‘Oh, yes-on Sunday. Of course, dear Mr Goodacre, if you wish it, I’ll do my best-’

‘It will gratify me very much.’

‘Oh, thank you. I-you-everybody’s so good to me.’

Miss Twitterton vanished upstairs in a little whirl of gratitude and confusion.

‘Poor little woman! poor little soul!’ said the vicar. ‘It’s most distressing. This unsolved mystery hanging over us-’

‘Yes,’ said Peter, absently; ‘not too good.’

It gave Harriet a shock to see his eyes, coldly reflective, still turned towards the door by which Miss Twitterton had gone out. She thought of the trap-door in the attic-and the boxes. Had Kirk searched those boxes, she wondered. If not-well, then, what? Could there be anything in a box? A blunt instrument, with perhaps a little skin and hair on it? It seemed to her that they had all been standing silent a very long time, when Mr Goodacre, who had resumed his doting contemplation of the cactus, suddenly said:

‘Now, this is very strange-very strange indeed!’

She saw Peter start as it were out of a trance and cross l the room to see the strange thing. The vicar was staring. up into the nightmare vegetable above his head with a deeply i puzzled expression. Peter stared too; but, since the bottom of the pot was three or four inches over his head, he could see very little.

‘Look at that!’ said Mr Goodacre, in a voice that positively shook. ‘Do you see what that is?’

He rumbled in his pocket for a pencil, with which he pointed excitedly to something in the centre of the cactus.

‘From here,’ said Peter, stepping back, ‘it looks like a spot of mildew, though I can’t see very well from this distance. But perhaps in a cactus that’s merely the bloom of a healthy complexion.’

‘It is mildew,’ said the vicar, grimly. Harriet, feeling that intelligent sympathy was called for, climbed on the settle, so that she could look at the plant on a level.

‘There’s some more of it on the upper side of the leaves if they are leaves, and not stalks.’

‘Somebody,’ said Mr Goodacre, ‘has been giving it too much water.’ He looked accusingly from husband to wife.

‘We haven’t any of us touched it,’ said Harriet. She stopped, remembering that Kirk and Bunter had handled it. But they were scarcely likely to have watered it.

‘I’m a humane man,’ began Peter, ‘and though I don’t like the prickly brute-’

Then he, too, broke off, and Harriet saw his face change. It frightened her. It became the kind of face that might have belonged to that agonised dreamer of the morning hours.

‘What is it, Peter?’

He said in a half whisper: ‘Here we go round the prickly pear, the prickly pear, the prickly pear-’

‘Once the summer is over,’ pursued the vicar, ‘you must administer water very sparingly, very sparingly indeed.’

‘Surely,’ said Harriet, ‘it couldn’t have been the knowledgeable Crutchley.’

‘I think it was,’ said Peter, as though returning to them from a long journey. ‘Harriet-you heard Crutchley tell Kirk how he watered it last Wednesday week and wound the clock before collecting his wages from old Noakes.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the day before yesterday you saw him water it again.’

‘Of course; we all saw him.’

Mr Goodacre was aghast. ‘But, my dear Lady Peter, he couldn’t have done that. The cactus is a desert plant. It only requires watering about once a month in the cooler weather.’

Peter, having emerged to clear up this minor mystery, seemed to be back on his nightmare trail. He muttered: ‘I can’t remember-’

But the vicar took no notice.

‘Somebody has touched it lately,’ he said. ‘I see you’ve put it on a longer chain.’

Peter’s gasp was like a sob.

‘That’s it. The chain. We were all chained together.’

The struggle passed from his face, leaving it empty as a mask. ‘What’s that about a chain, padre?’

Chapter XX. When You Know How, You Know Who

To be interrupted at a crisis had become so much a feature of daily life at Talboys that Harriet felt no surprise to see Bunter enter upon these words, as upon a cue. Behind him hovered the forms of Puffett and Crutchley.

‘If it will not inconvenience your lordship, the men are anxious to get these pieces of furniture out.’

‘You see,’ added Mr Puffett, stepping forward, ‘they works on contract. Now, if we could jest slip some of these ’ere things out to them-’ He waved a fat hand persuasively towards the sideboard, which was a massive dresser, made all in one piece and extremely heavy.

‘All right.’ said Peter; ‘but be quick. Take them and go.’ Bunter and Puffett seized upon the near end of the dresser, which came staggering away from the wall, its back festooned with cobwebs. Crutchley seized the far end and backed with it to the door.

‘Yes,’ continued Mr Goodacre, whose mind, once it fastened on anything, clung to it with the soft tenacity of a sea-anemone. ‘Yes. I suppose the old chain had become unsafe. This is an improvement. You get a much better idea of the cactus now.’

The sideboard was moving slowly across the threshold; but the amateurs were not making too good a job of it, and it stuck. Peter, with sudden impatience, pulled off his coat.

‘How he hates,’ thought Harriet, ‘to see anything bungled.’

‘Easy does it,’ said Mr Puffett.

Whether by good luck or superior management, no sooner had Peter set his hand to it than the top-heavy monstrosity abandoned the position and went sweetly through.

‘That’s done it!’ said Peter. He shut the door and stood before it, his face slightly flushed with exertion. ‘Yes, padre-you were saying about the chain. It used to be shorter?’

‘Why, yes. I’m positive it was. Quite positive. Let me see the bottom of the pot used to come about here.’

He raised his hand slightly above the level of his own tall bead.

Peter came down to him.

‘About four inches higher. You’re sure?’

‘Oh, yes, quite. Yes-and the-’

Through the unguarded door came Bunter once more, armed with a clothes-brush. He made for Peter, seized him from behind and began to brush the dust from his trousers. Mr Goodacre, much interested, watched the process.

‘Ah!’ he said, dodging out of the way as Puffett and Crutchley came in to remove the settle nearest the window, ‘that’s the worst of those heavy old sideboards. It’s so difficult to clean behind them. My wife always complains about ours.’

‘That’ll do, Bunter. Can’t I be dusty if I like?’

Bunter smiled gently and began on the other leg.

‘I am afraid,’ went on the vicar, ‘I should give your excellent man many hours of distress if I were his employer. I am always being scolded for my untidiness.’ Out of the tail of his eye he saw the door shut behind the other two men, and his mind, lagging behind his vision, made a sudden bound to catch up with it. ‘Wasn’t that Crutchley? We ought to have asked him-’

‘Bunter,’ said Peter, ‘you heard what I said. If Mr Goodacre likes, you can brush him. I will not be brushed. I refuse.’

He spoke with more sharpness, under his light tone, than Harriet had ever heard him use. She thought: ‘For the first time since we were married he has forgotten my existence.’ She went over to the coat he had thrown off and began to search it for cigarettes; but she did not miss Bunter’s quick upward glance or the almost imperceptible jerk of Peter’s head.

Bunter, without a word, went to brush the vicar, and Peter, released, walked straight up to the fireplace. Here he stopped, and his eye searched the room.

‘Well, really,’ said Mr Goodacre, with a refreshing delight in novelty. ‘Being valeted is quite a new experience for me.’