The Dancing Druids

Chapter Fifteen

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‘… where they say the great Emperor Frederick Barbarossa still holds his court among the caverns.’

Ibid. (Peter the Goatherd)

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Mrs. Bradley, as always, was as good as her word. By nine o’clock in the morning she and her host of extras were in full swing. The stone circle presented a lively spectacle and was, as the now refreshed Laura expressed it, positively crawling with ant-like archaeologists, almost all of whom had been hired for the occasion, although not by Laura.

The work was in charge of Mrs, Bradley herself and a tall young man in disreputable shorts who turned out to be one of her many nephews. The expert upon whom Mrs. Bradley had been counting was suffering, it transpired, from lumbago, and could not come. He had, however, been responsible for providing the reason for hiring the helpers, for the excuse for all the activity (if anybody asked any questions) was that a ‘dig’ was to be filmed for educational purposes.

‘And if we can’t outshine Charley’s Aunt,’ announced Laura darkly, ‘in competing for the educational hogwash, I shall be gloriously surprised. By the way, how come Denis? I thought he only played the violin!’

‘I remembered Denis just in time. He helped to excavate some hut circles in Wiltshire last year. He will make it look as though we know what we’re doing, and will also prevent us from doing any damage,’ said Mrs Bradley, waving an explanatory claw. ‘The great thing,’ she added, gazing benevolently round upon her ant-heap, ‘is to have enough people busy. It disarms suspicion. And the Chief Constable, as I told you yesterday, is not pleased with me. I have kept him out of his bed and caused him to creep in the lee of hedges and get the knees of his trousers dirty. It will be as well to demonstrate our own continuing zeal.’

She concluded this peroration with a startling yelp of laughter, and then called up her nephew and presented him to the other young men.

‘Denis does play the violin,’ she added, waving a skinny claw again as though to excuse this idiosyncrasy on the part of her nephew. ‘You will have much in common.’ She walked off, hooting mirthfully.

‘Aunt Adela is very full of beans to-day,’ said Denis. ‘She feels she’s up to mischief, and that, in my experience, always makes old ladies very cheerful.’

O’Hara and Gascoigne, who had taken to him at sight, would perhaps have liked to know what his experience had been, but they did not ask that, but only what was the plan of campaign on the site of the digging.

‘We have to fool about as long as possible without doing any actual digging,’ Denis replied. ‘So if you two wouldn’t mind taking this measuring tape and this fairly large protractor, and assing about over there for a bit without doing anything in particular, but just looking busy and intelligent, it would be handy. We lunch at twelve and shall spin the picnic out until two-thirty. Then we resume the fooling until four. By that time we hope to have attracted a fair amount of attention, and to have demonstrated our fat-headed innocence. Then we can push off home. At least, so Aunt Adela says.’

Gascoigne and O’Hara accepted the implements presented to them, retired to the north-west segment of the circle, and began a series of elaborate measurements. O’Hara produced a notebook and a fountain pen, Gascoigne a few unpaid bills and a pencil, and the two young men wrote down records and calculations of distances, angles, direction and length of shadows, and such other data as occurred to their yeasty intelligences or were suggested by the circumstances of the survey.

They also named, for their private satisfaction, all the nine stones, beginning with the names of the eight great planets, but as it was a matter for argument how then to name the ninth stone, they compromised by deciding to call all the stones after the most eccentric dons at their University. This exercise in ingenuity took some time, as it seemed necessary to relate each stone in some way to the person after whom it was to be called, and the time passed pleasantly enough.

At last there was a halt for the picnic lunch. A firm of caterers from Welsea Beaches, suborned or intimidated by Mrs. Bradley, appeared at ten minutes to twelve with lorry-loads of excellent food and a sufficient number of crates of bottled beer, and drove cautiously through the open gateway on to the site of the dig.

The archaeologists knocked off work at once, and, with completely comprehensible enthusiasm, unloaded and fell on the provisions. Laura sat between two of the film extras, a young man in velvet trousers and a young woman with hair so thoroughly bleached that it had turned white. Laura was an expansive, friendly person, and was soon conversing with the extras and listening with great interest to what they had to say about the cinema.

They were on location, she learned, to shoot half a dozen sequences involving a background of open hill-country, some pasture and a Tamworth boar.

‘Although what a Tamworth boar looks like, unless our producer,’ said the velvet-trousered one frankly, ‘beats me, what I mean to say.’

Laura agreed, although she knew perfectly well what a Tamworth boar looked like. She had not, so far, met their producer, however, and so reserved judgment on the aptness or otherwise of the velvet-trousered comment.

‘I suppose you’ve got digs down here?’ she said. ‘I mean, if you’re staying some time. How do they put you up?’

‘If you call it that,’ said the silver-haired one. ‘Digs, I mean. We’ve been given the attics in that house by the golf links. I suppose it’s all right if you’re not choosey, but being seventh lead, as you might almost say, I did think I ought to get something better. But it’s no use talking. Anyway, it’s dry and fairly clean, and the food’s not bad, and they give you a drink occasionally. Free, I mean.’

‘Iced?’ enquired Laura, upon what she hoped was a casual note; for she felt sudden excitement at the news that these people were actually housed in Cottam’s, of the four dead trees, a mansion which, she was still certain, contained a corpse.

‘Iced? Oh, I suppose so, if you like them that way. Personally, a gin is all I care for, and you don’t want that iced, do you?’

Laura said that she supposed not, and, the conversation showing signs of languishing, she was moved suddenly to enquire:

‘What sort of man is Concaverty?’

The silver hair and the velvet trousers exchanged glances which indicated indecision and a certain degree of embarassment.

‘Oh, well,’ said the velvet trousers, ‘he’s an old so-and-so, actually. Too big for his boots. In fact, too big altogether. But, look here, don’t say I said so. I don’t want to get the wrong side of him. He rents us the house, you know. The Gonn-Brown pay him five hundred a week, and, even then, he doesn’t much want us, we’ve been told.’

‘If he’s here, I wish you’d point him out,’ said Laura. ‘I believe I’ve heard of him. Better still, I wish you’d point your producer out to a friend of mine who’s in the O.U.D.S. and wants a small part in a film.’

‘Him? Oh, he wouldn’t be here, don’t you believe it! Probably still in bed. Oh, no! I’m wrong! Here he comes. The fellow with the battleship jaw.’

‘Oh!’ said Laura, realizing at once that this was a man she had never seen before. ‘Oh! I suppose you’re sure?’

‘One’s usually sure of the boss!’ the lint-haired seventh lead replied.

‘Hullo, who’s that talking to young Bradley?’ asked Gascoigne, joining his cousin. ‘Looks a bit of a bruiser, doesn’t he? What do you make of him? Your face has gone all expressive!’

‘Why, that’s the fellow!’ said O’Hara. ‘I recognized his voice at once. I wonder what his name is? I’ll go over and claim acquaintance. I’d like to find out what he’s got to say about the body we carried down those stairs.’

‘Do you mean the producer?’ asked Laura, coming up to them.

‘Good Lord, no! I mean that fellow talking to Bradley. Mrs. Bradley’s watching them, do you see? She smells a rat, and no wonder.’

He strolled over to where Denis was in conversation with a thickly-built, tallish man who looked like a professional boxer.

‘Hullo,’ said O’Hara casually. ‘How goes it?’

‘It looks all right to me,’ the man replied, ‘but I don’t know much about… Good Lord!’

‘Yes, exactly,’ said O’Hara, eyeing him. ‘How did our friend get on?’

‘Eh?… Oh! Poor old Chummy! Yes, that was a very bad business! But what possessed you to get out of the car like that? Still, he managed the journey all right, and we got him to hospital. Haemorrhage, too! The most extraordinary thing. I’ve never heard of it accompanying typhoid fever, have you?’

‘I don’t know much about illness,’ said O’Hara slowly, ‘but I knew he was pretty bad. I had an idea he was dead when I left the car.’

‘Of course not! There wasn’t any question of that! He was pretty bad, certainly, but he’s progressing well enough now. We didn’t think much of the local hospitals, so in the end we ran him up to London, and that’s where he is! Well, so long! Be seeing you!’ He turned and strolled away.

‘I wish I’d got that kind of cast-iron nerve,’ said O’Hara, when, at the end of the afternoon, the film extras and all other strangers had gone, and he, together with Gascoigne, Laura, Mrs. Bradley and the useful and decorative Denis, were getting into the two cars to return to Welsea Beaches. ‘He didn’t attempt to put me off. Just said that the sick man was progressing well and was now in London. Looked me in the eye as bold as brass, and asked me why on earth I’d got out of the car that night. Did you ever meet such an example of complete, copper-bottomed cheek?’

‘If we could only find that body, and get it identified!’ said Laura. ‘If only we could find out anything! I hate being kept in the dark.’

‘To-night,’ said her employer mysteriously, generously omitting all reference to the discovery of the smugglers’ cave and the important and entrancing theory that it ended under the pull-in at Slepe Rock, ‘we go on a mysterious quest. You wait and see. I think we have started our hare.’

‘That’s good,’ said O’Hara. ‘What do you want us to do?’

‘I don’t want your company, child. I have something most important for you and Mr. Gascoigne to do. You must all get what rest you can in the next few hours. Matters, if I mistake not, approach their zenith.’

She refused to add to this Elizabethan platitude, but cackled harshly in reply to further questions.

Although she was dogged by the supposition that Mrs. Bradley was indulging in an Indian midsummer madness, or had caught a touch of the sun, Laura agreed to spend the whole time between tea and dinner at rest on her bed at the hotel. She even fell asleep for a time, and did not wake until seven. She dashed in and out of a bath in record time, and hoped that the main dish would still be ‘on’ when she got to table, for at Welsea Beaches, as at most seaside places of the decade, it was necessary to be early unless one was prepared to eat some extraordinary mixture concocted from the remains of food left from the previous day, or something based on sausage-meat or macaroni.

Mrs. Bradley, however, had reminded the waiter to see that Laura received the portion due to her. She advised her young secretary not to hurry over her dinner as there was not the slightest need to do so. Hiccups, she pointed out, would be out of place at that evening’s special gathering at the standing stones, as silence was to be the chief consideration and even the most involuntary sounds taboo. To Laura’s questions she returned no answer except a hoot of laughter.

They set off as soon as dinner was over. The night sky, overcast as it was with cloud, had already brought darkness sufficient, Mrs. Bradley decided, for their purpose, and from the large and fashionable hotel at Welsea their departure would cause no comment, and probably would go unnoticed.

Laura, wide awake and conscious of excitement, noticed that the car, instead of making direct for the objective, went from Welsea Beaches for some miles along the London Road before it turned off at Coshill for Dimdyke, Allis and Hafford. This string of hill hamlets took in a wide oval beyond Cuchester and finished by the south-west border of the county. At last the passengers found themselves on the way (up a long narrow lane of potholes and the old tracks made by the caterpillar wheels of tanks) to the village of Upper Deepening. From there the car dropped gently, and, to an imaginative person, inevitably, to the stile from which they would reach the Dancing Druids.

‘What do we do now?—walk?’ enquired Laura, as the car drew up, and she and her employer got out.

‘There is nothing else to do,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘But please be guided by me. Do not speak unless I speak first, and leave our course of action entirely in my hands, no matter what may be forthcoming.’

‘Right. Do we leave George here again in charge of the car?’

‘We do.’

‘Where are Gerry and Mike? We haven’t seen them since…’

‘They are in position, I hope, by this time.’

‘By the Druids?’

‘Nowhere near the Druids, child. On the shore of the bay at Slepe Rock, if they have carried out instructions. And from now on, no talking, unless I speak first.’

‘Complete silence,’ agreed Laura. ‘Right.’

She and Mrs. Bradley then climbed the stile and walked towards the circle of standing stones. Mrs. Bradley went first, and Laura kept close behind her but left sufficient space between them for Mrs. Bradley to pull up short, if she wished to do so, without having Laura butting into her. They made no sound as they walked, and Laura, in spite of (or, possibly, because of) tightened nerves, began to enjoy the expedition with that kind of tingling excitement mixed with fear which is felt by young children with a sense of adventure when they embark upon the unknown or the previously untried.

The ground rose gradually from the road, for the steeper side of the hill was that which dropped to the farm on the opposite slope. The night, in the classic phrase, was chilly but not dark, and Laura was glad of her tweed coat. The hedge rustled beside them as they walked and gave its customary impression, in the darkness, of being full of eyes.

Laura began to wonder what Mrs. Bradley intended. Nothing so far had been said of the object of the excursion, but Laura connected it vaguely with the ‘archaeological eyewash’ as she herself expressed it, of the afternoon. She gave up further speculation, and began to wonder, instead, exactly how Mrs. Bradley would react if, on this hair-lifting excursion, something, coming out of the hedge, stabbed Laura soundlessly to death in the dark, and Mrs. Bradley found herself, at length, alone with the Dancing Druids. She embroidered this theme until she felt sufficiently terrified to abandon it.

At this point it occurred to Laura that the Druids themselves formed a sinister rendezvous, and that she and her employer were, after all, a very young and a very old woman to be undertaking a night tryst with them, especially in view of the lonely and exposed position in which the Druids stood. She dared not conclude this thought, but the one which followed it was not more comforting. Who knew, she wondered, what ghastly sights and sounds the stones had been witnesses of in long-past times and under the ancient sky? Why, anyway, were they called the Druids, and, again, why should they dance? She saw them, enveloped, like witches, in cloaks of mist. She saw them writhe out of the ground, and, with slow contortions, shuffle towards their victims, avid for blood.

These terrifying images disappeared as Mrs. Bradley turned off from the path through a gap in the hedge, and muttered to Laura to keep low. Dark thoughts forgotten and the fever of wild adventure again in her blood, Laura crouched down. Mrs. Bradley paused for no more than three minutes, and then moved on again. Laura followed with bold and tightened heart, and she and her employer began to creep across the turf towards the stones.

It was a long and uncomfortable trek, but at last the stone circle was reached, and Mrs. Bradley, extending a skinny claw, drew Laura to a halt, and then, without speaking, thrust her gently behind one of the stones.

‘Keep under cover unless I tell you anything different, child,’ she muttered. ‘Our business to-night is to watch. I hope nothing else will be necessary.’