Adders on the Heath

'Oh, golly!' exclaimed Hamish. 'How good! But no time for that now. The house is surrounded. Two of them. Came by car. Did you hear it?'

'Get into bed at once!' said his father. Hamish glanced at him and obeyed, dropping his things on the floor and hastily pulling on his pyjamas. 'Now get to sleep and we'll settle things in the morning.' He put out the light.

They're coming here, you know,' said Hamish, softly. 'I wasn't making it up. I wasn't, really!'

That he was right was soon proved. There was another scrabbling sound on the roof of the porch and the window was pushed further open. A voice said, 'Ladder! I'm not a blasted monkey on a stick!'

Gavin put out his hand to touch and reassure his son, but Hamish needed no such comfort. He was having the thrill of a lifetime. Gavin moved like a cat to the door. From the window came a grunt and the sound of a light ladder being rested against the sill. Then the window was filled with a monstrous, bulky shadow. The torchlight was blotted out as the man turned to aid his companion. Gavin waited, his hand on the switch, until they were both in the room. Then he gave an Indian war-whoop and turned on the light. Then he sprang. Henri, who had remained on the landing, came in again, waving his axe and chanting a Gallic battle-cry. He was followed by Laura, a tigress coming to the rescue of her young. Dame Beatrice followed, nursing her gun.

There was nothing to it. The intruders were taken by surprise and what with that and having to face Gavin with his police training, Henri with his fearsome weapon and Dame Beatrice with her small revolver, they offered no resistance. Laura, to her chagrin, was left with nothing to do. The men were taken downstairs to the dining-room and while Laura telephoned the Superintendent, Gavin questioned the intruders after informing them that he was a Detective Chief-Inspector from Scotland Yard.

They told him at once that they had been sent to kidnap the child by a man who had assured them that he was the boy's father. Gavin demanded the man's name. At first they protested that they did not know it; that they knew him only as 'the governor.'

At this Gavin turned to Dame Beatrice and asked,

'Do you think you could refresh their memories?'

At the mention of Campden-Towne, Maidston, ponies and ships, which she made implacably and with a mesmeric intensity which obviously unnerved them, they gave up the struggle.

'He had us sewn up,' said one. 'We didn't want to do it, sir, and that's a fact.'

'Are you sailors?' asked Gavin.

'Ah, we are that,' said the other. 'He's got the goods on us, else he'd never have talked us into this.'

'Well, we've got the goods on him,' Gavin told them pleasantly. 'He's a murderer with two deaths to his credit, and it's a good thing for you both that you didn't succeed in kidnapping my son, for-mark this!-at whatever risk to the boy, we should have been bound to pull Towne in. He's been selling State secrets. How does that strike you?'

The two men swore incredulously, and protested that they certainly had known nothing about it. Gavin believed them and said so.

'We knew there was funny business over the ponies,' said one. 'Leastways, we guessed as much. But we only thought he knocked 'em off.'

'The ponies were a secret code, and a very simple and clever one. I'm not giving it away, of course, but I can assure you chaps that you're well out of this business.'

'Well out, sir?'

'Yes, well out, unless Dame Beatrice wants to prosecute you for breaking into her house.'

Dame Beatrice leered at the men and they flinched.

'I imagine that they will be more useful in court as witnesses than as defendants,' she said.

'Yes, you'll have to give evidence as to the shipping of the ponies,' agreed Gavin.

'Knowing them to have been knocked off, Guv.?'

'I hardly think that need come into it. The less complicated your evidence the better, I should say, but of course, I'm not a lawyer.'

The Superintendent turned up at this juncture and was admitted by Henri, who, after a hasty dash upstairs to reassure his wife, had returned to his self-imposed guard duty.

'And I think, Superintendent, that, for the sake of their own safety, it would be as well to take these men into protective custody until Campden-Towne and Maidston have been arrested,' observed Dame Beatrice.

'We've got them, ma'am. Picked them up this afternoon as soon as your little party left the hotel. You convinced us all right, and I must apologise to Mr Richardson for keeping the tabs on him like I have done,' concluded the Superintendent handsomely. The young men, it transpired later, had not heard a sound of what had been going on, but had slept through everything.

FUGUE

'How all ye powers that rule above

Grant we may evil shun

And that henceforth such dreadful acts

May never more be done.'

Victorian Street Ballad

'Just fancy,' said Aileen Crumb to Doreen Dodds, 'what some of we girls might have been letting ourselves in for!'

'Glad we're sprinters and not milers.'