When the pans were clean we lit the oil lamp and closed the door against the sweet dusk, and went again through all the papers Connor had given us — the photographs and the typed notes, the interviews with the parents, statements from witnesses on the mountain and from the senator's staff in London, a glossy photograph of Jessica taken the previous spring, grinning gap-toothed in a studio with its painted backdrop of a blooming arbour of roses. Page after page of the material, and all of it served only to underline the total lack of solid evidence, and the family's coming financial emasculation, and the brutal, staring fact that all too often kidnappers who receive their money give only a dead body in return, a corpse who can tell no tales.
Holmes smoked three pipes and climbed silently into his bunk. I closed the file on the happy face and shut down the lamp, and lay awake in the darkness long after the breathing above me slowed into an even rhythm. Finally, towards the end of the short summer's night, I dropped off into sleep, and then the Dream came and tore at me with its claws of blame and terror and abandonment, the massive, shambling, monstrous inevitability of my personal hell, but this time, before its climax, just short of the final moment of exquisite horror, a sharp voice dragged me back, and I surfaced with a shuddering gasp into the simple quiet of the gipsy caravan.
'Russell? Russell, are you all right?'
I sat up, and his hand fell away.
'No. Yes, I'm all right, Holmes.' I breathed into my hands and tried to steady myself. 'Sorry I woke you. It was just a bad dream, worry about the child I guess. It takes me that way, sometimes. Nothing to be concerned about.'
He moved over to the tiny table, scratched a match into life, and lit a candle. I turned my face away from him.
'Can I get you anything? A drink? Something hot?'
His concern raked at me.
'No! No, thank you, Holmes, I'll be fine in a minute. Go back to bed.'
He stood with his back to the light, and I felt his eyes on me. I stood up abruptly and went for my spectacles and coat.
'I'll get some fresh air. Go back to sleep,' I repeated fiercely, and stumbled from the caravan.
Twenty minutes down the road my steps finally slowed; ten minutes after that I stopped and went to sit on a dark shape that turned out to be a low wall. The stars were out, a relatively uncommon thing in this rainy comer of a rainy country, and the air was clean and smelt of bracken and grass and horse. I pulled great draughts of it into me and thought of Mrs. Simpson, who had called it breathing champagne. I wondered if Jessica Simpson were breathing it now.
The Dream gradually receded. Nightmare and memory, it had begun with the death of my family, a vivid recreation that haunted and hounded me and made my nights into purgatory. Tonight, though, I had Holmes to thank for interrupting it, and its aftermath was considerably lessened. After an hour, cold through, I walked back through the first light of dawn to the wagon, and to bed and a brief sleep.
In the morning neither of us mentioned the night's occurrences. I cooked porridge for breakfast, flavoured with light flecks of ash and so lumpy Mrs. Hudson would have considered it suitable only for the chickens. We then walked up towards the described campsite, taking a roundabout route and a spade to justify our presence.
The site was unattended when we arrived. The tent was still standing, slack-roped and flabby-sided, with a blackened circle and two rusting pans to one side where Mrs. Simpson had cooked her meals. The area smelt of old, wet ashes, and had the forlorn look of a child's toy left out in the rain. I shuddered at the image.
I went up to the tent door and looked in at the jumble of bedrolls and knapsacks and clothing, all abandoned in the scramble to locate the child and now compulsively preserved in situ by police custom. Holmes walked around to the back of the tent, his eyes on the trampled, rain-soaked ground.
'How long have we?' I asked him.
'Connor arranged for the constable on guard to be called away until nine o'clock. A bit under two hours. Ah.'
At his expression of satisfaction I let the canvas flap fall and picked my way around to the tent's back wall, where I was met by the singular vision of an ageing gipsy stretched full out between the guy ropes with a powerful magnifying glass in his hand, prodding delicately at the tent's lower seam with his fountain pen. The pen disappeared into the interior of the tent. I turned and went back inside, and when the bedding had been pulled away I saw what Holmes had discovered: a tiny slit just at seam line, the edges pushed inward and the threads at both ends of the cut slightly strained.
'You expected that?' I asked.
'Didn't you?' I was tempted to make a face at him through the canvas, but refrained; he'd have known.
'A tube, for sleeping gas?'
'Right you be, Mary Todd,' he said, and the pen retreated. I stood up, head bent beneath the soggy canvas roof, and looked at the corner where Jessica Simpson had slept. According to her parents, the only things missing from her knapsack or the tent had been her shoes. No pullover, no stockings, not even her beloved doll. Just the shoes.
The doll was still there, feet up beneath the tangle of upturned bedding, and I pulled out the much-loved figure, straightened her crumpled dress, and brushed a tangle of yarn hair from her wide painted eyes. The once-red lips smiled at me enigmatically.
'Why don't you tell me what you saw that night, eh?' I addressed her. 'It would save us a great deal of troublé.' 'What was that?' asked Holmes' voice from a distance.
'Nothing. Would there be any objection if we took the doll with us, do you think?'
'I shouldn't think so. They only left these things here for us to see; they have their photographs.'
I pushed the doll into my skirt pocket, took a last look around, and went outside. Holmes stood, back to the tent and fists on his hips, looking down the valley.
'Getting the lie of the land?' I asked.
'If you were kidnapping a child, Russell, how would you get her away?'
I chewed my lip for a few minutes and contemplated the bracken-covered hillsides.
'Personally, I should use an automobile, but no one seems to have heard one that night, and it's a goodly hike to anywhere with three and a half stone of child on one's back, even for a strong man.' I studied the hill and saw the trails that wandered over and around it. 'Of course. The horses. No one would notice one more set of prints with all these here. They came in on horseback, didn't they?'
'It's a sad state of affairs when, being confronted by a hillside, the modern girl thinks of an automobile. That was slow, Mary Todd. Overlooking the obvious. Theological training is proving as destructive to the reasoning abilities as I had feared.'
I cringed away and whined at him.
'Aw, Da', it waren't me fault. I war lookin' a't'evidence.'
'Harden your t more,' he corrected absently. 'So, which way?'
'Not towards the road; there'd be too much chance of being seen.'
'Down the valley then, or over the hill?' he considered aloud.
'A pity we weren't here a week ago; there might have been something to see.'
'If wishes were horses — '
'Detectives would ride,' I finished. 'I should go further away from the nearest village, I think, along the hill or over it.'
'We have an hour before the guard is back. Let us see what there is to find. I'll go up the hill; you take the base of it.'
We zigzagged along and up the hill in increasingly wide arcs out from the tent. Half an hour went by with nothing but aching backs and stiff necks to show for our scrutiny. Forty-five minutes, and I began to listen nervously for the Welsh equivalent of 'Oy, what's this then?' from the campsite behind us. The two of us reached the furthest points in our arcs and turned back toward the middle. Something caught my eye — but it was nothing, just a gleam of bare stone where a hoof had scraped a rock. I went on, then turned back for a second look. Would an unshod hoof actually scrape into stone? On the whole I thought not.
'Hol — Uh, Da'!' I called. His head came up, and he started across the hillside at a long-legged trot, the spade bouncing on his shoulder. When he came up he was barely winded. I pointed and he dropped down with his glass to look more closely.
