Sweet Danger (18 page)

Guffy grunted. He could think of no adequate comment.

‘I heard the car go off about half an hour ago,' she ventured after a pause. ‘But I didn't yell in case there was still someone left behind. I haven't heard a sound since, though, so I suppose it's all right now.'

Guffy struggled to rise but gave it up, breathless and groaning.

‘How about you? Can you move?' he demanded.

‘No. I've been trying, but my arms are tied behind me to the back of the chair, and I think the rope goes on to my feet. Anyway, my ankles are bound to the chair leg. I've tried wriggling, but it just hurts and the rope seems to get tighter.'

‘Keep still, then. I'll have another go.'

It soon dawned upon the valiant Mr Randall, however,
that for once in his life he was beaten and he might struggle till doomsday and never get free.

‘Wright!' he called softly. ‘Wright! Farquharson!'

‘Hallo! Is that you, Guffy? I say, I can't stir.'

Eager-Wright's voice, stifled and breathless, sounded somewhere near at hand.

Guffy swore. ‘How's Farquharson?'

An inarticulate sound from somewhere across the room indicated that Mr Farquharson, besides being bound, was also gagged.

The minutes ticked on, and the company, having realized that silence was no longer politic, began to exclaim in their violent efforts to get free. It was when the struggle seemed to have gone on for hours that the miracle occurred.

‘Well,' said Aunt Hatt's cheerful American voice, vibrant and comfortingly strong. ‘Attacked in the home for the second time in one week, and they call this a quiet country. For crying out loud! I certainly feel better for that gag out of my mouth. Now just unfasten my hands. That's right. And the feet. That's better. Now let me see if I can give you a hand with the others.'

The surprise made them incredulous at first, but it soon became evident that the indomitable lady was certainly free. She set to work on the task of loosening the others with remarkable energy, considering the cramped position in which she had been sitting for so long.

Mary and Hal were released within a few moments, and the girl and her brother immediately turned their attention to the three pathetic bundles on the floor.

Guffy emerged from his hated sack battered and filthy, but a hero in Mary's eyes, and was thereby appeased.

Eager-Wright appeared to be comparatively unharmed, but Farquharson was unconscious when they ripped the gag from his mouth. Aunt Hatt took charge of him with a brisk efficiency that was tremendously comforting, and Guffy left him to her care when with Eager-Wright and young Hal
they set out to search the house for Amanda and those unlucky watchdogs, Lugg and Scatty Williams.

They found the girl almost immediately. She was in the dining-room, lashed to the heavy old-fashioned Chesterfield, a rag thrust into her mouth. Her wrists and ankles were raw where the cords had cut her as she struggled to get free, and there were tears of fury and frustration in the eyes which glared at them through a tangled mesh of flaming hair.

They released her and she staggered up, stiff and breathless and quivering with rage.

‘Six of them!' she burst out. ‘Only six of them, and we let them get us down! Why, we were almost even numbers, and yet they beat us and tied us up in our own house. I bit someone's hand through, though, and I'd have got away if they hadn't had guns. I've been trying to get free for hours.'

Tears choked her. Then she stood before them speechless, angry, and forlorn, while they looked at her helplessly. She pulled herself together.

‘Come on,' she said; ‘we must get Scatty and Lugg out. They're locked in the cellar. I've been listening to them swearing for the last two hours. The cellar grating is just outside this window.'

Hal and Eager-Wright went down to release the crestfallen bodyguard, and Guffy and Amanda adjourned to the drawing-room, where the others were still assembled. But it was not until Farquharson had revived and Aunt Hatt had made of tour of the house, to discover that the place had been ransacked, but apparently not pillaged, that Guffy put the question which had been worrying him for half an hour.

‘Miss Huntingforest,' he demanded, ‘who set you free?'

The good lady stared at him. ‘Why, you, of course,' she said. ‘Don't look at me like that, boy. You came up behind me and whisked the gag out of my mouth and the next thing I knew both my hands and feet had gotten free.'

‘But I let Guffy loose,' said Mary. ‘And you untied me,
Aunt Hatt, and –' she broke off, a terrified expression creeping into her eyes. ‘Who?' she demanded, looking round the dismantled room where the whole household was assembled. ‘Who set Aunt Hatt free?'

There was a long silence as they looked from one to another, startled enquiry in the face of each. No one replied, and all around them the great ancient house was silent and empty as a deserted tomb.

THE LETTER ADDRESSED
to ‘The Rev. Albert Campion' arrived by the post on the following morning and it lay upon the side table in the hall, an object of curiosity to all beholders from the moment of its arrival to the time of its disappearance and subsequent recovery.

Since it had not been re-addressed, bore a Northamptonshire postmark, and was labelled ‘Urgent', the feeling in the family that it might contain useful information was acute.

The household had spent an uncomfortable night in ransacked rooms, and Guffy at least was considerably more grim and morose when he descended the stairs, a lump the size of an egg on the back of his skull.

At a hurried council of war on the evening before it had been unanimously decided not to call in the police. Nothing had been taken, as far as could be discovered, and the visitors were convinced that in the circumstances County Police investigation was the last thing to be desired. Aunt Hatt had been curiously amenable to this arrangement, and the residents of the mill had decided to undertake their own defence, and, when possible, to wreak their own vengeance.

Guffy caught sight of the letter on his way in to breakfast. He stopped in his stride and stood looking at it thoughtfully. He saw himself faced with a minor but irritating problem. If he followed the simple course which his instincts and upbringing dictated, he reflected, he would re-address the letter ‘c/o Xenophon House', and dismiss the incident from
his mind. But, weighed down with the responsibility of his new vocation, he hesitated. His head was hurting abominably, and, hearing Amanda whistling happily as she clattered down the staircase behind him, he made a dive for the breakfast room, leaving the letter where it lay.

Amanda's reaction to the envelope on the table was very different. As soon as she saw it she paused, and, after a single guilty glance round to make certain she was unobserved, she whisked it off the polished wood and tucked it into that schoolgirl reticule, the knee of her knickers, and strode on in to breakfast.

Her whistling had not ceased throughout the incident, and Guffy would have been prepared to swear that she had followed him straight into the room.

The group gathered round the breakfast table in the warm morning sunlight was still considerably shaken by the events of the preceding night. Farquharson looked pale and unsteady, and Eager-Wright had several ugly bruises round his jaw. Young Hal possessed a black eye, of which he was inordinately proud, and only Aunt Hatt looked her compact, unruffled self.

A constraint had arisen between Guffy and Mary, and there was a slightly old-world shyness about the girl which enhanced her somewhat Edwardian beauty, and reduced the young man to a state of pleasurable idiocy pretty to watch.

Amanda alone had a light of triumph in her eye, and an even more pronounced jauntiness than before. Her wrists and ankles were disfigured by bandages, but her spirit appeared to have been strengthened rather than diminished. She planked a heap of wireless catalogues on the table next her plate, and began to turn over the leaves with tremendous interest.

‘It seems to me the radio's like drink; it just gets a hold on you,' Aunt Hatt remarked cheerfully to the table at large. ‘Amanda, will you drink your coffee before you spill it?
This girl spends half her time reading advertisements of fearful machines which she never even hopes to buy.'

‘Not at all,' said the miller with a certain amount of justifiable resentment. ‘I'm going to purchase four outsize valves – the plates run white hot at a thousand volts – a bunch of loud-speakers, and something rather sensational in the accumulator line. Very probably a new dress, too, if I feel like it.'

Her brother and sister laughed politely at this exuberance, and passed each other the honey, but Amanda was not content to let the matter drop.

‘Do you think,' she enquired gravely of Eager-Wright, who sat opposite her, ‘that it would be better to buy a new accumulator for the car or a new car altogether?'

‘Not to-day, Amanda. No bright conversation to-day. We're all a bit rattled.'

Young Hal's voice had the genuine note of authority in it. It was evident that he took his position as head of the family with becoming seriousness.

The girl turned upon him coldly. ‘I'm perfectly serious,' she said. ‘As it happens, I've come into a certain amount of money and I'm debating how to spend it. I think, perhaps, a new car after all. A last year's Morris would be fun. I've been talking to Scatty out of the window this morning, and he thinks we could pick one up in Ipswich for about ninety pounds. I thought I might go in and see about it this morning. The car would take me as far as Sweethearting and I can get a bus from there.'

Hal, Mary, and Aunt Hatt exchanged glances.

‘Poor Amanda, it's the excitement,' said the elder lady compassionately.

‘Wait a minute, Aunt.' Hal put out his hand apologetically and then turned to his sister, his young face grave and politely enquiring. ‘Do you mean this, Amanda?'

His sister granted him a single truculent stare. ‘Of course I do. You don't imagine I'm sitting here making a fool of
myself. I've got a first instalment of three hundred pounds, as a matter of fact, and as there are naturally a few things I want, I'm deciding how to spend it to its best possible advantage.'

Recollecting suddenly that the Fittons possessed an income of one hundred pounds a year, apart from their various activities, Guffy understood the expression of blank amazement on his host's face.

Amanda remained calm, but a little sulky.

‘Three hundred pounds? Where is it?'

‘In my dressing-table drawer. In your collar-box, if you want to know. It was so lumpy I didn't know where else to put it, so I borrowed your box.'

Hal frowned. He was leaning forward in his chair at the head of the table, his eyes wide and puzzled.

The two faced one another, Amanda superficially casual and ridiculously truculent, and the boy startled and incredulous. They were absurdly alike; the Pontisbright hair glowed and shone above their expressive faces.

‘Do you mean to say you've got three hundred pounds in notes in the house?'

‘Yes, I do.' Amanda's tone was plaintive. ‘Why shouldn't I? Lots of people have three hundred pounds all at once. You often do, don't you, Guffy? Don't be so
bourgeois
, Hal.'

Flushing under the injustice of the final admonition, the head of the Fitton family stuck to his guns.

‘Where did you get it? And what's all this about a first instalment?'

‘That,' said Amanda calmly, ‘I am afraid I'm not at liberty to tell you. Now I must go and get ready to go to Ipswich. I'll take Scatty, I think, if you don't mind.'

‘But, Amanda, you're joking,' Aunt Hatt appealed nervously.

‘Of course I'm not, darling. I happen to have three hundred pounds, that's all. I may also have some more. I'd like to say, too,' she went on, eyeing the assembly
severely, ‘that, in my opinion, all this interest in my money is a trifle vulgar.'

‘Was the money in the house last night?'

‘It was.'

‘And they never took it!' burst out Aunt Hatt, who could not get the burglary idea out of her head. ‘What a mercy!'

‘Perhaps they were just six Santa Clauses in unorthodox costumes,' said Hal contemptuously.

Amanda's cheeks flamed. ‘That's mean, mouldy, and unfortunately typical,' she said, and rose to her feet. ‘Now I'm going to Ipswich.'

As the door closed behind her Hal coughed deprecatingly, the gesture of a man three times his age.

‘Very extraordinary,' he observed, and went on with his breakfast with studied deliberation.

Eager-Wright caught Farquharson's eye and stifled a desire to laugh.

Guffy was thoughtful. It occurred to him that, amusing though Amanda's attitude might be, the facts were certainly odd, if true, and when he recalled her indignant outburst at Hal's suggestion concerning the possible identity of their visitors of the night before, an uncomfortable suspicion flashed through his mind. He put it from him hastily, but it still hovered there, and he could not get it out of his head that three hundred pounds might not be such an inconsiderable mess of potage if one needed it badly enough.

It was evident that something of the same idea had occurred to Hal, for he suddenly put down his table-napkin and rose to his feet.

‘If you'll excuse me for a moment,' he said with that grave courtesy which was his chief characteristic, ‘I think I'd like a word with Amanda before she goes off.' And leaving the table he hurried after his sister.

Amanda's room was situated directly above the apartment in which they sat, and although Aunt Hatt and Mary skilfully fielded the conversation it was impossible not to
overhear the staccato sounds which emanated from the floor above. It began with angry voices and continued in a series of rumblings which suggested that the rightful Earl was beating his sister up and that she was defending herself with true Pontisbright spirit. Eventually, the noise ceased and Hal reappeared in the breakfast room looking flushed and a little ruffled, but outwardly dignified and composed as ever.