All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (9 page)

"I'd heard you were in Cardiff, my lord."

"I motored to Ripon yesterday to read a paper at the Engineering School. Word came down about your funny; thought I'd have a look."

"Delighted, my lord." Kellow gestured toward the house and grounds. "But I haven't come up with a thing." He had to make an effort not to stare at Lord Luxton's hands, which were oddly without nails, the end of each finger blunt and pink as a cow's muzzle, of no use for labor. His lordship had the habit of carrying his hands protectively against his body, snuggled beneath the breastbone, as if they'd just been born. They did look exquisitely sensitive, which may have accounted for his success in handling intricate detonating mechanisms.

Luxton looked with interest at the great white house as they descended into the park. On the veranda a man in a wheelchair was placed in the sun by a nurse who wore a severely ecclesiastical pale-blue-and-black uniform.

"Fullerites, aren't they?"

"Yes, my lord. A vanishing sect, but still active among the heathen. They're well endowed with estates such as this one."

"I know. Cousin of mine left them a vast sum many years ago."

"Do stay within the flags, my lord; we haven't ruled out the possibility of something lethal in the ground hereabout."

"Sorry."

Luxton took his time within the devastated circle, fingering leaves and studying browned blades of grass. He stared at the clear blue sky, then summoned Kellow.

"Where was the body found, Mr. Kellow?"

Kellow pointed to an oak tree with a branched trunk that stood thirty feet away. "Wedged nearly upside down in the crotch of the great oak. All clothing blown away, some bits of it embedded in the flesh. The shoulders and arms were partly flayed, undoubtedly from being driven with such force halfway through the tree."

"Is there a reliable description of what the blast, or flash, looked like?"

"One of the children survived a parachute mine that went off not far from her home in Manchester. She said our blast was similar to that of the mine, but without the terrible growling, the concussion waves and pressure on the eardrums."

Lord Luxton nodded. "A large ball of shimmering light, with, perhaps, concentric rings of color—lavender shading to green—at the heart of the fireball."

"Why, yes, almost word for word. How did you—"

"I've survived a magnetic mine blast myself. But this, obviously, was not a mine. Nor could it have been a bomb filled with flash compound for night aerial photography. Either one would have left at least a trace of its substance behind. Therefore we have something entirely new, an experimental weapon fearsome beyond belief, or else all this"—he swept a hand around the withered circle—"resulted from a spontaneous and perverse act of nature."

"A bolt from the blue?" Kellow said incredulously.

Instead of replying, Lord Luxton walked slowly to the oak tree, after a while venturing to touch the trunk carefully, as if it were 'a bomb casing.

"Who was the victim?"

"A Dr. Eustace Holley," Kellow said, consulting his notebook.

"No one else in the park at the time? That is fortunate."

"Many of the in—the residents, my lord, are too unreliable to be left on their own out of doors."

His lordship looked around. "Inmates? Is that what you were about to say?"

"They're not referred to as such by staff, but some of them are—apparently they often went mad in the bush. The attrition rate, even among our colonial officials in the more hospitable coastal regions of tropical Africa, is quite high."

"Yes, isn't it. Perhaps I should have a look at the body. Would it be inside?"

To Kellow's surprise, their request to view the remains encountered resistance, even resentment. No one seemed to have time for them. There was a great deal of muted but urgent scurrying about in the dim halls, cries and whimpers from befuddled, apprehensive residents. The gentlemen from Bomb Disposal were allowed to cool their heels for an unconscionably long time in the outer office of the administrator. When Kellow began to be vocal about the delay and threatened action in the name of the minister of home security. Lord Luxton smiled more painfully than usual and excused himself.

In the ground-floor hall he encountered two workmen carrying buckets of calcimine and brushes to the stairs.

"Can't scrub it off," one of them complained. "Charcoal on these old walls? It's there for eternity."

"Waste of time painting it over," said the other. "A new course of stucco, that's what's needed."

"Old duffer, scribbling on his walls. Not like him, Thomas. He was always the tidiest one of the lot. Picked up after himself. Never careless about where he moved his bowels."

"Have they decided it was a bomb did him in?"

"What else could have done it? There's just no place that's safe anymore, Georgie. Next thing you know we'll be having one through the roof."

Lord Luxton watched the workmen up the oak staircase, then on impulse followed them to a second-floor chamber with a small brick hearth. The room had been fitted out with bookshelves, a comfortable Morris chair and reading lamp, a prie-dieu at the foot of the iron bedstead. Chessmen stood in rows on an octagonal game table. The private library consisted of classics in at least three languages. There were bland Currier and Ives prints on three walls. The unpolished parquetry was overlaid with rag rugs of the type displayed at rural fairs. It seemed almost a typical institutional common room, lacking keepsakes, the flavor or reflections of one man's personality.

Except for one odd thing: An invocation (perhaps) had been starkly scrawled on the wall at the head of the bed, apparently with a piece of wood char from the hearth.

LADY

IN THY SERPENT

PRISON-HOUSE

SOME PITY SHOW

Luxton noticed iron brackets in the wall, where something had hung for a long time. A large cross? The yellowed calcimine within the brackets confirmed this.

"Who has this room?" Luxton asked.

The workmen turned in surprise. "Shouldn't be up here, guv'nor," Georgie said.

"May I know whose room?" his lordship repeated pleasantly.

"The one that was blowed to smithereens in the park this morning." Thomas said. "Holley. Dr. Holley."

"When did he write that on the wall?"

"Begging your pardon, guv'nor, we're not allowed to natter about the residents. Regulations is strict here."

"Quite all right. Actually I was looking for the loo."

"Right, sir. Just down the hall to your left."

He was washing up when he glanced through the partly opened loo window and saw below a keg of a woman with a black bag trudging across green lawns to her car. His lordship opened the window wider and leaned out.

"Doctor, may I have a word with you? I'll just be a moment."

The doctor's name was Mary Burgess. She maintained her surgery in Nuncheap, and for more than twenty years she'd looked after the health of the residents of Hawkspurn House. She had a rather grizzled, mole-infested face and black eyes like moles that moved. She held her head erect and thrust slightly forward as if she dared anyone to find her homely. Plenty of pepper in her manner, too, but her mouth couldn't hold a firm line for long, and her hands trembled when Lord Luxton respectfully begged a few moments with the late Dr. Holley.

"He's in pitiable condition."

"I'm afraid I must insist," he said.

"Might I ask why, my lord?"

"The condition of the body could be informative. We have virtually nothing else to go on."

"What do you suspect?" the woman said, with the slowest-curdling smile his lordship had ever seen. Still, her hands would not stop trembling. "Some sort of secret weapon? I understand there've been bombs seen entering the ground and burrowing along beneath roadways, humping and bumping the surface as they move toward their targets."

"Of course you don't subscribe to such public fantasies."

"I
never
fantasize. And my common sense tells me you've nothing to gain by poking about Hawkspurn estate. What exploded in the park this morning was a single, stray bomb—"

"Which happened to kill a gentleman of whom you were very fond."

"He suffered enough in his life. The least I can do is spare him the indignity of strangers—"

"This is official business, madam," Lord Luxton said, summoning the nerve to speak with more authority. But his unconscious cuddling of the pink queer hands against his solar plexus somewhat mitigated the effect.

Her eyes were contemptuous, then sad. "If you must put it on that basis—"

"Well, yes."

"Come with me, then."

The woman led him back into the house and down to a cellar. In a rat-tight and dry storage room lit by a bare globe hung from the ceiling, the shrouded body of Dr. Eustace Holley lay on a trestle table awaiting removal by morticians. Mary Burgess hesitated only a moment before stripping the sheet from the body. She stepped back, mechanically folding the sheet, her eyes fixed on a blank wall, while his lordship examined the remains.

Eustace Holley had been a gaunt man of sixty-five or so, with a hairless torso and one deformed foot, perhaps the result of a monstrous abscess; the scars of surgical correction were still evident. The face was intact, the eyes closed. Judging from the size of those lidded orbs, like parboiled pigeon's eggs, he'd had large, perhaps soulful eyes under a compelling overhang of brow. The furrows of the forehead were straight—an honest, diligent man—the full mustache neatly cared for. Someone, Mary Burgess most likely, had carefully recombed his hair. The, upper torso was, as Kellow had mentioned, severely flayed. There was also a gaping wound in the groin area, now crusted over. The genitals were entirely missing.

His lordship swallowed hard and caught the eye of Mary Burgess.

"Would you turn him for me, doctor?"

That made her angry, but she moved the knobby long body in accordance with Lord Luxton's wishes. Except for a couple of faint, old tropical ulcer scars, the skin of his back and legs was clear. His thin buttocks, however, were stippled with minor but distinct lacerations, almost like puncture marks. Four in a row on each cheek, and recently made.

"Thank you," Luxton mumbled, and he got out of there, ungraciously leaving the corpse for Mary Burgess to reshroud.

By the time she reappeared in the open air his color had returned and there was a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, upside down after the fashion of Ronald Colman in some movie or other where it had rained interminably. His lordship greatly admired Ronald Colman.

"I trust you know more now than you knew before," the doctor said coldly, intending to pass him right by.

Lord Luxton smiled disarmingly. "I'm totally baffled." He fell in step beside Mary Burgess, to her great annoyance. 'What do you make of his condition? I'm referring specifically to the absence of—"

"Shrapnel wound, of course."

"Doctor, believe me, of one thing I'm entirely certain. There was no bomb in the park. Something else did him in."

"Hah," she said, dispiritedly.

"It rather looked to me as if his genitals had been pulled out by the roots."

Mary Burgess faltered as if kicked, then put her head down resolutely and continued on to her open car, a small vintage De Dion Bouton with a high transom windscreen and solid tires. Not what he'd pictured her driving; was she something of a Francophile?

"Good day, your lordship."

"I was wondering—about that time, isn't it?—perhaps tea."

"I'm much too busy for tea today. I've patients waiting and—"

Lord Luxton put a hand on the opening car door, then snatched it away before she could be further offended. But he succeeded in claiming the woman's full attention for several moments.

"Dr. Burgess, something quite odd occurred here this morning. Bizarre, I should say. If I'm not satisfied with my investigation, then there is every possibility that a more comprehensive investigation will be made, perhaps by Military Intelligence. You stand to lose a great deal of your valuable time to those gentlemen. Although I seem to be a considerable nuisance at the moment, if you'll only give me an hour or two perhaps I can spare you further inconvenience."

"What is it you'd like to know?"

"Everything about Dr. Eustace Holley. I especially want to know what possessed him to scrawl those words on the wall of his chamber, above the bed. I want to know what he meant."

"So you saw that," she said, distressed that he would go snooping around. But she couldn't sustain her indignation; her eyes clouded, and a certain elemental force seemed to leave her body.

"Yes."

"Then I'll tell you what I can," Mary Burgess said, her manner for once subdued.

"May I ride with you to Nuncheap? My chauffeur will follow."

"Very well."

Neither of them spoke the first mile and a half as Mary Burgess gave most of her attention to the laboring automobile, which pulled to the left and wheezed disastrously on the most minor grades. The doctor glanced several times at Lord Luxton as he fiddled with his pipe and absently patted his jacket pockets for matches, and finally she grumbled, "Smoke if you must, it doesn't bother me."