Dead Man's Quarry (34 page)

“Explain!” cried Cousin Jim violently, as John hurried off. “It's you, sir, who should explain! Ruffians! Yes, murder me if you like, you scoundrel! Put another nail in your coffin!”

Rampson's patient voice floated to John's ears as he picked up Mr. Clino's abandoned gun and hurried towards the shrubbery:

“Well, let's both explain, then. But you start. After all, you
did
try to shoot us, you know! I do think you owe us—”

John switched on his torch, for after the uproar caused by the capture of Cousin Jim he could scarcely hope to take the other wanderer by surprise, and flashed it around from tree to tree. He could still hear his friend remonstrating with his captive, who was more peaceful now, though an occasional objurgation broke through the even tenor of Rampson's voice. Even while all his senses were on the alert for sign or sound of the walker in the shrubbery, John's mind was puzzling over Mr. Clino and his part in this night's work. Was he an accomplice of that other who a few moments ago had shown the light of a torch among the rhododendron bushes? And if so, what in heaven's name were they doing? Then a more plausible explanation struck John, and he almost laughed aloud. Possibly Cousin Jim, like themselves, had become aware of movements in the house and garden and had bravely ventured forth with a gun to defend his cousin's home; and had taken John and Rampson for burglars. But this hardly explained his terror at the sight of Rampson nor the maledictions which he was even now calling down on that peaceable person's head.

John gave the problem up, and the next moment the light of his torch fell on something which put Mr. Clino and his aberrations entirely out of his head. A piece of pale drapery billowing in the soft, light breeze from the other side of the cedar trunk where he himself had lately taken cover. He approached cautiously over the close-cut grass, and stopped, waiting for a movement from whomever stood there hidden from him by the stout bole. The light of his torch fell on the glitter of sequins and beads: the long sash of a woman's evening gown. And still there was no movement, except that the piece of silk still fluttered limply, caught around the rough bark of the great tree.

Suddenly John became afraid. Had some second dreadful tragedy taken place in this dark graden? In a moment he moved round the tree, holding his torch at the level of his eyes, and though he experienced a shock of surprise, he did not see what he had dreaded.

Blodwen Price was standing with her back against the tree, her head leaning supported on the rough bark. Her hands hung limply at her sides and her eyes were open, looking straight into John's with a queer pensive stare. She was fully dressed in evening clothes, hatless and cloakless, and her hair, caught on the scarred surface of the trunk, strayed out in filaments like spiders' webs.

“Blodwen.”

She said remotely :“Oh, it's you, John,” and took his arm, swayed and leant heavily on him as though tired out or faint. But something wary and calculating in her bright eyes belied her action.

“Whatever's been going on? I heard a gun go off. I was—I was frightened and hid.”

John caught the hesitation and reluctance of her tone, and intuitively knew that this last statement was a lie, and a lie she hated to tell. A woman of Blodwen's strength of character does not care to write herself down a coward.

“It was Mr. Clino. He thought we were burglars or something.”

“Cousin Jim! Whatever is he doing out at this time of night?”

“What are you, Blodwen?” asked John seriously, resisting her attempt to draw him away from the trees out on to the lawn.

She looked at him with wide, feverish eyes.

“Do turn off that beastly torch, now you know I'm not a ghost. It blinds me.”

John lowered it from her face, but did not turn it off.

“You've stained your dress,” he remarked.

She glanced down at the green moss-stain on her light draperies.

“I know,” she said indifferently. She began to speak very fast:“The fact is, John, I thought I heard a rabbit squealing in a trap—I know that wretched little David sets traps about the place, though he's been told not to— and I couldn't bear to think of the poor creature suffering out here, so I came down to look for it and put it out of its misery. I'm a fool about animals, I know.”

“Find it?” asked John laconically.

“No. I must have been mistaken.”

“I'll go and have a look for it now I'm here.”

She pulled impatiently at his arm.

“No, no! I've looked everywhere. Take me indoors.”

He caught up the hand she had laid on his sleeve and looked at it in the torchlight. It was grimed with soil, stained with moss, and the nails were full of brown earth. He looked up from it and met her eyes, wide, desperate, full of an appeal he could not understand.

“Blodwen, what have you been doing in the shrubbery?”

“I've told you.”

“The truth?”

“Of course.” Morris Price himself could not have looked at a questioner with a haughtier stare.

John detached himself from her grasp and taking his torch and Clino's gull went on into the shrubbery among the rhododendrons where he had seen the light. The rhododendron bushes formed a little screen to a small hollow where pale heather, some harebells, moss and ferns grew in confusion. He flashed his torch over the ground and it lit at once upon a small wooden stake with a broken end of string attached, such as gardeners use to mark out borders. He picked it up and found that it was covered for eight inches from the point with traces of damp and brown soil.

“John.”

Looking up he saw that Blodwen had followed him. She stood a little way off like a ghost in her light gown and addressed him with sudden tremulousness.

“Don't bother any more, John. Go back to London and forget about us. You've been kind—so kind. It isn't fair to take up your time. Leave us alone now to manage as best we may. Don't bother any more. I ask you not to.”

One thing was plain—there was a secret she wished to keep. What that secret might be John had for the moment no idea. But her bright eyes clung to his, her pale lips smiled with a ghastly attempt at cajolery, her hand fluttered caressingly up and down his sleeve. And suddenly John felt sick and weary. Could Morris Price only be vindicated at the expense of Blodwen? Was this woman he had liked and admired really a monster willing to let her uncle go to the gallows for her own crime? In a flash John's thoughts travelled back over all that he knew of Blodwen and found no certainty anywhere. He asked aloud:

“Blodwen, was it you, then, who murdered your cousin?”

In the light of the torch he directed on her, he saw the strangest expression of surprise, uncertainty, even something like relief, pass over her face. She hung on the verge of a denial. Then, after a pause in which she seemed to collect and marshal her wits:

“Should I tell you if I had?” she asked very low.

Her eyes wandered to the earthy stake lying on the moss, and John, looking downwards, thought he could detect a small patch of moss around which the tiny filaments were flattened and earthy—a patch which had been removed and relaid.

“No, no!” cried Blodwen as he stooped, and would have caught up the gun, but he was too quick for her. And even as he put his finger under the little patch of moss and found that it came loosely away, he thought: Is this the behaviour of a guilty woman? To give herself away so utterly?

The earth was disturbed below the moss, loose and crumbling. He pressed it with his forefinger and it gave way, like a hole which has been lightly filled in. He looked around for some instrument to clear the hole, but had perforce to use his fingers. Whatever lay buried there was small and, to judge by the earth on the gardener's stake, lay not more than eight inches below the surface. But it is not easy to clear with one's fingers a vertical hole made by a pointed stake, especially when one has a loaded gun at one side of one and a desperate woman at the other. Luckily the ground, covered by moss and protected by the bushes from the heat of the sun, was fairly soft.

Blodwen, after watching him in still despair for a moment, suddenly dropped on her knees at his side.

“John, John!” she said brokenly. “Don't! Don't! For your own sake as well as ours! It can do no good. You're under no compulsion to go on with this case! Give it up! It wasn't I who killed Charles! If it had been, I'd find a better way out than this!”

Cautiously widening the hole with the stake and thrusting his hand down, John felt some small, hard thing like a pebble. He drew it up, and brushing the earth from it held it in the torchlight. It was a man's heavy signet-ring of gold, set with a large oval blood-stone.

Blodwen became silent as suddenly as she had begun to speak. They crouched together over the torch, gazing in silence at the dead man's ring. Then John rose to his feet and offering his hand to Blodwen helped her to hers.

“Blodwen,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice, “I know what's the matter with you. You've made up your mind that your uncle's guilty after all. Just when we've brought Felix to think him innocent, too. Do you know what Rampson says? He says you Prices are enough to drive a sane man crazy. And so you are, you know. All these dreadful doings at dead of night, with Mr. Clino firing guns at one, and Miss Price burying things in shrubberies, are enough to upset the nerves of Sherlock Holmes himself—”

John let his light, matter-of-fact voice run on, hoping to bring back the overstrung woman at his side to a sense of normality. But the darkness, the night wind, the rustling, ghostly rhododendrons, were not conducive to common sense.

“I did think,” he ended sadly, “that you were a sensible person, anyhow.”

The sensible person gave a dim, pathetic smile and suddenly burst into hysterical tears in his arms. For a moment John wondered whether she had final, fatal proof of her uncle's guilt. Murmuring the commonplaces of comfort he looked at the little trinket in his hand—a commonplace little ornament enough, with its plain, solid hoop of gold and unengraved seal of red-flecked green stone. Looking through the bushes, he saw that the lights were on in the library. There was peace in the garden, but for Blodwen's smothered sobbing. Rampson had managed to lure his captive withindoors.

In a moment or two Blodwen had regained her self-control.

“I'm sorry,” she said, drawing stiffly away from him. “I didn't think I could be such a fool. There seems to be a limit to what one can bear, after all. And now this —this horrible ring! I'd better tell you, I suppose—”

There was a questioning note in her voice as if she were still half-minded to leave him in the dark to think what he would.

“You certainly had,” said John emphatically. “And whatever the truth is, it can't be so dreadful after all. You wouldn't have thought it so dreadful yourself if it hadn't been for the strain you've been living under this past week. Come, Blodwen. I am certain that your uncle is innocent.”

“But why? But how?” she faltered. “Oh, so was I at first! But everything points to him and I can't be certain any longer! I feel a traitor, but I can't, I can't!”

She seemed disposed to weep again, but mastering herself said quietly:

“I found that ring pushed down at the side of the seat in my uncle's car. That's all. The car he was driving when he—when he met Charles. I was out in the car last night, and I dropped a shilling in the dark. And I felt about and pushed my hand down at the side of the cushion, and found—that.”

“And you think he put it there?”

“Who else? It was the last straw, John! I've been fighting and fighting not to think him guilty. But that coat found on the Forest! And now this! Oh, it's so like Uncle Morris! To be so careless, I mean, to be so thoughtless—to underestimate so the forces that would come to work against him!”

“There's one obvious thing to be said, my dear. What did he want with the ring at all? Why didn't he leave it on Charles's finger?”

“Oh, I don't know! You said yourself, long ago, it might have slipped off in a struggle.”

“A ring must be loose to slip off accidentally, very loose. But be comforted, Blodwen, this ring was tight on Charles's finger. Lion Browning told me so, and young Lion's an intelligent observer.”

“But who—?”

“Who took it off and planted it in your uncle's car? Ah, who? The murderer. And who is he? I don't know yet. Obviously not a friend of your uncle's, that's all we can say at present. But I'm feeling rather optimistic to-night.”

Blodwen, a little cheered by his calm and talkative manner, took his arm, and they went together across the lawn towards the house.

“Optimistic!” she echoed with a faint sigh. “Oh; John, why? Has anything happened that I don't know about?”

“A lady tried to poison me this afternoon,” said John with enjoyment. “Perhaps two ladies, but I think only one. Nothing makes a detective so happy, my dear, as an attempt on his life. It shows that somebody is finding him a nuisance.”

Rampson and Mr. Clino were occuping chairs opposite one another in the library. As John came in from outside the latter rose hastily. He was still wearing his Inverness but had laid aside the Homburg hat. His thick grey hair stood up like the crest of a tropical bird. He was obviously puzzled, offended and very much on his dignity. So much so that even the sight of Blodwen, dishevelled in her evening dress, did not cause him more than a momentary surprise.

“Blodwen, my dear!” he exclaimed. “Were you also disturbed by our guests' curious behaviour?” He glanced balefully at Rampson. “Perhaps, sir, you will now be so good as to allow me to return to my room.”

“Really, Cousin Jim,” said Blodwen with a faint smile. “I do think you owe our guests an explanation, if it's true that you've been trying to shoot them.”