“Good heavens, George!” said Mrs. Bradley.
“There’s such things as put-up jobs,” said George, glowering solemnly at Mr.Maslin, “and the party of the second part might just as well know exactly where they get off.”
With these admirable sentiments he went back to the car and opened the door for Ulrica. Then he took his place at the wheel, turned the car in the wide road in one magnificent arc, and drove back towards Hiversand Bay.
“Now, Mr. Maslin,” said Mrs. Bradley, when her own car was out of sight, “don’t worry too much. How much is known about the disappearance?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Look here, jump in, do you mind?—I’d like to get back to the convent. I’ve rung up the police, so that’s something. I don’t know the district, unfortunately, but I’ll comb out every inch—” The car shot away.
It was obvious, from the moment of their arrival, that something was seriously wrong. Mrs. Bradley clearly remembered the last occasion on which she had searched for Mary Maslin. This time (she was informed by the white-faced sister portress at the gate) Miss Bonnet, who had actually got into her car to drive back to Kelsorrow, had got out of the car again, put on her trousers, borrowed a hoe from the gardening shed, and had gone off, followed by the ironic applause of Bessie and the hysterical giggles of Kitty, to conduct a search on her own.
“Which way did she go?” asked Mrs. Bradley.
“Quick, I’ll show you,” said Bessie. “Lor’, she didn’t half look a cutie!”
“You run off and find Sister Geneviève and ask her to get hot blankets ready,”said Mrs. Bradley, turning away from Bessie towards Mrs. Maslin. “I suppose the buildings here and the grounds and the garden have been searched?”she said. “When was the girl first missed?”
“She was to have had tea with her father and me in the guest-house,” said Mrs. Maslin, more foxy-looking than ever with fright and anxiety. “It was all arranged, and when she didn’t turn up I thought she must have been kept after school or something. How was I to know that they don’t keep the children in? We were always kept in!”she added, peevish with fear.
“And at what time did you become anxious?”
“At half-past five, just after you had gone off with Ulrica, and now I find that she hasn’t been seen since the end of afternoon school.”
“Let’s see—she would have been having a games lesson with Mother Saint Benedict,” said Mrs. Bradley rapidly, “Go and find Mother Saint Benedict, Mrs. Maslin, and ask whether Mary had a fall or sustained any injury during the game. That might help a little, do you see?”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear! This violence! And all this dreadful secrecy about Ulrica! Whatever shall we do? It’s too terrible,” said Mrs. Maslin, going off to find Mother Saint Benedict.
It was too terrible for Mr. Maslin, as Mrs. Bradley could see. He had been pale when she had first met him; he was now a dreadful grey colour; his nostrils were pinched and his cheeks seemed to have fallen in.
“For God’s sake,” he kept muttering. “For God’s sake! For God’s sake!”
“Mr. Maslin,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I want you, please, to drive me to the village, and not to worry. Everything is going to be all right.”
At the village post office there was a telephone. The post office itself was closed, but the shop was still open, and there was no difficulty about calling up the hotel at Hiversand Bay.
“Here, madam, right in the entrance lobby,” George’s voice responded. “Nobody can come either in or out without I see them. The young lady went straight to her room on arrival, and says she doesn’t want any food. The other young lady has had a dinner sent up, madam, so the head-waiter tells me. It’s a homely little hotel, madam, and I am already in fairly close touch with most of the staff. I don’t think we need have much fear, madam, but what the young ladies will be safe.”
“Excellent, George. As soon as the inspector arrives, you can come on here and have your own supper. I’m telephoning him now.”
She telephoned the inspector, and went back, grimly smiling, to the almost frantic Mr. Maslin.
“The inspector thinks his men are well on the trail. Probably a bare-faced bit of kidnapping, he says,” she observed. “Somebody who’s heard that she’s Timothy Doyle’s granddaughter, I suppose.”
“They may kill her!”
“They won’t kill her. The police know where she is. ”
“Know where she is? Why the devil don’t they get hold of her, then?”
“All in good time,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Back to the convent, please.”
The convent had been searched from the attics in the Orphanage to the cellars beneath the frater. The nuns were in groups in the Common Room, the frater, the children’s refectory and the cloister. The guests had congregated miserably in the guest-house parlour; the orphans, under the jaundiced eye of Mother Saint Ambrose, were sitting in close rows in the Orphanage playroom, doing needlework with hands that were sticky with the sweat of excitement; the boarders, let off preparation, had been given freedom to help in the search of the school and the grounds. Mother Saint Francis was shut away in her room, because she and the Mother Superior (calm among her daughters, as behoved the head of the house) were the only members of the Community who knew that Mary Maslin was safe at Hiversand Bay, and while Mrs. Bradley knew that nobody would suspect that the benignity of the Reverend Mother Superior hid anything but an anxiety that was natural and general to everybody, she had not the same faith in the dramatic abilities of the volatile Mother Francis.
Meanwhile, the object of all the care and suffering was sitting at a small bedside table eating a four-course meal with every appearance of appetite, breaking off occasionally to observe in rapturous tones:
“I say, isn’t this a rag! I say, won’t the girls be sick!”
“I should think you’ll be the one to be sick,” her cousin coldly observed. “And I refuse to go to sleep with a policeman in the room.”
It turned out to be a policeman’s wife, however, a young and cheery creature, whose husband, a large, young sergeant, was posted on the landing outside the bedroom door, with a chair, a bottle of beer, some tobacco, a tumbler, a large ash-tray, a book and a plate of cold beef, cold ham, mustard pickles and bread. He was there unofficially, having been, however, officially released from duty so that he could be “lent” to Mrs. Bradley as a watchdog.
George, whose task was done, took his leave, and at a leisurely twenty-eight miles, drove over to Blacklock Tor, and garaged the car at the inn. He had a half-pint, went out for a walk on the moor, had another half-pint before they closed, then went up to his room. He was on the second floor, and his window looked over the sloping hill-side of moor towards the convent. He went to the window and looked out, but except for the steady light of Saint Peter’s Finger which shone from the church tower lantern, there was nothing else on the landscape visible except the dark stretch of the moor.
He went to bed at a quarter to eleven, gave a last glance at his watch before he put out the light, turned his face towards the window and closed his eyes. At five minutes to eleven he went to sleep.
He did not know what woke him. No light was shining on to his face, and no sudden noise had startled him, but through the uncurtained window he could see that the sky was alight with a deep, red glow. He got out of bed very quickly, and went to look out. A minute later he was putting on his flannel trousers, a lounge jacket and his boots, and a minute later still he was running downstairs to get the car.
The garage was a lock-up, and he had a key of his own. He switched on his lights, drove carefully on to the road, and then put the car at the moorland track at such a breakneck pace that it bounded over the ruts, the heather and the boulders like a car in a comic film. ( 2 )