Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  “I don’t know so much,” said Lesley. “We don’t want to be ambushed on the moor. The country looks pretty lonely after the next main road junction—look, see what I mean? Just here is where we are—and there are several side-roads, and at least two water-splashes, where they could pretty well pounce, if that’s what they mean to do. I vote we don’t take any chances. It isn’t dark yet, by a long chalk. Let’s back down here, through the village without taking this crossing at all, and then cross the railway again—it makes a jolly good landmark—and join this other main road. We don’t have to get to Lanark unless we want to. We can take it as far as—” Her voice trailed off as her forefinger travelled southwards down the map.

  “That’s the trouble. I think it’s a good idea, but where do we go?” asked Gillian. “Besides, I don’t really think they’re going to wait for us. For one thing, they came at such a rate that I don’t believe, really, they saw us. You see, they wouldn’t expect to see me, in any case, and they would expect to see that boy with you. By the way, we never even asked his name.”

  “I did. It was Smith.” She giggled. “Anyway, I shall never sneer at intellectuals in future. He was a friend and a brother, and asked no questions at all.”

  At this point the train went through, the gates opened, Lesley let in the clutch, Gillian felt for her gun, and the girls drove onwards. But by the time they reached the turning to Thankerton Station Gillian’s heart had failed her.

  “I wish now we’d done what you suggested,” she said.

  “Well,” said her sister, in the practical tones she had used over Gillian’s broken engagement. “I’ll tell you what we can do. I’ve been thinking over the map, and what you said about Aunt Adela and her notes. Remember Culter? Well, look, if we turned off here—” she indicated Thankerton Station—“and turned the car back on its tracks”—she performed these manoeuvres—“We could go back through good old Symington”—this time the level-crossing gates were across the railway-line, and the road was clear and empty—“go on to Coulter Station—God bless the L.M.S.—switch off comme ça”—she twiddled the wheel, and the car turned off the main road for just about a mile. “I’ve lost the thread of my remarks,” she added, as they came on to a main road again, “but this is A702 in the book of words, and here”­—she paused for dramatic effect—“is Culter, specifically mentioned by Aunt Adela in her notes, and as such—great jumping fireworks!”

  Culter was a very small place. The two motor cycles, one a red Charleroy and the other a green-and-dark-blue Wurton, lying abandoned by the roadside, were quite a feature of the village.

  “Now how on earth did they get here?” Lesley exclaimed.

  “And where are those two men?” demanded Gillian. “Lesley, I don’t like this a bit!”

  “At any rate, they weren’t chasing us,” said Lesley. “That seems fairly obvious. But let’s push on a bit.”

  She drove onwards, and then, the car bumping gently on the uneven ground and over the heather, she left the road and took to a dip in the moor. Before the car had quite come to rest, a motor cyclist tore past on a red Charleroy. He was wearing a fur-lined helmet, and was easily recognisable as Mr. Geoffrey. He left the high road and took a narrow, winding track southward by Culter Water.

  “Funny,” said Lesley, scowling at the map in the fading light. “Wonder where he’s off to? That way doesn’t seem to lead anywhere much. And what’s Mr. Joshua going to do?”

  “The sight of Geoffrey now gives me the creeps,” confessed her sister. “Do you think he noticed us?”

  “I should say he was going too fast. Pull yourself together, old soul. He wasn’t a ghost,” said Lesley. “Let’s get on our way a bit, in case Mr. Joshua’s still in the village.”

  • CHAPTER 9 •

  “ ‘O open the door to me, Marg’ret!

  O open and let me in!

  For my boots are full of Clyde’s water

  And the rain runs o’er my chin.’ ”

  In Mrs. Bradley’s mind as the car fled northwards—George did not often receive a commission as much to his mind as the twin commands to hurry and not to stop—were several questions. The most pressing seemed to her to be these:

  First—what had been Mr. Joshua’s motive in calling her into the case?

  Second—a somewhat similar query—had Mr. Geoffrey’s first meeting on the moors with Gillian been accidental, or was it part of a plot?

  Third—was there a body of a child, or the ashes of a man—the real Mr. Frere—in the coffin which had been lowered in a marshland grave three years before?

  Fourth—was there again a plan to substitute one dead body for another?

  Some questions, which her mind had formed previously had already been answered. For instance, she was certain that the “dead” man at the house in the marshes was not Mr. Lancaster. Mr. Lancaster, she suspected, had been dead some time—most probably murdered. Mr. Frere, too. That could be proved later. She was equally certain that the man who now called himself Mr. Lancaster was not dead, but in a cataleptic trance.

  This latter certainly seemed to give some sort of answer to her third question. Old Mr. Lancaster-Frere (she was fairly sure that the double impersonation was being carried out)—was not going to be buried, although he might be laid in his coffin—the coffin which could so easily be unscrewed. In that coffin would be buried another man, a man, Mrs. Bradley confidently hoped, who, at the moment of her speeding northwards, was still very much alive.

  A further small query remained. Did Mr. Joshua and Mr. Geoffrey know where their next victim lived, or were they depending upon her to locate the house? An answer to this seemed to lie in Mr. Geoffrey’s careless confusing of the two houses when he had described the rushing stream and the hill. They must know where the house was; they must have been to it; they might even have been inside it.

  What did they know, and what (having failed to obtain possession of the first part of the cypher from the murdered man’s rooms in Edinburgh) they must find out before they committed their next murder, was the place where the treasure was hidden.

  She herself believed that she had located this spot. What she had not discovered to her satisfaction (in spite of her bold map-reading with the inspector) was the exact situation of the house. Ironically, in the way that things do so often turn out, it was the thing she did not know which was of the greater importance, she believed. The Dark Gentleman’s cataleptic trance could not last indefinitely. The villains must have all their arrangements complete. It might be only a matter of hours before they accounted for their victim.

  The car ate the North Road smoothly. George, in his element, snicked in and out among traffic, saved a second here, split one there, and by the time Gillian had reached her mother’s house after the journey from York he was gliding between a brewer’s lorry and a stationary bus on the road to Newcastle.

  In the back seat of the car Mrs. Bradley worked out another variation or two of the directions given in the ballads. She went further than Gillian, however, in her handling of the material. Not content with having worked out the acrostic and used the ballads thus given her, she also went through the collection again to discover any other ballads in which the name “Hamilton” appeared. There was one in particular which seemed to hold some promise. It began with the words Ettrick Forest, and the stanzas which impressed her were these:

  “Ettrick Forest is a fair forest,

  In it grows many a seemly tree;

  There’s hart and hind, and doe and roe,

  And of all wild beasts great plenty.

  There is a castle built with line and stone;

  O gif it stands not pleasantlie!

  In the forefront of the castle fair,

  Two unicorns are braw to see.”

  Later came the “clue” word Hamilton, in the stanza which began:

  “Then spake the Earl hight Hamilton.”

  Mrs. Bradley sighed. There was really nothing to go on. All the clues from the ballads might be
false. There might be no point at all in having solved the acrostic from the titles of the ballads, although she felt, from the whole naïve character of the clues, that nothing else had been intended. The circumstances that also gave her hope were, first, the wrecking of the dead schoolmaster’s rooms, and, second, the persistence with which Mr. Joshua and Mr. Geoffrey seemed to have dogged her and Gillian. If she had seen Gillian’s spirited treatment of them, one after the other, after she herself had left the hotel in Edinburgh, she would have felt even more satisfied that she was on the trail. This treat, however, had been denied her.

  She spread out the map on her knees again, and considered the claims of Ettrick Forest. True, it was in the neighbourhood of water—a motif, which appeared the whole way through the ballad clues—but, to her way of thinking, it was not sufficiently far west. A line of a ballad, which did not appear at all in the Mary Hamilton acrostic kept running through her head, and had done so for several days.

  “The deepest pot of Clyde Water

  They got Young Hunting in;

  With a green turf, tied across his breast

  To keep that good lord down.”

  On the other hand, she reminded herself, stern on the suppression of fancies, if drowning were essential, there was Yarrow Water, there was St. Mary’s Loch, there were other streams in the Border country swift to drown a man and deep to hide him, and the same applied to the treasure.

  At Berwick she directed George to drive to a hotel. They would stay the night, she said. In the morning they would make for Lanark, explore the upper waters of the Clyde with an eye to Bonnington Woods, where she fancied the treasure was hidden, and from there—

  Suddenly her thoughts took a new direction.

  “Don’t stop after all, George,” she said. “I’m sorry. Go out by way of Coldstream and Kelso, then on to Galashiels and Peebles; so to Biggar and Lanark. Like our delicious Yvonne Arnaud in that excellent farce: I’ve got a good idea.”

  “Very good, madam,” said George.

  “You’d better have a rest and get something to eat and drink,” his employer added.

  “Very good, madam. Could I perhaps bring you something, madam?”

  “Yes, George. Whatever you’re having.”

  “Fish and chips and beer, if I can get it, madam.”

  “Good. Bring enough for two, get some cigarettes, fill up with petrol in case we get lost on the moors, boot, saddle, to horse, and away!” exclaimed Mrs. Bradley, crescendo.

  George made his usual response. Drove first to a garage for petrol, and then went off for the food. He returned quite shortly, and displayed the results of his explorations.

  “And the salt, madam,” he concluded, handing it in a little screw of newspaper.

  “George, this is marvellous,” Mrs. Bradley asserted. “Only one thing disappoints me. I wish Miss Gillian were here; and, better still, Miss Gillian plus her younger sister, Miss Lesley. I feel that we approach the crisis of the affair, George. What say you?”

  “I have no idea, madam.”

  “Do you think you can find your way on the moor at night?”

  “Yes, I fancy so, madam. I anticipate not much difficulty. It is a very romantic countryside, madam, the Border. I enjoyed it very much when I was driving my two American gentlemen. One of them, it appears, had ancestors living just north of the Border. Very gone on them, it was. Name of Ker, this gentleman. His family crest, he was telling me, was unicorns, a most unusual thing, surely.”

  “George,” said Mrs. Bradley, “this is fate. I now know why the bonnet-piece struck me all of a heap.” She ate the last of her fillet of fish, and gobbled up the rest of the potato chips with the infinite relish, which almost everybody, of whatever age or type, displays for this particularly democratic food. “The beer, George,” she observed.

  George, who had discovered, in the recess of the car’s boot, a picnic basket containing glasses, poured beer with Cockney accuracy and affection, and handed her a frothing tumbler.

  At Biggar George went wrong. On the west side of the town there were two possible roads. One ran past the next railway station, Coulter, and, after a southerly loop, north-west to Lanark. The other went south by Culter village, joined the Clyde at a little place called Lamington, and followed the river along its valley. This, the way that they were going, narrowed to a pass near Abington, and then mounted steeply between Wellgrain Dod and Rake Law, towards the Lowther Hills. It was on this rapidly-steepening road that George decided he had missed the way.

  “I’m very sorry, madam,” he said, engaging his lowest gear, “but we’ve come wrong somewhere.”

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But my fault, as I’m holding the map. What shall we do, George?”

  “I don’t think I’d better try and turn her, madam, particularly as we don’t know where we are, and it’s going on dark. I think we’d better persevere, and ask at the next place we come to.”

  “If they’re not all in bed and asleep, George.”

  “I think, anyway, madam, we’d ought perhaps to shelter for a bit. It’s blowing up wet, and if it does that on these moors the visibility is not everything it should be.”

  “True, George. All right, then. Stop at the first inn we come to, and we’ll be on our way as soon as we can in the morning. I only hope,” she added, “that the murderers will find it as difficult to go on as we do, if the weather turns really bad.”

  “The murderers, did you say, madam?”

  “Why, yes, George. I’m saving an old man’s life, I believe and hope.”

  “Then perhaps we should push ahead, madam.”

  “Oh, no, George. We must inevitably follow the fashion, and think of ourselves first. Besides, we should be of very little use to the old gentleman if we got ourselves bogged on this moor.”

  Beyond Abington the road had forked. George, hopelessly lost, hesitated at a secondary road which turned off to his left and which seemed to run with the railway.

  “Go ahead, George,” said Mrs. Bradley, for once in her life as lost as she might have been in the Sahara Desert. The secondary road continued with the railway. Then it picked up a burn, but did not cross it.

  They came to a station at last, and George got out and asked the way.

  “I’m afraid we’re right off track, madam,” he announced. “They say our best plan is to keep to the left all the way. That should take us back, more or less by the way we have come, to Biggar, so they tell me, if I’ve properly understood what they say.”

  “Very well, George,” said Mrs. Bradley. But to keep left, in the dark and the rain, was not as easy as it sounded. Around them soon stretched the moor, with its hundreds of glens and hills, its bogs, burns, tracks, and sheepfolds. The road they were on petered out with dramatic suddenness.

  “I see nothing for it, madam, but to wait until morning,” said George.

  Mrs. Bradley, like an old campaigner, could sleep anywhere, if she liked, no matter what the discomfort, and the car was far from uncomfortable. She insisted that George should come inside with her, gave him one of the cushions and a rug, and the two of them settled down in their respective corners to make the best of the night.

  Some large part of it was gone. By dawn Mrs. Bradley, having had four hours of dreamless sleep, woke cramped but rested. Quietly opening the door on her side of the car, she stepped out on to the road.

  It was no more than a track, which ceased in the sudden and inexplicable manner of many moorland roads, and beyond it there was nothing but the moor. Heather-covered, misty, alluring, beautiful, it stretched as far as she could see in rolling hills, deep violet-coloured dips, and gradually rising uplands.

  In the soft soil near the car were the prints of horses’ hoofs. As soon as she saw them, Mr. Geoffrey’s story, told to Gillian, came back into her mind, and she looked for the marks of wheels. Not far away, she knew, there was the railway, although how far away she did not remember. There were streams in plenty, too, and here were hills.

>   She remembered the Irish groom. It would be much more likely to find one here than in the marshes among which Geoffrey had pitched his tale.

  She walked on, following the hoof-marks and the track of the narrow-wheeled gig. She had not far to go. There stood the house, very much as she had imagined it; in fact, as she stood at the iron gates and gazed in, it had the familiarity of things seen in a dream.

  It was George who translated the mystery.

  “Why, madam,” he said, as he came up with her, “surely that must be the house Sir Walter lived in? It would be in these parts, I believe.”

  “Sir Walter?” said Mrs. Bradley. “Oh—Sir Walter! Yes, of course. Not his house, though, George. The house you are thinking of, and to which this house does bear the most extraordinary resemblance is that called Ashestiel, near Caddonfoot.”

  “That’s it, madam. I have illustrations of it. I used to know the whole of ‘Marmion’ by heart, madam, when I was at school.”

  “Admirable, George. Keep an eye on the car—in fact, get steam up—in case I am pursued. I am going to gate-crash this house, and that in the literal manner.”

  The iron gates were not high. Two stone pillars, crowned with stone urns, supported ironwork of plain, strong pattern, offering plenty of foothold. Mrs. Bradley looked about her, perceived nobody but the obedient George, who had turned his back on her and was walking towards the car, placed a thin foot, sensibly shod, upon the bars, and mounted with the swift agility of a monkey, or a small boy bent upon orchard robbery.

  A close-cut lawn formed a semi-circle in front of the house. The long frontage was broken (rather than graced) by a pointed-topped porch. A wing at right angles to the main building formed stables and a coach-house. Here all resemblance to the house in the marshes ceased, for to the right was a tumbling stream which, even in the height of the summer, held enough water, on those high moors, to rush shouting through the garden between its silver birches and its foxgloves, and over its clear, grey stones.