The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (5 page)

The first thing she saw was the Stone. There it crouched, a loathsome, toad-like thing, larger than ever in the semi-darkness. She herself was sheltering behind a pine. Away from her – in that most strange of symbols, a complete and perfect circle – stretched its tall upstanding brothers, a ring of witch's sentries guarding unhallowed ground. Ten yards, or thereabouts, from the Stone, lantern in hand, like some gigantic, lumbering, hag-ridden will-o'-the-wisp, was Rupert Sethleigh's cousin Redsey. Just as Felicity recognized him, he set down the lantern and began to dig.

In less than a minute, Aubrey Harringay realized that he was hopelessly lost in the woods. The tree-trunks, crowding together, barred his progress. He tore his socks and shorts on briars and brambles, his woollen sweater caught on to low-growing branches, his face was soon scratched and bleeding, and, although he had explored the woods from end to end in daylight, he began to realize that they seemed a different place by night. He halted and listened. Suddenly, a few yards in front of him and a little to his right, the gleam of the hurricane lamp intensified the surrounding gloom.

‘Doggo!' thought Aubrey, hastily stepping aside and concealing himself behind a tree. He had gained the middle of the wood. He crept forward, from tree to tree, until he was in sight of his cousin. The hurricane lamp, now standing on the ground, shone on the glinting surface of the quartz-encrusted triangular block of granite which went by the name of the Stone of Sacrifice, or the Druids' Altar. The tree behind which Aubrey's wiry body was concealed chanced to be a massive, smooth-trunked beech, but immediately in front of him, surrounding the rude stone altar which occupied the centre of the clearing, was a circle of sighing pines whose tall, straight trunks rose dread and awesome, towering into the night sky like guardian spirits of the brooding Stone.

Jim Redsey walked into the circle of light caused by the hurricane lamp and began to dig. The light loam was easy to move. Jim's arms and body moved with rhythmic grace. The pile of earth beside him grew and grew.

‘Great jumping cats!' said Aubrey to himself. ‘The chap is trying to get through to Australia! What
is
the little game? Is he walking in his sleep?'

Having effected a cavity some six feet long and of a fair depth – Aubrey judged it to be about three feet down – Jim laid down the spade. Then he stepped down into the hole very carefully and disappeared from view.

‘Chap must be off his chump!' thought Aubrey, more amused than uneasy at these curious manoeuvres. ‘Must be sleep-walking! Thinks he's in bed now, I expect. Wonder whether I ought to wake him up? Old Tompkins says it's dangerous to wake up sleep-walkers. They go loony or something. Wonder what I'd better do? Anyway, I'll pinch the spade before he can do any damage with it.'

He was about to act upon this idea when Jim Redsey's head and shoulders appeared above the hole in the ground, and he stood up, stepped carefully out on to the sparse grass of the clearing, and walked away from Aubrey towards a clump of hazel bushes. Scarcely had he disappeared within their depths when Aubrey, worming his way snakewise over the short grass, approached the spade, seized it by the handle, and wriggled back into cover, dragging the spade after him. Felicity, more surprised than ever, witnessed this performance, but made no sign.

Jim reappeared as suddenly as he had gone. He seemed hesitating and uncertain, and stood gazing at the bushes in either surprise or dismay – in the darkness it was impossible to tell which it was. He disappeared again into the same clump, and after a few moments, during which Felicity and Aubrey, from opposite sides of the clearing, could both hear him charging about and swearing softly but bitterly as he did so, he again appeared and began searching other clumps of bushes near at hand.

Nearer and nearer to Aubrey he approached. Aubrey considered the wisdom of retiring from the scene, but realized that to do so without attracting Redsey's attention would tax all his woodcraft, even without the additional burden of the spade. Hampered by the latter, which was large and heavy, he knew that he must be heard. Of course, he might have left the spade behind and so glided away, but, having once acquired, as it were, the flag of the opposing forces, he felt that death in its company would be preferable to the dishonour of abandoning it. He remained hidden where he was. Redsey, groping blasphemously among the bushes in quest of some object or objects unknown, the non-appearance of which seemed to be causing him the gravest uneasiness, suddenly seized his ear. Aubrey let out a yell which caused Mrs Bryce Harringay, far away in the Manor House, to stir in her sleep. Leaping up, and clinging fast to the spade as representing the spoils and the trophies of war, he sped through the woods towards the Manor House, and his mother. Luckily for himself, he stumbled upon the path and flew down it, turning as it turned, doubled on itself, and ever straining every nerve to detect the sounds of pursuit.

Behind him, but less fortunate, in that he had missed the narrow path, and was thus in imminent peril of rushing into a tree or tripping over briars and brambles and small low-growing bushes, Jim Redsey crashed and stumbled.

Suddenly Aubrey burst from the woods on to the vastness of the open park. A good half-miler in the school sports, he galloped on. Jim Redsey, extricating himself from the mass of brambles into which he had fallen, and swearing softly and continuously as he denuded his hair and person of clinging blackberry stems, realized that his quarry had escaped him and that further pursuit was hopeless.

Perplexed and worried, he reached the house just as Aubrey Harringay, having deposited the spade on one of the flower-beds where he assumed the gardener would find it early in the morning, was pulling the sheet up past his chin and wiping the perspiration off his face with it.

Felicity had recognized Aubrey, although she realized that Jim Redsey, in full cry after the lad, had failed to do so. When all sounds of pursuit had died away, and Felicity's fluttering heart had resumed its normal beating, she began to realize that she was alone in a large and terrifying wood, and that the hour was very late. Visions of a peaceful bedroom came to her.

‘But, before I go –' she thought to herself.

The lineal descendant of Eve in Eden crept cautiously forward until she stood beside the hole which James Redsey had seen fit to dig. She peered into its depths and shuddered. To the daughter of the spiritual adviser to the parish, the six-foot hole presented the appearance of a freshly dug grave!

Spreading the News

M
RS
G
EORGE
W
ILLOWS
was getting breakfast for the children. The day was Tuesday, the time ten minutes to eight and the temperature a pleasant sixty-five degrees in the shade. Mrs Willows was a small, anxious-looking woman who hovered round the half-dozen or so lusty young Willows as a foster-mother bird might hover round a nest full of young cuckoos.

The cottage would have filled the heart of an American motion-picture producer with unadulterated joy. It was thatched, it was floored with slabs of stone, and it had a small outside porch covered with pink rambler roses. A long narrow path led up to the door; on one side of the path a stretch of garden was devoted wholly to vegetables; on the other side blazed a bed of summer flowers. The cottage boasted four rooms and an out-house, for George Willows was no farm labourer; he was a gardener. Until the afternoon of June 15th he had been Rupert Sethleigh's gardener. Since that day he had been Major Farquar's gardener every afternoon, and general odd-job gardener to those who could afford him in the mornings and on Saturdays. At the moment when Mrs Willows was pushing Tommy Willows out of the front gate and latching it sternly behind him, and at the same time was admonishing George Willows, junior, who was showing signs of desiring to climb a tree in his best school shorts, her husband was putting a load of gravel down on the paths of the Cottage on the Hill, half-way between the village of Wandles Parva and the neighbouring town of Bossbury.

Mrs Willows waved to Emily Willows, who, with little Cissie Willows in tow, was about to turn the corner in the lane on the way to school, and then, with a sigh of gratitude to the powers that provide schools and teachers to come to the rescue of harassed parents, she retired to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for her husband. George was supposed to have done this job yesterday, but had not been able to procure the gravel and get it delivered at the Cottage until the late afternoon, when he was engaged at the major's and could not spare time to deal with it. Therefore he had gone off at six o'clock that morning and hoped to be home to breakfast by nine.

Mrs Willows glanced at the clock, cut the rind off four rashers of bacon, laid two eggs beside them on the blue-ringed plate and placed the frying-pan ready to hand. This done, she changed the table-cloth for a freshly ironed one, walked out to the gate again, and, shading her eyes with her hand, looked down the sandy lane in order to catch the first glimpse of George, which should afford her the signal to dart into the kitchen and start cooking his food.

Far away, and very faint in the clear delicate air of the morning, she could detect the note of the school bell indicating to the tardy that the time was five minutes to nine. Soon the bell ceased. The bees began to hum. The hazy blue of the sky deepened and the sun's warmth became more intense. Mrs Willows sighed. George had had nothing but a piece of bread and butter and a cup of tea before going out that morning. A man ought not to shovel and roll gravel with so little as that inside him, she felt sure. She sighed again, and longed for a cup of tea. She bent, and pulled a noxious silver-weed out from among the pansies. Then she went in again and glanced at the kitchen clock. It was twenty past nine.

At a quarter to eleven Willows came home.

‘I was getting that worried and upset, I nearly came to look for 'ee,' volunteered his wife.

Willows, an affectionate but taciturn husband, seated himself in a chair, hitched it up to the table, and, having waited in silence while his wife placed two rashers and an egg on his plate and the same on her own, grunted, and attacked his food with appetite. Mrs Willows, who had carried on a losing fight for some years on the grounds of being compelled to eat two rashers and an egg for breakfast whether she wanted them or not, sighed for the third time and picked up her knife and fork.

After ten minutes of steady mastication, Mr Willows pushed aside his empty plate and reached for the cheese. Then he looked across at his wife, who was hesitating before the second rasher.

‘Well,' he said, with the assumed ferocity of the self-conscious, affectionately disposed working man, ‘can't 'ee say something, like?'

‘I don't know as I got much to say, Geordie,' replied Mrs Willows timidly. ‘Could 'ee eat up another bit o' bacon if I put it on your plate?'

‘Now that'll do from you, my gal!' responded Mr Willows, eyeing her sternly. ‘You eat un up, and no nonsense! Here I feeds 'ee, day in, day out, as very few men feeds their wimmin-folk, I'll lay, and that's your gratitude! Where'd 'ee be now, I wonder, if I 'adn't see 'ee et well, eh?'

‘In – in 'eaven, Geordie, I shouldn't wonder,' replied Mrs Willows, desperately anxious to give the answer which would placate him by coinciding with his own opinions.

Mr Willows snorted.

‘Then you et un up,' he replied pithily.

‘Nice goings-on in the village last Sunday night, I 'ear,' observed Mrs Willows tentatively, when, breakfast over, her husband prepared to settle down in the doorway with a pipe.

‘You're right, my lass. There was. Who's bin talking wi' you about it?'

‘Oh, young Percy Noon was passing on his way to work and stopped to say thankee for them there young shallots. Said I'd tell when 'ee came 'ome. Percy says as how Squire Sethleigh's gone off to the States sudden-like, and young Mr Wright, up where 'ee bin working this morning, is going off's 'ead. Give I a turn, it did, to think of 'ee working there along. Percy did say as how he went clumping young Farmer Galloway over the head wi' a hog-pudden in the bar of the “Queen's Head”, and as how Galloway he took and give un the biggest thrashing out, and Bill Bondy, not liking to interfere, held the watch and see fair play. And Squire's cousin, that young Mr Redsey, Percy do say, was lying dead drunk in the middle of it all.'

‘Well, that's the news that was round the village yesterday,' said Mr Willows. ‘There's more to tell this morning. Made me late for my breakfast, going off along to know the truth of it.'

‘Well, there now! If I didn't watch and wait at the gate, wondering what had come over 'ee at all to be so late for breakfast,' said Mrs Willows.

‘Ah! Very likely 'ee did wonder. 'Ee'll wonder more when I do be telling 'ee all. There's bin a murder done at the butcher's in the market down in Bossbury.'

‘A murder? Lawk a-massy I! 'Ee'll sleep home to-night, Geordie, won't 'ee?'

‘Happen I will. Nothing much doing at the major's this afternoon. The roses can do wi' a spray, for the green fly is mortal busy up along of 'em, and I set the lad to weed the gravel yesterday, so he can go on wi' that again. The chrysants is coming on nice, and the strawberries looks a treat. But what ails you? You don't want for company wi' all the little 'uns in the 'ouse wi' you!'

‘I be mortal feared o' that there murder, Geordie!'

Mr Willows took the pipe out of his mouth and spat with accuracy and finality.

‘There won't be any call for 'ee to be worriting, my lass,' he observed. ‘Nobody don't want to murder 'ee. Happen 'ee 'en't important enough to be murdered. What's that clock say?'