knee in a darkened chamber, and get a servant-girl, who was either too terrified or too flattered to prevent it, with child. Well, I wonder what the end of it will be? The local police aren’t going to like the idea of arresting him, you know.”
The local police were not faced with this unpleasant necessity. Gavin called next day with the news that the girl had named the Colonel, and not Giles, as the father of her baby, and that the Colonel had blown his brains out.
“Giles has been arrested as an accessory after the fact,” added Gavin. “There’s no doubt the Colonel may have needed help in getting Spey’s body to the private road where it was found, but, even if he didn’t, Giles must have known about the murder of Spey, since both he and his uncle were together at Squire’s Acre that night. As for stringing up Gordon, well, there it is almost certain two men must have been involved.”
“Has anything more come to light concerning the death of Gordon?” asked Dame Beatrice.
“No, it hasn’t, so far as actual proof is concerned, but I think we are entitled to guess what must have happened. Gordon was very much in evidence, it seems, during Perse’s pageant. He was with his class, watching the Romans at the bottom of Ferry Lane in the morning, and he was with the children again at the Garter ceremony in the Town Hall. We think he was followed home by Giles and persuaded—probably didn’t really need persuasion— to show up at the Butts for the eighteenth-century election. He could have been throttled there under cover of the riot between the louts and the Grammar School. It was practically, if not quite, dark by the time that fight got under way, I’m told. We know Giles was at the Butts at the beginning of the affair, probably spying out the lie of the land. Of course, we shall never be able to prove whether we’re right about this, unless Giles chooses to come clean, and I doubt whether he will.”
“The Colonel may have left a confession which implicates Giles,” suggested Laura. Her husband shook his head.
“If he did, it’s been destroyed,” he said. “We’ve searched Squire’s Acre thoroughly. By the way, Laura, when you found the head you might also have found the axe. We had to do a lot of dredging for it, but it turned up all right in the end.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Special Sub-Committee Disbands
“…should be grateful for their diligence in setting down, and preserving these details of the life of the old town at a time when the whole country was passing through internal troubles of a most serious nature.”
« ^
It was a year or two later.
“It having been signified by the powers that be,” said Alderman Topson, the chairman, “as how we are soon to lose our identity as a separate borough and be merged with the towns of Gistleward and Hansbury Heath in accordance with some…”
“Bloody nonsense!” interpolated Councillor Beaton.
“Some interference enacted by them as ought to have their heads examined, it becomes our duty, being the special-appointed sub-committee for the purpose, to seek ways and means of bringing the said merger to the attention of the public, most of which is apathetic to the point at issue. The Chair is open to any suggestions.”
“It won’t do a scrap of good. The whole thing is signed, sealed and settled,” said Councillor Perry. He had touched off gunpowder.
“It’s a crying shame, that’s what it is!”
“It’s a politician’s bit of homework, no doubt about that!”
“There’s no damn’ sense in it!”
“We were a market town when Gistleward and Hansbury Heath were a couple of little villages!”
“We’ll be losing our very name, next thing you know. It’s iniquitous! It didn’t ever ought to have been allowed. Them as did it should be strung up on lamp-posts!”
“Can’t be done! Hanging’s finished, and what I say—”
“This,” said the chairman, “is not going to get us nowhere. Suggestions is what we’re asked for, not a lot of bellyaching about something as can’t be helped. I’m agreeable with all that’s been said, but that ain’t what we’re here for. Now, who’s going to make a suggestion?”
“What about an inter-district sports day? I reckon our schoolchildren could make rings round all of theirs.”
“Ah, they could do that all right, and we could follow it up with a swimming gala. What have we got a Public Baths for?”
“That’s all too ordinary. We want something more striking. What about tolling the church bells and having a service on funeral lines, with hymns appropriate?”
“Why don’t we have a town crier to go round and say we’re going to cut down the Druids’ Oak and make a bonfire of the logs? Symbolic, if you see what I mean.”
“You don’t want a
“A competition for the best letter sent to the local newspaper saying what people think about the merger, and advising them not to mince their adjectives.”
“A bit dicey, that idea,” said the chairman. “An action for libel might be brought. I should have to ask the Town Clerk.”
“You might be able to persuade one of the Sunday papers to print the letters, if they were sufficiently scurrilous,” said Councillor Perse, who, tongue in cheek, had proposed the competition. “Or the B.B.C. might be interested—in a different way, of course.
