The Skeleton in the Clock

'It's gambling,' whispered and blurted the other, his eyes now rolling horribly in articulo mortis. 'I wouldn't mind, see, but it's against the LOR. You'll 'ave the coppers on us!'

'Oh, my son! Don't you know no coppers can get in here today?'

'Whassat-forgossake?'

'This here. Lady Brayle—' H.M. was in good voice; it carried far—'thinks people's liberties are bein' interfered with. Couldn't you have guessed that from what she wrote on the posters out there?'

A hum of approval, growing to a roar, spread out over the crowd. Dust and gravel flew. At his last extremity the dying man's eye seemed to catch some flicker beyond, a signal from an arm in a grey-and-black checked sleeve, which said, 'Yes.' The pangs of agony dropped from him.

Whang went the cymbals from an invisible brass-band; and, by one of those inspired coincidences which really do happen, the band crashed into Camptown Races. Martin, his head down and pulling Ruth after him, was fighting his way through a pressing crowd with silver in its hands. His damaged forehead took some dizzying knocks, but he got through.

Ruth Callice, her straw sun-hat squashed down, removed the — hat and regarded him helplessly.

'Martin,' she said, 'is H.M. married?'

'Yes.'

'Have you ever met his wife?' 'No.'

Ruth shut her eyes, puffed out her cheeks, and seemed lost in questions of fancy in her own mind.

'This stout gen'leman will give you five to one the field; ten to one Blue Boy! Don't crowd, now! Keep back so's the 'andles can be turned. Lady Brayle wants you all to 'ave a fling!'

'Ruth,' Martin said, 'I've got to hurry. Excuse me if I go ahead.'

He had still fifty or sixty yards of the drive to cover. But the stalls and booths were fewer; he could almost run. A yellow balloon, lost from someone's hand, sailed past on a rising breeze. He could see that the oak trees, set back twenty feet from the drive, allowed room for the stalls inside. But the bigger exhibits; like the Mirror Maze, the merry-go-round, and something which called itself Mermaids' Paradise, raised their garish colours well back on the lawn behind the trees.

Well, the bandage was still on. And he reached the terrace.

Except to glance along the front, Martin hardly looked at Brayle Manor. Between two square grey-black towers, one at each end and of great age, had been built a Tudor or Jacobean frontage, with latticed windows, which seemed almost of yesterday by comparison.

Martin banged the heavy knocker on the front door. There was no reply. He banged and banged until the noise, in his head, grew louder than the band and the loud-speakers and the merry-go-round. He thought he heard some sound from an oriel window, projecting out over the front door, and he stepped back. But a voice spoke from behind the front door.

'Is that Mr. Martin Drake?'

'Yes!'

With a rattle of bolts and the click of a key, the heavy door opened under its low-pointed stone arch. Inside stood an elderly man in butler's canonicals, very shabby and clearly Dawson, with whom he had held that conversation about the five hundred pound.

He was in a dim, polished Tudor hall, low of ceiling and so much in twilight because all windows had been closed, all curtains drawn, against the noise.

'Martin!' said Jenny's voice.

A broad, low staircase, with carved balustrades, ascended along the left-hand wall. A heavy hinged panel at the side of the stairs stood more than part way open, and Jenny's face peered out at him.

'Martin,' she said without preamble, 'Grandmother's on the telephone.'

Chapter 18

Martin strode over, hearing Dawson shut and lock the door behind him. Jenny was now regarding his forehead with far more consternation and concern than seemed possible if he had suffered serious injury.

'Just a minute, Jenny,' he said. 'What have you told her?'

'She only just started to speak. She said, 'Jennifer, I—' and that was where Dawson opened the door.'

Taking the ‘phone from Jenny's hands as she moved out from under the stair-opening, Martin sat down on a low little chair and cleared his throat

'Lady Brayle? Martin Drake here.'

To tell the truth, Martin was beginning to feel sorry for the old girl. True, she had brought the whole mess on herself by inviting MacDougall's Mammoth into her grounds. But H.M. was the evil genius. And, in the third round, H.M. had landed such a knockout punch that his adversary was still unconscious after the count. Or was H.M., actually, the evil genius? Martin was beginning to have other ideas. Still, the fact remained…

'Indeed,' said Lady Brayle. 'I was not aware, Captain Drake, that I wished to hold any conversation with you.' Calm and even of voice, conscious of no interest but her own and not apparently caring who knew it, the lady with the cold grey eye spoke indifferently. 'So?' muttered Martin.

'However! I have heard certain rumours, which I do not believe, concerning the Manor.' You will not trouble to comment on the facts. This would not interest me. You will merely be good enough to confirm or deny these rumours.'

Martin held the telephone away from him and studied it. His temper, like a red line on a graph-paper, zig- zagged violently and then slowly soared high.

'Where are you now, Lady Brayle?'

'Really, that is not the slightest concern—'

'It may be. Where are you now?'

'I am at the Priory Hill vicarage, about two miles north of Brayle. I am in Mr. Bamham's study.'

'Is that the clergyman who's so dead-set against horse-racing?'

Distantly, but still audible, the band-music swayed and jigged:

'Oh, I put my money on a bob-tailed nag, Doo-dah, doo-dah—'

'Has it occurred to you, Captain Drake, that I am waiting for an answer?'

'Madam,' Martin said gently, 'I can't answer your question as it deserves to be answered, because I don't know. I have a theory, but it may not be right Sir Henry Merrivale,' he hoped he could keep his promise, 'will ring you in half an hour and explain everything.'

'You will regret this, Captain Drake. When I return home, I shall carry a riding-crop. It will be most unpleasant for the first half dozen people I meet inside my gates.'

Martin put down the phone and ducked out from under the stairs. Jenny, her wide-spaced blue eyes filled not only with concern, clutched his arms.

'You didn't say anything to insult her?'

'I don't think so, and I don't care.'

'Darling,' Jenny asked quietly, 'have you any idea how lordly you can look and sound, when you get annoyed with somebody?'

'Me?'

This, to him, seemed so nonsensical that he put it down to some fancy of Jenny's romantic brain. He glanced round the dim, heavily stuffy hall, where the lean and sallow-haired

Dawson in his shabby butler clothes seemed a kind of symbol.

'No,' Jenny answered his thought mockingly, with a smile on her entirely irresistible mouth, 'we didn't make the house look like a place of mourning because of the noise. It's a sort of gesture: when Grandmother comes back. Upstairs at the window we've been having a kind of signally-game with Mr. MacDougall. I don't know what it means, but he says it's frightfully important. Come along!'

Again the front-door knocker rapped, but far too heavily for it to have been Ruth Callice. Martin had his own guess.

'Chief Inspector Masters?' he shouted; and, at an affirmative reply, he nodded to Dawson.