‘Thought of that, as well, m’dear,’ he said despondently. ‘But we work in the courtyard – walled in, d’y’see. Walled in. No way to get so much as a peep.’
‘The mystery, then,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘is how does Mr Jimmy Amersham manage to find out what you’re up to and neutralize your engineering advantage by copying it?’
‘In a nutshell, m’dear, in the very nutshell.’
‘Do you know what I find always helps at a time like this?’ she said.
‘No?’ said Lady Farley-Stroud expectantly. ‘Do tell.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Sir Hector, ‘I know. It’s your whatchamacallit, your blackboard thingy.’
‘My crime board? No.’
Sir Hector looked to his wife for assistance.
‘Don’t look at me, dear,’ said Lady Farley-Stroud. ‘I’ve no idea how she does it.’
‘Come on then, m’dear,’ said Sir Hector. ‘We give up. You’ll have to tell us.’
‘Brandy,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
The Farley-Strouds both laughed. ‘Then we’d better withdraw to the drawin’ room and see if we can’t offer you a drop or two.’
And we did.
We played several hands of bridge, where Lady Hardcastle and I were roundly beaten thanks to some extremely skilful play and a certain amount of reckless bidding from the old couple, who, we learned, had been playing together for over forty years and were seldom defeated.
When we became too befogged for cards, we moved through to the ballroom where the Farley-Strouds kept their magnificent baby grand, and Lady Hardcastle treated us to some Chopin and a little Schubert before we launched into a selection of ribald music hall songs, to which – to my gleeful astonishment – Lady Farley-Stroud knew not only the words but also the actions.
We left at two in the morning and walked home down the hill, having been assured that Bert would drive the Rover back to the house by nine o’clock the next day.
Dressing, breaking our fast, and finishing our packing were all accomplished at remarkable speed the next morning following far too little sleep and while still feeling the after-effects of our splendid evening with the Farley-Strouds.
I regretted Lady Hardcastle’s decision to give Edna and Miss Jones the whole week off. Couldn’t they start their holiday on Tuesday? I wondered as I cleared away the breakfast things and had one last tidy round.
Bert arrived with the Rover as the hall clock chimed nine and declared it a ‘fine little vehicle’, before politely declining my offer to drive him home in it and setting off on foot. He said that the walk would do him good, but I also suspected that an opportunity to wander into the village and then take his time getting back to The Grange was also quite appealing.
Not long afterwards, Newton arrived in Dr Fitzsimmons’s trap, ready to take us to the station in nearby Chipping Bevington, the railway never having quite made it as far as Littleton Cotterell. He was a stolid, henpecked man, whose abrasive wife was Dr Fitzsimmons’s housekeeper. I had met her during our first week in the village and hadn’t been favourably impressed. A convenient consequence of her domineering nature, however, was that Newton didn’t bat an eyelid when I told him that I would help him load our baggage on to the trap. He didn’t even comment on my strength, something which I found more refreshing and relaxing than any amount of ‘Here, let me do that for you, miss’ could ever be.
Within no time, everything was loaded and we were off on our sedate and steady way to Chipping railway station. Newton made no effort to engage either of us in conversation, but we were still sufficiently groggy that we were happy to spend the long ride in companionable silence. The sun was out, the air was warm, and I drank in the sights and smells of England at its late-summery best. From the trap’s high vantage point, we could see over hedgerows that occluded our view when we were in the little motor car, and I was able to get an early start on my study of the countryside with a good long look at some of the West Country’s finest dairy herds – from a reassuringly safe distance. Cows, as anyone with any sense knows, are terrifying beasts and should not be approached, but it was safe to view them from the other side of a sturdy English hedgerow. As the journey progressed and we drew nearer to our destination, I also managed a glimpse or two of some rather entertaining-looking pigs (Gloucestershire Old Spots, I sincerely hoped, though in truth I had no idea) rooting about near their little wooden huts in a field beside the road.
As we drew up at the station, the porter, who seemed to recognize us from our previous trips, hurried towards the trap with his trolley. He began cheerfully unloading the luggage almost before we had stopped moving. By the time Lady Hardcastle and I had clambered down and she had pressed a few coins into Newton’s hand for his trouble, the sturdy little porter had piled everything on to his sturdy little trolley and was already on his way towards the sturdy little ticket office.
He was waiting for us as we walked in.
‘Mornin’, m’lady,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you again. Just you have a word with Young Roberts there for your tickets and I’ll see you to your train.’
‘Thank you, Mr . . . ?’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘Roberts, m’lady,’ he said, knuckling the peak of his railwayman’s cap. ‘“Old Roberts”, they calls me. Young Roberts over there behind the counter is me eldest, see. Railways is in our blood. There’s been Robertses here at Chipping Bevington station near sixty years now, startin’ with me grandfather, Mr Roberts.’
‘I say,’ said Lady Hardcastle with a smile as she approached the ticket counter. ‘How wonderful to be so well looked after. It’s like visiting an old family business.’
Roberts beamed proudly. His son looked faintly embarrassed, but gave a conspiratorial grin when Lady Hardcastle winked at him. ‘Two returns to Riddlethorpe, please,’ she said.
The young man reached under the counter and heaved up an enormous, well-thumbed volume. He spent some minutes flicking back and forth between the pages and making notes on a scrap of paper. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever sold a ticket to Riddlethorpe before, m’lady,’ he said when he had finished his calculations. ‘I shall have to note it in my book. I likes to keep track of all the places I sends people. It’s interestin’, I finds, seein’ where people gets to.’
She smiled warmly at him.
‘Your quickest route,’ he carried on, consulting his notes, ‘would be to get to Bristol Temple Meads, then get the express to Birmingham New Street. You can get a connection from there to Leicester, and then change on to the branch line to Riddlethorpe. Looks like you’ve arrived at exactly the right time, too. If you gets on the next train here, all your connections lines up nicely.’