At about five-thirty next morning I was awakened by William Coutts. His shining face, wet with perspiration and beaming with unholy joy and fierce excitement, loomed over me as I opened my eyes.
“I say, Noel! Oh, do wake up, you fool! Listen! I say! Noel! Noel!”
He thumped me vigorously and blew into my right ear, which was uppermost. My first thought was that I was back at school, so I sat up in bed with the idea of getting some rotter’s head in chancery and jolly well giving him beans. Then the identity of my assailant dawned on me, and so I merely rubbed my eyes and prepared to curse him.
“Get up!” commanded young William, before I could produce the book of words germane to the situation. “I’ve found him!”
“What!” I said, wide awake, of course. “Where?”
“In the pound,” said William, “and I can’t get him out. He’s chained up.”
Without stopping to reflect upon the peculiar nature of the tidings, I put on my shirt and trousers, thrust my feet into my boots, tied the laces, of course, and in about twenty seconds I was tearing after William down the stairs.
We had an ancient pound in the village. It was upon the village green. It was practically a historical monument, of course. Never used. Anyway, the vicar was in it. A huge stake had been driven into the ground, and the vicar, gagged with a leather driving glove and an army puttee—(can you have it in the singular? I suppose you can! It was only one, anyway, of course)—was tethered to it by a collar and chain. His arms were bound, and he looked the wildest, filthiest, angriest, most disreputable person in creation. The collar was padlocked on him, but I managed to detach the end of the chain from the stake and to remove the gag.
“Don’t attempt to talk, sir,” I said. “Good thing William found you so early in the morning.”
He’d been pretty well knocked about. His mouth was pretty badly bruised and the knuckles of both hands were cut almost to the bone.
“Yes,” he said, looking at his hands with what the books call gloomy satisfaction, “if my assailants were local people, it won’t be hard to pick ’em out. I think—I ra-ther think!—I’ve left my mark on them.”
This was after he’d had a rest and some bread and milk. I shot a stiffish dose of brandy into the pig-food before he started on it. Mrs. Coutts remonstrated, but, for once in our lives, we ignored the woman. I’m all for temperance, of course, but if ever a man needed— needed, mind you!—a drop of the amber adder, it was poor old Coutts. He was pretty far gone, take him one way and another. I think it was only his frightful annoyance that kept him up at all. His tale was a curious one, and when we had heard it, I said immediately:
“Mrs. Bradley is the person to get to the bottom of all this.”
Briefly, the yarn was as follows:
After having had the row with Sir William Kingston-Fox over the final of the choirboys’ hundred yards, old Coutts, in accordance with custom, returned to the vicarage, got himself a glass of lemonade and some bread and cheese and a handful of raisins, and settled down, with the wireless, to have a pleasant evening. However, what with the row he had had with Sir William getting thoroughly on his nerves, and the beastly wireless clicking a foreign station that would butt in and ruin the concert he was listening to, he got thoroughly fed, and decided to go out for a walk as far from the fête as he could.
He had been tinkering with the radio set for some time, trying to cut out the interference, and had taken a bit of time to get his meal and eat it, and so forth, so that it must have been, he thinks, round about nine o’clock when he left the vicarage, but it might have been later. With the idea of getting clear away from the fête, the raucous music of the roundabouts and all that, he walked up towards the stone quarries and down to the beach by Saltmarsh Cove. He walked fast, and was pretty tired when he reached the cove, so he sat on a bit of rock and gazed at the sea and decided it was a good chance for a swim. Bit of a Spartan, old Coutts, of course. It was getting dark by that time. (You can’t reach the cove in less than an hour and a half from the vicarage, even going all out.) He stripped off his flannels— he had been playing cricket during the day, of course, against Much Hartley—and pushed them just into the entrance to the Cove, as the tide was almost out. He had his swim—a lazy one, he admits—and was rubbing himself as dry as he could on a handkerchief—ever tried it?—when he was surprised to see a lantern swung rhythmically three times out at sea, apparently from the rail of a ship. He was interested, because there was no reason that he could think of for a ship to anchor out there. She must be taking a risk, he thought, to do so. She must be lying off an uninhabited island called Skall Rock, but the channel between the island and some totally submerged rocks was known to very few people indeed, and those strictly local men. No big ships could make the passage, and even small ones ran considerable risk in attempting it. Besides, there was no point in attempting it, as the way into Wyemouth Harbour was clearly charted, and was marked, where necessary, by buoys. He screwed up his eyes and thought he could just make her out. Suddenly, as he was thinking all this out, a beam from the ship’s searchlight fell clear upon him, and was immediately withdrawn. At the same time a lantern was swung three times again, this time from higher up—from the bridge—he thinks it must have been from the bridge—it looked high off the water anyway. It was all a bit queer, but he was getting chilly, so he ran about a bit to finish drying, put on his clothes and was about to reach for his straw hat when somebody behind him, who must have come up like a cat, gave him a terrific shove in the back, and down he went. Before he knew what was happening, some great bloke fell on him. He put up a good show, he said, and, if his knuckles were anything to go by, I should say he did! However, another fellow came up and they got him gagged at last, blindfolded him, tied him up and carted him along, by devious ways, to the pound. Weird! They must have spotted our torches and dodged us—Brown, Mrs. Bradley, the two students and myself,—while we were searching for him. Or he must have been in the pound by then. Everybody else was still at the fête, or else in bed. They didn’t meet a soul, anyway, Coutts thinks. Well, I mean, they couldn’t have done! What a neck, though! Both his captors had blackened faces, he thought. An old poachers’ trick, that, to avoid being recognised. And neither spoke a word. They communicated with one another in series of grunts. Well, I mean, it’s jolly difficult to recognise a chap by his grunt, as witness those frightful parlour games we all have played at times. One is called “Mum” and the other, I believe is known to the trade as “Squeak, Piggy, Squeak.” Anyway, they grunted their intentions to one another, and one drove the stake into the middle of the pound and they both chained him up as I’ve already described. They left him gagged, but took the bandage off his eyes. We tried to get him to make a guess at the fellows’ identity, but he couldn’t hazard a single one. It was very dark, of course. He hadn’t seen them clearly at all. We had to look out, he said, for two big fellows, one of whom had a face that looked as though it had been hit by the front of an express train.
“I know I didn’t mark one of ’em, the bigger one,” he said, “because he kept out of my reach. But the other must look like the outside page of a kids’ comic paper. So if they’re local men—”
He seemed not so keen on the idea of lugging Mrs. Bradley into it, but I put the point so forcefully that he agreed. Daphne and I went off to Sir William’s house, and I, for one, had a certain interest in seeing Sir William himself. He was biggish. True, I couldn’t quite imagine him blacking his face in order to escape recognition; neither could I see him calling in assistance, in the form of another black-faced desperado, to settle a private quarrel. Still, they had had a fearful row, he and the vicar, so really the whole thing was a bit of a coincidence. The Squire had the very devil of a temper, and the vicar’s peculiar code would probably forbid him to name the squire as his assailant even if he had recognised him…