anybody doesn’t get back to time, that’s where we’ll all have to go back and wait for stragglers, but it’s a good walk away and it’s uphill.’ He laughed jovially and the passengers joined in. ‘You won’t want to miss me!’ he assured them.
Most of them opted for coffee first and exploring afterwards, and Miss Harvey and Mrs Williams joined the majority in a small restaurant close at hand, having watched the coach drive away.
The sisters enjoyed their coffee, wended their way downhill, inspected the Cathedral with its shrine of the patron saint and walked as far as the entrance to the bishop’s palace, but decided that they would not be able to spend enough time among the very extensive ruins to justify the charge for admission. They bought a leaflet ‘just to show we’ve been,’ and took the long, uphill trek back to the bus-stop.
They were back far too soon, so they spent the time – killing it, to be more exact – in gazing in at nearby shop windows and in purchasing some sweets and a local newspaper. By dribs and drabs the rest of the coach-party joined them at the bus stop. The narrow pavement gradually became congested and a church clock struck twelve. Eyes were fixed expectantly on the road up which the coach had disappeared, but no coach came.
The church clock struck a disconsolate quarter; later, a warning half-hour. Still no coach appeared. The company became first restless, then agitated and at last angry. A policeman came up and one of the male passengers, abetted by others, told him of their dilemma. He suggested that one of them should go to the car-park and ‘hurry the driver up a bit, because you are congesting the footway, look you.’
Two of the men took his advice, having received from the policeman explicit directions in order to reach the car-park by the shortest route. They returned at the end of twenty-five minutes with the stunning information that neither coach nor driver was to be found. The policeman then came to the rescue by alerting his inspector. That official, realising the importance of the tourist trade to his native town, made himself busy on the telephone and in an admirably short time a local coach pulled up, took the party on board and transported them to the hotel overlooking Fishguard harbour where they were booked in for lunch.
The hotel, which owed its very existence to the coach-parties who patronised it all through the summer months, coped efficiently and the local driver, having telephoned his employers and eaten the lunch intended for Driver Daigh, expressed his willingness to carry out the rest of the day’s programme and to return the party to their hotel in Tenby in plenty of time for dinner.
At the dinner tables there was only one topic of conversation and only one viable solution of the mystery. The coach and its driver had been hijacked.
‘Happens all the time,’ ran the general consensus of opinion. ‘Arabs or the Irish, most likely, or an escaped convict or someone.’
Miss Harvey and Mrs Williams were caught up in the general excitement, but, like most of the women, they felt a considerable amount of dismay.
‘What’s going to happen to the rest of the tour, and how are we going to get home?’ they asked nervously.
‘Oh, the company will send up another coach,’ said an omniscient male. ‘You don’t want to worry. The receptionist here will have been on the telephone to them. We’re supposed to have a trip to Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge tomorrow, but, myself, I’d just as soon spend another day here in Tenby.’
The party did spend another day in Tenby. The hotel, it turned out, having received a telephone call from the Company’s head office, arranged to give the passengers an unscheduled lunch, and before tea-time that afternoon a relief coach and its driver had turned up, and the party was conveyed to Towyn, where it was to spend the night. The rest of the tour, apart from continued speculation and surmise and an unprecedented sale of papers ‘in case we should be in the news’, continued as per programme.
‘We don’t let them down,’ said Honfleur, somewhat smugly, later, to Dame Beatrice.
‘We couldn’t understand it at all,’ said Mrs Williams, the more personable and therefore, perhaps, the more forthcoming of the two. ‘It needs some looking into, that it does.’
‘I am here to look into it,’ said Dame Beatrice, already beginning to regret her choice of witnesses.
‘We heard there was another coach, before ours, that had something happen to it,’ said Mrs Williams.
‘It lost its driver, yes. This was not your first coach tour, I am told.’
‘Nor it was with most of the people on the tour. Most had been before.’
Dame Beatrice nodded.
‘I wonder whether you had any premonitions, before you left the coach to go sight-seeing in Dantwylch, that something untoward was going to happen?’ she enquired.
This inviting and leading question was to test the suggestibility and therefore, to some extent, the reliability of the witnesses. The sisters, true to their Cockney origin, stood firm.
‘Of course not,’ said Miss Harvey, ‘else we should have stayed behind in Tenby.’
‘Could you give me a short account of exactly what happened that day at Dantwylch?’
Like schoolchildren asked to describe a day in their summer holidays, the sisters, sometimes interrupting and very occasionally contradicting one another, began their account.
‘We got up after we’d made a cup of tea with the electric machine which another lady had shown us how to manage the night before, had a nice wash and then we went downstairs. I had grapefruit juice and bacon and egg and Maud had orange juice and a plate of cornflakes
‘Porridge, that day, Carrie.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right, porridge. After that she had bacon and sausage and a fried tomato, and we finished up with toast and marmalade, because I said as the bread rolls would be too filling if we had cakes at the coffee shop and our lunch to come. Besides, rolls is more fattening nor toast, though I will say as they put plenty of butter on the table…’
‘And there was two kinds of marmalade, the chunky and the shred…’
‘And honey. Don’t forget the honey. All in them individual little pots, so convenient and giving fair shares for everybody.’
