The luncheon with Teresa was a pronounced social success. French rather
than Irish in character, it was eaten under a plum-tree in the orchard.
Micky waited at table with his hat on, and then disappeared for awhile.
At two o’clock he rose again above the horizon, and said that the
electric car was at the door. Richard and Teresa set off to meet the
two-thirty train at Leighton Buzzard. By this time they had certainly
become rather intimate, according to the way of young persons thrown
together--by no matter what chance--in the month of June--or any other
month. It was not, perhaps, unnatural that Raphael Craig, when he
emerged from the railway-station and found the two laughing and chatting
side by side in the motor-car, should have cast at them a sidelong
glance, in which were mingled amusement, alarm, and warning.
Mr. Raphael carried the large brown portmanteau, which was now--as
Richard discovered by handling it--quite empty. On the journey home
Teresa drove the car, and her father sat by her side. Richard occupied
the rear of the car, giving a hint occasionally as to the management of
the machine.
‘I think I have nothing further to do here,’ he said when the party had
arrived safely at Queen’s Farm. ‘Both the other cars are in order. I
will therefore bid you good-day. Should anything go wrong with this car,
you will doubtless let us know.’
He spoke in his most commercial manner, though his feelings were far
from commercial.
Raphael Craig bent those dark, deep eyes of his upon the youth.
‘I have been telephoning to your firm this morning,’ said Craig, ‘and
have arranged with them that you shall take the Panhard back to town.
They are going to take it off my hands--at a price.’
‘With pleasure,’ said Richard.
‘But,’ Mr. Craig continued, ‘I wish to use the Panhard this week-end.
Therefore you cannot remove it till Monday.’
‘Very good,’ said Richard, ‘I will present myself on Monday morning.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime I have other business for my firm in the
neighbourhood.’
Teresa’s glance intercepted her father’s, and these two exchanged a
look. The old man frowned at his daughter.
‘Good-day,’ said Richard.
Raphael and Teresa shook hands with him. Was he a conceited ass, or did
Teresa really seem grieved?
‘Till Monday,’ said Teresa.
Richard walked down to the village, engaged Miss Puddephatt’s room, and
dined at the White Horse Hotel. He had not yet definitely decided what
course of conduct to follow. He was inclined to do nothing further in
the affair, and to tell Simon Lock on Monday that, so far as he could
discover, Simon Lock’s suspicions about Raphael Craig were groundless.
He had taken no money from Simon Lock, and he would take none. Yet
why should he pause now? Why should he not, for his own private
satisfaction, probe the mystery to the bottom? Afterwards--when the
strange secret stood revealed to him--there would be plenty of time then
to decide whether or not to deliver up Raphael Craig into the hands of
Simon Lock. Yes, on consideration he would, for his own pleasure, find
out whatever was to be found out.
That evening, an hour after sunset, he lay hidden behind a hedge on the
west side of Watling Street, exactly opposite the boreen leading to the
Queen’s Farm.
Richard slept. He was decidedly short of sleep, and sleep overtook him
unawares. Suddenly from the end of the boreen came the faint spit, spit
of a motor-car, growing louder as it approached the main road. Would it
awake Richard? No, he slept stolidly on. The motor-car, bearing an old
man and a young girl, slid down into the valley towards Dunstable, and
so out of hearing. An hour passed. The church clock at Houghton Regis,
two miles off to the east, struck midnight. Then the car might have been
heard returning, it laboured heavily up the hill, and grunted as though
complaining of its burden as it curved round into the boreen towards
Queen’s Farm.
Richard awoke. In a fraction of a second he was wide awake, alert,
eager, excited. He saw the car vanishing towards the outbuildings of
Queen’s Farm. Springing out of the hedge, he clambered over the opposite
hedge into Craig’s orchard, crossed it, passed the house by its north
side, and so came to the quadrangle of outbuildings. By keeping on the
exterior of this quadrangle he arrived at last, skirting the walls, at
the blind end of the boreen. He peeped cautiously round the angle of
the wall, scarcely allowing even the tip of his nose to protrude, and
discerned the empty motor-car. He ventured forward into the boreen. It
was at this corner of the quadrangle that the locked shed was situated.
Rather high up in the wall a light disclosed the presence of a small
window. The faintness of the light proved that the window must be
extremely dirty. But even if it had been clean he could not have
utilized it, for it was seven feet from the earth. He put his hand on
the wall and touched a spout. The spout felt rickety, but he climbed
up it, and, clinging partly to the spout and partly to the frame of the
window, he looked into the locked shed. It had once, he perceived, been
used as a stable, but it was being put to other purposes now. The manger
was heaped up with bright silver coins. In the middle of the floor stood
a large iron receptacle of peculiar shape. He guessed that it had been
constructed to fit into the well of the Panhard motor-car. By means of
two small buckets Teresa and her father were transferring the contents
of this receptacle, which was still half full of silver, into the
manger.
The shed was ‘lighted by a single candle stuck insecurely on what had
once been a partition between two stalls. The candle flickered and cast
strange shadows. The upper part of the chamber was in darkness. Looking
straight across it, Richard saw another little window exactly opposite
his own; and through this window he discerned another watching face.
‘Micky!’ he exclaimed softly to himself.
Raphael and Teresa were, then, doubly spied upon. But who was Micky?
Richard’s attention was diverted from this interesting inquiry by the
gradual growth of a light near the door, of which, being parallel with
his window, he had no view. Then a long, licking flame appeared.
He could see it creeping across the floor, nearer and nearer to the
unconscious heavers of silver. Raphael had turned on the waste tap of
the exhaust petrol under the motor-car. The highly combustible quid had
run beneath the door of the shed it had there come in contact with
the ax match used by Raphael to light the candle and then thrown down.
Richard saw next that the door of the shed was on fire; at the same
moment, unable any longer to keep his grip on the spout and the
window-frame, he fell unexpectedly to the ground.