I stepped through into the public bar after Mr Handley, and the place was empty except for the bloody bicyclist, reading a book. I nodded to him, and said, ‘I see your bike’s gone. Still jiggered, is it?’
‘Took it up to the blacksmith,’ he said, only half looking up from his book. ‘Chap called Ainsty, but he wasn’t about. He’s off fixing some motor, apparently.’
Well, here was more data for the wife, fascinated as she was by the movements of the bicyclist.
The bar smelt of wood and wisteria. All the windows were propped open. On one side they gave onto the golden cornfields and The Angel garden; to the other, they looked onto the trestle table, the dusty lane and the woods.
Mr Handley was at the barrel of Smith’s pouring me a pint, and one for himself. He boomed out a remark in his habitual blurred manner, and I could not understand. I asked him, as politely as I could, to repeat it, and it was hard to keep in countenance as he made the same baffling noise again. I looked over to the bicyclist for help, and sure enough he looked up from his book and reported with a sigh:
‘He says, “There are as many crimes committed high as low.”’
I nodded at Mr Handley, and said, ‘You’re right over that,’ although I was thinking of the constant succession of working men I’d given evidence against in the York police court. You hardly ever saw a toff before the magistrates.
‘Mr Handley,’ I said, ‘did Sir George Lambert have any military connection?’
Mr Handley shook his head as he raised his glass to his lips. He then touched the glass to his lips, and half the beer went down in an instant. I raised my own glass and tried the same, but I didn’t have the trick of it, and my glass went down by just two inches and I nearly choked. To cover up the embarrassment, I said, ‘Does the pub pay?’
Well, I had to listen very carefully, and say ‘Pardon’ a lot, but I got the gist. The pub did not pay. The village was in decline. The limestone quarry had been worked out, and farming had been in a bad way for years. His talk became a constant low moan on a theme of everything going to pot: the timber in the woods round about was not of the sort wanted by the modern house-builders, and the holiday trade was nothing to what it had been at the height of the cycling craze. Whole fleets of cyclists, it appeared, had once passed through the Adenwolds every week-end.
At this news, I looked across towards our own bicyclist, but he’d quit the room. Mr Handley talked on, and I pictured Lydia in the tin bath upstairs. I always liked to hang about when she took a bath, and if she didn’t tell me to clear off, that meant we would have a ride. Mr Handley was running on about how he was thinking of removing with his family to York. I asked him, ‘Where in York?’ and — not being very interested in the reply — revolved my own thoughts as he gave it.
What was the Chief up to at the Hall? Had John Lambert killed the Major, and did he mean to make a confession to it in order to save his brother? No. Couldn’t have, because he’d been in London at the time, and the court must have heard evidence to that effect.
What — if any — was the connection between the timetables for the military and the murder?
And the man Usher… If he meant to murder Lambert, why hadn’t he just gone ahead and done it directly? How did things stand between Usher and the new owner of the Hall?
Who had been the man in the dust-coat running away from the station?
And what was the bloody bicyclist up to?
I thought of Gifford, the man from Norwood. I took out my silver watch. It was ten after one; I was supposed to have seen him at the inn at one.
‘Gifford,’ I said, interrupting Mr Handley, ‘the commercial traveller… Have you seen him about?’
Mr Handley shrugged, muttered something like, ‘Not lately.’
I drained off my glass and — telling Handley that I was off to take a turn in the woods — I quit The Angel.
I didn’t mean to go into the woods, though. I meant to bang on the vicar’s door to ask questions as follows. One: why had he been staring at us in the graveyard? Two: why had he called Gifford back? Three: where did he suppose the man might be just at present? Bugger the Chief. He was an old man, shortly to be super-annuated. I would pursue that matter independently of him.
But I wasn’t long out of the front door of The Angel when, looking to my left as I walked towards the first green of Adenwold, I saw something wrong-coloured lodged in the greenery of the woods. I went in after it.
The road was lost to my sight within ten seconds as the barriers of green fell between it and me. I might just as well have jumped into a green sea. I twisted my way between the trees and holly bushes, brambles and ferns, all connected by spider webs of ivy and bindweed, and after half a minute of battling I came to the hat: a brown, high-crowned bowler. It hung on a brier bush in company with thousands of red berries glowing in the green darkness. No name was written in the crown, but it was Gifford’s, I was sure. I caught it up, and fought my way through to the wide clearing that lay beyond the brier bush.
This I took at first to be an expanse of flat moss, but a slip of my boot proved it to be a green and black pond over which a hundred insects swooped, the lot of them looking like man-made flying machines going through their paces. Why had Gifford, the man from the London suburbs who hated nature, entered this abandoned world?
I skirted the pond as he must have done after losing, or abandoning, his bowler, and pressed on, picking my way. Low, sharp branches kept whisking off my own hat as if to say, ‘ Keep it off: show us some respect, won’t you?’ At every turn, my boots broke the twigs beneath my feet, and I began to feel unsure about what lay beneath, like a man walking over the rotten rafters of an ancient attic.
I called out ‘Gifford!’ a few times, but there came no answer.
Of course, he might have gone the other way around the pond. My route led in the direction of a golden light coming through the trees, and as I came to the limit of the woods — and re-entered the heat of the day — I saw that the golden-ness was made by the sun and a cornfield combined. The edge of the woods was marked by clouds of cow parsley, just as the border of a fancy handkerchief is marked by lace.
I walked along a little way, and then I saw another wrong colour, this time on the ground. I picked up the red model engine: the single-driver. It was made of stout soldered tinplate, and beautifully finished. The maker’s name was stamped in German underneath. It might have been something like ‘Gastin’, with two little dots over the ‘a’, but the letters were too tiny to be made out.
Turning the model over in my hands, I thought of the German railways. It was said that you had to show your ticket to the guard on all trains with no exceptions, and that the guard saluted you like a military man when you did so. The station masters saluted passing trains all along the line, whether those trains stopped at their stations or not. As a people, they were lacking in humour, and they carried method too far.
But Gifford, surely, was neither German nor a travelling agent of that country. As he had said himself, he was a traveller in small locomotives. Yet he had possessed some secret, some knowledge touching on the Adenwold mysteries, and he had meant to tell me it.
Had he been observed in the course of observing someone? Had the vicar brought him into the woods to put his lights out, only to drop in on the railway station and collect the cricket team?