There was a third storey to the house but this yielded nothing of the slightest interest; neither did two attics at the top of a small wooden staircase. Bored by her fruitless exploration, Laura went to one of the attic windows. It was heavily cobwebbed, and she was about to brush aside some of this obscurity to look out upon the view when she drew back. The attic window overlooked the part of the garden between the house and the ruined lodge, and two men were approaching.
‘Holiday sightseers,’ was her first impression. ‘Wonder whether they’ve come to see the spot marked X or not? I didn’t know the news was all that much public’
She knelt on the boarded floor and did her best to peer through the window without getting too near the glass. But the men were no casual holiday-makers in spite of their hatlessness and careless holiday clothes. They came straight up to the house and one of them thundered on the door just as she had done, but even louder.
She crept to the top of the attic staircase and prayed that no creaking board would betray her, for, after a very short interval, the men let themselves in. She could hear their voices in the hall. Then they went into one of the rooms. She heard the door being shut.
Clutching her ash-plant, she began to creep down the stairs. They could hardly be Miss Faintley’s murderers, she decided, to come boldly and in broad daylight like this, but they obviously had some right to be in the house, which she most certainly had not. It would entail no end of awkward explanation if she were caught on the premises. They might even be police officers, although she did not think that plain-clothes men would wear cricket shirts, sweaters and grey flannel bags. Whoever they were, it behoved her to get away as circumspectly and as quickly as she could.
There was no sound of voices when she came to the foot of the staircase. She knew which room the men were in because it was the only one in which the door was shut. She herself had been careful to leave all the inside doors open as she had found them. Taking special care, and thankful that she was still wearing the rubber-soled shoes she used on the boat, she made her way to the kitchen and climbed out of the open window. She did not attempt to close it. The men, if they investigated, must think that it had been left as it was by the police.
Keeping on the grass, she made for the bushes, and, stooping very low, crept round them until she was out of line with the windows behind which lurked the two mysterious visitors. As she went, she pondered. The men had obviously been furnished with a key to the front door. Why, then, she wondered, had they troubled to beat that thunderous tattoo? The only explanation was that they had tried to find out, just as she had, whether the house was inhabited. But if they had the right to enter, and were furnished with the means of entry, why did they need to find out whether the house was occupied or empty? Did they expect that the police were still in possession?
As there seemed to be no obvious answer to this question she decided to wait in hiding for a bit and find out whether there was anything more to be learnt. The one furnished room intrigued her. As there was no bed, it did not seem likely that it had been a caretaker’s lodging. Still thinking deeply, she reached the crumbling lodge. It seemed to offer as good a bit of cover as anywhere else, and, although the roof was damaged, it certainly offered some prospect of shelter from the storm which was obviously gathering, for the sky had become overcast and already a few spots of heavy summer rain were splashing down on her head.
The floors of the lodge had disappeared. The interior was rank with nettles and bright with patches of willowherb. Laura, in her seafaring slacks, was able to cope with the nettles. She waded through them to shelter and settled down to keep watch from one of the broken windows which looked towards the house. She did not need to wait long. At the end of about a quarter of an hour the men appeared. By this time it was pouring with rain, and, to her great disappointment, both men were wearing large bandana handkerchiefs which partly obscured their faces.
‘Shades of Jesse James!’ thought Laura, vexed. ‘Now I shall never be able to recognize them if ever I meet them again! What a nuisance that attic window was all cobwebs!’ Their heads, too, were bent against the wind which was blowing full in their faces, and this made any chance of memorizing their appearance even more difficult. To her great interest, however, they were carrying a large package draped in one of the curtains which had been up at the windows of the room which they had entered.
Laura gave them another quarter of an hour. Then she went back to the house, climbed in, and went straight to the furnished room to try to identify their burden. This was easy enough. Where the case of ferns had been was an empty wall with only the plug-marks showing.
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ thought Laura. ‘What on earth can they want with that?’
She left the house at once… by the front door, this time… and trotted back to the lodge. Here she climbed the gate and ran down the winding slope to the shore. She had no fear of catching up with the men and so betraying that she had been to the house. They had more than twenty minutes’ start of her and had been walking as fast as the wind and their burden would allow.
Neither was there any sign of them on the beach. Moreover the other cruiser had gone. There might be no significance in this, as there was no evidence that the two men had come from the cruiser. It might have belonged to anyone. Laura returned in her own boat to Cromlech, and remembered, too late, that she had not been to the village of Wedlock after all. Next day she reported to Vardon that the case of ferns had been carried away from the house, and gave what description she could of the two men.
‘Fit hundreds of people,’ said Vardon. ‘Still, you
Laura thought this very unlikely, and could see that he did, too. She half expected a reprimand for going alone to the house, but this did not come.
‘Funny about the ferns,’ she said, hoping for information.
‘Funny case altogether, Miss Menzies. What’s Mrs Bradley up to? We heard she was going to France.’
‘She’s gone. I don’t know what the idea is. We’ll know more when she comes back. She’s taken young Mark Street along with her. I expect them back on Monday night.’
‘I see. Your two men might interest Detective-Inspector Darling. He’s lost a couple of rather interesting brothers!’
To Mark the whole of the journey was a fairy-tale told for his benefit. When at last they reached the caves Mrs Bradley put him in charge of a guide and went on her own tour of inspection. It was not her presence that Mark needed. Contrary to her satellites’ impression that she had received a kind of spirit message that Lascaux would provide the solution of their problem, or even the most faint, elusive clue that Miss Faintley’s mysterious activities and the riddle of her death were in some way connected with the prehistoric art of the caves, she had acted merely in obedience to one of her strongest emotions, a deep, abiding, amused and tender love of small boys. Mark, she sensed, had been much more bitterly resentful of and disappointed at the failure of his plan to visit France than his parents realized. Resentfulness and disappointment, she was well aware, do not strengthen character at Mark’s age; she considered it doubtful whether they did at any age. The Faintley case would make no further progress, she
