The Dancing Druids

‘Does the club wear a uniform?’

‘Not for cross-country running. We turn out in any old shorts and vests. We wear club colours for athletics matches in the summer when one can keep nice and clean. Ours is an apple green band on a white running-vest, and we wear white shorts.’

‘Very tasty, very sweet,’ observed Laura, who was following the narrative with great interest.

‘If it had been an orange band, I suppose you two wouldn’t have joined,’ Mrs. Bradley remarked. ‘Was your secretary one of the hounds in this cross-country run on Saturday?’

‘Oh, yes, He’s dead keen, you know. A fellow called Shoesmith, a bank-clerk. Very decent.’

‘Can you give my secretary his address?’

Laura took down the address, and then Mrs. Bradley continued:

‘I had better take you point by point through your story. Let us begin at the beginning. You took a different direction from the rest of the hounds at Cuchester, I believe, Mr. O’Hara?’

‘Yes. They turned off to the left through the town, and I kept straight on to the amphitheatre and then went up to the fort.’

‘You believed you would more easily catch up with your cousin that way?’

‘I hoped to be able to spot him, and give the others the tip, but I wasn’t lucky.’

‘This man with the car seems interesting. Were you surprised when he stopped you?’

‘Yes and no. I mean that strangers do take an interest in cross-country running, and they do quite often offer gratuitous advice. Sometimes, of course, it’s useful, and we have no rule against accepting it.’

‘I was interested in the form of words he used. Granted the circumstances, they seem rather striking.’

‘I didn’t notice anything in particular.’

‘Did you not? You used almost the same words when you reported the conversation you had with the woman at the door of this mysterious farm. You remember? About being late? It was the repetition of that remark by the woman which made what the man said significant. And now why do you suppose the man took you in the car?’

‘To hold the body on the back seat, I imagine, and to help lift it out when we got to wherever it was that we were making for.’

‘Couldn’t the woman have held the body on the seat? After all, the driver was expecting to meet someone else up there on the hill. He called out to someone, you said. ’

‘Yes. He called to someone named Con. And I suppose the woman could have held the body, although it was frightfully heavy. Still, she could have managed. I suppose there was some reason why she had to remain at the farm.’

‘Yes, I think you are right. It might be useful to know what that reason was, might it not? Now, you left the car when you heard the driver call out to this man he was to meet, and you gained the impression that the car had travelled a long way from the farm. Yet when you went back there on Sunday morning, you discovered that it was not so very far, after all. What do you make of that now?’

‘I don’t know what to make of it, except that it was to give me the impression I got—that the distance we had travelled was considerable. And that’s fishy, too.’

‘The Engineer’s Thumb,’ said Laura, an encyclopaedia of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

‘Yes, but why?’ asked Mrs. Bradley. ‘Why should he want to deceive you about the distance? It may equally well have been that the driver knew he had time to spare between leaving the farm and contacting this man Con. He had to get you away from the farm, I think, as soon as he could, for he must have realized that the first man had made a mistake and had sent him the wrong assistant. The woman was left behind, I have little doubt, to warn the right man when he turned up.’

‘You think the fellow in the car near the hill-fort had been sent to direct someone on to the farm, then?’ demanded Gascoigne.

‘It seems likely,’ Mrs. Bradley answered. ‘On the face of it— but we have not much evidence yet—it seems as though he mistook Mr. O’Hara for another of the runners. You said just now, Mr. O’Hara, that you saw another runner in front of you and supposed him to be Mr. Gascoigne. But it is now shown, by Mr. Gascoigne’s own account of the matter, that this lone runner could not have been he. The inference is that it was Mr. Firman—unless, of course, it was somebody quite unconnected with the club. I suppose it is not impossible that a solitary enthusiast should have been running over this county on Saturday afternoon?’

‘Not impossible, but rather unlikely,’ said Gascoigne.

‘And more than a bit of coincidence, surely?’ suggested O’Hara.

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘we will see what can be done to ease Mr. O’Hara’s mind.’

‘It’s eased already,’ said O’Hara.

‘Bless their hearts!’ said Laura sentimentally, for she was at the age when she felt like a mother to all boys two years her junior. ‘How much of the yarn do you think was true?’

‘I think we may proceed on the assumption that it is all true,’ her employer replied.

‘What do you think Sir Ferdinand will say?’

‘It all depends upon what you and I find out in the meantime, child.’

‘Oh, we are going to look into it, are we? I rather hoped we were. The first job, I take it, is to clear this spiked-shoes person out of the way… you know, the one who was sacked from the club for dirty running. It couldn’t have been he, so we’d better prove that it wasn’t.’

‘An intelligent suggestion,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, ‘but perhaps not quite the first thing on our list.’

‘What about the pickpocket, then?’

‘The pickpocket?’

‘Well, I thought that if we could look into the antecedents of the two obviously criminal members of the club… people who didn’t commit murder… if it is murder… and argue from cause to effect — ’

‘ “And so grow to a point,” ’ said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. ‘I think it might take some time, and I feel it might also be wasted labour, child. I believe it might be better to discover the antecedents of the young man named Firman.’

‘Oh, rather! Yes, of course! We certainly ought to check up on him,’ agreed Laura, with some excitement. ‘Well, how do we begin? What is my first assignment?’

‘To proceed to the bathroom and wash the inkspots from the ends of your eyebrows,’ Mrs. Bradley responded. ‘Then I think you might eat your lunch. I heard the gong some three minutes ago. Which of the young men did you prefer?’

‘Oh, Adonis, I think,’ said Laura, after a brief pause for thought.

‘Mr. Gascoigne?’

‘Yes. Which did you?’

‘I like nearly all young men,’ said Mrs. Bradley sincerely.

‘They are almost always delightful. I also like all very young women… or very nearly all.’

‘Present company excepted from the whole of that statement!’ said Laura. ‘By the way, I call the saturnine one… O’Hara… a “dark Celt.” Kipling knew them, didn’t he? There’s something different about that lad from the other. Wouldn’t you say that “dark Celt” somewhere tips him off?… And yet you could scarcely mistrust him!’

‘He has, at any rate, stepped into a dark adventure, child. Do you know, I have a fancy for this business. It promises to be of extraordinary interest. The nature of the countryside, the dead man kept warm by the application of hot-water bottles, the mysterious journey taken by the car, the decidedly sinister touch of the circle of standing stones, the badly-frightened woman who declared untruthfully that she was alone in the house except for an invalid suffering from an infectious disease, the plot (as I see it) to murder Mr. O’Hara…’

‘ What?’ shouted Laura, in horrified delight.

‘… these are deep matters, child, which cry out for our attention. There is a smack of minor Elizabethan drama about them which I find highly absorbing.’

Laura regarded her narrowly.

‘You do believe what those boys told us, don’t you?’ she enquired. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and prodded her in the ribs with a bony forefinger.

‘We shall see what I believe,’ she responded. ‘Go and wash, there’s a good child. After lunch we will take George and the car, and go to this farm and invent spells and recite charms. Did you know that the Neolithic