The Skeleton in the Clock

can't reproduce the tone, and, anyway, nobody could reproduce the volume, of what he said.

'He said: 'You stole my skeleton.' Then he turned round to the people in the door, who'd crowded out with their glasses in their hands, and said: 'Boys, that goddam hobgoblin stole my skeleton.' By this time we were off to a flying start

'There wasn't any motor-car outside the Dragon at all. Only a lot of bicycles, and a farm-cart with Will Harnaby's horse. H.M. was so mad he really and literally couldn't see straight and he fell all over the farm-cart when he tried to get up. But he did get there, and he did grab the reins and whip, and off we all went

'Grandmother was bending tensely over the steering-lever, putting on every ounce of speed; and Sir Henry was standing up and whirling the whip round his head like a charioteer in Ben-Hur. Only, you see, that electric car couldn't possibly do twenty miles an hour. And Will Harnaby's horse couldn't do fifteen.

That's where—' Jenny faltered a little—'Grandmother gave me the instructions. She said, with that smile of hers, I was to stick the skeleton's head out of the side-window so it faced H.M. And I was to move the lower jaw up and down as if the skeleton gibbered at him.

'Well, I did. I made the skeleton stick its head out and gibber about every twenty yards. And, every time the skeleton gibbered at him, his face got more purple, and his language was awful. Truly awful. I never heard anything, even in the Navy, that could…'

Jenny stopped. 'Martin!' she said, in an attempt at reproachfulness which broke down completely.

He couldn't help it. He knew it wasn't really funny; it was funny only because you could visualize the expressions of the persons concerned. He had collapsed against a tree, beating his hands on the bark. Jenny collapsed as well.

'But, Martin!' she insisted presently. 'You've got to see the serious side as well!'

'If you can see the serious side of that, my sweet, you'd appeal greatly to Sir Stafford Cripps. Besides, you haven't told me the ending.'

The ending is the serious side.'

'Oh? Who won the race?'

'We did. By yards and yards and yards.' Jenny reflected. 'I'm perfectly certain Grandmother told Dawson to be ready. He was there at the lodge gates, where there's no lodge-keeper now. But the wall is fifteen feet high, and there are big iron-barred gates.'

Prisons, it suddenly occurred to Martin: striking the amusement from his heart. Pentecost, Fleet House, Brayle Manor, all were prisons; though for the life of him he could not think how this applied to Fleet House, where the impression had-come only, from feeling.

He and Jenny were walking again through the mist A white tide of mist-under-mist washed across the grass, then revealed it ever moving. Its damp could be felt and breathed.

'Go on,' he prompted. 'What happened after your electric flyer got through the gates?'

'Dawson closed and locked them. Grandmother drove the car a fairly long way up the drive. After that she walked to the gates again. By that time she and H.M. too must have done a little thinking, because.. well, because it was different H.M. was sitting outside the gates on the seat of the farm-cart, with the whip across his knees and no expression on his face at all.

'Grandmother put her own face almost against the bars, and (don't think I've forgotten a word!) she said: 'It may be conceded that you won the first round, Henry; but can there be any doubt about who won the second?'' Martin whistled.

'Jenny,' he declared, 'something tells me there is going to be a third round. And that the third round will be a beauty.'

'But that's just what mustn't happen!' Jenny, peering at him past the side of her yellow hair, was again the eager and the breathless. 'Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter if it's something silly, like making skeletons gibber. Though even there I doubt whether your H.M. is as clever as Grandmother.'

'You think that, eh?'

'Yes. I do.'

'Wait,' advised Martin.

'But the skeleton-in-the-clock,' Jenny told him, her thin and arched eyebrows drawn together, 'is a different thing. It's serious, and — it may be deadly. Do you realize, from what H.M. said at Willaby's and from every bit of gossip floating about, that H.M. thinks this skeleton is a vital piece of evidence?'

'But evidence of what?'

'I wish I knew. And he told us straight out what he thought about Sir George Fleet's… death.'

'You're sure it was murder too. Aren't you, Jenny?'

She stopped short and turned round, her lips apart 'Martin! What makes you ask that?'

'Because every single time you've mentioned it you hesitate before you say 'death.' Besides, for some reason yesterday you started to be passionately interested all of a sudden, and wanted to learn all about it Why, Jenny?'

Instead of lessening as they walked, the mist was becoming thicker. Already, some distance back, a hedgerow had loomed unexpectedly in their faces; they groped for the stile. Now a fence emerged with almost equal materialization from the white twilight They reached the fence, and Jenny put a hand on it

'Martin. Did you ever wonder why I didn't offer to go with you on the ghost-hunting expedition?'

Martin felt uncomfortable. 'Well! I thought you were…'

'Jealous? Yes, that was true. Afraid of ghosts? Also true, a little.' Her lips and eyebrows apologized gently. 'But I told you there was another reason. Martin, I want you to know everything about me. I do, I do! But I can't tell you now because if I'm wrong it's not merely being mistaken; it's — if s sordidly stupid.'

'Jenny, I don't care. I'm not a detective.'

She shook her hair violently, and settled the coat over her brown sweater as though more conscious of mist- clamminess.

It all comes back to that utterly meaningless skeleton,' she said. 'And now Grandmother's got it locked up somewhere.'

'For innocent reasons, of course.’' He tried hard to make this a plain statement, without any inflection of question.

'Naturally. You see, under everything, Grandmother is just a sentimentalist'

Martin found his reason rocking. 'Your grandmother,' he said, defining the words with care, 'you call a sentimentalist?'

'Oh, she isn't easy to live with. I hate her sometimes. But she is kind-hearted, and you'd see it if it weren't for the arrogance. Grandmother is shielding somebody.' Jenny hesitated. 'She says the skeleton is legally her property. She also says nobody, not even the police, can take it from her unless they can show why it's a vital piece of evidence. Is that right?'

'You'd better ask Stannard. But it sounds reasonable to me.'

'Then that means,' cried Jenny, her eyes shining under lowered lids, 'the police don't know themselves. It means..'

Here Jenny, whose gaze had wandered along the line of the fence, uttered a cry and ran to Martin. Some little distance down beside the fence, a man was standing motionless.

A drifting mist-veil hid everything except his legs, as he stood sideways to the fence. Then the moving veil slowly swirled past and up. Martin saw clearly a large and somewhat burly figure, with its blue serge suit and its ruddy face dominated by a boiled blue eye, under a bowler hat

'Chief Inspector Masters!' Martin said.

Masters lifted one foot experimentally, and set it down with a faint squelch. If he did not happen to be in a good temper, the Chief Inspector never showed this in his professional countenance.

'Morning, miss. Morning, sir,' he greeted them, as offhandedly as though he were in a London office instead of a mist-wrapped Berkshire field at half-past four on Sunday morning. Bland as ever, poker-faced as ever in public, he walked towards them and looked hard at Martin.

'Still alive, I see,' he added.