The Mystery At Lover's Cave

“If,” said Roger Sheringham, helping himself to a third piece of toast, “your brain had as many kinks in it as your trousers have few, Anthony, you would have had the intelligence to find out our train from St. Pancras this morning before you ever arrived here last night.”

“There’s a telephone here and an enquiry office at St. Pancras, I believe,” retorted his cousin. “Couldn’t the two be connected in some way?”

“You write to me and ask me to waste my valuable time in amusing you on your holiday,” Roger pursued indignantly. “I not only consent but very kindly allow you to choose the place we shall go to and book our rooms for us; I even agree to harbour you here for a night before we start and submit to your company and your chattering at my own breakfast-table (a thing peculiarly offensive to any right-minded man and destroying at one blow the chief and abiding joy of bachelorhood). I do all this, I say, and what is my reward? You refuse point-blank even to find out the time of our train from St. Pancras!”

“I say, did you see this?” exclaimed Anthony, glancing up from the Daily Courier. “Kent all out for forty-seven on a plumb wicket at Blackheath! Whew!”

“If you were to turn to the centre of the paper,” replied Roger coldly, “I think you might find some rather more interesting reading matter than the performances of Kent on plumb wickets at Blackheath. The editorial page, for instance.”

“Meaning there’s another of your crime articles in?” Anthony asked, flicking back the pages. “Yes, I’ve been reading some of them. They’re really not at all bad, Roger.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” Roger murmured gratefully. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! Anyhow, you understood them, did you? That’s good. I was trying to write down to the standard of intelligence of the ordinary Courier reader. I appear to have succeeded.”

“This is rather interesting,” Anthony remarked, his eyes on the required page.

“Well, yes,” said Roger modestly, folding up his napkin. “I did rather flatter myself that I’d⸺”

“This article on ‘Do Shingled Heads Mean Shingled Hearts?’ By Jove, that’s an idea, isn’t it? You see what he’s getting at. Boyishness, and all that. He says⸺”

“I think you’ve mistaken the column,” Roger interrupted coldly. “The one you’re looking for is on the right, next to the correspondence.”

“Correspondence?” repeated Anthony vaguely. “Oh, yes; I’ve got it. ‘Clergymen Who Gabble. Sir: I attended the burial service of my great-aunt by marriage last Thursday and was exceedingly distressed by the slipshod way in which the officiating clergyman read the⸺’ ”

“I don’t think I’ll go for a holiday with you, Anthony, after all!” observed Roger suddenly, rising to his feet with such vehemence that his chair fell violently to the floor behind him.

“You’ve knocked over your chair,” said Anthony, quite seriously.

At this point, very fortunately, the telephone-bell rang.

“Hullo!” said Roger into the mouth-piece, more loudly than was strictly necessary.

“Hullo!” answered a voice. “Is that Mr. Sheringham?”

“No! He left for Derbyshire early this morning.”

“Oh, come!” chided the voice gently. “Not before eleven o’clock, surely. He wouldn’t go without his breakfast, would he?”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Burgoyne, Daily Courier. Seriously, Sheringham, I’m very relieved that I’ve caught you. Listen!”

Roger listened. As he did so his face gradually cleared and a look of intense excitement began to take the place of the portentous frown he had been wearing.

“No, I’m afraid it’s out of the question, Burgoyne,” he said at length. “I’m just off for a fortnight in Derbyshire with a cousin of mine, as you know. Rooms booked and everything. Otherwise I should have been delighted.”

Expostulatory sounds made themselves heard from the other end of the wire.

“Well, I’ll think it over if you like,” Roger replied with a great show of reluctance, “but I’m very much afraid— Anyhow, I’ll let you know definitely in a quarter-of-an-hour. Will that do?”

He listened for a moment, then hung up the receiver and turned to Anthony with a beaming face. “Our little trip’s off I fear,” he said happily.

“What?” exclaimed Anthony. “But—but we’ve booked our rooms!”

“You’ve booked them,” Roger corrected. “And there’s nothing to prevent you from occupying them. You can sleep in one and brush your hair in the other, can’t you? Of course I shall be delighted to reimburse you for any expense you may have incurred through your misunderstanding that I would accompany you, though I must take this opportunity of pointing out, without prejudice, that I am not legally liable; and should my heirs or fellow-directors dispute the claim, my solicitors will have instructions not to⸺”

“What are you talking about?” Anthony shouted. “Why do you want to back out at the last minute like this? What’s happened? Whom were you talking to then?”

Roger resumed his seat at the breakfast-table and poured himself out another cup of coffee.

“To take your questions in inverse order,” he said at length, and with a slight diminution of his bantering air, “that was the editor of the Daily Courier, a very great man and one before whom politicians tremble and duchesses stand to attention. You may remember that I had some truck with him last summer over that Wychford business. He wants me to go down at once to Hampshire as Special Correspondent to the Courier.”

“To Hampshire?”

“Yes. I don’t know whether you saw a little paragraph in the papers yesterday about a woman who fell over the cliffs at Ludmouth Bay and was killed. The idea now appears to be that it might not have been an accident after all, and there’ve been one or two important developments. They want me to follow up those articles I’ve been doing by covering the business for them, to say nothing of putting in a little amateur sleuth-work if the chance arises. It’s a job after my own heart!”

“But I heard you say that it was out of the question, because you were going away with me?”

Roger smiled gently. “There’s a way of doing these things, little boy, as you may find out when you get a little older. But, seriously, you’ve got the first claim on me; if you’re dead set on this Derbyshire trip, I’ll come like a shot and chuck the other.”

“Of course not!” Anthony said warmly. “I wouldn’t dream of it. What do you take me for? Run off and sleuth to your heart’s content. I may even buy the Courier once or twice to see how big an idiot you’re making of yourself.”

“If you can drag your eyes away from the cricket page! Well, it’s jolly sporting of you to take it like this, Anthony, I must and will say. I know how maddening it is to have one’s plans upset at the last minute.”

“I dare say I shall be able to survive it,” Anthony opined philosophically, stuffing tobacco into his pipe. “I’m not much of a whale for my own company, it’s true, but I’ll probably fall in with somebody or other up there; one often does. Baccy?”

“Thanks.” Roger took the extended pouch and transferred some of its contents to the bowl of his own pipe with a somewhat absent air. Suddenly his face cleared and he smote the table lustily. “I’ve got it! Why on earth shouldn’t you come too? It ought to be interesting enough and I’d be jolly glad of your company. Of course!”

“But the other rooms have been booked,” Anthony demurred.

“For goodness’ sake, stop harping on the bookedness of those rooms! You’re getting positively morbid about them. They can be cancelled, can’t they? Would you like to come down with me?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Then go out and cancel them by wire, and I’ll send the woman a cheque from Ludmouth; so that’s settled. I’ll ring up the Courier and say I’ll go, and then I shall have to fly down there and see them before I start. There’s a train for Bournemouth at twelve-ten, I know, because I caught it a fortnight ago. Greene will have got my bag packed by now, so after you’ve wired come back here and collect the luggage and go on to Waterloo. Take two first singles to Ludmouth and I’ll meet you in front of the little place where you book for Sandown Park five minutes before the train goes. Shoot!”

“What’s your second name, Roger?” Anthony asked admiringly. “Pep or Zip?”

As he made his way down the main stairs of the building in which Roger Sheringham’s bachelor flat was situated, Anthony Walton smiled slowly to himself. The little holiday he had fixed up with Roger was going to be even more amusing than he had expected.

Although there were more than ten years between the cousins (Roger was now thirty-six, Anthony a bare twenty-five), they had always been good friends, and that also in spite of the fact that they had scarcely a taste or a feeling in common. It is often remarked, and even by people whom one would certainly expect to know better, that opposites make a happy marriage. Nothing could be more ludicrously untrue, but they do frequently make a happy male friendship. This one was a case in point.

Anthony, big, broad-shouldered, good-natured and slow-witted, had got his blue for rugger at Oxford, and now regularly left his father’s office, where he sat and amiably did nothing for the rest of the week, each Saturday morning to play for the Harlequins. It was his secret opinion that games were the only things that mattered in this world. In the matter of brains he was no match for the keen-witted if slightly volatile Roger, and his slow deliberation was in equal contrast with that gentleman’s dynamic energy; nor did he possess enough imagination to be impressed in the slightest degree by his cousin’s fame as a novelist with an already international reputation, though he did afford him a qualified respect as the owner of a half-blue for golf obtained at Oxford nearly fifteen years ago.

With his usual methodical care Anthony set about carrying out the string of orders which had been entrusted to him. Seven minutes before the train was due to leave he took up his position, tickets in hand, at the appointed spot on the vast surface of Waterloo Station. Punctually two minutes later Roger appeared and they passed through the barrier together, followed by a staggering porter with their combined traps. The train was not full, and an empty first-class smoker was obtained without difficulty.

“We’re going to enjoy ourselves on this little trip, Anthony, my son,” Roger remarked as the train began to move, settling himself comfortably in his corner and beginning to unfold a large wad of newspapers which he had brought with him. “Do you know that?”

“Are we?” Anthony said equably. “I shall enjoy watching you on the trail, certainly. It must be a strange sight.”

“Yes, and now I come to think of it, you’re by way of being rather indispensable there yourself, aren’t you?”

“Me? Why?”

“As the idiot friend,” Roger returned happily. “Must have an idiot friend with me, you know. All the best sleuths do.”

Anthony grunted and began somewhat ostentatiously to turn the pages of The Sportsman with which he had prudently armed himself. Roger applied himself to his bundle of papers. For half-an-hour or more no word was spoken. Then Roger, throwing aside the last newspaper from his batch, broke the silence.