“You get what you pay for, on the whole,” I said.
Most bruises faded within a week, Martin had said, and also this time on the Monday I got a doctor to stick together the worst of the cuts with small adhesive strips.
“I suppose you walked into another black-masked door,” guessed Constable Dodd, horrified. “Rose may not frighten you but, from what I’ve heard, she’d terrify me.”
“Rose didn’t bother about a mask,” I said, putting together a spicy rice supper on Monday evening in the kitchen of my house on the hill. “Do you like garlic?”
“Not much. What are you planning to do about Rose Payne? You should go to the Taunton police and make a complaint against her for assault. That wound might even constitute GBH.”
Grievous Bodily Harm, I thought. Not half as grievous as she had intended.
“What would I tell them — a thin woman beat me up so a friend of mine with a criminal record smashed down her front door and set his dogs on her?”
She was not amused but simply repeated, “So what are you going to do about her?”
I didn’t answer directly. I said instead, “Tomorrow I’m going to Lynton in Devon and I’d rather she didn’t know.” I frowned over a green pepper. “It’s a wise man as knows his enemies,” I asserted, “and I do know our Rose.”
“In the biblical sense?”
“God forbid!”
“But Rose Payne is only one person,” Catherine said, drinking fizzy water routinely. “There were four black masks, you said.”
I nodded. “Norman Osprey, bookmaker, he was Number Two, and Ed Payne, who was Martin Stukely’s racetrack valet and is Rose’s father, he was Number Three and he’s sorry for it, and all those three know I recognized them. One other seemed familiar to me at the time but I can’t have been right. He was a clutcher setting me up for the others and I think of him as Number Four. He was behind me most of the time.”
Catherine listened in silence and seemed to be waiting. Skidding now and then across a half-formed recollection went the so-far unidentified figure that I called simply Blackmask Four, and I remembered him most for the inhumanity he took to his task. It had been Norman Osprey who’d smashed my watch, but it had been Black mask Four who’d bunched my fingers for him. For all Norman Osprey’s awesome strength, in retrospect it was Blackmask Four who’d scared me most, and who now, eight days later, intruded fearsomely into my dreams, nightmares in which Blackmask Four intended to throw me into the 1800 degrees Fahrenheit of the liquid glass in the tank in the furnace.
That night, while Constable Dodd slept peacefully in my arms, it was she whom Blackmask Four threw to a burning death.
I awoke sweating and cursing Rose Payne with words I’d rarely used before, and I felt more reluctant than ever to leave Catherine to the risks of her plainclothes operation.
“Come back safe yourself this time,” she said worriedly, zooming off in the dawn, and I, with every intention of carrying out her instructions, walked down to my blameless furnace and did the day’s work before my three helpers arrived.
The day before they had joked about my recurring Monday bruises, which Irish had sworn were the result of pub brawls. I hadn’t disillusioned them, and on the Tuesday cheerfully left them practicing dishes for the day while I walked out of the village for a mile to catch a bus.
Neither Rose nor Gina, nor anyone else I knew, came into sight, and I felt, when I disembarked outside a busy newsstand in the next town and climbed into another prearranged car with driver, that there could be no one on my tail. Tom Pigeon, who had designed “the simple exit for glassblowers,” had begged me at least to take one of his dogs with me, if I wouldn’t take him. Hadn’t I been bashed enough? he asked. Hadn’t I needed him to rescue me twice? Wasn’t I now being insane to insist on traveling alone?
Yes, quite likely, I agreed. So give me advice.
Thanks to him, then, I went to Lynton on the North Devon coast unmolested, and in the electoral register found the full address of Doctor Adam Force, in the Valley of Rocks Road.
The chief disappointment to this successful piece of research was that there was no one in the house.
I knocked and rang and waited and tried again, but the tall gray old building had a dead air altogether and an empty-sounding reverberation when I tried the back door. The neighbors weren’t helpful. One was out, and one was deeply deaf. A passing housewife said she thought Doctor Force worked in Bristol during the week and came to Lynton only for the weekends. Not so, contradicted a shuffling old man angrily waving a walking stick; on Tuesdays, Doctor Force could be found up Hollerday Hill, at the nursing home.
The old man’s anger, explained the housewife, was a form of madness. Doctor Force went up to Hollerday Phoenix House every Tuesday, insisted the walking stick.
My driver — “Call me Jim” — long-sufferingly reversed and returned to the town’s center when the double bull’s-eye more or less left us both laughing. Doctor Force worked in Bristol half the time and opened up his Valley of Rocks dreary house on Sundays and Mondays, and went up to Hollerday Phoenix House on Tuesdays. A small girl with plaited blond hair pointed out the road to Hollerday Phoenix House, then told us not to go there because of the ghosts.
Ghosts?
The Phoenix House was haunted, didn’t we know?
The Town Hall scoffed at the idea of ghosts, afraid of deterring holiday visitors in spring and summer.
That useful person, ‘A Spokesman,’ explained that the mansion built by Sir George Newnes on Hollerday Hill had been totally arsonized in 1913 by persons still unknown and later blown up as part of an army exercise. The Phoenix House recently built close to the grown-over ruins was a private nursing home. There were positively no ghosts. Doctor Force had patients in the nursing home whom he visited on Tuesdays.
My driver, who believed in the supernatural, cravenly balked at driving up to the Hollerday Phoenix House, but swore he would wait for me to walk there and back, which I believed, as I hadn’t yet paid him.
I thanked ‘A Spokesman’ for his help. And could he describe Doctor Force, so I would know him if I saw him?
“Oh yes,” ‘A Spokesman’ said, “you’d know him easily. He has very blue eyes, and a short white beard, and he’s wearing orange socks.”
I blinked.
“He can’t see red or green,” ‘A Spokesman’ said. “He’s color-blind.”
7
I took the quiet old back way through the woods, climbing the overgrown gently sloping carriage road that thoughtful Sir George Newnes had had blasted through rock to save his horses having to haul a coach up a heart-straining incline to his house.
On that January Tuesday I walked alone through the trees. Traffic motored sparsely along a modern road on the other side of the hill, raising not even a distant hum on its way to the new complex that had risen on the memory of the old.
There were no birds where I walked; no song. It was dark even in daylight, the close-growing evergreens crowding overhead. My feet trod noiselessly on fallen fir needles and in places there were still bare upright slabs of raw gray blasted rock. Atmospherically the hundred-year-old path raised goose bumps. There were ruins of a tennis court where long ago people had laughed and played in another world. Eerie, I thought, was the word for it, but I saw no ghosts.
I came down to Hollerday Phoenix House from above, as “A Spokesman” had foretold, and saw that much of the roof was covered with large metal-framed panes of glass, which opened and closed like roofs of greenhouses. The glass of course interested me — it was thick float glass tinted to filter out ultraviolet A and B rays of sunlight — and I thought of the departed days of sanataria, where people with tuberculosis most unromantically coughed their lives away in the vain hope that airy sunshine would cure them.