'We'll have to make sure he doesn't spot us. He's a dangerous lunatic, I'm sure,' I said earnestly.
'Oh, well, it's not as though he knows we know he digs in the hermit's cottage,' said Kenneth. 'We'll have to keep mum about that.'
Down by the brook we found Our Sarah with Our Ern and the rest of the hangers-on. This was surprising, for in Our Sarah's cottage, we knew, Saturday was bedroom day and she was usually kept at home to help turn out the rooms, change the sheets and clean the floors. Bedroom day was an institution among poor families in my childhood, but in London it was usually celebrated on Fridays and the bigger girls were kept away from school regularly on Friday in term-time so that they could help with the chores. In Our Sarah's home, however, bedroom day was on Saturday and she carried out the whole operation on her own, while her mother shopped at the Co-op and her father spent money at the pub.
'Hoy, you young Oi say,' she called out as we approached. 'Where be you a-goen?'
'To the sheepwash,' Kenneth replied.
'You don't warnt to be a-goen there today. You stop along of us and see the band and the percession,' said Our Sarah authoritatively.
'What band?'
'This be 'Orspital Sat'day. They always has it on Saint Swithin's.'
'Are you playing hookey?' asked Kenneth, always bolder at putting direct questions than I was.
'How jer mean?'
'I thought your mother made you work on Saturdays.'
'Us be letten the bedrooms go for thes once. Me dad's en the band.'
'Oh, isn't it the Salvation Army band?'
'No, t'ent, then. 'Tes the town band. They always leads the percession on 'Orspital Sat'day. They haves people dressed up and en masks and they haves boxes what they comes up and rattles at ee, and you puts en an a'penny ef you got one. You got an a'penny, you young Oi say?'
'Yes, but I want it for the fair,' said Kenneth. 'Besides, collections are for grown-ups. They won't expect children to pay.'
So we perched ourselves on the coping of the little bridge which carried the culvert and prepared to watch the procession go by.
'Where ded you get to Wednesday?' asked Our Ern.
'Tea at the manor house.'
'Garn! You never!'
'All right, then. Ask Lionel.'
'What you have for tea?'
'Ordinary bread and butter, currant bread and butter, bloater paste, jam, chocolate biscuits, little jammy buns, plum cake and cups of tea.'
'Garn! Bet ee daren't walk under the bredge,' said Ern, changing the subject. (The culvert under the bridge was no higher than a big drain.)
'I will, if you will,' said Kenneth.
'Garn! Oi done et before. Oi done et a dozen toimes.'
'Oh, yes? You and who else?'
At this moment we heard the sound of the approaching band and I hoped this would deter Kenneth, but it did not. He slid down the bank and waded into the brook. I went to the end of the bridge where he would emerge and waited anxiously. It did not take him long, but I thought he looked very pale when he climbed out and his shorts were soaked to the top of his thighs.
'There you are, then,' he said, walking up to Ern. 'And now you can have this.' With this remark he uppercut Ern and knocked him backwards into the brook. I prepared to take Kenneth's side if Our Sarah decided to intervene, but when Ern crawled out and began to blubber, all she said was:
'Serve ee glad for tellen loies. You never walked under there in your loife. He be twoice the man what you be. Hold yer howlen. Here 'em comes.'
We did not know Sarah's father, so could not pick him out from among the other bandsmen, but we yelled and clapped and Sarah and Ern (who was wet and muddy, but had taken his sister's advice and stopped howling) fell in behind the band, which already had a following of children.
'Come on,' said Kenneth; but I hung back and even retreated on to The Marsh. Not many things frightened me, but people wearing masks always did and still do. There was not much in the way of a procession except for a set of Morris dancers whose caperings did not fit in with the tune the band was playing. There were, however, a dozen or more creatures in the most terrifying get-up I had ever seen except in pictures. They were prehistoric animals, dinosaurs, I suppose, and they looked like demented crocodiles or the sort of giant lizards you might see in a nightmare.
Attached to their claws were collecting-boxes made of tin which they rattled as they pranced along behind the Morris dancers and the band. Although they were nightmarish, they were horribly realistic, too; nothing like the things which can be made nowadays for such films as the Argonauts and Sinbad the Sailor, of course, but dreadfully frightening, all the same. When they came up close and shook their collecting boxes, some people, I am sure, hastily dropped coppers into the rattling tins just to get rid of them.
Personally, I let them go by before I followed on and then I walked very slowly, so that by the time I reached Aunt Kirstie's gate the band, the dancers and the masked importunists were away up the hill and the music was almost inaudible.
They're going up to the manor house,' said Kenneth, 'but Aunt Kirstie says they may be coming back this way. The collectors are medical students. Aren't they grand? They're prehistoric animals, you know. I wish I had a costume like that. Why didn't you come along? One of them picked me up and pretended to bite my head off. It was grand. Some of the women screamed. It was terrific'
'I want my dinner,' I said, 'so I shan't bother to go to the front gate if they do come back this way.' Nothing, I felt, would induce me to encounter those fearsome beings again, and that was before we heard about the murder.
CHAPTER FIVE
MRS KEMPSON PUTS PEN TO PAPER
I am sure of my facts, dear Mrs Bradley. I can assure you of that. I have kept a journal ever since the death of my husband and it is to that which I have referred in beginning this statement to you. The particulars are as concise but, I hope, as complete as it is possible for me to make them. I realise that you have many commitments, but I shall be immensely relieved when you are free to take my brother as your patient. His conduct has become most disquieting and I am in urgent need of professional assistance in determining what is best to be done, both in his interests and my own.
The death of my husband did not, in itself, sadden me. His last illness was prolonged and very distressing, and the termination of his life some ten years ago was a blessed relief to both of us. It was then, as I say, that I took to keeping a journal. It filled a gap and helped to pass a somewhat lonely existence. My only child, a girl, is married and lives mostly abroad, as her husband is attached to one of our embassies. She has two children, Amabel (now at finishing school in Paris) and a young son Lionel, still at his preparatory school.
Sometimes the children come to me for a week or two during the summer, but otherwise my life is lonely and not very interesting, as my only other close relation is my brother Ward, the subject of this analysis. I should add that I have an adopted son, Nigel, but the adoption is not a legal one and there is no question of Nigel's having any claim on me or on the estate. He is supposed to be the son (illegitimate, I fancy) of an actor-manager for whom my late husband, a very wealthy man (fortunately for me!), once acted as an angel-for so, I believe, they call the backers of theatrical enterprises. Nigel's mother, I feel sure, was the leading lady in the production financed by my husband. It sometimes crosses my mind that Nigel may even be the illegitimate son of my husband himself and this actress, as so much was done in putting him to public school and university and then finding him a well-paid sinecure of a job in London with a firm in which my husband had a controlling interest. My husband, in fact, sometimes urged that we should take out adoption papers, but this was a course I steadfastly opposed, as I felt that it was against my daughter's interests.