There May Be Danger (19 page)

“Oh, no place pertickerler. I moves about.”

A light broke on Kate. She had an extraordinary sense of relief. Of course! Was not Mr. Dai Lewis's encampment still pitched in the field opposite Gwyn Lupton's? Were not gipsies notoriously evasive in speech, amiable in manner, secretive in action, as careless, no doubt, of black-outs as of property-laws?

“Are you—” Kate was about to say “one of the gipsies” but she did not know whether a gipsy might not resent this term. She substituted: “Are you Dai Lewis?”

“There, now, and you was asking did you know me!” responded the man in his soft and evasive way which yet, Kate did not doubt, could harden at need to the most definite and terrifying ruthlessness. There had been no hesitation, no ambiguity, about the way in which he had taken her torch out of her hand: nor about the way in which he had refused to give it back, affably as he had couched his refusal!

The worst of Kate's fears, the fear of what is unknown, went to rest. Dai Lewis the gipsy was, after all, a relation of Kate's friend, Mrs. Davis. A gipsy was the last person to be suspected of signalling to enemy planes, although no doubt the loss of a ferret might seem more dire to him than the loss of a country. If this were Dai Lewis, Kate could abandon the idea that there had been signalling from this house. She had something else to talk to Dai Lewis about.

“Mr. Lewis, I've been wanting to see you.”

“That's very kind of you, I'm sure!” replied the man with a sort of jocose crude gallantry.

“You remember the boy who disappeared—Sidney Brentwood?”

There was a moment's pause before the other answered—Kate thought, rather guardedly:

“Ah, I remember him.”

“He came to see you, didn't he, about making a net?”

“Aye.”

Did you ever see him again? Did he ever come to this house? Or did you ever see traces of somebody having been here? You see,” said Kate eagerly, as Dai Lewis remained silent, “if when Sidney came out that night he saw the same light that I saw—Mr. Davis says it was a dark night—he may have thought, as I did, that it was a signal, and he may have come here, as I did, to find out what it was.”

“Well?”

“Well, you might have seen him.”

“Wouldn't I have told the police if I'd seen him?” inquired the man. “Or does you think as I did the boy some harm that night—murdered him, maybe?”

Kate laughed, but nervously, at this grim note.

“No, no! But—”

“Nobody's bin here but me, as I knows on, and I isn't often here. I wasn't here the night as the boy went, so if he come here I shouldn't know.”

“Oh, no! I remember now, Mr. Davis said you'd gone into Breconshire.”

“That's right.”

Something in the intonation with which Dai Lewis uttered these two simple words caught Kate s ear, perplexed as it already was by that sense of vague recognition.

“Are you a Welshman, Mr. Lewis?” she ventured.

“Why does you ask?”

“You don't talk like a Welshman, it seems to me.”

“There's different kinds of Welsh talk, I reckon,” replied Mr. Lewis cautiously.

“Of course, there must be,” agreed Kate, noting at the same time that her question remained unanswered.

“I guess you hasn't been here long enough to know how Welsh people talks,” said Dai Lewis tolerantly.

“No, perhaps not. But in my job one gets interested in how people talk, one gets to listen to people's intonations.”

“Aye? What is your job?”

“The theatre,” said Kate, and suppressed a sigh: the theatre seemed so far away.

She could not be sure, but it seemed to her that she had startled Mr. Lewis. There was something rigid about the silence which followed. Then he echoed indifferently:

“The theatre, is it? You're an actress, are you, miss?”

“I do a bit of acting sometimes. But stage-management's my job. Well, if you'll give me my torch, Mr. Lewis, I'll make my exit.”

“Til shine you out,” replied he courteously but firmly, and stood aside to let her pass, shining the torch upon broken boards so that she could pick her way.

There seemed nothing for it but for Kate to skirt the damaged floor and descend. Mr. Lewis followed, keeping his circle of torchlight shining ahead of Kate down the stairs. Its shifty, stagey light fell on stairs deeply ingrained with the grey dust of ages, on the matchboarded walls puffed and splitting with damp, on the door at the bottom hanging on long iron hinges.

As the circle of light fell over the door, Kate almost stopped dead on the fourth step from the bottom, almost gave a cry. Stuck to the blistering, thickly painted boards of the rough door, about a foot from the top, was a small square of bright green tinfoil, such as is used for wrapping toffees.

Then Sidney
had
been here!

“What's the matter?” asked her escort from behind her, as after that involuntary jerk she went on down into the room, following the shifty circle of light closely with her eyes for other signs. Sidney
had
been here! Kate was not in the mood to weigh any other possibilities. Sidney had left that green square of tinfoil as a warning and a sign. Green for safety: but not this time!

“I thought I saw a mouse,” said Kate calmly, holding out her hand for her torch.

Dai Lewis switched it off, and for a moment Kate's primitive fears threatened to return upon her. But, of course, to open a door in the black-out, one must switch off one's torch! Kate heard the wind in the trees, and, she thought, once again, far off, that stubborn steady thrum of planes forging through the dark.

“Good-bye, Missie. Don't put on your torch. There's planes about, I hears them.”

Kate thought this was rather cool advice from one who had been guilty of blazing lights out of windows with enemy planes abroad.

“And don't
you
forget that black-out!” as she took her torch from him in the darkness.

He laughed. It still seemed to Kate that his laugh, even more than his voice, was vaguely familiar to her. No doubt she had seen and heard Dai Lewis in Hastry village shop or elsewhere. A stage training develops an ear for voices, but not always a methodical memory for placing them.

“Aye. I'll hang up my jacket!” he replied, as Kate felt her way down the garden path and out of the rickety gate.

The plane was coming closer, and Kate, who dared not use her torch, made slow and floundering progress. When it had passed overhead, she heard the unmistakeable, sickening, earth-heavy crash of an exploding bomb. A pause, then another, farther off. Impossible for an ear attuned to town bombing to determine how far away those bombs had fallen. Not so far as they sounded, Kate guessed, for the plane that dropped them had been more or less overhead only a few seconds ago.

No more bombs fell, and for the present no more planes were to be heard. As she returned down the difficult path, Kate's thoughts returned to Sidney Brentwood. If Sidney had stuck that piece of tinfoil on the door on purpose, as a despairing sign to friends who might follow on his trail, it must be that he had been constrained, unable to escape, unable to send any other message. Coming downstairs at Hymns Bank—perhaps being dragged downstairs—he had managed to stick that piece of green toffee tinfoil upon the door, knowing that Mrs. Howells, anyway, should news of it ever reach her ears, would connect it with him. But who had constrained him? Not Dai Lewis, for Dai Lewis and his tribe had been in Breconshire at the time that Sidney disappeared. Besides, even if Sidney had found Dai Lewis at Hymns Bank, why should Dai Lewis have done more than send him off with a flea in his ear? There was nothing dangerously criminal about using an empty house as headquarters for poaching in the woods, and Sidney knew all about the gipsies' poaching exploits.

But that Sidney Brentwood had been at Hymns Bank that night, Kate felt sure. Her night's search had led her one step in the right direction. It was from Hymns Bank, not from Hastry, that she must track Sidney now.

Who owned Hymns Bank, she wondered? It should not be difficult to find out. It lay at least two miles from Llanhalo Abbey and Gideon Atkins was scarcely the man to be encumbered with such derelict and unprofitable property: otherwise Kate might have played with the notion that it was his. Her thoughts continually reverted to that fabled subterranean passage, and to Gideon Atkins' wrathful denial of its existence. She had to check a tendency to exaggerate Gideon Atkins' unamiable denials into sinister and monstrous signposts to secret guilt.

When, about two o'clock, Kate arrived back in Hastry, she found both Mr. and Mrs. Howells up—she feared, on her account, although they assured her they had got up entirely for their own satisfaction. However, they were both so relieved to find that neither of the bombs they had heard had landed anywhere near her, that she remained unconvinced that their vigil had not been on her account.

“Berminster waterworks, that's what they be after,” said Mr. Howells, looking less than ever like a postman, with his thatch of grey hair standing on end and his collarless shirt open around his sleep-dishevelled beard. “Every time I hears a bomb, I thinks of my sister's brother-in-law, Jeff Dew, listening up at the control-station to hear if this'un or that'un's going to send him to glory, and I has to laugh. Because he's right as rain, they fellows never hits what them's aiming at, my God, no.”

It appeared from Rumour, who arrived in the village before the dawn and hung around on the doorsteps waiting for the taking down of the black-out, that Mr. Howells' laughter was justified. Five, ten, twenty sheep—the number varied—were a dead loss, and there were two craters on Mr. Jenkins's, Mr. Jones's, Mr. Richard Hillier's, Mr. Meredith's land—Rumour was impartial in distributing the glory—big enough to put a house in, pretty near. But the Berminster waterworks and Jeff Dew remained unscathed.

Colin, when Kate told him of her night's expedition, did not express concern so loudly as Mrs. Howells had done. In fact, he said nothing for a moment. But he looked serious, and Kate could feel the air, already cold enough for sitting out in, grow cooler still with his silent disapproval. They were sitting on Pentrewer Tump, where Colin had been showing Kate the patch of recent digging cunningly covered over with fresh turves and replanted foxglove stems. The day was bright, with a snap in the air, and Mr. Davis, like any respectable farmer, was making a bracken-stack in his yard.

“Mrs. Howells was afraid a bomb had dropped on me.”

“Well, it might have done,” said Colin, and Kate could not deny it. He added amiably, having evidently decided either that warnings were wasted on Kate or that she had the right to disregard them if she chose: “where did you go? Did you find anything?”

“I went to Hymns Bank. And I found a light, and a piece of green tinfoil. The light hadn't anything to do with Sidney, but the tinfoil had.”

Kate had expected Colin's curiosity to be aroused by that piece of tinfoil, and looked expectantly at him. But it was the light that seemed to interest him.

“You saw a
light
, Kate?” he asked quite sharply. “What sort of light? Where? A light in the black-out, do you mean?”

Kate told him the story of her night's adventures. She expected Great-Aunt Colin to draw the moral, as he would have been justified in doing, of the dangers that lie in wait, even in the twentieth century, for unaccompanied females who make nocturnal journeyings about the countryside. But he did not do so. In fact, Kate was a little disappointed to find how little her terrors seemed to interest him. He examined her, with a closeness that made her feel she was in the witness-box, on the subject of the light she had seen.

“I'm afraid my education in the morse code's been neglected, Colin. All I know is, there are such things as light-signals, and so when I heard that old bomber, I feared the worst. But if the light came from Hymns Bank, as it probably did, I was wrong. It was Dai Lewis signalling to his ferrets, as I've told you.”

“I don't believe looking for ferrets with a torch would give the effect of signalling through a window,” said Colin slowly. “Though of course we can't be sure without experimenting.”

Kate laughed.

“Well, we can't experiment without getting locked up! So I vote we take Mr. Dai Lewis's word for it. He seemed perfectly candid. Except—”

Colin looked at her sharply.

“Except what?”

“Well—Except that he wouldn't let me see him properly. He wouldn't give me my torch till I was out in the black-out with a bomber overhead and couldn't put it on. And all the time he had it, he held it directed at the floor. That was one thing. And the other was—”

“Well?”

“Something about the way he spoke,” said Kate slowly. “Such a queer intonation. Not at all like the local accent.”

“He may not be a local man.”

“He's a cousin of Mrs. Davis.”

“But he may have been brought up in another part of the country, and got a different accent, all the same.”

“Oh, I know. But that wasn't it. It was—That I seemed to recognise something queer about his accent. I've heard the same kind of accent before, not here, somewhere quite different, I don't know where. Also, I thought I recognised his voice, but that isn't so puzzling, because very likely I have heard it, in the post office or somewhere.”

Colin agreed:

“And as for his accent, no doubt you heard that at the same time! To me, the fact that he avoided being clearly seen is much more odd.”

“Yes, but not so very odd, when you think what queer fish gipsies are. It worried me at first, but when he said who he was, it didn't worry me any more. And, of course, Colin, a gipsy would be the last kind of person in the world to be signalling to the enemy, though he might be the first person to be careless about the black-out. I don't see, either, how Dai Lewis could have had any connection with Sidney's disappearance, because he was in Breconshire the night Sidney disappeared, Mr. Davis said so.”