The Dancing Druids

‘I’m sorry you’ve been troubled,’ she repeated, and closed the door very gently in his face, giving him, as she did so, a lustful and conciliatory smile. It was evident she had had no eyes for Laura.

‘Thank goodness for your comely face,’ said the latter, when Gascoigne joined her. ‘You could have knocked me endwise! That was the woman from Newcombe Soulbury, that was! Ah, well, let’s wait and watch the lorry drive in. There’s something delightfully fishy about all this—or don’t you think so?’

She walked beside Gascoigne slowly back to the car. O’Hara was not to be seen. They climbed in, and had scarcely done so when a car came from the opposite direction, slowed down, and stopped. A boy got out from beside the driver, and went forward to open the lodge gates.

‘Well!’ said Laura. ‘What do you make of that? That’s the kid from the hotel! The one who threw rocks at me the other morning!’

The boy pushed the gates back as wide as they would go, and the car drove in past the lodge.

Of O’Hara there was still no sign. Gascoigne lit a cigarette for Laura and another for himself, and had scarcely put away his lighter when O’Hara dropped over the high brick wall which shut the house off from the road, came down in the ditch, picked himself up and hurried towards the car.

‘The boy seems in a hurry!’ said Laura, starting the engine as O’Hara opened the door and scrambled inside.

‘That woman you spoke to… I was hiding in the bushes… she’s the one at the farm… the one who told me she was alone in the house. And those people who drove up just now…’

‘Are the man and the boy from our hotel at Slepe Rock. Yes, we know,’ said Laura.

‘And there goes the ice-cart,’ said Gascoigne, as the lorry drove in at the gates. ‘All liars, aren’t they?’

‘I don’t know about liars, but they may be murderers,’ said O’Hara. ‘I heard that man who came with the kid—I heard him speak. That’s the fellow called Con, I’m almost certain.’

Chapter Twelve

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‘ “Ha!” thought she as she looked at it through the window. ‘Cannot I prevent the sun rising? ” ’

Ibid. (The Fisherman and His Wife)

« ^ »

Now what?’ said Laura, full of pleasurable excitement as the car drove on towards the farm. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’ she added, elucidating this query.

‘Return, one of us, and suborn that old man with the barrow,’ said Gascoigne readily. ‘We shall find out what he knows of the people from Slepe Rock, and perhaps he can tell us what the ice is to be used for, although I should rather think he can’t. Pull up round the next bend, anyway, and I’ll go back, and see what I can find out.’

‘Both of us will go back,’ said O’Hara firmly.

‘But you may be recognized, and that would hardly do.’

‘It can’t be helped. You stay here,’ added O’Hara to Laura, ‘and be ready to help us make a dash for it if anybody chooses to be annoyed. Good-bye. We will see you later.’

‘You’ll see me sooner,’ retorted Laura. ‘What do you think I am? If there’s going to be any fun I’m all for being in the thick of it. None of this women and children business with me! I’m a lot older than either of you, and, furthermore, I’m Mrs. Croc.’s accredited representative. Besides…’

‘All right, then,’ said O’Hara, hastily. ‘If you feel like that about it, I think you’d better come. What do you say, Gerry? Shall we take her with us?’

The handsome Gascoigne assumed a reproachful expression, but did not voice his sentiments, and the car was reversed as far as the nearest gate. Here Laura turned it, and the three were soon near the house with the four dead trees.

‘This is about as far as we should go, I think, before we get out and walk,’ suggested Laura.

‘And now,’ said Gascoigne, when they were almost opposite the gate, ‘you two had better stand by, I think, whilst I contact our aged friend. He won’t talk to three of us at once.’

This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and therefore O’Hara and Laura remained under cover of some bushes whilst Gascoigne walked up to the gate. By good luck the aged gardener was not more than ten yards away. He was standing on the brickwork of a tiny culvert which carried the weedy drive across a brook, and was gazing into the water and scratching his mossy-looking thigh.

‘That there old water-rat,’ he said, without turning his head, ‘do be rousing his whiskers at all of us. Catch a holt of him I don’t somehow seem to, seemingly.’

‘Tough luck,’ said Gascoigne, joining the ancient man, putting his hands in his trouser pockets and peering sympathetically into the ditch.

‘Live under that arch, he do, and laugh his way through against all of us,’ the old man continued. ‘And my fowls fattening, and him with his eye on ’em like he had on the chicks last August twelvemonth, was a Sunday night, as I remember.’

‘I suppose that was before the new owners took over?’ said Gascoigne. ‘I mean, they haven’t always been here, have they?’

‘New owners?’ The old man spat. ‘Tenants, um be, not owners. Film people. Money and no sense. Ice by the cartload for their drinks. If beer wants ice, must be funny beer, says I. And if sperrits wants ice, give me water. Neither Englishmen nor Yankees, them don’t be.’ Upon saying this, he turned his head and gave Gascoigne a long look.

‘I suppose they have lots of visitors,’ remarked the young man, kicking a stone from the culvert into the ditch.

‘Not so many. Secret proceshesses, they says. Trade rivals, they says. Keep out, they says. Well, there y’are. Mr. Concaverty, round at the lodge, he has his orders, and, being in their service already, before they comes here, no doubt he carries ’em out. But this old water-rat, drat him, ain’t nobody’s business but mine. Mr. Concaverty, he don’t keep fowls. He don’t know this old water-rat like I do.’

He picked up a bit of stick, and, stepping from the culvert on to the bank of the ditch, poked industriously and with considerable vigour underneath the arch. Gascoigne waited a moment or two. Then he said gently, but with a persistence which Laura would have approved:

‘What about some beer that’s not iced?’

By way of answer, the old man took off his cap and held it up. Gascoigne dropped half a crown into it. The old man scooped up the coin, bit it, nodded indulgently, said that that was a bit of all right, and ambled off.

‘Concaverty!’ said Laura, as soon as Gascoigne had told the others the gist of the conversation. ‘We must get to him before the old man gets round there. And, this time, it had better be me! We don’t want them comparing notes, and thinking you’ve been snooping, although, of course, you have.’

‘Do you think…?’ began O’Hara. But Laura insisted that her idea was the right one, and Gascoigne was inclined to agree.

‘We must get what we can,’ he said gloomily.

All three young people were conscious of a feeling of slight flatness. If the inmates of the house with the four dead trees were film people, all idiosyncrasies on their part immediately lost any tendency to seem dramatic, improbable, lethal or, in fact, at all exciting, and it was a deflated although outwardly debonair Laura who marched up to the lodge and enquired for Mr. Concaverty.

An older woman opened the door, and one whom Laura again did not fail to recognize. It was the caretaker from O’Hara’s mysterious farm. Laura, who was not altogether unprepared for this, since some connection between that farm and the house with the four dead trees by this time could be taken for granted, smiled naturally and asked for a bucket of water. She needed it, she said, for the car.

The woman supplied it without a word. Laura thanked her, took the bucket of water to where she had left her friends, set it down and told them the news.

‘I don’t see how to ask again for Concaverty,’ she added. It proved unnecessary to do so, however, for, when she returned the empty pail and made a remark upon the weather, the woman asked curiously:

‘What did you want with Mr. Concaverty?’