The House on the Strand (31 page)

"Naturally," he said, "you will have a great deal to discuss together. You realise, of course, that the house and contents will have to be valued for probate. I would appreciate it if I could see over it, by the way, if it wouldn't be too much trouble?"

"Why, of course."

We all rose to our feet, and Vita said, "The Professor had a laboratory in the basement, a most alarming place—at least, so my small sons thought. I suppose the things there would hardly go with the house but should be returned to his laboratory in London? Perhaps Mr. Willis would know what they are."

Her face was all innocence, but I had the impression that her mention of the laboratory was deliberate, and she wanted to know what was there.

"A laboratory?" queried the lawyer. "Did the Professor do any work down here?" He addressed himself to Willis. The little mouse-like man blinked behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. "I very much doubt it," he said with diffidence, "and, if he did, it would be of little scientific importance, and have no connection with his work in London. He may have made a few experiments, just to amuse himself on a rainy day—certainly nothing more, or he would have mentioned it to me."

Good man. If he knew anything he was not going to commit himself. I could see that Vita was on the point of saying I had told her the contents of the laboratory were of inestimable value, so I suggested that we should inspect the laboratory before visiting the rest of the house. "Come along," I said to Willis, "you're the expert. The room used to be an old laundry in Commander Lane's day, and Magnus kept a lot of bottles and jars in it." He looked at me, but said nothing. We all trooped down to the basement, and I opened the door.

"There you are," I said. "Nothing very exciting. Just a lot of old jars, as I told you."

Vita's face was a study as she looked around her. Amazement, disbelief; and then a swift glance of enquiry at me.

No monkey's head, no embryo kittens, only the empty rows of bottles. She had the supreme intelligence to remain silent.

"Well, well," said the lawyer, "the valuer might put a price of sixpence apiece on the jars. What do you say, Willis?"

The biophysicist ventured a smile. "I would think", he said, "that Professor Lane's mother may have preserved fruit here in former days."

"A still-room, didn't they call them?" laughed the lawyer. "The still-room maid would make preserves for the whole year. Look at the hooks in the ceiling! They probably hung the meat here too. Great sides of ham. Well, Mrs. Young, this will be your province, not your husband's. I recommend an electric washing-machine in the corner to save your laundry bills. Expensive to instal, but it will pay for itself in a couple of years, with a young family."

He turned, still laughing, back into the passage, and we followed. I locked the door behind me. Willis, who was hovering in the rear, bent to pick up something from the stone floor. It was a label from one of the jars. He gave it to me without a word, and I put it in my pocket. Then we tramped upstairs to inspect the remainder of the house, Herbert Dench making the remarkable suggestion that if we wanted to turn the property into an investment we might split the whole place up into flatlets for summer visitors, keeping for our own use the bedroom-suite with the view of the sea. He was still extolling the idea to Vita as we wandered round the garden. I saw Willis glance at his watch.

"You must have had about enough of us," he said. I told Dench on the way down that we would call in at Divisional Headquarters at Liskeard and answer any questions the police might want to put to us. "If you'd telephone for a taxi we could go there straight away, and have dinner in Liskeard later before catching the night train."

"I'll drive you myself," I said. "Hold on, there's something I want to show you. I went upstairs, and after a few minutes came back with the walking-stick. This was near Magnus's body. It belongs with the others in the London flat. Do you think they will let me keep it?"

"Surely," he said, "and the other sticks too. I'm so glad you've got this house, by the way, and I hope you won't part with it."

"I don't intend to." Vita and Dench were still a short distance off on the terrace.

"I think", said Willis quietly, "we had better tell more or less the same story at the inquest. Magnus was an enthusiastic walker, and if he wanted some exercise after hours in the train it was typical of him."

"Yes," I said.

"Incidentally, a young friend of mine, a student, has been looking up historical stuff for Magnus at the B.M. and the Public Record Office. Do you want him to continue?"

I hesitated. "It might be useful. Yes... If he turns anything up ask him to send it to me here."

"I'll do that."

I noticed for the first time an expression of loss, of emptiness, behind the horn-rimmed spectacles.

"What are your own plans?" I asked.

"I shall go on just the same," I suppose, he said. "Try to carry on something of Magnus's work. But it will be tough going. As boss and colleague he will be irreplaceable. You probably realise that."

"I do."

The others came up, and nothing further was said between Willis and myself. After a cup of tea, which none of us wanted but Vita insisted on getting, Willis suggested the move to Liskeard. I knew now why Magnus had chosen him as senior member of his staff. Professional competence apart, loyalty and discretion were the qualities behind that mouse-like appearance.

Once we were in the car, Dench asked if we might cover part of the route Magnus had taken on the Friday night. I drove them along the Stonybridge lane past Treverran farm and up to the gate near the top of the hill, and pointed across the fields down to the tunnel.

"Incredible," Dench murmured, "quite incredible. And dark, too, at the time. I don't like it, you know."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, if it doesn't make sense to me it won't to the Coroner, or to the jury. They're bound to see something behind it."

"What sort of thing?"

"Some sort of compulsion to get to that tunnel. And once he found it we know what happened."

"I don't agree," said Willis. "As you say, it was dark at the time, or nearly dark. The tunnel wouldn't have shown up from here, or the line either. I believe he had the idea to go down into the valley, perhaps take a look at that farmhouse from the other side, and when he got to the bottom of the field the railway viaduct interfered with his view. He scrambled up the bank to find out the lie of the land, and the train hit him."

"It's possible. But what an extraordinary thing to do."

"Extraordinary to the legal mind," said Willis, "but not to Professor Lane. He was an explorer in every sense of the word."

After I had landed them safely at the police headquarters I turned back for home. Home... The word had a new significance. It was my home now. The place belonged to me, as it had once belonged to Magnus. The strain that had been upon me through the day began to lift, and the weight of depression, too. Magnus was dead; I should never see him again, never hear his voice, rejoice in his company or be aware of his presence in the background of my life, but the link between us would never be broken because the home that had been his was mine. Therefore I could not lose him. Therefore I should not be alone.

I passed the entrance to Boconnoc, which in that other time had been Bockenod, before descending the hill to Lostwithiel, and thought of poor Sir John Carminowe, already infected with the dreaded smallpox, riding beside Joanna Champernoune's clumsy chariot on that windy October night in 1331, to die a month later, having enjoyed his position as Keeper of Restormel and Tremerton Castles for barely seven months. On the other side of Lostwithiel I took the road to Treesmill, so that I could have a closer view of the farms situated on the opposite side of the valley from the railway. Strickstenton was on the left-hand side of the narrow road, and, from the brief glimpse I had from the car, of considerable age, and what a tourist brochure would describe as picturesque. The pasture land belonging to it sloped downwards to a wood.

Once I was out of sight of the house I got out of the car and looked across to the railway on the other side of the valley. The tunnel showed up plainly, and even as I watched a train emerged like a straggling snake, yellow-headed, evil, and wound its way below Treverran Farm and disappeared down to the lower valley. The goods train that had killed Magnus had appeared from the opposite direction, climbing the rising ground and vanishing into the tunnel, a reptile seeking cover in the underworld, as Magnus, who had neither seen nor heard it, dragged himself dying to the hut above. I drove on down the twisting lane, noting on my left the turning which, I judged, led past Colwith Farm to the bottom of the valley and what remained of the original river stream. At some time, before the railway cut into the land, there would have been a track leading from Great Treverran across the valley to its smaller neighbour, Little Treverran.

Either farm might be the Tregest of the Carminowes. I went on down to Treesmill, and up the hill to the call-box in Tywardreath. I dialled the Kilmarth number, and Vita answered.

"Darling," I said, "it seems rather rude to leave Dench and Willis on their own in Liskeard, so I think I'll hang around until they have finished with the police, and then have dinner with them."

"Oh well," she said, "if you must. But don't be late. No need to wait for the train."

"Probably not," I told her. "It depends how much there is to discuss."

"All right. I'll expect you when I see you."

I rang off, and returned to the car. Then I drove back again to Treesmill and up the twisting lane, and this time took the turning that led to Colwith. The lane went on, past the farm, as I had thought it would, becoming steeper, and finally petered out in a small water-splash at the bottom of the hill. To the left, across a cattle-grid, was a narrow entrance to Little Treverran. The buildings themselves were out of sight, but a board with lettering on it said: W.P. Kelly. Woodworker.

I risked the water-splash and parked the car, out of sight of the lane, in the field beyond, close to a line of trees and only a few hundred yards from the railway.

I looked at my watch. It was a little after five. I opened the boot of the car and took out the walking-stick, which I had primed, in the dressing-room, with the last of bottle A, before showing it to John Willis in the library.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IT WAS SNOWING. The soft flakes fell upon my head and my hands, and the world all about me was suddenly white, no lush green summer grass, no line of trees, and the snow fell steadily, blotting the hills from sight. There were no farm-buildings anywhere near me—nothing but the black river, about twenty foot broad where I was standing, and the snow, which had drifted high on either bank, only to slither into the water as the mass caved in from the weight, revealing the muddied earth beneath. It was bitter cold; not the swift, cutting blast that sweeps across high ground, but the dank chill of a valley where winter sunshine does not penetrate, nor cleansing wind. The silence was the more deadly, for the river rippled past me without sound, and the stunted willows and alder growing beside it looked like mutes with outstretched arms, grotesquely shapeless because of the burden of snow they bore upon their limbs. And all the while the soft flakes fell, descending from a pall of sky that merged with the white land beneath.

My mind, usually clear when I had taken the drug, was stupefied, baffled; I had expected something akin to the autumn day that I remembered from the previous time, when Bodrugan had been drowned, and Roger carried the dripping body in his arms towards Isolda. Now I was alone, without a guide; only the river at my feet told me I was in the valley. I followed its course upstream, groping like a blind man, knowing by instinct that if I kept the river on my left I must be moving north, and that somewhere the strip of water would narrow, the banks would close, and I should find a bridge or ford to take me to the other side. I had never felt more helpless or lost. Time, in this other world, had hitherto been calculated by the height of the sun in the sky, or, as when I traversed the Lampetho valley at night, by the stars overhead; but now, in this silence and beneath the falling snow, there was no means of gauging whether it was morning or afternoon. I was lost, not in the present, with familiar landmarks close at hand, the reassuring presence of the car, but in the past.

The first sound broke the silence, a splash in the river ahead, and moving swiftly I saw an otter dive from the further bank and swim his way upstream. As he did so a dog followed him, and then a second, and immediately there were some half-dozen of them yelping and crying at the river's brink, splashing their way into the water in chase of the otter. Someone shouted, the shout taken up by another, and a group of men came running towards the river through the falling snow, shouting, laughing, encouraging the dogs, and I saw they were coming from a belt of trees just beyond me, where the river curved. Two of them scrambled down the bank into the water, thrashing it with their sticks, and a third, holding a long whip, cracked it in the alr, stinging the ear of one of the dogs still crouching on the bank, which plunged after its companions.

I drew nearer, to watch them, and saw how the river narrowed a hundred yards or so beyond, while on the left, at the entrance to a copse of trees, the land fell away and the stream formed a sheet of water like a miniature lake, a film of ice upon its surface. Somehow the men and the dogs, between them, drove the hunted otter into the gulley that fed the lake, and in a moment they were upon him, the dogs crying, the men thrashing with their sticks. The dogs floundered as the ice cracked, the surface crimsoned, and blood spattered the film of white above black water as the otter, seized between snapping jaws, was dragged from the hole he sought, and torn to pieces where the ice held firm. The lake can have held little depth, for the men, hallooing and calling to the dogs, strode forward on to it, careless of the crack appearing suddenly from one end to the other. Foremost among them was the man with the long whip, who stood out from his fellows because of his height, and his dress as well, a padded surcoat buttoned to the throat and a high beaver hat upon his head, shaped like a cone. "Drive them clear," he shouted, to the bank on the further side. "I'd as soon lose the lot of you as one of these," and bending suddenly, amongst the pack of yelping hounds, he lifted what remained of the otter from the midst of them and flung it across the lake to the snow-covered verge. The dogs, baulked of their prey, struggled and slid across the ice to retrieve it where it now lay, while the men, less nimble than the animals, and hampered by their clothing, floundered and splashed in the breaking ice, shouting, cursing, jerkins and hoods caked white with the falling snowflakes.