The House on the Strand

  "Well, well," said the lawyer, "the valuer might put a price of sixpence apiece on the jars. What do you say, Willis?"

  The biophysicist ventured a smile. "I would think," he said, "that Professor Lane's mother may have preserved fruit here in former days."

  "A still-room, didn't they call them?" laughed the lawyer. "The still-room maid would make preserves for the whole year. Look at the hooks in the ceiling! They probably hung the meat here too. Great sides of ham. Well, Mrs. Young, this will be your province, not your husband's. I recommend an electric washing-machine in the corner to save your laundry bills. Expensive to install, but it will pay for itself in a couple of years, with a young family."

  He turned, still laughing, back into the passage, and we followed. I locked the door behind me. Willis, who was hovering in the rear, bent to pick up something from the stone floor. It was a label from one of the jars. He gave it to me without a word, and I put it in my pocket. Then we tramped upstairs to inspect the remainder of the house, Herbert Dench making the remarkable suggestion that if we wanted to turn the property into an investment we might split the whole place up into flatlets for summer visitors, keeping for our own use the bedroom suite with the view of the sea. He was still extolling the idea to Vita as we wandered round the garden. I saw Willis glance at his watch.

  "You must have had about enough of us," he said. "I told Dench on the way down that we would call in at Divisional Headquarters at Liskeard and answer any questions the police might want to put to us. If you'd telephone for a taxi we could go there straight away, and have dinner in Liskeard later before catching the night train."

  "I'll drive you myself," I said. "Hold on, there's something I want to show you." I went upstairs, and after a few minutes came back with the walking-stick. "This was near Magnus's body. It belongs with the others in the London flat. Do you think they will let me keep it?"

  "Surely," he said, "and the other sticks too. I'm so glad you've got this house, by the way, and I hope you won't part with it."

  "I don't intend to."

  Vita and Dench were still a short distance off on the terrace.

  "I think," said Willis quietly, "we had better tell more or less the same story at the inquest. Magnus was an enthusiastic walker, and if he wanted some exercise after hours in the train it was typical of him."

  "Yes," I said.

  "Incidentally, a young friend of mine, a student, has been looking up historical stuff for Magnus at the BM and the Public Record Office. Do you want him to continue?"

  I hesitated. "It might be useful. Yes... If he turns anything up ask him to send it to me here."

  "I'll do that."

  I noticed for the first time an expression of loss, of emptiness, behind the horn-rimmed spectacles.

  "What are your own plans?" I asked.

  "I shall go on just the same, I suppose," he said. "Try to carry on something of Magnus's work. But it will be tough going. As boss and colleague he will be irreplaceable. You probably realize that."

  "I do."

  The others came up, and nothing further was said between Willis and myself. After a cup of tea, which none of us wanted but Vita insisted on getting, Willis suggested the move to Liskeard. I knew now why Magnus had chosen him as senior member of his staff. Professional competence apart, loyalty and discretion were the qualities behind that mouse-like appearance.

  Once we were in the car, Dench asked if we might cover part of the route Magnus had taken on the Friday night. I drove them along the Stonybridge lane past Treverran farm and up to the gate near the top of the hill, and pointed across the fields down to the tunnel.

  "Incredible," Dench murmured, "quite incredible. And dark, too, at the time. I don't like it, you know."

  "How do you mean?" I asked.

  "Well, if it doesn't make sense to me it won't to the Coroner, or to the jury. They're bound to see something behind it."

  "What sort of thing?"

  "Some sort of compulsion to get to that tunnel. And once he found it we know what happened."

  "I don't agree," said Willis. "As you say, it was dark at the time, or nearly dark. The tunnel wouldn't have shown up from here, or the line either. I believe he had the idea to go down into the valley, perhaps take a look at that farmhouse from the other side, and when he got to the bottom of the field the railway viaduct interfered with his view. He scrambled up the bank to find out the lie of the land, and the train hit him."

  "It's possible. But what an extraordinary thing to do."

  "Extraordinary to the legal mind," said Willis, "but not to Professor Lane. He was an explorer in every sense of the word."

  After I had landed them safely at the police headquarters I turned back for home. Home... The word had a new significance. It was my home now. The place belonged to me, as it had once belonged to Magnus. The strain that had been upon me through the day began to lift, and the weight of depression, too. Magnus was dead; I should never see him again, never hear his voice, rejoice in his company or be aware of his presence in the background of my life, but the link between us would never be broken because the home that had been his was mine. Therefore I could not lose him. Therefore I should not be alone.

  I passed the entrance to Boconnoc, which in that other time had been Bockenod, before descending the hill to Lostwithiel, and thought of poor Sir John Carminowe, already infected with the dreaded smallpox, riding beside Joanna Champernoune's clumsy chariot on that windy October night in 1331, to die a month later, having enjoyed his position as Keeper of Restormel and Tremerton Castles for barely seven months. On the other side of Lostwithiel I took the road to Treesmill, so that I could have a closer view of the farms situated on the opposite side of the valley from the railway. Strickstenton was on the left-hand side of the narrow road, and, from the brief glimpse I had from the car, of considerable age, and what a tourist brochure would describe as "picturesque." The pasture land belonging to it sloped downwards to a wood.

  Once I was out of sight of the house I got out of the car and looked across to the railway on the other side of the valley. The tunnel showed up plainly, and even as I watched a train emerged like a straggling snake, yellow-headed, evil, and wound its way below Treverran Farm and disappeared down to the lower valley. The freight train that had killed Magnus had appeared from the opposite direction, climbing the rising ground and vanishing into the tunnel, a reptile seeking cover in the underworld, as Magnus, who had neither seen nor heard it, dragged himself, dying, to the hut above. I drove on down the twisting lane, noting on my left the turning which, I judged, led past Colwith Farm to the bottom of the valley and what remained of the original river stream. At some time, before the railway cut into the land, there would have been a track leading from Great Treverran across the valley to its smaller neighbor, Little Treverran. Either farm might be the Tregest of the Carminowes.

  I went on down to Treesmill, and up the hill to the callbox in Tywardreath. I dialed the Kilmarth number, and Vita answered.

  "Darling," I said, "it seems rather rude to leave Dench and Willis on their own in Liskeard, so I think I'll hang around until they have finished with the police, and then have dinner with them."

  "Oh well," she said, "if you must. But don't be late. No need to wait for the train."

  "Probably not," I told her. "It depends how much there is to discuss."

  "All right. I'll expect you when I see you."

  I rang off, and returned to the car. Then I drove back again to Treesmill and up the twisting lane, and this time took the turning that led to Colwith. The lane went on, past the farm, as I had thought it would, becoming steeper, and finally petered out in a small water-splash at the bottom of the hill. To the left, across a cattle-grid, was a narrow entrance to Little Treverran. The buildings themselves were out of sight, but a board with lettering on it said: "W. P. Kelly. Woodworker."

  I risked the water-splash and parked the car, out of sight of the lane, in the field beyond, close to a line of trees and only a fe
w hundred yards from the railway.

  I looked at my watch. It was a little after five. I opened the boot of the car and took out the walking-stick, which I had primed, in the dressing-room, with the last of bottle A, before showing it to John Willis in the library.

  19

  It was snowing. The soft flakes fell upon my head and my hands, and the world all about me was suddenly white, no lush green summer grass, no line of trees, and the snow fell steadily, blotting the hills from sight. There were no farm-buildings anywhere near me--nothing but the black river, about twenty foot broad where I was standing, and the snow, which had drifted high on either bank, only to slither into the water as the mass caved in from the weight, revealing the muddied earth beneath. It was bitter cold; not the swift, cutting blast that sweeps across high ground, but the dank chill of a valley where winter sunshine does not penetrate, nor cleansing wind. The silence was the more deadly, for the river rippled past me without sound, and the stunted willows and alder growing beside it looked like mutes with outstretched arms, grotesquely shapeless because of the burden of snow they bore upon their limbs. And all the while the soft flakes fell, descending from a pall of sky that merged with the white land beneath.

  My mind, usually clear when I had taken the drug, was stupefied, baffled; I had expected something akin to the autumn day that I remembered from the previous time, when Bodrugan had been drowned, and Roger carried the dripping body in his arms towards Isolda. Now I was alone, without a guide; only the river at my feet told me I was in the valley.

  I followed its course upstream, groping like a blind man, knowing by instinct that if I kept the river on my left I must be moving north, and that somewhere the strip of water would narrow, the banks would close, and I should find a bridge or ford to take me to the other side. I had never felt more helpless or lost. Time, in this other world, had hitherto been calculated by the height of the sun in the sky, or, as when I traversed the Lampetho valley at night, by the stars overhead; but now, in this silence and beneath the falling snow, there was no means of gauging whether it was morning or afternoon. I was lost, not in the present, with familiar landmarks close at hand, the reassuring presence of the car, but in the past.

  The first sound broke the silence, a splash in the river ahead, and moving swiftly I saw an otter dive from the further bank and swim his way upstream. As he did so a dog followed him, and then a second, and immediately there were some half-dozen of them yelping and crying at the river's brink, splashing their way into the water in chase of the otter. Someone shouted, the shout taken up by another, and a group of men came running towards the river through the falling snow, shouting, laughing, encouraging the dogs, and I saw they were coming from a belt of trees just beyond me, where the river curved. Two of them scrambled down the bank into the water, thrashing it with their sticks, and a third, holding a long whip, cracked it in the air, stinging the ear of one of the dogs still crouching on the bank, which plunged after its companions.

  I drew nearer, to watch them, and saw how the river narrowed a hundred yards or so beyond, while on the left, at the entrance to a copse of trees, the land fell away and the stream formed a sheet of water like a miniature lake, a film of ice upon its surface.

  Somehow the men and the dogs, between them, drove the hunted otter into the gulley that fed the lake, and in a moment they were upon him, the dogs crying, the men thrashing with their sticks. The dogs floundered as the ice cracked, the surface crimsoned, and blood spattered the film of white above black water as the otter, seized between snapping jaws, was dragged from the hole he sought, and torn to pieces where the ice held firm.

  The lake can have held little depth, for the men, hallooing and calling to the dogs, strode forward on to it, careless of the crack appearing suddenly from one end to the other. Foremost among them was the man with the long whip, who stood out from his fellows because of his height, and his dress as well, a padded surcoat buttoned to the throat and a high beaver hat upon his head, shaped like a cone.

  "Drive them clear," he shouted, "to the bank on the further side. I'd as soon lose the lot of you as one of these," and bending suddenly, among the pack of yelping hounds, he lifted what remained of the otter from the midst of them and flung it across the lake to the snow-covered verge. The dogs, balked of their prey, struggled and slid across the ice to retrieve it where it now lay, while the men, less nimble than the animals, and hampered by their clothing, floundered and splashed in the breaking ice, shouting, cursing, jerkins and hoods caked white with the falling snowflakes.

  The scene was part brutal, part macabre, for the man with the conical hat, once he knew his hounds were safe, turned his attention, laughing, to his companions in misfortune. While he himself was wet now to the thigh, he at least had boots to protect his feet, while his attendants, as I supposed they were, had some of them lost their shoes when the ice broke, and were thrashing about with frozen hands in useless search of them. Their master, laughing still, regained the bank, and, lifting his conical hat a moment, shook the snowflakes clear before replacing it once more. I recognized the ruddy face and the long jaw, although he was some twenty feet away. It was Oliver Carminowe.

  He was staring hard in my direction, and although reason told me he could not see me, and I had no part in his world, the way he stood there, motionless, his head turned towards me, disregarding his grumbling attendants, gave me a strange feeling of unease, almost of fear.

  "If you want to have speech with me, come across and say so," he called. The shock of what I thought discovery sent me forward to the lake's edge, and then, with relief, I saw Roger standing beside me to become, as it were, my spokesman and my cover. How long he had been there I did not know. He must have walked behind me along the riverbank.

  "Greetings to you, Sir Oliver!" he cried. "The drifts are shoulder-high above Treesmill, and your side of the valley too, so Rob Rosgof's widow told me at the ferry. I wondered how you fared, and the lady Isolda too."

  "We fare well enough," answered the other, "with food enough to last a siege of several weeks, which God forbid. The wind may change within a day or two and bring us rain. Then, if the road does not flood, we shall leave for Carminowe. As to my lady, she stays in her chamber half the day sulking, and gives me little of her company." He spoke contemptuously, watching Roger all the while, who moved nearer to the riverbank. "Whether she follows me to Carminowe is her concern," he continued. "My daughters are obedient to my will, if she is not. Joanna is already promised to John Petyt of Ardeva, and, although a child still, prinks and preens before the glass as if she were already a bride of fourteen years and ripe for her strapping husband. You may tell her godmother Lady Champernoune so, with my respects. She may wish a like fortune for herself before many years have passed." He burst out laughing, and then, pointing to the hounds scavenging beneath the trees, said, "If you have no fear of fording the river where the plank has rotted, I will find an otter's paw which you may present to Lady Champernoune with my compliments. It may remind her of her brother Otto, being wet and bloody, and she can nail it on the walls of Trelawn as a memento to his name. The other paw I will deliver to my own lady for a similar purpose, unless the dogs have swallowed it."

  He turned his back and walked towards the trees, calling to his hounds, while Roger, moving forward up the riverbank, and I beside him, came to a rough bridge, made out of lengths of log bound together, the whole slippery with the fallen snow, and partly sagging in the water. Oliver Carminowe and his attendants stood watching as Roger set foot upon the rotting bridge, and when it collapsed beneath his weight and he slipped and fell, soaking himself above his thighs, they roared in unison, expecting to see him turn again and claw the bank. But he strode on, the water coming nearly to his waist, and reached the other side, while I, dry-shod, followed in his wake. He walked directly to the edge of the copse where Carminowe stood, whip in hand, and said, "I will deliver the otter's paw, if you will give it to me."

  I thought he would receive a lash fr
om the whip across his face, and I believe he expected the same himself, but Carminowe, smiling, his whip raised, lashed suddenly among the dogs instead, and whipping them from the torn body of the otter took the knife from his belt, and cut off two of the remaining paws.

  "You have more stomach than my steward at Carminowe," he said. "I respect you for that, if for nothing else. Here, take the paw, and hang it in your kitchen at Kylmerth, among the silver pots and platters you have doubtless stolen from the Priory. But first walk up the hill with us and pay your respects to Lady Carminowe in person. She may prefer a man, once in a while, to the tame squirrel she occupies her days with."

  Roger took the paw from him and put it in his pouch, saying nothing, and we entered the copse and began threading our way through the snow-laden trees, walking steadily uphill, but whether to right or left I had no idea, having lost all sense of direction, knowing only that the river was behind us and the snow was falling still.

  A track packed high with snow on either side led to a stone-built house, tucked snugly against the hill; and, while Carminowe's attendants still straggled in our rear, he himself kicked open the door before us and we entered a square hall, to be greeted at once by the house-dogs, fawning upon him, and the two children, Joanna and Margaret, whom I had last seen riding their ponies across the Treesmill ford on a summer's afternoon. A third, somewhat older than the others, about sixteen, whom I took for one of Carminowe's daughters by his first marriage, stood smiling by the hearth, nor did she embrace him, but pouted with a sort of petulant grace when she saw he was not alone.

  "My ward, Sybell, who seeks to teach my children better manners than their mother," Carminowe said.

  The steward bowed and turned to the two children, who, after having kissed their father, came to welcome him. The elder, Joanna, had grown, and showed some sign of dawning self-consciousness, as her father had said, by blushing, and tossing her long hair out of her eyes, and giggling, but the younger, with still some years to go before she too ripened for the marriage-market, struck out her small hand to Roger and smote him on the knee.