The Complete Four Just Men (74 page)

Chapter 14

The pedlar

The man with the pipe was standing within half a dozen paces of her. She was going back through the gate, when she remembered Aunt Alma’s views on the guardianship.

‘Are you waiting here all day?’ she asked.

‘Till this evening, miss. We’re to be relieved by some men from Gloucester – we came from town, and we’re going back with the nurse, if you can do without her?’

‘Who placed you here?’ she asked.

‘Mr Gonsalez. He thought it would be wise to have somebody around.’

‘But why?’

The big man grinned.

‘I’ve known Mr Gonsalez many years,’ he said. ‘I’m a police pensioner, and I can remember the time when I’d have given a lot of money to lay my hands on him – but I’ve never asked him why, miss. There is generally a good reason for everything he does.’

Mirabelle went back into the farmhouse, very thoughtful. Happily, Alma was not inquisitive; she was left alone in the drawing-room to reconstruct her exciting yesterday.

Mirabelle harboured very few illusions. She had read much, guessed much, and in the days of her childhood had been in the habit of linking cause to effect. The advertisement was designed especially for her: that was her first conclusion. It was designed to bring her into the charge of Oberzohn. For now she recognized this significant circumstance: never once, since she had entered the offices of Oberzohn & Smitts, until the episode of the orangeade, had she been free to come and go as she wished. He had taken her to lunch, he had brought her back; Joan Newton had been her companion in the drive from the house, and from the house to the hall; and from then on she did not doubt that Oberzohn’s surveillance had continued, until . . .

Dimly she remembered the man in the cloak who had stood in the rocking doorway. Was that Gonsalez? Somehow she thought it must have been. Gonsalez, watchful, alert – why? She had been in danger – was still in danger. Though why anybody should have picked unimportant her was the greatest of all mysteries.

In some inexplicable way the death of Barberton had been associated with that advertisement and the attention she had received from Dr Oberzohn and his creatures. Who was Lord Evington? She remembered his German accent and his ‘gracious lady’, the curious click of his heels and his stiff bow. That was a clumsy subterfuge which she ought to have seen through from the first. He was another of her watchers. And the drugged orangeade was his work. She shuddered. Suppose Leon Gonsalez, or whoever it was, had not arrived so providentially, where would she be at this moment?

Walking to the window, she looked out, and the sight of the two men just inside the gate gave her a sense of infinite relief and calm; and the knowledge that she, for some reason, was under the care and protection of this strange organization about which she had read, thrilled her.

She walked into the vaulted kitchen, to find the kitchen table covered with fat volumes, and Aunt Alma explaining to the interested nurse her system of filing. Two subjects interested that hard-featured lady: crime and family records. She had two books filled with snippings from country newspapers relating to the family of a distant cousin who had been raised to a peerage during the war. She had another devoted to the social triumphs of a distant woman, Goddard, who had finally made a sensational appearance as petitioner in the most celebrated divorce suit of the age. But crime, generally speaking, was Aunt Alma’s chief preoccupation. It was from these voluminous cuttings that Mirabelle had gained her complete knowledge of the Four Just Men and their operations. There were books packed with the story of the Ramon murder, arranged with loving care in order of time, for chronology was almost a vice in Alma Goddard. Only one public sensation was missing from her collection, and she was explaining the reason to the nurse as Mirabelle came into the kitchen.

‘No, my dear,’ she was saying, ‘there is nothing about The Snake. I won’t have anything to do with that: it gives me the creeps. In fact, I haven’t read anything that has the slightest reference to it.’

‘I’ve got every line,’ said the nurse enthusiastically. ‘My brother is a reporter on the
Megaphone
, and he says this is the best story they’ve had for years – ’

Mirabelle interrupted this somewhat gruesome conversation to make inquiries about luncheon. Her head was steady now and she had developed an appetite.

The front door stood open, and as she turned to go into the dining-room to get her writing materials, she heard an altercation at the gate. A third man had appeared: a grimy-looking pedlar who carried a tray before him, packed with all manner of cheap buttons and laces. He was a middle-aged man with a ragged beard, and despite the warmth of the day, was wearing a long overcoat that almost reached to his heels.

‘You may or you may not be,’ the man with the pipe was saying, ‘but you’re not going in here.’

‘I’ve served this house for years,’ snarled the pedlar. ‘What do you mean by interfering with me? You’re not a policeman.’

‘Whether I’m a policeman or a dustman or a postman,’ said the patient guard, ‘you don’t pass through this gate – do you understand that?’

At this moment the pedlar caught sight of the girl at the door and raised his battered hat with a grin. He was unknown to the girl; she did not remember having seen him at the house before. Nor did Alma, who came out at that moment.

‘He’s a stranger here, but we’re always getting new people up from Gloucester,’ she said. ‘What does he want to sell?’

She stalked out into the garden, and at the sight of her the grin left the pedlar’s face.

‘I’ve got some things I’d like to sell to the young lady, ma’am,’ he said.

‘I’m not so old, and I’m a lady,’ replied Alma sharply. ‘And how long is it since you started picking and choosing your customers?’

The man grumbled something under his breath, and without waiting even to display his wares, shuffled off along the dusty road, and they watched him until he was out of sight.

Heavytree Farm was rather grandly named for so small a property. The little estate followed the road to Heavytree Lane, which formed the southern boundary of the property. The lane itself ran at an angle to behind the house, where the third boundary was formed by a hedge dividing the farmland from the more pretentious estate of a local magnate. It was down the lane the pedlar turned.

‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ said the companion of the man with the pipe.

He opened the gate, walked in, and, making a circuit of the house, reached the orchard behind. Here a few outhouses were scattered, and, clearing these, he came to the meadow, where Mirabelle’s one cow ruminated in the lazy manner of her kind. Half-hidden by a thick-boled apple-tree, the watcher waited, and presently, as he expected, he saw a head appear through the boundary hedge. After an observation the pedlar sprang into the meadow and stood, taking stock of his ground. He had left his tray and his bag, and, running with surprising swiftness for a man of his age, he gained a little wooden barn, and, pulling open the door, disappeared into its interior. By this time the guard had been joined by his companion and they had a short consultation, the man with the pipe going back to his post before the house, whilst the other walked slowly across the meadow until he came to the closed door of the barn.

Wise in his generation, he first made a circuit of the building, and discovered there were no exits through the blackened gates. Then, pulling both doors open wide:

‘Come out, bo’!’ he said.

The barn was empty, except for a heap of hay that lay in one corner and some old and wheel-less farm-wagons propped up on three trestles awaiting the wheelwright’s attention.

A ladder led to a loft, and the guard climbed slowly. His head was on a level with the dark opening, when: ‘Put up your hands!’

He was looking into the adequate muzzle of an automatic pistol.

‘Come down, bo’!’

‘Put up your hands,’ hissed the voice in the darkness, ‘or you’re a dead man!’

The watcher obeyed, cursing his folly that he had come alone.

‘Now climb up.’

With some difficulty the guard brought himself up to the floor level.

‘Step this way, and step lively,’ said the pedlar. ‘Hold your hands out.’

He felt the touch of cold steel on his wrist, heard a click.

‘Now the other hand.’

The moment he was manacled, the pedlar began a rapid search.

‘Carry a gun, do you?’ he sneered, as he drew a pistol from the man’s hip pocket. ‘Now sit down.’

In a few seconds the discomfited guard was bound and gagged. The pedlar, crawling to the entrance of the loft, looked out between a crevice in the boards. He was watching, not the house, but the hedge through which he had climbed. Two other men had appeared there, and he grunted his satisfaction. Descending into the barn, he pulled away the ladder and let it fall on the floor, before he came out into the open and made a signal.

The second guard had made his way back by the short cut to the front of the house, passing through the garden and in through the kitchen door. He stopped to shoot the bolt, and the girl, coming into the kitchen, saw him.

‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I don’t know, miss.’ He was looking at the kitchen windows: they were heavily barred. ‘My mate has just seen that pedlar go into the barn.’

She followed him to the front door. He had turned to go, but, changing his mind, came back, and she saw him put his hand into his hip pocket and was staggered to see him produce a long-barrelled Browning.

‘Can you use a pistol, miss?’

She nodded, too surprised to speak, and watched him as he jerked back the jacket and put up the safety catch.

‘I want to be on the safe side, and I’d feel happier if you were armed.’

There was a gun hanging on the wall and he took it down.

‘Have you any shells for this?’ he asked.

She pulled open the drawer of the hall-stand and took out a cardboard carton.

‘They may be useful,’ he said.

‘But surely, Mr – ’

‘Digby.’ He supplied his name.

‘Surely you’re exaggerating? I don’t mean that you’re doing it with any intention of frightening me, but there isn’t any danger to us?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a queer feeling – had it all morning. How far is the nearest house from here?’

‘Not half a mile away,’ she said.

‘You’re on the phone?’

She nodded.

‘I’m scared, maybe. I’ll just go out into the road and have a look round. I wish that fellow would come back,’ he added fretfully.

He walked slowly up the garden path and stood for a moment leaning over the gate. As he did so, he heard the rattle and asthmatic wheezing of an ancient car, and saw a tradesman’s trolley come round a corner of Heavytree Lane. Its pace grew slower as it got nearer to the house, and opposite the gate it stopped altogether. The driver, getting down with a curse, lifted up the battered tin bonnet, and, groping under the seat, brought out a long spanner. Then, swift as thought, he half turned and struck at Digby’s head. The girl heard the sickening impact, saw the watcher drop limply to the path, and in another second she had slammed the door and thrust home the bolts.

She was calm; the hand that took the revolver from the hall-table did not tremble.

‘Alma!’ she called, and Alma came running downstairs.

‘What on earth – ?’ she began, and then saw the pistol in Mirabelle’s hands.

‘They are attacking the house,’ said the girl quickly. ‘I don’t know who “they” are, but they’ve just struck down one of the men who was protecting us. Take the gun, Alma.’

Alma’s face was contorted, and might have expressed fear or anger or both. Mirabelle afterwards learnt that the dominant emotion was one of satisfaction to find herself in so war-like an environment.

Running into the drawing-room, the girl pushed open the window, which commanded a view of the road. The gate was unfastened and two men, who had evidently been concealed inside the trolley, were lifting the unconscious man, and she watched, with a calm she could not understand in herself, as they threw him into the interior and fastened the tailboard. She counted four in all, including the driver, who was climbing back to his seat. One of the newcomers, evidently the leader, was pointing down the road towards the lane, and she guessed that he was giving directions as to where the car should wait, for it began to go backwards almost immediately and
with surprising smoothness, remembering the exhibition it had given
of decrepitude a few minutes before.

The man who had given instructions came striding down the path towards the door.

‘Stop!’

He looked round with a start into the levelled muzzle of a Browning, and his surprise would, in any other circumstances, have been comical.

‘It’s all right, miss – ’ he began.

‘Put yourself outside that gate,’ said Mirabelle coolly.

‘I wanted to see you . . . very important – ’

Bang!

Mirabelle fired a shot, aimed above his head, towards the old poplar. The man ducked and ran. Clear of the gate he dropped to the cover of a hedge, where his men already were, and she heard the murmur of their voices distinctly, for the day was still, and the far-off chugging of the trolley’s engine sounded close at hand. Presently she saw a head peep round the hedge.

‘Can I have five minutes’ talk with you?’ asked the leader loudly.

He was a thick-set, bronzed man, with a patch of lint plastered to his face, and she noted unconsciously that he wore gold ear-rings.

‘There’s no trouble coming to you,’ he said, opening the gate as he spoke. ‘You oughtn’t to have fired, anyway. Nobody’s going to hurt you – ’

He had advanced a yard into the garden as he spoke.

Bang, bang!

In her haste she had pressed butt and trigger just a fraction too long, and, startled by the knowledge that another shot was coming, her hand jerked round, and the second shot missed his head by the fraction of an inch. He disappeared in a flash, and a second later she saw their hats moving swiftly above the box. They were running towards the waiting car.