Stop Press (54 page)

‘For Discretion, too,’ continued Shoon, ignoring this, ‘is a goddess. You will agree, Benton, that there is much in the lives even of the most blameless which they would not care to have pass from the keeping of the discreet to that of the indiscreet among their acquaintance.’ He looked thoughtfully down the table once more. ‘I am almost surprised that Winter’s face is not at least faintly familiar to me. Benton, you are acquainted with his career?’

‘I wish I could help your curiosity, Shoon. But really, I have never much enquired.’

‘He has never, by any chance, been in – ah – a branch of the government service? Dons sometimes drift that way for a time. I had a dear friend – a scholar of great distinction – who was for a time in the Military Intelligence. A most interesting calling, do you not think, Miss Cavey?’

‘Really’ – Benton abandoned the attempt to eat – ‘you take me into very unfamiliar territory. I think it hardly possible.’

‘There are matters’, said Shoon, ‘about which it is satisfactory to make sure.’ He picked up and idly toyed with a carving knife before him. ‘Yes, indeed.’ Once more he looked reflectively down the table. ‘What an interesting family the Eliots are.’

‘It has occurred to me–’ began Miss Cavey. It had occurred to Miss Cavey that her present hosts at Rust would capitally fill a niche in her projected
Season of Mists
. But she was not given the opportunity to enlarge on this topic now.

‘Look at them, Benton,’ Shoon continued. ‘Regard each in turn. Does nothing come back to you? Scrutinize them, I beg.’

Benton scrutinized – evidently keenly conscious that meantime he was being scrutinized himself. ‘I wish’, he said, ‘that my memory was not so indifferent. But I am really almost certain that – apart from my pupil – I never saw any of them before they came across today. Except – again – Mr Eliot himself. He did once call on me at college.’

Shoon shook his head musingly. ‘It is curious,’ he murmured. ‘Like so much that has been happening – and that promises to happen – around us, it is curious. My mind is on Muscat – or was it Dunkot? Benton, does that bring nothing to your recollection? Look again, my dear man.’

Benton looked again – fixedly at Belinda. ‘No,’ he declared with an attempt at finality, ‘I can discover no link of association at all.’

Shoon shook his head in perplexity. ‘Miss Cavey,’ he said as if politely abandoning a barren subject, ‘I am very interested in plots. Let us talk about that.’

The little man André raised a hand and pointed the index finger into space. He paused dramatically; the hand moved slowly on a horizontal line above his head; the index finger, working from the first joint, made arabesques in air the while.

‘This’, said André, ‘is Folly Hall.’

The moving finger ceased to write; the hand made a showman’s flourish. André in disfavour with his own party from Rust, was beguiling himself by recounting the tale of its embarrassments to the Friends of the Venerable Bede.

‘And this’ – Timmy heard Patricia’s voice in his ear – ‘is Nightmare Abbey: come and explore it.’ She spoke urgently, as if André’s description of the affair of the architrave had brought something suddenly to her mind. ‘And don’t worry. I’ll see you don’t miss the west tower.’

They slipped from the room and rambled hand in hand through the great shadowy house. They passed through raftered galleries, panelled halls, armouries where the moonlight streaming through stained glass threw irregular splashes of colour on Patricia’s frock. They went up great carven staircases past bedroom floors where servants were scuttling about with manchets and chet-loaves and hot water bottles; up an uncarpeted staircase to a deserted floor; and from there up a winding staircase to a little round empty room. They were both panting slightly by the time they had got so far, but above this Timmy presently heard a curious sighing sound.

‘The wind is rising,’ said Patricia in an absent, conversational voice. She was climbing a loft-ladder in the centre of the room. ‘Help, Timmy.’

Timmy held her ankles to steady her, watching with a dubious interest as she strained her slim figure backwards and pushed up the trapdoor above her head. The sighing of the wind became a loud alarming moan. They were on the roof.

Great expanses of lead swam in the full winter moonlight like a calm sea – with here and there the incongruous swell of a frozen and suspended wave where the roof rose in a ridge. In front were battlements, waist-high. Timmy stepped forward, put his hands on the clammy stone to steady himself, and looked down. Far below was something slightly swaying in the wind: it was the topmost bough of a tremendous oak. And then Timmy saw that they were very high, that they were on the highest turret of the main building. There was only one higher point at the Abbey – the great west tower which dominated the ruins.

He turned round. Patricia was leaning on her back against the final pitch of the turret, her feet braced in the leaden gutter. Her body was like a recumbent shadow, her face was pale to the moon, her eyes were following some star through a racing labyrinth of little clouds. ‘I suppose,’ she said raising her voice against the wind, ‘you’ve got a fair head?’

‘Of course I’ve got a fair head. I’ve–’ He paused in quick suspicion. ‘But what about you? I’ve a notion Belinda said–’

‘Come round this side.’ Patricia vanished as she spoke; Timmy scrambled after her to the other side of the turret. She took his hand. ‘I promised you fun… You see?’

Timmy saw. This was the point at which the house and ruins touched. From the point at which they stood a great bogus-broken wall swept down and away into the darkness. It was without rail or parapet; it was, however, broad and well cemented, though with an irregular surface. Up and down, but always gradually sinking like a giant dipper, it swooped away into the night. There was nothing suicidal about what could be seen of it: granted nerve, that was to say, it would require some element of ill-luck to bring disaster.

Patricia went first. It took them ten minutes to reach solid earth in the large ruined cloister. ‘Now,’ she said.

Now
was the real thing. The great west tower had an inspection ladder – iron rung upon iron rung running to an altitude from which one could survey five counties. ‘About Jasper,’ said Patricia, clasping the ladder, ‘I’ve come rather to think that you’re right. It is all most disturbingly spurious.’ She waved her hand at the monstrous pseudo-ruin that stretched for acres around them. ‘Even the Collection, I don’t doubt.’ She began to climb. ‘So it’s something to get something real out of him.’ She was gone.

‘I say,’ said Timmy, ‘I don’t think you ought–’ But he was speaking to air. And so from Shoon’s eccentricity they proceeded to wring the experience of danger. The ladder ran up behind the shelter of a long buttress and Patricia’s body was lost in the shadow; only her legs, gleaming palely in their light-toned stockings, worked steadily just above Timmy’s head. And, certainly, Belinda had said something about Patricia having no taste for heights. Timmy noted that beautiful things are not less beautiful, not less desirable, when they dance wantonly within the shadow of danger.

They reached the top quite safely. There was a small platform, comfortably sheltered and walled in. They sat down. ‘Patricia,’ asked Timmy sharply, ‘is that the only route back?’

‘Oh, no. There’s a tiny spiral staircase down the middle. The ladder is only for keeping an eye on the external fabric.’

Timmy shivered in a sudden spasm of nervous relaxation. ‘Curious,’ he said, ‘that you will never be let do quite that sort of thing again.’

Patricia made no reply. The wind had blown nearly all the clouds away and the stars were as bright as in a frost. These were moments of extraordinary happiness and peace. Timmy, leaning back on the chill stone beside Patricia, looked in imagination down from his tower and massively felt the absolute absurdity and incomprehensibility of Shoon Abbey and all else that lay below. He looked down from his tower and below was one great antic jig, one
danse macabre
. It was a vision, an intellectual clarification of exceptional exactness. It was an intimation of unknown and pleasing powers within himself. He lay still and chanted rhymes.

‘
…up unto the watch-towre get,

And see all things despoyl’d of fallacies:

Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes,

Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learne

By circuit–’

Abruptly Timmy stopped, exclaimed, clutched at air. The west tower had given an ugly lurch.

He heard Patricia’s laugh. ‘Only the wind,’ she said; ‘–the wind and your cousin Archie’s ingenuity. The stonework below is all a fake. We’re slung up here on great steel girders. It’s just as if you had a golf-club standing on its steel shaft, and you vibrated it and we were inside the head. An amusing motion…’

Gently the top-heavy crown of the tower swung to the wind. It was cold. They drew closer together. ‘I’m glad we did that scramble,’ said Patricia. ‘It clears the head. And no more damage’ – she looked at her stocking – ‘than one big ladder.’

Timmy looked at the ladder. ‘Did you ever’, he asked, ‘play Snakes and Ladders? Belinda and I once had a set with little moral lessons thrown in.’

‘I hope you profited.’

‘Moral lessons in pictures. At the head of the biggest snake was Laziness: chaps lounging in a pub.’ Timmy tapped Patricia on the head. ‘You went right down that snake to Failure.’ He tapped her on the toes. ‘Failure was a sort of workhouse ward.’

‘And the ladders?’

‘The biggest stood for Industry.’ And Timmy placed two fingers at the bottom of the ladder on Patricia’s stocking. ‘From there you climbed straight–’

‘I think’, said a practical voice behind them, ‘they’re just going to begin.’

‘Just beginning to come out for the inspection,’ explained John Appleby. ‘No, I believe I’m wrong. But we shan’t have long to wait. And with the bright moonlight this is a capital place for a bird’s-eye view. Don’t, by the way, let me interrupt in the matter of the Snakes and Ladders.’

They stared at him stupidly. ‘John,’ Patricia demanded, ‘why ever–’

‘Our friends will come out of the house and make their way here through the broken shadows of the ruins. Once arrived beneath the tower, they are likely to come to a halt in full moonlight. That will be the moment,’ Appleby paused, and from the shadow in which he stood there came the click of metal. ‘Patricia, do you know that the cellarium which is so carefully guarded by that hermit is nothing less than a little arsenal? Or something between that and a wholesale warehouse? Every type of lethal engine neatly laid out on display. I rather wished I could have nobbled a rifle.’

‘A rifle!’ said Timmy, startled.

Again there came the click of metal. ‘A revolver’, said Appleby placidly, ‘is a tricky thing. Even with a good long barrel like this’ – and now there was the ring of steel tapped on stone – ‘and any amount of practice one can’t do a great deal.’

‘John,’ interrupted Patricia, ‘just what is this about? Who is going to attack whom?’

‘Have you ever practised with one?’ Appleby took a brother’s licence to go his own conversational way. ‘The principle is that you don’t aim but point. You hold it head-high, bring it down as if it were a pointing forefinger, and fire at the moment your instinct dictates. If you’re lucky you really hit the haystack. But of course my business will be to miss.’

Timmy peered at the ground, immensely remote below. ‘It doesn’t just sound as if in the coming fracas you are going to bear an immensely effective role. I should rather expect you to be shadowing poor old Rupert round.’

‘Rupert? Oh, I don’t think that anybody except Rupert thinks that Rupert is in any deadly danger.’ There was a spurt of a match as Appleby lit a cigarette. ‘Not that he
mayn’t
be in deadly danger – but that will be his own fault.’ There was a chuckle from the shadows. ‘You don’t mind my beguiling this wait by murmuring enigmas? Patricia knows I don’t make a vice of it.’

‘Not at all,’ said Timmy gloomily; ‘not at all.’

‘Rupert, by the way, has been securely locked up. A kindly ministering to his nerves on a plan suggested by your father. As nine o’clock approaches he has been put quietly to browse in the Collection. Even if somebody were out for his blood they wouldn’t get at him there.’

‘They might from the roof,’ said Patricia sharply. ‘There’s a trapdoor–’

Her brother shook his head. ‘Well and truly bolted from within.’ He stiffened, peered towards the house. ‘Another false alarm. I rather wish they’d hurry up.’ He paced the little platform. ‘I confess to some mild anxiety on behalf of Winter.’

‘Winter!’ Timmy and Patricia simultaneously exclaimed.

‘Something
might
happen to Winter almost at any time. But the risk is small and he must run it. Of course I may be wrong, but what I’m expecting in the next few minutes is something else.’

‘You don’t think’, said Timmy quickly, ‘that daddy–’

‘Your father has never been in danger of attack. And he isn’t now.’

Patricia stood up. ‘John,’ she said curiously, ‘you really think there is to be attempted murder down there?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that coming up here gives you your best chance of stopping it?

‘Yes.’

‘There isn’t a more certain way? Warning somebody? Arresting somebody?’

‘My dear child, the whole affair is utterly shadowy. I’ve climbed up here on a scaffolding of hair-raising hypotheses which at the moment simply wouldn’t face the light of day. The metaphor is old, but you may see what I mean.’

‘And if you can’t stop this – this murder?’

‘Then’, said Appleby very placidly, ‘it can’t be helped.’

‘See’, said Timmy – and the histrionic trick was used perhaps to conceal a slightly unsteady voice – ‘where they come!’

From the direction of the house rose a fitful murmur of voices; a few seconds later a little group of figures appeared far away among the ruins.

‘Winter’, said Appleby softly, ‘burgled the Birdwire.’