‘Most certainly we will post your letter,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘It must be a great disadvantage to be so far from the village unless you have a car.’
‘We have a car. My husband is using it. Thank you so much. ’
She went back into the house, and was gone for some time.
‘Writing the letter, I should think,’ said Laura, abandoning her inspection of the engine and taking the driver’s seat once more. The woman came out with the letter and Mrs. Bradley and Laura drove away.
‘Well!’ said Laura, as the car went slowly downhill towards Newcombe Soulbury village. ‘And what do we make of her, I wonder?’
‘It is too early to be certain,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, ‘but I should not be surprised if I were right, and that she is the older David Battle’s second wife, and that he has not, in the sense that we understand it, “disappeared” at all, but has merely gone underground for his own purposes. And I am truly sorry to disappoint you again, but I have a strong feeling that the police have been there before us, that they have alarmed the Battles, and that the letter we are to post in Newcombe Soulbury contains information relating to our visit. And now we will try Slepe Rock.’
Once they had turned off the main road, their route lay among hills. Great, round-headed slopes lay on either side of the way and rose to meet the car as it headed towards the sea.
Slepe Rock itself was on the seaward side of the village of Slepe, a straggling little place with a poor-looking bungalow or two on its outskirts, some untidy cottages, a house turned into a shop, and a large garage. Laura had seen nothing of the village on her hill-track pilgrimage to Slepe, but had passed through it on the return journey in the car.
Beyond the village was the bay (once, as George had surmised, a smuggler’s hole), some limestone caves, a wash of creaming water, like teeth, breaking the surface of the sea, a semi-circle of cliff, a coastguard’s hut, and, just where the beach widened to include, between pebbles and backwash, a strip of dirty sand, the refreshment shack of which they were in search.
‘Not much future in this,’ said Laura decidedly. She regarded Slepe Rock with disfavour. ‘I enjoyed my walk over the hills, but, seen from this angle, Slepe Rock is a beastly little place! It’s like Lulworth Cove gone hellish. Why should anyone want to live here?—or wasn’t it like this when the disappearing Bulstrode lived here?’
It was a question which Mrs. Bradley could not answer.
‘The cottage must have been near the sea,’ she observed, ‘if George’s report is correct, and I have no doubt whatever that it is.’ She surveyed Slepe with a non-committal eye, and added, ‘I think, child, that we ought to put up at the hotel. I wish your David Gavin were here with us. A young inspector of police could extract more information from a barmaid in the space of a quarter of an hour than you or I would be likely to get in a year and a half.’
‘O’Hara and Gascoigne,’ said Laura, quickly. ‘They’d love to help, and they can’t be doing anything important, and, after all, they got us into this!’
‘An excellent idea,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘but I have doubts about Mr. O’Hara. I don’t want him to run into danger on our account.’
‘He wouldn’t mind danger,’ said Laura, ‘and, after all, it’s because of him that we’re going to all this trouble.’
‘True,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. Gascoigne, however, came alone, explaining that his cousin had gone over to Ireland to a wedding, but would be coming back later and would join them then. He asked what he could do to help the enquiry.
‘We want to find out,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘all that we can about the house which used to exist on the site of that shack beside the pull-in for coaches. We want to know why the house was taken down, who lived there, what happened to him, and we need any other information which happens to come to light. You shall pursue boatmen and compliment barmaids. You shall indulge in friendly chat with the hotel manager and pass the time of day with the men who work at the pull-in for coaches.’
The god-like Gascoigne promised to do his best, and Laura announced her intention of keeping a close watch on the hotel guests.
‘You never know,’ she said. ‘It won’t take the villain of the piece very long to find out that we’re on his track, and he might come here to keep an eye on us.’
‘But we don’t know for certain that there is a villain, do we?’ Gascoigne enquired.
‘Well, there must be,’ said Laura bluntly, ‘or Mrs. Bradley wouldn’t be here wasting her time.’
Chapter Nine
—«♦»—
‘And at twelve o’clock the young man met the princess going to the bath…’
Ibid. (The Golden Bird)
« ^ »
So Mrs. Bradley, Laura and Gascoigne booked rooms at Slepe, and on the day following Gascoigne’s admission to their circle, Laura got up early in the morning and went down to the beach to bathe. The tide was coming in, and bathing was comparatively safe. She took off pullover, shirt, slacks, socks and vest behind rocks, and, in the one-piece sea-green bathing costume she had put on underneath the rest of her clothing, she went cautiously seawards, wearing her rope-soled shoes.
She placed shoes and towel upon a rock which, she deduced, the sea would not reach until after she had finished her dip, and waded into the water.
The sea was grey and uninviting. The tide came crosswise, from the east, into the opening, and the undercurrent was strong.
Laura, who had been able to swim since she was six, treated unknown waters with respect. Having swum, keeping level with the shore, whilst she tested the idiosyncrasies of the locality, she at last struck out for the caves on the eastern side of the bay.
The water grew deep and seemed warmer. The undertow was noticeable, but did not drag sufficiently, she thought, to be dangerous. In less time than she had allowed she was out of deep water and was wading towards an opening in the rocks.
It was a most fascinating cave. So much was soon apparent.
The sand, which, opposite the pull-in, seemed dirty and indeterminate, here was firm and hard. Not much of it was left uncovered, for the tide was coming in fast. Laura would have liked to loiter and explore, but beyond establishing the fact that on the left side as she went in there was a long ledge of slippery rock which would, at a pinch, make a path to the back of the cave, she did not wait or linger for fear of the tide. She promised herself, however, a complete exploration of the cave when conditions were good.
She chose the easy way back. This was to swim with the full run of the incoming tide and let it take her across the bay.
So crosswise did the tide set that her lazy manœuvres took her across to the opposite side and much farther west than the spit of sand from which she had entered the water.
She accepted these conditions, and was brought up opposite a cliff-fall before which some great blocks of limestone had fallen to form great rocks. Even at low tide the water scarcely abandoned them, and they were overgrown with moss-like, slippery weed and small, hard, strongly-adhering shells.
Laura had no intention of making her way barefoot over such stuff to reach her clothes, so, on gaining the rocks, she sat in the water and rested for half a minute, and then set to work to swim round, level with the shore, until she came to her shoes and her towel.
She was within twenty yards of these objectives when a boy on the beach began throwing stones into the sea. He was a lad of about seventeen, and Laura was not aware of him except vaguely until a fairly heavy pebble landed half a yard in front of her. She called out. The boy continued, without, apparently, having noticed her, to hurl considerable numbers of pebbles into the water, most of them fairly heavy.