C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (24 page)

But I didn’t want to get too close. I didn’t want to be seen. If you had asked me why I felt it was important to keep my presence a secret, I don’t think I could have given you an intelligent answer—except that I realised I was now behaving as oddly as the pair in front of me, and I didn’t want to have to explain, to my employer or anyone else, why I was traipsing across the moors, half-dressed and half-pyjamaed, at that hour of the morning. So I hung back. But I was always ready to rush forward to Lady Pamela’s defence should anything happen to threaten her safety.

We trudged on, with Drax and Lady Pamela setting a good brisk pace ahead of me, until the Hall had completely disappeared below the horizon behind us and we were pushing our way through the prickly heather that filled the wilder parts of the moorland.

Then the two ahead of me plunged down the slope of a narrow valley and passed into a thick copse of trees. I hurried to get closer in case I lost them entirely. When I reached the edge of the trees, they were just emerging on the other side, and I realised, from the nearness of their voices, that they had come to a halt.

For a long moment I stopped still. Then I began to edge forward as silently as I could. And, of course, I couldn’t. I hadn’t gone far before a large twig cracked noisily under my boots.

‘What was that?’ said Lady Pamela on the far side of the trees.

Since Drax didn’t answer, she asked again, ‘Did you hear anything?’

The pale beam of the electric torch swept in my direction and I huddled as low as I could behind the narrow trunks of the nearest trees. The light failed to pick me out.

Drax said something I couldn’t make out, and Lady Pamela replied, ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right—it was probably a badger.’

To my relief they turned away and went on.

But not far. Only a few yards further ahead they stopped again. They were standing in dark shadow, penetrated by none of the pale blue moonlight, and I heard the rattle of keys.

Suddenly I knew exactly where we were: at the remote, isolated moorland cottage occupied by Drax—the cottage Jack and I had stumbled across two days earlier. The wall of dark shadow blocking the moonlight was the front wall of the cottage.

I heard a door creak open, and then—nothing. It seemed the two had gone inside. That made it safe for me to move again, so I crept forward.

Emerging from the trees I saw the looming black shape that was the cottage. And I was right—the door was now closed, and Drax and Lady Pamela were nowhere to be seen.

I slipped forward over the tangled, overgrown grass that surrounded the building until I reached the wall. Then I groped my way along it until I came to a window sill. There was the faintest glimmer of light coming from around the edges of the window, but the curtains were tightly drawn and no matter where I moved around that window I could not catch the smallest glimpse of what was inside.

But I could hear voices—very faintly. I put my ear to the glass and tried to pick up some words. At first I could hear only muffled murmurs. I listened for a long time, trying to make up my mind as to whether I should do something or not. Had Lady Pamela been abducted? Was she now being held in the cottage against her will? There was no sign of it as she had clearly walked off with Drax of her own free will.

Then the noises from inside the cottage changed and I could clearly make out the sound of sobbing—but it was not a woman’s voice. It was a man’s voice, a baritone, sobbing pathetically. Again I asked myself if the time had come for me to intervene. I leaned against the wall of the cottage for I don’t know how long, feeling as uncertain and as indecisive as Hamlet on one of his vaguer days.

Before I could make up my mind to become the noble rescuer, the door of the cottage opened again and Lady Pamela appeared. Drax was behind her holding a candle. The two conferred again in hushed tones, then Lady Pamela bid him farewell.

‘You did the right thing coming to fetch me,’ she said. The expression in her face was decidedly glum. She was definitely down among the wines and spirits. It was probably the sort of expression Napoleon wore as they were cleaning up the loose ends after the Battle of Waterloo.

Then Lady Pamela turned around and strode off purposefully in the direction of the distant Plumwood Hall.

I watched her electric torch click on and the faint beam bob away into the darkness. Drax stood in the doorway watching her go. Then he closed the door and I heard bolts and bars sliding into place.

Suddenly it occurred to me that if I didn’t follow Lady Pamela I would quickly become completely lost on those moonlit moors. I took off as rapidly as I dared and followed in her footsteps. Happily I picked up the distant torch beam and was able to follow at a safe distance all the way the back to the Hall.

When I finally climbed back into my welcome bed, the bedside clock told me it was now a little after three o’clock in the morning. That, I thought, was the strangest two hours of my life. If I were a poet instead of a novelist, I thought, I would definitely turn that into a poem. Then I fell asleep.

After breakfast the next morning I hurried down to the village to report my strange night-time adventures to Jack. I found him sitting in the sun on a wooden bench in front of
The Cricketers’ Arms
contentedly puffing on his after-breakfast pipe and serenely contemplating the purpose of life. Or possibly—since I knew how his mind worked—he was thinking about the use of prepositions in Milton’s shorter poems. Whatever it was, it had clearly put him in a sunny mood.

‘You’ll never guess what happened to me last night,’ I said, flopping down onto the bench beside him, feeling rather like a music hall comedian who has just learned a new joke and is keen to launch the ripsnorter on an audience.

‘Never? In that case,’ said Jack cheerfully, ‘I won’t attempt to guess—you can tell me.’

I began to do so. I laid on the colour to make the tale as vivid as possible. Perhaps I was labouring the atmospherics and taking too long to get to the heart of the matter, because I’d only got to the point of me leaning out of my bedroom window when we were interrupted.

The white-haired old apothecary, Arthur Williamson, came puffing up the street, red-faced and looking quite alarmed. This normally calm and serene old gentleman looked as if he had pulled on his boots after breakfast only to discover that a slug had crawled into the left one overnight and was now somewhere between his toes.

However, it turned out to be rather worse than that.

‘Do you gentlemen know where the police officers are?’ he wheezed as he tried to catch his breath.

‘Which police officers?’ I asked.

‘Any of them. Constable Nile will do. Or those Scotland Yard men—are they about?’

I said I hadn’t seen any of them, and Jack concurred that he too had so far spotted none of the official upholders of the law that day.

‘Oh dear me, dear me,’ the old man flustered, flapping his hands like a seal at the zoo asking for another fish. ‘I am most concerned, most concerned, and I want to alert someone, but I can’t leave my shop for long. I should be back there now.’

‘You tell us,’ said Jack helpfully, ‘then we’ll find a policeman and pass it on.’

‘Would you? Would you, really? Oh thank you, thank you.’ The old chemist took a deep breath and then said, ‘Young Ruth Eggleston has disappeared. My shop assistant. You must remember her—you both met her the day you came to my shop.’

I said yes, I remembered, and Jack said, ‘What do you mean, disappeared?’

‘Well, she failed to turn up for work this morning. That in itself is most unusual. She has shown herself to be a very reliable girl. Not like most of these young people today. And if she’s indisposed she always sends her younger sister to tell me. This morning there was no Ruth and there was no message. And I have to go across to Market Plumpton today to collect a parcel of supplies from a pharmaceutical company—one of the chemists in Market Plumpton is holding the parcel for me. But I can’t leave my shop if Ruth isn’t there.’

He stopped to mop his brow with a large white handkerchief, sat down heavily on the bench beside us and then resumed, ‘So I went around to her house. Ruth’s mother was also concerned—a very nice woman, Ruth’s mother, I’ve known her all her life. It seems that Ruth didn’t come home last night. Her mother didn’t realise this until this morning. She just assumed Ruth had come back very late and let herself in. But when she checked Ruth’s bed it hadn’t been slept in. So where is she? Where has she got to?’

Arthur Williamson looked left and right, up and down the village street, almost as if he expected to see his missing shop assistant pop out of one of the cottage gardens like a jack-in-the-box with a cheerful cry of ‘Had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?’

‘Such strange things have been happening around here lately,’ he continued, in the absence of the hoped for appearance. ‘Very strange things. Perhaps I’m being a foolish old man, but I’m most concerned.’

‘We’ll find a policeman,’ said Jack, patting the old man comfortingly on the shoulder. ‘You get back to your shop, and we’ll pass on your concerns to the proper authorities.’

‘Would you? Oh, that’s most kind of you, most kind indeed,’ he replied. Then he rose, a little stiffly and awkwardly, from the wooden bench and waddled off down the street in the direction of his shop.

Jack and I then set off to carry out the commission we had undertaken.

We started in the pub, but were told by Alfred Rose that both Inspector Crispin and Sergeant Merrivale had left for the day. They had left early, he said, and not told him where they were going.

We then walked up the street in the direction of the police cottage. We arrived to find the village bobby, Constable Charlie Nile, just coming out of his front gate, looking, as he always did, like a clumsy but rather likeable puppy.

Jack reported Arthur Williamson’s conversation, passing on the old chemist’s concerns about the missing girl.

Charlie Nile seemed singularly unimpressed. ‘Young people sometimes do stay out all night,’ he said, with a knowing smirk as he rocked back on his heels and did his best to radiate benevolent tolerance towards the strange behaviour of the younger generation.

Jack was not happy with this.

‘May I suggest, my dear Nile,’ he boomed, ‘that there have been two poisonings in this district in a matter of a few days. This is not the time to take the disappearance of a young woman lightly.’

Nile pushed back his helmet and scratched his head. ‘Do you really think so, sir? I mean to say, if this is not just high jinks or gallivanting around then . . . do you think I should really call up district headquarters?’

Anything beyond a serious case of littering in the village street seemed to paralyse Constable Nile into indecisive inaction.

‘Make the phone call,’ said Jack in his hearty, forceful voice, ‘there’s a good chap.’

‘Yes . . . yes . . . I think perhaps I’d better. Just step into the police cottage and I’ll put you on the line, Mr Lewis, to pass on the details you know.’

We followed Nile into the little ivy-covered cottage. As he was dialling the number he said over his shoulder, ‘I happen to know that those Scotland Yard men, Inspector Crispin and Sergeant Merrivale, are at Market Plumpton police station this morning having a meeting with Colonel Weatherly, the Chief Constable. Oh, hello? Yes, it’s Constable Nile here. Yes, from Plumwood. It seems a girl has gone missing from the village—I need one of the senior officers, please.’

There was some more uncertain to-ing and fro-ing for a while, and then the constable said, ‘He wants to speak to you, sir,’ and handed the phone over to Jack.

From hearing one side of the conversation I worked out that Jack was speaking to Inspector Crispin. In short, clear sentences Jack laid out the case that Mr Williamson had presented to us—Ruth Eggleston absent all night, bed not slept in and mother having no idea where she might be.

At the end of his conversation Jack handed the phone back to Constable Nile and said to me, ‘Crispin agrees that it might very well be serious. He’s organising a search. Bearing in mind the transparent lie she told about you buying the missing cyanide, Morris, it’s not impossible that her disappearance is connected in some way with these murders.’

Nile’s conversation was short, and consisted, on his part, mostly of grunted ‘yes, sirs’. When he put the phone down, he said, ‘They’re going to make inquiries at railway stations and start a wide area search. He’s told me to go from door to door in the village and ask if anyone’s seen her.’

‘Well, you’d better get on with it then,’ boomed Jack, handing Nile his helmet, which had been lying on the hall table.

Outside in the sunshine Nile set off in one direction while Jack and I walked towards the other end of the village street.

Jack re-lit his pipe and then said, ‘Now, Morris—you were in the middle, or possibly just at the beginning, of an interesting yarn. Please continue.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘my strange experiences of last night. This disappearance of Ruth Eggleston put that entirely out of my head. Where had I got to? Yes, that’s right, the voices outside on the lawn at one o’clock in the morning. Well, what happened was . . .’