“We could hear of no other service which missed a beat, as you might say, on the night of Thursday, October the fourteenth,” Maltby declared in answer to a question from Hanaud.
“Ten minutes now,” said Mr. Ricardo looking at his watch, and Hanaud fetched out of his pocket the clumsy silver chronometer of Septimus Crottle. He laid it face upwards on the table between them, and all three bent their heads over the white face.
“Twelve minutes, by the old man’s repeater,” said Hanaud.
Mr. Ricardo was regarding his friend with awe. He looked round suspiciously. There were three naval officers on their way to Plymouth, a journalist bound for Exeter, and a couple of holiday folk for Cornwall. But they were all to the front of the car. He turned hack to Hanaud.
“I should never have thought of that,” he said, reproaching himself, “if I lived till I was a hundred. You actually borrowed the watch from Mr. Crottle?”
Hanaud shook his head.
“I took it when he wasn’t looking.”
Whether borrowed or taken, the watch was an advantage. It gave them an absolute precision for their arrangements.
“If you, Monsieur Hanaud, will watch on this side of the plane, Mr. Ricardo and I will look after the other.”
Maltby moved across the aisle and drew back the curtain. Ricardo placed himself in the seat in front and both stared down through the moonlit air. The aeroplane was travelling along a big whale-backed ridge like one of the Berkshire Downs. Here and there the smooth turf was broken by a black outcrop of rock; here and there in a scoop of the sides there grew a little spinney of larches. Below and along the three men watched with a concentration which spread through the car and provoked the curiosity of the other travellers, so that their conversation ceased and they, too, began to look downwards, but for what they did not know.
On the table in front of Hanaud the monstrous watch of Septimus ticked, it seemed to Ricardo, louder and louder with each second. He saw now, beside the surface of the down below him, flat meadows to his right, with cut ditches in which water gleamed, and a long way forward and to his right a sprinkling of lights which betokened a town. Bitter thoughts came into his mind “We are on the wrong air-line. There will be another company running a different service. Perhaps, if Maltby hadn’t booked us as ordinary passengers! In front there, in the pilot’s cabin, a man would see more clearly.” Why was it so important to hide their movements? Secrecy—hush, hush—there could be too much of it.
Mr. Ricardo was beginning to boil with exasperation, when suddenly Hanaud’s finger closed upon a spring and the clear, yet tiny chimes, chimes of the little people, tinkled with a strange incongruity through that most modern of carrier wagons.
“We shall miss it,” Ricardo cried, and even as he cried he saw it, just ahead, just before the down broke off abruptly in the plain. It stood in the open upon a slope of ground, with a break like a quarry in the side of the down behind it, a farm-house without a light in any window, and not another house visible its neighbourhood. Ricardo turned excitedly towards the Superintendent. “Do you see? Do you see?” he asked in a whisper, and the rudder of the aeroplane gave a wriggle. The machine was turning, so that it would move straight over the house towards the grouped lights of the city. In a second Hanaud would see it upon his side. Mr. Ricardo rushed across the cabin. Hanaud was sitting with his face at the window and his hands curved about it to shut out the light above and behind him.
“Look! Look!”; and the aeroplane swung clear of the down and swept across the fields and dykes of Sedgemoor to the airport on the edge of the city.
“Did you see?” asked Ricardo.
Hanaud picked up the watch and tucked it away in his pocket, a little embarrassed by his friend’s excitement. But Maltby cleared the air with a most unveracious story.
“The house was probably not that house, but one of an earlier date. But certainly Monmouth was taken there. His men had broken before Colonel Kirke’s pikes on this flat land. Monmouth, I think, was found under a truss of straw in one of the outbuildings.”
Maltby noticed the other passengers turning away with a smile from these historical enthusiasts, and the aero plane took the ground.
As they dismounted a big man in a blue suit advanced towards them. “Superintendent Maltby? My name’s Lance. Inspector Lance.”
The two men shook hands.
“There are rooms for your party engaged at the hotel,” said Lance, “and I would rather talk there.”
A car was waiting, and a few minutes afterwards Inspector Lance, in a comfortable sitting-room warmed by a bright fire, with a hot grog at his elbow, was administering, not without a certain pleasure, the coldest of cold douches to his colleague from the Metropolis.
“I am afraid that you have wasted your time, Superintendent. If I had only known before,” and he sighed as he looked into the coals.
“You couldn’t, because we didn’t,” Maltby answered.
“Yesterday, for instance,” said Lance slowly.
Maltby smiled.
“If we had known yesterday, I should have been able to give you a much more complete account of how much we needed your help than I could over the telephone this afternoon.”
Inspector Lance admitted by implication to have had his plumage a trifle ruffled.
“The call sounded a little abrupt.” Nobody could be humbler than Maltby when something was to be gained by humility.
“It must have,” he agreed remorsefully. But there had been no time for the courtesies. He had only just that moment learnt what air service failed on the night of October 14th. “But perhaps now you will, over another glass of this excellent whisky, allow me to tell you a little more particularly of our need.”
He rang the bell, and on the appearance of the Boots—for it was then half an hour after midnight—said “Repeat!”
The Boots looked at Hanaud, and, whether he was naturally sympathetic or just wished to spare him an unnecessary journey up and down the stairs, pointed out: “The foreign gentleman has drunk nothing.”
“I want nothing,” Hanaud snapped. As if he couldn’t pass for an idiomatic Englishman anywhere!
Maltby was suddenly afraid that here again the proper courtesies had been neglected.
“This is Monsieur Hanaud of the Sûreté in Paris,” he said, addressing the whole room. He tried to gather a few bouquets from his recollections, but once again the notice was too short, “of whose activities you will not need me to remind you.”
It was not very good, no, and Hanaud was justly annoyed.
“You will not join us, monsieur?” asked Lance, and Ricardo seized the moment gleefully.
“Hanaud is partial to a peppermint frappé, which he is unlikely to get at this hour of the night in the west of England. So perhaps a glass of Porto or a cup of coffee?
“Ah! Coffee!” cried Hanaud, and the Boots went away upon his errand.
Meanwhile Maltby filled in those details of the history of Septimus Crottle which he had not had the time to give over the telephone. When he had finished, Inspector Lance threw his hands up in the air.
“The luck of the thing! Of all the unchancy businesses,” and he swung round, now thoroughly mollified, to his companions.
“Arkwright’s. That’s the name of the place. A farm once, and not so bad. But the owner, old Mrs. Destries over to Bridgewater, sold off most of the land, and the house stood there unlet for a long time.”
In the end a man, Frank Barnish, with his wife, had hired it. It had a few acres of grazing land, which they let, and made do with a vegetable plot, a small orchard, a couple of pigs and some chickens. He had been a sailor, it seemed, but they made no friends; he, a hulking big fellow, cantankerous and sullen, and she a good match for him. They gave no trouble but, nobody liked them; they never fitted in. They were just solitary people in a solitary place. They had some money of late weeks, and had bought somewhere in London an old motor-car.
“A battered old blue thing to look at,” said Lance. “But once I saw her coming into the town, and she could go.”
He looked straight at Maltby and added: “So it’s just your bad luck, Superintendent.”
Maltby was tired by now of vague assertions that his luck was out. He answered shortly: “What is?”
“That you didn’t come yesterday.”
“They have gone?”
Inspector Lance nodded. He got up and offered a cigarette to Maltby, began to offer one to Monsieur Hanaud, but, seeing what he was smoking, fell back aghast, and was offered and accepted a cigar for himself by Ricardo.
“Yes. Upon receipt of your message—sounds like old days, doesn’t it, Superintendent?—in accordance with instructions, I proceeded, etcetera, etcetera . . . ”
“The people who put through the message to you from the Yard don’t seem to have used very much tact, I am afraid,” Maltby replied dryly.
“Oh, that’s all right. Urgency and good manners have different patterns,” said Lance. He conveyed to everyone in the room a pleasant sense of enjoyment. Here were two important officials from London and Paris and a tertium quid all of a flutter, who had flown down to teach the West Country yokels their business, whereas if they had only talked with reasonable clarity over the telephone . . .
“You see, we sent out a police-officer upon the receipt of your message to keep an eye upon Arkwright’s, and he reported that there was no one about.”
“When was that, Inspector?”
“About seven o’clock.”
“And where did he report from?”
“Arkwright’s.”
The Barnishes had a telephone in a living-room which they never used, except perhaps for telephoning. The police-officer had found the door on the latch and not an answer to a cry.
“I told him to hold on and I would send him another man to keep him company. Empty houses at night are creepy things. We shall find the two men there in the morning. There’s obviously nothing more that we can do until then.”
Inspector Lance picked up his hat and threw the stump of his cigar into the fireplace.
“No, indeed,” said Hanaud, at his sweetest, “and should ever fortune send you on the air to Paris, may I do no less for you!”
Inspector Lance looked a trifle doubtfully at Hanaud, as though he were not quite sure how to interpret that sentence. He bowed, however, and remarked: “I hope that you’ll all be comfortable.”
He was just opening the door he came to a halt. He clicked his tongue several times against his palate in annoyance, shut the door, and marched back into the centre of the room.
“It is by our mistake, perhaps, that the Barnishes have escaped you. I hope not. We had our local duty to do, and no word from you earlier, I think, than four.”
Hanaud leaned forward. What little pellet of discomfort was the Inspector now going to discharge upon them? One fairly potent in aroma, Hanaud gathered from the slow-savouring smile of penitence which waited upon his speech.
“We knew nothing until then,” Maltby declared. “We telephoned as soon as we knew.”
“Yes, but what a pity! You see, a farmer who grazes his sheep on the down at the back of Arkwright’s sent in the morning before a shepherd to complain of a dog which had killed some of his ewes. The man thought that the dog was an Irish wolf-hound. Well, you gentle men of the Yard will know that an Irish wolf-hound’s like a German. He can’t be cured. So, naturally, we got to work and, naturally, Arkwright’s was the first objective.”
“Oh!”
Hanaud jumped from his chair.
“Arkwright’s was the nearest house. Also, Barnish was a morose, unfriendly man. It might, perhaps, give him a sullen sort of pleasure to injure a neighbour, especially with some cruelty added. Moreover, if he had a dog, he hadn’t something else which went with it—a dog licence.”
“And when did you send your officer?” Hanaud asked.
“Let me see. The shepherd reached us about twelve. We sent Cox out—yes—as soon as he had had his dinner. He went off upon his bicycle at two o’clock or thereabouts.”
“Yesterday?” said Maltby.
“Well—conveniently but incorrectly,” Inspector Lax replied, and he looked at the clock on the mantel “It’s getting on towards two o’clock in the morning—yes, we’ll call it yesterday. Cox bicycled out to Arwright’s at two o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” said Mr. Ricardo with approval. He did not mean to be a cipher in these agreements and explanations, even though, whenever he did put in his everybody else turned and stared at him as though had only at that moment materialised in the room. “Tuesday afternoon at two.”
“Barnish was at home,” Lance continued. “It’s a curious old house, shingle and bricks and little windows. There’s an archway through to the yard at the back and the front door, as you might say, is on the right-hand side under the arch.”
“Then Cox got off his bicycle,” Mr. Ricardo suggested, to help a rather lame story on to its climax, and met the thoughtful glance of the Inspector.
“Ah, now, did he?” the Inspector asked. “Did he get off his bicycle? Or did he just stop at the door, like, with one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal? We’ll have to consider of that. It didn’t occur to any of us that you gentlemen would think the point important.”
There was only one action for Mr. Ricardo to take, and he took it. Hadn’t the Duke of Wellington once gone on his knees to a ridiculous Spanish General had felt himself insulted? “The matter being important—down I plumped,” wrote the Duke and, fortified with that example, Mr. Ricardo grovelled.
“I won’t interrupt again. I apologise, Inspector, on my knees,” he said meekly.
Inspector Lance was mollified.
“He did get off, I think, for as he was propping his bicycle against the wall, the house door being a bit open, he heard a chair flung back and a dish clattering on the floor, as if the Barnishes had been fairly startled, and in a second Barnish was blocking the doorway, with a face like thunder. He began with a quarrelsome, ‘What do you want?’ and then saw Cox’s uniform. Cox said he turned quite sickish in colour, but looked better when he was asked whether he had an Irish wolf-hound or any sort of dog.”
Barnish said that he had none, and stood in the door way as if that ended the matter. But Cox was pertinacious and said that he would go in and have a look round. For a moment it seemed that Barnish would hinder him, as, of course, he had a right to do, but he stood aside at last.
“‘All right,’ he said. ‘But you people in your uniforms, you upset women, you know.’”
And certainly when Cox pushed his way into the kitchen he saw a very frightened woman. But there was no dog, though he looked into the cellar to find him. Cox did not go upstairs. First, because the stairs weren’t visible from the kitchen. They were behind a door at the end of a corridor. Second, if the animal were locked up anywhere, it would be in the outbuildings. Cox searched the outbuildings beyond the arch, with Barnish and his wife treading upon his heels, and it had none of the pleasure of a treasure-hunt. He was very glad to make sure that there was no dog upon the premises, get upon his bicycle again—this last the Inspector underlined with a formal little bow to Mr. Ricardo—and report to headquarters.
“Cox wasn’t comfortable about his visit to Arkwright’s,” Lance continued. “There was something about the two Barnishes which he didn’t understand. something which gave him gooseflesh, he said, and Cox isn’t the man to get queer fancies. Then, at four o’clock to-day, you telephoned.”
Inspector Lance walked to the door.
“You would like to see Arkwright’s, no doubt,” he said. Hanaud directed an imploring glance towards Maltby and Maltby understood and replied accordingly: “Very much, if it could be early.”
“We’ll make it eight o’clock if you like, and you could catch a fast train up to London at nine-fifteen.”
Thus it was arranged. Hanaud stood looking into the fire after Lance had gone with a curious smile breaking the composure of his face and then vanishing and recurring again. He was remembering the speech he had made to Mrs. Leete in Paris, and how pat this example had come upon it. A plot was worked out, watertight, undiscoverable, with its sequences and rehearsals; a foggy night, a kidnapping, a lonely farm where, sooner or later, release could be arranged, unless, happiest consequence: of all, madness solved all the troubles and made truth an acrostic which none could ever read. But for two small accidents! An aeroplane crossing the sky each night above the prison house at midnight, and a sheep-killing dog which brought a policeman from town.
“No doubt,” said Hanaud, “Barnish and his wife thought the game was up, the dog licence an excuse for the snoop, and, one, two, they get rid of their prisoner and disappear. The little accidents one cannot foresee, they burst open perfect crimes.”
But the morning was advancing, and no one, not even Mr. Ricardo, was willing to listen further.
“Yes,” said Maltby curtly. “Rouse and two people who walk a mile or so home from a country dance. And a newsboy sent back one morning for a fresh batch of papers who passes a door three times, and sees it shut, and finds it open, and next time it’s shut again. Oh, yes! Suppose we go to bed!”
To bed they went. And a few minutes after eight that morning they were trampling, with a little more noise than perhaps was necessary, about the squalid house and precincts of Arkwright’s Farm. Why they were noisy, no one of them was quite sure, no one would have admitted it if he had been sure. Horror and fear and suffering had left behind them in that house an air which was heavy and charged with dim threats. For no reason, each one looked quickly over his shoulder when he had passed a door, or, if he turned a sharp corner, made shift to return upon his steps in silence to see whether he was followed. And in one room the three of them halted with one accord. It was a bare room with no furniture in it but a deal table in a squat tower with a broken window over the back yard and a little hatch upon the corridor.
All eagerly agreed with Lance that it was the service hatch which had turned their suspicions into certainties. But it was nothing of the kind. As they stood in the wretched room, they knew that they had reached the end of their search. There was an oppression which weighed upon their brains, a cruelty which clutched at heir hearts until they hurt. Maltby stepped forward, but very quietly, like a churchwarden in a church, and, pulling forward one of the shutters from the clip which held it to the outside wall, showed them where the screws had fixed it to the window frame.
“Yes,” he said, as though he were confirming some thing they were all agreed about, “it was here.”
“Yes, the room is hateful,” said a voice which Ricardo hardly recognised as Hanaud’s, so quiet and yet so respectful was the sound of it. But no more was said. Inspector Lance was looking at his watch. “If you gentlemen want to catch the nine-fifteen—” and Hanaud started again into animation.
“I think we do,” said Maltby, and to Hanaud: “You agree?”
But Hanaud’s face was so smoothed out with relief that no words were needed from him. He uttered them none the less, and they remained for a long while stark in Mr. Ricardo’s thoughts.
“What I see and smell and touch through all this house, and, above all, in this empty room, is cruelty. We ought to be quick.”