It was nearly ten before the Meltons returned — with the same technique. I never even heard Jim change down. He reined the hearse back on its haunches with six inches between the bumpers and a wheelbarrow.
Mr. and Mrs. Melton were thoroughly relaxed by double whiskies, and cackling over their success. On arrival at Gorble’s retreat, Jim had kept firmly in his part of driver, saying that he wouldn’t come in, that his old woman wouldn’t confide in him what it was all about and he didn’t want to know either.
As soon as she was alone with Fred, Mrs. Melton told him that a lady had given her an urgent message for he-knew-who. Gorble showed no surprise, which proved that she was on the right lines. He said that the gentleman wasn’t coming back.
Mrs. Melton had then clothed herself in vague gipsy portentousness and delivered a warning that no good would come of it all. She invented a husband who was due back unexpectedly on Saturday from the Assizes. I gathered from her incoherent chuckles that he hadn’t been in the dock but was one of Her Majesty’s Judges.
This frightened Gorble into indecision. He admitted that he could pass a message, but refused. It wasn’t worth his while, he said. The gentleman had paid him well, and there was more money promised if orders were obeyed. Fred expected to receive a telephone call —he wouldn’t say where or when —and was forbidden to open his mouth at all except to give the answers to two questions: yes or no.
Eventually, to get rid of her, he told her what the two questions were. Had anybody been making inquiries? Was a certain person still living where he did?
“Ah, him at the Warren!” Mrs. Melton exclaimed.
That apparently satisfied Gorble that she knew more about the business than he did. He said he didn’t care to be hanging around Hernsholt asking silly questions, and would she get the information for him?
The pair of them waved away my thanks and apologized for stopping on the road. They reckoned I’d be glad to see them.
“We ‘aven’t give him no trouble,” protested the eldest daughter. “We’ve been ‘aving fun.”
“Aye. In the shed. I can see that,” said Jim severely. “One day you’ll get ‘urt burrowin’ in all that junk.”
“What’s the matter with the shed?” I asked.
“Knocked down a tarpaulin and bust a flowerpot.”
“Let’s go and see.”
As soon as I had Jim outside, I told him we had never been in the shed and stopped him going straight to it.
“Did you lock the door when you put the van away?”
“I did. Somebody in there, you think?”
It was most unlikely; but if the rain had driven an observer down into the shed for shelter, Jim’s sudden and dashing return would certainly have startled him. He had no time to get out of the door but he could have dived into the litter of odds and ends at the back.
“Switch the light on,” I said, “and don’t come any further. And don’t say anything which could give away what we’re doing — make out we’re looking for a handy plank.”
I did not tell him that I needed him as a witness in case I had to fire in self-defense. I knew he distrusted the box as much as the dock.
Jim switched on the light and I walked through his stores with my hand in my pocket. There was indeed a broken flowerpot on the floor, and a tarpaulin had fallen — if that wasn’t its usual place — on the top of two upright rolls of wire. Behind them was possible cover for a man, provided nobody looked for him.
“This will do the job,” I said, extracting a piece of two-by-four from a pile of loose timber.
We shut the shed and went out. And yet I felt my enemy. That is difficult to analyze. I suppose that only years of living on one’s nerves can teach the difference between imagination which is out of control and the quite dependable instinct of the hunted.
The instinct at any rate was strong enough for me to search about for some logical reason which could justify it. I asked what the stables at Woburn were like.
Jim described a Victorian farmhouse with its back facing a yard round which, on the other three sides, were stables and cowsheds with a second story of lofts over them.
“When you were leading them on to tell you about fforde-Crankshaw, where actually were you?”
“Bang under the gable with the clock in it.”
“What’s up there?”
“Nothing except rats, I’d say.”
It was a far-fetched theory; but what about that vanishing while the horse was being unsaddled? If Mr. fforde-Crankshaw were wanted by name or description, the last place the police would look for him would be the livery stables. And if he had decided to he up there for a day he could probably see and possibly overhear all visitors to the yard.
“When you were talking to the chaps there, did you give your address?”
“They knows it,” Jim replied. “Ah, but didn’t I? Bought a nice load of manure, you see. Mushroom farmers, they’ll pay anything for well-rotted stuff. Yes, they had a new man, and I told him the nearest way.”
It was working out. Mr. fforde-Crankshaw, scenting danger but partially convinced he was imagining it, must have been very tempted to check up. There had been no police inquiries, but who was Jim? What was behind his interest?
There was one grave objection to this picture of my opponent’s board. He must have calculated on leaving the stable lofts after dark. Yet he had left in broad daylight. Was that possible without being seen and inviting questions?
“What’s behind the gable with the clock in it?”
“Company director’s place it was once,” Jim said, “before he went bust and ‘ad to run for it with all the money he’d lost farming. Other side of the stables is all his fancy trees and rhododendrons.”
That too fitted. It was now worthwhile to test the only available fact which could prove my hypothesis — or, if not worthwhile, it had to be done. I told Jim to stay where he was, and I would find his missing spade for him. I would have liked to have him alongside me, but it was not a fair risk for the father of a family —even though I was pretty sure the tiger would not have returned to the sandpit from which he could no longer see anything at all.
I crawled up the slope behind the shed and put my head cautiously over the edge of the depression. The working floor of sand, some eight or nine feet beneath me, was bare and the light still good enough to distinguish any object on the flat surface. The spade was there all right.
To see anything else I should have had to go down with a torch. That was asking for trouble, since I could not know what was on the opposite side of the excavation; so I contented myself with taking a close look at the wet, packed sand within a few feet of my nose. I found fresh footmarks — of a rather pointed shoe which certainly did not belong to any of the Melton family. For the weight of the tiger it was a small foot. The tracks pointed straight downhill for the shed until they were wiped out by the furrows of my knees and forearms.
It was all very interesting, but of no immediate use. Tiger impulsively but sensibly reconnoiters Jim’s cottage from above. Finds convenient sandpit for observation post. Hunch pays off, for he hasn’t been there long before he sees me arrive. Is tempted by spade which he can approach without being seen. A bad mistake, though doubtless it would help if my body wasn’t found for a week. Shelters from rain in shed. Could easily have explained that was just what he was doing and got away with it. But his reconstruction of my unseen board is alarming. And Jim is still an enigma. So when he is nearly caught he first hides and then clears out.