Spotted Hemlock

chapter four

Echoes of Highpepper

‘Little tell-tale!“ said my wife, ”why have you betrayed me? I meant to have surprised your father.“ ’

Ibid.

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That the police would have little difficulty in tracing Mrs Coles (as she had turned out to be) or that, alternately, she would return home or to college when she had recovered from her emotional crisis, turned out to be wishful thinking. During the ensuing days, the police obtained no clue to her whereabouts and Dame Beatrice, with no more to go on and without their facilities for search, gave up the quest and went home. Her theory remained unaltered. The girl had left college voluntarily and did not intend to be found. She would reappear in her own good time, thought Dame Beatrice.

‘I suppose there’s a baby on the way, and, as she’s still got her college course to finish and her finals to come, and as she isn’t supposed to be married, it’s all a bit difficult,’ suggested Laura, Dame Beatrice’s secretary and the wife of Chief Detective-Inspector Robert Gavin of the C.I.D.

‘It is the most likely explanation,’ Dame Beatrice agreed. ‘Miss McKay has volunteered to keep me informed of the march of events, but I don’t see what I can do to help. Why on earth couldn’t the little silly wait to be married until she was clear of the college?’

This rhetorical question went unanswered, and the days passed. Miss McKay wrote at the end of a week to say that the police still had no clue and that she was in correspondence with the missing girl’s relatives, but that (thank goodness!) they showed no signs of wanting to haunt the college. She added that, so far, the business had been kept out of the papers, but she felt that, sooner or later, publication of the fact that Calladale had lost or mislaid a student would have to be resorted to if the girl was to be traced and found.

‘I can’t think why the parents aren’t making more fuss,’ Miss McKay concluded. ‘One would almost suppose that they know where she is and are not concerned. If that is so, I do think they might tell us and set our minds at rest. Meanwhile, college has to go on as usual. I suppose you couldn’t spare time to come back and have another look round?’

Carey Lestrange had his own problems. One of these was the necessity of getting back, as soon as possible, to his own pig-farm. He put the point to Miss McKay, who received it with a plea that he would stay until his predecessor was able to resume duty.

‘Yes, but when is that likely to be?’ Carey asked. Miss McKay could not say, but promised to write and enquire. His second problem was to keep a correct relationship between himself and the more forthcoming of his students.

‘The shameless baggages make unmistakable passes at me, although I’m old enough to be their father,’ he complained to Dame Beatrice, when, in response to Miss McKay’s pleading, she came back to the college. ‘I think I’d better bring Jenny along and show them that I’m admirably suited.’

Jenny, his wife, came, and brought the two children. During the visit it dawned on those students who were showing the children round the estate that, all over the flowerbeds, tender clumps of rhubarb were beginning to thrust up their infant heads. As it happened, the early autumn had been free from frosts and therefore the crowns of rhubarb had not suffered much from the lack of protective straw. It was obvious that, in tidying up after the raid by the destructive band which had let the pigs out near the beginning of term, the students had not discovered a tenth of the rhubarb and dead rats buried by the myrmidons of Preddle and Soames.

When the visitors had gone, driven back to Stanton St John by Carey, a Common Room meeting was called by the head student and volunteers were called for to clear the flower-beds of the alien vegetation. There was no rush to enlist. As one shrinking student, heavily backed by others, put it, the case rested not upon the rhubarb but upon the dead rats.

‘They were dreadful before; they’ll be worse now,’ said the student. ‘I think the college ought to hire a couple of men.’

‘Make Highpepper do it,’ said someone else. ‘They put them there; make them dig them up again.’

There was so much feeling that, in the end, a deputation went to Miss McKay. She was sympathetic, but pointed out that she had no power to demand the presence of Highpepper men on the Calladale estates. She advised the students to put a good face on it and do the necessary work themselves.

This turned the horrid task into what was known at Calladale as a Hostel Pot-Luck. In effect, the various hostels drew lots, the unlucky one to undertake the work. It chanced that Miss Paterson’s hostel drew the short straw, and, true to tradition, tossed up between the senior and junior section of the house, to decide which should be responsible for doing the chore during the Thursday half-holiday.

‘This is the limit!’ groaned one Anne Hopkins to the unlucky group of which she was a member, and which happened to be the seniors of Paterson’s. ‘Tell you what! I vote, when we’ve dug everything up, we let Highpepper have the lot back. We’ll stick it all up against their luxurious garages, the rich, awful pigs! I know where we can leave it during the daytime, close enough to deal with it later. You know where their back gates come down to the old Canborough road? Well, do you remember the stage coach, about fifty yards from the front of the Cloak and Dagger hotel?’

It was generally agreed, afterwards, that if the juniors (i.e. the first year contingent) of Paterson’s had been unlucky enough to lose the toss on this particular occasion, matters might have turned out very differently. It was unlikely that they would have conceived the idea of trying to hoist Highpepper with its own petard and even more unlikely that they would have thought of the stage coach at the Cloak and Dagger as a possible receptacle for the rhubarb crowns. (The carcasses of the rats, it may be stated, were, for reasons of hygiene, incinerated as and when they were found.)

The Cloak and Dagger was patronised by the gentlemen farmers only when there was no time to go into Garchester, but it throve, nevertheless, on such custom as the young men and the local farm-labourers brought to it, and was a pleasant Georgian house with a long, flat front and a pull-in for cars. At either end of this long front there was a considerable piece of grassland, and on that to the left, as one faced the house, there was drawn up the ancient stage-coach to which reference had been made by the tutor of Preddle and Soames.

It had figured in one of the more picturesque Highpepper rags. It had been commandeered, harnessed up, filled with students in late eighteenth-century costume, provided with outriders dressed as highwaymen, and driven into Garchester to collect for the local hospital, an object so worthy that the landlord of the Cloak and Dagger had not had the heart to complain about the unceremonious filching of his property, particularly as the college had almost drunk his cellars dry in celebration of the exploit.

Apart from a regular cleaning up and re-painting once in every five years, the coach was completely neglected in the ordinary way, so that Miss Hopkins’ idea of using it as a cache for the rhubarb crowns until they could be dumped by moonlight in the Highpepper policies was, so far as it went, a sound one.

The knowledge that a rag against the men’s college was impending and that it could be carried into effect as soon as the ground was cleared of rats and rhubarb, lent such goodwill to the work that by three o’clock on the half-holiday, while all the rest of the college was at games or off the premises bent on relaxation or the pursuit of outside interests, the rhubarb was all gathered and stacked and willing hands were putting it into sacks.

A telephone message to the firm in Garchester who supplied motor-coaches for college outings brought a driver to the Calladale gates by four o’clock, and, with his assistance, the bulging sacks were loaded into the boot. Rhubarb and students were then driven to the back gates of Highpepper Hall, where the cargo was unloaded, under the direction of Miss Hopkins and Miss Casey, her second in command, and there was no lack of volunteers to reload it into the derelict stage-coach.

The stage-coach was on the blind side of the inn, so that there was little fear, at that time of day—it was a quarter to five:—of the proceedings being overlooked, and the old road was always very quiet except when the gentlemen-farmers were about. The rhubarb sacks having been stacked by the roadside, the driver was bidden to drive on and to return for the students in half an hour.

As soon as he had gone, the students humped the sacks of sprouting rhubarb crowns from the parking-place of the motor-coach to the strip of grass which bore the stage-coach. Willing and careful hands unlatched the inside door. The creaking hinges gave a note between a moan and a scream which ought to have served as a warning had any of the girls possessed second sight.

On the floor was a heap of rags which gave forth an unusual and suspect odour, but a bold hand plucked the rags forth to make room for the rhubarb. Somebody screamed. There was a general sortie from the vicinity of the stagecoach. One student, less impressionable and possibly more realistic than the others, craned her neck—she had been at the back of the queue—gave a long, incredulous look at the contents of the coach, and exclaimed in shocked, Midlands accents: .

‘Good Lord! It’s poor old Palliser!’