'Are you a gipsy then, lady?'
'What do you think?' I grunted.
'My Dad says yes.'
'Your Dad is wrong.' Shocked silence met this heresy. After a minute she plucked up her nerve again.
'If it's not a gipsy you are, then what?'
'A Romany.'
'A Romany? There's foolish, there is! They carried spears and they're all dead.'
'That's a Roman. I'm Romany. Want to give this to the horse?' A small boy took the oats from me. 'Is there anyone in town who'd like to sell me a couple of suppers?' My crowd silently consulted, then:
'Maddie, run you by there and ask your Mam. Go now, you.' The tiny girl, torn between the desire to keep watch and the undeniable honour of providing service, reluctantly took herself down the road and disappeared into the pub.
'Have you no pan?' asked a small person of one sex or another.
'I don't like to cook,' I said regally, and shocked silence, deeper than before, descended. If the other was heresy, I could be burnt for this. 'Is there a telephone in town?' I asked the spokesman.
'Telephone?'
'Yes, telephone, you know, the thing you pick up and shout down? It's too dark to see any wires. Is there one in town?' The puzzled faces showed me this was the wrong village. A child piped up.
'My Da' used one once, he did, when the Gran died and he had to tell his brother by Caerphilly.'
'Where did he go to use it?'
An eloquent shrug in the light of the lamps. Oh, well.
'What for do you need a telephone machine?'
'To call my stockbroker.' I continued before they could ask for a définition, 'You don't get many strangers through here, do you?'
'Oh, many they are. Why, only at Midsummer's, an autocar filled with English came here and stopped, and drank a glass at Maddie's mam's.'
'Just coming through don't count,' I asserted loftily. 'I mean comin' in and eatin' and drinkin' here and stop- pin' for a time. Don't get many of them, do you?'
I could see from their faces that they didn't have any convenient group of strangers to offer me, and sighed internally. Tomorrow, perhaps. Meanwhile —
'Well, I'm here, but we're not stopping long. If you want to run home and tell your people, we'll have a show for you to watch in an hour. Unless my Da' finds the beer here too good,' I added. 'I tell fortunes too. Run along now.'
The supper was good and plentiful, the take from the fiddling and cards poor. Before dawn the next morning we jingled off down the road.
The next village had telephone wires but few isolated buildings. Neither my small informant nor the pub inhabitants could be gently prodded into revealing any recent influx of strangers. We moved on after midday, not pausing to perform.
Our next choice started out promising. Telephone lines, several widely scattered buildings, and even response to questions about strangers caused my pulse to quicken. However, by teatime the leads had petered out, and the strangers were two old English ladies who had come to live here six years before.
We had to backtrack to reach the road to the other villages, and as dusk closed in on us I was thoroughly sick of the hard, jolting seat and the imperturbable brown rump ahead of me. We lit the wagon's side lamps and climbed down with a lantern to lead the horse. I spoke to Holmes in a low voice.
'Could the kidnappers be locals? I know it looks like outsiders, but what if it was just a couple of locals?'
'Who spotted an American senator and thought up a gas gun and letters in The Times on the spur of the moment?' he drawled sarcastically. 'Use the wits God gave you, Mary Todd. Locals are almost certainly involved but are not alone.'
We crept wearily into village number four, where for the first time we were not greeted by a company of children. 'Too late for the little ones, I suppose,' Holmes grunted, and looked at the small stone pub with loathing.
'What I would give for a decent claret,' he sighed, and went off to do his duty for his king.
I settled the horse, found and heated a tin of beans over the caravan's tiny fire, and slumped at the minuscule wooden table with the Tarot deck, sourly reading my fortune: The cards gave me the Hanged Man, the enigmatic Fool, and the Tower with its air of utter disaster. Holmes was a long time in the pub, and I was beginning to consider moving over to my bunk, travel-stained clothing and all, when I heard his voice come suddenly loud into what passed for the village's high street.
' — my fiddle, and I'll play you a dancin' tune, the merriest of tunes that ever you'll hear.' I jerked upright, all thought of sleepiness snatched from me and the beans turning instantly to bricks in my stomach. The caravan's door flew open and in came me old Da', several sheets to the wind. He tripped as he negotiated the narrow steps, and fell forward into my lap.
'Ah, me own sweet girlie,' he continued loudly, struggling to right himself. 'Have you seen what I done with me fiddle?' He reached past me to retrieve it from the shelf and whispered fiercely in my ear. 'On your toes, Russell: a two-storey white house half a mile north, plane tree in front and another at the back. Hired in late June, five men living there, perhaps a sixth coming and going. Curse it!' he bellowed, 'I told you to fix the bloody string,' and continued as he bent over the instrument, 'I'll make a distraction at the front of the house in fifty minutes. You make your way — carefully, mind you — around to the back and see what you can without getting too close. Black your skin and take your revolver, but use it only to save your life. Watch for a guard, or dogs. If you're seen, that's the end of it. Can you do it?'
'Yes, I think so, but — '
'Me sweet Mary,' he bawled drunkenly in my ear, 'you're all tired out, ain't you? Off t'bed wi'you naow, don't wait up for me.'
'But Da', some supper — '
'Nah, Mary, wouldn't want to be spoiling all this lovely beer with food, would I? Off to dreamland now, Mary,' and he slammed heavily out the door. His fiddle skittered into life and, heart pounding and hands fumbling, I made myself ready: trousers pulled on beneath my dark skirts, a length of brown silk rope around my waist, tiny binoculars, a pencil-sized torch. The gun. A smear of black from the dirty lamp-glass onto my face and hands. A final glance around before shutting down the lamps, and the rag doll caught my eye, slumped disconsolately on the shelf. On sudden impulse — for luck? — I pushed her into a pocket and slipped out silently into the shadows, away from the pub, to make my way down to the big square house that sat well off the road, the one with no neighbours.
I crept up the road with infinite care but met no one and was soon squatting down among some bushes across from the house, studying it through my binoculars. The rooms on the ground floor were lit behind thin but effective curtains, and other than the voices coming from, I thought, the corner room on the far side, there was no way of knowing what the house concealed. Upstairs the front was dark.
After ten minutes the only sign of life had been a tall man crossing the room in front of the lamp, and coming back again a minute later. There were no indications of outside watchmen or dogs, and I continued up the road, scuttled across at a crouch, and worked my way back to a ramshackle outhouse, which smelt of coal and paraffin. The house's thin curtains allowed lamplight to escape so that the ground around the house was illuminated for night- adapted eyes; ten more minutes in that spot, and nothing moved, other than a fitful breeze.
I fell back from the outhouse and picked my painstaking way through an overgrown vegetable garden, over a fence in need of mending, behind a second outhouse (this one smelling faintly of petrol) and its attached chicken coop, under the branches of a small orchard where the plums rotted underfoot, and up to a third shed whose diminutive size and location would have declared its function even if its aroma had not. It also gave me a full view of the back of the house and its yard.
There was a light on in a room upstairs. From the arrangement of windows I decided there were probably two rooms on this side, with perhaps a small windowless lumber-room between them, and it was the room on the right, away from the tree, that was lit. To my distinct pleasure the house's general decrepitude came to a climax in
