They were back far too soon, so they spent the time – killing it, to be more exact – in gazing in at nearby shop windows and in purchasing some sweets and a local newspaper. By dribs and drabs the rest of the coach-party joined them at the bus stop. The narrow pavement gradually became congested and a church clock struck twelve. Eyes were fixed expectantly on the road up which the coach had disappeared, but no coach came.
The church clock struck a disconsolate quarter; later, a warning half-hour. Still no coach appeared. The company became first restless, then agitated and at last angry. A policeman came up and one of the male passengers, abetted by others, told him of their dilemma. He suggested that one of them should go to the car-park and ‘hurry the driver up a bit, because you are congesting the footway, look you.’
Two of the men took his advice, having received from the policeman explicit directions in order to reach the car-park by the shortest route. They returned at the end of twenty-five minutes with the stunning information that neither coach nor driver was to be found. The policeman then came to the rescue by alerting his inspector. That official, realising the importance of the tourist trade to his native town, made himself busy on the telephone and in an admirably short time a local coach pulled up, took the party on board and transported them to the hotel overlooking Fishguard harbour where they were booked in for lunch.
The hotel, which owed its very existence to the coach-parties who patronised it all through the summer months, coped efficiently and the local driver, having telephoned his employers and eaten the lunch intended for Driver Daigh, expressed his willingness to carry out the rest of the day’s programme and to return the party to their hotel in Tenby in plenty of time for dinner.
At the dinner tables there was only one topic of conversation and only one viable solution of the mystery. The coach and its driver had been hijacked.
‘Happens all the time,’ ran the general consensus of opinion. ‘Arabs or the Irish, most likely, or an escaped convict or someone.’
Miss Harvey and Mrs Williams were caught up in the general excitement, but, like most of the women, they felt a considerable amount of dismay.
‘What’s going to happen to the rest of the tour, and how are we going to get home?’ they asked nervously.
‘Oh, the company will send up another coach,’ said an omniscient male. ‘You don’t want to worry. The receptionist here will have been on the telephone to them. We’re supposed to have a trip to Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge tomorrow, but, myself, I’d just as soon spend another day here in Tenby.’
The party did spend another day in Tenby. The hotel, it turned out, having received a telephone call from the Company’s head office, arranged to give the passengers an unscheduled lunch, and before tea-time that afternoon a relief coach and its driver had turned up, and the party was conveyed to Towyn, where it was to spend the night. The rest of the tour, apart from continued speculation and surmise and an unprecedented sale of papers ‘in case we should be in the news’, continued as per programme.
‘We don’t let them down,’ said Honfleur, somewhat smugly, later, to Dame Beatrice.
‘We couldn’t understand it at all,’ said Mrs Williams, the more personable and therefore, perhaps, the more forthcoming of the two. ‘It needs some looking into, that it does.’
‘I am here to look into it,’ said Dame Beatrice, already beginning to regret her choice of witnesses.
‘We heard there was another coach, before ours, that had something happen to it,’ said Mrs Williams.
‘It lost its driver, yes. This was not your first coach tour, I am told.’
‘Nor it was with most of the people on the tour. Most had been before.’
Dame Beatrice nodded.
‘I wonder whether you had any premonitions, before you left the coach to go sight-seeing in Dantwylch, that something untoward was going to happen?’ she enquired.
This inviting and leading question was to test the suggestibility and therefore, to some extent, the reliability of the witnesses. The sisters, true to their Cockney origin, stood firm.
‘Of course not,’ said Miss Harvey, ‘else we should have stayed behind in Tenby.’
‘Could you give me a short account of exactly what happened that day at Dantwylch?’
Like schoolchildren asked to describe a day in their summer holidays, the sisters, sometimes interrupting and very occasionally contradicting one another, began their account.
‘We got up after we’d made a cup of tea with the electric machine which another lady had shown us how to manage the night before, had a nice wash and then we went downstairs. I had grapefruit juice and bacon and egg and Maud had orange juice and a plate of cornflakes
‘Porridge, that day, Carrie.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right, porridge. After that she had bacon and sausage and a fried tomato, and we finished up with toast and marmalade, because I said as the bread rolls would be too filling if we had cakes at the coffee shop and our lunch to come. Besides, rolls is more fattening nor toast, though I will say as they put plenty of butter on the table…’
‘And there was two kinds of marmalade, the chunky and the shred…’
‘And honey. Don’t forget the honey. All in them individual little pots, so convenient and giving fair shares for everybody.’
‘Better than that, because there was six pots between four of us, but, of course, we only took one pot each…’
‘And I finished yours up, you not liking too much marmalade on top of your butter and me not liking to waste good food.’
At last Dame Beatrice got them to describe the journey itself and their experiences in Dantwylch.
‘Can you remember the last words you heard the driver say?’ she asked, at the end of another pointless recital.
‘Not word for word, but it was clear enough,’ said Mrs Williams. ‘He was putting us down so we could have a coffee and a walk round, and we was to be back in the same place at twelve sharp ’cos he wasn’t allowed to hang about for us. If anybody was late back, he’d wait for them in the carpark further up the hill. But nobody was late back and we all hung about there for more than half the day, all told. We was just mooching around and looking at the shops, but not liking to go far away in case the coach turned up while we was gone. My feet ached, because it was a fair old climb up from the Cathedral, and not all that much to see when you got inside. Dark, I mean, and, to my mind, not so good as Christchurch Priory.’ Mrs Williams seemed prepared to go on, but Dame Beatrice prevented this.
‘You had stopped for lunch in Swansea on your second day out. Did the driver give any indication that he knew anybody or had any friends there?’
‘Swansea? What about it? Oh – Swansea. You mean because that’s where they found our coach?’
‘Yes. Did the driver appear to make any contacts there?’
The sisters shook their heads.
‘He never said nothing about knowing nobody there, not in particular,’ said Mrs Williams. ‘He knew the hotel, of course. Good food, but very crowded it was. He knew the hotel because he’d taken coach parties there before. It was the coaches’ usual lunch stop and right in the middle of the town. The dining room was so full that some of our gentlemen had a job to get hold of anybody to bring a glass of beer to the table and there hadn’t been no time to go into the bar. At table there wasn’t hardly elbow-room to use your knife and fork. I had a steak. Maud, you had the plaice, didn’t you?’
‘So the driver knew the hotel, but you do not think he had friends in the town,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Let us return to Dantwylch. What happened at the end of your long wait for the coach which did not return to pick you up?’