‘Good heavens!’ said O’Hara. ‘Not really? I mean, you haven’t really found that drowned couple who inherited the house from Bulstrode?’
‘And Mr. Bulstrode himself, sir, what is more,’ said the Inspector with great satisfaction. ‘Also a head and a pair of hands, which we should like to have identified.’
‘Did Mrs. Bradley put you on to it?’
‘Yes, she did, sir. And a nod was as good as a wink. The police, in their way, sir, are not entirely without imagination.’
O’Hara and Gascoigne, not unused to the interior of Bow Street after Boat-Race night, did not believe this last statement. Gascoigne chuckled, O’Hara was silent, and soon the police car, followed by that of Mrs. Bradley, crept down the long hill towards the sea, and drew up half a mile from the bay.
‘Now, then,’ said the inspector, ‘everybody quiet, please. And no torches unless you see me use mine. You’ll have to manage in the dark, the same as cats.’
‘And bats and owls,’ muttered Laura. But, like the others, she followed the route in silence and in the darkness. The little party—there were a sergeant and two constables with the inspector—soon climbed the grassy slope to the top of the cliffs above the bay, and there, at a curt command, they lay and waited.
Time passed, and three of the hunters had begun to think that the quarry was not going to show up when a searchlight, playing over the bay from a point to the east of the watchers, picked out a fair-sized yacht and a couple of boats which seemed to be making towards her.
‘O.K. for vision,’ muttered Inspector Fielding contentedly, and took his policemen away with him. The boats, in the searchlight’s beam, became a couple of frenzied insects, their oars sprouting like legs.
‘Why can’t we go with them?’ demanded Laura, referring to the police, and feeling disappointed and affronted by the rather mean tactics of the regulars.
‘Because they won’t let us, and because we have other fish to fry,’ replied Mrs. Bradley. She did nothing, however, for twenty minutes after she had made this statement, and her companions assumed restful attitudes, talked softly, and kept their eyes on the sea, which was again in darkness.
Suddenly Mrs. Bradley rose to her feet.
‘Time for the kill,’ she observed. ‘If you wish to be in at the death, you also may be in for a fairly long walk.’
‘Not—?’ exclaimed Laura suddenly.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘We are going to take your Ancient British trackway—all of us except for George.’
‘Cuddle-Up to his intimates,’ said Laura, with a deplorable giggle.
‘George will take the car to Welsea, garage it, and go to bed,’ said George’s thoughtful employer. ‘There is no need for him to spend the night out.’
‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ said George, extremely coldly. Mrs. Bradley knew better than to argue with him, and replied with great cordiality:
‘Very well, George, but you may have to lurch, belch and bellow, when the time comes.’
‘Vcry good, madam. I have often played the part of an inebriate at domestic festivals in order to amuse my mother’s guests, and shall not be at a loss,’ replied George sublimely.
The party, guided by Laura, took the three-thousand-year-old track across the hills. Laura remembered it chiefly as a thyme-scented open vastness of sky and scudding clouds, the distances broken by green and treeless contours on which the round barrows stood out like the old, healed wounds on an oak; but now there was nothing to see except the faint gleam of torches on the ground, and Laura, working by compass, divination and what she privately regarded as her personal luck, but which included a flair for direction inherited from a long line of Highland moor-and-mountain men, led the party up the first long gradual slope and down the second steep one, past the small circle of standing stones and up to the ancient camp.
‘All right, so far,’ she said, getting up from a tumble into the camp’s grassy ditch. ‘There’s a wood comes next, as I remember it.’
‘And in that wood, where often you and I upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie, we will ambush the villains Cassius and Battle,’ said Mrs. Bradley.
‘You seem very sure about this,’ said O’Hara suddenly. Mrs. Bradley wasted upon the upland darkness a horrible and satisfied leer.
‘I don’t know how to find my way into the wood,’ said Laura, halting upon its outskirts. ‘If it were daylight, we could skirt it and see the three barrows beyond, but— ’
‘Three barrows and three dead men,’ said O’Hara, with Irish omniscience.
‘Then here we stay,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘We don’t need to go in among the trees.’
The night was chilly, and the woods were wet. The party remained upon the outskirts, where Laura remembered fallen tree-trunks. They took these for seats, and waited in patient silence broken only by the striking of a match as the young men lit their pipes.
Mrs. Bradley, whose amiable custom it was to devote her sweets to her young friends, had come with sundry pieces of chocolate. These, and some slices of bread, sustained the party, and a nip all round from her flask helped to keep out the chills and the damp.
At two in the morning, by Laura’s luminous watch, a light appeared among the trees on the edge of the wood, and there was the sound of voices. At a nudge from Mrs. Bradley, Gascoigne got to his feet, switched on his torch, and, loudly swearing, began to grope his way towards the direction from which the voices came.
‘Me, too?’ muttered O’Hara, under cover of his cousin’s noisy progress.
‘No, child. Listen. We must find out first whether these arc the right people.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He relaxed again and listened. Gascoigne had waylaid the newcomers.
‘That’s the man!’ murmured O’Hara, recognizing the voice of the older Battle.
‘Then up and at him!’ Mrs. Bradley commanded. ‘Never mind the rules— ’
‘Just knock ’em cold,’ said Laura, going into battle with her usual single-minded enthusiasm.
‘All three of ’em!’ yelled Gascoigne, from the van of the engagement. The enemy, taken entirely by surprise and outnumbered six to one (for a posse of policemen, to Laura’s fury, got up suddenly like partridges from the ground) formed an easy prey. They were Cassius and the two Battles. Cassius’ son, the lubberly Ivor Sisyphus, was found next morning hiding in the wood.
‘And now,’ said the voice of Laura’s fiancé, David Gavin, who had accompanied the police from Welsea, where he had expected to find Laura that evening, ‘what’s all this about?’
‘If only we could go to bed together,’ said Laura rapturously, from her seat on Mr. Cassius-Concaverty’s head, ‘I’d have plenty of time to tell you.’
‘I doubt it,’ said her swain, ‘but we could try.’
An unpleasant task awaited O’Hara next day. Mrs. Bradley had concluded that the head and hands, which had been dug up from the floor of the cave with the bodies of Bulstrode and the drowned couple, must belong to the man who had misdirected O’Hara (mistaking him for Firman) on the day of the Club hare and hounds.
O’Hara’s confirmation of her theory clinched the case against the Battles and Cassius.
‘I’m afraid of the Druids,’ said Laura. ‘I shall never go near them again.’ The young men were not of this opinion.