Faintley Speaking

to displaying the notes.

‘Thing is, dear,’ she said confidentially, ‘as I didn’t want to upset my ’usband nor Mr Mandsell, but it seemed sort of funny to me, if you take my meaning, him being on his beam-ends one minute and flashin’out four pounds the next, so I kep’ ’em separate. Here they is, look, with a rubber band around’em.’

Mrs Bradley was not an expert in detecting forgeries, but an enthusiastic Scotland Yard officer had once spent an entire morning in pointing out to her the slight errors by which even the cleverest forgers are tripped up. The most minute scrutiny of the four notes through her small but powerful magnifying glass failed to reveal any of the discrepancies she had been instructed to look for, however. She compared minutely each of the four notes with one from her own purse, but was compelled to conclude either that the forger had been a master of his trade, or else that the four notes were genuine. There was only one interesting feature. On three out of the four notes were traces of some blotchy outlines, and these were particularly clear on one, where they happened to come on the half-crown-sized white circle on the back.

She took from a small leather case some minute surgical forceps and very gingerly scratched at the marks. Memory, aided by the powerful magnifying glass, began to stir. She saw the darkish walls of the Lateral Passage at Lascaux, its sandy floor and the dust at the foot of its walls. She remembered that here alone, in this spine-chilling underground temple of primitive man with its terrifying suggestion of art come alive through the ‘monstrous power of witchcraft’, could be detected the slight atmosphere of damp sufficient for the growth of a form of prehistoric mould, ‘an archaic fungus,’ says Alan Houghton Brodrick in his Lascaux.

It was not often that Mrs Bradley felt the tingling excitement in which half Laura Menzies’ young, lusty life was lived, but she felt it now.

Monsieur Banneestaire! And Monsieur Bannister had been to Lascaux! Was there… could there be… any connexion?

‘This is valuable evidence,’ she said impressively. ‘Will you exchange these four notes for four I will give you, or will you take them straight to the police station?’

‘I don’t want nothing to do with the police,’ said Mrs Deaks slowly. ‘If so be as you’ll agree to mark the notes you gives me with Deaks’ undelyable pencil, and if so be as you agrees to ’ave Mr Mandsell in as a witness to me giving you up his notes in exchange for yours, well, I don’t mind changing ’em. If yours is duds and those is duds, well, I shan’t be no worse off,’ she concluded with her class’s deep philosophy.

Mandsell was called into the kitchen, and the notes were marked and exchanged.

‘Now for the villainous Tomson,’ said Mrs Bradley.

‘Yes,’ said Mandsell, brightening. ‘Yes! I wouldn’t at all mind confronting that bloke. I’ll give him my I.O.U. That ought to settle his hash, one way or the other. I mean, he’ll either have to come clean about the parcel or lose his money.’

‘No, no. You must leave the negotiations to me.’

Upon this understanding they sought out Tomson. He did not seem pleased to see them, and asked them, in surly and unwilling fashion, what he could have the honour of showing them.

‘Faintley-coloured materials,’ Mrs Bradley replied.

‘Pastel shades, madam? Those on the shelves are all I have in stock. Would anything of that kind suit you?’

‘No, no. I require curtains the colour of blood.’

‘Blood, madam? I don’t know that I —’

‘No? A great pity. Have you never heard of blood-coloured curtains? Faintley-coloured and blood-coloured are quite the rage nowadays, you know. Oh, and my second cousin here believes that he owes you five pounds. Can you remember the transaction, I wonder?’

‘What’s your game?’ demanded Tomson, suddenly abandoning any pretence of being the anxious shopkeeper and becoming, with one short question, the anxious petty criminal. ‘You never come here to buy curtains!’

‘I wonder how you know that? Can you possibly have a guilty conscience, my poor man? Never mind. We have come to return the five pounds which you so kindly lent to my ward here. May we have a receipt?’

‘You can go to hell!’ said Tomson, snarling. ‘Get out of my shop, the pair of you! I don’t know nothing about any five pounds, but I knows the confidence trick when I sees it!’

Mrs Bradley slowly shook her head and Tomson was suddenly reminded of a cobra he had seen in his youth on a trip to the London Zoo.

‘It won’t do at all,’ she said gently. ‘What species of fern did you find in the statue you broke?’

This question really frightened Tomson.

‘I didn’t find nothing in the statue,’ he asserted. ‘And I never broke it! It was broke when it landed up ’ere!’

‘I think you found Ophioglossum Vulgatum – in other words, the adder’s-tongue fern,’ she said. ‘And the police think you broke the statue deliberately and have confessed as much.’

‘Adder’s-tongue?’ He licked his lips, his apprehension obviously increasing. ‘What do you mean… adder’s- tongue? There wasn’t nothing in it, I tell you! And I ’ave not said I broke the statue, because I never!’

‘You have been warned,’ pronounced Mrs Bradley, solemnly. ‘Come, dear fellow,’ she added to Mandsell. ‘This man is determined that nothing I can do shall save him.’

‘I say, you scared him all right,’ said Mandsell, when they were out of the shop. ‘What exactly was all that in aid of?’

‘Time will show, child. I wonder, however, that Tomson was left in peace when once he had allowed his curiosity to overcome him and had broken that statue. In fact, the only explanation… Yes, I think I see.’

‘The thing I got from Hagford wasn’t a statue, you know.’