Gunner Kelly

to devise such old-fashioned man-traps; but he had appeared on the scene too late to be their sole architect—

The trees ended abruptly. Simultaneously he was out of the wood and on to the well-kept lawn which ran down to the manor house, smooth springy turf underfoot, and no more trailing branches and bramble tendrils plucking at him in the dark.

And there was the manor itself, brightly lit—

He strove for a moment to hold his inner train of thought on its lines, but the impact of his first true vision of the building was too strong for him, wrenching him irresistibly off course against his will.

He knew already what it was like, with Colonel Butler’s dummy1

photographs and plans etched on his memory: the solid, rectangular three-storey mansion, its incongruous towers at each corner—half house and half castle. Yet now what had seemed to him unnatural and ugly—the towers were no higher than the house, and neither towers nor house were surmounted by roofs, as would have been the case with every such still-inhabited survival in his own country—it had its own reality, dramatically illuminated by lights on the terrace below and from the crenellated parapet above against the intense blackness which framed it: Duntisbury Manor, in Duntisbury Royal, in Duntisbury Chase in the county of Dorset, was where it had been for half a thousand years or more, grown out of its own ground— and woe betide the invader!

“Get on with you, then!” Kelly urged him from behind.

Benedikt stood firm, scrutinising the manor in his own time. “This is Duntisbury Manor—is it?” He let Thomas Wiesehofer speak.

For, after all, poor Thomas had never seen the Manor, lacking the benefit of Colonel Butler’s researches and advice.

“And what else would it be—Buckingham Palace?” Kelly sniffed.

“Did ye not see it this afternoon—or ‘twould be yesterday afternoon now—when ye were out and about, snoopin’ round the village?”

“Please?” Benedikt decided that Thomas would be unfamiliar with

‘snooping’. In their insularity, the English took it for granted that most foreigners could understand their language and were unconcerned about their own ignorance. “What is ... ‘snoopin’?”

“Don’t turn round! Never mind—just get on—go on with you,”

ordered Kelly.

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There now! thought Benedikt, stepping forward again: Michael Kelly had recalled him to the consideration of what was important again—which was Michael Thomas Kelly himself.

There were three ingredients here, in Duntisbury Chase, which had come together like those in gunpowder to produce an explosive mixture—Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and Dr David Audley and Gunner Kelly. And Colonel Butler had known about the first two of them, and had guessed about the third—and the Colonel had been right: there was a sulphurous smell about Gunner Kelly, he was sure of that now.

Gunner Kelly—

They were approaching the Manor. The flashlight at his feet picked out a gravel path which circled an immense ornamental pond on which the night sky was reflected like a black mirror.

Gunner Kelly—the other two were what they were—and the path, which had been crunching under his feet, ended with a flight of steps leading him downwards, on to a wide stone-flagged terrace on which the flashlight at his back lost itself in the great pool of light which filled the south frontage of the manor: the facade, which had seemed so much longer and lower from that first view, now towered above him, with the curve of the towers on each side embracing him—

Gunner Kelly, with his sharp words of command, and his chameleon voices, and the inner certainty of those voices matching the certainty of his searching fingertips— Gunner Kelly was something more than the faithful retainer the facts had made him, dummy1

the Old General’s loyal servant in life and the Old General’s granddaughter’s obedient instrument now.

He paused, as though irresolute now that he had lost the guiding light at his feet. There were French windows cut into the thickness of the ground floor, with other windows similarly pierced on each side of them betrayed by chinks of light through drawn curtains.

But the true entrance was there in the angle of the south-western tower, shadowed under a twisted canopy of branches and leaves.

Benedikt’s adrenalin pumped. For Benedikt Schneider knew now that, if Miss Becky had supplied the will to this mischief, and if David Audley had fashioned the means to it, the spark must have come from outside them—the spark and the certainty—

“Go on, then!” Kelly circled to his right, carefully out of reach.

“What are ye waitin‘ for?”

And Benedikt Schneider knew that Gunner Kelly was the source of that spark—that Colonel Butler had been right. But he was playing Thomas Wiesehofer now, and poor Thomas would not know—

could not know—that the postern door of Duntisbury Manor was on his left, shrouded by the famous Duntisbury Magnolia, the seeds of which dated from the days when the Elector of Hanover had ruled American colonies as King of England.

“Please?” The more he suspected Kelly, the more determined he was to play Thomas as long as possible.

The postern door saved them both from more shadow-boxing by opening with the sharp metallic clunk of a heavy latch and an un-oiled whinny of iron hinges.

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“Michael?” The door rattled on a chain. “Have you got him?”