This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and therefore O’Hara and Laura remained under cover of some bushes whilst Gascoigne walked up to the gate. By good luck the aged gardener was not more than ten yards away. He was standing on the brickwork of a tiny culvert which carried the weedy drive across a brook, and was gazing into the water and scratching his mossy-looking thigh.
‘That there old water-rat,’ he said, without turning his head, ‘do be rousing his whiskers at all of us. Catch a holt of him I don’t somehow seem to, seemingly.’
‘Tough luck,’ said Gascoigne, joining the ancient man, putting his hands in his trouser pockets and peering sympathetically into the ditch.
‘Live under that arch, he do, and laugh his way through against all of us,’ the old man continued. ‘And my fowls fattening, and him with his eye on ’em like he had on the chicks last August twelvemonth, was a Sunday night, as I remember.’
‘I suppose that was before the new owners took over?’ said Gascoigne. ‘I mean, they haven’t always been here, have they?’
‘New owners?’ The old man spat. ‘Tenants, um be, not owners. Film people. Money and no sense. Ice by the cartload for their drinks. If beer wants ice, must be funny beer, says I. And if sperrits wants ice, give me water. Neither Englishmen nor Yankees, them don’t be.’ Upon saying this, he turned his head and gave Gascoigne a long look.
‘I suppose they have lots of visitors,’ remarked the young man, kicking a stone from the culvert into the ditch.
‘Not so many. Secret proceshesses, they says. Trade rivals, they says. Keep out, they says. Well, there y’are. Mr. Concaverty, round at the lodge, he has his orders, and, being in their service already, before they comes here, no doubt he carries ’em out. But this old water-rat, drat him, ain’t nobody’s business but mine. Mr. Concaverty, he don’t keep fowls. He don’t know this old water-rat like I do.’
He picked up a bit of stick, and, stepping from the culvert on to the bank of the ditch, poked industriously and with considerable vigour underneath the arch. Gascoigne waited a moment or two. Then he said gently, but with a persistence which Laura would have approved:
‘What about some beer that’s not iced?’
By way of answer, the old man took off his cap and held it up. Gascoigne dropped half a crown into it. The old man scooped up the coin, bit it, nodded indulgently, said that that was a bit of all right, and ambled off.
‘Concaverty!’ said Laura, as soon as Gascoigne had told the others the gist of the conversation. ‘We must get to him before the old man gets round there. And, this time, it had better be me! We don’t want them comparing notes, and thinking you’ve been snooping, although, of course, you have.’
‘Do you think…?’ began O’Hara. But Laura insisted that her idea was the right one, and Gascoigne was inclined to agree.
‘We must get what we can,’ he said gloomily.
All three young people were conscious of a feeling of slight flatness. If the inmates of the house with the four dead trees were film people, all idiosyncrasies on their part immediately lost any tendency to seem dramatic, improbable, lethal or, in fact, at all exciting, and it was a deflated although outwardly debonair Laura who marched up to the lodge and enquired for Mr. Concaverty.
An older woman opened the door, and one whom Laura again did not fail to recognize. It was the caretaker from O’Hara’s mysterious farm. Laura, who was not altogether unprepared for this, since some connection between that farm and the house with the four dead trees by this time could be taken for granted, smiled naturally and asked for a bucket of water. She needed it, she said, for the car.
The woman supplied it without a word. Laura thanked her, took the bucket of water to where she had left her friends, set it down and told them the news.
‘I don’t see how to ask again for Concaverty,’ she added. It proved unnecessary to do so, however, for, when she returned the empty pail and made a remark upon the weather, the woman asked curiously:
‘What did you want with Mr. Concaverty?’
‘Actually, to know whether my friends—a man and his son—a boy of about sixteen—have left the house yet. We know they came, but don’t know how long they intended to stay.’
‘Oh, them!’ said the woman. She looked at Laura curiously. ‘Ain’t you the young lady I put on the way to Little Dorsett? Would these here be friends of yours, then?’
‘Well, we are staying at the same hotel in Slepe, and hoped to meet them for tea,’ explained Laura, seizing upon the first excuse that came into her head.
‘You’ll not see them at tea to-day,“ said the woman decidedly. ’They’re to stay a night or two to see the Druids dance. It’s the great night around these parts, and, films or no films, everybody, so they tells me, goes up at midnight to see it.’
‘The Druids? How queer,’ said Laura, racking her brain for some means of prolonging the conversation, but finding none that she thought it would be wise to employ.
‘Oh, there’s things queerer than that,’ said the woman, ‘and I would advise you to keep clear of them.’ She lowered her voice to a confidential huskiness, and added, ‘And this Mr. Concaverty, too. You’re a real young lady, you are, and not for the likes of him, though he pays my wages.’
She shut the door on these words, and Laura walked back to the others.
‘I’ve put my foot in it,’ she said gloomily. ‘I’ve made her suspicious, I think.’ She recounted the conversation. O’Hara whistled. Gascoigne said:
‘We’ll see the Druids dance, too. That must be on the ninth of September. But, I think, not you, Laura dear. This sounds to me like men’s work.’
‘Sez you!’ retorted Laura with her usual force and inelegance. ‘And let’s drive on. I want to think, and I think better in a vehicle that’s moving.’
The first result of her thinking was a letter to Mrs. Bradley which she sent to the house in Kensington, knowing that it would be forwarded at once if Mrs. Bradley were not at home.
‘Essential to see Druids dance,’ wrote Laura with telegraphic brevity. ‘Don’t write back to say not. Mind made up. Should appreciate blessing on enterprise, and will promise to duck if guns brought into play. Hope you are well. Come back soon. Deep doings at Slepe Rock re man and stone-slinging kid. Regards. Laura.’
Mrs. Bradley received this missive whilst she was at breakfast on the following morning.
‘Dear, dear!’ she observed to her maid Célestine who was removing the plate which had held Mrs. Bradley’s egg on toast. ‘What do you think Miss Menzies is up to now?’
‘That passes comprehension,’ said Célestine, whose attitude to Laura was one of the amused admiration of a human being for a young and lively elephant. ‘That one, she has of the most surprising stomach.’
‘And we, as we get older, have no stomach at all, surprising or otherwise,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘Ah, well! Tell Henri I shall be in to lunch and that there will be two gentlemen as well… my son Ferdinand, in fact, and the Assistant Commissioner of police. Will the butcher have offal, do you think?’
‘It will be surprising if not,’ replied Célestine with vigour. ‘Again, Henri has a chicken. It is from America, that land of the loan. It is frozen, like all the assets. I speak of the chicken, you understand.’
Mrs. Bradley cackled. Lunch consisted of very good giblet soup, some poached turbot, chicken en casserole and devilled pigs’ liver on toast.
‘It is for the gentlemen, this lunch,’ said Célestine, sniffing slightly. ‘Ladies are less appetizing.’