certain that Firman means to turn up,’ said Gascoigne.

‘He’ll come,’ said O’Hara confidently. ‘He’ll probably be gunning for me, don’t you see, as ardently as I’ll be gunning for him!’

‘Yes, I’d thought of that,’ said Gascoigne, gloomily. ‘It’s the one thing I don’t like at all about this business. Supposing he’s got a revolver?’

‘What, with running togs? Be your age! How could he carry a whacking great revolver on a cross-country run and not have it spotted?’

‘He could kid people he was the starter,’ said Gascoigne, grinning. ‘All right, I won’t play grandmother, but we’ll keep a weather eye lifting until we get him where we want him. I’ve conceived a dislike for the little ferret.’

The headquarters of the small but keen running club to which Gascoigne and O’Hara belonged was just over the Somerset border, but the club had no ground of its own and was dependent upon the local amateur football club (whose secretary happened to be one of the members) for changing-rooms and a field on which to practise.

During the winter, however, the football club’s ground and changing-rooms were not available, and the members who joined in cross-country running had to make the best of things in a small public house called the Horse and Hound which allotted them a sitting-room and a bathroom every Saturday afternoon between September and April.

To the Horse and Hound, therefore, Gascoigne and O’Hara repaired, there to exchange jests with the rest of the runners and to change into dark shorts and white running vests ready for the word to be given which should set them on the track of the mysterious and (they thought) criminal Mr. Firman.

‘He’s turned up all right,’ said O’Hara, as they stood dancing about on the pavement outside the public house waiting for the rest of the field. ‘He didn’t bat an eyelid when I greeted him.’

‘Probably quite a downy bird,’ suggested Gascoigne. ‘Wait until we catch up with him later on.’

They had decided upon the spot where they would contact Firman, and were anxious only that he should reach it.

‘No use making it too close to the start,’ had said Gascoigne; and O’Hara had agreed. The country they were to traverse was distant twenty miles or so from Yeovil, and the runners, changed, and with overcoats over their shorts and vests, made the first part of the journey by train.

It had been agreed between the cousins that they should separate fairly near the beginning of the course, and converge upon the quarry later. O’Hara was to shadow Firman, and Gascoigne, as the better runner, was to forge ahead for the first mile and a half and then gradually fade in again, as it were, towards the meeting-place.

The plan, as Gascoigne saw it, had this disadvantage; that if O’Hara were really a marked man, it was quite likely that the older Battle (who would have heard about the run from Firman) might have decided that the afternoon offered as good a chance as any of ambushing O’Hara and putting him out of the way without troubling Firman with this task.

He mentioned this to his cousin, but O’Hara, with a light-hearted reference to forewarning and forearming, refused to take the matter seriously.

‘Let’s concentrate on Firman,’ said he; and before there was time to say more, the word was given, and the runners cantered off. Gascoigne and O’Hara had no scruples about finishing or not finishing the run, although it was an inter-club match, for it was considered likely that the home team would get the first half-dozen places at least, unless there were unforeseen accidents, for the visitors were a very much younger team consisting for the most part of youngsters of seventeen. In fact, it was as much to put this club on its feet as from any desire to score at their expense, that the good-natured secretary of the home team had put his men into the field.

Gascoigne was a more sensitive and a more imaginative man than his cousin. He disliked intensely the thought that O’Hara, far from being one of the hunters, might as easily be tracked down and murdered; therefore he trotted alongside another member of the team, an old Cambridge Blue who had been a good man in his day, and apprised him, as they cantered over the common which formed the first part of their route, of the course which events had taken.

‘Good Lord!’ said the Cambridge man. ‘What fun!’

Gascoigne then bespoke his assistance, and, soon satisfied that he had a staunch ally, he lengthened his stride and went to the head of the field, and (not too obviously, he hoped) began to run at a pace which was foolishly fast if he had hoped to finish the course. O’Hara tagged on to Firman, and the Cambridge man stuck to O’Hara as he had promised. Firman was not much of a runner, and the trio was slow.

The course was a circular one, with the starting-point on the northern circumference, so that at no time during the run were the competitors at more than about four miles from their base. The route avoided roads as far as possible, and permission had been obtained for the teams to include two private parks in the course, one south and one east of the starting-point. Here and there along the course were friends of the clubs who possessed cars and motor cycles, and acted as guides and checkers-in.

Between the two private estates lay a fairly considerable wood. A long hill led up to it, and on the home side there was a stretch of sand and heather known locally as Punch Dripham. It was uneven, and contained deep hollows not dangerous unless one wandered into them in the dark, but large enough, for the most part, to hide, say, a patrol of Boy Scouts or four or five men, for the lips of these places were overhung with soft soil in which great roots of heather writhed, while in the holes themselves there were wild, labyrinthine bushes of ancient gorse and occasional clumps of bracken.

The rendezvous for Gascoigne and O’Hara was to be in the depths of the wood before they reached Punch Dripham, and Gascoigne, arriving, according to arrangement, well ahead of the rest of the field, plunged in amongst the undergrowth until he was about twenty yards north of the path, and thankfully—for the pace he had set himself had been a hot one—he lay down on the bank of a small brook which flowed through the wood and waited for the signal from his cousin. The last of the checkers-in had greeted him some mile and a quarter further back along the course.

The Cambridge man, Gascoigne hoped, had been able to stick to O’Hara. He glanced at the wristwatch he was wearing, and by which he had been timing himself, and decided that he could take ten minutes’ rest at least before the others arrived.

It was very quiet in the wood. It was so far from any road along which vehicles could pass that its selection as the place in which Firman should be interviewed had seemed obvious. Gascoigne dipped his hand in the brook. It was clear, and rippled pleasantly over sand. Time passed. He looked at his watch and wondered idly why the checker-in had mentioned that people were shooting on the estate. He had not heard a sound of it himself. At the end of a quarter of an hour he felt irritable; at the end of twenty minutes he was anxious.

The trouble was that he did not know what to do. If he left the wood and so missed the others, that would be unfair to them and a breaking of the agreement which had been made. On the other hand, there was always the chance that one of them had met with a mishap. O’Hara had turned his ankle on the previous run; such accidents were always liable to happen. It might even be something more serious ; one of the three spiked on a fence, through trying to vault it and slipping at the take-off, perhaps; or somebody helpless with a broken leg or badly-torn muscles.

Twenty-five minutes; and Gascoigne, in an agony of indecision—a state of mind to which, with his supreme, unegotistical self-confidence, he was entirely unaccustomed— began to walk through the woods to find out whether, by any possible chance, the others had arrived without his knowledge and were in another part of the wood.

The trees gave place, at one point, to a little clearing. He found Firman’s body half into a large clump of very tall, pink willow-herb. He would never have seen it but for the cloud of flies that rose with guilty haste at his approach. He would, even then, have walked on, but he could not help seeing the area of smashed, long stems and the welter of crushed, pink blossoms. The next sight, that of the gaping mouth and one wide-open, horrified, dead, glazed eye, filled him with nightmare horror. There was a hole through Firman’s skull where his other eye had been, and a blackening of powder and a scorching of skin round the wound. Gascoigne had never felt so ill in his life. The fine afternoon surged blackly about him. He turned and staggered away, and then fell down in a near-faint merely from shock.

He had managed to struggle to his feet, and, pulling himself together, was wondering—his heart hammering and his mouth as dry as sand—what he had better do, when a youthful voice from a bush beside him observed on a confident note:

‘You’re dead! It’s a plame we’re gaying.’

Gascoigne jumped a couple of yards. Then out of the bush crawled a boy in the uniform of a Wolf Cub. He was an engaging-looking child with scratched knees, freckles, a green cap, a grey jersey and a broad smile.

‘I bagged him, Chinstrap,’ he observed.

‘Yes, Mr. Handley,’ responded a second voice, as its owner followed the freckled Mr. Handley on to the path. ‘I don’t mind if you did, sir.’

‘Well, it’s a fair cop, Governor Handley,’ observed Gascoigne, collecting his wits. ‘How do, Colonel?’

‘Happy to meet you, sir,’ responded the Colonel. ‘Cow dew, did you say, sir? I’ll try anything.’

‘Well, look here,’ said Gascoigne earnestly, ‘as it happens, I’m rather in a spot.’

‘Lather in a pot? I don’t think I should like it,’ giggled the Colonel, entranced by his own wit. ‘Did you hear that, Mr. Handley? He said “rather in a spot,” and I said “lather in a pot.” Not bad!’

‘Oh, dry up, Chinstrap, and don’t be funny,’ said Mr. Handley, giving the Colonel a dig in the spine which made him wince. ‘Can’t you see he’s serious? Are you training for anything?’ he asked, looking with great interest at Gascoigne’s running-vest with the Club badge on the left breast.

‘No. Just a cross-country run,’ said Gascoigne. ‘But I’m a—a sort of a special constable in my spare time—help the police a bit, you know—and I’m on the track of a criminal and I want to get in touch with them. Where’s the nearest police station? Do you know?’

‘We wouldn’t be Wolf Cubs long if we didn’t,’ said Mr. Handley, giving a realistic howl. ‘Look here, we shall probably go a good deal faster than you, even if you are a runner. We have to keep up a wolf’s pace, you know, which most grown-up people can’t manage. It takes a bit of doing, I can tell you! So perhaps we had better forge ahead and you can follow at your own pace. We’ll leave a spoor. Where do you want the police to meet you? Wouldn’t you like us to help you track the criminal? We’re very good at tracking, you know. I’m the best tracker, and Chinstrap comes-second, and then— ’

‘You silly ass!’ shrieked the Colonel. ‘Of course you’re not the best! Why, only last week— ’

‘Oh, dry up! We’re on a job,’ said Mr. Handley hastily.

‘You’re jolly good chaps,’ said Gascoigne, gratefully. He had been wondering how he could manage to get rid of the two children. It was quite impossible that they could play in the wood for long without discovering the body. ‘All right. You push along, then, but mind how you go. I shouldn’t rush. I wouldn’t have anyone of the Itma team hurt for any money.’

‘Dirt and honey, sir?’ said the irrepressible Chinstrap, smacking himself on the head, or, rather on the cap, with delight, and then ecstatically punching his friend. ‘I don’t think me sister would like it.’

The two little boys then neighed like horses, and began to canter away.

‘What, Crafty Clara?’ came over the air on the boyish, treble notes of Mr. Handley. ‘The woman who— ’ Gascoigne missed the rest of it, and settled down grimly to await the arrival of the others, not certain how long it would be before help came, and speculating upon the length of time the body had been in the wood before he had arrived. He could guess who had killed Firman, but not where the murderer had gone. It was evident, though, that the checker-in had heard the shot, and this would help to fix the time of the death.

At the end of ten minutes he heard the sound he had been awaiting, the call of the cuckoo repeated four times. He came out on to the path by which he had reached the wood, and saw O’Hara alone.

‘We’re too late,’ he said, as soon as his cousin came near. ‘Somebody’s shot poor Firman through the head. I’ve found the body.’

‘We saw him kidnapped,’ said O’Hara. ‘That fellow— Battle, or whoever he is—swooped on him with a car just as we’d got him cut out from the rest of the field. He forced him to get in. We’ve been trying to find out where the car went. That’s why I’m late. Is he really—I suppose you do know that he is dead?’

‘He’s dead all right. He was killed before I got here. I found the body. It’s back there.’ Gascoigne jerked his head. ‘Could you swear to Battle?’

‘Impossible to swear to him. For one thing, he’d got a tin hat on—you know how that alters a chap’s appearance—and he had a handkerchief tied over his mouth and chin. There was nothing to see but his eyes, and I couldn’t have sworn to those, I mean, not at a trial or even to the police.’

‘It wasn’t Cassius, I suppose?’

‘It might have been. I couldn’t say. Nobody could accept my identification, I’m afraid.’

‘What happened, exactly?’

‘Well, it isn’t very easy to describe. He just drove straight up to Firman. I thought he was going to drive into him at first. So did Firman. He jumped a gorse bush and the fellow drove straight on after him. Then he took out a gun, after he had pulled up the car, called on Firman to stop, went up to him, stuck the gun in his ribs, and took him back to the car. Firman got into the car, and away they went.’

‘Where were you when all this happened, then?’

‘About two hundred yards behind; but we were on the other side of a hedge, and I don’t think the fellow saw us. He was in the deuce of a hurry. Neither of us did a thing. I still don’t see what there was to do. The two were in the car, and the car was off, before we could grasp what had happened.’

‘Did Firman seem to know the chap?’

‘Oh, yes, there’s not much doubt he did.’

‘Well, this fellow’s killed him—or somebody has.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve sent someone to fetch the police. I’d better trot back and direct them here. I should think he’s got them by now. By the way, I found a telephone, and rang up Mrs. Bradley. I thought she ought to know about the kidnapping.’

‘We shall have to ring her again.’ said Gascoigne gloomily. ‘We are unlucky. It looks as though Firman knew something really important.’

‘Or else that, whatever he knew, they had reason to think he’d spill it.’