But I made up my mind to learn more regarding Billy Clevedon. His sister’s agitation had been too pronounced to be disregarded; and it was the more impressive in that I knew her for a very clever actress with a singular capacity for holding her own and keeping a straight face.
What was it, I wondered, that had so completely upset her and smashed down all her defences. It did not take me long to decide that. She had been told that I was “a great detective” who would infallibly discover the murderer and practically my first observation had been a direct hint that her brother might be the man. A suggestion so libellous should have caused her to flame out in resentment and denial instead of which she had had to exert all her strength and will-power to keep herself from fainting. There was more in all this than one could sum up in a moment or two and I made up my mind then and there that Billy would become an object of great interest to me.
It was not difficult to learn all I wanted. The fact that most people referred to him as Billy Clevedon and that no one called him Sir William may indicate something of his general personality, though that would be to do him some injustice since the diminutive was partly born of affection and was partly a survival from bygone years. There were those who declared that his sister had been mainly responsible for the reputation Billy had enjoyed for juvenile mischief. I could well believe that, knowing her in maturer years. She would lead him on and he, being a little gentleman, would bear the blame.
But that after all is only the female way. Man was intended by Nature to carry every burden save one and that the heaviest of the lot. From my housekeeper to whom I first applied I learnt little. She had heard stories but had never known Billy Clevedon personally. I applied to both Dr. Crawford and the Vicar, but with hardly more success. They, too, had the usual legends off by heart, but Billy had never been ill and had no reputation for piety and seemed to have kept out of the way of both doctor and parson. Tim Dallott could tell me a little more but it consisted chiefly of reminiscences of Sunday rat-hunts and fishing. Among them all, however, I built up a picture of a freckled, yellow-haired lad, full of high spirits and mischief, but honest and never afraid to face punishment for what he had done. And somewhere, not far away, hovered incessantly the figure of his sister, as irrepressible as himself but far more adroit.
But all that was years ago when they came as orphans to live at White Towers, when Lady Clevedon’s husband was alive and before the late Sir Philip had succeeded to the title. In due time they both went away to school and Cartordale knew them only in the holidays. They were but shadows of their former selves as far as their general activities went, or possibly were more careful and clever at evading the results.
Eventually Billy Clevedon went into the army, but as a career, not merely as a war measure, and won some distinctions in France. But he justified his old-time reputation in that he remained apparently a somewhat incalculable quantity always doing the unexpected. His sister, having finished her education with more or less credit, accompanied her aunt to Hapforth House and settled there, though during the war she engaged in various occupations and learnt to drive a motor, milk cows, and use a typewriter.
CHAPTER XI
A VISIT FROM RONALD THOYNE
The “Waggon and Horses” in Cartordale was one of the best known inns in the district, with a history behind it that went far beyond the printed word into the mists and myths of legend and tradition. I believe, in fact, that it possessed its own duly authenticated ghost, that of a sailor on tramp towards the coast, who had been murdered for his gold by a rascally landlord and his wife. This was well over two centuries ago and it was a long time now since the sailor’s restless spirit had been seen. But the records of its appearances were definite and were at all events implicitly believed in by the Dale folk.
The inn was a favourite visiting place of holiday-makers from Midlington and on a fine Saturday afternoon or Sunday in the summer one might see sixty or seventy vehicles lined up in the wide open space before the entrance, while their passengers refreshed themselves within.
Tim Dallott, the landlord, was well known throughout the Dale and was highly esteemed. The new-fangled notion that an innkeeper is a sort of semi-criminal had no countenance in Cartordale, where they liked their ale and took it strong—as strong, that is, as a grandmotherly Control Board would allow them to have it.