Hag's Nook E-Book

John Dickson Carr

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 323

Beschreibung

'The Starberths die of broken necks' goes the legend in the village of Chatterham . . . The Starberth family governed the now-abandoned Chatterham prison for many years, and each male heir must spend the night of his twenty-fifth birthday there, alone, overlooking the hanging site of Hag's Nook. Meanwhile, after a chance encounter on a railway platform, Dorothy Starberth and young American graduate Tad Rampole fall in love. Rampole is here in rural Lincolnshire to see Gideon Fell. The following day, Dorothy's brother is found dead of a broken neck, just as his father and grandfather before him. Ingeniously plotted and packed with atmosphere, Hag's Nook will not disappoint mystery lovers.

Leseprobe

HAG’S NOOK

John Dickson Carr was born in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer. While at school and college, he wrote ghost, detective and adventure stories. After studying law, he headed to Paris in 1928. Once there, he lost any desire to study law and soon turned to writing crime fiction full-time. His first novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930. Two years later, he moved to England with his English wife; thereafter he became a prolific author and became a master of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, radio plays, dozens of short stories, and magazine reviews. He died in 1977 in South Carolina.

Hag’s Nook

A Gideon Fell Mystery

JOHN DICKSON CARR

First published in 1933 by Hamish Hamilton.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Polygon,an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

1

Copyright © John Dickson Carr 1933

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN 978 1 84697 494 6

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 206 7

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on requestfrom the British Library.

Typeset by 3btype.com

Contents

1.     The Girl in Grey

2.     Horrible and Wet

3.     A Face of Fear

4.     Dark Heritage

5.     The Starberths Die of Broken Necks

6.     Midnight Comes Too Soon

7.     In the Governor’s Room

8.     ‘What About a Death-Trap?’

9.     Damned in the Blood

10.   An Autobiography of Murder

11.   The Lifting of a Curse

12.   The Light in the Prison

13.   The Secret of the Walls

14.   The Cipher in Verse

15.   The Adventurer Budge

16.   Waiting for a Murderer

17.   Death Enters a Room

18.   Statement of a Killer

1

The Girl in Grey

THE OLD LEXICOGRAPHER’S STUDY ran the length of his small house. It was a raftered room, sunk a few feet below the level of the door; the latticed windows at the rear were shaded by a yew tree, through which the late afternoon sun was striking now.

There is something spectral about the deep and drowsy beauty of the English countryside; in the lush dark grass, the evergreens, the grey church spire, and the meandering white road. To an American, who remembers his own brisk concrete highways clogged with red filling-stations and the fumes of traffic, it is particularly pleasant. It suggests a place where people really can walk without seeming incongruous, even in the middle of the road. Tad Rampole watched the sun through the latticed windows, and the dull red berries glistening in the yew tree, with a feeling which can haunt the traveller only in the British Isles. A feeling that the earth is old and enchanted, a sense of reality in all the flashing images which are conjured up by that one word ‘merrie’. For France changes, like a fashion, and seems no older than last season’s hat. In Germany even the legends have a bustling clockwork freshness, like a walking toy from Nuremberg. But this English earth seems (incredibly) even older than its ivy-bearded towers. The bells at twilight seem to be bells across the centuries; there is a great stillness, through which ghosts step, and Robin Hood has not strayed from it even yet.

Tad Rampole glanced across at his host. Filling a deep leather chair with his bulk, Dr Gideon Fell was tapping tobacco into a pipe and seemed to be musing genially over something the pipe had just told him. Dr Fell was not too old, but he was indubitably a part of this room. A room – his guest thought – like an illustration out of Dickens. Under the oak rafters, with smoke-blackened plaster between, it was large and dusky; there were diamond-paned windows above great oak mausoleums of bookshelves, and in this room, you felt, all the books were friendly. There was a smell of dusty leather and old paper, as though all those stately old-time books had hung up their tall hats and prepared to stay.

Dr Fell wheezed a little, even with the exertion of filling his pipe. He was very stout, and walked, as a rule, with two canes. Against the light from the front windows his big mop of dark hair, streaked with a white plume, waved like a war-banner. Immense and aggressive, it went blowing before him through life. His face was large and round and ruddy, and had a twitching smile somewhere above several chins. But what you noticed there was the twinkle in his eye. He wore eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon, and the small eyes twinkled over them as he bent his big head forward; he could be fiercely combative or slyly chuckling, and somehow he contrived to be both at the same time.

‘You’ve got to pay Fell a visit,’ Professor Melson had told Rampole. ‘First, because he’s my oldest friend, and, second, because he’s one of the great institutions of England. The man has more obscure, useless and fascinating information than any person I ever met. He’ll ply you with food and whisky until your head reels; he’ll talk interminably, on any subject whatever, but particularly on the glories and sports of old-time England. He likes band music, melodrama, beer and slapstick comedies; he’s a great old boy, and you’ll like him.’

There was no denying this. There was a heartiness, a naïveté, an absolute absence of affectation about his host which made Rampole at home five minutes after he had met him. Even before, the American had to admit. Professor Melson had already written to Gideon Fell before Rampole sailed – and received an almost indecipherable reply decorated with little drawings of a hilarious nature and concluding with some verses. Then there had been the chance meeting on the train, before Rampole arrived at Chatterham. Chatterham, in Lincolnshire, is some hundred and twenty-odd miles from London, and only a short distance away from Lincoln itself. When Rampole boarded the train at dusk, he had been more than a little depressed. This great dun-coloured London, with its smoke and its heavy-footed traffic, was lonely enough. There was loneliness in wandering through the grimy station, full of grit and the iron coughing of engines, and blurred by streams of hurrying commuters. The waiting-rooms looked dingy, and the commuters, snatching a drink at the wet-smelling bar before train time, looked dingier still. Frayed and patched they seemed, under dull lights as uninteresting as themselves.

Tad Rampole was just out of college, and he was, therefore, desperately afraid of being provincial. He had done a great deal of travelling in Europe, but only under careful parental supervision on the value-received plan, and told when to look. It had consisted in a sort of living peep-show at the things you see on post cards, with lectures. Alone, he found himself bewildered, depressed, and rather resentful. To his horror, he found himself comparing this station unfavourably with Grand Central – such comparisons, according to the Better American Novelists, being a sin.

Oh, well, damn it!

He grinned, buying a thriller at the bookstall and wandering towards his train. There was always the difficulty in juggling that money; it seemed to consist of a bewildering variety of coins, all of inordinate dimensions. Computing the right sum was like putting together a picture puzzle; it couldn’t be done in a hurry. And, since any delay seemed to him to savour of the awkward or loutish, he usually handed over a bank note for the smallest purchase, and let the other person do the thinking. As a result, he was so laden with change that he jingled audibly at every step.

That was when he ran into the girl in grey.

He literally ran into her. It was due to his discomfort at sounding so much like an itinerant cash register. He had tried jamming his hands into his pockets, holding them up from underneath, walking with a sort of crab-like motion, and becoming generally so preoccupied that he failed to notice where he was going. He bumped into somebody with a startling thud; he heard somebody gasp, and an ‘Oh!’ beneath his shoulder.

His pockets overflowed. Dimly he heard a shower of coins tinkle on the wooden platform. Fiery with embarrassment, he found himself holding to two small arms and looking down into a face. If he had been able to say anything, it would have been ‘Gug!’ Then he recovered himself to notice the face. Light from the first-class carriage beside which they stood shone down upon it – a small face, with eyebrows raised quizzically. It was as though she were looking at him from a distance, mockingly, but with a sympathetic pout of her lips. A hat was pulled down anyhow, in a sort of rakish good humour, on her very black, very glossy hair; and her eyes were of so dark a blue that they seemed almost black, too. The collar of her rough grey coat was drawn up, but it did not hide the expression of her lips.

She hesitated a moment. Then she spoke, with a laugh running under it: ‘I say! You are wealthy . . . Would you mind letting go my arms?’

Acutely conscious of the spilled coins, he stepped back hastily.

‘Good Lord! I’m sorry! I’m a clumsy ox. I – Did you drop anything?’

‘My purse, I think, and a book.’

He stooped down to pick them up. Even afterwards, when the train was rushing through the scented darkness of a night just cool enough, he could not remember how they had begun talking. A dim train shed, misted with soot and echoing to the rumble of baggage trucks, should not have been the place for it; yet it seemed, somehow, to be absolutely right. Nothing brilliant was said. Rather the opposite. They just stood there and spoke words, and Rampole’s head began to sing. He made the discovery that both the book he had just bought and the book he had knocked out of her hands had been written by the same author. As the books were thrillers, this coincidence was hardly stupefying enough to have impressed an outsider, but Rampole made much of it. He was conscious of trying desperately to hold to this subject. Each moment, he felt, she might break away. He had heard how aloof and unapproachable Englishwomen were supposed to be; he wondered whether she was just being polite. But there was something – possibly in the dark-blue eyes, which were wrinkled up at him – of a different nature. She was leaning against the side of the carriage, as carelessly as a man, her hands shoved into the pockets of the fuzzy grey coat: a swaggering little figure, with a crinkly smile. And he suddenly got the impression that she was as lonely as himself.

Mentioning his destination as Chatterham, he enquired after her luggage. She straightened. There was a shadow somewhere. The light throaty voice, with its clipped and slurred accent, grew hesitant; she spoke low: ‘My brother has the bags.’ Another hesitation. ‘He – he’ll miss the train, I expect. There goes the horn now. You’d better get aboard.’

That horn, tooting thinly through the shed, sounded inane. It was as though something were being torn away. A toy engine began to puff and stammer; the bumping shed winked with lights.

‘Look here,’ he said, loudly, ‘if you’re taking another train –’

‘You’d better hurry!’

Then Rampole grew as inane as the horn. He cried in a rush, ‘To hell with the train! I can take another. I’m not going anywhere, as it is. I –’

She had to raise her voice. He got the impression of a smile, bright and swashbuckling and pleased. ‘Silly! – I’m going to Chatterham, too. I shall probably see you there. Off you go!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, that’s all right, then. You see –’

She gestured at the train, and he swung aboard just as it got under way. He was craning out of one corridor window, trying to get a glimpse of her, when he heard the throaty voice call something after him, very distinctly. The voice said an extraordinary thing. It called: ‘If you see any ghosts, save them for me.’

What the devil! Rampole stared at the dark lines of idle carriages sweeping past, the murky station lights which seemed to shake to the vibration of the train, and tried to understand that last sentence. The words were not exactly disturbing, but they were a little – well, cockeyed. That was the only way to express it. Had the whole business been a joke? Was this the English version of the needle, the raspberry, or any similar picturesque and delicate term? For a moment his neckband grew warm. No, damn it! You could always tell. A train guard, passing through the corridor at this moment, perceived an obviously American Young Gen’lman thrusting his face blindly out of the window into a hurricane of cinders, and breathing them with deep joyous breaths, like mountain air.

The depressed feeling had vanished. This little, swaying train, almost empty of passengers, made him feel like a man in a speedboat. London was not big and powerful now, nor the countryside a lonely place. He had drunk strong liquor in a strange land, and he felt suddenly close to somebody.

Luggage? He froze for a moment before remembering that a porter had already stowed it into a compartment somewhere along here. That was all right. Under his feet he could feel the floor vibrating; the train jerked and whirled with a clackety roar, and a long blast of the whistle was torn backwards as it gathered speed. This was the way to begin adventure. ‘If you see any ghosts, save them for me.’ A husky voice – which somehow suggested a person standing on tiptoe – drifting down the platform . . .

If she had been an American, now, he could have asked her name. If she had been an American – but, he suddenly realised, he didn’t want her to be an American. The wide-set blue eyes, the face which was just a trifle too square for complete beauty, the red and crinky-smiling mouth; all were at once exotic and yet as honestly Anglo-Saxon as the brick staunchness of Whitehall. He liked the way she pronounced her words, as though with a half mockery. She seemed cool and clean, like a person swinging through the countryside. Turning from the window, Rampole had a strong desire to chin himself on the top of one of the compartment doors. He would have done so but for the presence of a very glum and very rigid man with a large pipe, who was staring glassily out of a nearby window, with the top of his travelling cap pulled over one ear like a beret. This person looked so exactly like a comic-strip Englishman that Rampole would have expected him to exclaim, ‘What, what, what, what?’ and go puffing and stumping down the corridor, had he seen any such athletic activity indulged in here.

The American was to remember this person presently. For the moment, he knew only that he felt hilarious, hungry and in need of a drink. There was, he remembered, a restaurant-car ahead. Locating his luggage in a smoking-compartment, he groped his way along narrow corridors in search of food. The train was clattering through suburbs now; creaking and plunging and swaying under the shrillness of its whistle, and lighted walls streamed past on either side. To Rampole’s surprise, the restaurant-car was almost full; it was somewhat cramped, and smelt heavily of beer and salad oil. Sliding into a chair opposite another diner, he thought that there were rather more crumbs and blotches than were necessary; whereupon he again damned himself for provincialism. The table shook to the swaying of the train, lights jolted on nickel and woodwork, and he watched the man opposite skilfully introduce a large glass of Guinness under a corresponding moustache. After a healthy pull, the other set down the glass and spoke.

‘Good evening,’ he said, affably. ‘You’re young Rampole, aren’t you?’

If the stranger had added, ‘You come from Afghanistan, I perceive,’ Rampole could not have been more startled. A capacious chuckle enlivened the other man’s several chins. He had a way of genially chuckling, ‘Heh-heh-heh,’ precisely like a burlesque villain on the stage. Small eyes beamed on the American over eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon. His big face grew more ruddy; his great mop of hair danced to the chuckles, or the motion of the train, or both; and he thrust out his hand.

‘I’m Gideon Fell, d’ye see? Bob Melson wrote me about you, and I knew you must be the person as soon as you walked into the car. We must have a bottle of wine on this. We must have two bottles of wine. One for you, and one for me, d’ye see? Hehheh-heh. Waiter!’

He rolled in his chair like a feudal baron, beckoning imperiously.

‘My wife,’ continued Dr Fell, after he had given a gargantuan order – ‘my wife would never have forgiven me if I’d missed you. She’s in a stew as it is, what with plaster falling off in the best bedroom, and the new revolving sprinkler for the lawn, which wouldn’t work until the rector came to call, and then it doused him like a shower-bath. Heh-heh. Have a drink. I don’t know what kind of wine it is, and I never ask; it’s wine, and that’s enough for me.’

‘Your health, sir.’

‘Thank’e, my boy. Permit me,’ said Dr Fell, apparently with some vague recollections of his stay in America, ‘to jump the gutter. Nunc bibendum est. Heh . . . So you’re Bob Melson’s senior wrangler, eh? English history, I think he said. You’re thinking of a Ph.D., and then teaching?’

Rampole suddenly felt very young and very foolish, despite the doctor’s amiable eye. He mumbled something noncommittal.

‘That’s fine,’ said the other. ‘Bob praised you, but he said, “Too imaginative by half ”; that’s what he said. Bah! give ’em the glory, I say; give ’em the glory. Now when I lectured at your Haverford, they may not have learned much about English history, but they cheered, my boy, they cheered when I described battles. I remember,’ continued the doctor, his vast face glowing as with a joyous sunset, and puffing beneath it – ‘I remember teaching ’em the Drinking Song of Godfrey of Bouillon’s men on the First Crusade in 1187, leading the chorus myself. Then they all got to singing and stamping on the floor, as it were; and a maniacal professor of mathematics came stamping up with his hands entangled in his hair – as it were – and said (admirably restrained chap) would we kindly stop shaking the blackboards off the wall in the room below? “It is unseemly,” says he; “burpf, burpf, ahem, very unseemly.” “Not at all,” says I. “It is the Laus Vini Exercitus Cruris.” “It is, like hell,” says he. “Do you think I don’t know ‘We Won’t Be Home Until Morning’ when I hear it?” And then I had to explain the classic derivation . . . Hallo, Payne!’ the doctor boomed, breaking off to flourish his napkin at the aisle.

Turning, Rampole saw the exceedingly glum and rigid man with the pipe, whom he had noticed before in the corridor of the train. The cap was off now, to show a close-shaven skull of wiry white hair, a long brown face, and a general air of doddering down the aisle, looking for a place to fall. He grumbled something, not very civilly, and paused by the table.

‘Mr Payne, Mr Rampole,’ said Dr Fell. Payne’s eyes turned on the American with a startling flash of their whites; they seemed suspicious. ‘Mr Payne is Chatterham’s legal adviser,’ the doctor explained. ‘I say, Payne, where are your charges? I wanted young Starberth to have a glass of wine with us.’

A thin hand fluttered to Payne’s brown chin and stroked it. His voice was dry, with a premonitory rasp and difficulty, as though he were winding himself up.

‘Didn’t arrive,’ replied the lawyer, shortly.

‘Humf. Heh. Didn’t arrive?’

The rattle of the train, Rampole thought, must shake Payne’s bones apart. He blinked, and continued to massage his chin.

‘No. I expect,’ said the lawyer, suddenly pointing to the wine bottle, ‘he’s had too much of that already. Perhaps Mr – ah – Rampole can tell us more about it. I knew he didn’t fancy his little hour in the Hag’s Nook, but I hardly thought any prison superstitions would keep him away. There’s still time, of course.’

This, Rampole thought, was undoubtedly the most bewildering gibberish he had ever heard. ‘His little hour in the Hag’s Nook.’ ‘Prison superstitions.’ And here was this loose-jointed brown man, with the deep wrinkles round his nose, turning the whites of his eyes round and fixing Rampole with the same pale-blue, glassy stare he had fixed on the corridor window a while ago. The American was already beginning to feel flushed with wine. What the devil was all this, anyhow?

He said, ‘I – I beg your pardon?’ and pushed his glass away.

Another rasp and whir in Payne’s throat. ‘I may have been mistaken, sir. But I believe I saw you in conversation with Mr Starberth’s sister just before the train started. I thought perhaps – ?’

‘With Mr Starberth’s sister, yes,’ said the American, beginning to feel a pounding in his throat. He tried to seem composed. ‘I am not acquainted with Mr Starberth himself.’

‘Ah,’ said Payne, clicking in his throat. ‘Just so. Well –’

Rampole was conscious of Dr Fell’s small, clever eyes watching through the joviality of his glasses; watching Payne closely.

‘I say, Payne,’ the doctor observed, ‘he isn’t afraid of meeting someone going out to be hanged, is he?’

‘No,’ said the lawyer. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen. I must go and dine.’

2

Horrible and Wet

THE REST OF THAT RIDE often came back to Rampole as a sinking into the deep countryside; a flight into cool and mysterious places as the lights of towns went out with the hours, and the engine’s whistle called more thinly against an emptier sky. Dr Fell had not referred to Payne again, except to dismiss him with a snort.

‘Don’t mind him,’ he said, wheezing contemptuously. ‘He’s a stickler for things. Worst of all, the man’s a mathematician. Pah! A mathematician,’ repeated Dr Fell, glaring at his salad as though he expected to find a binomial theorem lurking in the lettuce. ‘He oughtn’t to talk.’

The old lexicographer did not even manifest any surprise at Rampole’s acquaintance with the unknown Starberth’s sister, for which the American felt grateful. Rampole, in his turn, refrained from asking questions about the odd statements he had heard that evening. He sat back, pleasantly padded by the wine, and listened to his host talk. Although he was no critic in the matter of mixing drinks, he was nevertheless a trifle appalled at the way Dr Fell poured down wine on top of stout, and followed both with beer toward the close of the meal; but he kept up valiantly with every glass. ‘As for this beverage, sir,’ said the doctor, his great voice rumbling down the car, ‘as for this drink, witness what the Alvismal says: “Called ale among men; but by the gods called beer.” Hah!’

His face fiery, spilling cigar ashes down the front of his necktie, rolling and chuckling in his seat, he talked. It was only when the waiters began to hover and cough discreetly round the table that he could be persuaded to leave. Growling on his two canes, he lumbered out ahead of Rampole. Presently they were established facing each other in corner seats of an empty compartment. Ghostly in the dim lights, this small place seemed darker than the landscape outside. Dr Fell, piled into his dusky corner, was a great goblin figure against the faded red upholstery and the indistinguishable pictures above the seats. He had fallen silent; he felt this unreal quality, too. A cool wind had freshened from the north and there was a moon. Beyond the flying click of the wheels, the hills were tired and thick-grown and old, and the trees were mourning bouquets. Then Rampole spoke at last. He could not keep it back. They had chugged in to a stop at the platform of a village. Now there was absolute silence but for a long expiring sigh from the engine.

‘Would you mind telling me, sir,’ said the American, ‘what Mr Payne meant by all that talk about “an hour at the Hag’s Nook” and – and all the rest of it?’

Dr Fell, roused out of a reverie, seemed startled. He bent forward, the moon on his eyeglasses. In the stillness they could hear the engine panting in hoarse breaths, and a wiry hum of insects. Something clanked and shivered through the train. A lantern swung and winked.

‘Eh? Why, Good Lord, boy! I thought you knew Dorothy Starberth. I didn’t like to ask.’

The sister, apparently. Handle with care. Rampole said: ‘I just met her today. I scarcely know her at all.’

‘Then you’ve never heard of Chatterham prison?’

‘Never.’

The doctor clucked his tongue. ‘You’ve got something out of Payne, then. He took you for an old friend . . . Chatterham isn’t a prison now, you know. It hasn’t been in use since 1837, and it’s falling to ruin.’

A baggage truck rumbled. There was a brief glare in the darkness, and Rampole saw a curious expression on the doctor’s big face, momentarily.

‘Do you know why they abandoned it?’ he asked. ‘It was the cholera, of course; cholera – and something else. But they said the other thing was worse.’

Rampole got out a cigarette and lit it. He could not analyse his feeling then, though it was sharp and constricting; he thought afterwards that it was as though something had gone wrong with his lungs. In the dark he drew a deep breath of the cool, moist air.

‘Prisons,’ continued the doctor, ‘particularly prisons of that day, were hellish places. And they built this one round the Hag’s Nook.’

‘The Hag’s Nook?’

‘That was where they used to hang witches. All the common malefactors were hanged there, of course. H’mf.’ Dr Fell cleared his throat, a long rumble. ‘I say witches because that fact made the most impression on the popular mind . . .’

‘Lincolnshire’s the fen country, you know. The old British called Lincoln Llyn-dune, the fen town; the Romans made it Lindum-Colonia. Chatterham is some distance from Lincoln, but then Lincoln’s modern nowadays. We’re not. We have the rich soil, the bogs and marshes, the waterfowl and the soft thick air – where people see things, after sunset. Eh?’

The train was rumbling out again. Rampole managed a little laugh. In the restaurant-car this swilling, chuckling fat man had seemed as hearty as an animated side of beef; now he seemed subdued and a trifle sinister.

‘See things, sir?’ the other repeated.

‘They built the prison,’ Fell went on, ‘round a gallows . . . Two generations of the Starberth family were governors there. In your country you’d call ’em wardens. It’s traditional that the Starberths die of broken necks. Which isn’t a very pleasant thing to look forward to.’

Fell struck a match for his cigar, and Rampole saw that he was smiling.

‘I’m not trying to scare you with ghost stories,’ he added, after he had sucked wheezingly on the cigar for a time. ‘I’m only trying to prepare you. We haven’t your American briskness. It’s in the air; the whole countryside is full of belief. So don’t laugh if you hear about Peggy-with-the-Lantern, or the imp on Lincoln cathedral or, more particularly, anything concerned with the prison.’

There was a silence. Then Rampole said, ‘I’m not apt to laugh. All my life I’ve been wanting to see a haunted house. I don’t believe, of course, but that doesn’t detract from my interest. What is the story concerned with the prison?’

‘Too imaginative by half,’ the doctor muttered, staring at the ash on his cigar. ‘That was what Bob Melson said. You shall have the full story tomorrow. I’ve kept copies of the papers. But young Martin has got to spend his hour in the Governor’s Room, and open the safe and look at what’s in there. You see, for about two hundred years the Starberths have owned the land on which Chatterham prison was built. They still own it; the borough never took it over, and it’s held in what the lawyer chaps call “entail” by the eldest son – can’t be sold. On the evening of his twenty-fifth birthday, the eldest Starberth has got to go to the prison, open the safe in the Governor’s Room, and take his chances.’

‘On what, sir?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody knows what’s inside. It’s not to be mentioned by the heir himself, until the keys are handed over to his son.’

Rampole shifted. His brain pictured a grey ruin, an iron door and a man with a lamp in his hand turning a rusty key. He said, ‘Good Lord! it sounds like –’ but he could not find words, and he found himself wryly smiling.

‘It’s England. What’s the matter?’

‘I was only thinking that if this were America, there would be reporters, newsreel cameras, and a crowd ten deep round the prison to see what happened.’

He knew that he had said something wrong. He was always finding it out. Being with these English was like shaking hands with a friend whom you thought you knew, and suddenly finding the hand turned to a wisp of fog. There was a place where thoughts never met, and no similarity of language could cover the gap. He saw Dr Fell looking at him with eyes screwed up behind his glasses; then, to his relief, the lexicographer laughed.

‘I told you it was England,’ he replied. ‘Nobody will bother him. It’s too much concerned with the belief that the Starberths die of broken necks.’

‘Well, sir?’

‘That’s the odd part of it,’ said Dr Fell, inclining his big head.

‘They generally do.’

No more was said on the subject. The wine at dinner seemed to have dulled the doctor’s rolling spirits, or else he was occupied with some meditations which were to be seen only in the slow, steady pulsing and dimming of his cigar from the corner. Over his shoulders he pulled a frayed plaid shawl; the great mop of hair nodded forward. Rampole might have thought him asleep but for the gleam under his eyelids; the bright, shrewd steadiness behind those eyeglasses on the black ribbon . . .

The American’s sense of unreality had closed in fully by the time they reached Chatterham. Now the red lights of the train were sinking away down the tracks; a whistle fluttered and sank with it, and the air of the station platform was chill. A dog barked distantly at the passage of the train, followed by a chorus which sullenly died. Their footsteps crunched with startling loudness on gravel as Rampole followed his host up from the platform.

A white road, winding between trees and flat meadows. Marshy ground, with a mist rising from it, and a gleam of black water under the moon. Then hedgerows, odorous with hawthorn; the pale green of corn stretching across rolling fields; crickets pulsing; the fragrance of dew on grass. Here was Dr Fell, in a rakish slouch hat, and the plaid shawl over his shoulders, stumping along on two canes. He had been up to London just for the day, he explained, and he had no luggage. Swinging a heavy valise, Rampole strode beside him. He had been startled, momentarily, to see a figure ahead of them – a figure in a nondescript coat and a travelling cap, beating along the road, with sparks from a pipe flying out behind. Then he realised it was Payne. Despite his doddering walk, the lawyer covered ground with speed. Unsociable dog! Rampole could almost hear him growling to himself as he walked along. Yet there was small time to think of Payne; here he was, singing with adventure under a great alien sky, where not even the stars were familiar. He was very small and lost in this ancient England.

‘There’s the prison,’ said Dr Fell.

They had topped a slight rise, and both of them stopped. The country sloped down and out, in flat fields intersected by hedgerows. Some distance ahead, muffled in trees, Rampole could see the church spire of the village; and farmhouses slept, with silver windows, in the rich night-fragrance of the soil. Near them and to the left stood a tall house of red brick, with white window frames, austere in its clipped park beyond an avenue of oaks. (‘The Hall,’ Dr Fell said over his shoulder.) But the American was staring at the promontory to the right. Incongruous in this place, crude and powerful as Stonehenge, the stone walls of Chatterham prison humped against the sky.

They were large enough, though they seemed much bigger in the distortion of moonlight. And ‘humped,’ Rampole thought, was the word; there was one place where they seemed to surge and buckle over the crest of a hill. Through rents in the masonry, vines were crooking fingers against the moon. A teeth of spikes ran along the top, and you could see tumbled chimneys. The place looked damp and slime-painted, from occupation by lizards; it was as though the marshes had crept inside and turned stagnant.

Rampole said suddenly, ‘I can almost feel insects beating against my face. Does it get you that way?’

His voice seemed very loud. Frogs were croaking somewhere, like querulous invalids. Dr Fell pointed with one cane.

‘Do you see that’ – queer how he used the same word – ‘that hump up there, on the side where there’s the fringe of Scotch firs? It’s built out over a gully, and that’s the Hag’s Nook. In the old days, when the gallows used to stand on the edge of the hill, they’d give the spectators a show by attaching a very long rope to the condemned man’s neck and chucking him over the brink with a sporting chance to tear his head off. There was no such thing as a drop-trap, you know, in those days.’

Rampole shivered, his brain full of images. A hot day, with the lush countryside burning dark green, the white roads smoking and the poppies at the roadside. A mumbling concourse of people in pigtails and knee-breeches, the dark-clad group in the cart creaking up the hill, and then somebody swinging like an unholy pendulum above the Hag’s Nook. For the first time the countryside really seemed to be full of those mumbling voices. He turned to find the doctor’s eyes fixed on him.

‘What did they do when they built the prison?’

‘Kept it. But it was too easy to escape that way, they thought; walls built low, and several doors. So they made a kind of well below the gallows. The ground was marshy anyhow, and it filled easily. If somebody got loose and tried a jump he’d land in the well, and – they didn’t pull him out. It wouldn’t have been pleasant, dying with the things down there.’

The doctor was scuffling his feet on the ground, and Rampole picked up the valise to go on. It was not pleasant, talking here. Voices boomed too loudly, and, besides, you had an uncomfortable sensation that you were being overheard.

‘That,’ added Dr Fell, after a few wheezing steps, ‘was what did for the prison.’

‘How so?’

‘When they cut down a person after they’d hanged him, they just let him drop into the well. Once the cholera got started –’

Rampole felt a qualm in his stomach, almost a physical nausea. He knew that he was warm despite the cool air. A whispering ran amongst the trees, lightly.

‘I live not far from here,’ the other continued, as though he had mentioned nothing out of the way. He even spoke comfortably, like one pointing out the beauties of a city. ‘We’re on the outskirts of the village. You can see the gallows side of the prison very well from there – and the window of the Governor’s Room too.’

Half a mile on, they turned off the road and struck up through a lane. Here was a crooked, sleepy old house, with plaster and oak beams above and ivy-grown stone below. The moon was pale on its diamond-paned windows; evergreens grew close about its door, and the unkempt lawn showed white with daisies. Some sort of night bird complained in its sleep, twittering in the ivy.

‘We won’t wake my wife,’ said Dr Fell. ‘She’ll have left a cold supper in the kitchen, with plenty of beer. I – What’s the matter?’

He started. He wheezed, and gave an almost convulsive jump, because Rampole could hear the slither of one cane in the wet grass. The American was staring out across the meadows to where – less than a quarter of a mile away – the side of Chatterham prison rose above the Scotch firs round Hag’s Nook.

Rampole felt a damp heat prickling out on his body.

‘Nothing,’ he said, loudly. And then he began to talk with great vigor. ‘Look here, sir, I don’t want to inconvenience you. I’d have taken a different train, except there isn’t any that gets here at a reasonable hour. I could easily go to Chatterham and find a hotel or an inn or –’

The old lexicographer chuckled. It was a reassuring sound in that place. He boomed, ‘Nonsense!’ and thumped Rampole on the shoulder. Then Rampole thought, He’ll think I’ve got a scare, and hastily agreed. While Dr Fell searched after a latch-key, he glanced again at the prison.

These old woman’s tales might have influenced his outlook. But, just for a moment, he could have sworn that he had seen something looking over the wall of Chatterham prison. And he had a horrible impression that the something was wet.

3

A Face of Fear

SITTING NOW IN DR FELL’S STUDY,