Run! (24 page)

“Slugs!” said Sally with a shudder. “I once saw a most revolting yellow slug in a cellar, and if I trod on one, I should probably die.” She shuddered again. “James, don't let Jocko go down into the cellars. It's not only the slugs—I used to have a perfectly dreadful dream about being buried where no one could find me, and the cellars here always bring it back. There are two layers of them, one under the other.
Don't
let him go down.”

“I don't know how I'm going to stop him,” said James, and with that they came to the top of the stair.

A black corridor ran away to the right and to the left. Jock turned left, and they followed him. There was a second turn almost at once. Even by candle-light it was easy to see that this was the old part of the house. Floor and walls were of stone. They passed the head of a winding stair. Jock lifted his candle to show the sloping, uneven steps.

“That's the way the Queen's necklace went, and Giles after it. It comes out on the far side of the hall. Daphne had it all wrong. This is the room where Giles was sleeping, so of course they took this way. The great stair would have been miles round. No, the thief came up this little stair, and they both hared down it in the dark.”

He turned from the stair and flung open an oak door with an arched top. The room inside was small. The big fourpost bed almost filled it. There was some old panelling upon the walls, but the roof was of stone. There was one small window high up in a corner. A mouldy smell hung upon the cold air. James decided that nothing on earth would persuade him to sleep in that damp, forbidding bed. The hangings might have been there since the days of Giles. They were of a dark damask which had once been red but was now all gone away to a brownish colour like rust or long-spilled blood. The mattress reeked, and pillows and bolster were clammy to the touch as he and Jock pulled them away from the bed head. In so small a space three candles gave light enough. It showed the Rere coat deeply carved with its three bats.

“Well, there they are,” said Jock, “but I don't know what we're going to do about them.”

They all looked at the bats. The head-board, very massive, was about two inches thick. The carving cut into an inch of it.

“There simply wouldn't be room to hide anything there,” said Sally.

“Not in the head-board—at least I shouldn't think so. Let's get the mattress off.”

There wasn't anything under the mattress, and after feeling and poking it all over they came to the conclusion that there wasn't anything in the mattress either. There might be a hiding-place in the panelling. If there was, they failed to find it.

“It may be simply anywhere,” said Sally in a despairing voice. “A hundred people might search this place for a hundred years and never find it.”

Jock laughed.

“Three very persevering people have been doing their damnedest ever since Aunt Clementa died. If they had found what they were looking for, they wouldn't still be trying to murder our James. Or would they? I dunno. The criminal mind is a very odd thing. Anyhow I believe Giles is a wash-out. Let's try the Headless Lady. Her proper name, by the way, was Eleanor Rere, and she lost her head in the reign of Edward IV—I don't remember why.”

“Her husband did it,” said Sally. “He was jealous, and he had a very hasty temper. He did it with a battle-axe, and then went into a monastery to repent.”

Eleanor Rere's room was, if possible, colder and mouldier than Giles's. It was the same size and shape, but without the panelling. The stone walls stood stark, and there was no bed. There was no furniture of any kind. Across the chimney breast, three in a row, were the Rere bats carved in the solid stone. They gazed at them with a helpless feeling. What could you do to a carved stone bat—push it, poke it, bang it on the head? And when none of these things produced the slightest impression, stand helplessly back and look at it again.

“I believe this is a wash-out,” said Jock. “Of course you could hide almost anything up the chimney, but I don't see Aunt Clementa climbing chimneys, and it doesn't fit in with the bit about the thing opening quite easily and not to force it.

“No,” said James.

There was a silence.

“We'd better go and have another look at the bat in Aunt Clementa's bedroom,” said Sally. “It's so much the most likely place—yes, Jocko, it is. And it's no good your saying it was ‘bats' in the letter, because she might quite easily have written ‘One of the bats—the one in my room,' or something like that.”

They went back to the stair head and along the right-hand corridor to an immense room with a Brussels carpet, a mid-Victorian wall-paper, and cumbrous mahogany furniture, but instead of the large bed which should have gone with dressing-table, wardrobe and chest of drawers, a plain iron bedstead painted white stood small and lonely against the long wall.

“They made her have it,” said Sally, “because of having to lift her and wash her, but she did hate it so, poor old pet. She used to go on and on about her old bed and all the Reres who had died in it.”

“Where is it?” said James. “And are there any bats on it, Sally?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, no. It wasn't really old, you know—just a Victorian mahogany affair like the rest of the furniture. And anyhow they'd got it away from her long before this hiding business cropped up. Now I say that this is the place where she hid the book or whatever it was. It's an obvious hiding-place, and all we've got to do is to find out how to open it.”

The room had two large windows hung with dark red curtains.

“Look!” said Sally, holding up her candle. “You see all the rest of the room is papered, but here between the windows there's a piece of panelling, and there's the bat right in the middle of it. This part of the house is early seventeenth century, and it was all panelled once. I expect the old panelling is there somewhere behind the paper still, but when they covered it up they left this bit untouched, and what I say is, they must have had a reason for not papering it over. I'm quite sure the panel opens, and that is why it was left. And the most natural place for Aunt Clementa to hide anything in
would
be her own room.”

Jock laughed mockingly.

“All right, if it opens, open it! I spent three quarters of an hour over it, broke all my nails, and completely lost my temper. By the time I gave it up I felt an inward conviction that Aunt Clementa was having us on.”

“Perhaps she was,” said James.

Sally shook her head vehemently.

“Oh, no, she wasn't. You didn't see her—and hear her, like I did. She was in deadly earnest, and she only wasn't afraid because she knew she was going to die, so she didn't care. Besides, she was a Rere, and they've never been afraid of anyone. ‘Rere knows no feare' is one of their jingling mottoes. If I was all Rere, I shouldn't be afraid of slugs.”

They spent half an hour over the panel without any result. Jock, declaring that he had done his bit, merely watched them with his hands in his pockets. Before the half hour was up he retired to the depths of a large easy chair and appeared to be sunk in slumber.

“It's no good,” said Sally at last in a despairing voice. “What next?”

James got up from the floor and dusted the knees of his trousers.

“Well, I think I had better put the Rolls away. I suppose there's a garage?”

“Oh, yes—round the left of the house to the back and straight on. Jocko's car is there, but there's plenty of room. I'll come with you.”

“Oh, no—I'll find it. You get J.J. waked up and think out what we'd better do next. I won't be any time at all.”

Sally controlled a faint inward shiver. She wanted to go with him. She didn't want to stay in this horrible dark house, in this horrible dark room, where the old shaky hand had clung to hers and the old shaky voice had whispered, “They don't know that I get out of bed—and walk about the house—in the night,” and then, “Wicked people—wicked, wicked people.”

Without opening his eyes Jock said, “She's afraid to stay with only me to protect her—but he can't hold your hand whilst he's driving, you know.”

“Better stay here,” said James.

Sally stayed.

XXXII

James turned the Rolls and drove round two corners of the house. A brick archway at the far end of it took him into the big paved yard which went back to coaching days. He thought it was the same place to which he and Sally had come on that foggy afternoon which was, incredibly, only a fortnight ago, but they had come to it then by way of the front of the house and a flight of old steps.

An open coach-house door showed him the back of Jock's car with plenty of room beside it for the Rolls. He ran her in and got out. His mind for the moment was completely taken up with the question of whether there would be any means of locking the coach-house door. The Rolls was worth about two and a half thousand pounds, and since she was Colonel Pomeroy's property and in his charge, he had got to make quite sure of her safety. His conscience was not too happy as it was, because he ought really to have put her away before he did anything else. It wasn't to be supposed that Ambrose Sylvester was a mere car thief, but he might conceivably take the point of view that the enemy's transport was fair game. James's conscience accused him of neglect of duty. It took a nasty sermonizing tone to him as it enquired how he would have felt if he had come down to find that Colonel Pomeroy's car had been stolen.

It was, perhaps, because he was listening to this sermon that he did not hear either sound or movement in the dark coach-house. He tried to think afterwards whether he had heard anything at all, but he could remember nothing. There was neither footfall nor hurried breathing, only the sudden blow which sent him crashing into unconsciousness.

The man who had knocked him out switched on an electric torch and turned it on the slumped figure. A voice spoke from behind him.

“Take care—he mustn't see you.”

The man laughed.

“
Chérie,
he will see no one—no one at all, any more.” He spoke in French.

The woman's voice said coolly, “Is he dead?”

Henri Niemeyer was stooping, turning the body over. He let the beam play on James's face, on James's sightless eyes.

“I think not—not yet. I got him under the ear. You see how useful it is to be able to see in the dark. And now we will put him in the hayloft.”

“Why don't you finish him?”

Henri's tone mocked her as he said,

“Dear Hildegarde, what a soft heart you have! But you shouldn't let it run away with your head. This good James will be found with a broken neck. He will have ditched his car, smashed into a telegraph-post, and been thrown through the windscreen. The injuries he receives must occur before he is dead. There must be nothing to raise a doubt in the mind of a meddlesome police surgeon. My blow under the ear will pass very nicely, and if he survives his little affair with the windscreen, it will be quite easy to finish him off. For the moment he has enough. Now if you will take his feet—”

James came to himself some time later. The process was an unpleasant one. Henri had hit very hard, so hard in fact that but for the unusual toughness of his skull there might have been no awakening. As it was, he blinked, wondered where he was, wondered what had happened to his head, and sat up. He at once became very giddy and fell over sideways upon a rough, tickling mass of hay. He found himself with straws in his mouth still wondering where he was.

His next effort was more successful. Having sat up, he remained sitting, and after some minutes his head began to clear and he began to remember. He remembered that he was at Rere Place—and he had come out to put away the car—and someone had knocked him out—

Instantly his mind was filled with a furious anxiety about the Rolls. In his present state of pain and confusion he could not get past the Rolls. If she had been stolen or damaged, his name was mud. He got up on his knees, groaned, and subsided again upon the hay. Car thieves—and he hadn't even had time to lock the doors—no, no time—the open coach-house door—another car—J.J.'s car—plenty of room—ought to have put her away before—ought to have … He could get as far as that, and then he couldn't get any farther, because other wasn't any farther to get. The crash came next—blackness, and pain, and this waking—troubled—
frightfully
difficult.…

He stayed still, and things got clearer again. It was like a space clearing in a fog. Into this clear space Sally came, looking at him with a glint of green between her lashes. And that was the first moment in which he realized Sally's danger. Sally in that enormous, dark, rambling house. Sally with only J.J. to look after her.

Quite suddenly everything became terrifyingly clear. Not car thieves—no, nothing so easy and safe as car thieves. It wasn't the Rolls that was aimed at. It was James Elliot, who knew too much, who was thought to know too much. And it was Jock and Sally West, who shared a dangerous knowledge, and who had six thousand a year between them which would go to Ambrose Sylvester—if they died. The last three words stabbed like forked lightning. James groaned aloud, and at the sound of it he made a great effort and got to his feet with a stumble which bruised his shoulder against the wall. He had to stand quite still for a minute, and at once the thought of Sally was there again. He must go to her—without any delay—because nobody knew—what might be happening—nobody—Sally—but he must know.…

He began to grope with his hands along the wall. He had been in a hayloft with Sally. If it was this one, there was a door in the gable end—not a real door—more like a shutter—and a ladder running up to it from the yard. But he couldn't find the shutter. It wouldn't be behind the hay, and the hay was high on two sides of him. He moved carefully and felt at the other two walls. The hay would be lowest towards the gable end, so the door would be there. And presently he found it, a rough shutter. He could feel the hinges—but there wasn't any handle. Well, that was absurd, because what's the good of a door if you can't open it?