Neither was there any sign of them on the beach. Moreover the other cruiser had gone. There might be no significance in this, as there was no evidence that the two men had come from the cruiser. It might have belonged to anyone. Laura returned in her own boat to Cromlech, and remembered, too late, that she had not been to the village of Wedlock after all. Next day she reported to Vardon that the case of ferns had been carried away from the house, and gave what description she could of the two men.
‘Fit hundreds of people,’ said Vardon. ‘Still, you might be able to pick them out again if you saw them.’
Laura thought this very unlikely, and could see that he did, too. She half expected a reprimand for going alone to the house, but this did not come.
‘Funny about the ferns,’ she said, hoping for information.
‘Funny case altogether, Miss Menzies. What’s Mrs Bradley up to? We heard she was going to France.’
‘She’s gone. I don’t know what the idea is. We’ll know more when she comes back. She’s taken young Mark Street along with her. I expect them back on Monday night.’
‘I see. Your two men might interest Detective-Inspector Darling. He’s lost a couple of rather interesting brothers!’
To Mark the whole of the journey was a fairy-tale told for his benefit. When at last they reached the caves Mrs Bradley put him in charge of a guide and went on her own tour of inspection. It was not her presence that Mark needed. Contrary to her satellites’ impression that she had received a kind of spirit message that Lascaux would provide the solution of their problem, or even the most faint, elusive clue that Miss Faintley’s mysterious activities and the riddle of her death were in some way connected with the prehistoric art of the caves, she had acted merely in obedience to one of her strongest emotions, a deep, abiding, amused and tender love of small boys. Mark, she sensed, had been much more bitterly resentful of and disappointed at the failure of his plan to visit France than his parents realized. Resentfulness and disappointment, she was well aware, do not strengthen character at Mark’s age; she considered it doubtful whether they did at any age. The Faintley case would make no further progress, she surmised, until school reopened and Miss Faintley’s life could be regarded from another angle. The opportunity was present, therefore, to remove the poison from Mark’s mind. True, she was not the no-doubt gallant and resourceful Ellison, but perhaps to fly to France instead of going by sea and train would compensate somewhat for that.
That it had more than compensated she was soon aware, and the boy’s silent ecstasy enhanced her own pleasure in the trip. The custodians of Lascaux knew her, for she had spent several months there researching into the psychological significance of the Aurignacian cave-decorations and in attempting to read their symbolism in the light of modern psycho-analytical knowledge, so they allowed her to wander at will while she sought out her own favourite paintings, including that of the so-called Apocalyptic Beast with his forward-pointing horns, his watchful head, and his attitude of alertness, his firm legs planted and yet a-quiver, like those of a hunter’s hound. There was nothing dog-like, however, about this sagging-bellied, demoniacal creature with the Indian bullock’s bulge on his shoulders and his tremendously-muscled thighs. He was master, not servant, in the cave.
When she rejoined Mark she had a short talk with the guide, and obtained an item of intelligence which she filed in her mind as being too good to be true. She had guessed that the prehistoric caves, not Lascaux, particularly, but many of those which could be found all along the Dordogne, had been used during the war by the French Resistance. What she learned now was that a man called Bannister had taken a prominent part in the Resistance, having been, in fact, a British Intelligence officer. The name stuck. Mark, who had almost no French, picked it up, too.
‘He said Monsieur Bannistaire,’ he remarked. ‘Didn’t mean Mr Bannister, did he?’
‘I dare not suppose that he meant your Mr Bannister, child.’
‘Well, Bannister’s been here, to Lascaux. It wasn’t just that he’d bought the book. I mean, you could tell, just like when they give you a jogger lesson on some place either they’ve been to or they haven’t. You can always tell. Besides, why should a maths beak tell us about a thing like this unless he’d been here?’
‘Sound arguments, logically expressed, child.’
‘But why caves?’ demanded Laura when they got back.
‘Ferns might grow in them,’ Mrs Bradley cryptically replied. ‘From what I hear from our indefatigable police officers, ferns would appear to be the foliage, if not entirely the root, of the matter.’
Chapter Seven
MISS GOLIGHTLY
‘Stern Pluto shall himself to mirth betake,
And crowned ghosts shall banquet for thy sake.’
shakerley marmion – Proserpine
« ^ »
Laura knew her employer far too well to ask too many questions, but she turned over Mrs Bradley’s remark about caves and ferns, and light dawned.
‘You went inside that house yourself with the police, and spotted that case of ferns,’ she said at breakfast next morning. Mrs Bradley cackled at, but did not deny, this statement.
‘We must bring our holiday to a close,’ she remarked. ‘There are various people we ought to see and various things we ought to do before we come back to Cromlech.’
‘We are coming back, then? I rather hoped we were. We’ve had less intriguing cases than this one. Ferns!’ She brooded, visualizing them growing. There was an old lady in her home town who kept the front-room window full of them to make a screen so that she could peer out but the passers-by could not peer in. There were harts-tongue ferns, shining in the Devonshire rain; ferns under dripping cascades in the north from which Laura came; ferns in damp woods; bracken fronds (not, she supposed, true ferns) in the New Forest clearings, on the sandy wastes around Sandringham, all over Surrey and Exmoor. The road from Porlock to Lynmouth was bordered with them. There were rare varieties of ferns much prized by collectors. There was maidenhair fern for bouquets or to put with carnations to make a spray for a dance frock. But all these ferns were living. They began in their infancy wrapped round by, curled up in, a sort of red-brown moss. They unfolded, prettiest before they reached maturity. They ate and drank and breathed and propagated their kind. There had been ferns before there were monkeys or men. There were ferns so tiny that only a botanist would find them; and there were ferns like trees – ferns as tall and as graceful as palms.
She found herself disliking ferns very much.
‘They’re sinister, aren’t they?’ she said aloud. Mrs Bradley cackled again, but did not answer the question. Instead she observed:
‘A letter from the Queen to play croquet.’
‘The Duchess in this case being –?’
‘Mark’s headmistress.’
‘Why her?… Oh, of course! The late Faintley’s boss. Don’t suppose she knows very much about her.’
‘We must leave no stone unturned —’
‘No avenue unexplored. Right-o. Are you coming back with me in the cruiser, or would you prefer to go by train? The weather’s cleared up again, thank goodness, so it ought to be quite a decent trip. To think, if it hadn’t been for that beastly rain, I could have got those two men identified! I’m sure they were up to no good.’
‘I always enjoy a sea-trip,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘What a pity the boy’s mother was too nervous to allow him to join us! And don’t worry too much about the men. You certainly did everything you could, and even if you had seen their faces it is most unlikely that it would have helped.’