Footsteps in the Dark Read online

‘That put the Sûreté on to the right track at last. Martin, like the other man, refused to talk, and there was nothing found on him to give the police any further clue. Or so they thought. They sent a man over to London, and this is where the C.I.D. steps in.’

  ‘Did you take it on then?’ Margaret inquired.

  ‘No, another man was put on to it at first, but after a bit they had to transfer him to another job, and I took over.’

  ‘You mean,’ Celia said shrewdly, ‘the other man failed to solve it, don’t you?’

  He reddened. ‘I expect he’d have solved it if he’d had more time, Mrs Malcolm.’

  ‘That’s all right, Celia,’ her husband said. ‘This is the man behind the scenes in that big murder case you used to read religiously in all the evening papers about six months ago. He’s only being bashful. Go on, Draycott: how did you get on to this place?’

  ‘Oh, that was really a slice of luck!’ Michael assured them. ‘When I went through everything Martin had had on him at the time of his capture, I found just one thing that looked as though it might be worth following up. He had his order-book, his passport, and licence, and various papers connected with his business. They didn’t help. The only other things he had were a London hotel bill, a letter from his wife, a local time-table, and a small account-book in which he kept a check of his running expenses. I had a look at the time-table first. It was one of those rotten little paper books you buy for twopence at the railway station. It was a time-table of trains on the line that runs through Manfield to Norchester. Now Norchester’s not a very likely spot for a traveller in Parisian novelties, and as you know, it’s the only place of any size on this line. Still, it was quite possible that there was some shop there that stocked these goods.

  ‘The next thing I got on to was the account-book. Martin was a very methodical man, and he didn’t just jot down his expenses roughly. Obviously his instinct was to write down exactly what he’d spent every penny on, and the book was full of items such as “’Bus to Shepherds Bush, so much,” and “Cigarettes, so much.” Also he kept a strict account of his railway fares. Usually he put down the town he went to, but sometimes it was just: “Train fare, so much.” At first this didn’t seem to lead anywhere, but I studied the book very closely, and I found after wading through pages of that sort of stuff that though he sometimes put down “Fare to Birmingham,” and sometimes only “Fare to B,” or even just “train fare, so much,” there was one train fare that kept on recurring and never had anything more against it than the words “train fare.” The sum was six and eightpence, and by good luck it was the only six and eightpenny fare he ever had. I tabulated all his various journeys, and found that there was no mention in his accounts of any town on this particular line. So then I got down to it, and studied his time-table. It took in the Tillingford Junction areas as well, so there was a fair field. I noted the names of all the stations you could get to for six and eightpence, and those that had cheap day returns at that price. In the end I got it down to five, of which Manfield was one.’

  ‘I call that most ingenious!’ said Mrs Bosanquet, who had been listening enthralled. ‘But wasn’t it still very difficult?’

  ‘It wasn’t so much difficult as boring,’ Michael replied. ‘It was a case of nosing about at pubs, and such-like places, and trying to find out whether there were any suspicious people in any of these places. When I worked round to Manfield it was just at the time that you were moving into this house, and there was a fair amount of talk about it. When I learned that the house had been empty for years, and was supposed to be haunted, I thought I was getting warm, and I moved on to Framley. Fripp followed me, and between us we soon found out enough to make us feel we’d hit on the place we were looking for. Only’ – he smiled – ‘you’d taken possession of the house, your servants were already here, and it was very difficult for me to do much. But I managed to pick up a good deal of information one way and another, and when I heard of previous tenants being frightened away, and of a cowled figure being seen, I was as sure as a man can be that the Priory was the source of the false banknotes.’

  ‘Not happening to believe in ghosts,’ said Charles, with an eye on his aunt.

  She was quite equal to it, and answered with complete composure: ‘This has been a lesson to all of us not to be credulous, I am sure. If you remember, Charles, from the very first I said that you were imagining things. Pray continue, Mr Draycott.’

  Charles seemed incapable of speech. Michael went on: ‘I got on to Inspector Tomlinson at Manfield, and he was exceedingly helpful. Through him I learned what there was to know about most of the people here. Naturally Duval was the most suspicious character. I won’t bore you with the stages at which I arrived at the conclusion that there was an underground passage. Suffice it that I did arrive at it. Finding that opening into the well clinched the matter. And I hit on the moving stone. That didn’t lead to much, but a visit, on the off-chance, to the British Museum library disclosed one significant fact.’

  ‘We know!’ Peter interrupted. ‘Two pages torn out of the history of this house!’

  ‘Oh, did you get on to that too? Yes, that was it. That same day I went to visit your solicitor, to find out whether anyone had tried to get you to sell the house, and if so, who he was, and where he came from.’

  ‘I found that out,’ Margaret said. ‘You don’t know how it worried me.’

  ‘Did it? I’m sorry.’ He smiled down at her, and Celia caught her husband’s eye significantly. ‘I drew a blank, except that I found someone had tried to buy the place. I next got on to Wilkes.’

  ‘Yes, what made you suspect him?’ Peter asked. ‘Was it that electric-plant of his?’

  ‘Not at first. It was just one little thing after another. I found that when you traced all the Priory ghost stories back they generally came from the same source: Wilkes. The very day you arrived’ – he nodded at Charles – ‘Wilkes spun a very fine yarn about having seen the Monk. I don’t know if you remember, but Fripp was in the bar at the time, and he recounted the whole story to me. It was a good story I thought, and there was only one flaw. Wilkes couldn’t be content to confine himself to eerie feelings and shadowy figures: he had to strain after an effect, which he doubtless thought very terrifying, and say he saw the Monk standing behind him. And he then committed the crowning error of saying the Monk just vanished into thin air. That was going a bit too far, and it set me on to his tracks. Then there was Duval. He used to come every day to the Bell, and he wasn’t exactly the sort of customer a landlord of Wilkes’ type encourages as a general rule. When he was drunk he got talkative, and rather abusive, but so far from throwing him out Wilkes always seemed anxious to humour him. The electric light plant I couldn’t get a glimpse of for quite some time, but one thing I did see: Nearly every night, at opening-time, most of the village turns up at the Bell, as you probably know. They’re in and out the whole evening, and the bar’s usually pretty full. I kept a watch on the various habitués, and I noticed that two of the men who went in I never saw come out again. Moreover, Wilkes was never visible in the early morning, and it looked very much as though he was in the habit of keeping remarkably late hours. That gave me the idea that there might be a way down to the underground passage from the Inn. As you know, the Bell is very old, and it may well have been some sort of an annexe to the original monastery. The difficulty was to locate this possible entrance, and that’s not an easy matter in a public inn. You never know whom you’ll run into if you start prowling about. However, I got a chance to go down into the cellars unperceived yesterday, and I seized it. It’s full of bins, and I managed to hide myself successfully. It was one of the most uncomfortable evenings I ever spent, for once down I didn’t dare come up again till I’d discovered all I hoped to. I saw Wilkes, Spindle and two other men come down soon after closing time, and I watched them shift a big cask that stood on top of the trap-door. All but Spindle went down, and when he had replaced the cask over the trap, Spindle went off again. He�