Dead Man's Quarry (11 page)

“Hullo!” A schoolboy with bleached, ruffled hair and a pleasantly freckled face greeted John with a smile of recognition. “It's the motorists! So it was
au revoir
after all! Isabel, it's the motorists we met on Rodland Hill.”

His companion, a slender girl in a blue cotton frock, smiled a self-possessed greeting.

“Good morning. Have you come to see the sights? There aren't any, I'm glad to say. Lion would drag me here. He's a horrid little ghoul.”

“I like that!” protested the boy indignantly. “Upon my soul, I like that!” He seemed about to enter on a lengthy refutation of this remark, but John broke in to introduce himself and Rampson.

“I'm afraid this is a sad end to your cycling tour. You all looked such a jolly party on Rodland Hill the other day I quite wished I could join you. It's a horrible thing to have happened.”

“Beastly,” said Isabel composedly. “Though of course none of us knew Charles well. He was quite a stranger. Still, for three days he was one of us. I don't feel I ever want to go on a cycling tour again.”

“Rats!” said Lion heartlessly. “I say, Mr. Christmas, have you heard that Charles's bicycle is missing? It was the wrong one they found. Charles had my pump on his bicycle. I should know it again anywhere. That ought to be a clue, don't you think?”

John smiled a little at the boy's enthusiastic tone, but Isabel, with a sudden little shiver, said distastefully:

“Oh, it's horrible! Come on, Lion! Let's go home.”

Lion, however, was so obviously disposed to stay and attach himself to John and Rampson that she relented and sitting on a great boulder a short distance from the quarry, began to draw in a little sketch-book.

The rugged face of the rock rose some hundred feet above the tumbled litter of fallen boulders that lay about its base. Its weathered and mellow look and the bracken and sprawling blackberry bushes that grew among the boulders showed that the quarry had long been disused. But for the rusty lines that ran past it to the railway, this sudden hollowing of the hillside seemed the work of nature rather than of man.

“Fancy falling over there,” said Lion, voicing the common thought. “Beastly. Awfully easy, too. The grass is awfully slippery up above and the edge part slopes down.”

“How do you know?”

“Went there the other evening, while the rest of them were at tea in the Tram. I wanted to put the quarry on my map, as the inn was called after it, and of course I couldn't put it on the map without seeing it. It wouldn't have been fair.”

“Oh, that map!” exclaimed Isabel Donne, turning at these words with the ghost of a laugh. “Don't let the child start talking about his map, Mr. Christmas, or you'll never have any peace.”

Lion looked a little hurt.

“I don't talk about my map to people who aren't interested in maps,” he said with dignity. “I was just explaining why I went to the quarry, Isabel, not talking about my map at all. I don't know why it is,” he added detachedly, “but girls always love to call one a child if one happens to be a year or two younger than themselves. They think it annoys one. But of course it doesn't.”

“Of course not,” agreed John, suppressing a smile. “And as it happens, I am interested in maps. What kind of a map is this?”

Lion looked at him a trifle doubtfully, as if suspecting his good faith. He had evidently had to endure a good deal of teasing on account of his hobby. But he replied amiably:

“Well, it's a map of our tour, that's all, that I made myself. I put in everything that happened, with drawings and things, in coloured inks.” He added in a louder tone, looking inimically at Miss Donne's drooped red-gold head: “I put in things like Isabel falling off her bicycle in the middle of Hereford High Street, and Isabel running away from two cows because they looked at her, and things like that.”

Miss Donne raised her head from her drawing, put out the tip of a delicate tongue, and resumed her sketching. Mollified, Lion admitted with a grin:

“I made that up, that about the cows. Isabel isn't really frightened of cows. She isn't frightened of anything.”

“I'm frightened of you, young Lion.”

“Rot,” said Lion briefly. “Pax. Well, now, Mr. Christmas, do you see any reason why I shouldn't put in my map that Charles got killed? Nora says it's a disgusting idea, and I'm not to. But if my map's a proper map of the tour, I must put it in because it happened at the end of the tour. And after all it's no use pretending he didn't get killed, because he did.”

John smiled at the boy's earnestness, and the spectacle he made of the artist confronted with a problem as old as art.

“Well,” he temporized, endeavouring to be tactful, “I should leave it for a bit until—”

“Until they've caught the murderer?”

“Yes, and until people have got more used to the poor chap's death and more or less forgotten it. Could you show me your map some time? I should awfully like to see it.”

“Rather, of course I will. I say, is Mr. Rampson looking for the ring that's missing? Let's go and help him.”

“Hopeless, I'm afraid, in all this welter of rocks and brambles. Besides, we don't know that the ring's there to be found.”

“No,” agreed Lion. “But it's a funny thing that ring has disappeared, Mr. Christmas. Because it was awfully tight on his finger. I don't think it could possibly have slipped off. Once when I wanted to borrow it to use as a seal I tried to pull it off and it wouldn't come. And Charles had quite a job to get it off himself. It's been stolen, I bet. Hullo, Mr. Rampson's found something!”

“Coming over!” called Rampson from among the boulders, and a small object whizzed through the air. Lion caught it neatly and looked at it with an expression of disappointment.

“An apple! That's not much of a clue!”

He was about to throw it away when John stopped him.

“Don't do that, I want it! Where d'you find this, Sydenham?”

“Best I can do for you,” said Rampson, approaching. “Here's another one. Picnic-party's refuse, I should say. There are one or two rusty tins among the brambles, too. Don't put them in your pocket, you ass. You don't know who may have been handling them.”

“Exactly.”

Rampson laughed good-humouredly.

“Oh, they're clues, are they,
faute de mieux
? Shall I go back and fetch the sardine-tins?”

“Not if they're rusty. They must have been there some time. But these apples are perfectly fresh, though a good deal bruised.”

“Probably some picnic-party up above, gorged to the eyes with ham sandwiches and bananas, threw them at a rabbit or something. Very wasteful, of course. But picnic-parties are inclined that way.”

“It's possible,” agreed John. “I wonder whether the worried damsel at the Tram Inn sells apples to passing picnickers. Most of the trees in her orchard are Worcester pearmains, and so are these.”

“I say!” Lion, round-eyed and flushed brightly with excitement, exclaimed. “Are you a detective, Mr. Christmas?”

“Not really. I'm just a humble admirer of the great Holmes, like yourself, Lion.”

The young generation raised an eyebrow and remarked that it preferred Dr. Thorndyke.

“More scientific. Everything he finds he puts under the microscope. I wish I had a microscope of my own. Dad's got one, but he doesn't much like me using it when he's not there. I do like the sort of people that understand microscopes, and science and things.”

John laughed.

“Then you'll like Rampson. He soaks in science and keeps one eye at the microscope even in his sleep.”

‘'I say!” Lion looked rather shyly at this embodiment of his ideal. “Do you really? I say! Are you staying long? Would you come over and have a look at Dad's microscope, and my slides? All the slides I make look kind of blurred. Do you think—”

“Dirt,” said Rampson laconically. “Righto, of course
I
will.”

He did not by word or look reproach John for having thus deflected the stream of Lion's young enthusiasm. He was happy in the company of schoolboys, and when they turned to go home walked contentedly off with his new satellite, who was assuring him earnestly that the possibility of foreign matter appearing in his slides had been carefully guarded against by an extensive use of soap and water. Isabel shut up her sketch-book and rose from her boulder and smiled at John, who waited to be her escort.

“We left our bicycles at Upper Ring Farm,” she explained. “Lion wouldn't risk his priceless tyres along this track. Gorgeous day, isn't it? Have you been up on Radnor Forest yet? I went yesterday. You can't think how lovely it is. Just hills and hills and trees and trees, and a little waterfall that's one of the loveliest things in the world. You must go, if you can find time from your detecting. Or is Lion wrong in supposing that you detect? Do you detect, or don't you?”

They followed in the steps of the two earnest scientists. The track was only wide enough for two, and John was extremely glad that a happy thought of his had transferred Lion's budding devotion from himself to Rampson, since it left him Isabel as a companion. Her light, clear voice which when she spoke of waterfalls itself suggested the sound of splashing water, her precise enunciation, her self-possessed and tranquil manner—all suggested a brain admirably clear behind that pretty white forehead. Pretty she was, too, in an elvish, sharp-pointed manner, with thin, humorous lips and heavy white lids that hid her thoughts.

“I do detect,” replied John airily, responding to her manner, “when circumstances allow me. Do you?”

“Not I. I accept, and make no attempt to pierce the veil, as the spiritualists put it. Poor Charles! All your detecting won't bring him to life again.”

“No, it has another object.”

She gave him a long glance from the bright, hazel eyes under those heavy lids.

“What is your object? Do tell me.”

John hesitated.

“I might say, a passion for abstract justice,” he replied. “But it wouldn't be true. My object is just the interest the problem has for me.”

She nodded.

“Some like algebra, some like chess, and some like detecting crimes. I don't much like any of them.”

“What is your favourite amusement?

“Talking to intelligent young men,” she replied calmly. “And drawing. But I'm better at the former than the latter. I'm too lazy to study properly, and fall back on lightning-sketches and caricatures. There's one of you in here. Like to see it?

She handed him her sketch-book, open at a page which showed a lively caricature of himself and Rampson examining imaginary clues among the blackberry bushes. John laughed appreciatively, admired and turned a few more pages.

“That's Dr. Browning,” said Isabel, looking over his arm, “looking pleased at one of his own remarks. That's Felix raising an eyebrow at Charles. That's Charles slapping Felix on the back.”

“Oh, that's Charles, is it?”

John looked attentively at the large-featured, genial face, portrayed wearing an exaggerated smile. A wide mouth, a long chin and numerous open-air wrinkles around the eyes seemed to be the chief features of a jovial, but not particularly pleasant, physiognomy.

“That's Nora, but it's not very good,” said Isabel, as he turned another page. “She's too good-looking to caricature well. And that's the lot,” she added rather hastily, as he turned over again, “except for some art-school ones, not interesting and all bad.”

John handed back the sketch-book.

“You ought to see Nora's books, if you're interested in drawing,” observed Isabel. “She's worth twenty of me as an artist. But then she works and I don't. And Felix draws very well, though he goes in for photography instead.”

“You all go to the same art-school?”

“Nora and I do. Felix only works there occasionally, when he can get time off from photography. I don't know whether I shall go back next term. It's amusing, but I think I've had enough of it. Oh, that dog! What frightful animals these farmers keep! We're told that the dog is the friend of man. Who would have thought it? Do you think we ought to give this woman something for looking after our bicycles, or not? I don't quite understand the social distinctions in this part of the world.”

“Not,” said John decidedly. “This is her own farm, such as it is. And, anyway, these people aren't so easily tipped as our southerners. They have a dour sort of pride quite their own.”

“‘Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,'” murmured Isabel, as John wheeled her bicycle away from the yard. “By the way, has it occurred to anyone that the signet-ring you're all so bothered about may have been pocketed by the gentleman who found poor Charles? Mr. Hufton, or whatever his name is, the proud lady's lodger?”

“Rather risky,” commented John. “After all, this is a case of murder.”

“Hufton didn't know that. He probably thought it was an accident. And he
is
a bit of a thief,” added Isabel meditatively.

John looked at her in some surprise.

“It seems to me,” he remarked, “that as a detective, Miss Donne, you leave me standing still. I understand this is your first visit to the district, and you haven't been here forty-eight hours. Yet already you have detected a thief nine miles or so from where you are staying. Very good work, in my opinion.”

Miss Donne's thick golden eyelashes quivered slightly. There was the fraction of a minute's silence, while all sorts of strange, vague surmises rose in John's mind, and his interest in this pale, pretty, self-possessed young woman suddenly became intensified. Then:

“Wild strawberries!” she cried in a sort of childish glee, and stooping to the hedge-bank began to collect the little scarlet globes in the palm of her hand.