Faintley Speaking mb-27 Read online

  As there seemed to be no obvious answer to this question she decided to wait in hiding for a bit and find out whether there was anything more to be learnt. The one furnished room intrigued her. As there was no bed, it did not seem likely that it had been a caretaker’s lodging. Still thinking deeply, she reached the crumbling lodge. It seemed to offer as good a bit of cover as anywhere else, and, although the roof was damaged, it certainly offered some prospect of shelter from the storm which was obviously gathering, for the sky had become overcast and already a few spots of heavy summer rain were splashing down on her head.

  The floors of the lodge had disappeared. The interior was rank with nettles and bright with patches of willowherb. Laura, in her seafaring slacks, was able to cope with the nettles. She waded through them to shelter and settled down to keep watch from one of the broken windows which looked towards the house. She did not need to wait long. At the end of about a quarter of an hour the men appeared. By this time it was pouring with rain, and, to her great disappointment, both men were wearing large bandana handkerchiefs which partly obscured their faces.

  ‘Shades of Jesse James!’ thought Laura, vexed. ‘Now I shall never be able to recognize them if ever I meet them again! What a nuisance that attic window was all cobwebs!’ Their heads, too, were bent against the wind which was blowing full in their faces, and this made any chance of memorizing their appearance even more difficult. To her great interest, however, they were carrying a large package draped in one of the curtains which had been up at the windows of the room which they had entered.

  Laura gave them another quarter of an hour. Then she went back to the house, climbed in, and went straight to the furnished room to try to identify their burden. This was easy enough. Where the case of ferns had been was an empty wall with only the plug-marks showing.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ thought Laura. ‘What on earth can they want with that?’

  She left the house at once… by the front door, this time… and trotted back to the lodge. Here she climbed the gate and ran down the winding slope to the shore. She had no fear of catching up with the men and so betraying that she had been to the house. They had more than twenty minutes’ start of her and had been walking as fast as the wind and their burden would allow.

  Neither was there any sign of them on the beach. Moreover the other cruiser had gone. There might be no significance in this, as there was no evidence that the two men had come from the cruiser. It might have belonged to anyone. Laura returned in her own boat to Cromlech, and remembered, too late, that she had not been to the village of Wedlock after all. Next day she reported to Vardon that the case of ferns had been carried away from the house, and gave what description she could of the two men.

  ‘Fit hundreds of people,’ said Vardon. ‘Still, you might be able to pick them out again if you saw them.’

  Laura thought this very unlikely, and could see that he did, too. She half expected a reprimand for going alone to the house, but this did not come.

  ‘Funny about the ferns,’ she said, hoping for information.

  ‘Funny case altogether, Miss Menzies. What’s Mrs Bradley up to? We heard she was going to France.’

  ‘She’s gone. I don’t know what the idea is. We’ll know more when she comes back. She’s taken young Mark Street along with her. I expect them back on Monday night.’

  ‘I see. Your two men might interest Detective-Inspector Darling. He’s lost a couple of rather interesting brothers!’

  To Mark the whole of the journey was a fairy-tale told for his benefit. When at last they reached the caves Mrs Bradley put him in charge of a guide and went on her own tour of inspection. It was not her presence that Mark needed. Contrary to her satellites’ impression that she had received a kind of spirit message that Lascaux would provide the solution of their problem, or even the most faint, elusive clue that Miss Faintley’s mysterious activities and the riddle of her death were in some way connected with the prehistoric art of the caves, she had acted merely in obedience to one of her strongest emotions, a deep, abiding, amused and tender love of small boys. Mark, she sensed, had been much more bitterly resentful of and disappointed at the failure of his plan to visit France than his parents realized. Resentfulness and disappointment, she was well aware, do not strengthen character at Mark’s age; she considered it doubtful whether they did at any age. The Faintley case would make no further progress, she surmised, until school reopened and Miss Faintley’s life could be regarded from another angle. The opportunity was present, therefore, to remove the poison from Mark’s mind. True, she was not the no-doubt gallant and resourceful Ellison, but perhaps to fly to France instead of going by sea and train would compensate somewhat for that.

  That it had more than compensated she was soon aware, and the boy’s silent ecstasy enhanced her own pleasure in the trip. The custodians of Lascaux knew her, for she had spent several months there researching into the psychological significance of the Aurignacian cave-decorations and in attempting to read their symbolism in the light of modern psycho-analytical knowledge, so they allowed her to wander at will while she sought out her own favourite paintings, including that of the so-called Apocalyptic Beast with his forward-pointing horns, his watchful head, and his attitude of alertness, his firm legs planted and yet a-quiver, like those of a hunter’s hound. There was nothing dog-like, however, about this sagging-bellied, demoniacal creature with the Indian bullock’s bulge on his shoulders and his tremendously-muscled thighs. He was master, not servant, in the cave.

  When she rejoined Mark she had a short talk with the guide, and obtained an item of intelligence which she filed in her mind as being too good to be true. She had guessed that the prehistoric caves, not Lascaux, particularly, but many of those which could be found all along the Dordogne, had been used during the war by the French Resistance. What she learned now was that a man called Bannister had taken a prominent part in the Resistance, having been, in fact, a British Intelligence officer. The name stuck. Mark, who had almost no French, picked it up, too.

  ‘He said Monsieur Bannistaire,’ he remarked. ‘Didn’t mean Mr Bannister, did he?’

  ‘I dare not suppose that he meant your Mr Bannister, child.’

  ‘Well, Bannister’s been here, to Lascaux. It wasn’t just that he’d bought the book. I mean, you could tell, just like when they give you a jogger lesson on some place either they’ve been to or they haven’t. You can always tell. Besides, why should a maths beak tell us about a thing like this unless he’d been here?’

  ‘Sound arguments, logically expressed, child.’

  ‘But why caves?’ demanded Laura when they got back.

  ‘Ferns might grow in them,’ Mrs Bradley cryptically replied. ‘From what I hear from our indefatigable police officers, ferns would appear to be the foliage, if not entirely the root, of the matter.’

  Chapter Seven

  MISS GOLIGHTLY

  ‘Stern Pluto shall himself to mirth betake,

  And crowned ghosts shall banquet for thy sake.’

  shakerley marmion – Proserpine

  « ^ »

  Laura knew her employer far too well to ask too many questions, but she turned over Mrs Bradley’s remark about caves and ferns, and light dawned.

  ‘You went inside that house yourself with the police, and spotted that case of ferns,’ she said at breakfast next morning. Mrs Bradley cackled at, but did not deny, this statement.

  ‘We must bring our holiday to a close,’ she remarked. ‘There are various people we ought to see and various things we ought to do before we come back to Cromlech.’

  ‘We are coming back, then? I rather hoped we were. We’ve had less intriguing cases than this one. Ferns!’ She brooded, visualizing them growing. There was an old lady in her home town who kept the front-room window full of them to make a screen so that she could peer out but the passers-by could not peer in. There were harts-tongue ferns, shining in the Devonshire rain; ferns under dripping cascades in the north from
which Laura came; ferns in damp woods; bracken fronds (not, she supposed, true ferns) in the New Forest clearings, on the sandy wastes around Sandringham, all over Surrey and Exmoor. The road from Porlock to Lynmouth was bordered with them. There were rare varieties of ferns much prized by collectors. There was maidenhair fern for bouquets or to put with carnations to make a spray for a dance frock. But all these ferns were living. They began in their infancy wrapped round by, curled up in, a sort of red-brown moss. They unfolded, prettiest before they reached maturity. They ate and drank and breathed and propagated their kind. There had been ferns before there were monkeys or men. There were ferns so tiny that only a botanist would find them; and there were ferns like trees – ferns as tall and as graceful as palms.

  She found herself disliking ferns very much.

  ‘They’re sinister, aren’t they?’ she said aloud. Mrs Bradley cackled again, but did not answer the question. Instead she observed:

  ‘A letter from the Queen to play croquet.’

  ‘The Duchess in this case being –?’

  ‘Mark’s headmistress.’

  ‘Why her?… Oh, of course! The late Faintley’s boss. Don’t suppose she knows very much about her.’

  ‘We must leave no stone unturned —’

  ‘No avenue unexplored. Right-o. Are you coming back with me in the cruiser, or would you prefer to go by train? The weather’s cleared up again, thank goodness, so it ought to be quite a decent trip. To think, if it hadn’t been for that beastly rain, I could have got those two men identified! I’m sure they were up to no good.’

  ‘I always enjoy a sea-trip,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘What a pity the boy’s mother was too nervous to allow him to join us! And don’t worry too much about the men. You certainly did everything you could, and even if you had seen their faces it is most unlikely that it would have helped.’

  ‘I suppose,’ suggested Laura, ‘it wouldn’t be a good idea to push along to that house again and have another look round?’

  ‘I hardly think so, child. The men have got what they wanted. They are not likely to take the risk of turning up there again, and you saw for yourself how little the house has to tell us. Until the men proved its value by removing it, there was nothing to suggest that the case of ferns had any significance. Now we know it has, and I am infinitely obliged to you for finding that out.’

  ‘You’d have found it out for yourself, later on,’ said Laura shrewdly. ‘I still don’t believe you flew to France just to find smugglers’ caves.’

  ‘Those were not smugglers’ caves, child, but I will admit that after I had been over that house (as you surmised) with the police, I had a long conversation over the telephone with the last known occupant of the house. I asked him what he had left behind, because it seemed inexplicable that he should have left one room more or less furnished.’

  ‘How did you get in touch with him?’

  ‘The police knew his name, of course, as the school had been advertised in all the local papers for miles around, and a scholastic agency soon put me upon his track. He replied that nothing had been left behind, so far as he remembered. Then I mentioned the case of ferns, but he was certain that the school had never possessed one. Interesting, is it not?’

  ‘Focus on ferns, as the B.B.C would say. But why France? We deduced you must have got hold of some information, or else had the whale of a hunch.’

  ‘I thought Mark would like the trip, child.’

  Laura looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘Now stop pulling my leg,’ she said, ‘and come and help me overhaul the gear.’

  ‘No. You go and see to the boat. I’ll pack,’ her employer replied. ‘We must be off betimes in the morning.’

  ‘For me as well? You’re an angel. Celestine packed for me coming down. If she hadn’t I should have brought about half the things I did bring. I can’t think how she gets what she does into a suitcase. A cabin trunk wouldn’t contain it all if I did the packing!’

  It was not a long run from Cromlech to the Hamble River, and the early morning was ideal. The cruiser bounced and nose-dived, flung up spray, and spread a fantail of foaming wash behind her. It was an exhilarating trip. It also seemed a long way from the magic caves of Lascaux, Mrs Bradley reflected – about forty thousand years, in fact.

  ‘There we are,’ said Laura, when she had brought the cruiser over from the Calshott side in order to get a good view of the buoy which marked the river entrance. She altered course from due north to north-east to follow the channel. It was not a tricky entrance, particularly on such a good day, but Mrs Bradley remained seated and silent whilst Laura performed the necessary manoeuvres, for the river was popular with yachtsmen who had to be given right of way, and, at that time of year, it was crowded.

  Skilful and careful, Laura came on past Warsash and Bursledon, and at last brought the Canto Five to her usual moorings.

  ‘There’s George with the car,’ she said when the cruiser was tied up. ‘Good. He can help with the luggage.’

  The stocky chauffeur saluted them gravely, tucked them into the back seat, stowed away the suitcases and said, ‘The Lyndhurst road, madam?’

  ‘Yes, George. We want our lunch. Do you know where Kindleford is?’

  ‘I have heard of it, madam. I will look it up on the map. The papers have made an interesting thing of the case of Miss Lilian Faintley.’

  ‘Was her name Lilian? Oh, yes, I remember it was Lilian at the inquest. Are you acquainted with any headmistresses, George?’

  ‘Only with one, madam, and she, unfortunately, is no longer among us.’

  ‘Indeed? And who was that?’

  ‘The lady who directed my infant intelligence from the age of five until seven, madam. I had an immense passion for her. I may say, without offence, that, apart from my mother, she is the only woman I have ever really loved.’

  ‘Present company excepted,’ said Laura, with a mischievous grin.

  ‘Naturally, miss,’ agreed the chauffeur with unimpaired gravity.

  ‘I’ve never taken the micky out of George yet,’ said Laura regretfully, as they drove off towards the green tunnels and sunny heaths of the New Forest. ‘Do you suppose he ever laughs?’

  ‘I have known him to do so once, many years ago, when a man laying down the law to him on the subject of types of cars, slipped and fell backwards into a tub of swill.’

  ‘I’d like to have been there. When do we pursue this headmistress at Kindleford school?’

  ‘Mark tells me that the school reopens on Wednesday – that is, to-morrow – so there is little doubt that Miss Golightly will be there preparing for the new school year, and we should be able to obtain a comparatively uninterrupted interview with her if we set off directly after lunch.’

  ‘She will bless us! Still, that can’t be helped. What part, if any, do I play?’

  ‘Time will show, child. Look! Quite a number of New Forest ponies! I owned one when I was a child.’

  Laura glanced at her. She found this sudden change of subject disquieting. She said, ‘Did you?’ in a non-committal voice and changed the subject herself.

  ‘Are you going to the Kindleford police, as well as to Miss Golightly?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Some interesting news came through from them to the Inspector who is investigating the death at Cromlech. It seems that a certain Mr Mandsell, an impecunious author —’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’

  ‘I imagine so… went to the Kindleford police as soon as he read about the murder, and told them a rather interesting story which may have considerable significance. It appears that this Mr Mandsell took, on a public telephone, a call from Miss Faintley which, it had clearly been arranged, was to have been picked up by somebody else. The result was that Mr Mandsell, for a whim, went to a railway station, picked up a parcel and delivered it at an obscure and not too much above-board little shop in a back street. He had been told to ask for a receipt, forgot to do so, went back and was blandly informed that no parcel had been
handed in.’

  ‘Very fishy. Whom did Miss Faintley think she’d been talking to on the phone? Did that come out?’

  ‘No, it did not, and the police have no clue to his identity. But for Mr Mandsell’s having picked up the call by mistake, they would not even know that this man existed.’

  ‘Mandsell may be lying?’

  ‘The Kindleford police do not think so. They have made inquiries, and there is no reason to doubt that he had never so much as heard of Miss Faintley before. My own view, from what little I know at present, is that Miss Faintley’s correspondent was one of the men teachers at the school.’

  ‘A teacher? What makes you think that? Teachers, on the whole, are not given to mixing themselves up with fishy parcels and grimy, two-purpose little shops, are they?’

  ‘No, decidedly they are not, but one or two things in Mr Mandsell’s evidence struck me as pointers to Miss Faintley’s collaborator. First, although there was this arrangement to call some man up on a public telephone at a given time —’

  ‘You’d think it would have been more practical for him to have called her up, under those circumstances, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You certainly would… but I’m coming to that. It all fits in with my theory that he was a teacher. Well, now: Miss Faintley lived with an aunt in this little provincial town of Kindleford, but we know from the police that the aunt’s house is not on the telephone. Therefore, wherever she was, Miss Faintley was not at home when she spoke to Mandsell. The time, incidentally, was round about nine in the evening. All the shops, including the post office, were shut, and had been, all the afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, she must have been at school,’ said Laura, ‘but wasn’t it rather late in the evening for that?’

  ‘It was the end of the term, remember. It is likely that some festivity was going on… a tennis dance, perhaps. It is a mixed school with a mixed staff, you see.’