‘Feeling better now?’ asked Selina, anxiously scrutinising the reddened, tear-streaked features.
‘Much better, thank you. I’m going to be fine. Just let me catch my breath.’
While he almost surreptitiously pressed his thumb on his patient’s wrist to take her pulse, Rolfe said, ‘Now, Mary dear, may I ask if something – I mean to say, something specific – brought on this little attack?’
‘It’s – well, to tell the truth, it’s Roger. I’m so worried.’
‘Worried, Mummy?’ asked Selina, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
In Mary ffolkes’s reply there could be detected an uncharacteristic trace of bitterness.
‘You see – you haven’t noticed. You’ve all become so preoccupied again with your own affairs. And why not? I can’t blame you for that. But not one of you seems to have noticed that Roger has been outside for a long time – really a lot longer than is good for him, particularly in weather like this. It’s started snowing again, quite heavily. I’m a born worrier, I know, but … Oh, forgive me for being so foolish!’
Trubshawe immediately trained his gimlet eye on the grandfather clock. It was one-forty.
‘At exactly what time did he leave?’ he asked Mary ffolkes.
‘But that’s just it,’ she mumbled, wiping away her tears with a lacy handkerchief which she drew from the sleeve of her cardigan – her cardie, as she invariably called it. ‘That’s what’s so frustrating. I don’t know. I just don’t know. It was just Roger off on one of his constitutionals. He’s taken a walk at least once every day of his life. Except – except it seems to me this time he’s been out much longer than usual. I’m sure I’m getting into a dither for nothing, but we women do have our instincts, you know …’
‘Anyone else note what time the Colonel left?’
‘Well, sir –’
‘Yes, Farrar?’
‘You recall, he wanted someone to pop down to the kitchen to check up on the servants?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, one of the kitchen walls has a large bay window and, if you stand beside it listening to all the below-stairs gabbing –’
‘Yes, yes, get on.’
‘Well, it enables you to see anybody leaving the house. And after about fifteen minutes the Colonel did walk past the window, just by the monkey-puzzle tree, with your dog Tobermory trotting along behind him – and it was exactly twelve-twenty by the kitchen clock.’
‘Twelve-twenty, eh?’ Trubshawe paused for a moment of reflection. ‘That would mean he’s been on the moors for quite a bit above an hour.’
He turned again to Mary ffolkes.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs ffolkes, but you understand I’m not what you would call conversant with your husband’s ambulatory habits. Is that a normal length of time for his walk? Or too long? Or what?’
‘Oh dear, Inspector, I really couldn’t say. Obviously, it’s never occurred to me to time one of Roger’s walks. What can I tell you? I just feel in my bones he’s been away too long.’
‘Now, Mary,’ Evadne Mount said to her cheerfully, ‘you really are worrying about nothing at all, you know. I’m certain Roger’s out there taking a long, vigorous walk to clear his head and, what’s more, enjoying every blessed minute of it. I also believe he’ll literally laugh his head off when he learns how alarmed you were. I can almost hear that laugh of his now.’
‘For once I’m in agreement with Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe nodded sagely. ‘It’s perfectly understandable you should be prey to all sorts of anxieties, what with everything that’s taken place here in the last couple of days. And you probably think your husband’s been absent longer than usual for no better reason than that you yourself have been looking out for him. Aren’t you forgetting the proverbial kettle?’
Mary ffolkes blinked.
‘The proverbial kettle?’
‘I mean, about watching it boil,’ Trubshawe explained.
‘Oh yes. Of course. When you put it like that …’ she added doubtfully.
‘But that said and done,’ he went on, ‘I would like to see you have your mind put to rest. So this is what I propose. A small group of us men – you, Don, if you would, Farrar and me – Rolfe here will stay behind in case you have any further need of him, Mrs ffolkes – we’ll collect some torchlights and go out looking for the Colonel. Farrar ought to have some idea of the direction in which he tends to take his walks, so I’m pretty confident we’ll meet him on his way back, possibly even strolling up the driveway as we open the front door. Whatever – at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’s no longer out there on his own. Now how does that sound?’
‘Oh thank you, Inspector,’ said Mary ffolkes, smiling palely. ‘I know I’m being needlessly alarmist, but – yes, I would be awfully grateful.’
‘Good, good,’ replied Trubshawe. ‘Then shall we get going, men – Don, Farrar?’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Evadne Mount declared.
The Chief-Inspector instantly negatived this suggestion.
‘I won’t hear of it, Miss Mount. This is a man’s job, and your place is here with the other ladies.’
‘There you go again! And it’s all pish-posh. I’m as much a man as you are, Trubshawe. Besides, there’s nothing for me to do here – Cora could tell her stories to the back of the Clapham omnibus and never know the difference. No, no, no, you can like it or you can lump it, but I’m coming with you.’
And she did.
Chapter Twelve
The landscape appeared even less inviting than when the Colonel had set out on his constitutional. In fact, it looked as though God had taken a giant eraser to the horizon and simply rubbed it out like a blackboard – or whiteboard. It was now snowing heavily again, and the only sound to be heard, except for the whine of the ebbing wind, was a powdery creaking underfoot. Nothing, however, could have left a less Christmassy impression than the eerily virginal moorland that afternoon. Its whiteness was the whiteness of death, its pallor the hideous pallor of a cadaver.
Even the torchlights which cast their yellow haloes at everyone’s feet illuminated only the stark fact that there was nothing to illuminate. You half-expected the startled eyes of some feral creature to be trapped blinking in their beams – but no. Nothing. There was no such creature to be seen.
Nor – and this was a thought which had no doubt already crossed the mind of everyone in the search party, though no one had shown any readiness to put it into words – nor was the Colonel to be seen. Trubshawe’s parting reassurance to Mary ffolkes, that he might well encounter her husband walking back up the driveway of ffolkes Manor on his way home, had proved, after no more than a few minutes, to have been hopelessly optimistic. Only under the shelter of the monkey-puzzle tree were Roger ffolkes’s unobliterated footprints, preceding Tobermory’s by a couple of yards, visible to the naked eye. But there was only one set of his prints and they were headed in only one direction – away from the house.
It was the Chief-Inspector who eventually broke the silence.
‘The cold getting to you, Miss Mount?’
The authoress was attired in a ratty, moth-eaten tweed coat, one that had seen many better days, a thick woollen scarf wound several times about her neck and the matelot’s tricorne hat which had become her trademark in London’s literary world. This outré ensemble assuredly kept the freezing temperature at bay, but it also gave her a troubling resemblance to one of those madwomen who can be found peddling boxes of matches on the forecourt of Charing Cross Station. Not that she gave a fig about that.
‘Not at all, not at all!’ she protested in a muffled voice still loud enough to echo over the moors. ‘I like the cold.’