What Happened at Hazelwood? by Michael Innes Page A

this way. I remembered her luggage perfectly well. And those suitcases were nothing like it.
    At that I left Owdon and went on my way. He was, I concluded, preparing to make an unobtrusive bolt, and to this end was caching some of his possessions near the high road. He had been at Hazelwood ten times as long as I had – and now within twenty-four hours of the arrival of the Australians he was getting ready to cut and run. Such behaviour on the part of an old retainer surely suggested a first-rate mystery, and it may seem surprising that as I tramped on I didn’t give my mind to it. But somehow I couldn’t bring Owdon anywhere near the centre of things; to the Hazelwood problem as I saw it he was peripheral only. And I think it was because of this – because, I mean, I didn’t start speculating on why Owdon should be preparing his get-away – that ten minutes later the incident sprang up in my mind again in quite a different focus.
    What if it wasn’t his own unobtrusive departure that Owdon was preparing? What if it was Timmy’s?
    The notion alarmed me. It alarmed me because it brought up the knight-errant theme again. Gerard Simney had come with ludicrous speed to the notion that it might be altogether virtuous and laudable to abscond with me to the antipodes. That was tiresome enough. But young Timmy was a fowl of a different feather; it was impossible that he could have grown up without feelings of injustice and dispossession; and the suppressed rage bred of this he had somehow hitched on to the spectacle of George and myself. Of this I had been granted a sudden revealing glimpse not many hours before. Was it possible that Owdon knew more of the boy – and feared more?
    The drift of my mind here must seem melodramatic enough. But remember, please, that Simneys as a race are impossibly rash – and that Timmy, whether on the distaff side or not, is a Simney every inch. Quite simply, then, I was confronting this: that Owdon feared the lad’s doing George some horrible violence – and was proposing to get him out of the way either before or after such an event.
    But this was not the only possibility. The matter might be altogether different. Some threat was in the air. The Australians had brought it with them. Owdon had felt it at some word spoken by Hippias. The depleted Hazelwood crystal witnessed to this. Nay, Owdon had felt it earlier; the very arrival of those people on the doorstep had discomposed him. And what if, in some obscure way, the threat were to his boy? Why had George attempted to hustle from the room the lad whom he had been so indecently ready to exhibit in the character of a footman? Were those suitcases designed to accompany Timmy to some less unhealthy spot?
    I was revolving all this not without anxiety – for Timmy somehow did concern me – when the next of that morning’s regular succession of incidents occurred… This is a thoroughly artless recital, I would have you observe. I simply tramp from point to point about George Simney’s beastly great park – and something happens to me every time.
    This time it was a bit of eavesdropping.
    It isn’t easy to eavesdrop in the middle of a park covered in snow. And, of course, if you are a nice person it isn’t easy to do at all. Persons who have to admit to the fact commonly are at some pains to represent how the thing came upon them unawares, and how before they knew what they were about they were landed in a situation from which there was no immediate extricating themselves without hopeless embarrassment. But it wasn’t like that with me on this occasion. And when I say that in the quite near future I was to be constrained to relate the whole incident to the police I think you will agree that I more or less expiated my conduct now.
    I indianed. This is something which very nice children do in books which were read to me in my early teens. The nice children indianed not, of course, for the purpose of vulgar eavesdropping but in order to