N or M_ - Agatha Christie [64]
Albert heaved a sigh as he remembered the melting strains of ‘Richard, O mon roi’, which the faithful troubadour had crooned so feelingly beneath tower after tower.
Pity he himself wasn’t better at picking up a tune.
Took him a long time to get hold of a tune, it did.
His lips shaped themselves into a tentative whistle.
Begun playing the old tunes again lately, they had.
‘If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy–’
Albert paused to survey the neat white-painted gate of Smugglers’ Rest. That was it, that was where the master had gone to dinner.
He went up the hill a little farther and came out on the downs.
Nothing here. Nothing but grass and a few sheep.
The gate of Smugglers’ Rest swung open and a car passed out. A big man in plus fours with golf clubs drove out and down the hill.
‘That would be Commander Haydock, that would,’ Albert deduced.
He wandered down again and stared at Smugglers’ Rest. A tidy little place. Nice bit of garden. Nice view.
He eyed it benignly. ‘I would say such wonderful things to you,’ he hummed.
Through a side door of the house a man came out with a hoe and passed out of sight through a little gate.
Albert, who grew nasturtiums and a bit of lettuce in his back garden, was instantly interested.
He edged nearer to Smugglers’ Rest and passed through the open gate. Yes, tidy little place.
He circled slowly round it. Some way below him, reached by steps, was a flat plateau planted as a vegetable garden. The man who had come out of the house was busy down there.
Albert watched him with interest for some minutes. Then he turned to contemplate the house.
Tidy little place, he thought for the third time. Just the sort of place a retired Naval gentleman would like to have. This was where the master had dined that night.
Slowly Albert circled round and round the house. He looked at it much as he had looked at the gate of Sans Souci–hopefully, as though asking it to tell him something.
And as he went he hummed softly to himself, a twentieth-century Blondel in search of his master.
‘There would be such wonderful things to do,’ hummed Albert. ‘I would say such wonderful things to you. There would be such wonderful things to do–’ Gone wrong somewhere, hadn’t he? He’d hummed that bit before.
Hallo, funny, so the Commander kept pigs, did he? A long-drawn grunt came to him. Funny–seemed almost as though it were underground. Funny place to keep pigs.
Couldn’t be pigs. No, it was someone having a bit of shut-eye. Bit of shut-eye in the cellar, so it seemed…
Right kind of day for a snooze, but funny place to go for it. Humming like a bumble bee Albert approached nearer.
That’s where it was coming from–through that little grating. Grunt, grunt, grunt, snoooooore. Snoooooore, snoooooooore–grunt, grunt, grunt. Funny sort of snore–reminded him of something…
‘Coo!’ said Albert. ‘That’s what it is–SOS. Dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot.’
He looked round him with a quick glance.
Then kneeling down, he tapped a soft message on the iron grille of the little window of the cellar.
Chapter 13
Although Tuppence went to bed in an optimistic frame of mind, she suffered a severe reaction in those waking hours of early dawn when human morale sinks to its lowest.
On descending to breakfast, however, her spirits were raised by the sight of a letter sitting on her plate addressed in a painfully backhanded script.
This was no communication from Douglas, Raymond or Cyril, or any other of the camouflaged correspondence that arrived punctually for her, and which included this morning a brightly coloured Bonzo postcard with a scrawled, ‘Sorry I haven’t written before. All well, Maudie,’ on