Annie Haynes Premium Collection – 8 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Annie Haynes
can I thank you?”
Mavis tore herself away.
“Oh, Garth, some one is coming—I heard the leaves rustling!” her cheeks still aflame. “And, see, what in the world has Pompey got there?”
She darted away. Garth, his eyes fixed fondly on her, followed more slowly.
“It is a chain,” she said. “And what is this—a little book?” taking it from the dog’s mouth. “Be quiet, Pompey! No, sir, you shall not have it,” as he sprang upon her. “I wonder who has lost this—it is evidently a notebook from a chatelaine.” She unfastened the clasp with some difficulty and looked inside. “Garth”—the colour ebbing from her cheeks—“look at this!”
“What is it, Mavis? What is the matter?”
Mavis held it out and pointed to the name written on the first page, her hands trembling visibly.
Garth looked over her shoulder. The little book had evidently lain in the damp for some time; the leaves were stained and discoloured, the cover tarnished, but the inscription written in ink on the fly-leaf was still perfectly legible—“Mary Anne Marston, from Lady Davenant.”
“Mary Anne Marston!” Garth repeated in amazement. “Why, then, this is—it must be—part of the chatelaine my mother gave Nurse Marston when she first left home! We all made her some little present, and I know this was my mother’s, for I remember well how particular she was that everything should be put on the chain that she thought could be useful to a nurse—scissors and a knife and such like. This is the notebook, certainly. But how in the world did it come here? What is frightening you, Mavis?”
For Mavis was ghastly pale and shivering apparently with fright.
“Don’t you see that she must have dropped it after she left our house that night?” she said in a low, awestruck tone. “Don’t you remember that the note she wrote to my mother to say she wanted to see her was written on a page torn from this very book? Look!” she turned rapidly to the end and held it out to him. “There—that is the place she tore it from! Oh, Garth, don’t you see?”
“I see!” Garth took it from her and looked at it carefully as he turned it about. “Well, at all events this proves that she came through the Home Coppice on her way from the Manor, and so it is valuable to us as the first clue that we have been able to find since she left her patient’s room. But then we knew she must have gone somewhere, so I am not sure that it tells us much. Still, I think as we go through the village we had better call at the police station and show them this and explain exactly how we found it.”
Mavis clasped his arm tightly and looked round her with wide open, terrified eyes.
“Surely you do not imagine that I shall go on after seeing this, Garth? Nothing would induce me to go any farther through this dreadful wood.”
“My dear child, this is really—” Garth was beginning when the steps that Mavis had heard before sounded nearer on a parallel path to them, and then as the two walks merged into one Tom Greyson came into sight. He was looking particularly gloomy and disconsolate as he strode along with his dog at his heels, but as he touched his hat he glanced in some surprise at the girl’s agitated face.
She put out her hand and stopped him.
“Don’t go on, Tom; you must stay and help us now. I am so frightened”—a little sob catching her throat.
“Frightened, Miss Hargreave?” Greyson repeated in a puzzled tone.
Garth passed his arm round her trembling form.
“Come, come, Mavis; you must not give way like this; there is nothing really to alarm you! It is only that we, or rather the dogs, have found something that belonged to Nurse Marston, and it has upset Miss Hargreave. It is a notebook, and must have been dropped after she left the Manor.”
A gleam of interest lighted up Greyson’s moody face.
“She did come this way then, sir? I have always said she must ha’ done; but she would come right out close to her mother’s cottage. It puzzles me why she did not go in and speak to the old woman, just to set her mind at rest, as it were. She is getting worn to a shadow is Mrs. Marston with all the worry of it.”
“I cannot understand it at all,” Garth said thoughtfully.
“She came into this wood,” Mavis said, shuddering from head to foot with a vague intangible horror. “It may have been to see her mother, or anything, I don’t know what, but perhaps she never came out. Oh, don’t you see what I mean, Garth? She may have been taken ill here and lain down among the trees and died, or she may have met a tramp and been murdered, and—and—be lying here still!”
She uttered the last words in a low, terrified tone beneath her breath.
The eyes of the two men met in one long significant glance as she paused; then Garth said with a resolutely cheerful air:
“My dear Mavis, we have not the least reason for supposing that Nurse Marston is dead. She is probably alive and well and will give us her own reasons for this mysterious absence when she returns. Come, you are tired and over-wrought; I will take you back to the Manor. Greyson, I think it might be as well to let the police know of this discovery, if you are going that way.”
“I will tell them, sir,” the man said as he touched his hat.
“First you must look to see that she is not lying here,” Mavis said with an effort, putting up her hands and clutching nervously at her throat as she spoke. “The—the dogs were moving about among the moss and leaves over there. Behind, farther in the wood, there is a hollow. I shall not go away—I could not—until I know. Garth, you must look—you must!”
“No, no, sir! You stay with Miss Hargreave, sir,” Tom Greyson interposed quickly. “I’ll go and look. Don’t you frighten yourself, miss. Why, we are all over this coppice of nights now that the pheasants are nesting! If there had been anything of that sort here we should ha’ been bound to find it before now. Under that oak you said the dogs were, didn’t you, miss?”
He sprang off. Garth drew Mavis to a fallen tree-trunk near and made her sit down.
“Why, Mavis, I didn’t think you were so nervous!”
“I think somehow a horror of the whole affair came over me—not quite at the first, but very soon after—with regard to Nurse Marston’s disappearance,” she said slowly. “It was all so strange when you think of it—that cry Dorothy heard; and Jenkins was so certain she could not have got out of the house.”
“Ah, well! It is perfectly obvious now that the old man was wrong there,” Garth said, with as much cheerfulness as he could assume, for in truth her nervousness was beginning to infect him. “As for the shriek Dorothy heard—well, I have never been able to connect that with Nurse Marston. If she had been taken ill in the house, or any evil had happened to her there, she must have been found before now. Probably Dorothy fancied it, or perhaps one of the maidservants had a fit of hysterics. Well, Greyson, what is the result of your search?”
“She isn’t there, sir,” the man said. “I made sure she wasn’t. We know our woods a bit too well for that to happen, as I told Miss Hargreave.”
But it struck Garth, that, in spite of his apparent confidence, the man’s ruddy face was some degrees paler than it had been a few minutes before.
“Well, now you are satisfied, I hope,” he said, turning to Mavis, whose colour was beginning to return. “Come, it is no use our staying here any longer. Greyson, you might look round the wood farther in just to satisfy Miss Hargreave—or stay, what are you going to do now?”
“Going to have my dinner, sir. I live right by the side of the coppice, but that don’t matter if there is anything you would like me to do first.”
“No, no! Have your dinner, and then come up to the Manor. I shall be there and we can ask Sir Arthur what he thinks is best to be done now.”
“Very