Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes Page B

nods back. ‘I’m going out to scout around. I’ll slip along the terrace while you attract attention to yourself and your car.’
    ‘Very well. I’ll start the engine and race her. Only, let’s hurry – for my mother and I must honestly be off fairly soon.’
    Jay whistles on a rising note. It is a sound Grant has heard before. Two boys and a girl glide out of the buttery and take their stance at the back of the lobby. All are deadly serious, and all are armed with bows. They stand with arrows notched, facing the door. The set-up, Grant realizes, is genuinely lethal. Sooner or later there will be a misadventure. Jay has drawn the bolts. Before he knows it, Grant is outside, flashing the torch before him and whistling. The door bangs to behind him. As he takes a second cautious step down from the terrace he can just hear it softly opening again.
    There is a clear sky and a sickle moon. After a few minutes in the open it would just be possible to get about without a torch. Driving will be pleasant – but Grant glances at his watch and wonders at what unearthly hour he and his mother will finally make a decent hotel. He wants to get away from this place. And, once away, he is quite sure that he is not coming back. If his mother really succeeds in bringing the crazy old dame to a deal he will go in and veto it. Once in a way, his authority with his mother will stretch to that. Let Jay run Candleshoe, hallucinations and all, until one morning its owner is found stiff in her bed. And then let family lawyers descend on the place and clear it all up. Let them, at a pinch, burn Jay’s bows and send his forces packing and set him to a useful trade. It will be better for him in the end than getting the boundaries of fact and fancy so dangerously confused.
    In this mood of impatience Grant comes to his car. He climbs into the driving-seat and switches on a light. His mother’s guidebook, with its fatal promise of long-and-short work at Abbot’s Benison, lies open on the floorboards. He picks it up and then switches on the ignition. He has promised to make a row, and he will. But perhaps he is no friend to the children in encouraging a mass of obsessive nonsense that has plainly gone too far. He tugs the self-starter. Nothing happens.
    He tugs again – although already he knows that there is something wrong. After a minute he gets out, swings up the bonnet, and flashes his torch on the engine. One look tells him enough. The car will not move that night.
    He finds himself acting in an extraordinary way. He flicks off the torch, reaches into the car and switches off the light, turns, and walks swiftly and quietly into shadow. It needs thinking out.
    He has no impulse to suspect the children. This is intuitive and immediate, and only seconds later does he see that it is backed by logic. For the moment Jay is putting up with him, and has even pressed him into service. But the boy wants nothing more than to be rid of him – or at least to be rid of his mother. Jay has no motive for doing this thing. Moreover – ruthless as one may feel him to be – this can be guessed as something he would not do even to the most unwelcome visitor who had once received the hospitality of Candleshoe.
    There is a possible explanation in insubordination and stupidity. Robin is certainly not a lieutenant to display either of these weaknesses. But there is a whole bunch of other kids, and it is unlikely that Jay has been able so to handpick his forces that one or two young blockheads are not among them.
    Yet that won’t do either; won’t do for the sufficient reason that the job on the car has been a knowledgeable one. Grant begins to see why he is acting queerly. And he is acting queerly. He has got on the shadowed side of a yew-hedge, long since grown wild and cliff-like, and he is listening intently. He wants to locate Robin, now on his scouting expedition, and get him back to the house. For his own imagination is working. Just as, a little time