‘We have to fool about as long as possible without doing any actual digging,’ Denis replied. ‘So if you two wouldn’t mind taking this measuring tape and this fairly large protractor, and assing about over there for a bit without doing anything in particular, but just looking busy and intelligent, it would be handy. We lunch at twelve and shall spin the picnic out until two-thirty. Then we resume the fooling until four. By that time we hope to have attracted a fair amount of attention, and to have demonstrated our fat-headed innocence. Then we can push off home. At least, so Aunt Adela says.’
Gascoigne and O’Hara accepted the implements presented to them, retired to the north-west segment of the circle, and began a series of elaborate measurements. O’Hara produced a notebook and a fountain pen, Gascoigne a few unpaid bills and a pencil, and the two young men wrote down records and calculations of distances, angles, direction and length of shadows, and such other data as occurred to their yeasty intelligences or were suggested by the circumstances of the survey.
They also named, for their private satisfaction, all the nine stones, beginning with the names of the eight great planets, but as it was a matter for argument how then to name the ninth stone, they compromised by deciding to call all the stones after the most eccentric dons at their University. This exercise in ingenuity took some time, as it seemed necessary to relate each stone in some way to the person after whom it was to be called, and the time passed pleasantly enough.
At last there was a halt for the picnic lunch. A firm of caterers from Welsea Beaches, suborned or intimidated by Mrs. Bradley, appeared at ten minutes to twelve with lorry-loads of excellent food and a sufficient number of crates of bottled beer, and drove cautiously through the open gateway on to the site of the dig.
The archaeologists knocked off work at once, and, with completely comprehensible enthusiasm, unloaded and fell on the provisions. Laura sat between two of the film extras, a young man in velvet trousers and a young woman with hair so thoroughly bleached that it had turned white. Laura was an expansive, friendly person, and was soon conversing with the extras and listening with great interest to what they had to say about the cinema.
They were on location, she learned, to shoot half a dozen sequences involving a background of open hill-country, some pasture and a Tamworth boar.
‘Although what a Tamworth boar looks like, unless our producer,’ said the velvet-trousered one frankly, ‘beats me, what I mean to say.’
Laura agreed, although she knew perfectly well what a Tamworth boar looked like. She had not, so far, met their producer, however, and so reserved judgment on the aptness or otherwise of the velvet-trousered comment.
‘I suppose you’ve got digs down here?’ she said. ‘I mean, if you’re staying some time. How do they put you up?’
‘If you call it that,’ said the silver-haired one. ‘Digs, I mean. We’ve been given the attics in that house by the golf links. I suppose it’s all right if you’re not choosey, but being seventh lead, as you might almost say, I did think I ought to get something better. But it’s no use talking. Anyway, it’s dry and fairly clean, and the food’s not bad, and they give you a drink occasionally. Free, I mean.’
‘Iced?’ enquired Laura, upon what she hoped was a casual note; for she felt sudden excitement at the news that these people were actually housed in Cottam’s, of the four dead trees, a mansion which, she was still certain, contained a corpse.
‘Iced? Oh, I suppose so, if you like them that way. Personally, a gin is all I care for, and you don’t want that iced, do you?’
Laura said that she supposed not, and, the conversation showing signs of languishing, she was moved suddenly to enquire:
‘What sort of man is Concaverty?’
The silver hair and the velvet trousers exchanged glances which indicated indecision and a certain degree of embarassment.
‘Oh, well,’ said the velvet trousers, ‘he’s an old so-and-so, actually. Too big for his boots. In fact, too big altogether. But, look here, don’t say I said so. I don’t want to get the wrong side of him. He rents us the house, you know. The Gonn-Brown pay him five hundred a week, and, even then, he doesn’t much want us, we’ve been told.’
‘If he’s here, I wish you’d point him out,’ said Laura. ‘I believe I’ve heard of him. Better still, I wish you’d point your producer out to a friend of mine who’s in the O.U.D.S. and wants a small part in a film.’
‘Him? Oh, he wouldn’t be here, don’t you believe it! Probably still in bed. Oh, no! I’m wrong! Here he comes. The fellow with the battleship jaw.’
‘Oh!’ said Laura, realizing at once that this was a man she had never seen before. ‘Oh! I suppose you’re sure?’
‘One’s usually sure of the boss!’ the lint-haired seventh lead replied.
‘Hullo, who’s that talking to young Bradley?’ asked Gascoigne, joining his cousin. ‘Looks a bit of a bruiser, doesn’t he? What do you make of him? Your face has gone all expressive!’
‘Why, that’s the fellow!’ said O’Hara. ‘I recognized his voice at once. I wonder what his name is? I’ll go over and claim acquaintance. I’d like to find out what he’s got to say about the body we carried down those stairs.’
‘Do you mean the producer?’ asked Laura, coming up to them.
‘Good Lord, no! I mean that fellow talking to Bradley. Mrs. Bradley’s watching them, do you see? She smells a rat, and no wonder.’
He strolled over to where Denis was in conversation with a thickly-built, tallish man who looked like a professional boxer.
‘Hullo,’ said O’Hara casually. ‘How goes it?’
‘It looks all right to me,’ the man replied, ‘but I don’t know much about… Good Lord!’
‘Yes, exactly,’ said O’Hara, eyeing him. ‘How did our friend get on?’
‘Eh?… Oh! Poor old Chummy! Yes, that was a very bad business! But what possessed you to get out of the car like that? Still, he managed the journey all right, and we got him to hospital. Haemorrhage, too! The most extraordinary thing. I’ve never heard of it accompanying typhoid fever, have you?’
‘I don’t know much about illness,’ said O’Hara slowly, ‘but I knew he was pretty bad. I had an idea he was dead when I left the car.’
‘Of course not! There wasn’t any question of that! He was pretty bad, certainly, but he’s progressing well enough now. We didn’t think much of the local hospitals, so in the end we ran him up to London, and that’s where he is! Well, so long! Be seeing you!’ He turned and strolled away.
‘I wish I’d got that kind of cast-iron nerve,’ said O’Hara, when, at the end of the afternoon, the film extras and all other strangers had gone, and he, together with Gascoigne, Laura, Mrs. Bradley and the useful and decorative Denis, were getting into the two cars to return to Welsea Beaches. ‘He didn’t attempt to put me off. Just said that the sick man was progressing well and was now in London. Looked me in the eye as bold as brass, and asked me why on earth I’d got out of the car that night. Did you ever meet such an example of complete, copper-bottomed cheek?’
‘If we could only find that body, and get it identified!’ said Laura. ‘If only we could find out anything! I hate being kept in the dark.’
‘To-night,’ said her employer mysteriously, generously omitting all reference to the discovery of the smugglers’ cave and the important and entrancing theory that it ended under the pull-in at Slepe Rock, ‘we go on a mysterious quest. You wait and see. I think we have started our hare.’