The Talisman Ring Read online

  The valet folded his lips closely, but after a moment replied: ‘Well, you see, Mr Stubbs, that is my business. I have my reasons.’

  The Runner eyed him with growing disfavour. ‘Lookee!’ he pronounced. ‘When I go ferreting for news of a desprit criminal, that’s dooty. When you does the same thing, Mr Gregg, it looks to me uncommon like Spitefulness, and Spitefulness is what I don’t hold with, and never shall.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Mr Peabody.

  The valet smiled again, but unpleasantly, and said in his silky way: ‘Why, you may say so if you choose, Mr Stubbs. And I hope I may ask whom you saw at the Red Lion?’

  ‘I didn’t see no desprit criminal,’ answered Mr Stubbs. ‘It’s my belief there ain’t no desprit criminal. Is it likely the place would house such with a Justice of the Peace putting up there?’

  ‘You went into the little back bedchamber? They let you go there?’

  ‘I went into two back bedchambers, one which is the landlord’s and the other which the young French lady’s maid has.’

  The valet’s eyelids were quickly raised. ‘Her maid? Did you see her maid?’

  ‘Ay, poor wench, I saw her right enough, and I heard Miss a-scolding of her all for breaking a bottle.’

  ‘What was she like?’ demanded Gregg, leaning forward again.

  Mr Stubbs looked at him with a shade of uneasiness in his eyes. ‘Why, I didn’t get much sight of her face, she being crying into her shawl fit to break her heart.’

  ‘Ah, so you didn’t see her face!’ said Gregg. ‘Perhaps she was a tall girl – a very tall girl?’

  Mr Stubbs had been engaged in filling a long clay pipe, but he laid it down, and said slowly: ‘Ay, she was a rare, strapping wench. She had yaller hair, by what I could see of it.’

  Gregg sat back in his chair and set his finger-tips together, and over them surveyed the Runners with a peculiar glint in his eyes. ‘So that was it!’ he said. ‘Well, well!’

  ‘What do you mean, “that was it”?’ said Mr Stubbs.

  ‘Only that you have seen Ludovic Lavenham; yes, and let him slip through your fingers too, I dare say.’

  Mr Peabody, observing his colleague’s evident discomfiture, came gallantly to the rescue. ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘What we’ve done is, we’ve Lulled him – if so be it is him, which we ain’t proved yet. What we have to do now is to make a Pounce, and that, Mr Gregg, is what we decided to do without any help of yourn.’

  ‘You had better have made your pounce when you had him under your hand,’ said the valet dryly. ‘It is said in these parts that there are cellars below the ones you may see at the Red Lion; cellars which only Nye and Clem know the way into.’

  ‘If that’s true, we shall find them,’ said Mr. Stubbs, with resolution.

  ‘I hope you may,’ responded Gregg. ‘But take my advice, and go armed! The man you are after is indeed desperate, and I fancy he will not be without his pistols.’

  The Runners exchanged glances. ‘I did hear tell of him being handy with his pops,’ remarked Mr Stubbs in a casual voice.

  ‘They say he never misses,’ said Gregg, lowering his eyes demurely. ‘If I were in your shoes, I should think it as well to shoot him before he could shoot me.’

  ‘Yes, I dare say,’ said Mr Stubbs bitterly, ‘but we ain’t allowed to go a-shooting of coves.’

  ‘But if you told – both of you – how he shot first, and would have escaped, it would surely be overlooked?’ suggested Gregg gently.

  It was left to Mr Peabody to sum up the situation, but this he did not do until the valet had gone. Then he said to his troubled companion: ‘You know what this looks like to me, Jerry? It looks to me like as if there’s someone unaccountable anxious to have this Ludovic Lavenham put away quick – ah, and quiet, too!’

  Mr Stubbs shook his head gloomily, and after a long silence, said: ‘We got to do our dooty, William.’

  Their duty took them up the road to the Red Lion very early next morning. Their plan of surprising the household was frustrated by Nye, who had taken the precaution of setting Clem on the watch. By the time the Runners had reached the inn Ludovic had been roused, and haled, protesting, to the cellar, and his room swept bare of all trace of him. The Runners were not gratified by the least sign of surprise in Nye, who greeted them with no more than the natural annoyance of a landlord knocked up at an unseasonable hour. In the tap-room Clem was prosaically engaged in scrubbing the floor; he turned a blank, inquiring face towards the Runners, and with the stolid air of one who has work to do, returned to his task.

  ‘Well, and what might you be wanting at this hour of the morning?’ asked Nye testily.

  ‘What we want is a word with that abigail we saw yesterday,’ said Mr Stubbs.

  ‘Do you mean Mamzelle’s Lucy?’ said Nye.

  ‘Ah, that’s the one I mean,’ nodded Mr Stubbs.

  ‘Well, if you want a word with her, you’d best get on the Brighton stage. She ain’t here any longer.’

  Mr Stubbs gave him a penetrating look, and said deeply: ‘You’re quite sure of that, are you, Mr Nye?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure! I told you yesterday how it would be. Miss turned her off. What do you want with her? She was a rare silly wench, and not so well-favoured neither.’

  ‘You know what I want with her,’ said Mr Stubbs. ‘You’re harbouring a dangerous criminal, Mr Nye, and that wench was him!’

  This pronouncement, so far from striking terror into the landlord, seemed to afford him the maximum amount of amusement. After staring at the Runners in a bemused way for several minutes, he allowed a smile to spread slowly over his face. The smile led to a chuckle, the chuckle to a veritable paroxysm of laughter. The landlord, wiping his eyes with the corner of his apron, bade Clem share the joke, and as soon as it had been explained to him, Clem did share it. In fact, he continued to snigger behind his hand for much longer than the Runners thought necessary.

  When Nye was able to stop laughing he begged Mr Stubbs to tell him what had put such a notion into his head, and when Mr Stubbs, hoping that this card at least might prove to be a trump, said that he had received information, he at first looked at him very hard, and then said: ‘Information, eh? Then I’ll be bound I know who gave you that same information! It was a scrawny fellow with a white face and the nastiest pair of daylights you ever saw! A fellow of the name of Gregg: that’s who it was!’

  Mr Stubbs was a trifle disconcerted, and said guardedly: ‘I don’t say it was, and I don’t say it wasn’t.’

  ‘Lord love you, you needn’t tell me!’ said Nye, satisfied that his shot had gone home. ‘He’s had a spite against me since I don’t know when, while as for his master, if a stranger was to stop for half a day in this place, he’d go mad thinking it was Mr Ludovic come home to stop him taking what don’t belong to him. You’ve been properly roasted, that’s what you’ve been.’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ replied Mr Stubbs. ‘All I know is it’s very highly suspicious that that abigail ain’t here no more, and what I want to see, Mr Nye, is those cellars of yourn.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got something better to do than to take you down to my cellars,’ said Nye. ‘If you want to see ’em, you go and see ’em. I don’t mind.’

  An hour later, when Sir Hugh came down to breakfast, a pleasing idea dawned in Nye’s brain, and as he set a dish of ham and eggs before his patron, he told him that the Runners were in the house again. Sir Hugh, more interested in his breakfast than in the process of the Law, merely replied that as long as they kept from poking their noses into his room, he had no objection to their presence.

  ‘Oh, they won’t do that, sir!’ said Nye, pouring him out a cup of coffee. ‘They’re down in the cellar.’

  Sir Hugh was inspecting a red sirloin, and said in a preoccupied voice: ‘In the c