‘When will you go?’

  ‘Tomorrow. The sooner I get there the better, I think. Robert is sending one of his own men down, so I shall not be without support.’

  ‘What did you mean about your great-niece’s letter having some connection with this one?’

  ‘The murdered squire lived just outside the village where Fenella spent the night when her car broke down after she left us to join her cousins in Douston, that is all. She writes to say that she is staying at the same inn, as it is nearest to her husband’s school. She goes on to tell me that in the space of about a fortnight the management and the whole staff at the inn has changed. Not one of the inmates whom she met on her previous visit is the same. She regards this as strange, and so do I.’

  ‘I suppose the other people sold it, or else the brewers have put another manager in charge.’

  ‘The inn may have changed hands, but one would think that some, if not all, of the staff would have stayed. Seven Wells is only a village, and in a village there are not so many chances of employment that people lightly change their work. Besides, there were some slightly bizarre features about that particular inn which I find extremely interesting. I shall certainly pay it a visit while I am staying with Lady Bitton-Bittadon. I really cannot think why she wants me. When I wrote to dear Robert I fully intended to put up at the More to Come if they could accommodate me. However, it seems that Lady Bitton-Bittadon is determined to have me at the manor house.’

  ‘Wants to keep an eye on you, perhaps. Could look a bit suspicious,’ said Laura cynically.

  ‘Well, at any rate, the local superintendent of police and Robert’s London detective-inspector have been warned of my imminent arrival and are to give me their full co-operation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura, eyeing her employer, ‘I bet they are! And if Fenella hadn’t got herself mixed up in something fishy, you wouldn’t be going within a hundred miles of Seven Wells, would you?’

  Fenella was finding the More to Come changed in other ways, apart from the disappearance of the Shurrocks, Sukie, Clytie and Bob. At the end of the journey from Douston to Seven Wells, after she had dropped off her new-wedded lord at Saint Crispin’s school, where he was to finish the term before taking up his appointment after the summer vacation, she had driven to the More to Come where she had written to engage a room, fully expecting to find the inn in its former condition and herself entering it, as before, by way of the side door to the saloon bar.

  All that was altered. During her comparatively short absence, the car-park had been covered smoothly with asphalt and a neat notice on the side door read: Entrance at front. She walked out into the street, found the front door, which previously had been barred, standing wide open, and entered a neat, square hall with two small, swinging, glass signs above doors which faced one another. One said Bar, the other Dining Room. The only feature which Fenella recognised was the front staircase, at the foot of which was a notice: Visitors’ Lounge. T.V. Another notice, adjacent to it and supplemented by the painting of a large golden hand with pointing forefinger, said: Reception.

  As she had told Dame Beatrice in her letter, there was no sign of the Shurrocks, Clytie, Sukie or the boy who had helped with Fenella’s luggage on her previous visit. A golden-haired woman was in charge of the reception desk and a uniformed porter who collected her baggage when she had registered her name, address and nationality, led the way up the front stairs past the lounge and the bathroom which Fenella had used on her previous visit, and up another flight of stairs and along a corridor. Here he unlocked a bedroom door, handed Fenella the key, dumped her suitcase on to the stand designed to receive it, thanked her for the tip she handed him and departed, closing the door behind him.

  The furnishing of the room was new, adequate and functional. There were hand and bath towels and an armchair as well as a dressing-table stool. The taps ran hot and cold water, there were writing paper and envelopes in one small top drawer, shoe-cleaning impregnated paper in another, and there was a neat list of meal-times under the glass top of the dressing-table.

  ‘This could be simply anywhere,’ said Fenella aloud. She went to the window and looked out. Her room was at the end of the corridor and she realised that it could not be ‘simply anywhere’ after all. The window was at the side of the inn which faced away from the village. The prospect before her was of a country road and the menacing hill-fort on which the hermaphrodite skeleton had been buried not much more than two weeks before.

  There was a bathroom on the opposite side of the corridor. Fenella bathed, dressed and went down to dinner. The diningroom was what had been the saloon bar, but she scarcely recognised it. A waiter showed her to a small table and she had scarcely seated herself in the chair which he sedulously drew out for her when she saw her husband advancing towards her. This was completely unexpected.

  ‘Hullo again,’ he said, seating himself. ‘Hillson offered to take prep, for me tonight, so I came along. Are you pleased to see me, or had you made other arrangements? This is a dashed unsatisfactory sort of peculiar honeymoon, anyway.’

  The waiter handed them menus and a tall, dark man, wearing a flower in his buttonhole, approached with the wine-list.

  T hope you will be very comfortable with us, Mrs Pardieu,’ he said. ‘I am the manager. I think you met my wife at the reception desk when you checked in.’

  ‘There seem to be a good many changes since I was here last time,’ said Fenella.

  ‘Really? When was that? I didn’t know that the old-style More to Come took guests.’

  ‘Neither did it,’ said Nicholas, breaking in with an abruptness which surprised and startled Fenella. ‘My wife hit upon this place for a meal when her car broke down one time. I’m afraid the best they could do for her then was a snack in the saloon bar and a dock glass of sherry or something or other. Now, then, let’s see what we are going to eat. You can leave the wine-list and we’ll order when we’ve chosen our meal.’

  ‘Oh, very good, sir,’ said the manager, completely changing his voice and attitude.

  ‘Why didn’t you want him to know that I’d actually stayed a night here?’ asked Fenella, when the man had gone.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Nicholas. ‘A sort of instinct prompted me. I’m superstitious about this village and its peculiar little ways, and I could wish you weren’t staying here. Wouldn’t some place in Cridley have been better?’

  ‘Rather a long way from your school, darling, and – well – I admit the village is a bit frightening in some ways, but I liked the Shurrocks and Clytie and I thought they’d be quite pleased to have me again. Of course I had no idea they wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘But surely when they answered your letter….’

  ‘It was only a printed card to say that a single room was available and it was initialled, not signed, so I didn’t think anything about it except to feel that the More to Come had gone up in the world to have printed cards.’

  ‘So it has, I must say. Wish I were staying here with you.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be so very long now before we get our own place, and we do get three week-ends out of four at Douston, don’t forget.’

  ‘God bless Hubert and Miriam. At least we can honeymoon while we’re with them. Shall I write you a bucolic Epithalamion, like Spenser’s, only more so?’

  ‘No. Tell me what this is all about – if I can remember it. I think I can. I heard it nine times altogether and in this very house.

  Sagittarius be archer and shoot at the sun;

  Capricorn butt bachelors and cause ’em to run;

  Aquarius ’e stand wi’ ’is bucket o’ water,

  Pisces come swimmin’ a christened babe arter.

  Aries ’ave killed off the bleatin’ old wether …’

  Nicholas interrupted her.

  ‘It’s a fertility rhyme, darling. Who repeated it to you?’

  ‘Nobody. The zodiac people chanted it down in the old church under the priest’s room and in the crypt when they were bringing up those bones they buried on the hilltop.’

  ‘Old Bitton-Bittadon repeated it to me once when he was in his cups, the old lecher.’

  ‘Was he really?’

  ‘A lecher? Oh, yes, and usually as drunk as a lord as well. Still, bibulous old backwoodsman as he was, he wasn’t a bad old boy, and certainly wasn’t the sort who made enemies.’

  ‘He certainly seems to have made one’

  ‘Yes, indeed. “Aries have killed off the bleating old wether.” And, talking of christened babes, the son, Jeremy Bitton-Bittadon, came home from his travels long, long before anybody could have expected him.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Charnel House

  ‘… and now there is nothing left of him but his bones.’

  Frederick Marryat – The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains

  * * *

  Her brief courtship and her plan to marry another man in place of Talbot, coupled with her first experience of being truly in love, had left Fenella mentally breathless, spiritually uplifted and physically in such a state of exuberant health that she rose blithely in the mornings and passed her days in a kind of dreaming haze of surprised happiness, her only longing being for the next meeting with the beloved.

  The village no longer seemed strange or unfriendly. In fact, during her walks abroad, she met with so many smiles and pleasant greetings that, after a few days, she found it almost impossible to recall her first impressions of the place.

  She did not like to ask point-blank what had happened to the Shurrocks and their servants, or for an account which would explain the complete metamorphosis of the More to Come. Her room was comfortable, the food was good and Nicholas contrived to get away from the school every afternoon during games periods. At these times he drove over to spend a precious couple of hours with her and twice a week, when he was off duty, he dined with her at the inn and on Saturdays and Sundays they were together at Douston Hall.

  Twice she made a pilgrimage to the hill-fort at the end of the village and came back baffled. She could no longer believe that she had been a witness to what she thought she had seen there on Mayering Eve. Nevertheless, she could not ignore the blackened ground where the bonfire had been, or the stamped earth which now covered the strange grave. It was after the second of these walks that she had an unlikely and terrifying dream and that the dream had an equally strange and terrifying aftermath.

  Before that happened, however, she had another experience which left her uneasy and somewhat perturbed. Nicholas had dined with her at the inn and she had accompanied him a couple of miles on his way back to the school. He was driving his own car. She had left hers at the More to Come and had planned to return to the inn on foot.

  It was a beautiful evening, and was unusually calm, a circumstance which, when she thought it over, struck her as having been sinister. As it happened, the school lay in the opposite direction to the hill-fort, and so, on her walk back, she decided to turn aside for another look at the seven springs from which the village of Seven Wells took its name, and which now had romantic associations for her. This time, of course, there was no Jack-in-the-Green to accost her. In fact, except for a courting couple who were jammed against the trunk of one of the greyboled ash trees, the common appeared to be deserted.

  She wandered round the edge of the water away from the absorbed couple, then climbed the bank and saw, approaching her from the direction of the village main street, a man whose walk and figure seemed familiar. He was exactly like Jem Shurrock, the former landlord of the More to Come. The time was a quarter to nine, the sun was setting and the walking man had his back to it. It was not until she was almost up to him that she realised that the long shadows had deceived her. The man was about Jem Shurrock’s height and build, but there the likeness ended.

  In country fashion he gave her a civil ‘Good evening’, and was passing on when Fenella, acting on impulse, (as she often did), halted and said,

  ‘I’ve been trying to locate a Mr and Mrs Shurrock. They used to keep the More to Come public house, but nobody there seems to know what’s happened to them.’

  The man’s attitude changed with considerable abruptness. He stared at her and said brusquely,

  ‘Them as asks no questions won’t get told no lies. Best you be off back to where you come from and not to be meddlin’ any more in things as don’t consarn ee.’

  ‘Thank you for your advice,’ said Fenella. She gave him a curt nod and passed on her way. She thought she had recognised his voice as that of Leo, but it was difficult to be sure. However, the encounter had an unpleasant effect on her. All her earlier impressions of the village and its inhabitants crowded back on her. ‘How thankful I shall be,’ she murmured to herself, ‘when the summer holidays come, and Nicholas and I can be shut of this place for ever!’

  She returned to the inn more than ever convinced that there was a mystery connected with the disappearance of the Shurrocks and their staff. She supposed that some kind of scandal must have blown up which had necessitated their abrupt departure. It was idle to speculate upon what might have happened, but, all the same, she found herself doing it. Something must have occurred to drive them away at such short notice, unless they had failed to comply with the brewers’ explicit instructions about something or other, and had been summarily dismissed as a consequence.

  All the same, although that might account for Jem Shurrock and his wife, it hardly seemed to account for Sukie, Clytie and the young fellow Bob who had helped with the odd jobs, unless, of course, the staff had all resigned out of loyalty to the landlord. In the case of Sukie, whom Fenella, at first, had thought was the landlord’s wife, this might be the explanation, but Fenella was much less sure of it in the case of the two adolescents, unless they had received some inducement from the Shurrocks to go with them to take on other employment. As for the man she had met on the common, there was no doubt that he had recognised her, and that his earlier suspicion and dislike of her, when he had been one of the masked and gowned figures in the lounge on Mayering Eve, had been renewed at meeting her again, and intensified by her remark about the Shurrocks. That he knew the reason for their disappearance she felt certain.

  Fenella had a good ear for voices. She felt that, because of this, she now could be pretty certain of the identity and ordinary appearance of two of the signs of the zodiac, Leo and the horried young Aries. She had no suspicion at the time that this knowledge was likely to prove useful in the future, but continued her walk back to the inn in less good spirits than when she had turned aside to revisit the seven springs.

  She thought afterwards that her slightly unpleasant encounter with Leo might have been the cause of her sinister dream, but the dream did not follow until she had been to the hill-fort again, so the connection was not a direct one. Her objective, on this further occasion, was not the fort itself, but the countryside beyond it. She breakfasted early that morning, and having on the previous day asked for a packed lunch she set off in her car, drove past and partly round the hill and then left the Croyton road, of which she had far from happy memories, and turned into a winding lane which seemed to encircle the village.

  It was an unfenced road and there had been no sign-post to indicate where it led. She began to wonder whether it led only to a farmhouse, but, about three miles further on, it merged into a slightly wider road which came into it from the left, and this she pursued until it crossed a tiny river. This was hardly more than a brook, to which the country road had descended before it mounted again to reach a hamlet. This was a tiny place, and on the further side of it a narrow lane turned off to the left. Following an idle fancy, on the verge of this lane Fenella pulled up and left the car, proposing to walk up the tracks, which looked inviting, and take her al fresco meal at a convenient spot on the hillside up which the little road climbed.

  She soon realised that she could not have brought the car much further, for the lane petered out into a narrow grass-grown footpath. It wound upwards on an easy gradient which encouraged walking, and half a mile further on it passed through a wood. A long way off, between the trees, she could see a small manor house and she paused to look at it before she continued to climb the hill.

  As no drive appeared to lead up to the house, she concluded that she was inspecting it from the back or from one side. It was built, so far as she could make out from such a distance, in Tudor style, although, owing to the tall trees which were in almost full leaf, she could not see the characteristic Tudor chimneys at all clearly. What she did see clearly was a tall man who suddenly dropped out of a tree almost on to her toes. He scrambled to his feet and seized her petrified arm.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me,’ he said urgently. Fenella shook him off. She was considerably alarmed. He must be either a maniac or an escaped convict, she thought. She was not certain which would have been her preference, had she been called upon to choose. Fortunately the man gave a hunted glance round about him, ejaculated, ‘Here they come,’ and, vaulting the wall which separated the public path from the manor park, he began to run towards the house. Fenella wasted no time. She also began to run, not towards the house, which, in any case, was walled off from her, but up the hill. It was heavy going and she was soon winded. She dropped into a walk, then stopped to look back. Nobody was following her, and she was soon clear of the trees and out on the grassy, pleasant hillside. The sun was shining, there were cowslips among the grasses and from where she stood she had a clear view of the Tudor manor house. It looked quiet and completely innocuous. She wondered whether perhaps it was a private nursing-home for the mentally afflicted, and whether the man was a patient there.

  As though this thought had conjured up spirits from the vasty deep, as she turned to follow the hill-track up and over the brow of the rise she was aware of a small, thin, female figure, attended by a sturdy, thick-set male one, coming down the slope towards her.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23