The Ha-Ha Case Read online

  Miss Menteith kept her eyes fixed on the road with unnecessary intentness.

  “He’s at the hero-worshipping stage, I think,” she confirmed.

  Something in her tone suggested that this phase in a youth’s development might not be an altogether desirable one.

  “And there’s only one hero on the premises for him to worship just now?” Jim Brandon suggested, with a trace of acidity in his voice.

  “Mr. Laxford seems to have a lot of influence with him,” Miss Menteith admitted with a certain reluctance, as though she felt that she might be going too far.

  Jim Brandon detected the faint critical inflexion in her voice, and he wondered if by any chance she felt a touch of jealousy in the matter. She seemed to have a fancy for Johnnie, to judge by the way she had almost fired up when she heard the youngster disparaged. If she were keen on Johnnie, it would be natural enough to find her resenting Laxford’s preponderant influence.

  “You don’t seem to approve, altogether,” he suggested by way of probing further.

  But evidently Miss Menteith thought she had gone far enough.

  “What business is it of mine?” she retorted sharply. “Your family put Johnnie into Mr. Laxford’s charge, didn’t they? Well, it’s their affair; and if they’re satisfied with the result, there’s no more to be said, is there?”

  Johnnie must have been talking, Jim Brandon reflected; or else this girl had kept her ears open to some purpose. She seemed to have a pretty good idea of the lie of the land; and her sympathy was not on Laxford’s side, to judge by her tone rather than her actual words. She might make a useful ally, if he could enlist her; and even if he stopped short of that, he might be able to utilize her in furthering his plans. In the meanwhile, he decided, he had better drop this rather ticklish subject.

  The car rose and dipped as they ran across a culvert, and Jim Brandon caught a glimpse of a swollen little stream swirling brown and foam-flecked as it swept into the archway.

  “Lot of rain you must have had lately,” he said with a gesture towards the water. “That’s fairly high.”

  Miss Menteith nodded.

  “Yes, it’s been pretty wet. All the streams are full. There was a lot of rain up in the hills, over yonder, and the water hasn’t drained off yet.”

  “Is Johnnie doing much fishing in his spare time? He used to be rather keen about it.”

  “He’s had to be careful lately, after that sprained ankle he got a month or so ago. Didn’t you notice him limping when he was up in town?”

  “Up in town, was he?” Jim Brandon had some difficulty in stifling his surprise at this news. “No, I didn’t see him. When was he up?”

  “Oh, ten days or a fortnight ago,” the girl answered. “He and Mr. Laxford went up together for the day. I thought Johnnie would be sure to look you up.”

  Jim Brandon was hard put to it to preserve an air of indifference. Johnnie up in town, along with Laxford? It might mean nothing; perhaps they had merely run up to London on some casual errand which was no concern of his. Still . . . Johnnie hadn’t said a word about that excursion in his letters, either beforehand or afterwards; and in that suppression, at least, Laxford’s hand was plain. And if Laxford wanted the trip kept dark, there must be something going on behind the scenes. That was one useful bit of news that this girl had given him, though she didn’t realise it. Meanwhile, his best policy was to keep his suspicions to himself and not let her guess that she had given anything away.

  “Most likely they were very busy,” he commented lazily. “There’s always so much to do in London when you’re only up for the day.”

  “Well, his ankle’s all right again,” Miss Menteith volunteered, harking back to the earlier subject. “He had to be careful for a while, you know, and keep off rough ground for fear of giving it a fresh twist. Hard lines on him, being tied by the leg like that. He’s quite mad on shooting, just now; and he hated having to hobble about with a stick.”

  Jim Brandon was glad to get still further away from dangerous ground.

  “Not much shooting at this time, surely,” he pointed out.

  “Not real shooting,” the girl agreed. “But Johnnie’s quite happy if he has a gun in his hand. He spends most of his time shooting rabbits. In fact, if we lived by his gun, the Edgehill diet would be painfully monotonous. Until the family rebelled, it was a case of the Curate’s Grace with us:

  Rabbits hot and rabbits cold,

  Rabbits tender and rabbits tough,

  Rabbits young and rabbits old:

  I thank Thee, Lord, I’ve had enough.’

  I don’t want to see rabbit pie again in my life—not that I ever doted on it. Australia is the place for me. They don’t eat rabbits there, I’m told.”

  Jim Brandon’s mind had gone back to that trip to London. A fresh possibility occurred to him.

  “By the way,” he asked, “Johnnie didn’t go up to town to see a bone-setter, by any chance? About his ankle, I mean?”

  Miss Menteith’s decided headshake disposed of this comforting hypothesis at once.

  “No, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do anything of the sort. He’s an absurd young Spartan in some ways, you remember. Grin and bear it—all that sort of thing. He wouldn’t even let Mr. Laxford get a doctor from Talgarth to look at his ankle. There was quite a wrangle over it. I told him he was silly, not having the thing properly looked after. However, he was quite right, as it turned out. The thing got well again of itself, just by taking care.”

  So that run up to town was still unexplained, Jim Brandon recognised with some uneasiness. London might mean lawyers, when Johnnie was in question; and lawyers might mean the very devil, at this juncture.

  “This is Talgarth,” his companion explained as they ran into a trim little village. Jim Brandon glanced incuriously at the white thatched cottages, each with its little hedge-enclosed garden, a few larger dwellings, a shop or two, and an old-fashioned half-timbered inn with rambler roses thick on its frontage.

  “It seems very neatly kept,” he commented.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Miss Menteith agreed, with a certain enthusiasm. “It belongs to Mr. Wendover—one of the local magnates—and he’s a model landlord, they say. He encourages the people to take some pride in the place. It all looks old-fashioned, but everything inside these cottages is modernised. I’ve been in one or two.”

  “Must have cost him a pile,” Jim Brandon commented, with something rather grudging in his tone.

  “That gate there is the entrance to the Dower House on the Silver Grove estate,” Miss Menteith explained as they left the village behind. “It’s empty just now. So’s the big house itself. There’s a very pretty little lake, up yonder behind the trees. If you stay here for a day or two, you ought to go up and have a look at it, it’s quite worth seeing. Nobody will mind, so long as you keep to the paths and don’t wander at large through the woods.”

  Jim Brandon had a suspicion that all this local information was not being offered merely for its own sake. Miss Menteith was using it as a barrier to keep him from putting any more questions about Edgehill affairs. She had given him some information, but it had evidently been carefully selected. Now she was talking to forestall anything savouring of a cross-examination by him.

  “That’s the entrance to Talgarth Grange,” she went on, as they swept past a big ornamental gateway leading into an avenue. “It belongs to that Mr. Wendover that I mentioned a minute ago. He’s chairman of the County Council, a J.P., president of the local Antiquarian Society, something in the Royal Agricultural Society, and all that kind of thing.”

  “What sort of person is he?” Jim Brandon asked, merely to let her see that he accepted her tacit decision to keep off the Edgehill problem.

  “Oh, he’s nice. Very nice indeed,” Miss Menteith declared with a rather surprising warmth and sincerity. “He’s the sort of man one likes at sight. He looks a sort of Ideal Uncle, if you see what I mean. A bit old-fashioned in some ways. Manners dignified, and yet
genial, you know, the kind of thing they used to call ‘courtly.’ He brings it off and makes you feel it’s all genuine. He’s teaching me golf. He’s got a six-hole practice course on his ground up there, and he’s been awfully decent in playing with me and giving me a hand. The last man you’d expect to have a taste for crime,” she wound up unexpectedly.

  “What’s that?” queried Jim Brandon. “He isn’t a Raffles or what not, is he?”

  “No, no. He’s a criminologist—dabbles in murder cases, you know. He’s a friend of Sir Clinton Driffield, the Chief Constable of the county. I expect that’s where he picked it up.”

  “Rum sort of hobby,” Jim Brandon commented with a slight shrug which might have indicated contempt. “Hasn’t he grown out of the Sexton Blake stage yet?”

  “I can’t see the charm in gruesome stuff like that,” the girl admitted. “Morbid sort of taste, isn’t it? He ought to have got married, and then he’d have had brighter interests.”

  “A woman-hater, is he?” Jim Brandon hinted, with a side-glance at his companion.

  “Not a bit of it,” she retorted. “There’s nothing of the crusty old bachelor about him. He likes young people. He’s been very nice to me.”

  “What’s his friend like? The Chief Constable, I mean.”

  Miss Menteith reflected for a moment or two before replying. She seemed to have difficulty in recalling salient characteristics which would serve in a description; and when she finally tried to sketch the Chief Constable she produced only a disjointed catalogue of details.

  “Oh, well, he’s somewhere round about thirty-five, I should think. But it’s difficult to guess his age. He’s about your height, and he’s got a close-clipped moustache and fine teeth. He’s got a sort of sardonic way of talking at times. There’s a kind of edge on what he says, if you understand what I mean . . . I can’t quite describe it. Sometimes it’s double-edged. Most of the time he seems politely interested—just on the verge of boredom, but not quite showing it. Then at other times he watches you in a speculative sort of way, not as if he were looking at your nose or your mouth or your eyes, but somehow as if he were seeing you as you really are—your personality, I mean, not your mere outside appearance. But that’s only the merest flash. Usually he looks as ordinary as possible,—more ordinary than the man in the street even. He gives you nothing to take hold of, somehow.”

  “Curious cove, evidently. Doesn’t pose as the big official, then?”

  “Not a bit. I only heard what he was by accident. Before that, I hadn’t a notion of what his line could be.”

  “Did you ever meet his wife?”

  “He hasn’t one,” Miss Menteith informed him curtly.

  She seemed to have lost interest in Wendover and the Chief Constable. They had served their turn in keeping the conversation off other things. Now her expression betrayed a trace of perplexity, as though she were trying at the last moment to choose between two alternatives which confronted her.

  “Here’s Edgehill,” she explained, turning the car into a lodge-gate which opened on a broad avenue leading upward through a belt of trees.

  Then, slowing the car as though to spin out the last few moments, she turned to her passenger.

  “You’ve been trying to size me up, haven’t you?” she demanded with a hint of mockery in her tone. “Well, I’ve been trying an experiment on you. So we’re quits, I think.”

  She pressed the button and sounded a long blast on her horn, apparently to announce her arrival to those in the house, but possibly, Jim Brandon reflected, to prevent him from making any comment on her last speech.

  As the car drew up before the house, Johnnie Brandon made his appearance at the front door.

  Chapter Two

  The Brandon Heritage

  JIM BRANDON ushered his brother into the Edgehill gun-room; and then, after a cautious glance along the corridor, followed him over the threshold and closed the door.

  “Take a pew, Johnnie,” he suggested pleasantly, with a nod towards one of the chairs. “I want to have a talk with you. We’ve not had a minute alone together since I came down.”

  He propped his gun in a corner. Then, sweeping aside a scratch-brush and some rags, he cleared a space for himself on the table, sat down, and lit a cigarette.

  “Have one? No? All right.”

  For a moment or two Jim smoked in silence, reflecting that he had blundered badly in his opening. ‘I want to have a talk with you’ had been their father’s prelude to the discussion of delinquencies when they were children. That phrase must have struck a wrong note at the very start, as he could see from the expression on Johnnie’s face. It suggested that a wigging was coming, and that was the worst kind of beginning for a mission of persuasion. However, it was too late to worry about that.

  Johnnie had detached the barrels from the stock of his gun and was preparing to clean them. He took this task seriously, and he went about it with a methodical deliberation which at this moment served to irritate his elder brother, who wanted to secure undivided attention from his junior. One by one, Johnnie collected his requisites with the care of a conjurer running over his properties before a performance. He reached across the table for a cleaning rod and screwed a brass jag to its end with a rather fumbling touch. From a drawer he produced some bristle brushes. He considered the scratch-brush for a moment, hesitating, and then dropped it back into its place. Another drawer was opened to secure clean tow and woollen patches. Then a shelf across the room had to be visited to fetch down bottles of linseed oil and Three-in-One, along with a pot of vaseline. Finally, after a clutch at some of the oily rags across the table, he ranged his collection in neat order before him, looked them over to see that none was missing, and prepared for work.

  Jim, fuming internally but outwardly unmoved, watched his brother’s awkward movements as he walked to and fro. There had been some excuse for that girl when she miscalculated their ages. For all his twenty-one years, Johnnie had the look of a bulky, overgrown schoolboy; and that frank, freckled, and rather simple face added to the illusion of his immaturity. The blue eyes under the unruly mop of fair hair had still something of child’s candour in them. If the mouth showed any firmness at all, it was the firmness of obstinacy rather than of character. Jim reflected sourly on the ill-chance which had made the fortunes of that generation of Brandons dependent on the whim of an inexperienced dullard. Now the danger-period was upon them, and all might turn upon his own diplomacy. He put his cigarette on the table beside him, hitched himself into a more comfortable position, and addressed his brother.

  “Why don’t you come up to London and see the Governor, Johnnie? He’s fond of you, and he feels it more than a bit when you seem to be avoiding him deliberately. He’s lonely now, since the Mater died, and it cuts him more than you’d think, your staying away like this. He’d like to see you.”

  The overgrown schoolboy showed very plainly in Johnnie’s attitude in face of this appeal. He looked acutely uncomfortable and tried to conceal it by bending over his task. At last he gave an awkward shrug which revealed his inward discomfort.

  “I can’t manage it just now, Jim; I can’t, really.”

  Apparently encouraged by the boy’s obvious uneasiness, Jim tried a fresh argument.

  “There’s one thing you might do. You know how much store the Governor sets by anniversaries and all that sort of thing—birthdays, Christmas, and so forth. Rot, I think it, myself. Still, there it is. You know what I mean. For the last month or two he’s been brooding over your coming-of-age. He’s spoken to me about it more than once. I can see what’s worrying him. Of course, in the old days, before he muddled things, it would have been a big spree on the estate. All the tenants to dinner, decorations, flag on the mast, speeches, everybody very mellow and cheery. He’d have spread himself over it and enjoyed every minute. It’s the sort of thing where he’d have shone, you know. Bluff old squire, and the young hopeful coming on. Well, that’s all dead and done with. . . .”

  A sl
ight twitch of his lips betrayed his feelings for a moment. The contrast between the actual state of affairs and the might-have-been was a painful subject. If Johnnie was touched by it, he concealed his feelings by a closer absorption in his cleaning operations and avoided glancing at his brother.

  “What he’s set his heart on,” the elder brother continued, “is just this. He wants you to spend your coming-of-age with him. It means coming up to town to-morrow, first thing. But you’ll get back in plenty of time for the partridges.”

  Johnnie made a sudden gesture of refusal, but Jim continued smoothly as though he had not noticed it.

  “’Twon’t be exactly a treat, I quite admit, to spend the day with a sick man in frowsy digs. I see that well enough. Still, I thought I’d come down and see if I couldn’t persuade you to humour him, Johnnie. ’Tisn’t much to ask, is it? The Governor’s been an old fool. True enough. Nobody knows it better than I do. Still, he’s very keen on you. It would give him no end of pleasure. Just look at it that way, Johnnie. Do the decent thing.”

  Johnnie’s face had grown more and more overcast as the appeal progressed; but the cloud on it was one of worry and perplexity rather than of ill-temper. He appreciated all the points of his brother’s argument; but, behind his protective mask of rather surly indifference, a conflict between two loyalties was raging furiously.

  Jim felt in his pocket and produced a letter. He held it out towards Johnnie for a moment and then, with an after-thought, drew it back again.

  “I’ll read it to you. Then you’ll hear just how it sounds.”

  Johnnie had recognised his own scrawling handwriting on the envelope.

  “You needn’t bother, Jim. It’s my last letter to the Governor, isn’t it? I know quite well what I said to him.”

  But Jim Brandon had his own reasons for reading this letter aloud. He knew that he could make it tell more heavily by mere intonations of his voice.

  “You know what you said, all right, I expect. But I doubt if you know just how you put it in words. Listen, now.”