Faintley Speaking

the telephone chap. It couldn’t possibly be. I’m certain enough to take my oath on it.’

‘Pass, Mr Bannister, and all’s well… so far,’ said Mrs Bradley to Laura, while the two men were having their after-dinner port before Mandsell was taken back to Kindleford.

‘So far?’ echoed Laura.

‘Yes. I am inclined to share his view that the activities of the Faintley gang are not political, and it certainly seems, from Mr Mandsell’s evidence, that it was not Mr Bannister who had agreed to take that call. All the same…’ she paused and meditated.

‘What was that crack of yours about a Freudian error?’ Laura inquired, at the end of a dutiful period of silence.

‘He called Mr Trench an homme incompris. But that is what he himself had to be during the war. He was known to the guardians at Lascaux, and the Germans undoubtedly knew of him. So much I think he made clear. When all this is over, we must ask him for the story of his adventures. They were probably fantastic.’

‘And a man like that settles down to teach elementary mathematics to kids,’ said Laura. ‘Not bad at it, either, let me tell you.’

‘And how good a teacher is Mr Trench?’

‘You’d better ask him,’ said Laura. ‘I don’t know the first thing about the woodwork and metal work centre,’

‘Mr Bannister must be our informant, then. I want to know as much about Mr Trench as he will tell you.’

‘Bannister?’

‘Mr Bannister in person. You had better warn him that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence.’

‘You don’t want me, then. You want Vardon, I should say.’

‘Mr Bannister would not like to confide in Detective-Inspector Vardon. I suggest that he would like to confide in one of us, and, of the two of us, you would be the more likely to gain the truth from him.’

‘So that I can spill it to you?’

‘Mr Bannister will be more than agreeable to that course of procedure, dear child. He is anxious to confide in someone.’

‘All right, but I shall ask him first, you know, whether that’s really what he wants.’

‘To use your own fearsome idiom, I couldn’t agree more.’

‘Oh, you couldn’t?’ said Laura, uneasily. She was still inexperienced enough to share young Mark Street’s schoolboy instinct that when the grown-ups agreed with you you had better watch out. Laura had not quite outgrown her terror of the goblins. Demoniacal possession, she sensed (wrongly) to be the prerogative of the adult world. Mrs Bradley realized this, and cackled. Laura looked reproachful.

‘Look here,’ she said to Bannister, when they were together in the garden after Mandsell had gone home that night, ‘Mrs Croc. has her optics on you. What was all that about you and the caves at Lascaux? And the Gestapo, and so forth?’

‘Yes,’ replied Bannister absently. ‘I know what she meant. I was in the Resistance, of course. One of the lucky ones, on the whole. Parachuted in, and my mother was French, so I had the gab and knew the country. We used to hide blokes… our own and others. Not in Lascaux itself… it was too well known… but there are lots of caves in that part of France. We winkled chaps out of occupied France and sometimes out of Italy, and smuggled them away through… well, I’d better not tell you. It might be needed again, and the higher the fewer, so to speak.’

‘Well, what about Trench? I’ve been told to pump you about him. What can you tell us?’

‘Nothing at all. He wasn’t mixed up with my push, if that’s what you mean. I met him for the first time on the school staff. Why? What has he got to do with it?… No, I won’t ask you that. I see the issue quite plainly. Your boss thinks that either Trench or I did in Faintley because one of us was scheduled to take that telephone call, and we were the only men not at school that night. I don’t see Trench as a murderer. I’m sure he is more or less all right in himself. Trouble is, he’s Red, and, not only that, but like lots of chaps who happen to be under the weather, he’s become fanatical – you know, agin the Government, and all that – but that doesn’t mean he’d do any harm. Of course, it’s obvious that, saddled with that wife of his who’s always being ill, he must be pretty badly stuck for money, and it’s true he never seems to be all that short. Beyond that, I can tell you nothing.’

‘But you don’t think he’d commit murder?’

‘It depends upon what you call murder, you know. After all, we murder people when we hang them.’

Laura had heard this view expressed by her employer.

‘That’s what Mrs Croc. says,’ she answered. ‘Well, we’d better go in. It’s getting a bit chilly out here.’

‘Ah, Mr Bannister,’ said Mrs Bradley, when they re-entered the Stone House. ‘I’ve been thinking about the caves at Lascaux while you two have been out in the garden. Why it is that I seemed to sense a difference between the atmosphere of the Lateral Passage and that of, say, the Hall or the Nave?’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ replied Bannister, frankly and immediately. ‘I expect you mean that the Lateral Passage is slightly damp in places. There’s a peculiar kind of ancient mould or fungus growing on parts of the walls.’

Early on the following morning Mrs Bradley telephoned to Detective-Inspector Darling that she proposed to interview Mr and Mrs Trench.

Chapter Eleven

MR TRENCH

‘… by fines so heavy that for some time afterwards a Castillian would take off his hat at sight of a piece of gold.’