The Longer Bodies Page 4

  Kost came trotting towards her.

  ‘A creditable performance, trainer. The Home Cinematograph, operated by Grandson Anthony, will now record your method. Repeat.’

  Kost bowed, walked back to his starting place, and picked up the pole. Great-aunt Puddequet produced and blew a small silver whistle. From the sunk garden appeared Timon Anthony with the cine-camera.

  ‘Trainer Kost will demonstrate the pole vault,’ she said. ‘Record his performance.’

  Timon Anthony grinned and nodded. The rest of the practising athletes came up to watch.

  ‘The chap shows style,’ observed Francis to Malpas, as Kost cleared the bar and made a faultless landing.

  ‘So do I, over ten feet,’ retorted his elder brother. ‘Put that bar up a foot and a half, and there would be a different tale to tell. Everybody is the same. I look like a world-beater when I’m doing four feet six over the high jump. I always take great care to be doing about that height when Aunt appears. She told me yesterday how nicely I was getting on. Kost has bunged it into her head that style is everything, you see. Unfortunately, she saw me sit down on five-eleven this afternoon, so I’m no longer the blue-eyed boy.’

  ‘Well, style is everything, to a certain extent,’ said Hilary. ‘Look at batting, for instance.’

  ‘Yes, but the prettiest style gets you nowhere unless you’ve got the guts to back it up with,’ contributed Clive Brown-Jenkins. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Half-past twelve, thank God. Time for a bath and some lunch. Come on. The bloke’s putting on his sweater, so he’s finished for the morning.’

  III

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Celia. She was walking round the sports field with her brother before the afternoon’s work began.

  ‘Thought I kicked something,’ replied Clive. ‘Yes, I did, too.’

  He bent and picked up a javelin from the long grass where it had lain hidden from view.

  ‘That’s rather queer,’ he said. ‘There was one lying there this morning. Aunt sent Joe away with it. I wonder who left it here again? We had better take it in. It will get spoilt.’

  They were about to put their suggestion into practice when Great-aunt Puddequet’s bathchair emerged from the central gateway and was propelled swiftly towards them. Clive and Celia walked up to it.

  ‘What is this?’ said the old lady, pointing to the javelin with her umbrella.

  Clive held it out.

  ‘Attendant,’ squealed Great-aunt Puddequet, ‘take the implement to the trainer. Desire him to restore it to its rightful place, and ask him how it is that he leaves the tools of his trade about the field so that they become damp, mildewed, and rusty.’

  ‘Very good, mam,’ replied Joe.

  He took the javelin and glanced at it curiously.

  ‘Beg pardon, mam, but this is the same javelin you give me this morning to take away, and I took and stood it in a corner of the kitchen to get dry, and then I cleans the rust off the end, and then I up and takes it over to the gymnasium and puts it beside the other two there, and ’ere it is again.’

  He looked dubiously at it, as though it were the rod of Moses and might turn into a serpent at any moment.

  ‘Attendant,’ screamed Great-aunt Puddequet, tapping the shaft of the javelin irritably with the ferrule of her umbrella, ‘be off! Be off! And don’t be a fool!’

  Joe grinned, and retired. He found the trainer engaged in putting a new battery into a powerful electric torch. He smiled when he saw Joe, and put the torch down.

  ‘I suppose I’m to come and start work, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Is the boss there?’

  ‘She is,’ said Joe.

  Kost laughed.

  ‘You know anything about electricity, boy?’ he asked, looking at the torch.

  Joe smiled sadly and wagged his head.

  ‘Just enough to lose me money at the White City when I goes ’ome to see me poor old mother,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason in particular,’ said Kost. ‘What’s this?’ And he pointed to the bloodstained javelin.

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘Know anything about this ’ere?’ he enquired, pointing to the tip of the javelin.

  Kost did not appear to understand the import of the question.

  ‘I should say so, perhaps,’ he said, taking the long shaft from Joe’s hand. ‘A Swede named Lundqvist holds the record for the last Olympic Games. Two hundred and eighteen feet and a bit. Come outside.’

  Joe complied with the request.

  ‘Now, then, I bet you can’t throw it as far as that clump of meadowsweet. This is the action, perhaps. Look.’

  ‘Nothing doing,’ said Joe, arresting the movement with a touch of his hand on the trainer’s arm. ‘I been sent to ask you whether you chucked it at the old lady just now.’

  ‘Me?’ Kost grinned and lowered the javelin. ‘Sure I didn’t! Why should I?’

  Joe lowered his voice.

  ‘Look ’ere,’ he said. ‘It’s a damn funny thing. This morning she finds this ’ere javelin in the grass, and she cusses some and sends me away with it. That there Miss Caddick points to the end of it—this ’ere tin part—and talks about blood. I thinks it’s rust. But when I comes to clean it, blowed if it ain’t blood after all. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kost. He took the javelin and looked attentively at the point. ‘Except that, unless I’m mistaken, there’s blood on it again. Did you clean it all off properly, perhaps?’

  ‘I did, mate.’

  Joe squinted down at the dark discoloration and then touched it gingerly with the tip of his forefinger.

  ‘Well, come on to the old lady,’ he said, ‘and tell ’er what you think.’

  Kost, however, declined to do anything of the kind until the afternoon’s work was over.

  ‘I will do what I am to be paid for, perhaps,’ said he. ‘And that is not to run after silly old ladies—no! It is to teach the leap, the put, the throw, perhaps. I will go later.’

  ‘Trainer,’ said Great-aunt Puddequet, as Kost drew near the bathchair at the conclusion of the short afternoon’s practising and instruction, ‘attend to me.’ She indicated the javelin, which was propped against the brick wall which divided the sunk garden from the sports ground. ‘What do you mean by mislaying this implement? Slackness, trainer, slackness!’

  ‘Madam,’ replied Kost, drawing himself up and looking her straight in the eye, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about, perhaps. Since it was decided—wasn’t it?—that Mr Anthony should not participate in the training, perhaps, the javelins, to my knowledge, have not been used by any of the gentlemen, and I disclaim responsibility for them —yes, sure.’

  Great-aunt Puddequet laughed.

  ‘Creditably proclaimed, trainer,’ she observed. ‘Attendant!’

  Joe stood to attention.

  ‘Take the implement to the nearest police station.’

  ‘Very good, mam!’

  ‘And get the inspector to find out the nature of that dullish substance on the point.’

  ‘Blood,’ said Miss Caddick again, with the same intense pleasure she had shown on the preceding occasion.

  ‘Nonsense, companion!’ squealed old Mrs Puddequet. ‘How can it be blood? Attendant, off with you!’

  ‘But, if you are certain it is not blood, Great-aunt,’ said Hilary, ‘why send it to the police?’

  ‘You’re a fool, Grandnephew!’ screamed the old lady, switching round in the bathchair so suddenly that she almost precipitated herself and it through the doorway into the sunk garden. Malpas put a steadying hand on the conveyance, and said soothingly:

  ‘Never mind him, Aunt. What about tea? It’s half-past four.’

  Great-aunt Puddequet looked at her gold watch.

  ‘Time. Quite time,’ she said. ‘Grandnephew Malpas, take me in. I suppose you will all look sulky if I ask you to come out and practise again later this afternoon, but I am compelled to state, Grandnephews, that you make little
progress. Be earnest! Show grit! Be determined. Rome was not built in a day! But it was built! Build it, Grandnephews! Build it!’ And she thumped on the ground with her umbrella to lend emphasis to her words.

  ‘I’ll see masel’ drooned first,’ said Hilary under his breath.

  Miss Caddick, startled by hearing that dire quotation thus heretically burlesqued, gave a quaint little snort of laughter.

  ‘You’re an ass, Companion Caddick,’ whispered Hilary, working his eyebrows up and down as old Mrs Puddequet did when she was in a rage.

  ‘Mr Hilary, you really must behave yourself,’ said the angular lady, bridling coquettishly, and holding her lace handkerchief to her lips. ‘You young gentlemen are too humorous!’

  ‘Seriously, sister Caddick,’ said Hilary in a low voice, as the two of them dropped to the rear of Great-aunt Puddequet’s bathchair, ‘if something doesn’t happen soon, I’m going home. This is a hole. However do you stick it?’

  ‘It’s my living,’ responded Miss Caddick, ‘and Mrs Puddequet is not a hard employer. Not hard at all. And always goes to bed at just after nine.’

  ‘Always?’ asked Hilary. ‘Oh, that’s not so bad.’

  ‘Yes, always,’ replied Miss Caddick. She glanced hastily about her, and then dropped her voice. ‘But I would like to know, Mr Hilary, who it was took her bathchair out in the wet last night?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Caddick, ‘it was taken out. And that’s all I know. At nine o’clock last night she went to bed, and at eight o’clock this morning Joe asked to see me. Mr Hilary, that bathchair was soaking wet. We had an awful job to dry it in the kitchen without her knowing. It may still be damp for all I know. And if it is still damp, and she has the rheumatism, whatever shall I feel like? But I dared not tell her, Mr Hilary, because I made sure, and so did Joe, that some of you young gentlemen had been playing about with it! But if so, Mr Hilary, I do please wish you would not do it! I should get into such dreadful trouble if she found out! I might even be dismissed from my post! And I have certain expectations, Mr Hilary, you see. Not Great Expectations—she giggled girlishly—’but still expectations. And if I were to be dismissed—’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Hilary hastily. ‘Quite. Well, I didn’t take the bathchair out last night, and I don’t know who did. Does that satisfy you? I suppose it doesn’t.’

  ‘Well, it was out,’ said Miss Caddick, ‘because it got soaked with the rain, and there was no rain, Mr Hilary, until after ten last night. And a bathchair may run downhill by itself, but not out of the door of a lockup shed that is locked up, Mr Hilary! So there it is! And then that javelin—I don’t like it. If you gentlemen must have your joke with the old lady, I wish you would be a little less ghoulish. Please, Mr Hilary!’

  Hilary looked at her and sadly shook his head.

  ‘I suppose it’s a waste of breath to inform you, sister Caddick, that I didn’t so much as know that there were any condemned javelins about the place,’ he said. ‘Still, for what it is worth, I pass the information on. Neither is it my idea of a joke to attempt to scare an old woman of ninety.’

  He sighed.

  ‘And to think that in you, sister Caddick, I fancied I had discovered a twin soul,’ he added sorrowfully.

  At twelve o’clock that night there were once more three young Flemish Giants in each hutch; and in the outer scullery, to which he had gained admission by methods peculiarly his own, Scrounger Joseph Herring was cleaning some yellowish clay off his boots.

  Chapter Four

  Friday Night and Saturday Morning

  I

  PRISCILLA YEOMOND REMOVED her evening frock and hung it up in the wardrobe. She closed the wardrobe door, picked up the candle from the dressing-table, and walked over to a long Venetian mirror on a writhing wrought-iron stand, and, holding the candle aloft, stood for a moment studying her very pleasing reflection in the glass. At last, with a little sigh, half of satisfaction, half of amusement at knowing herself satisfied, she replaced the candle on the dressing-table and began to brush her shining, short, dark hair.

  It was nearly one o’clock. She had intended coming to bed earlier, but when Great-aunt Puddequet retired at nine o’clock they had put on the gramophone and there had been dancing. Then at half-past eleven she had accompanied Celia up the stairs, but had lingered in the girl’s room, talking, and had only just wished her good night. She liked Celia. She wondered what Amaris Cowes was like. Dick Cowes was queer. Perhaps Amaris was a freak. She was a plucky freak, anyway. She had cut loose from her family and had struck out on her own. It was sink or swim, thought Priscilla. There was Celia, too. She was only eighteen, and yet she had work to do and earned money. Mentally she reviewed her own life. It seemed a trifle feeble and inadequate compared with the comings and goings of these Amazonian cousins.

  A sharp crack at the window caused her to start violently. For a full thirty seconds she stood there, her heart thudding. Recovering herself, but still trembling, she went to the casement, drew aside the curtains, and peered out. Even in the darkness, she thought, it was possible to make out a darker shadow below. She pushed open the window and called softly, but in a voice sharp with nervous tension.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  There was no reply. Straining her eyes, she realized that the dark shadow was the new cypress tree which Great-aunt Puddequet had caused to be planted in the sunk garden that morning.

  The candle behind her flickered and sputtered in the draught from the open window. Priscilla was about to withdraw her head when the moon struggled out and showed with astonishing clearness a strange sight. Someone was pushing Great-aunt Puddequet’s bathchair round the cinder track at a fair running pace, and, so far as Priscilla could make out, Great-aunt Puddequet was in it! At one o’clock in the morning! . . .

  Suddenly the candle gave up the unequal contest and went out. At the same moment, in the enveloping darkness immediately behind Priscilla, someone coughed.

  Priscilla shut the window with trembling hands and swung round.

  ‘Who—who’s there?’ she called. Her own high-pitched voice surprised her.

  There was no answer or sound of any kind.

  Priscilla suddenly realized that she was looking straight at the luminous dial of an alarm clock which stood on top of a small cupboard on the landing opposite her bedroom door.

  The door was open, then. Somebody had come in!

  Priscilla gave a wild glance round the darkened room. A feeling of panic came over her. With shaking hand she relighted the candle and by its light gathered up the things she required for the night. Go to the window she would not. Stay by herself she could not.

  ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance to you,’ she observed, walking into Celia’s bedroom, armed with nightdress, dressing gown, and brush and comb, ‘but I’m not going to sleep alone.’

  Celia looked round in surprise. She finished dabbing night-cream on to her face and then smiled happily.

  ‘Three cheers for the company,’ she announced.

  ‘Before we go to bed I propose we lock the door,’ said Priscilla. ‘I’d feel ever so much safer. I don’t want to frighten you, but someone came into my room just now in a sort of queer way—I can’t explain it quite—and I know I saw Great-aunt’s bathchair careering round the sports field at twenty miles an hour.’

  Celia giggled, unimpressed, and, bending down and groping under the large four-poster bed, she produced the leg of a chair. It was made of solid mahogany, was beautifully turned and polished, and made a weighty, well-balanced weapon. She grasped it in both hands and wagged it playfully at Priscilla.

  ‘Anybody who comes in here will wish he hadn’t,’ she observed with spirit. ‘I vote we fix a notice on the door: Visitors Enter at Their Own Risk. What about it?’

  Priscilla laughed.

  ‘I know you think I’m an idiot,’ she said, ‘but I don’t care. And I’ve brought a box of chocolates, so you needn’t say you don’t want me, beca
use I’ve made up my mind to stay.’

  Half an hour later Celia was still awake. A vision came to her of Great-aunt Puddequet taking the air in the bathchair round the cinder track, and she began to chuckle softly. An insane desire to go and see whether she was still at it took hold of her. She slid out of bed.

  The moon was full now. The sky was clear. Every object in the room was clearly to be seen.

  ‘Lovely night for a record-breaking run,’ thought the sister of a champion cyclist, giggling to herself.

  She crept to the door and turned the key. Priscilla stirred in her sleep, responsive to the slight sound of the moving lock, but she did not wake. Celia took her dressing gown off a chair, and slipped out of the room. The thick carpets everywhere gave grateful warmth to her bare feet. She passed up the long passage to Priscilla’s room and peeped in at the open door.

  A figure was bending over the bed.

  Celia Brown-Jenkins drew in her breath sharply. Then she said, very distinctly:

  ‘Hands up!’

  The figure swung round to face the sound of her voice.

  ‘Shut up, you little idiot,’ he hissed.

  ‘Oh, Clive, it’s you!’ said Celia helplessly. ‘Whatever are you doing?’

  Clive stepped to the door and laid his hand on her arm.

  ‘Get back to bed,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s something funny going on, and I’m out to know what it is. Whose room is this?’

  ‘It’s Priscilla’s. But she’s in my room now,’ said Celia. ‘Clive, go to bed.’

  Clive drew her on to the landing and softly closed the door of Priscilla’s room.

  ‘I can’t get back to my hut tonight,’ he whispered. ‘Door’s locked between the sunk garden and the sports field. And the kitchen regions are all locked up too. I should make an awful row getting out. I shall go down to the dining room and sleep on the settee.’