‘No, no,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘George is to have his supper. The dog will come to no harm.’
‘I’ll go out there myself after dinner,’ said Laura, ‘and give vent to a couple of yells. I wonder what came over him? He can’t have been chasing rabbits. I say! You don’t think he would worry the Forest ponies? I thought I heard some about.’
Dinnertime came, and the after-dinner coffee, but the dog had not come back. Laura finished her coffee and went upstairs to change into slacks. Her bedroom window overlooked the common and, obeying a sudden thought, before she went downstairs she took a previously unused dog-whistle out of a drawer and, with a superstitious thrill as she remembered a frightening episode in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, she opened the window and blew the high-pitched pipe. Then she picked up an electric torch and went downstairs. She found George waiting respectfully in the hall.
‘Madam’s orders, madam,’ he replied in response to Laura’s question, ‘and we are requested not to proceed to any great distance beyond the house, as madam thinks the mist may be getting thicker.’
‘Which it is,’ said Laura, when the front door was open and the mist swirled in against the light from the hall. ‘Our torches are not going to make a lot of impression on this.’
They went as far as the beginning of the path across the common, then Laura stopped. She took the dog-whistle from her raincoat pocket and blew again, then she stood still and they waited and listened, but there was nothing but the cold, wet mist and the darkness. She blew once more and they waited for a response which did not come.
(3)
Laura needed very little sleep. Once before midnight, and twice between two o’clock and six, she crept downstairs and blew the dog-whistle again. At half-past seven, just after sunrise, she dressed, slipped out of the house and took the path across the common. The ground was damp but the mist was dispersing in the face of a light wind. She crossed a culvert over a ditch and then the path climbed to a slight eminence. Here she stopped and looked about her. On either side stretched the common, but in front of her, a mile or more away, there was a considerable wood.
The only evidences of life upon the common, so far as her keen eyes could make out, were half a dozen ponies and a donkey. Of the dog there was no sign. Laura, taking advantage of the long, gradual, downward slope which lay before her, made at a round pace, half-walking, half-running, for the woods. Between them and the common ran the pretty little Lymington River, crossed here by a broad plank bridge. She stopped to look at the clear brown water and then blew the whistle again and entered the woods.
On one side of the broad path which formed a clearing there was a fenced enclosure barred off by a gate. The Forestry Commission’s lorries had churned up a muddy road on the other side of the fence. Laura leaned on the gate and listened, then made up her mind to try the enclosure before she explored the open woodland.
The foresters’ lorry-track was so soft and deep with mud that she left it almost at once for an ill-defined path on higher ground which marched with the boundary fence. Here she was constantly impeded by trailing blackberry stems and, at the frequent dips in the path, she had to find a way round pools too wide to step across or jump over. There was about a mile and a half of the enclosure. At the far end was a cattle grid, then another bridge over the river, a stretch of grass interspersed with oaks and, beyond all this, the main Bournemouth road which by-passed the village and went over the level-crossing.
Laura looked at her watch. By this time breakfast would be on the table and she was hungry. She had no mind to footslog it into the village and over the watersplash to reach home, so she pushed her way back along the path by which she had come. Unwilling to give up the hunt until she had made every attempt to find the dog, she fastened the gate of the enclosure behind her and took the broad path through the woods, stopping occasionally to call, whistle and listen.
Giant beeches, with, here and there, a mighty oak, bordered the path on her left; the wooden fencing of the enclosure and a shallow, mossy ditch were on her right. Behind the great trees, however, there was a tangle of brushwood and thorn, and, beyond this, a further wilderness of gorse and waist-high, dead, brown bracken.
The broad path ended, as Laura had known it would, in a vast pond, shallow, but with treacherously muddy fringes. Here she had to turn back. Without hope, before she did so she called the dog by name, repeating it several times. Then she stood still and listened, for, from some distance away, she thought she had heard a despairing howl.
She called again and was answered. Certain that, roughly at least, she had located the sound, she ran back along the path, repeating the call, and then, tripping over the roots of a beech-tree in her haste, she plunged in among the undergrowth along a narrow track which suddenly opened up among the gorse and bracken.
Her heart missed a beat as she saw a foot, with a woman’s shoe on it, sticking out from behind a gorse bush. At the same moment Fergus sidled up to her and licked her hand.
(4)
Laura ran all the way back to the Stone House and precipitated herself into the morning-room where Dame Beatrice was seated at breakfast.
‘Will you please ring up the police?’ she gasped. ‘The big boys, not the village cop. I’m too breathless to talk to them myself. Tell them to come here at once.
