The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  “This is the actual place, ma’am, on the shore of a little Broad not more than a hundred yards across, just about midway between Hoveton and Ranworth. It hasn’t got a name on the map, but the people in the villages round call it Voley Water. It’s got a kind of a funny reputation. Have you heard of the Norfolk evil spirit, ma’am? One of those old tales, you know. Of course, I’m a London man myself, and don’t take much stock in local stuff. Well, they call him Old Shuck (although I don’t know that anybody much believes in him now, with all this popular education and all that), and he’s supposed to be a dog about as big as a calf.”

  “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Ah, just about the same,” said the superintendent. “Old Shuck keep under the shadow of the hedges, and dog people at night. If he follow you it mean death within the year. He haunt by Barton Broad, and over Cottishall Bridge, and that also claim to haunt at a place called Beeston, near Sheringham over to Overstrand, in the north-east part of the county.”

  “A wide district for one unfortunate demon to cover,” commented Mrs. Bradley. “The name Shuck comes, I believe, from the Anglo-Saxon for demon?”

  “Yes, ma’am, so a learned gentleman told me once,” agreed the inspector, who appeared to regard the superintendent with a kind of conscientious magnanimity which must have been rather trying. “Well, this is the point: just about this time last year some irresponsible sort of people—visitors, no doubt, who’d got to hear of the story—put it about that they’d seen Old Shuck swimming across this very same Voley Water. Now Old Shuck has never been known to swim, so far as I am aware, but you know what country people are! There’s always some who are willing to take in anything, and the story got round in no time, when it was known the body had been found. A woman of about thirty-five, ma’am, and, according to the doctor, not one who’d been any better than she should be. Anyway, she was murdered all right. The young ladies were called to the inquest this morning, but, of course, we had to ask for an adjournment. Haven’t even got evidence of identification yet. Nothing but the medical evidence.…But I dare say you’d like to hear the young ladies’ story…I’ve got their full statements here.…”

  He accepted her cooperation, she was interested to notice, without question.

  • CHAPTER 4 •

  “I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice,* who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as serpents do, you know.”

  —From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  *The fact that the name of one of the characters in this book also happens to be Alice is fortuitous, and has no connection with the chapter headings.—G.M.

  “We’d better check the stores,” said Alice.

  “Hot dog,” said Kitty.

  “I shouldn’t think she is,” said Alice seriously. “She’s sitting on the roof of the saloon with the owner, and they’re discussing the chart and arguing about draught of water and mooring head to the wind.”

  “By ‘hot dog’ I didn’t mean Dog,” explained Kitty; and, having thus readjusted her friend’s mind, she settled with enthusiasm to the contemplation of food.

  “You call them out and I’ll write them down,” said Alice, gazing with an aunt-like eye, indulgently, at a vast collection of tins and bottles, which covered the floor and table of the saloon, and overflowed onto the seats.

  “What about my shorthand? It would be very much quicker,” said Kitty, who boasted an extraordinary facility in this strange and difficult art.

  “Yes, but no one else can read it. Go on. Shout.”

  “OK. I say, I feel awfully hungry. Shan’t you be glad when we can make a start on these?”

  “You’ve only just had your lunch. And, in any case, you can’t open these until they’re checked. Call them out, please.”

  “Tongue, tinned, six; olives, bottled, two; brisket of beef, tinned, four; salmon, red, tall, tinned, six; salmon, red, flat, tinned, twelve—I think; half a second; let me count; right. I can’t think where on earth we’re going to stow this lot—before we eat it, I mean. Chutney, glass, one; mixed pickles, glass, one; piccalilli, glass, one; vinegar, bottle, pint, one; walnuts, pickled, glass, one—we shall never eat all this stuff—sardines—that’s better—in oil, six; anchovies, squiggly—”

  “What?”

  “Squiggly—all rolled up—two; puddings, fruit, mixed, ready cooked, tinned, twelve (I think—yes); biscuits, tinned, assorted (each tin’s a different kind, that’s what I mean by that), twelve; ham, complete, (the wrapping paper’s got a bit greasy, but that won’t matter), one (looks as if it might be fairly lean, too); bacon, rashers, long-back, one pound (I should think); soups, assorted, tinned, twelve; salad dressing, bottles, two; steak and kidney pudding, boxed, three (that ought to be rather decent); galantine, glass, three; and tinned, three (different makes, that’s why); fruit, various, tinned, twelve; jam, raspberry, two; strawberry, four; marmalade, six; custard powder, tin, one; mustard, tin, large, one; lobster, tinned, large (good!), six; meat and fish pastes, various, glass, twelve; tomato juice, tinned, six; tea, packets, quarter-pound, China, two; Indian, two; Bovril, large (sixteen ounce, in fact, so you can get a teaspoon in, which I think is a great advantage, don’t you?), one; sugar, granulated, two-pound, six; cocoa, tins, quarter-pound, three; condensed milk, sweetened, two; unsweetened, two (label it Emergency only); orange juice, bottled, large, two; cereal breakfast food, packets, various, six (you know, anybody would think we were spending six months on a desert island, instead of a fortnight on the Broads); vegetables, tinned, various, chiefly asparagus, celery hearts and baked beans, twelve. That seems to be the lot. I expect there’s tons we’ve forgotten. Oh, here’s a packet of pepper. I wonder whether there’s salt. Yes, here we are! Now there ought to be a couple of loaves and some butter. Got ’em. Here they are.”

  “Well, that’s one job done,” said Alice, putting the top on her fountain pen. “Now where, I wonder, did we put the gramophone and those records? Oh, and did you both bring a bit of soap?”

  “In the after cabin, I think. That’s where the portable wireless is. Let’s go in and see. Soap? I’ve got some. I don’t know about old Dog, but her mother packs for her, so it’s sure to be all right.”

  They passed from the saloon through the tiny galley and across the launch’s cockpit to the cabin.

  “Ample storage provided,” said Laura, coming down when the owner had wished her luck and had driven off in his car. She surveyed first the cabin and then the saloon and its stocks of tins and bottles. “All I ask is—where?”

  “We can put quite a lot in this oven thing,” Kitty observed. “Did you bring any soap, Dog? And we can put plenty of stuff in the drawers under the spare berth. Nobody wants that for clothes.”

  “What a thing it is to have a brain for organisation,” observed her friend, seating herself on the only available foot of space at the end of one of the berths, and looking on indulgently as Alice, under Kitty’s directions, proceeded to store the food.

  “Get off that wretched bed, slacker, and come and help,” said Kitty, standing with three tins of pineapple in a pyramid on one hand while she used the other to help keep her balance as she picked her way over the suitcases which were still on the floor. “If you don’t want to mess about stacking the grub, undo the suitcases and bung the clothes into the drawers. Then the suitcases have to be carted ashore and stored in that little lock-up shed. Get up and get a move on, do, or we shall never cast off today.”

  “Can’t duck. Can’t help.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we haven’t settled yet where we’re going to sleep and it would be horribly inconvenient if I packed your things under Alice’s bunk and hers under mine and all that.”

  She smiled serenely upon her baffled friend, and then got up and began to assist her. It did not take more than a few minutes to store away the tins. The bottles presented a little more difficulty, and a crate of beer, which was brought to the s
ide of the launch by a whistling youth presented what seemed at first to be another storage problem until it occurred to the ever resourceful Kitty that there were two little seats in the observation well just aft of the foredeck and that the crate could be pushed under one of them out of the way.

  “And now,” said Laura enjoyably, when everything seemed to be shipshape and they had tossed for beds, “to start her up.” She went to the cockpit and could be heard observing, “Hey, bonny boat, and ho, bonny boat, and all aboard the saucy Hispaniola!”

  “This is the moment I’ve been dreading,” confided Kitty in low tones to Alice. “To sit in a boat controlled (or not!) by old Dog, is to take part in a suicide pact.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” agreed Alice, who seemed, nevertheless, unperturbed. “But the man distinctly said that if you could drive a car you’d probably be all right, and Laura did take the wheel for a bit while we had our trial run at eleven o’clock this morning, and she seemed to be able to steer, and to know how to shut off the engine.”

  It was not, as a matter of fact, Laura’s first experience of the Broads, and she took the small cruiser up the river past moored craft of all kinds with a gentle skill, which restored Kitty’s confidence and justified Alice’s calm.

  The holiday had been Laura’s idea. She was in the happy position of having a brother who knew a young man who knew an older man who knew still a third man who owned the small motor-cruiser Dithyramb and kept her at Wroxham. The result of these entangled friendships had been a considerable lessening of the usual expenses attendant upon a fortnight’s holiday on the Broads.

  Laura opened the throttle, and the land began to slide by. Long hours of daylight remained, in which to cruise, laze, swim, fish and gossip. The three had lunched ashore, “to save,” as Laura expressed it, “inroading on the grub before we start,” and were looking forward to an afternoon on the water before finding moorings for the night.

  They cruised upstream as far as Coltishall, a pretty place with a mill, and came back downstream to Wroxham. They passed under Wroxham Bridge with the engine barely turning over, and moved quietly past moored craft on the farther side, and then came up behind a yacht, not too well handled, which was tacking from one side of the river to the other against a slightly freshening wind. It looked in ever-increasing danger of running aground, and Laura, reducing further the very low speed at which the Dithyramb was proceeding, crept up until, as the yacht took the port tack, she could open out the throttle and slide past.

  “They’ll be into the bank in a minute, the silly cuckoos,” she observed, reducing speed again to turn into Wroxham Broad. There were numbers of craft on Wroxham, from motor-cruisers considerably larger than their own, and some smart yachts freshly painted for the season, to punts and canoes on hire for the afternoon. There was plenty of room to cruise, however, and the girls circumnavigated the Broad before coming to moorings.

  “Tea on Hoveton Little Broad,” said Laura, shutting off the engine and climbing out of the cockpit on to the roof of the saloon. She lay flat, obligingly spreading the map across her stomach so that the others could come and look at it.

  Kitty folded it up and put it away, and they lay on Wroxham for an hour, Laura, who did not always sleep well at night, making up her rest whilst Kitty did some embroidery and Alice some knitting. At three they woke Laura and she took the cruiser on until a great loop of the River Bure brought them to their moorings for tea.

  “Pretty!” said Alice, appreciatively, looking at the small islands of which Hoveton Little Broad was possessed. Laura, having brought the cruiser to rest, took her ease on the cabin top again and demanded that the kettle should be put on.

  It was a glorious afternoon. The sun shone on the white paint, mahogany and brass of the Dithyramb as she lay at her pleasant moorings. The windows of the saloon twinkled with sunshine, and a streak of light made a broad bright path across the water. From other boats lying near, the sounds of voices, gramophones, and portable wireless sets came clearly and not unpleasantly on the air.

  In the tiny galley Kitty grappled with a paraffin stove whilst Alice cut bread and butter. One by one the other boats slipped away, and by half-past five the cruiser lay alone, and even the wooded shores, which gave some impression of Thames-side scenery, were as deserted as the shores of an unknown island.

  Laura, knowing that tea would take some time to prepare, descended to the cabin, pulled off her shirt, shorts, and sweater, kicked her feet out of her tennis shoes, put on her bathing suit and dropped overboard for a swim. She was dry and dressed again by the time the perspiring Kitty and the meek Alice came up with the tea. Alice had boiled three eggs from a private store she had brought. The eggs were partly swathed in handkerchiefs, as the cruiser boasted no egg-cups, Laura grasping hers with a strongly scented paraffin rag.

  “It was a handkerchief,” she objected, when Kitty, with a motherly cry of horror, commanded her to give it up, and herself dropped it into the cockpit. “Where are we going to moor for the night, by the way?”

  This proved to be a debatable point and they argued it, Kitty from the galley where she went to do the washing up, Alice from the saloon, where she was busy putting blankets on the berths (for these were used as seats during the day-time), Laura from the cabin, where she had the map spread on her knees.

  At last, as there was no majority verdict, it was decided to cruise on and stay the night as the first likely-looking spot. The cruiser carried no lights (one of the points of agreement with the owner had been that there should be no cruising after dark), so moorings had to be found in the early evening.

  “Of course, come to that, I suppose we could have stayed on the Broad with the islands, where we had tea,” observed Alice, as the Dithyramb slid by an inn near the village of Lower Street and the river bent sharply southwards to Horning Ferry. A quarter of a mile from the ferry a windmill stood up like a landmark, and a short distance from the windmill an inviting staithe caused Laura to draw in to the side and shut off the engine.

  “What about running up the staithe a bit to see what it looks like?” she suggested. The idea was well received, so she took the narrow channel carefully, and bade the others get forward and keep a look-out for weed which would foul the propeller. Fortunately the staithe had been cleaned and the passage was comparatively clear. To the delight of the girls, the staithe opened into a tiny Broad, unnamed (although marked) on the map. It was less than a hundred yards across at its widest point, and was shaped like a four-pointed star. What was even more intriguing was the fact that it proved to have two entrances onto the staithe, for they cruised all round it before deciding upon their night moorings. It was heavily wooded at the western end, and had marshy ground to the south.

  “Mosquitoes,” said Kitty, pointing to the map, speaking in the voice of doom, and then surveying the marshes. “For goodness’ sake let’s moor somewhere else for the night. I don’t want to get malaria.”

  This remark was received with groans of derision from Laura, and the comfortable opinion from Alice that there was not the slightest need to moor anywhere near the marshes. Thus overruled, Kitty fell silent, merely remarking later, when all three of them heartily wished that her advice had been followed, that she had never liked the spot from the beginning.

  “But you did!” protested Laura, every time the argument began. “You agreed to moor there, in the end, just as much as we did. You and your old mosquitoes!”

  At any rate, no thought of future horrors troubled the three as, before mooring for the night, they cruised back to the staithe and explored it to its end. This came abruptly in a board across the water, which said: Private Grounds. It was impossible to turn round in such a narrow waterway, so Laura had to take the cruiser out in reverse, an irritating operation but one which, fortunately, did not last very long. Once back on the Broad, and at moorings, the girls prepared the evening meal by broaching stores and making a jug of cocoa to drink with the tinned food. By half-past nine they were glad to put on
wraps, for, with the decline of the sun, the air was chilly and a white mist was creeping across the waters from the marshes.

  “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” said Laura, suddenly, with a shiver. “Come on. Who says bed?”

  The mattresses on the berths were well-sprung and comfortable. It had been agreed that Alice and Kitty should share the cabin and that Laura should take one of the two berths in the saloon. There was some desultory conversation after all had gone to bed, but it died away as first Kitty and then Alice fell asleep.

  Laura remained awake. She required little sleep, and often lay awake until one or two o’clock, resting, comfortable, and perfectly content, turning over in her mind the events of the day or planning the pleasures of the morrow.

  The night on the Broad was full of sounds, and she amused herself for some time by trying to interpret them. Some were easy enough—the plop and splash of leaping fish, the cry of a night-bird; but at about eleven o’clock came others to which she could assign no meaning. She lay in the dark, ears strained to listen, mind working but incapable of producing any likely explanation. The sounds grew a little more decided. She sat up and looked out, but it was too dark to see much.

  If the cruiser had been moored by the bank she might have thought of water-voles rustling their way from water to sheltered hole; but the cruiser was too far out on the Broad for even the sharpest ears to catch such a very slight sound. Besides, these mysterious stirrings were louder and came more regularly than would have been the case had the movements of voles been accountable for them.

  The sounds died away, and, listen as she might, she heard no more of them. She lay awake for some time, trying to interpret them, but could not. Her thoughts merged at last into dreams, and she slept until five in the morning.

  She got up quietly when she woke, for the daylight was already sufficiently advanced to allow her to find her way about the small saloon. She slipped off her pyjamas, put on her bathing costume, and went out to test the temperature. It was cold on deck. She lay flat on her stomach and reached down over the stern of the cruiser to dabble her fingers in the water. That was cold, too.