There May Be Danger (22 page)

“I suppose all these farm-buildings are let, are they?”

“No, they're all empty, except that one. Mr. Morrison doesn't like letting his buildings for some reason. He didn't really like letting the barn to Gid, but as Gid had an unexpired agreement with the former owner of the Veault, he has to put up with it till next Lady Day,” said Aminta cheerfully from the stable which stood alongside the wall of the cobbled courtyard.

When, having fed her Lion, she emerged, and Rosaleen suggested that she might have a lift back to Llanhalo in Major Humphries's car, Kate eagerly claimed one, too. Nurse Maud opened the field-gate for them with the detached air of a professional gate-keeper. She scarcely responded to Major Humphries's stiff salute, but winked sadly at Kate as they went by.

Since Aminta was taking a couple of large milk-cans and a small dog back with her, Kate sat in front and conversed on the local scenery with Major Humphries. She spoke with the false brightness of the mentally abstracted, for her thoughts were all the time running on plans for the investigation of Llanhalo cellar.

“I beg your pardon, Major Humphries! I didn't catch what you said.”

“I said: awful there's been no news about that boy. Mrs. Morrison tells me you're connected with him. Dreadful thing for everybody concerned. Feel it myself, though God knows
I
couldn't have done anything to stop him running off like that. Good billet, too, nice people the Howells, best billet in the village. Got homesick, I suppose, the silly young owl. Didn't know what was good for him.”

“What do you really think's happened to him, Major Humphries?”

How often Kate had asked this question since she arrived in Hastry, and how often received the answer she now received, she had lost count. What parrots people were! she thought with gusty impatience. Or did they all give the same reply, not because they were parrots but because it was the only conclusion to which thought led? Was it in hopefulness, or in folly, that Kate stood alone? The major drew down the corners of his mouth under his trim and bristly greying moustache.

“I'm afraid the river'll give the answer one day, Miss Mayhew. The river, or the hills. Don't like saying it, but there it is. No use blinking facts.”

He drew the car up at the bend of the road where Kate had first seen Gideon Atkins trimming his hedge. Aminta's little dog sprang out, and there was a clanking of cans as Aminta descended.

“Can you manage the door? Let me,” said Major Humphries, stretching across Kate.

But it was not a difficulty with the car door that had frozen Kate for a moment, half turned to get out, her foot on the step. She had the door, in fact, open in her hand. And at the bottom of the door, stuck on the dark green leather, was a small square of bright green tinfoil.

Kate managed to say:

“No, I suppose it isn't any use blinking facts.”

She got out. She did not want to get out. She wanted to stay in Major Humphries's car, in the company of Major Humphries, to whom she had paid so little attention, to have another look at him, to study him, to listen to him.

“Everything O.K.?” asked Major Humphries breezily, putting in his clutch. “You quite O.K., Miss Mayhew? You look a bit off-colour, doesn't she, Miss Hughes?”

“I'm quite all right,” said Kate, smiling the dim, mechanical smile which had no doubt caught the Major's eye. “Thank you.”

“Not at all! Glad to be of service. Good-bye.”

He drove off.

“Aminta,” said Kate, looking after him, “how tall would you say that Major Humphries was?”

“How
tall
? I'm sure I don't know! Taller than me. About your height, I should think. Are you going to be sick, Kate?” asked Aminta curiously. “You do look a bit peculiar, now I come to look at you.”

Over tea with Mrs. Howells, Kate led the conversation via the Home Guard, to Major Humphries. Major Humphries, it seemed, though now a character well-known in the district, a member of the local council, a churchwarden, vice-president of the local horse show and secretary of the local hunt, had not been living long in the neighbourhood. He was a retired Army man, a bachelor, who had come to settle down two years ago in a house with a small estate between Hastry village and the railway station. He was a bit of a busybody, Mr. Howells opined, with a finger in everyone's pie. But Mrs. Howells's opinion seemed to be that he had a kind heart, and that Hastry folk did not on the whole object to having their pies stirred by him.

Two years, thought Kate: the same length of time that Gideon Atkins has been at Llanhalo. She remembered that Humphries, even while expressing the liveliest contempt for Atkins, had admitted frequent visits to Llanhalo. Perhaps those visits had not, as he claimed, been made purely in the interests of the hunt?

They seemed unlikely partners, on the face of it, Kate reflected, the rough-and-ready money-grabbing farmer and the gentlemanly army man. But at once it occurred to her that Major Humphries would not be a difficult part to play. The man who could put up so creditable an impromptu performance as a gipsy ferreter would have no trouble in studying and maintaining such a stock part as that of Major Everyman!

She had made her appointment with Ronnie at Llanhalo for three o'clock next morning. The waning moon would be high then. Moonlight or none would seem to be a matter of indifference to the adventurer in cellars and secret tunnels beneath the earth. But Kate's experiences at Hymns Bank last night had given her a strong distaste for darkness.

The wind was in the south, and the distant bells of Hastry church tower struck three as she stood at Llanhalo dairy door. A voice breathed hoarsely, sibilantly in the doorway:

“Is that you, Miss?”

She slipped into the dairy, and softly shut the door.

“Well, here we are, Ronnie.”

They looked at one another by the light of a candle on the dairy shelf, Ronnie with eager, bright-eyed trust in Kate and the hour, Kate with more tranquil assurance than she felt. Ronnie looked smaller than usual by this light, slighter, younger, and more vulnerable. She noticed that he was dressed for adventure, in a corduroy wind-sheeter zip-fastened up to the neck and his trousers tucked into the tops of his gum-boots.

“Everybody asleep?”

Ronnie nodded.

“You got a torch?”

He nodded again.

“Come on, then.”

Kate took the candle in her hand and followed Ronnie to the cellar, shutting the door softly after her and locking it. The earthy, vault-like chill of a little-used cellar to which the daylight scarcely penetrates, struck coldly on her bones, with a foretaste of what might be expected in a subterranean tunnel. There was a faint unpleasant smell in the damp air, too, which probably came from the bunch of uncooked lights hanging on a nail, the cats' dinner, the only commodity kept in this place. The doorway through which they had just come was, Kate observed, arched, and the stone spandrels were finely moulded. This place had never been built as the cellar of a farmhouse. Like the ruins outside, it was a relic of the mediaeval abbey which had once existed there.

“I've took the grating out, Miss. I thought it'd save time.”

“Good. Did it come out easily?”

“Quite easy. Miss. It just lifts out.”

Ronnie crouched and grasped the heavy grating in his thin hands to demonstrate the extreme ease of lifting it, but it seemed to Kate that the effort was as much as he could manage, and, afraid that he would drop it on his toe and hurt himself, or against the stone wall and rouse the house, she restrained him.

A hollow, two foot square, yawned in the dark stone wall. Kate, lying on the ground and shining her torch into the aperture, could see a low arched tunnel about two feet high and three feet wide, walled and roofed with rough masonry, extending away from her for a distance that was difficult to assess—perhaps twelve feet or so. It appeared to end disappointingly in a rough stone wall.

“Ronnie, I'm afraid this tunnel's a wash-out,” said Kate, withdrawing her arm and looking up at Ronnie, who crouched eagerly at her shoulder. “It only runs for a few yards.”

Ronnie shook his head vehemently. His narrow, clear-skinned face, pale, not flushed, with excitement, wore quite an exalted look. His grey eyes were very dark.

“Miss, that's not the end you can see! It's a sort of cave, or something!”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I've got a stronger torch than you, I believe, Miss. And I—I wriggled a little farther in, Miss, when I was looking. I didn't go down the tunnel. I kept my feet this side of the hole,” explained Ronnie. “I just—wriggled in a bit. And I could see there was a kind of hollow place at the end that seems to go up and down.”

Kate borrowed his stronger torch. It certainly looked now as if there were a gap in the floor at the end of the tunnel before that rough stone wall blocked the view. It looked as if a well existed there. A little shudder ran over Kate, not only at the bare thought of a well in such a place as this, but at the possibilities which fringed this bare thought with horror. Wells did exist within doors in ancient houses, she knew. She pictured the deep shaft, the ancient masonry of its rounded sides extending downwards, downwards, far beyond the light of any torch that might be shone down it, so far that the black water at the bottom would send up only one small reflective gleam. What old secrets, and new ones as well as old ones, might not such a well conceal?

Ronnie's face fell when Kate told him that he must wait in the cellar until she had investigated as far as that well, but he did not protest. There was scarcely room for two in the tunnel together, since the roof was so low that it would be necessary to crawl along almost at full length.

Kate had rarely seen a less inviting ingress. She pushed the lighted candle in its enamel stick ahead of her into the narrow earthy place in which, as she went head and shoulders, she imagined she could indeed smell the waters of some ancient spring, and crawled after it, pushing it ahead of her along the ground at the point of a walking-stick she had brought with her. The candle-flame burnt clearly enough, though it flickered a good deal in a draught that seemed to come from ahead of her. The air was all right, anyway. But Kate would not care to proceed far along a subterranean passage in this snakelike fashion. And reflecting as she went upon the arrangement of the ground floor at Llanhalo farmhouse, she realised that the tunnel she was in could not be much below the ground, and was unlikely to proceed far at this level. The kitchen was only two or three steps up from the level of the dairy floor, and the dairy was three steps up from the cellar. The floor of this passage ran level with the cellar floor, and therefore its roof was not much below the ground-floor level.

Kate's torch, combined with the candle-light, showed clearly now that the tunnel she was in ended in a kind of well that extended upwards as well as downwards, a narrow rounded shaft of rough masonry. She crept cautiously along to the end, and, peering over with a faint dread of what it might be her fate to see, found that she was looking down the dark well of a very narrow staircase that dropped, steep as a ladder, to a ground-level about ten feet below. Looking up, she saw that the circular well extended about four feet above the roof of the tunnel in which she lay.

She could stand upright now, her feet on the top step, in a circular well of masonry which she could touch all round at the stretch of her arms. Ancient timbers covered the well just above her head. She lifted her hands, and pressed upwards. The timber did not yield and, rapping softly on it, Kate had the impression that the well was ceilinged, not with boards, but with baulks of great weight and thickness.

Kate did not know Llanhalo well enough to say where she was now. She guessed, under the kitchen. But if ever there had been an egress here into the house from the ancient stone stairs which led who-knew-where beneath her, it had been blocked up long ago. It was downwards that she must go. With her bicycle-lamp hooked on to her belt and the candle in her hand she went cautiously down, backwards, as down a ladder, for though a couple of iron rods stood up out of the narrow flight the chain or rope that had once connected them and formed a handrail was no longer there, and the flight was very steep. At the bottom, Kate found herself in the entrance of what was apparently quite a spacious tunnel, in which even she could stand upright. The walls and arched roof, like those of the little tunnel she had just come through, were of rough masonry. The uneven floor, in which, in the slanting light of Kate's lamp, bumps and hollows appeared, and rough-edged stones cast sharp, exaggerated shadows, was, she judged, a floor of the natural rock of the hillside. She could not tell how long the tunnel was, which slanted at a narrow angle off from the direct line of the stairs. Its dark walls, and roof, and floor, seemed to swallow the light she cast into it and reveal nothing that was not very close. She stooped and spoke along the tunnel: “Sidney!” and her voice seemed to echo softly away from her for an immense distance. If it had been cold in the cellar, it was colder still down here. But there were no signs of flooding, the floor was dry and the air, odorous of cold rock, was breathable.

Kate was about to re-climb the stone steps to summon Ronnie to a view of Llanhalo tunnel, when she heard a scrambling noise, and the child's head appeared in the aperture at the top of the stairs. In the macabre shifty light of his own and Kate's lamp, in these grim grey stone surroundings, his face looked luminous, fragile, and intensely alive.

“Ronnie, I thought—”

“Miss, I had to come! I heard a noise in the dairy. Somebody in the house. Somebody after us, there is, I believe, Miss! I didn't dare wait!”

Drawing his knees up, crouching and then standing erect, the child slithered helter-skelter down the stone steps.

“I pulled the grating to behind me, Miss, so if they gets into the cellar they won't know we're down here. I couldn't get it quite into the frame. I think I got it the wrong way up, but I reckon it'll be all right.”