The Dancing Druids

Chapter Four

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‘But the wizard king was not at home, and his grandmother sat at the door in her easy chair.’

Ibid. (The Giant with the Three Golden Hairs)

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Neither Mrs. Bradley nor her son Ferdinand had very much spare time; neither was their scanty leisure coincident. It happened, however, that a new grandchild had been born, and Mrs. Bradley had attended the christening; thus she was at her son’s house, three miles from Cuchester, when two handsome boys turned up to see Ferdinand and to ask his advice.

‘I suppose I throw them out?’ suggested Mrs. Bradley’s young and competent secretary, Laura Menzies, when, having been apprised by the butler of the presence of Gascoigne and O’Hara, she had confronted Mrs. Bradley with the news. ‘It seems a pity. They’re easy on the eye and ear, and come from what the cognoscenti call Oxford College.’

‘Admit them,’ said Mrs. Bradley, leering horribly at her grandchild who happened to be lying in her lap.

‘But doesn’t our native honesty compel us to explain that Sir Ferdinand is in London defending the public-spirited murderer of six G.I. brides?’ demanded Laura.

‘True, child. But do not stress the fact of his absence just at first. Do I know these boys?’

‘I don’t… at least, I didn’t until they introduced themselves. They are Irish, I should think, from their names. Let’s see.’ She closed her eyes, opened them, and recited, ‘Mr. Patrick Michael Brian Maurice Bennett Sean O’Hara. Mr. Gerald Fitzgerald Gascoigne. And very nice, too. As a Scot, I appreciate aristocratic nomenclature, and they’ve got it in gobs.’

The baby blew a series of congratulatory bubbles and Mrs. Bradley swabbed these away with absentminded efficiency. A moment later the two tall young men, one as black as Saturn, the other fair as Apollo, were shown into the room by the butler in accordance with Laura’s instructions.

They looked apprehensively at the baby, critically at Laura, and with evident interest at Mrs. Bradley, who scarcely did justice to the ninety years with which she had been credited.

‘Sit down and speak freely,’ said she, handing the baby to Laura much in the manner of the Duchess in Alice handing over her sneezing child. ‘Be bold. Confess—for only the walls have ears.’

‘We came,’ said Gascoigne gravely, ‘to… to put a hypothetical case, as it were, to Sir Ferdinand Lestrange. I… er… that is, my mother used to know him. It’s… well, it’s Michael’s… my cousin’s… story, really. Go on, Mike. Speak up.’

‘Begorra!’ said Mrs. Bradley, fascinated by the lordly Hibernians and anxious to do them honour by employing what she affected to believe was their idiom. ‘Arrah, now, be aisy, wouldn’t ye?’

This last remark, apparently addressed to the baby, achieved its object. The young men laughed, with some constraint but to their own relief. Laura rang the bell, passed the buck (in her own words) by giving the baby to the nurse who answered the summons, and seated herself at the table with notebook and pencil.

‘Go on, please,’ she said, ‘but make it snappy. We have to catch the three o’clock train.’

‘Well,’ began Gascoigne, ‘as I say, it’s really Mike’s story, and, to tell you the truth’—he turned to Mrs. Bradley again— ‘it isn’t too easy to explain.’

‘I see,’ Mrs. Bradley observed. ‘You haven’t, by any chance, committed murder, I suppose?’

‘No,’ said O’Hara, coming in boldly at this. ‘But I’m wondering whether, perhaps, I’m an accessory after the fact.’

‘Interesting,’ remarked the elderly lady. ‘Well, go on. Don’t leave out any details, however unimpressive they may seem, and don’t cut a long story short, whatever you do. The three o’clock train doesn’t matter.’

‘Step high, wide and handsome,’ agreed Laura, licking her pencil and looking expectantly at them.

‘Well, it was like this,’ said O’Hara. He told the story of the hare and hounds cross-country run, and of his experiences at the lonely farm. ‘And I’m now quite certain that the man was dead,’ he concluded, ‘and from the fact that he was said to be suffering from something infectious, but actually bled all over me, I’m wondering whether there wasn’t something rather peculiar, in fact, something rather nasty, about the business, and, if there was, well—I’m involved, I suppose. I’d rather like to know what to do.’

‘It might be better if my son did not advise you. Not, at the least, face to face. I will put the facts before him myself, if you desire it, and, if you will give me an address to which my secretary, Miss Menzies, can write, I will let you know his unofficial views.’

‘I say, that’s awfully good of you,’ said O’Hara. ‘You see, when we found that the fellow had not been admitted to hospital…’

‘I do see. Now, there are just one or two points which my son may want to have clear. First of all, tell me, how many of you were running across country that day?’

‘Eleven, including Gerald. He was the hare.’

‘Had you only one hare?’

‘Yes, only one.’

‘So there were nine others besides your two selves, and all nine of these were hounds. Was anybody missing from the reunion at the end of the day?’

‘No, we were all there. I got in late, of course, but… Oh, one fellow didn’t finish. A bloke called Firman. He’d told us he probably wouldn’t, though. We met him next day while we were messing about at the farmhouse. He turned up in a car and gave us a lift. That was—well, just a bit queer. That he should have been there, I mean. But I don’t suppose there was anything in it, you know.’

‘Was there any untoward incident, other than Mr. O’Hara’s extraordinary adventure, on the day of the race?’ Mrs. Bradley asked, turning to Gascoigne.

‘Not that I heard of. But I didn’t see any of the others during the run. At least, not to speak to. We were pretty close at the finish, but I was running my hardest then, and wouldn’t have had much breath to spare for gossip.’ He paused for a moment, laughed, and very soon added, ‘But there was plenty of chance at dinner for the men to swop stories, and I didn’t hear of anything unexpected.’

‘There was that fellow, though, that I took to be you,’ said O’Hara.

‘Oh, but that must have been Firman, as we said. You must have spotted him after he’d decided to give up.’

‘Yes, I know. Still, it doesn’t altogether fit in with the rest of his story. His uncle doesn’t live in that direction, and he was hanging round that farm in his car next day.’

‘And it couldn’t have been any of the others, because they were all in a bunch for the whole of the run. We know that.’

‘Who were these others? Were they all particular friends of yours? And were they members of your University?’ Mrs. Bradley enquired.

‘It’s nothing to do with the Varsity,’ Gascoigne explained. ‘It’s an athletic club. They don’t bar anyone so long as he can run a bit and pays his subscription and isn’t a bounder. I expect you know the sort of thing. We joined while school was evacuated during the war, and now turn out when we can.’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs. Bradley, scanning the plaintiffs narrowly, and ignoring most of their remarks, ‘and what interpretation are we to put upon the word “bounder,” I wonder?’

The cousins exchanged glances ; then Gascoigne said :

‘Rotter, I suppose. I don’t know quite how one’s…’ he smiled ‘one’s aunts would interpret the word. I meant that anybody can join, and they keep him in unless they find they don’t like him, and then they bung him out. That’s all there is to it. Unless you’re a bounder you’re welcome for as long as you like.’

‘Does it ever happen that a member is asked to resign?’

‘Hardly ever, but they did give a miss last year to a fellow who pinched money from the dressing-rooms. It’s awkward, you see, if the fellows can’t leave their loose change in their trousers’ pockets. Then there was a chap just before the war who was blackballed for dirty running.’

‘It was more dirty temper than dirty running, I think,’ put in O’Hara. ‘At least, that’s what I was told. He used to spike fellows round the bend behind the water jump—very malicious, I believe. Two other clubs complained to the secretary, and chaps don’t complain about that sort of thing for nothing. I mean, anybody is liable to get spiked if there’s manoeuvring for position going on, especially in a tight race and with a big field. Fellows get boxed in, you know—it’s all tactics in the longer races unless you’ve got the legs of the rest of them, and even then you’ve got to keep your wits about you. But with this chap it was a bit nasty, apparently, so he came off the books. Can’t have bad blood between one club and another. Ruins the whole thing. The committee were quite right to sack him.’

‘Does the club wear a uniform?’

‘Not for cross-country running. We turn out in any old shorts and vests. We wear club colours for athletics matches in the summer when one can keep nice and clean. Ours is an apple green band on a white running-vest, and we wear white shorts.’

‘Very tasty, very sweet,’ observed Laura, who was following the narrative with great interest.

‘If it had been an orange band, I suppose you two wouldn’t have joined,’ Mrs. Bradley remarked. ‘Was your secretary one of the hounds in this cross-country run on Saturday?’

‘Oh, yes, He’s dead keen, you know. A fellow called Shoesmith, a bank-clerk. Very decent.’

‘Can you give my secretary his address?’

Laura took down the address, and then Mrs. Bradley continued:

‘I had better take you point by point through your story. Let us begin at the beginning. You took a different direction from the rest of the hounds at Cuchester, I believe, Mr. O’Hara?’

‘Yes. They turned off to the left through the town, and I kept straight on to the amphitheatre and then went up to the fort.’

‘You believed you would more easily catch up with your cousin that way?’

‘I hoped to be able to spot him, and give the others the tip, but I wasn’t lucky.’

‘This man with the car seems interesting. Were you surprised when he stopped you?’

‘Yes and no. I mean that strangers do take an interest in cross-country running, and they do quite often offer gratuitous advice. Sometimes, of course, it’s useful, and we have no rule against accepting it.’

‘I was interested in the form of words he used. Granted the circumstances, they seem rather striking.’

‘I didn’t notice anything in particular.’

‘Did you not? You used almost the same words when you reported the conversation you had with the woman at the door of this mysterious farm. You remember? About being late? It was the repetition of that remark by the woman which made what the man said significant. And now why do you suppose the man took you in the car?’

‘To hold the body on the back seat, I imagine, and to help lift it out when we got to wherever it was that we were making for.’

‘Couldn’t the woman have held the body on the seat? After all, the driver was expecting to meet someone else up there on the hill. He called out to someone, you said. ’

‘Yes. He called to someone named Con. And I suppose the woman could have held the body, although it was frightfully heavy. Still, she could have managed. I suppose there was some reason why she had to remain at the farm.’

‘Yes, I think you are right. It might be useful to know what that reason was, might it not? Now, you left the car when you heard the driver call out to this man he was to meet, and you gained the impression that the car had travelled a long way from the farm. Yet when you went back there on Sunday morning, you discovered that it was not so very far, after all. What do you make of that now?’

‘I don’t know what to make of it, except that it was to give me the impression I got—that the distance we had travelled was considerable. And that’s fishy, too.’

‘The Engineer’s Thumb,’ said Laura, an encyclopaedia of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

‘Yes, but why?’ asked Mrs. Bradley. ‘Why should he want to deceive you about the distance? It may equally well have been that the driver knew he had time to spare between leaving the farm and contacting this man Con. He had to get you away from the farm, I think, as soon as he could, for he must have realized that the first man had made a mistake and had sent him the wrong assistant. The woman was left behind, I have little doubt, to warn the right man when he turned up.’

‘You think the fellow in the car near the hill-fort had been sent to direct someone on to the farm, then?’ demanded Gascoigne.

‘It seems likely,’ Mrs. Bradley answered. ‘On the face of it— but we have not much evidence yet—it seems as though he mistook Mr. O’Hara for another of the runners. You said just now, Mr. O’Hara, that you saw another runner in front of you and supposed him to be Mr. Gascoigne. But it is now shown, by Mr. Gascoigne’s own account of the matter, that this lone runner could not have been he. The inference is that it was Mr. Firman—unless, of course, it was somebody quite unconnected with the club. I suppose it is not impossible that a solitary enthusiast should have been running over this county on Saturday afternoon?’

‘Not impossible, but rather unlikely,’ said Gascoigne.

‘And more than a bit of coincidence, surely?’ suggested O’Hara.

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘we will see what can be done to ease Mr. O’Hara’s mind.’

‘It’s eased already,’ said O’Hara.

‘Bless their hearts!’ said Laura sentimentally, for she was at the age when she felt like a mother to all boys two years her junior. ‘How much of the yarn do you think was true?’

‘I think we may proceed on the assumption that it is all true,’ her employer replied.

‘What do you think Sir Ferdinand will say?’

‘It all depends upon what you and I find out in the meantime, child.’

‘Oh, we are going to look into it, are we? I rather hoped we were. The first job, I take it, is to clear this spiked-shoes person out of the way… you know, the one who was sacked from the club for dirty running. It couldn’t have been he, so we’d better prove that it wasn’t.’

‘An intelligent suggestion,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, ‘but perhaps not quite the first thing on our list.’

‘What about the pickpocket, then?’

‘The pickpocket?’

‘Well, I thought that if we could look into the antecedents of the two obviously criminal members of the club… people who didn’t commit murder… if it is murder… and argue from cause to effect — ’

‘ “And so grow to a point,” ’ said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. ‘I think it might take some time, and I feel it might also be wasted labour, child. I believe it might be better to discover the antecedents of the young man named Firman.’

‘Oh, rather! Yes, of course! We certainly ought to check up on him,’ agreed Laura, with some excitement. ‘Well, how do we begin? What is my first assignment?’

‘To proceed to the bathroom and wash the inkspots from the ends of your eyebrows,’ Mrs. Bradley responded. ‘Then I think you might eat your lunch. I heard the gong some three minutes ago. Which of the young men did you prefer?’

‘Oh, Adonis, I think,’ said Laura, after a brief pause for thought.

‘Mr. Gascoigne?’

‘Yes. Which did you?’

‘I like nearly all young men,’ said Mrs. Bradley sincerely.

‘They are almost always delightful. I also like all very young women… or very nearly all.’

‘Present company excepted from the whole of that statement!’ said Laura. ‘By the way, I call the saturnine one… O’Hara… a “dark Celt.” Kipling knew them, didn’t he? There’s something different about that lad from the other. Wouldn’t you say that “dark Celt” somewhere tips him off?… And yet you could scarcely mistrust him!’

‘He has, at any rate, stepped into a dark adventure, child. Do you know, I have a fancy for this business. It promises to be of extraordinary interest. The nature of the countryside, the dead man kept warm by the application of hot-water bottles, the mysterious journey taken by the car, the decidedly sinister touch of the circle of standing stones, the badly-frightened woman who declared untruthfully that she was alone in the house except for an invalid suffering from an infectious disease, the plot (as I see it) to murder Mr. O’Hara…’

‘ What?’ shouted Laura, in horrified delight.

‘… these are deep matters, child, which cry out for our attention. There is a smack of minor Elizabethan drama about them which I find highly absorbing.’

Laura regarded her narrowly.

‘You do believe what those boys told us, don’t you?’ she enquired. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and prodded her in the ribs with a bony forefinger.

‘We shall see what I believe,’ she responded. ‘Go and wash, there’s a good child. After lunch we will take George and the car, and go to this farm and invent spells and recite charms. Did you know that the Neolithic inhabitants of this island had the name for being cannibals?’

‘In a strictly religious sense, of course,’ said Laura. ‘You don’t mean that the people who murdered this heavy man were cannibals, do you? Because, if so, I’m dashed if I’m coming with you. I don’t mind the risk of being killed, but I’m jolly well not going to be eaten. Of course,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘it would tend to solve a murderer’s chief difficulty, wouldn’t it? I never thought of that before.’

‘It would only do so if the murderer had the attributes and appurtenances of the elderly gentleman in Through the Looking Glass, child.’

‘Eh? Oh, you mean Old Father William?’

‘Yes. He finished the goose with the bones and the beak… Ah, well, let us see what cook has done about lunch.’

‘I’m not sure that I’m hungry,’ said Laura.