Tender to Danger

Seven

On the map, Cheriton Shawe looked like a small village not far from the Hertford Road. It appeared to be some distance off the coach route, but, short of hiring a car to get there, the Green Line Coach seemed to be the best means of reaching it. The nearest railway station was several miles away.

The coach was comfortable. It made good speed. And the conductor knew all about the way to get to Cheriton Shawe. “Your best route, sir, is by Wyminden Lane. That’s before we come to Waltham Cross.”

London sprawled out over the morning till you might have thought the suburbs reached to Aberdeen. They seemed endless. The road bent, squirmed, curved, shot off at tangents and doubled back on itself; but the coach knew its business. It got there.

“Wyminden Lane,” the conductor called.

Green patches had been a little more frequent among the bricks and mortar. At Wyminden Lane you had the feeling of being on the edge of town. There were houses on one side of the main road, fields on the other; and the lane, wide and newly paved, reached flatly out across the fields.

The coach sped on, leaving its one alighting passenger to a sense of loneliness and dismay. The hope he had had of picking up a taxi was immediately dashed. There was not a vehicle in sight, or any sign of a garage. Possibly he would find something along the lane. If not, it wasn’t far to Cheriton Shawe.

After walking for ten minutes, Andrew decided that the last statement needed some qualification. It wasn’t far to Cheriton Shawe on the map. Doubts began to assail him. The conductor may have put him on the wrong track. Andrew decided to wait and question a pedestrian who was coming along some distance behind him. He waited, but the pedestrian turned off into a bypath that led to an area of glasshouses. He walked on. On one side, there were rows and rows of glasshouses. They had vegetables growing in them and seemed deserted.

At last a car appeared. He signalled, but the driver drove on, ignoring him. Another driver stopped.

“Cheriton Shawe?” he said. “Hop in.”

He was a small man, dried up, gnome like. He drove slowly and grimly.

“What sort of place is Cheriton Shawe?” Andrew asked.

“I don’t like the pub,” the man answered after some thought.

“Know Walden House?”

“Never heard of it.”

He did not seem to care for conversation. When there was some indication that Andrew might ask another question, he reached out and switched on the car radio. An orchestra was playing Till Eulenspiegel. He reached out again and hastily changed the station. A military band grappled with a waltz.

Andrew still heard Till Eulenspiegel. He swivelled to peer through the rear window. Absurd? Of course it was absurd. Especially as the whistler in the night had passed on his way, possibly innocent of any design but to reach his own home. And if you were inclined to argue that the Hallers and the Kretchmanns would be likely to pick up a fragment of Strauss, you had to remember that the trick was also within the scope of the Bert Smiths and the Alf Browns. Any time you turned the knob of a wireless set you might get Till Eulenspiegel. It didn’t mean a thing in itself. To see anything significant in it, you had to be of a very suspicious turn of mind and perhaps a trifle neurotic.

Andrew looked back a second time.

“What’s the matter?” asked the gnome. “Police after you?” “I’m interested in greenhouses.”

“Wouldn’t put my money in glass. It’s too brittle. Here’s your village. Don’t say I didn’t warn you against the pub.”

Andrew used it merely to ask the way to Walden House. First to the left past the church, and you couldn’t miss it; the big place on the rise with the high garden wall.

The wall was very high indeed and had a tiled coping. There were patches where it was mouldering away, but on the whole it was standing up to time and still efficiently obstructing the view of anyone who might be curious about the house and grounds.

Andrew skirted quite fifty yards of wall before he came to an opening. There were heavy brick gateposts. No doubt there had been ornamental gates, but now the only barrier to straying cattle was a length of rusty chain. The left-hand pier had been hit by a steam roller or something of equivalent weight.

The entry showed signs of having been churned into a morass by heavy traffic, but that had been some time ago; it was now grass covered. The drive, defined by deep ruts in neglected gravel, was visible for a few yards. Then it withdrew behind a dank screen of trees and overgrown shrubs. A notice board, newly painted, swung from the chain. It said:

Andrew stepped over the chain and, walking on the gravel between the ruts, started down the drive.

There was nothing round the first bend, only another screen of trees and bushes. Then the wheel ruts got impatient and, leaving the drive to its own graceful meanderings, crashed on through the undergrowth in a straight line. Andrew followed them and came upon a vista that pulled him up sharply. Beyond a wide, tree-dotted expanse of grass that may once have been a lawn stood a house.

It was unquestionably modern. The original idea, perhaps, had been to re-create a small French chateau, but even more lunatic counsels had prevailed and features reminiscent of a Norman castle and trimmings from a Rhenish Schloss had been applied with an apple-cheeked Teutonic exuberance that defied criticism. The whole looked like something from a beer-house frieze. There were corbels and machicolations everywhere. Cone-topped turrets sprouted from the corners. The main entrance had the stark simplicity of one of Ludovic of Bavaria’s nightmares.

The house was not the only startling feature. The grassy area in front of it looked as if it were shared as storage space by a monumental mason and a medieval stonecutter. There were statues everywhere, and shaped building blocks of granite and sandstone. There were sections of fluted columns, bits of broken capitals, cornices and gargoyles strewn about as if Samson had been there brawling with the Philistines. But all this was as nothing compared with the staggering collection of statuary which cluttered the place. Venus rose from the sea of grass in a dozen different attitudes, Hercules flexed his muscles or bent a bow, Atlas stood braced under the weight of the world, Perseus flourished the head of Medusa, while dozens of nonentities looked on with blind-eyed approval.

Andrew found it impossible to believe that one frail girl with red hair could have accomplished all this work. She might be a most prolific sculptor, but she just could not have had the time in her short life. Was it possible, then, that she had acquired all this rubbish in order to study it at home? Then she must be mad, and mad without method. At least there was no detectable system in either the selection or the arrangement of it all. Tarnished metal pieces stood in close companionship with bits of marble, and strewn among them, peeping through trees and peering over bushes, were plaster casts of the more renowned classics. Inevitably the weather had made havoc. Rain had finally penetrated protective paint, sodden limbs had dropped off, weary feet of clay had given way, white bodies had fallen, and weeds had grown up to bury them. Chariot wheels had ground the dust of gods into the mire of Hertfordshire.

Chariot wheels or army truck tyres.

Andrew stepped forward cautiously. The Emperor Augustus stood up under a protecting oak, one arm flung out, looking as portentous and arresting as a traffic policeman. The arm had a sign fixed to it with wire, a piece of wood with faded letters in stencilled characters: to the latrines. An inscription in indelible pencil was easier to decipher:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay

For alien legions — points the urgent way.

A worn path through the trees was still only partially overgrown.

Andrew hastened to the front door and looked for a bell push. A note had been pinned to the wooden spike of a dummy portcullis. It said: Gert, I’ve gone shopping. Hot up the pie and keep out of the studio. It also said, by implication, that there was nobody in, that he would have to wait.

He tried the bell. It rang loudly, and that was all. He walked round the house, examining it in detail. The building was not so large as the perspective view had suggested, but it was still overpoweringly horrible. There were three floors with probably twenty to thirty rooms between them. It had an uninhabited look, but that may have been due to a prevalence of drawn blinds. A few windows on the top floor showed curtains. Perhaps the family was away somewhere. Perhaps Ruth Meriden had come home in advance of them.

A small patch of kitchen garden in the rear showed signs of cultivation, but nobody was at work in it. Andrew returned to the front of the house and browsed among the statues. The indelible pencil had been used quite extensively and not always by the same hand. Beards, moustaches and other adornments had been added to Olympian immortals and Roman heroes. One noble soldier, whose victories were won in the pre-Christian Era, wore upon his toga a badge of more recent design. The drawing, in most cases, was extremely crude; but not nearly as crude as the comments and tags of mural wit that disfigured the flanks and other flattish surfaces of the female divinities.

Andrew wandered back to the house. He was just in time. The girl was approaching by a well-beaten short cut, wheeling a bike festooned with vegetables and paper parcels in string shopping bags. She was wearing a suede windbreaker, blue denim pedal-pushers, and tan sandals. Against the sombre background of fir and oak, her hair was a mop of incandescence.

She gave no sign of having seen him until she was about six feet away. Then she stopped.

“Hello! Looking for me?”

It was exactly the tone she had used at the airport-casual, indifferent, smug. Moreover, he had already opened his mouth to speak first and was thus left standing there gaping for a moment.

“Yes, Miss Meriden.” Something about her called up severity in him. He opened his mouth to speak again.

“Well,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting you till next week.”

This time he really gaped at her. She walked on past him.

“I’ve just got home,” she added over her shoulder. “I’m afraid I haven’t much to show you. Positively nothing of any account. No doubt they warned you. Seen my woman anywhere?”

He stumbled after her.

“No. I-”

“Late again. Come inside. I’ll pop the pie in the oven; then I’ll be with you.”

Inside the hall a stencilled sign on the first door said: Q.M. Stores — Keep Out.

She called back from a bend in the corridor: “Wait upstairs. You’ll find more light.”

He found more tidiness, also. The ground floor was a wreck. The walls looked as if an elephant had been taking kicks at them. One floor board was up. Dry rot in others made walking perilous. But there were none of these hazards upstairs. The flooring was intact, and carpeted. The stencilling, too, was in a better state of preservation. Andrew passed battery office and contemplated officers’ mess for a moment. Memory thus stimulated was a shade depressing, and he found no ease before a door marked battery commander. He recalled one battery commander with septic tonsils. They had managed to get hold of a bottle of gin and…

The corridor was wide, with mullioned windows. It was like a small gallery and there were sculptures at intervals. There were a bust of a woman by Maillot, a girl’s head by Epstein, a small Heracles by Bourdelle, an old man by Rodin. At least, the chiselling strongly suggested these masters, but he rejected the idea that they could be genuine. Copies, of course; student pieces, chipped out for the annual exhibition of the Hertford Society of Arts, and now proudly preserved by the young sculptor. Here it became quite obvious what that critic meant by her eclecticism. There wasn’t an original line in any of the work. The Epstein, for instance, was pure Epstein. The Bourdelle departed from a characteristic devotion to plastic truth only in so far as it betrayed the smugness of the transcriber. The signature of Ruth Meriden was there to read. But it wasn’t bad. Andrew knew enough about this sort of sculpture to realise that it wasn’t bad. And, putting prejudice aside, looking at them fairly objectively, the other things weren’t bad either.

She came up the staircase, observing him quizzically.

“Like the show?” she inquired.

He had to say something, but it really was embarrassing. He was suddenly conscious of a dreadful weakness in some of the work.

“Very good,” he murmured. “Really quite good.”

“Junk!” she said.

He was surprised at this modesty, but also resentful. After all, he had merely tried to be polite. Still…

“I wouldn’t call it junk,” he answered generously. “Some of it has feeling. The head of the archer is very good. Bourdelle himself might have done it.”

“Bourdelle himself did do it,” she retorted. “It’s one of the early sketches for the big bronze in the Luxembourg. Poor old Emile! He never could get away from Rodin. Born fifty years later, he would have been a good sculptor. Let’s go upstairs.”

At that moment he would have liked the stairs to open and engulf him. It eased his embarrassment only a little to realise that she was unaware of what had been in his mind. She led the way to a long low attic with a considerable area of leaking skylight. She smiled as she opened the door. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile, and in that revolutionary moment he made an important discovery. There was nothing smug about her. She had not meant to be rude when she rejected his offer of help at the airport. She had been behaving merely in her normal casual manner. Through his absurd reaction to an imaginary snub, he had formed a wrong impression of her. The reality was that she was more trustful than suspicious. She accepted him now on completely even terms. She seemed to see him as a connoisseur who was interested in her work, and she, the artist, had invited him to view it. The accord was complete, and he hesitated to break it. The misconception, or whatever it was, afforded him an opportunity to study her. He would choose the moment to reveal himself.

The long room was fitted up like a carpenter’s workshop. There were benches with all kinds of vices and wheels. There was a lathe and an electric saw. There were polishing and burnishing devices, and backing the main bench was a long rack of gleaming tools, including handsaws of all kinds.

She said: “I’m really very sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”

“Maclaren,” he answered. “Andrew Maclaren.”

“Maclaren,” she repeated experimentally.

Along the wall opposite the benches and the lathe were a series of round, waist-high pedestals, each surmounted by an unusual object made of a plastic that looked like glass. The objects followed varied geometric patterns. None of them was very large. The tallest could not have measured much more than two feet from base to tip. It was a fragile, pyramidal thing of bisecting planes.

“I’m beginning to remember,” the girl said. “You’re the man the Glasgow critic spoke to me about. I had your name mixed up. I thought it was Macartney.”

He let that pass, making a noise in his throat that he hoped was noncommittal as well as inarticulate. He had no wish to impose on her, but this was definitely not the moment for revelation. She was looking on him as a human being. It was just as if she had removed a pair of sunglasses and he were seeing her eyes for the first time.

“This is the thing I’m working on.” She picked up a large drawing from the bench and held it up for his inspection. It was another of those objects, but here projected in perspective on the two dimensional sheet. It was like a sea shell with a highly complex series of convolutions-except that it was nothing like a sea shell.

“Too intricate,” she commented. “I’ll try to simplify it when I get it under my fingers. There’s a feeling here, I think.” Her tool scarred right hand reached graspingly towards one corner of the drawing, then described arabesques in the air. “Something new. I’m sick of these’ eternal comparisons. I must stand alone. Even the most incompetent critics must be made to see that I do stand alone.”

“They talk such a lot of rot,” Andrew murmured.

“Perhaps it’s because they have to deal with such a lot of rot.” Miss Meriden was grave. She lifted the drawing once more. “What do you see in this?”

He stared helplessly.

She went on. “I believe that this sort of art must create a new language. There may be here something that cannot be put into words, yet the thought is to be read by the sensitive mind. It must be inevitable, invariable, or the art is false. What does it give you?”

From gaping, he gulped. It gave him a complete blank.

“Nothing,” he murmured reluctantly. “Unless you mean it’s a sea-”

He was going to say sea shell, but it suddenly struck him that this would be one of the objectionable comparisons.

Again the imaginary spectacles came from the blue eyes.

“That’s really remarkable,” she said. “Nothingness, then the sea. Primordial. You feel it? This!” She pointed to some of the more excessive convolutions. “Before thought.”

“Yes,” he agreed uneasily. “Before thought.”

She watched him with a gleam of appreciation in her eyes, then led him across the floor to one of the displayed objects. “This is one of the earlier studies,” she told him. “To be disregarded, naturally. But I’d like your ideas.”

It was a primitive form of harp in transparent plastic, if it was anything. On second thought it was three harps stuck together. Either that or a dimpled bottle with the dimples pressed in to a point of dissolution. The harp suggestion was conveyed by a series of white strings that seemed to be imbedded in the plastic. Whatever you might think of it as a construction, the craftsmanship was superb.

Ruth Meriden leaned forward and touched an electric switch. The pedestal began to revolve slowly. Shifting light on the turning surfaces of perspex made enchanting effects. This might not, in the ordinary sense, be sculpture, but Andrew was full of approval. The only thing he regretted was that it had to mean anything. It was acutely embarrassing to be asked to make something out of nothing. It was like expecting a magician to produce a rabbit when the poor man was obviously without his top hat.

“Well?” inquired Miss Meriden, impatient for the rabbit.

He had seen the word “Etude” on a label before the pedestal began to turn. It recalled again the criticism he had read; he fished in memory for a tag from it.

“Music,” he answered her at last. “Scarlatti.”

“No.” The artist was disappointed. “Beethoven,” she insisted. “Definitely Beethoven. Possibly the Waldstein Sonata.”

She revolved the delicate pyramidal effect. Little pagodas turned within pagodas and glancing lights made chandeliers of ice. This time he had it. The Snow Queen’s Palace.

“I call it Shive Dagon,” Ruth Meriden announced. “Just as a joke, of course. It’s really an abstraction. I’ve never been in Burma.”

“I like it,” Andrew asserted. “It has brio.”

She looked at him with new attention, but this had nothing to do with his borrowed comment. She was puzzled. “Did you say your name was Maclaren?” she asked. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that we’ve met somewhere before. It keeps growing on me. Were you at the Edinburgh Festival last year?”

“No.” Andrew shook his head, but inwardly he nodded to himself. This was the moment. “I was on the plane from Athens the other day.” It startled her, he thought. At any rate she was arrested in a movement and turned slightly to stare at him.

“Then you’re not…” She broke off helplessly. Little coruscations from the revolving abstractions cast ripples of light between them.

“Of course,” she said, making up her mind. “You’re the man who spoke to me at the airport in Brussels. You…”

“I thought you needed help with the porter.”

“It was kind of you.” The belated acknowledgement came in a friendly tone. Then a suspicion took the warmth from her voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I had to see you. About Brussels. There was no time to write, so I came out on the chance.”

She looked completely mystified. “Why should you want to”

“To warn you.” It tumbled out as if that had been his sole purpose. “I wanted to reach you before the police.”

“The police! What on earth are you talking about?”

“I was afraid you mightn’t have heard,” he said. “Kusitch is dead.”

“Kusitch?” She frowned impatiently. “Let me get it clearly. Somebody named Kusitch is dead. Is that what you said?”

“Yes. He was taken from the Risler-Moircy. He was murdered. The Brussels police found his body in the Bois de la Cambre.”

“Kusitch?”

“Yes. Shot through the head.”

“And my name is Ruth Meriden? Is that right?”

“Let us be serious, Miss Meriden,” he suggested. “This man was on the plane from Athens to Brussels. He had your address written down in a Green Line Coach Guide. Also he was carrying a review of your show at the Blandish Gallery.”

“This address?” The girl seemed genuinely puzzled. “You mean he was coming here to see me? If he was that interested, why didn’t he speak to me on the plane?” She shrugged helplessly. “I never heard of anyone named Kusitch. Am I supposed to have done so?”

“You may have known him by another name.” “I knew no one on the plane. Did you say he was a Greek?”

“I said he joined the plane at Athens. He was from Yugoslavia, from Dubrovnik. And you’ve just come from Dubrovnik, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have. What about it?” Her voice rose. “What is all this?”

“That’s what I want to find out, Miss Meriden. I came here in the hope that you might be able to tell me.”

She surveyed him coolly. Then she put her hand out and stopped the revolving pagoda.

“What exactly do you want, Mr. Maclaren?” she said curtly.

“Doctor Maclaren,” he corrected her.

The absurdity of the correction was to occur to him later. At that moment it was important that she should find him a responsible person. The word “Doctor” always reassured displaced persons.

It did not reassure Miss Meriden. She looked faintly but not agreeably amused.

“Is that what the police call you?” she inquired.

Andrew stared at her. “The police?”

She nodded. “You must know the kind of thing,” she said sweetly: “’John Smith, alias Andrew Maclaren, alias The Doctor. Poses as medical man or art critic. Works new version of old Spanish prisoner confidence trick using mysterious Yugoslav as bait.’ How much are you after, Dr. Maclaren, and where do I send the money?”

For a moment he stared at her speechlessly. Then he exploded.

“Well, of all the confounded impertinence,” he began.

She turned away contemptuously. “’Blusters when challenged,’” she added. “Have you any proofs of your identity? Of course you must have. False passport and false identity card all complete. Well now, Doctor-or should it be ‘Doc’?-do you get out or do I call the police?”

For a space of about ten seconds he stood there silent. He was shaking with anger now and could feel the blood tingling away from his face. With an effort he brought his voice under control.

“I think you’d better call the police,” he said. She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Aren’t you taking things a little too far, Doc?”

He felt in his pocket. “I’m going to take them a great deal farther, Miss Meriden. As far as I’m concerned you can go to blazes’ and stay there, but you’re going to apologise to me first. Now then..” He put the contents of his breast pocket on the bench. “Passport and identity card, forged of course, but nice pieces of work. Then there’s a document accrediting me to the International Red Cross organisation. Again forged. And there’s this letter appointing me to the staff of the Kingsland Road Eye Hospital. That’s a risky one, of course, because you can easily telephone the hospital and check on it. But the bluff usually works. Take a look, Miss Meriden.”

She was watching him now. His eye met hers. Then she stepped forward and, picking up the papers, glanced through them quickly. He watched her vindictively. When she came to the letter she paused, then went back to the beginning of it and read again.

“Well?” he demanded.

Suddenly she began to laugh.

He stared at her angrily.

She went on laughing. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she gasped, “my dear Dr. Maclaren, I do apologise, but really…” A fresh paroxysm seized her. “I’m truly sorry,” she managed at last, “but you must see how funny it is… ‘Blusters when challenged.’… Oh dear! I am so sorry…”

And then Andrew began to laugh too.

After a bit it was arranged that he should stay to lunch.

Over the pie, which emerged eventually from the oven, he told her the story from the beginning. But when he paused expectantly at the point where the Mary Isabella came into it, she looked blank.

“I still don’t see what all this has to do with me,” she said. “Is the Mary Isabella important?”

“Well, it should be. It’s a yawl-rigged fishing craft and your father bought it in Yugoslavia before the war.”

“My father?”

“Isn’t John Quayle Meriden your father?” She sighed wearily and without replying got up from the table.

“What’s the matter? Isn’t he your father?”

She gripped the back of a chair firmly. “My father,” she said a trifle bitterly, “died when I was five. John Meriden was my uncle and my guardian.”

“Was?”

“He died four months ago. I am his heiress.”

“Oh.”

She flung an arm out dramatically. “You see this house?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Mine. You saw that rubbish in the grounds?”

“It was difficult to miss.”

“Mine.” She sat down again somewhat violently and leaned across the remains of the pie. “Uncle John,” she said venomously, “was what polite people call an eccentric. In fact, he was what the Americans call a jerk. He made his money betting on the Stock Exchange. He was on the lunatic fringe. He bought anything he thought looked like a bargain-anything worthless going cheap. Where near-idiots feared to tread, Uncle John clumped in with both feet. But when any near-idiot would have lost his shirt-if you can follow the metaphors-Uncle John, the full and complete idiot, hit the jackpot. Not once, but four times! He’d have soon lost the lot again, of course, in the ordinary way and serve the old fool right. Unfortunately, he had an honest stockbroker to deal with and this idealist absolutely refused to handle any more of Uncle John’s fancy business. He said it was silly. Either Uncle John put his fancy money in some decent securities or he could take his account elsewhere. In what must have been Uncle John’s last moment of sanity, he agreed. But that was his last moment. From then on he became the world’s number one bargain-hunting nitwit. Anything going cheap he bought. You see this house? A fleabite! There’s stuff all over the world as far as I can see. Bargains! It was snuffboxes one week, anchors the next. A steam yacht, a 1922 Grand Prix racing car… do you know why I went to Yugoslavia?” “I was wondering that.”

“He even bought a palace! A palace! I ask you! That’s why I had to go. There’s the Yugoslav Bureau of Alien Property mixed up in it. I had to go in person to agree to an inventory and sign papers. We’ll end up by owing them money of course. You see, he collected lawsuits as well.”

“What about fishing boats?”

“Wait a minute. I’m trying to think. Zavrana’s the port near this ridiculous palace of his-of mine that is. Uncle John was at Zavrana with the yacht, Moonlight. Moonlight! A silly great tub of a thing that ran away with a fortune. If I wanted a few pounds for schooling, you’d have thought I was asking for the earth. But he spent enough on Moonlight in a week to educate an army. There wouldn’t have been a penny left if the Admiralty hadn’t requisitioned her during the war. Luckily she was sunk, so it may not be so bad in the end. Uncle John wouldn’t settle for the compensation they offered, but I shall. At least I think so. Nobody knows yet whether the estate’s bankrupt or solvent.”

“Isn’t there anyone who can help you?”

“There’s Aunt Clara in Brussels.”

“Is that the one who met you at the airport?”

“Yes, but she’s nearly as dotty as Uncle John.”

“What about Mary Isabella?”

“Oh yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to run on so. I’ve been thinking. There was something about a boat. The Yugoslavs wanted to know if Uncle John had taken it to England with Moonlight.”

“And did he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps he did. Kusitch must have thought it was here if he’d come all the way here to look for it.”

“But how do you know he was looking for it?” she asked.

“I’m guessing. Did your uncle never mention the boat at any time?”

She sighed. “He mentioned so many things. There might be a note about it in one of his diaries.” “Diaries?”

It seemed that, characteristically, Uncle John had been an inveterate diarist. For years he had made it a habit to write down all the dullest happenings in his life from day to day. If he had ever heard of the craft again, he would surely have recorded the fact. The difficulty would be to comb through the books. There were quite a number of them.

“They’re in the Battery Office downstairs,” Ruth Meriden explained. “The gunners left some useful shelving. Shall we go down?”

The room was small and overcrowded. A pine folding table of a stark military pattern was straining under the weight of ceramics and more statuary. Great jars that looked like stage properties for the Forty Thieves stood on the floor, and there were a few broken chairs to complete the junk-shop effect. The shelving climbed all the way up one wall and it was piled with a varied collection of books in heavy bindings. Stacked against the other walls, or leaning here and there in solitary state, were great oil paintings in monstrous gilt frames. A portly figure in mayoral fur and chains of office stared challengingly across at another portly figure in a navy blue jacket and white yachting cap.

“Uncle John,” Ruth Meriden explained.

“Both of them?”

“Both of them.”

The man had a terrifying jauntiness, and an equally terrifying complacency. The twinkle in the eye and the cocksureness of the carriage told you that life must have been lots of fun for John Quayle Meriden, though the obstinate mouth and the idiot-blue eyes might make you doubt whether it had been quite so funny for the people who had had to deal with him. You could be sure, anyway, that he had exacted some devotion to his interests. He looked very well fed and cared for. Someone had polished up that chain of office till it shone. Someone had pressed those nautical slacks till they were fit for the commodore of any fleet. He was king baby with a teething ring suspended from his neck. He was mother’s little sailor boy just before he was sick over his nice new uniform. He was egotism incarnate. He had been, as Miss Meriden had indicated, a jerk.

The diaries were readily distinguishable from the rest of the books. They were of a quarto shape issued annually by a firm of stationers, and quite uniform except for slight variations in binding style over the years. They stood together neatly and in chronological order. They went back to 1912, and reached forward to the current year.

It was a formidable collection, but Andrew could console himself with the thought that he would not have to go back beyond the start of the war in 1939 for possible references to the yawl.

“I haven’t much spare time just now, but I’ll help you as much as I can,” Ruth Meriden said. “It’s going to be quite a job, isn’t it? You’d better take some of the books back to town with you.”

This trustfulness, this confidence in him, was an agreeable development, but he had to admit it was offset by the hint that, now that the joke was over, he had better hurry about his business and leave her to her work. He made a pile of diaries, and she found a piece of string for him.

“If the police call on you,” he said, “there’ll be no need to tell them about the yawl. Unless they ask you specifically about the registration number.”

“Why should we hold anything back?” she demanded.

He had no wish to discuss his motive, his disgust with Jordaens and his determination to teach the fellow a lesson.

“We ought to find out the meaning of the yawl,” he asserted; “try to discover why Kusitch was so interested.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “We might get some information from Captain Braithwaite. He used to be skipper of Moonlight. He lives at Thames Ditton these days.”

He rose to it eagerly. “Is he on the phone?”

“Yes, but I’m not. I had it cut off.” She smiled enchantingly. “So you see I couldn’t really have called the police. I’ll come down to the village with you on your way home. We’ll call him from the post office.”

Here was another hint that she was bustling him off, but he had no cause for complaint. She was being helpful. She also jotted down his address and telephone number, in case she needed it. She looked at her watch. She knew the coach times by heart. He would be able to catch the three-sixteen. That would allow ample time for everything, if they started fairly soon. She walked him rapidly to the post office, got Captain Braithwaite on the telephone, then handed over the instrument. “You talk to him,” she said.

The Skipper remembered the yawl quite clearly, and what he had to say confirmed the final details of Charley Botten’s story. John Meriden had wanted the craft for use as a tender, but it had never been brought into commission. It had been drawn up on a slip at Zavrana and was undergoing repairs when John Meriden bought it. The repairs were still under way when the war broke out, and John Meriden had sailed away hastily in the Moonlight, abandoning the newly bought tender.

“Most likely the Italians grabbed it when they overran the coast,” Captain Braithwaite said. “If so, they probably beat the insides out of it. In any case, it would cost more than it’s worth to recover it. You tell Miss Meriden she’d better write it off. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t at the bottom of the Adriatic.”

“You don’t think Mr. Meriden brought it back to England?”

“I’d be amazed if he did. Anyway, I wouldn’t know. We had a quarrel on that voyage home, and I left him to do a job of work for the Navy. I never spoke to him again. I never wanted to. What are you, a lawyer of his?”

“No. A friend of Miss Meriden’s. If her uncle had recovered the yawl, have you any idea where he would have moored it?”

“Son, you take a map and stick a pin in it. Left to that fellow, it might be among the houseboats of Srinagar or in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Tell Miss Meriden not to bother about it. It wouldn’t be worth a Chinese dollar today. Ask her to speak to me.”

Her contribution to the conversation seemed to be mainly laughter. He watched her face through the glass side of the booth. Most people looked quite ugly when they laughed. Oddly enough, she didn’t.

“Not much help from the old boy,” she commented when she emerged. “Perhaps we should take his advice and forget about the yawl.”

Andrew shook his head. “We’ll forget about it when we know it’s at the bottom of the sea.”

“You must be a good doctor,” she said. “You never give up.”

She walked a little way with him. She asked about his work, and they talked of Greece. The trip to Yugoslavia, she said, had offered her the opportunity to see Greece, otherwise she would have stayed at home.

They parted at the turn into Wyminden Lane, and now she impressed on him that he must hurry. He hurried. He looked back and saw her going down the road to Cheriton Shawe. When he looked back a second time she had disappeared. A sudden discontent seized him; but it was a sweet discontent. He hurried.

On the coach to London, he opened one of the diaries and began to read:

Resigned from board of P.H. amp; D.B.- Gave C.H. a piece of my mind.- Not satisfied with Ruth’s school report; money not justified. Fear she is complete blockhead.

He did not go on with the reading. His mind was full of the blockhead. He saw her as he had seen her going back to Cheriton Shawe with the sun in her hair. The image was still with him when he reached home and opened the door of his borrowed flat. It was several seconds before he realised the change in the place. Then his heart gave a bump and he stubbed the toe of one shoe against the rug as he moved forward into the room.

Papers were strewn on the floor, desk drawers turned out, cupboards ransacked. There was the same state of disorder in the bedroom.

As the first sense of shock subsided, he began to think. There had been nothing here, nothing that any sane burglar would want, nothing of any conceivable consequence except the notes Charley Botten had made about the yawl.

He felt hastily in his pockets. Then he remembered that he had tucked the slip of paper away in a pocket. Jacket? No. He had been wearing his dressing gown.

The garment had been cast down on the floor by the intruder. Andrew picked it up and searched in the pockets. The slip of paper had gone.