There May Be Danger (2 page)

Your Children Are Safer in the Country! ran an L.C.C. poster on one of the hoardings Kate's bus passed in its cautious journey into unfamiliar streets. All except Sidney Brentwood. What had happened to Sidney Brentwood? I shall probably never know, said Kate to herself philosophically. But not so philosophically as she intended, for almost in the moment of formulating the words, her vague stirrings of curiosity in pity crystallised into a firm determination to find out.

Number 105 Tranchester Terrace was one of the neatest of a rather shabby and dejected street of three-storey houses with little ironwork balconies hung frivolously on their dingy stucco fronts, and small square front gardens, which were for the most part little wildernesses of flowering grass and sprawling shrubs. Number 105 possessed a polished door-bell and a whitened doorstep, upon which sat a very large tabby cat with a Narpac disc round its neck and its tongue slightly out in an insolent devil-may-care expression.

Kate rang the bell. There was no answer, and she was about to ring again, when a door in the area below opened, and a little elderly lady came a few inches outside it and peered up at Kate. She carried in her arms another large tabby cat, and seemed to be using her feet to prevent the emergence from the area of yet a third.

“Yes?” she inquired, a little shortly.

“Are you Miss Brentwood?” asked Kate, looking down over the hand-rail.

“Yes,” said the little lady in the area, keeping her eye upon the cat bent on escape and obstructing it neatly with her foot. “Go back. Pixie! Naughty cat!”

The thwarted cat swore loudly, and the large torpid animal in Miss Brentwood's arms looked on with a complacent expression, as if he thought Pixie deserved all he got.

“I saw your advertisement,” began Kate.

“Oh, yes! Well, it's on the second floor, I'm afraid, but there's the use of an Anderson shelter,” replied Miss Brentwood, in a slightly more friendly tone. “
Will
you behave, Pixie? Bad, bad puss! I expect you'd like to see over the flat, wouldn't you? Would you mind coming in this way? I'm short-handed just at present, and Pixie—”

“Oh, but I didn't come about a flat!” said Kate, descending the area steps. The large tabby cat who had been sitting on the front doorstep put its head through the railings and looked down as if to see what all the commotion was about. “I saw your advertisement in Edgware Road, and—”

“Oh, poor little Sidney!” exclaimed Miss Brentwood, with an air at once harassed and enlightened. “Have you any news of him? Do come in! Bobbie!” she cried suddenly, catching sight of the cat on the front steps, and speaking with deep reproach: “You naughty, naughty, naughty—Oh, catch him,
please
! I can't come, Pixie will escape if I do!”

Kate scurried up the area steps again, and was in time to see Bobbie remove himself in a leisurely and sinuous manner through the railings into the next-door garden, where he turned, tongue still out, to see what she would do now. She went quickly out of the gate of 105 and in at the gate of 103 in time to watch Bobbie's further exit through the railings into the garden of 101, where he turned again and gave her an interested look. She glared at him over the railings and repeated the performance. When he reached 99, however, he became bored with the game, and suddenly accelerating shot away from her, leapt on to a shed in the garden of number 95, which was the end house of the terrace, and disappeared, the devil-knew-where. Kate had to return empty-handed and apologising to the area of number 105, where Bobbie's owner still anxiously awaited him.

“Oh dear, he is a naughty, naughty cat! And there's cat-flu about, too! Do come in! You came about poor little Sidney, you said.
No
, Pixie, you
shan't
follow Bobbie's bad example! Look at Ki-Ki, what a good cat he is!
He
doesn't want to run out into the naughty dangerous streets!”

She led the way into a very dark basement passage about which hung a curious stuffy aroma that reminded Kate of the Zoo, and opened the door into a sunny, but also very stuffy, little room in which were at least four saucers containing milk or meat-remains perched about on various articles of furniture, besides three on the floor.

“Do sit down, Miss—”

“Mayhew.”

“Not there, that's Pixie's chair and he
does
leave his hairs about so! So you've come about poor little Sidney, Miss Mayhew. I'm so terribly anxious about him. Have you any news?”

“I'm afraid not,” said Kate, sitting down on a sofa whose broken springs protested loudly. “I—I saw your advertisement and I just came to see if I could help.”

“Oh, I see,” said Miss Brentwood a little vaguely. “Well, of course the police are doing all they can. But it's three weeks since we had news of him, and I'm afraid in a case like this no news is bad news!”

She put the cat she was carrying down in front of a saucer of sardine-bits, at which he sniffed with a replete and disgusted air, before stalking out of the room.

“Hasn't anybody seen or heard anything of your nephew since he disappeared?” asked Kate.

“Oh, there've been a lot of people who've thought they'd seen him in all sorts of places, but when the police come to investigate, it always seems to come to nothing.”

Now that all her cats were out of the room, Miss Brentwood seemed a little more able to concentrate on the comparatively unimportant matter of her nephew's disappearance. She was a very thin, stooping little lady with an aquiline profile that had been pretty and now was rather too bird-like, and a quantity of untidy, fluffy grey hair.

“Of course,” she pursued, “one mustn't give up hope. But I'm dreading the day when his poor father gets home to England—his only child, you know, that makes it so much worse, doesn't it? And of course, for my own sake—well, you can't help getting fond of a child when you've looked after him for over a year, can you? Not that Sidney wasn't a dear little boy, he
was
, but of course like all boys he was a handful and I must admit I was glad of the rest when he was evacuated! Children keep you on the go so! And of course with the cats, I really had my hands full already when his father left him here. Still I was very glad to do what I could for him. It's his father that's my nephew really—in the Merchant Navy, he is. Little Sidney's my great-nephew. His mother died when he was a baby.”

Poor little Sidney! thought Kate: no mother, a father on the high seas, and only a great-aunt who prefers cats to care whether you live or die!

“Are you a friend of his father's?” asked Miss Brentwood curiously.

“No,” replied Kate. “I didn't know anything about it until this morning. But I've got nothing to do just at present...” She paused, but only for a second, to listen to the voice of reason telling her not to be a fool, then took the plunge. “I thought I'd go and look for him.”

“Oh, my dear!” stammered his great-aunt. “But—! The police
are
looking for him, you know—and it's three weeks since he disappeared!” She looked sidelong at Kate, as if doubtful of her sanity. “Of course, I should be very, very grateful, but I'm afraid-—well, how would you set about it? I mean, I'm beginning to think—”

“That he's dead?” asked Kate baldly.

Miss Brentwood looked pained.

“Well, three weeks without sight or sound of him! And that wild, mountainous country! What I can't help thinking is, that he must have gone off by himself into the hills—some boy's adventure, you know—and broken his leg or something, and—oh, poor little Sidney! Too awful to think of!”

“But surely the hills have been searched?”

“Oh yes, of course, but still people
do
get lost in such places—very wild, I believe, though I've never been there. I should have liked to go and see Sidney in his billet, but I find it so difficult to get away! My cats tie me so, you see! Is that Bobbie outside the window?”

But luckily for the continuity of their conversation the cat who was busily scratching a hole in her front garden was not Bobbie, but a low stranger. She made a few indignant shooing sounds at him, and returned to her chair.

“Sidney's billet was in a village in the hills. From their letters, they seemed nice people. The village postman, the man was, and his wife keeps a little shop.”

“What happened exactly?” inquired Kate.

“Well, my dear,” said Miss Brentwood unhappily, “it seems the child got up in the middle of the night, dressed, went off on his bicycle, without saying a word to anybody, and simply never came back! Disappeared! For no reason at all—I mean, there hadn't been any trouble, either at school or at his billet. And since that day—October the 1st, it was, a Tuesday—nobody's seen a trace of him. His bicycle's not been found, either. What can one think, except that he must have gone off and got lost in those wild, treacherous mountains?” said Miss Brentwood helplessly. “Any other kind of accident, you see—well, he'd have been found, wouldn't he, by now? Even if he was
drowned
, poor little Sidney, surely his bicycle would have been found by now! But with those miles and miles of wild, uninhabited country,” said Miss Brentwood, who seemed, Kate thought, to regard Radnorshire as first cousin to the Arizona desert, “almost at his door, all rocks and forests and—”

“Could I have the name and address of the people he was living with?” asked Kate, taking an envelope and pencil from her handbag.

“Certainly, but do you
really
intend then—? It's very, very good of you, Miss Mayhew, but—”

Miss Brentwood gazed doubtfully at Kate with her faded blue eyes.

“I want to go to Radnorshire, anyhow. I've got a friend there,” said Kate briskly, since it seemed necessary to rationalise her impulse for the benefit of the old lady.

Miss Brentwood brightened immediately at what she took for a sign of normality, and it did not seem to occur to her that Radnorshire was rather a large place. Searching behind a hideous black marble clock on the mantelpiece, she sorted out a collection of old letters and handed the address to Kate.

Kate copied it carefully.

“I
shall
be glad to hear from you, Miss Mayhew,” said old Miss Brentwood, “even if you don't find anything out at once. I'm naturally very anxious. Of course, nobody can hold
me
responsible, but still, Sidney was in my care, in a way, and— oh dear! If
only
he'd gone to High Wycombe, where some of the other children went! Radnorshire is so far away, actually in
Wales
, isn't it? Acres of mountain country, I believe, worse than Cumberland, and we know what a lot of poor people lose their lives on those hills!”

Putting the address away, Kate asked:

“Is there anything you can tell me about Sidney that might help? I mean, the kind of boy he is?”

It was evident from Sidney's great-aunt's puzzled and vague expression that this question would get no useful answer. She looked as if she had never really noticed what kind of boy Sidney was.

“Well, I don't know, my dear. He was a nice, good- tempered boy, rather disobedient sometimes. I don't think he was specially clever at school, just average, you know. He was better at doing things with his hands than book-work,” said Miss Brentwood rather helplessly.

Kate thought it would be useless with this unobservant aunt to pursue the subject further, and got up to go, narrowly avoiding treading in a saucer containing a little stale and dusty milk.

“I'll write to you, Miss Brentwood.”

“Do, do! I am
sorry
I can't come with you!” said the old lady regretfully. “But of course it's impossible! My cats
tie
me so!”

Kate did not share her regrets. At the area door Pixie, who seemed to be a cat of one idea, was sitting with his nose against the crack waiting the opportunity to bolt from his loving owner into the wide world. To his furious indignation, Miss Brentwood picked him up before she opened the door for Kate.

“
If
you see Bobbie,
do
tell him to come home!” said Miss Brentwood. “I don't like the cats to be out in front, with all this traffic about, and now I hear there's cat-flu.
Good
-bye!”

They clasped hands, awkwardly, for the irate Pixie was lolloping, a dead weight, under his mistress's right arm.

“You know,” said Miss Brentwood, “if I don't seem to express my gratitude to you very well, it's partly because I am so very much surprised!” 

Her old blue eyes once again studied Kate's face half-doubtfully, half-admiringly, as if for the signs of insanity that did not appear on the surface. “Take care of yourself, Miss Mayhew! Don't
you
go doing anything rash and risking
your
life!”

“Not I!” said Kate, smiling at what seemed to her, then, a very absurd idea.

At the corner of the road she saw Bobbie sitting on the pavement watching the traffic, his pink tongue hanging out to catch any microbes of cat-flu that might be flying around in the dust.

“Go home, Bobbie,” said Kate reprovingly.

He leered at her.

The rest of Kate's day was occupied with preparations for departure, which included the purchase of a canvas knapsack and a pair of rubber wellingtons, for Miss Brentwood had conveyed to her a picture of unlimited wild forest, and herself tramping through it, though common-sense told her that a boy could not be lost in such country for three weeks, and still survive, and that it was at least equally possible that Sidney had never gone near the hills at all, but had headed back for London. At the same time, though of course she could not answer for Sidney, Kate felt that she herself would have had to be wretched indeed in her country billet before
she
would have headed back towards Bobbie, Pixie and Ki-Ki!