The Death-Cap Dancers

Chapter 4: DODDER

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After breakfast on the following day Erica paid a visit to the cabin across the way to thank John Trent for his intervention.

‘But for you, it looks as though we might have been pestered by that youth for the rest of our stay,’ she said.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. If he is staying at Youth Hostels he is allowed a maximum of three nights in any one of them. It was abominable of him to attempt to knock you up at that time of night, but I don’t think you’ll see or hear any more of him. I’ve put his motorcycle right and sent him off.’

She had scarcely got back to her own cabin when she and the others had another visitor. This was the warden. He was accompanied by the forester who had led the conducted tour on the Sunday.

‘Not to alarm you,’ he said, ‘but I’m making a round of the cabins because I have just had a police message. A convict has escaped from Hangmoor. He will be in need of money and a change of clothes. The police don’t think he has any outside contacts. He’s a convicted murderer, not a habitual criminal, but he must be desperate and may be dangerous. The police think he is somewhere on the moors and will soon be recaptured, but until that happens it might be as well to stick to the forest walks, or, if you do go out on the moors, to remain in your car and on no account to give anybody a lift. Anyway, whatever you do or wherever you go, my advice is that you all keep together and make sure that your cabin is locked up when you’re out and is made secure at night.’

John Trent came over after the warden had gone.

‘My parents and I are checking out on Saturday morning,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know whether our cabin has been booked for the following week. If it should be left empty you’ll be rather isolated out here, so you’ll be a bit careful until this fellow is caught, won’t you?’

‘You know, said Tamsin, when John had left them, ’I think all that business with Adam has upset my nervous system. I don’t believe I want to go out today.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Isobel. ‘We mustn’t give in to a scare. There isn’t one chance in a thousand that we shall run across this murderer. As for Adam Penshaw, well, he was just a nuisance to you, and that was your own fault. You shouldn’t have encouraged him in the first place.’

‘I suppose I encouraged him too, you know, ’ said Hermione. ‘I gave him the lift in my car. Who was to know that he would latch on to us the way he did?’

‘Well, the rain has stopped,’ said Erica, ‘and I can’t see us spending all our time cooped up indoors just because there’s a convict on the run. Why don’t we try one of the forest trails if Tamsin’s ankle will stand up to a bit of walking? We need not go all that far.’

‘Oh, the ankle is all right. I’ll buy an ash-plant just in case. I expect they’ve got some at the shop,’ said Tamsin. ‘If not, they’ll have them in Gledge End.’

‘We’ll each buy one,’ said Hermione, ‘and then it won’t matter how many escaped convicts we meet.’

‘We’re not likely to meet any in the forest,’ said Isobel, ‘with the foresters and the other cabin people all over the place. I’m game for a walk. Who’s coming?’

Into the outhouse at the Youth Hostel slunk a bedraggled, dirty, unshaven man. The outhouse was an open-fronted shed with a bench on all three sides. It was there to accommodate Youth Hostellers who arrived before five in the afternoon, since the hostel admitted nobody before that hour. The man knew nothing of this. He was merely taking a much-needed rest. When he heard voices he got up from the bench and almost collided with two young men who were about to enter the outhouse.

‘No good trying yet. It wants a quarter to five,’ said one. ‘I say! You’re wet, brother! Been sleeping rough?’

‘Lost my way,’ said the man, trying to push past.

‘Mean you were out in the rain last night? They’ve got a drying-room here. You’ll be all right by morning.’

‘Drying room?’

‘Sure. Dry your gear, see? Haven’t you stayed in one of these before?’

‘One of what?’

‘Aren’t you a member?’

‘Member of what? I’ve got to get on. Let me by.’

‘Where are you bound for?’

‘What’s that to you?’ He pushed past and plunged downhill on to the moor, but the questioner was not to be put off so easily. He ran after him and caught up with him. The man turned on him like an angry cat. ‘Let me be! Get lost!’ he said hoarsely.

‘I can’t let you be, brother .You’d be on my conscience. Look, you’re down on your luck. I can see that. Come back with me to the hostel and I’ll get you a bed. A mate of mine can’t come and I’ve got his membership ticket as well as my own. You can be him, so far as the hostel will know. The Lord will forgive me the bit of cheating, as it’s in a good cause. Come on back with me. I’ll see you through. Got any money?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think you have, but the bed is paid for. We have to book and pay in advance. On the road, are you?’ All this time the earnest young man had remained with a sinewy hand grasping the wanderer’s sleeve. The unkempt man ceased to resist. ‘Would they really give me a bed?’ he asked.

‘Sure, if I show them the card. Your name’s Bert Leeds for tonight. Got it? Bert Leeds. That’s who you are, and you have to leave before ten in the morning. Now I don’t ask any questions, so you don’t need to tell me any lies. I want to be your friend, brother, that’s all. You see, I believe we were put into this sinful world to help each other, so I’m going to help you. Just between ourselves, what’s your name? I want to pray for you.’

‘I don’t have a name and prayers won’t do me any good.’

‘Oh, well, brother, if that’s the way you want it, I won’t press you. Where are you making for?’

‘I’ve got to get to Gledge End, so let me get on.’

‘You’ll never make it across the moor tonight. You look to me like you’ve got a weak chest. You come on back with me, brother. I’m not going to have your death on my conscience.’

‘What did you say my name was?’

‘Bert Leeds. All I have to do is hand in the cards and collect them up again when we leave.’

‘I’ll have to leave early.’

‘That’s all right. You leave as early as you like.’ The other young man came up to them. ‘Oh, hullo, Tony,’ said the Good Samaritan. ‘Are they open?’

‘They are, Steve, they are.’

The bedraggled man licked his lips.

‘I haven’t heard those blessed words since I don’t know when, ’ he said. The young men laughed.

‘Not that kind of open, brother,’ said his rescuer. ‘We’re strictly T.T. Come on, and I’ll stake you to a tin of beans.’

The four young women found that the walk through the woods was not an unqualified success. It was extremely wet underfoot after the rain, the trees dripped relentlessly on to the walkers who had a tendency to keep glancing from side to side in a wary, in fact nervous, manner, and at the end of a mile Tamsin’s ankle was beginning to feel the strain of coping with slippery mud and the heaps of sodden, fallen leaves.

With the help of Erica’s walking-stick as well as her own, she managed to get back to the carpark and the reception room, where Erica commanded her to sit and rest while she herself brought the car across the clearing.

‘I was looking at the notice-board while you were gone,’ said Isobel, when they had got themselves and Tamsin into the car.

‘There are some folk-dancers coming to give a show in a church hall at Gledge End on Saturday afternoon. The warden here has tickets. Shall we go?’

‘How much are the tickets?’ asked Erica.

‘Fifty pence and downwards, Mistress Shylock.’

‘For that dirty crack I shall treat you all, so there!’

The Youth Hostel was a popular one, but, so late in the holiday season, it was not full. Steve handed in the three tickets and he and Tony were soon making use of one of the calor gas cookers to heat up baked beans and fry the sausages they had bought at the hostel shop. Their guest ate his share, but remained taciturn. He did, however, insist upon doing the washing-up unassisted. After that, he asked where his bed was, so Steve showed him a large dormitory crowded with bunk beds, and he said he would turn in. The other two went into Long Cove Bay, the fishing village near by, to take a look at the sea, but by nine o’clock they, too, were in their bunks, and the hostel locked its doors at ten.

The warden did not live on the premises, but had what had been the lodge when the big Victorian house had been a private residence. She came over at seven in the morning to hand out the after-breakfast chores of cleaning and tidying-up which the hostellers were pledged to carry out before they left and to hand back membership tickets to those who were checking-out.

There was no sign of their overnight guest when Steve and Tony turned out of their bunks at eight. Steve applied to the warden.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I expect he’s the energetic sort. He must have gone out before I came over. His name is Leeds, you say? Well, he certainly hasn’t checked out because his membership card is still here.’

‘He’ll have to get his own breakfast, then, when he gets back,’ said Tony. ‘One thing, it’s only tea and cereal and baps and that pot of marmalade we bought here at the shop last night.’

They prepared their own breakfast and ate without talking. At nine they had performed the tasks allotted them by the warden but they still hung on without, at first, sharing the thought which was in both their minds.

At a quarter to ten the warden said brightly, ‘Well, you two are quite the last. You know I have to close the hostel at ten, don’t you? I should think your friend has decided to go on ahead of you.’

‘Well, we can’t wait any longer for him,’ said Steve. He collected the three tickets and he and Tony went out to the vestibule where all outdoor boots and shoes had to be left so that mud was not brought into the public rooms. ‘He’s cut his stick, I reckon,’ he added to Tony when they were out of earshot of the warden.

He had not only left the hostel, they discovered. He had taken Steve’s anorak and rucksack with him. Steve was too godly a young man to swear. Instead, his eyes filled with tears of self-pity and disappointment.

‘And I helped him and I trusted him,’ he said. ‘I called him brother. I was a Good Samaritan unto him. Our iron rations of biscuits and chocolate were in that rucksack, as well as all my spares.’

He could say no more at the time, for the warden came out after them. She still spoke brightly.

‘Oh, well, if you’re off, I can lock up now,’ she said. ‘I hope you catch up with your friend, but I daresay he’s on his way back here by now to join you unless he’s run into the escaped convict.’

‘Escaped convict?’ said Tony.

‘Why, yes. Didn’t you see the notice I put in the common-room? It was for the benefit of the girls mostly. You boys can always take care of yourselves, can’t you? Yes, I had a police warning. A convicted murderer has escaped from the Hangmoor gaol and is thought to be on the moors.’

The two young men looked at one another.

‘Thanks for telling us,’ said Tony. As they tramped down the lane towards the coast-road he said to Steve, ‘What do you think? Was he? He could be, I suppose.’

‘Whether he was or not, he’s a dirty dodder,’ said Steve morosely.

‘You mean an artful dodger, old man.’

‘No, I don’t. I mean a dirty dodder.’

‘What’s a dodder?’

‘It’s a plant. My botany book says it’s a vampire. It feeds solely on the sap of other plants, just as a vampire lives by sucking other people’s blood. Besides, if this dodder of ours is a murderer, he must have sucked somebody’s blood.’

‘Oh, hang it all, you can’t write him off like that. You only thought he was a tramp down on his luck, and I daresay that’s all he was, you know.’

‘I shall think twice another time. It’s a bit hard if you only try to carry out your ideals and a serpent turns and bites you in the heel.’

‘When we get to a telephone you’d better give a description of him to the police.

‘How can I? They would ask all sort of questions and I should have to say I’d got him into the hostel on somebody else’s ticket.’

‘I don’t suppose the police would worry about that. If he is the escaped murderer they ought to be told about him. You can describe your anorak and your rucksack, can’t you? Lucky he didn’t pinch your boots as well.’

‘I don’t suppose he could get them on. I’ve got small feet for my height. Why don’t we flag down a likely car and hitch a lift? I don’t feel like footslogging it all day. Somebody can jolly well do me a good turn for a change.’

‘Where shall we go?’ asked Erica, when they were all in the car after she had bought the tickets for the dancers’ show.

‘To identify this church hall and then south, more or less,’ said Isobel.

‘To keep out of the murderer’s way?’

‘We don’t know which is his way. I said south because we haven’t explored in that direction.’

Enquiry at the post office in Gledge End produced directions so that they found the church hall, and then Erica turned on to the outskirts of the southern end of the little town and took the road to Alderwood where there were castle ruins for Tamsin to sketch and the others to explore.

‘Although we’d better take it in turn to be with her in the car,’ said Erica, ‘in case our bright lad has taken it into his head to follow us again on that damned motorbike. Not you, Hermy. It would take Isobel or me to wipe the floor with him. Not that I think he’ll bother us again.’

They saw nothing of Adam and had forgotten all about the convict until they had the most grim of reminders. They had tea at the only café in the little town of Alderwood and then, as there was plenty of daylight left, Erica decided to make a long cast round to get back to the forest and the cabin.

The route was supposed to take them across country by secondary roads to Gledge End and so home, but proved shorter than Erica had thought, so, instead of picking up the main road at a village called Yieldrigg, she went north on another secondary road with the intention of half-circling the forest area before dropping south again.

Eventually this brought them on to the moor and Hermione soon realised that they were on the road she had taken by mistake on her first journey. There was no fear of getting lost this time, as the neighbourhood was now familiar ground. She was looking out of the side window of the back seat which she was sharing with Isobel when she spotted the bicycle. Tamsin, seated beside the driver, saw it at the same moment and said, ‘Somebody seems to have had a nasty spill. There’s a bike in the heather.’

Erica pulled up on the verge.

‘No reason for anybody to have had an accident on a road like this,’ she said, ‘unless there was a car involved.’ Isobel said that perhaps they had better take a look. ‘You and me,’ she said to Erica. ‘You two can stay with the car.’