She wandered round the edge of the water away from the absorbed couple, then climbed the bank and saw, approaching her from the direction of the village main street, a man whose walk and figure seemed familiar. He was exactly like Jem Shurrock, the former landlord of the More to Come. The time was a quarter to nine, the sun was setting and the walking man had his back to it. It was not until she was almost up to him that she realised that the long shadows had deceived her. The man was about Jem Shurrock’s height and build, but there the likeness ended.
In country fashion he gave her a civil ‘Good evening’, and was passing on when Fenella, acting on impulse, (as she often did), halted and said,
‘I’ve been trying to locate a Mr and Mrs Shurrock. They used to keep the More to Come public house, but nobody there seems to know what’s happened to them.’
The man’s attitude changed with considerable abruptness. He stared at her and said brusquely,
‘Them as asks no questions won’t get told no lies. Best you be off back to where you come from and not to be meddlin’ any more in things as don’t consarn ee.’
‘Thank you for your advice,’ said Fenella. She gave him a curt nod and passed on her way. She thought she had recognised his voice as that of Leo, but it was difficult to be sure. However, the encounter had an unpleasant effect on her. All her earlier impressions of the village and its inhabitants crowded back on her. ‘How thankful I shall be,’ she murmured to herself, ‘when the summer holidays come, and Nicholas and I can be shut of this place for ever!’
She returned to the inn more than ever convinced that there was a mystery connected with the disappearance of the Shurrocks and their staff. She supposed that some kind of scandal must have blown up which had necessitated their abrupt departure. It was idle to speculate upon what might have happened, but, all the same, she found herself doing it. Something must have occurred to drive them away at such short notice, unless they had failed to comply with the brewers’ explicit instructions about something or other, and had been summarily dismissed as a consequence.
All the same, although that might account for Jem Shurrock and his wife, it hardly seemed to account for Sukie, Clytie and the young fellow Bob who had helped with the odd jobs, unless, of course, the staff had all resigned out of loyalty to the landlord. In the case of Sukie, whom Fenella, at first, had thought was the landlord’s wife, this might be the explanation, but Fenella was much less sure of it in the case of the two adolescents, unless they had received some inducement from the Shurrocks to go with them to take on other employment. As for the man she had met on the common, there was no doubt that he had recognised her, and that his earlier suspicion and dislike of her, when he had been one of the masked and gowned figures in the lounge on Mayering Eve, had been renewed at meeting her again, and intensified by her remark about the Shurrocks. That he knew the reason for their disappearance she felt certain.
Fenella had a good ear for voices. She felt that, because of this, she now could be pretty certain of the identity and ordinary appearance of two of the signs of the zodiac, Leo and the horried young Aries. She had no suspicion at the time that this knowledge was likely to prove useful in the future, but continued her walk back to the inn in less good spirits than when she had turned aside to revisit the seven springs.
She thought afterwards that her slightly unpleasant encounter with Leo might have been the cause of her sinister dream, but the dream did not follow until she had been to the hill-fort again, so the connection was not a direct one. Her objective, on this further occasion, was not the fort itself, but the countryside beyond it. She breakfasted early that morning, and having on the previous day asked for a packed lunch she set off in her car, drove past and partly round the hill and then left the Croyton road, of which she had far from happy memories, and turned into a winding lane which seemed to encircle the village.
It was an unfenced road and there had been no sign-post to indicate where it led. She began to wonder whether it led only to a farmhouse, but, about three miles further on, it merged into a slightly wider road which came into it from the left, and this she pursued until it crossed a tiny river. This was hardly more than a brook, to which the country road had descended before it mounted again to reach a hamlet. This was a tiny place, and on the further side of it a narrow lane turned off to the left. Following an idle fancy, on the verge of this lane Fenella pulled up and left the car, proposing to walk up the tracks, which looked inviting, and take her al fresco meal at a convenient spot on the hillside up which the little road climbed.
She soon realised that she could not have brought the car much further, for the lane petered out into a narrow grass-grown footpath. It wound upwards on an easy gradient which encouraged walking, and half a mile further on it passed through a wood. A long way off, between the trees, she could see a small manor house and she paused to look at it before she continued to climb the hill.
As no drive appeared to lead up to the house, she concluded that she was inspecting it from
