Читать книгу The Riddle of the Rail - Fred M. White - Страница 8

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The proprietor of the White Hart, who apparently had at some time in his career been a gentleman's servant, welcomed the new-comers respectfully, and inquired what he could do for them.

"You can give us a couple of bedrooms, I suppose?" Norcliff asked "We may stay a few days; that is, if the fishing comes up to our expectations. We hear rather well of it."

"I don't think you will be disappointed, sir," the landlord said civilly. "It is just a bit early for our water but some good baskets of trout have been taken by my customers in the last day or two. And I can give you bedrooms, of course, sir. Do you want them at once, or in the course of a few days?"

"Oh, we will take them at once," Norcliff said. "Our traps are at Abbotsbury station in the cloak-room there, and perhaps you can send a man to fetch them. We have no rods or tackle with us, but my man will send them down from town in a day or two. Can you manage to send to the station?"

The landlord would send for the gentlemen's belongings at once. Meanwhile, would the gentlemen please to lunch at the hotel, or had they already made their arrangements?

"We'll both lunch and dine here," Norcliff said. "Meanwhile, we will go as far as Abbotsbury and collect our handbags from the hotel where we stopped last night. As it happens, my friend here has a certain amount of business to do in Abbotsbury. But we will be back here in time for luncheon at half-past one."

It was quite a good luncheon that the landlord of the White Hart provided, and the dinner that followed, in due course, was equally satisfactory. Then, after the house had closed for the night, Norcliff strolled into the bar, which fortunately was empty, and ordered himself a drink. It would be a pleasure, he said, if the landlord would join him in a whisky and soda.

"I am sure you are very good, sir," the landlord said. "Have you been in this neighborhood before?"

Norcliff replied, truthfully enough, that he had not.

"I had often wanted to," he said. "I have a weakness for these old towns, and that Abbey of yours has a great attraction for me. I could spend hours wandering about there. But don't you find this rather a quiet spot in the winter?"

"Oh, a man gets used to that sort of thing," the landlord smiled. "Besides, I have neighbors."

"Ah, so I noticed," Norcliff said casually. "It seems rather a pity that those four houses down the road should be looking right down on the railway track, with their gardens touching a siding. They must find it rather a nuisance."

"No, I don't think they do, sir. You see, it isn't very often that any shunting is done on that siding, because there is only a single line there, and most of the heavy work takes place on the far side of the station. You see, the siding is a comparatively new one, though the hedges at the bottom of the gardens were there before the siding was made, and when the ground that it stands on was a field. Quiet people they are."

"What sort of people?" Norcliff asked.

"Well, one of the gentlemen is a retired bank manager. He came here thirty years ago, and will probably end his days in Abbotsbury. Then in another is a well-known tradesman in the town. The third belongs to a solicitor and the fourth is the property of retired clergyman, who is not in the best of health. You see, he spends quite half his time in the South of France."

Norcliff had elicited all this information in his own outwardly simple way, and the landlord would have been surprised if he could have seen the back of his customer's mind. Norcliff had almost at once dismissed the first three occupants of the houses, but there was something about this invalid clergyman that appealed to him.

"Oh, does he?" he said. "I wonder if he would be prepared to let his house during the time he is away. You see, there is fishing in the Avon—winter fishing, I mean—which is quite as good as your trout season. And if this old gentleman didn't want his house between say, September and May, then I think I might find him a tenant, if he would let his house furnished. I mean myself."

"Now that is an odd thing, sir," the landlord said. "The house is let furnished at the present moment, and has been for months. You see, the reverend gentleman rarely comes back home till the last week in May, and goes off again at the end of September. Something wrong with his chest, they tell me."

"Oh yes, and who has the house now?"

"A gentleman called Farr. He took the place over some time ago, together with the owner's elderly housekeeper and he has been living there ever since."

"An elderly man?" Norcliff asked tentatively.

"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that," the landlord said. "About forty-five, perhaps. Well-set-up gentleman, who looks as if he had seen service. In fact, a good many people here call him Captain Farr. But I don't know anything about that, sir. He comes here sometimes, but he doesn't say much, and keeps himself very much to himself. Not at all the sort of man you'd like to tackle with gloves, though I could do a bit myself that way at one time."

"But what on earth is a man like that doing down here?" Norcliff asked "Is he a fisherman, too?"

"Never cast a line as far as I know, sir. He told me one day not so long ago, that he came into the district with a view to purchasing a chicken and bee farm about ten miles away, and I believe he has been negotiating with the owner ever since. In fact I know he has, because the man who has the farm lives close to a brother of mine. Not that it is any business of mine."

"Or mine," Norcliff smiled. "I should like to have a chat with this Mr. Farr, because, if he is giving up the house down the road, then I might take it off his hands for a bit."

"I am afraid that can't be managed just now, sir," the landlord said. "That is, not unless you are staying for a week or so, because Mr. Farr shut up the house on the evening of Whit-Sunday and went away for a few days."

Here was interesting information, Norcliff thought, though it might lead to nothing in the end. Still, in the light of what he knew, it was rather strange that a man who kept himself very much to himself should take a house on the very edge of that siding and that he should shut it up and leave it just at the time when the fruit train was shunted into its solitary siding. A big, strong man, in the prime of life, and one who evidently possessed the muscular development in the highest possible degree.

"Ah, well, I suppose I must let the matter stand over, for the present, at any rate," Norcliff sad. "I suppose you have no idea where Mr. Farr has gone?"

"Well, I couldn't say for certain, sir, but on Saturday evening the old housekeeper I was speaking of came in to see my wife, and told her not to send any more eggs and butter up to the house until she came back again. You see, sir, I have a bit of a dairy, and I supply a fair amount of produce in the neighborhood."

"Then the housekeeper is not on the premises?"

"Oh no, sir; she has gone off to stay with some relations in Gloucester. And she did drop a word to the effect that Mr. Farr was going to Birmingham for a few days."

Norcliff went up to bed presently, feeling that he had not altogether wasted his time. Before he had finished, he was going to know a great deal more about the house—the garden of which ran down to the railway siding and was only separated from it by an old quickset hedge. Moreover, the tenant of the house had shut it up and gone away fairly early on Whit-Saturday, somewhere about the time, probably, when the fruit train was being dispatched from Brendham. Moreover, he was a man who appeared to be interested in farming, and, as a resident of some months standing, would have every opportunity of discovering all there was to be learnt in connection with the goods traffic in and around Abbotsbury. There was no reason whatever why he should not know that the fruit vans should be shunted off the main line only twenty miles away from the starting-place. He might have studied all that sort of thing out minutely through his experience of what he could see for himself during the short rush which made up the Easter holidays. It was more than probable that exactly the same thing had happened during the first holiday festival of the year, and that he had laid his plans accordingly. Of course, it was no more than mere conjecture at the moment, but the line of reasoning was sound enough to induce Norcliff to probe a great deal deeper into the comings and goings of the man who was known in the neighborhood as Captain Farr.

"All of which is distinctly fishy," he said to Trumble, when they met at the breakfast-table next morning. "We are going to look over that house and garden, and I shall be greatly surprised if we don't find something there to reward our pains. Whilst you are smoking your pipe I think I will slip down as far at Abbotsbury station and ask if that early vegetable train for the West was held up here at Easter precisely as it was on Whit-Saturday."

Norcliff was absent for the best part of an hour, and, when he came back, a mere glance at his face showed Trumble that the man from Scotland Yard had hot been wasting his time.

"It's all working out beautifully," he explained. "It appears that the same thing happens practically before every bank holiday. I am not talking about Christmas, but the other days, when the traffic is more than normal. Anyway, I have elicited the fact that the corresponding train, dispatched to the West on Easter Saturday, was held up in the same siding for a similar period. If Farr is the man we are after, then I take it he was aware of all that I have been telling you; and I am going to suppose, for the sake of my theory, that he took the house by the siding for the purpose of carrying out that dastardly crime."

"I am inclined to agree with you," Trumble said. "Now then, what's the next move?"

"A visit to the house by this railway," Norcliff said curtly.