Postern of Fate (Tommy & Tuppence 5)

All the nice girls love a sailor,

And you know what sailors are.'

'Oh, shut up, Maudie, we're tired of that one. Now let the lady hear something,' said Uncle Ben. 'Let the lady hear something. She's come here to hear something. She wants to hear where that thing there was all the fuss about was hidden, don't you? And all about it.'

'That sounds very interesting,' said Tuppence, cheering up. 'Something was hidden?'

'Ah yes, long before my time it was but I heard all about it. Yes. Before 1914. Word was handed down, you know, from one to another. Nobody knew exactly what it was and why there was all this excitement.'

'Something to do with the boat race it had,' said an old lady. 'You know, Oxford and Cambridge. I was taken once. I was taken to see the boat race in London under the bridges and everything. Oh, it was a wonderful day. Oxford won by a length.'

'A lot of nonsense you're all talking,' said a grim-looking woman with iron-grey hair. 'You don't know anything about it, you don't. I know more than most of you although it happened a long time before I was born. It was my Great-Aunt Mathilda who told me and she were told by her Aunty Lou. And that was a good forty years before them. Great talk about it, it was; and people went around looking for it. Some people thought as it was a gold-mine, you know. Yes, a gold ingot brought back from Australia. Somewhere like that.'

'Damn silly,' said an old man, who was smoking a pipe with an air of general dislike of his fellow members. 'Mixed it up with goldfish, they did. Was as ignorant as that.'

'It was worth a lot of money, whatever it was, or it wouldn't have been hidden,' said someone else. 'Yes, lots of people come down from the government, and yes, police too. They looked around but they couldn't find anything.'

'Ah well, they didn't have the right clues. There are clues, you know, if you know where to look for them.' Another old lady nodded her head wisely. 'There's always clues.'

'How interesting,' said Tuppence. 'Where? Where are these clues, I mean? In the village or somewhere outside it or -'

This was a rather unfortunate remark as it brought down at least six different replies, all uttered at once.

'On the moor, beyond Tower West,' one was saying.

'Oh no, it's past Little Kenny, it was. Yes, quite near Little Kenny.'

'No, it was the cave. The cave by the sea front. Over as far as Baldy's Head. You know, where the red rocks are. That's it. There's an old smugglers' tunnel. Wonderful, it must be. Some people say as it's there still.'

'I saw a story once of an old Spanish main or something. Right back to the time of the Armada, it was. A Spanish boat as went down there. Full of doubloons.'

Chapter 10

ATTACK ON TUPPENCE

'Good gracious!' said Tommy, as he returned that evening, 'You look terribly tired, Tuppence. What have you been doing? You look worn out.'

'I am worn out,' said Tuppence. 'I don't know that I shall ever recover again. Oh dear.'

'What have you been doing? Not climbing up and finding more books or anything?'

'No, no,' said Tuppence, 'I don't want to look at books again. I'm off books.'

'Well, what is it? What have you been doing?'

'Do you know what a PPC is?'

'No,' said Tommy, 'at least, well, yes. It's something -' He paused.

'Yes, Albert knows,' said Tuppence, 'but it's not that kind of one. Now then, I'll just tell you in a minute, but you'd better have something first. A cocktail or a whisky or something. And I'll have something too.'

She more or less put Tommy wise to the events of the afternoon. Tommy said 'good gracious' again and added: 'The things you get yourself into, Tuppence. Was any of it interesting?'

'I don't know,' said Tuppence. 'When six people are talking at once, and most of them can't talk properly and they all say different things - you see, you don't really know what they're saying. But yes, I think I've got a few ideas for dealing with things.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, there is a lot of legend, I think, going on about something that was once hidden here and was a secret connected with the 1914 war, or even before it.'

'Well, we know that already, don't we?' said Tommy. 'I mean, we've been briefed to know that.'

'Yes. Well, there are a few old tales still going around the village here. And everybody has got ideas about it put into their heads by their Aunt Marias or their Uncle Bens and it's been put into their Aunt Marias by their Uncle Stephens or Aunty Ruth or Grandmother Something else. It's been handed down for years and years. Well, one of the things might be the right one, of course.'

'What, lost among all the others?'

'Yes,' said Tuppence, 'like a needle in a haystack. Exactly.'

'And how are you going to find the needle in the haystack?'

'I'm going to select a few what I call likely possibilities. People who might tell one something that they really did hear. I shall have to isolate them from everybody else, at any rate for a short period of time, and get them to tell me exactly what their Aunt Agatha or Aunt Betty or old Uncle James told them. Then I shall have to go on to the next one and possibly one of them might give me a further inkling. There must be something, you know, somewhere.'

'Yes,' said Tommy, 'I think there's something, but we don't know what it is.'

'Well, that's what we're trying to do, isn't it?'

'Yes, but I mean you've got to have some idea what a thing actually is before you go looking for it.'

'I don't think it's gold ingots on a Spanish Armada ship,' said Tuppence, 'and I don't think it's anything hidden in the smugglers' cave.'

'Might be some super brandy from France,' said Tommy hopefully.

'It might,' said Tuppence, 'but that wouldn't be really what we're looking for, would it?'

'I don't know,' said Tommy. 'I think it might be what I'm looking for sooner or later, Anyway, it's something I should enjoy finding. Of course it might be a sort of letter or something. A sexy letter that you could blackmail someone about, about sixty years ago. But I don't think it would cut much ice nowadays, do you?'

'No, I don't. But we've got to get some idea sooner or later. Do you think we'll ever get anywhere, Tommy?'

'I don't know,' said Tommy. 'I got a little bit of help today.'

'Oh. What about?'

'Oh, about the census"

'The what?'

'The census. There seems to have been a census in one particular year - I've got the year written down - and there were a good many people staying in this house with the Parkinsons.'

'How on earth did you find all that out?'

'Oh, by various methods of research by my Miss Collodon.'

'I'm getting jealous of Miss Collodon.'

'Well, you needn't be. She's very fierce and she ticks me off a good deal, and she is no ravishing beauty.'

'Well, that's just as well,' said Tuppence. 'But what has the census got to do with it?'

'Well when Alexander said it must be one of us it could have meant, you see, someone who was in the house at that time and therefore you had to enter up their name on the census register. Anyone who spent the night under your roof,

and I think probably there are records of these things in the census files. And if you know the right people - I don't mean I know them now but I can get to know them through people I do know - then I think I could perhaps get a short list.'

'Well, I admit,' said Tuppence, 'you have ideas all right. For goodness' sake let's have something to eat and perhaps I shall feel better and not so faint from trying to listen to sixteen very ugly voices all at once.'