"For the last time," Masters said with powerful restraint "there was NOTHING wrong with those field-glasses. They fell on the grass and weren't broken. Bert Hartshorn, the constable, took them into the house only a second or two after the gentleman fell. No murderous devices. No—"
"H.M. turned to Ricky. "What about you?"
I didn't see them," retorted Ricky. "I…" He told his story briefly, much as he had told it to Martin and Jenny. "All these years the thing has seemed perfectly simple. Now you've got it so tangled up I don't understand it myself. Field-glasses, for instance."
"Pink flashes," amplified Masters. "Skeletons in clocks. God's truth!"
"I want to know what's wrong with Mother," persisted Ricky. There were lines of strain drawn from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. The powerful hands and wrists dug into the pockets of his sports-coat "I'm released from a marriage-obligation, or I'd hoped so; but am I released? Then this expedition to the prison tonight…"
"What expedition to the prison?" H.M. asked sharply.
They had all, by instinct, gone to the middle of the roof at its edge. Now, also by instinct, they moved back towards the furniture of darkened chromium and orange canvas.
At the rear of the roof, the staircase-door opened. Martin, somewhat drawn of face but with a gleam in his eyes, walked quickly towards them. Ricky signalled, "What did you find out?" and Martin signalled back, 'Tell you later."
"You—" H.M. pointed his finger at Martin—"were shouting some gibberish about an execution shed, now I remember. What's this game tonight? All of it?"
Martin told him.
"I see," commented H.M., keeping an indecipherable poker-face. "Resistin' the powers of darkness and cryin', 'Ho!' All right You two just nip downstairs, will you. Masters and I have got to have a little causerie. Don't argue, bum it! Hustle!"
Presently the staircase-door closed behind Martin and Ricky. It was very quiet on the roof, though a very faint murmur of voices floated from the Dragon's Rest All about them the countryside, dark-green and somnolent called a visitor to lounge and drowse from worry. All that is, except Pentecost Prison.
"Masters," said H.M., "we've got to stop this 'expedition.'"
The Chief Inspector, though uneasy and no longer satirical, remained practical
"We can't stop it," he pointed out "If they've got permission from the Ministry, there's nothing anybody can do."
H.M. lifted both fists. "Then we got to… stop a bit! What do you know about the inside of this jail?"
"Not much. We got the wire, a year or two ago it was, that Shag Fairlie was hiding out there. Remember when Shag broke Dartmoor? But it wasn't true."
"'Storage purposes.' What have they got stored in the place?"
"Paper," grunted Masters. "Bales and boxes and tied-up bundles! Stacked as high as your head and higher, through practically every corridor and cell and room! Only a little space so you can move between them and the wall. Oh, ah. I expect" his eye wandered round, "I expect anybody (hurrum!) anybody who was on the stout side wouldn't be able to get in at all."
Then every superior air dropped away from him.
"Fair's fair," snapped Masters, "and messing about is messing about I ask you — straight, now—is there anything in all this 'pink flash' business?"
"There is. But that's not the main reason why we're here, Masters. We're here to prevent another murder."
Masters straightened up. The breath whistled through his nostrils.
"Another…?"
"That's right"
"But whose murder?"
"Decide for yourself, son. In this whole case, where there are as many women as there are men, who would you say is practically certain to get murdered?"
Chapter 9
There was a bright quarter-moon, that night, in a soft blue-black sky without stars. The darkness caressed, it invited, anyone who sat under the hedgerows or followed the broad winding road. Its warmth would have stirred the blood of lovers, and doubtless did, somewhere under those trees.
The side road which led to Pentecost Prison had once been paved. Now, between the tall grass on each side, it lay cracked and broken and ridged because it had not been repaired for decades. The motor-car, with one wing banging, jolted badly on its surface. But, since the road was straight, the car's headlamps picked up far ahead the high iron double-gates against a rounded face of bricks once painted grey.
A few seconds more the car jolted off the asphalt to a gravel circle now thick-grown with weeds. The handbrake ticked back with a decisive wrench and the clanking engine was shut off, letting in stillness.
First John Stannard jumped out of the car, from the front seat. Then Ricky Fleet from behind the wheel. Then, from the back, Martin Drake, Ruth Callice, and — still to the surprise and very faint discomfort of the others—'young’ Dr. Hugh Laurier.
"I am extremely grateful…" Dr. Laurier began. But his voice rang out loudly, and he stopped. The clock on the car's dashboard indicated the time as twenty-five minutes to midnight
Footsteps swished among weeds. Someone laughed nervously.
"Got the lamps?" called Ricky's voice. "Here," came the husky assurance of Stannard; and he chuckled.
"Shall I leave these car-lights on?" Martin demanded.
"Yes," assented Stannard's voice. "After all, three of you will be leaving in twenty-five minutes."
Seen only by car-lamps, magnified by darkness and a quarter-moon, the grey-brick roundness of Pentecost appeared immense. Its air of intense desolation was heightened, towards the north-west, by the ghost-village which still straggled towards its wall.
When men fretted out their sentences here, when they heated their brains and assured everybody they would be free next week, there grew up round it that huddle of cottages which lie near any country prison. Here lived the married officers, the non-convict staff, their wives and relatives and children: all the residue from that force which made the machine-shop hum, the food-tins bang, the endless line shuffle round and round the exercise yard. These houses, now, were as dead as Pentecost
"Is everybody ready?" asked Stannard.
All five had gathered round the car-lights. Stannard had told them to wear old clothes: which Ruth interpreted as meaning black slacks and a red sweater, Stannard his ungainly plus-fours, the others sports-coats and flannels.
Ruth laughed softly. So did Dr. Laurier.
"You know," Ruth observed, '1 thought this evening would never end. I almost choked over dinner."
"So did I," said Ricky, for some reason deeply impressed by this coincidence of thought. I’m sorry Mother didn't come down after all."
"I assure you, Richard," declared the precise and conservative Dr. Laurier, "that Lady Fleet is in no danger. I have given her half a grain of morphia. We, on the other hand, have a stimulant"
All five were strung up, each of them not quite his or her normal self, which may account for much that happened afterwards. Each would have denied this. But if anybody had been watching them — and there was someone watching — that person would have seen it in a quick movement a turn and gleam of an eye against the head-lights.
"I should have thought" said Ruth, "that you people who lived in this district must have been terrified. I mean, of escaped prisoners."
Stannard chuckled, his lips folded back from gleaming teeth.
"My dear, you are still confusing local prisons with convict prisons."
"I'm afraid I don't remember the difference."
"Come, now! If a man's sentence is anything from six months to two years, with time off for good behaviour, he won't endanger it by trying to escape. Some of them go mad, of course. But an attempted break is rare." Then Stannard's eyes narrowed. "Stop, though I There is an alarm-bell, aside from the ordinary main bell"