The Dancing Druids

war and had not, so far, returned to its base.

Laura’s adventures had taken less time than Mrs. Bradley’s travels and telephoning, and she was already back in position behind the hedge before her employer arrived. She gave an account of herself and was warmly congratulated.

‘I thought you’d be mad,’ said Laura candidly. ‘I felt an awful idiot, getting boxed up at Cottam’s like that. Still, all’s well that ends well, I suppose. Do you think the police have got that little van by now?’

‘Do you imagine that you would have been allowed to telephone the numbers on its plates if the driver had not intended to change them, child?’

‘’Oh!’ said Laura, considerably dashed by this hypothesis. ’So I’ve done no good after all!’

‘You have relieved your feelings about little Cassius-Concaverty,’ Mrs. Bradley pointed out. ‘Unsatisfied longings may easily lead to a state of trauma. This you will now escape.’

‘I certainly gave the little thug a pasting,’ agreed Laura, with satisfaction. ‘Still, it hasn’t helped the enquiry.’

‘It has not hindered it, child. And we should not have been able to stop the lorry, in any case. I confess that I had not thought they would need to remove the identifiable portions of the dead man quite so soon. It sounds as though there have been deep doings at Slepe Rock, and thither I think we should repair as soon as we have breakfasted.’

‘Anything you like. Come on, then. Dead men or no dead men, I could eat a horse.’

‘What I like about you,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘is your genius for putting first things first.’

They got back to Welsea half an hour after the arrival of the Chief Constable, and discovered him in a fine mixed state of anxiety and fury.

‘Where on earth have you been, Adela?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were here! You might have been murdered yourself, for all I knew!’

‘For all you know, I might be yet,’ retorted Mrs. Bradley. ‘Come and have breakfast with us, and I’ll tell you all you want to know.’

By the time the meal and the recital were concluded, the Chief Constable’s ill-humour had given place to surprise and interest.

‘Faked pictures, you say? And possibly some stolen Old Masters? We can check up on all that, of course. I’ll get an expert from the National Gallery at once. But the deaths! The deaths! How do you know it is Allwright?’

‘I don’t. I’m relying on you to prove it. It seems to me that it must be, and I think we’ve got the body for you to see.’

‘Really! Good heavens! Where is it?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Oh, good heavens, Adela! Don’t play the fool! Where is it?’

‘I tell you that I don’t know. I gave it to my nephew.’

‘Now, look here…’ said the Chief Constable dangerously.

‘But I did! He went off with it, he and George, and, until I contact them again, I don’t know where they’ve hidden it. But please don’t worry. You shall have it.’

‘Then where is Denis now?’

‘He’s gone to Slepe,’ said Mrs. Bradley, with an innocent expression.

‘Gone to sleep?’

‘Well, I’m very much afraid so, which means, of course, that we shall have to go and find him. I do know that he was going to Slepe, but I shouldn’t think he took the body with him. Still, there’s another body you could see. That’s the one that was killed accidentally… unless you think the Druids did it on purpose, which would not surprise me in the least.’

‘That I should think it?’

‘That it should happen. We still know far too little about the religious beliefs of pre-history, don’t you feel?’

The Chief Constable, in hasty rather than in well-chosen words, consigned the religious beliefs of pre-history to a religious belief of the mediaeval Church. He got up from table as soon as Mrs. Bradley rose, and stamped about in the hotel vestibule whilst she and her secretary prepared themselves for an excursion less exacting than the one which they had undertaken over-night.

‘So!’ said the Chief Constable, brought face to face, although hardly literally, with the headless, handless corpse. Laura, who did not want to see it, remained at a safe distance. ‘Now what’s all this about, I wonder?’

‘I should think that the man was a local person, or, at any rate, easily recognizable locally,’ said Mrs. Bradley.

‘Ah! His death would lead us to the rest of the gang? Yes, I see. Yes, that must be it. Horrid fellers!’ said the Chief Constable, turning away. ‘You’ve told the Welsea police, you say? Well, they ought to have been here by now!’

As though these words were their cue, the Welsea police, in the person of their Superintendent, a sergeant and four constables, appeared at this point over the brow of the hill complete with haulage tackle for removing the stone from the body.

‘Got the doctor coming right away, sir,’ said the Superintendent, in reply to a question from the Chief Constable. ‘An accident, so we understand.’

‘Yes. Mrs. Bradley here, who gave you the information, is a material witness,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Well, you might as well carry on, Ellis. Not that the doctor can do anything. Still, you’d better carry on according to pattern. Now, Beatrice what about this nephew of yours and the other body you promised me? Ellis, I think you’d better put Fielding on to all that.’

‘I beg pardon, sir,’ said the Superintendent, ‘but we’ve had a message through from Cuchester to know if we can find anybody to identify a certain Mr. Denis Bradley who’s being held there, with another three men and a stolen lorry full of crates of pictures, pending a complaint from a Mr. Cassius that the pictures belong to him and that he claims them.’

‘So they got them!’ said Laura, who had heard the Superintendent’s remarks from where she was standing in the ditch which surrounded the stone circle. ‘Good old Denis! And good old Mike! And good old Gerry! And good old George! Whoopee!’

‘Laura! Behave!’ said Mrs. Bradley urgently. ‘Don’t incriminate us!’

‘Come, come!’ said the Chief Constable ill-temperedly.

‘Yes, let us all come,’ Mrs. Bradley agreed. ‘It is more than time. I don’t suppose those boys or my poor George have had any breakfast.’

Mr. Cassius was full of his woes, and tackled the Chief Constable as soon as the latter arrived at Cuchester police station.

‘I recognize these two men!’ he said, waving towards Gascoigne and O’Hara. ‘They’ve been dogging me for this very purpose! They even had the colossal impudence to put up at the same hotel at Slepe Rock.’

‘There is only the one hotel at Slepe Rock,’ Mrs. Bradley soothingly pointed out. ‘They could hardly have used any other. ’

‘They’ve stolen my property, anyway, and I’ll prosecute to the top of my bent!’ said Mr. Cassius. ‘You know, Sir Crimmond, it’s a most disgraceful thing if a man of my standing cannot claim back his own property without being detained here like this by your policemen! I’ve a good mind to have a question asked in the House!’

‘Perhaps I’d better hear what these fellows have to say, Mr. Cassius,’ observed the Chief Constable. ‘By the way, have you changed your name since you let Cottam’s to the Gonn-Brown film company for the summer?’

‘Changed my name? Certainly not!’ Mr. Cassius replied with spirit. ‘Cassius happens to be my business name, that is all. I used it in making myself known to your policemen in order to establish my title to those pictures. I deal in pictures, and I trade under the name of Cassius. My real name, as you perfectly well know, is Rufus Concaverty.’

‘Ah,’ said the Chief Constable. This, it seemed, was too non-committal a rejoinder to suit the claimant to the pictures.

‘I dare those men to tell you how they came by my property,’ he said. ‘If they do dare, you will hear a story of assault and battery which will shake your faith in the public school system, Sir Crimmond.’

‘Well, hardly. You see, I’m a product of it myself,’ said the Chief Constable, with most unusual mildness. Ill-