She turned from the gate and ran or rather stumbled alongside The Cut in a desperate attempt to reach the hillside by the tunnel, and as she ran she heard the creak of the wooden gates to the yard and the louder baying of the hounds. The Flawse pack was on the scent again. Mrs Flawse fled on into the darkness, tripped and fell, got up, tripped again and this time fell into The Cut. It wasn't deep but the cold was intense. She tried to climb the far bank but slipped back and giving up, waded on knee-deep in the icy water towards the dark shadow of the hill and the darker hole of the great tunnel. It loomed larger and more awful with each uncertain step she took. Mrs Flawse hesitated. The black hole ahead spoke to her of Hades, the baying pack behind of Pluto, no gay cartoon of Disneyland, but rather that dread god of the infernal regions at whose altar of mere wealth she had unconsciously worshipped. Mrs Flawse was not an educated woman but she knew enough to tell that she was caught between the devil and, by way of taps, toilets, and sewers provided by the Gateshead and Newcastle Waterworks, the deep blue sea. And then as she hesitated the baying hounds were halted in their tracks and against the skyline she could see in silhouette a figure on a horse thrashing about him with a whip.
'Get back, ye scum,' shouted Lockhart, 'back to your kennels,
ye scavengers of hell.'
His voice drifting with the wind reached Mrs Flawse and for once she felt grateful to her son-in-law. A moment later she knew better. Addressing Mr Dodd as he had addressed the hounds, Lockhart cursed the man for his stupidity.
'Have you forgotten the will, you damned old fool?' he demanded. 'Let the old bitch but go one mile beyond the radius of the Hall and she will forfeit the estate. So let her run and be damned.'
'I hadna thought of that,' said Mr Dodd contritely and turned his horse to follow the pack back to Flawse Hall while Lockhart rode behind. Mrs Flawse no longer hesitated. She too had forgotten the clause in the will. She would not run and be damned. With a desperate effort she scrambled from The Cut and stumbled back to the Hall. Once there she had not the strength to climb the sheets to her bedroom but tried the door. It was unlocked. She went inside and stood shivering in the darkness. A door was open to the kitchen and a light shone beneath the cellar door. Mrs Flawse needed a drink, a strong drink to warm her blood. She stepped quietly to the cellar door and opened it. A moment later her screams echoed and re-echoed through the house for there before her very eyes, naked and with an enormous scar from groin to gullet, sat old Mr Flawse on a bare wood table stained with blood and his eyes were the eyes of a tiger. Behind him stood Mr Taglioni with a piece of cotton waste which he appeared to be stuffing into her husband's skull and while he worked he hummed a tune from The Barber of Seville. Mrs Flawse took one look and having screamed passed out. It was Lockhart who carried her gibbering dementedly back to her room and dropped her on the bed. Then he hauled up the sheets and blankets and knotted her to the bedstead.
'Ye'll go no more a-wandering by the light of the moon,' he said cheerfully and went out locking the door. It was true. When Mr Dodd took her breakfast up he found Mrs Flawse staring dementedly at the ceiling, gibbering to herself.
Down in the cellar Mr Taglioni gibbered too. Mrs Flawse's eruption and hysteria in the cellar had completed his demoralization. It had been bad enough to stuff a dead man but to have his work interrupted in the middle of the night by a wailing widow had been too much for him.
'Take me home,' he pleaded with Lockhart, 'take me home.'
'Not before you've finished,' said Lockhart implacably. 'He's got to speak and wave his hands.'
Mr Taglioni looked up at the masked face.
'Taxidermy's one thing. Marionettes another,' he said. 'You wanted him stuffed, you got him stuffed. Now you say I got to make him speak. What you want? Miracles? You better ask God for those.'
'I'm not asking anyone. I'm telling,' said Lockhart and produced the small loudspeaker. 'You put that where his larynx is…'
'Was,' said Mr Taglioni, 'I no leave nothing inside."
'Was then,' continued Lockhart, 'and then I want this receiver put in his head.' He showed Mr Taglioni the miniature receiver. Mr Taglioni was adamant.
'No room. His head is stuffed with cotton wool.'
'Well take some out and put this in and leave space for the batteries. And while you're about it I want his jaw to move. I've an electric motor here. Look, I'll show you.'
For the rest of the morning, the late Mr Flawse was wired for sound and by the time they had finished it was possible to hear his heart beat when a switch was pulled. Even his eyes, now those of the tiger, swivelled in his head at the touch of a button on the remote control. About the only thing he couldn't do was walk or lie down flat. For the rest he looked rather healthier than he had done of late and certainly sounded as articulate.
'Right,' said Lockhart when they had tested him out, 'Now you can drink your fill.'
'Who?' said Mr Taglioni, by this time thoroughly confused. 'Him or me?'
'You,' said Lockhart and left him to his own devices and the contents of the wine cellar. He went upstairs to find that Mr Dodd was also drunk. The sound of his Master's voice issuing from that fearful effigy in the cellar had been too much even for his sturdy soul and he was half-way through a bottle of his own Northumbrian brew. Lockhart took the whisky from him.
' I'll need your help to get the old man to bed,' he said, 'he's stiff in the hip joints and needs levering round corners.5
Mr Dodd demurred but eventually between them they got Mr Flawse, clad in his red flannel nightgown, into bed where he sat up bellowing and calling on the Almighty to save his soul.
'You've got to admit he's very realistic,' said Lockhart. 'It is just a pity we didn't think of taping his utterances earlier.'
'It's more a pity we ever thought of taping them at all,' said Mr Dodd drunkenly, 'and I wish his jaw wouldna go up and down like that. It puts me in mind of a goldfish with asthma.'
'But the eyes are about right,' said Lockhart. 'I got them from the tiger.'
'Ye dinna have to tell me,' said Mr Dodd and surprisingly broke into Blake. 'Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. What demented hand and eye framed thy awful circuitry?'
"I did,' said Lockhart proudly, 'and I'm fixing him a wheelchair so that he can move about the house on his own and I'll direct it by remote control. That way no one will suspect he isn't still alive and I'll have time to see if this Mr Boscombe in Arizona is my father,'
'Boscombe? A Mr Boscombe?' said Mr Dodd. 'And for why would you be thinking he was your father?'
'He wrote a great many letters to my mother,' said Lockhart and explained how he had got them.
'Ye'll be wasting your time ganning after the man,' said Mr Dodd. 'Miss Deyntry was right. I recall the little man and he was a poor wee thing that your mither had no time for. You had best look closer home.'
'He's the only lead I've got,' said Lockhart, 'unless you can suggest a more likely candidate.'