Watson's Choice (27 page)

As though (also according to Laura) the climate itself was for once on the side of the angels, with almost no warning the mild weather which had succeeded the first cold snap of January gave way to an old-fashioned winter, and an iron frost clamped down upon the most of the country.

To the great excitement and delight of the little boys, even the river froze over, the most picturesque and impressive feature of this being the arrested flow of a small lasher which precipitated water past the mill-wheel which was distant less than forty yards from the road to the
Queen of the Circus
.

Alice, who had a firm faith in the ability of little boys to preserve their lives (which, in her opinion, were at least as numerous as those of cats), allowed the two children to go out in all weathers as long as they ate well and did not catch colds. She believed, probably with some justification, that frost had a tonic effect upon the healthy human frame, so she encouraged the boys, wrapped up warmly, to go off whenever it pleased them.

One day they set off, as usual, and upon foot, for she had forbidden the use of bicycles because she was afraid that these might skid on icy patches on the roads. The children had discovered a new interest, that of watching the sand-pit ponds becoming frozen over.
After
eight successive days of hard frost, when cart-ruts turned to iron and breath was like smoke upon the air, the ice thickened and the boys rejoiced in the knowledge that a long-cherished dream was coming true – they could, at last, walk over to the island.

This magic Tir-nan-Og was some fifty yards long and fifteen yards broad, and it lay in the middle of the largest sheet of water near the farm. The island itself was an ugly hunk of gravel, sand, and clay, and offered, to the adult mind, no romantic possibilities at all, for it boasted no vegetation of any kind except the sparse, coarse grass which grew everywhere on the sand heaps round the gravel pits. It was also extremely ugly, for it had never even formed part of the heath but had been the centrepiece of some rough pasture before a built-up area had commandeered the gravel under the grass.

The children, however, were delighted with it. John’s contention was that the island formed the stronghold of robbers; Philip spoke excitedly of buried treasure. They reached the edge of the broad sheet of ice which had enclosed the island, after having scrambled through a stiff hedge and crossed a piece of waste ground which led to the gravel pit. Work at the gravel pit was at a standstill. There was nobody about. The boys, torn and sooty, stepped confidently on to the ice, and half-walked, half-slid their way across it.

To less determined idealists the island must have proved a disappointment, but the little boys were enchanted with it. They explored it a dozen times, quartering it from every direction. The bitter cold of the late-January day did not affect them, for they took no heed of it, and for a time they kept themselves warm by searching for flat stones and skating them across the ice towards the mainland shore.

At last John looked at his wrist-watch.

‘Time to be moving,’ he said. ‘There’s hot roast pork for dinner.’

Philip, whose appetite for food was still not as keen as the motherly Alice would have wished, demurred, and a compromise was reached. They would each take an end of the island and meet in the middle; then they would make tracks for home. But before this plan could be carried out, Philip had a better idea.

‘Let’s walk on the ice round the island, opposite ways, and keep crouched down so that we can’t see one another,’ he said. ‘That would be much more exciting.’

John agreed.

‘Let’s make it a race,’ he suggested. Philip adopted this plan with great enthusiasm. John had more stamina than he had, but it had been proved more than once that over short distances he was the fleeter of foot.

Each child cascaded down the almost vertical four-foot-high bank to the ice, and John gave the signal to start. Almost as soon as they had both rounded opposite ends of the island and were within sight of one another again, a large pebble dropped between them on the ice, having soared over the top of the island to land on the frozen pond on the opposite side to the road along which they had come from the farm.

John signalled violently, and crouched immobile where he was. Philip accepted the hint, and remained in position like a statue. Two more large stones came hurtling over the top, and others landed on the island itself.

The boys remained where they were. They had once been chased and stoned by a gang of louts, and were not anxious to repeat the experience. Nothing more followed, however, and at last John, signing to Philip to remain where he was, crawled cautiously up the bank and lay flat on the stiff, frozen grasses to spy out the lie of the land.

There was not a soul in sight. Whoever had flung the pebbles had vanished from the scene. Greatly relieved, John crawled along on hands and knees until he reached his companion.

‘It’s all right. They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘Let’s begin again. Over the top, and back to the start.’

Unknown to the boys (or, indeed, to anyone except the men who had been in charge of a small dredger before the frost came), there was a deep hole about twelve feet across, just under the bank and on the northern end of the island. Philip reached this first, but John was almost as quick, so that both were on a danger spot at the same instant. The ice split and spread in a cracked and crooked grin, for over the ten-foot depth it was too thin to bear the combined weight and elephantine tactics of the boys.

John flung himself sideways, clutched at some grass on the bank and held on, kicking away with one boot to make foothold on the gravel bank. Philip, less experienced in rapid physical movement, went through into ten feet of water, icy cold in the dangerous and narrow hole. He yelled in terror and anguish as he felt his foothold
go,
and then disappeared below the surface. He came up threshing and choking, John, unperturbed, shouted:

‘Spread out your arms on the ice!’

Philip, however, flung himself slightly sideways towards some long grass on the bank. More ice cracked and gave way, but this time his head was not submerged. He had got one plunging foot on the edge of a spit of gravel where the excavating dredger had not yet been at work. The bank sloped here. The quick-witted John, on his stomach, leaned over and gave him a hand. With his other hand Philip clutched at a particularly large but insecure pebble, and dragged it into the water. The sturdy John hung on. Philip flung himself at the bank, and, suddenly, everything was over. Soaked, coughing up water, and very cold, he was lying on the bank beside John.

‘Better run about a bit,’ said John, thumping him well-meaningly between the shoulder-blades. ‘Might catch a cold this weather. I say, you might have been drowned. What did you want to whang through the ice like that for? I say, that was a whopping big stone that went into the water. I say, are you all right now? If you are, you ought to run about a bit.’

Philip got to his feet. Together the little boys did their best to squeeze, press, and wring the water out of his clothes, but, with all their efforts, his garments remained too heavily weighted with water to allow him to do more than jog-trot miserably about the tiny island, cold, sodden, and in desperate discomfort.

It was John who stumbled upon the harpoon. He stopped and picked it up.

‘
This
wasn’t here before,’ he said. ‘Those people throwing stones must have thrown it over here. Fancy leaving it, though! I don’t know quite what it is, but it’s something rather good.’

Philip said, jerking his head, ‘They couldn’t come after it. The ice wouldn’t bear them. Anybody who could throw that, and those big pebbles, would be a lot bigger than we are. Let’s take it home. I wonder why they didn’t want it, though? My uncle’s got one of these.’

Alice was horrified at the state in which they arrived. She bathed both, put them to bed in hot blankets, gave them huge basins of thick soup, and generally made what Laura called ‘an old-hen fuss’ of them. At sight of the harpoon, however, Laura whistled.

‘You didn’t see who threw it?’ she demanded. Regretfully the boys were obliged to say that they had not.

‘You see, it must have come over after the big stones, when Philip was in the water,’ explained John.

‘What do you make of it?’ Laura enquired of Mrs Bradley at supper.

‘It looks like the one Sir Bohun had, but why, as it has been in full view of everybody since (as well as before) the death of Miss Campbell, somebody decided to get rid of it is a minor mystery,’ Mrs Bradley replied. ‘However, it is one which may tie up with that other minor mystery which I suggested our dear Robert might investigate – the minor mystery of the Sherlock Holmes
insignia
, so to speak, which continue to be showered upon Sir Bohun by some unknown and, I fear, unfriendly hand. He telephoned while you were out for your afternoon walk. He has now received a parcel containing a photograph of two young people in late nineteenth-century costume bearing the caption: Irene Adler and the Hereditary King of Bohemia. What do you think of that?’

‘A cinch for Gavin,’ replied Gavin’s fiancée. ‘If he can’t find out where
that
came from, he must be a chump.’

‘I agree. By the same post, Sir Bohun received a short, block-printed communication to this effect: “What about the
Crooked Man?
See Samuel ii, 11 and 12.”’

‘Good heavens! Sir Bohun must have quite a museum of the things by now, counting what he and Bell got ready for the Sherlock Holmes party. We ought to push over and see Mm. Didn’t he ask you to go?’

‘Indeed he did, and I have promised to join him to-morrow.’

‘What do you think is the point of sending him all these things?’

‘To compass his death, child.’

‘Are you serious? That
does
mean Manoel, then. He’s been quite open about wanting to do for Sir Bohun ever since he’s been over here. Gavin ought to pinch him before he can do any damage. I know Gavin thinks he’s the murderer.’

‘I want to see the island on which the boys found the harpoon,’ said Mrs Bradley, taking no notice of these statements and opinions.

‘Whoever it was – and Manoel is still my guess – he couldn’t have known the kids were there. It’s quite a thought that he might have hit one of them,’ went on Laura, in no way abashed by her
employer’s
lack of interest in her remarks. ‘What was the idea, do you suppose?’

‘There is nothing to show. There was no advantage to the murderer in getting rid of the harpoon, since it has been on view both before and since the murder, and no doubt has been tested for fingerprints.’

‘I wonder what the idea was, then?’ said Laura. Mrs Bradley made no reply.

Immediately after lunch the next day, leaving a disappointed and disgruntled Laura to amuse the little boys, whom Alice, as a precautionary measure, was, to their mingled resentment and alarm, keeping in bed for the day, Mrs Bradley drove to Sir Bohun’s house from the farm and was welcomed effusively by the baronet.

‘Oh, so
you’ve
got my harpoon!’ he exclaimed, looking at the implement which Mrs Bradley was using as a walking-stick. ‘I couldn’t think where it had got to!’

‘It got to the Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ she responded. ‘I want to speak to Mr Lupez.’

‘Manoel? I believe he went out. Bell would know, perhaps.’ He rang for the red-haired secretary.

‘Ah, Mr Bell,’ said Mrs Bradley, lunging at him in a playful manner with the harpoon. ‘I have come to return Sir Bohun’s property and to ask after the health of Mr Lupez.’

‘Lupez?’ said Bell, flinching away from the harpoon. ‘I think he went out to the post-office. I’ll go and find out.’

‘Obliging sort of fellow,’ said Sir Bohun in a discontented tone. Mrs Bradley waited for what was to follow, but it did not come immediately, for Sir Bohun was staring out of the window at the secretary who was walking up the drive. ‘Some more of these damned Sherlock Holmes things,’ he commented. ‘You know, Beatrice, the joke’s gone stale on me. In fact’ – he lowered his voice – ‘I find myself dreading the sight of the beastly things.’

‘Where are they posted from?’ Mrs Bradley demanded.

‘I’ve no idea. Bell unwraps the things, as he does all my parcels and correspondence, and I’ve never bothered to ask him. I’ll tell him to bring this one in, and we’ll have a look.’

He rang again, but Mrs Bradley slipped out into the hall to take a parcel from the hands of the secretary whom the butler had just admitted.

‘It’s very heavy for you to hold, Doctor Bradley,’ said Bell, yielding it into her outstretched hands. Mrs Bradley grinned in her terrifying fashion, and observed:

‘It is indeed heavy. I take it that this is one of the Six Napoleons.’

‘I couldn’t say.’ He stood aside, smiling, and added, ‘Our own bust of Napoleon is in the hall, but this is another little present for Sir Bohun, I imagine, anyway.’

Mrs Bradley handed the parcel back to him with the remark that it
was
heavy, and preceded him into the room. Bell placed the package on the table and began to undo the string.

‘Not another of those Sherlock gadgets?’ said Sir Bohun, obviously reluctant to have the parcel opened.

‘It looks like it, Sir Bohun,’ said Bell. ‘This is like all the other labels I’ve seen, and, now I come to look, the postmark’s the same.’

‘Is it? What
is
the postmark?’ demanded Sir Bohun. He took the wrapping-paper and studied it carefully. ‘Blest if
I
can make it out. What do you say it is, Beatrice?’

Mrs Bradley took out her small magnifying glass.

‘Difficult to say,’ she replied, studying the label and then the wrapping-paper. ‘What do
you
make of it, Mr Bell?’

‘Wapping,’ said Bell. ‘You can’t see it at all clearly on this parcel but it is just the same as all the others. Shall I open the box, Sir Bohun, or, as you have it here, do you prefer to de-box it yourself?’

‘No, no, go ahead,’ replied Sir Bohun, who was still puzzling over the postmark and had borrowed Mrs Bradley’s magnifying glass as an aid to further study.