Head of a Traveller Read online

  Nigel laughed. ‘Oh, you mustn’t ride my hobby-horse too hard.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he is. He rescued my father once from the bull we used to have. Stood right in its path, and beat it off with a stick. Jolly good show by the little imp. But he’s strong as a lion.’

  ‘Strong and silent. Is he completely dumb, in fact?’

  ‘To the best of our knowledge. Why?’

  ‘When I was here in June, your stepmother talked about him as a Fool who said such wise things. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Oh, that’s just Janet’s nonsense. Haven’t you ever heard a doting woman say exactly the same words about her dog.’

  ‘I see.’

  They fell silent as Finny Black approached. He laid the tea-table under the cedar tree beside them, without his usual nods and becks and wreathed smiles. The dwarf almost scowled at Nigel: there were beads of sweat on his little, hideous face, and his movements lacked their usual deftness.

  ‘Looks as if there might be a thunderstorm before long,’ said Lionel, mopping his forehead. ‘Phew, it’s close, isn’t it?’

  The front door of Plash Meadow opened. Robert and Janet Seaton emerged. As they approached across the lawn, a piercing momentary qualm transfixed Nigel Strangeways. He had observed that the poet was carrying his head under his arm.

  ‘Not bad, is it?’ said Robert Seaton, carefully placing the head on the table.

  Mara Torrance had done something to it since Nigel saw it last. The evil had gone out of it; but so had the vitality, too. It was now a very respectable, dead likeness.

  ‘I’ll ring the handbell if I want some more hot water,’ said Janet to Finny Black, who was staring at the head with a wild, intent, puzzled expression. He lolloped away, glancing back over his shoulder several times.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let Finny see it,’ said Lionel. ‘It might upset him. This afternoon, particularly.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Robert robustly. ‘Why should it? How d’you like it, Strangeways?’

  ‘Well, it’s a good photograph.’

  Janet Seaton bent her prominent eyes upon him. ‘But the spirit is not there. I agree entirely with you. A piece of laborious, insipid realism, nothing more. It would do very well for the Royal Academy.’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t be hard on Mara,’ said Robert, laughing. ‘After all, you challenged her yourself to produce a good likeness. It’s not her usual line at all.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have undertaken it, then,’ replied Janet Seaton censoriously. ‘Are you interested in the plastic arts, Mr Strangeways?’

  ‘Moderately.’

  The remarkable woman went off into a lecture on non-representational sculpture, thickly larded with expressions like ‘cubic factors’, ‘pure meaning’, ‘plane, volume and tension’, ‘dynamic correlation of masses’, ‘hyperconscious equilibrium.’

  There was a respectful silence round the tea-table when she had finished, broken at last by her husband saying:

  ‘Is that—er—what you’re going to tell the Women’s Institute on Saturday?’

  ‘I shall simplify it for them, naturally,’ his wife replied, with a lack of humour which Nigel found quite devastating.

  ‘Janet has been mugging it all up from an article by Herbert Read, I suspect,’ said Robert Seaton. There was a certain mischievousness about the remark which did not seem quite in character.

  Nigel indicated the pile of note-books.

  ‘I’d like to come and beard you in your den this evening, if I may,’ he said to Robert.

  ‘Of course. About six? I’ve got to do a bit more work on a poem first.’

  ‘It’s going well, is it?’

  A faint, secretive smile, like that of a shy child receiving a bag of sweets, gave the poet’s face a beatific expression.

  ‘Yes, it’s going well,’ he said, ‘it’s all going very well, I think.’

  He rose, tucked his head under his arm again and walked briskly into the house.

  At six o’clock Nigel entered Robert Seaton’s study. The poet was sitting at his desk, the clay head in front of him. His face had a tranquil, drained look. They discussed certain points about one of the poems in the manuscript book on which Nigel had been working since tea. Then Robert Seaton rang the bell and asked Finny Black to bring up some sherry. Presently the dwarf returned with a decanter and glasses on a tray. He seemed unable to take his eyes off the clay head on Seaton’s work-table. His face twitched: it was white and puffy this evening, like a circus midget’s.

  ‘All right, Finny. You can go now,’ said the poet gently, and turned away to pour out the drinks.

  Nigel, hands in pockets, had moved across to the work-table and was bending over it.

  Robert Seaton brought a glass of sherry to him.

  ‘Here you are. Good lord, what the devil! Did you do that?’

  The sherry slopped over, as Seaton pointed at the clay head, which appeared to have grown, in one instant, a bristling and satyr-like beard.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel.

  ‘You have a remarkable turn for inverted metaphor, young man,’ said the poet. ‘Bearding me in my den, indeed!’

  ‘I just wanted to see what it looked like. I bought the beard in a toy shop in Redcote this afternoon.’

  ‘And what does it look like?’ asked Robert Seaton, his head cocked to one side in the attitude of a blackbird listening for a worm on the lawn.

  ‘It looks exactly like the face of the satyr in that bit of wood-carving by Mara Torrance—the one you showed me when I was here last June.’

  ‘By Jove, so it does! You’re quite right,’ said the poet with animation. ‘You’d better take it off now. I wouldn’t like Vanessa to wander in and see it. She mustn’t see her father as a satyr. And really,’ he added, ‘I’m not one.’

  There was a curiously unembarrassed silence. The two men sat down in armchairs.

  ‘Of course,’ said Nigel, at last, ‘it’s your affair. I ought to apologise for—well, unseemly curiosity.’

  ‘If it was just my affair—but, the trouble is, it’s Mara’s much more than mine. It’s Mara’s secret.’

  ‘She admires you tremendously. She told me you’d been wonderfully kind to her in the past.’

  Robert Seaton made a deprecating gesture. ‘I fancy you have guessed something of the truth. Enough, anyway, for you to realise how carefully we must all go, just now,’ he said slowly. ‘Excitement is so bad for her. Any stirring up of the past. Let it lie, my dear fellow, if you can. No pranks of this sort with her.’

  ‘Of course not. But, you know, a police investigation is bound to stir up the past.’

  The poet sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s a great nuisance.’

  ‘I’m afraid it must be interfering with your work a lot.’

  That faint, inward smile showed on Robert Seaton’s face again.

  ‘Well, no, I can’t pretend it does. I really seem to be finding it quite stimulating. And then, of course, Janet makes an admirable watchdog. I think even your friend the Superintendent has his work cut out to get past her. He was in again this morning, by the way.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Apparently someone in the village saw me returning from a nocturnal prowl that night. And it doesn’t fit in with the time when Mara said she’d seen Janet and me crossing the courtyard to have a look at Kitty. I presume the chap got it wrong. Your Superintendent seemed quite satisfied anyway. But I don’t like the idea of Mara being badgered.’

  Nigel forbore to remark that his friend the Superintendent had an outstanding gift for appearing satisfied with a piece of evidence. What he actually said was:

  ‘If you don’t mind my offering a bit of advice, I hope you won’t, through your natural wish to keep Miss Torrance’s affairs secret, give the police the impression that you’re being evasive about happenings in the much less remote past.’

  ‘This murder, eh? The police are welcome to everything I know about it,’ replied Robert Seaton bravely.

/>   ‘Good. Well, I’ll go and have a wash before dinner.’

  A few minutes later, when Nigel was brushing his hair and singing to himself in his harsh baritone, the door of his room opened.

  ‘I heard you singing,’ Vanessa said. ‘May I come in? I didn’t know you were in here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I mean, it isn’t the usual guest-room. That’s the other side of the passage.’

  ‘Looking out over the courtyard?’

  ‘Yes.’ Vanessa wandered inquisitively about the room, picking up Nigel’s brushes, sniffing his shaving-soap. She seemed to be screwing herself up to an important statement. ‘Phew, it’s jolly stuffy, isn’t it? Hadn’t you better open a window. It’s very unhealthy, sleeping with your window shut. Lieutenant—you know, she runs the Guides, I’ve told you about her—she does exercises in front of an open window every morning, summer or winter: she says every girl ought to; she says it’s the best preparation for Healthy Motherhood.’ Vanessa cast a languishing glance at him. ‘You haven’t any china dogs you don’t want, by any chance, have you?’

  ‘Do you collect them?’

  ‘Yes. Would you like to see my collection? I started it last January. Felicity—she’s my best friend—collects Egyptian scabs.’

  ‘What? Oh, scarabs?’

  ‘Mm. I think they’re rather eerie myself. I mean, there might be a curse on them. Buck up! What a time men take tying their ties and that sort of rot!’

  She seized his hand and dragged him out of the room, down the passage. There, taking a key from her little reticule, she unlocked the door.

  ‘See? Aren’t they a lot of preciouses?’ she said, pointing at the mantelpiece and breathing heavily with possessive pride.

  Nigel examined the array of china dogs. ‘I like this one best,’ he said.

  ‘Sssh! So do I actually,’ said Vanessa in a breathy whisper. ‘But you shouldn’t say it out loud. That’s favouritism. You’ll hurt the feelings of all the other poor doggies.’

  ‘It’s a valuable collection. D’you always keep the room locked?’

  ‘In the daytime. Only I often forget to. And if you’ve any valuables, take my advice and keep your room locked too.’

  ‘But surely nobody—’

  ‘Well, not intentionally. But things do sometimes disappear.’ Vanessa gazed at him earnestly. ‘It’s supposed to be a family secret, but I’ll tell you. We have a kleptomaniac in the house. It’s very sad.’

  ‘Do you know who it is?’

  The girl shook her hair over her face and gave him a coy glance through it. ‘I mustn’t tell you that. But I expect you can guess—’

  After dinner they had music. Lionel Seaton played Chopin preludes and some Schumann with considerable virtuosity, his keen, young-old face turned to an unearthly and abstract beauty in the darkening room. Presently, candles being lit, Vanessa was persuaded to sing. Her voice, singing Scots folk-songs, was pure and thin and wavering as the candle-flames, which shook from time to time with a waft of air through the open windows. After two or three songs she stopped, saying it made her sweat all down her back. The atmosphere tonight was indeed oppressive, thick as lukewarm, congealing soup. Nigel felt a tension in the air; but whether it came from the elements alone he could not say. At any moment he expected to hear the first mutter of thunder from beneath the distant rim of the sky. Janet Seaton, her fingers gripped tight together, half reclined on a window-seat gazing out. Nigel fancied it was a relief to her when, at eleven o’clock, he said he was sleepy and would go to bed.

  Up in his room he did not undress, however, but took from his pocket-book a sheet of paper headed with a large question-mark, and studied it. The notes were somewhat cryptic, jotted down from time to time during the last few days:

  ‘(i) Mara’s wood-carving; the original expression on the clay head. Satyr. Satyromania? Poof! Was it O. or R.’

  Nigel took out his pencil and drew a line through ‘R’.

  ‘(ii) Is Finny Black really dumb?’

  Nigel added ‘no proof yet’.

  ‘(iii) Which was right, Robert, Janet or the expectant father? This could be crucial, IF . . . Essential fix exact time thunder-shower began. Where did R. take shelter? Were his clothes wet when he got back? etc.

  ‘(iv) Who keeps key of (a) orchard gate, (b) dairy? How many keys?

  ‘(v) Was R.T. really “plastered” that evening? Did L.S. really sleep right through storm?

  ‘(vi) Did L.S. arrive at friends’ house that weekend with same amount of luggage he left Plash Meadow with? (Blount).

  ‘(vii) J.S. “a stickler for the proprieties.” Why the T’s then?’

  Nigel added, ‘Depends on answer to (i).’

  ‘(viii) The society magazine with photograph of family. Might explain much, IF . . .’

  Nigel now wrote in another question:

  ‘(ix) Does or does not J.S. approve of abstract art? If answer yes, why the clay head? If no, why her line this afternoon?’

  Nigel studied this last question. He was still picking away at it in his mind when a growl of thunder invaded his thoughts. He put the paper away, went to the window. The last dregs of light were draining out of the sky. Nigel moved away, silently opened his door, looked up and down the passage, then slipped into the room opposite—the one, Vanessa had told him, where guests usually slept. It was empty. Nigel very gently opened the lower half of its window and sat down on the window-seat. The storm was approaching from this side, from the north. Congested indigo clouds, darker than the night, were piled up untidily one on another in precarious heaps which it seemed a single thrust of lightning would send toppling over. The night held its breath, then released it in a sudden, hot puff which stirred the foliage of the chestnut tree. From behind the cloud-massif, a sheet of lightning flared up and shook the sky, outlining the fantastic scarps and ridges and pinnacles of the thunder-clouds. As Nigel watched, the lightning flickered more energetically, till it was almost continuous, darting and vibrating all over the tortured heavens. Like wagon-wheels down a stony defile the thunder rumbled nearer.

  Nigel felt in his pocket, to make sure his electric torch was there. He believed that something was going to happen tonight, and he believed he knew what it was. His eye turned more frequently now to the door of the wing to his right where the servants’ quarters were. He waited a long time, his head out of the window now, his gaze alternately dazzled by lightning and muffled by the darkness which followed each flash.

  Presently he became aware of a door opening; not the door of the servants’ wing, but one directly below him. He was not the only watcher at Plash Meadow tonight. Whoever it was down there who had opened the door, did not attempt to move: he must be standing on the threshold, looking out towards the courtyard, waiting. Nearly five minutes passed. Nigel became obsessed by a fancy that the person down below was waiting for a seventh great flash, so that he might dart out unseen through the ensuing trough of darkness, like a boy on a beach calculating the precise moment between two waves when he can dash to the water’s edge and retrieve some treasure cast up by the storm.

  Then at last the door of the servants’ wing did open. The next moment a livid, protracted glare of lightning revealed a figure running full tilt across the courtyard. It moved with a scuttling, crab-like gait, if you could imagine a crab running as fast as a man; but once it bounded into the air in the manner of a dog hunting through bracken, and as it did so Nigel saw something bounce upon its back. The figure was Finny Black—no doubt about that. And the thing on his back, the globular thing hanging from his shoulders that, glimpsed momently in a second flash of lightning, might have been a gross black spider riding him . . .?

  Nigel saw the figure swallowed up by another wave of blackness. There was a scrabbling noise. And when lightning lit up the scene again, nothing moved out there but the foliage of a lower branch of the chestnut tree. Nigel ran down the passage and quickly descended the stairs. A peal of thunder crashed over the house. As he emerged from
the door, Nigel noticed a figure flitting over the courtyard. It was much bigger than Finny Black: the other watcher, no doubt.

  Making a detour by the old barn, Nigel approached the tree silently from the opposite side. He could hear a voice, calling gently out of the darkness at the foot of the tree:

  ‘Finny! Come down, Finny! It’s only me.’

  It was the voice of Janet Seaton, and there seemed to be a great sadness in its soothing tones.

  From far above there came a scuffling noise, immediately drowned by a head-splitting crack of thunder. In the silence that followed, Mrs Seaton quietly called:

  ‘Come down, Finny, at once. And bring it with you. Bring it down with you. It’s not yours, Finny.’

  She might have been gentling a restive horse. The lower branches shook. The figure of Finny Black appeared, swinging down from bough to bough with a horrible alacrity. He landed lightly at Janet Seaton’s feet, jumping from the lowest bough. A flash of lightning showed up a string bag dangling from his shoulders, and in the bag, as Mrs Seaton took it from Finny, the clay head of her husband.

  Nigel walked forward.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ he said, ‘while he’s about it, he’d better fetch down the other one?’

  Chapter 6

  Head in Air

  JANET SEATON WHIPPED round, letting out a little scream. She shrank away from Nigel, till her back was against the giant bole of the chestnut tree.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed. ‘Go away! Finny! Help!’

  The next moment Nigel was fighting for his life. As if infected by her panic, or like a dog instinctively leaping to defend its mistress, Finny Black went for him. The dwarf jumped up upon Nigel, wound his legs round Nigel’s waist, and groped for his throat. Taken completely by surprise, Nigel staggered a pace backwards and, a little half-heartedly at first, tried to prise the dwarf off his chest. It was like fighting a child, so light was the body which had clamped itself to him—but a child, he soon realised, of uncanny strength. Finny’s long arms were thick and sinewy as conger-eels. His fingers sank into Nigel’s throat. For a moment Nigel saw the dwarf’s distorted, sweating face glaring into his like a mad baby’s: then the face was hidden in his shoulder, where he could not get at it, and the fingers tightened.