Ten Star Clues (29 page)

“I was on the point of walking over to the castle to inquire,” he said, a little in the manner of a man confessing to a nervousness he knew to be slightly absurd.

Bobby made no comment, for he thought to himself that it might be easy to guess the nature of Sophy's errand—if indeed it was for the forest she was bound.

He wondered if he could overtake her. He felt the attempt would have to be made. He asked what path it was on which Sophy was said to have been seen. It led, he learned, almost directly to the Charles the Second oak, and was often used by hikers and picnickers bound in the summer for that well-known view-point. But the path was not very easy to find or keep to, since it was crossed by many side tracks.

As quickly as the darkness and his ignorance of the ground permitted, he hurried on; for he had a feeling that haste was needed, and when he reached the verge of the forest, where the tall trees made the black night blacker still, he saw, or not so much saw as was aware of, a dark and shadowy form flitting lightly before him, only a short distance ahead.

He called her by name. She did not answer. He heard instead, in the quiet of the forest and the night, how instantly she increased her speed.

Bobby called but got no answer. He called again, his voice lost in the vast and sombre silence of the woods. He began to run, but already those light footsteps he had been aware of had faded, they, too, into the all-prevailing stillness. He had a powerful electric torch with him. He flung its beam ahead, around, as he ran. Here and there its strong ray startled into life some denizen of the forest that even those light passing footsteps Bobby had heard had frightened into immobility. But the faint scampering such small creatures made as they sought safety, or the flutter of wings as some bird or another made its indignant and disturbed way to a fresh roosting place, alone broke the brooding quietude all around. Bobby tried to run more quickly, but in the darkness speed was not easy. After he had collided with a tree or two, stumbled once or twice, felt a branch like the lash of a whip across his face, he slackened to a walk.

After all, he might have been mistaken. What he had thought were light and running steps might have been in reality only dead leaves rustling in the slow night breeze. He looked at his watch. It was past eleven now, and only the faint and intermittent light of the stars shining here and there from behind a panoply of cloud, relieved the darkness beneath the trees. He wished he had more experience of life in the open air, of country life. A man felt so small, so lost, so insignificant in the heart of this great forest where forest had been since the beginning, where his remote, skin-clad ancestors would have felt so much more at home than he could ever be, with his sophisticated training of town and pavement. He found himself wondering if it could really be Sophy he had heard, and deciding that it was impossible. How could she, so small, shy, shrinking, ever have found the courage to penetrate into this sombre solitude at this dead hour of the night?

Abruptly he discovered that he was on the wrong path, one that was running north instead of due west, since the Charles the Second oak lay, he knew, due west of the castle, and, small knowledge as he had of the stars, he could at least recognize the north star, now shining directly ahead of him instead of on his left. By good luck he stumbled on a path that seemed to lead in the right direction. He followed it till it joined another, one also running west, and apparently more frequently used.

Suddenly he stiffened to attention. Always, all the small innumerable noises of the night, all the whispering movements of the little busy creatures that go about their business in the greater safety of the covering darkness, all had hushed to a wary stillness as he passed by, recognizing that here was something coming that was strange, unknown and formidable. Only his own footsteps, that even to himself sounded so clumsily, so almost indecently loud, broke that primaeval forestal tranquillity. Yet already his ears had in some measure attuned themselves to the all-pervading quiet, as if now they were recovering ancestral qualities only forgotten, not lost, in disuse; able, therefore, to distinguish quickly alien sounds that had no commerce with the life. He stood quite still and listened again, at once aware that here were sounds of approaching steps that differed altogether from those earlier ones that he had heard before. Hurried they were indeed, as those others also had been, but loud, uneven, clumsy, utterly alien to the life of the woods into which the earlier footsteps had seemed to merge, having with it something in common, as though they belonged to some belated dryad hurrying back to her tree home.

The steps came nearer. A man's, undoubtedly. Ralph Hoyle, perhaps, Bobby thought, or else that unknown who might be the missing Bertram Two, as Bobby was beginning to call him in his thoughts, who again might turn out to be the sender of the mysterious 'phone message received by Ralph at the Glasgow hotel. Bobby found himself wondering with dark fear if that message had been to make an appointment in this forest loneliness that had perhaps already been kept.

A disturbing thought there in the black and silent night, for if that appointment had been made, then for what purpose in so lonely a spot and why from it was apparently only one returning?

Those hurrying, stumbling footsteps were nearer now. In the night the approaching form began to take shape, to be recognizable as a man. Bobby stepped out into the middle of the path where the darkness was at least less intense. He was preparing to utter a challenge. It never got spoken, for with a howl scarcely human in the intensity of its fear and its surprise, of what indeed seemed its despair, the unknown hurled himself at Bobby.

Taken by surprise, astonished, too, by the fury of the assault, Bobby reeled backwards. He caught his foot on the root of a tree and went headlong, his assailant with him. Over and over they rolled, locked in a close, embracing fury. Bobby tried to wrench himself free. He received a heavy blow on the side of the head from some heavy instrument, and for the moment was dazed. A second blow he managed to take on his elbow. He wrenched himself free by an effort that called for every ounce of his strength. A blow he aimed at the glimmering patch of whiteness in the dark that he took for a face, had full effect. His assailant went sprawling, his grip loosened. Bobby got to his feet. His electric torch was still in his hand. He switched it on, turned its ray on the huddled form at his feet, almost indistinguishable from the bush into which it had been hurled by Bobby's well-aimed blow. But if the sharp, searching ray of the torch showed that, it showed also the muzzle of a pistol pointing straight at Bobby.

For an interminable moment, from the heart of the bush, that muzzle pointed thus, its deadly threat hanging suspended in the clear light of the ray from the electric torch. There flashed into Bobby's mind the thought that he made an excellent target. Then he thought that now he would never know who it was, for while the prostrate man held the pistol steady in one hand, he kept the other before his face, his hand and the branches of the bush concealing it completely.

“Get out, clear out, keep out,” a high-pitched, screaming voice cried at him, a voice in which there mingled menace and panic in a way that Bobby knew, for he had heard it before at other times, carried with it deadly warning, the menace and the panic each reinforcing and strengthening the other.

He gathered himself together for a spring, his only chance. He thought:— ‘He can't miss,' and then again:— ‘He is as scared as I am—more.' A stone came flying over his shoulder, thrown from behind. A yelp showed that it had hit its mark. The pistol muzzle wavered. Bobby sprang. In the bush, fortunately it was not a bramble bush, not thorny, they wrestled to and fro, threshing confusedly in the dark. Then Bobby found himself uppermost, found his fingers grasping a coat collar, hauled with vigour, discovered he was standing upright, a little breathless, a trifle dishevelled, at his feet a limp, unresisting form whining incoherent protests, from which Bobby could distinguish that there had never been even the most remote intention of firing, that sooner would the speaker have shot himself than Inspector Owen, whom he had failed to recognize, and had absurdly mistaken for a highway robber, that he had only found the pistol that night, that he had fully intended to take it straight to Inspector Owen, that for that service he had expected to be thanked or even to receive some small reward, not to be knocked about something terrible as he had been, and the sight of one eye probably lost for ever, owing to a blow received from a stone, which, in his considered opinion, was hardly to be expected from a gentleman like Inspector Owen.

“Get up,” said Bobby with an unsympathetic though not very severe application of the toe of his boot to an appropriate part of the anatomy of one whom he had now recognized to be Martin, the castle butler. “So it's you, is it? Well, what have you been playing at?”

“Playing?” groaned Martin bitterly, “playing?” and indeed with his torn clothing, his bruised eye, his nose and mouth still oozing blood from the blow dealt by Bobby, he looked anything but playful. “Playing?” he repeated still more bitterly.

Bobby was thinking:—

‘Who threw that stone? someone threw that stone. Who?'

Martin went on whining:—

“It hit me in the eye, right in the eye, I expect I shall be blind in one eye, who will want a one-eye'd butler?”

Bobby, swinging his torch to and fro, searching the ground, saw now what he had been seeking—a pistol lying near the bush where it had been jerked from Martin s grasp. He picked it up. It was a Colt automatic point thirty-two. He said:—

“How did you get this?” Then he said: “Is this what was used for the murder?”

“I don't know,” whined Martin. “How should I know? It might be. I thought to myself, I thought: ‘What's he talking so much about that old oak for?' and I thought if I went there and I found anything same as I did, it being there all right, the pistol I mean, and I said to myself, I said, that'll be a help, I said, and maybe a trifle of a reward, too, just by way of acknowledgement, instead of which there's all my teeth out and very likely an eye gone as well. Who'll want a one-eye'd butler?”

“Shut up,” ordered Bobby roughly. “Quiet.”

He listened. He could hear them distinctly now. Fresh foot-steps approaching and the sound of voices raised in argument.

Martin, seeing how intently Bobby was listening, seemed to think it an opportunity. He was trying to slip away when Bobby shot out an arm and caught him by the collar and jerked him back.

“You'll have a lot to explain if that does turn out to be the murder weapon,” he said grimly. “Won't look too good for you, you know.”

Martin began to babble excuses, protests, explanations, but once again Bobby cut him short.

“Keep that till later on,” he said, “and don't spend the time thinking up lies. It'll only make things worse for you if you do, and they look bad enough already.”

By now the newcomers had drawn near. Bobby threw the light of his torch on them. They were three in number. Two of them were the plain clothes men Bobby had asked should be sent to watch the oak. Between them was the missing Ralph Hoyle, indignant and protesting. He recognized Bobby at the same time.

“What in blazes is all this?” he demanded. “What's the game?”

“Don't know,” Bobby answered. “Can't give it a name yet. It might be saving your life—or even your honour. Do you mind falling down?”

“What?” said Ralph, thinking he had not heard correctly. “What's that?”

“Yours not to reason why,” murmured Bobby; and, taking Ralph completely by surprise, very neatly tripped him up and deposited him full length on the ground. “Lie still, you fool,” he added in a quick whisper to the considerably astonished and even annoyed Ralph, and then in a loud voice, indeed in a very loud voice:— “He's fainted. It's a deep wound, probably fatal.”

“What the hell?” protested Ralph furiously.

But Bobby had leaped away. He had heard a quick, rustling movement behind one of the trees. A moment later he emerged, accompanied by Sophy.

“I thought that dodge would work,” he said complacently. “Gave herself away at once.”

“What the hell?” repeated Ralph, making up for want of originality in expression by even greater depth of feeling.

“Now, now,” said Bobby, soothingly this time, “you said that before.”

“Oh, he isn't hurt, he isn't hurt a scrap,” declared Sophy.

“Well, aren't you glad?” asked Bobby, innocent now.

Enlightenment came to Sophy as she glanced from Bobby, looking now a trifle smug, to Ralph, looking much more than a trifle bewildered. To Bobby she said with tremendous emphasis:—

“You—you beast.”

“What in thunder—” began Ralph, and then gave it up for sheer want of words to continue.

“I suppose what you mean,” observed Bobby, “is: What is Miss Longden doing here at this time of night?”

“I was having a walk,” said Sophy hurriedly.

“Well, now, think of that,” murmured Bobby.

“I suppose,” said Ralph, throwing in his hand, “this is some sort of new game—charades, probably.”

“How did you know?” demanded Sophy, still indignant, of Bobby.

“Detectives always know,” answered Bobby impressively, and Sophy wasn't at all impressed and said very loudly.

“Fiddlesticks.”

“Well,” explained Bobby, “when at what is called the psychological moment a detective sees a stone arrive out of the blue, a well-aimed stone, and it saves what is called, vulgarly, that detective's bacon, and when he remembers that a young lady who thinks that to hit the mark all you have to do is to aim straight, is somewhere about, then he adds two and two together and decides that the answer makes—Miss Longden.”

“I think it's very horrid of you,” said Sophy, unappeased.