"Of course not," I hastened to reassure him.
He reached back into his sheaf of maps, withdrew half a dozen of the very largest scale, and fitted them together. We puzzled over the lines of streams and roads, footpaths and houses. I absently wiped a smear of pickle from the map and brushed off some crumbs, and thought aloud.
"There are only four small villages in that direction. Five, if we count this furthest, though it would have forced them to ride very fast. All are near enough to the road, they might have a telephone line. These two villages seem rather more scattered than the others, which might give whatever house they're in more privacy. I can't see that we'll make them all by tomorrow."
"No."
"We have only six more days before the ransom is to be paid."
"I am aware of that," he said testily. "Get the horse in the traces."
We were away before the constable returned, but it was nearly dark before we came to the first village. Holmes trudged off to the pub, which looked to be on the ground floor of someone's home, while I cared for the horse and tried to concentrate my brain on conversation with the children who inevitably appeared at our arrival. I had found that there was usually one who took responsibility for communicating with this strange visitor. In this case the representative was a very dirty girl of about ten. The others kept up a running commentary, or perhaps a simultaneous translation, in a Welsh that was much too fast and colloquial for me to grasp. I ignored them all and proceeded with my tasks.
"Are you a gipsy then, lady?"
"What do you think?" I grunted.
"My Dad says yes."
"Your Dad is wrong." Shocked silence met this heresy. After a minute she plucked up her nerve again.
"If it's not a gipsy you are, then what?"
"A Romany."
"A Romany? There's foolish, there is! They carried spears and they're all dead."
"That's a Roman. I'm Romany. Want to give this to the horse?" A small boy took the oats from me. "Is there anyone in town who'd like to sell me a couple of suppers?" My crowd silently consulted, then:
"Maddie, run you by there and ask your Mam. Go now, you." The tiny girl, torn between the desire to keep watch and the undeniable honour of providing service, reluctantly took herself down the road and disappeared into the pub.
"Have you no pan?" asked a small person of one sex or another.
"I don't like to cook," I said regally, and shocked silence, deeper than before, descended. If the other was heresy, I could be burnt for this. "Is there a telephone in town?" I asked the spokesman.
"Telephone?"
"Yes, telephone, you know, the thing you pick up and shout down? It's too dark to see any wires. Is there one in town?" The puzzled faces showed me this was the wrong village. A child piped up.
"My Da' used one once, he did, when the Gran died and he had to tell his brother by Caerphilly."
"Where did he go to use it?"
An eloquent shrug in the light of the lamps. Oh, well.
"What for do you need a telephone machine?"
"To call my stockbroker." I continued before they could ask for a définition, "You don't get many strangers through here, do you?"
"Oh, many they are. Why, only at Midsummer's, an autocar filled with English came here and stopped, and drank a glass at Maddie's mam's."
"Just coming through don't count," I asserted loftily. "I mean comin' in and eatin' and drinkin' here and stop- pin' for a time. Don't get many of them, do you?"
I could see from their faces that they didn't have any convenient group of strangers to offer me, and sighed internally. Tomorrow, perhaps. Meanwhile —
"Well, I'm here, but we're not stopping long. If you want to run home and tell your people, we'll have a show for you to watch in an hour. Unless my Da' finds the beer here too good," I added. "I tell fortunes too. Run along now."
The supper was good and plentiful, the take from the fiddling and cards poor. Before dawn the next morning we jingled off down the road.
The next village had telephone wires but few isolated buildings. Neither my small informant nor the pub inhabitants could be gently prodded into revealing any recent influx of strangers. We moved on after midday, not pausing to perform.
Our next choice started out promising. Telephone lines, several widely scattered buildings, and even response to questions about strangers caused my pulse to quicken. However, by teatime the leads had petered out, and the strangers were two old English ladies who had come to live here six years before.
We had to backtrack to reach the road to the other villages, and as dusk closed in on us I was thoroughly sick of the hard, jolting seat and the imperturbable brown rump ahead of me. We lit the wagon's side lamps and climbed down with a lantern to lead the horse. I spoke to Holmes in a low voice.
"Could the kidnappers be locals? I know it looks like outsiders, but what if it was just a couple of locals?"
"Who spotted an American senator and thought up a gas gun and letters in The Times on the spur of the moment?" he drawled sarcastically. "Use the wits God gave you, Mary Todd. Locals are almost certainly involved but are not alone."
We crept wearily into village number four, where for the first time we were not greeted by a company of children. "Too late for the little ones, I suppose," Holmes grunted, and looked at the small stone pub with loathing.
"What I would give for a decent claret," he sighed, and went off to do his duty for his king.
I settled the horse, found and heated a tin of beans over the caravan's tiny fire, and slumped at the minuscule wooden table with the Tarot deck, sourly reading my fortune: The cards gave me the Hanged Man, the enigmatic Fool, and the Tower with its air of utter disaster. Holmes was a long time in the pub, and I was beginning to consider moving over to my bunk, travel-stained clothing and all, when I heard his voice come suddenly loud into what passed for the village's high street.
" — my fiddle, and I'll play you a dancin' tune, the merriest of tunes that ever you'll hear." I jerked upright, all thought of sleepiness snatched from me and the beans turning instantly to bricks in my stomach. The caravan's door flew open and in came me old Da', several sheets to the wind. He tripped as he negotiated the narrow steps, and fell forward into my lap.
"Ah, me own sweet girlie," he continued loudly, struggling to right himself. "Have you seen what I done with me fiddle?" He reached past me to retrieve it from the shelf and whispered fiercely in my ear. "On your toes, Russelclass="underline" a two-storey white house half a mile north, plane tree in front and another at the back. Hired in late June, five men living there, perhaps a sixth coming and going. Curse it!" he bellowed, "I told you to fix the bloody string," and continued as he bent over the instrument, "I'll make a distraction at the front of the house in fifty minutes. You make your way — carefully, mind you — around to the back and see what you can without getting too close. Black your skin and take your revolver, but use it only to save your life. Watch for a guard, or dogs. If you're seen, that's the end of it. Can you do it?"
"Yes, I think so, but — "
"Me sweet Mary," he bawled drunkenly in my ear, "you're all tired out, ain't you? Off t'bed wi'you naow, don't wait up for me."
"But Da', some supper — "
"Nah, Mary, wouldn't want to be spoiling all this lovely beer with food, would I? Off to dreamland now, Mary," and he slammed heavily out the door. His fiddle skittered into life and, heart pounding and hands fumbling, I made myself ready: trousers pulled on beneath my dark skirts, a length of brown silk rope around my waist, tiny binoculars, a pencil-sized torch. The gun. A smear of black from the dirty lamp-glass onto my face and hands. A final glance around before shutting down the lamps, and the rag doll caught my eye, slumped disconsolately on the shelf. On sudden impulse — for luck? — I pushed her into a pocket and slipped out silently into the shadows, away from the pub, to make my way down to the big square house that sat well off the road, the one with no neighbours.