Striding Folly

Contents

 

The Haunted Policeman

Talboys

A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers

STRIDING FOLLY

 

A Lord Peter Wimsey Story

‘SHALL I EXPECT YOU next Wednesday for our game as usual?’ asked Mr

Mellilow.

‘Of course, of course,’ replied Mr Creech. ‘Very glad there’s no ill

feeling, Mellilow. Next Wednesday as usual. Unless …’ his heavy face

darkened for a moment, as though at some disagreeable recollection. ‘There

may be a man coming to see me. If I’m not here by nine, don’t expect me.

In that case, I’ll come on Thursday.’

Mr. Mellilow let his visitor out through the french window and

watched him cross the lawn to the wicket gate leading to the Hall grounds.

It was a clear October night, with a gibbous moon going down the sky. Mr

Mellilow slipped on his goloshes (for he was careful of his health and the

grass was wet) and himself went down past the sundial and the fish-pond

and through the sunk garden till he came to the fence that bounded his tiny

freehold on the southern side. He leaned his arms on the rail and gazed

across the little valley at the tumbling river and the wide slope beyond,

which was crowned, at a mile’s distance, by the ridiculous stone tower

known as the Folly. The valley, the slope and the tower all belonged to

Striding Hall. They lay there, peaceful and lovely in the moonlight, as

though nothing could ever disturb their fantastic solitude. But Mr Mellilow

knew better.

He had bought the cottage to end his days in, thinking that here was a

corner of England the same yesterday, today and for ever. It was strange

that he, a chess-player, should not have been able to see three moves ahead.

The first move had been the death of the old squire. The second had been

the purchase by Creech of the whole Striding property. Even then, he had

not been able to see why a rich business man – unmarried and with no rural

interests – should have come to live in a spot so remote. True, there were three considerable towns at a few miles’ distance, but the village itself was

on the road to nowhere. Fool! he had forgotten the Grid! It had come, like a

great, ugly chess-rook swooping from an unconsidered corner, marching

over the country, straddling four, six, eight parishes at a time, planting

hideous pylons to mark its progress, and squatting now at Mr Mellilow’s

very door. For Creech had just calmly announced that he was selling the

valley to the Electrical Company; and there would be a huge power-plant on

the river and workmen’s bungalows on the slope, and then Development –

which, to Mr Mellilow, was another name for the devil. It was ironical that

Mr Mellilow, alone in the village, had received Creech with kindness,

excusing his vulgar humour and insensitive manners, because he thought

Creech was lonely and believed him to be well-meaning, and because he

was glad to have a neighbour who could give him a weekly game of chess.

Mr Mellilow came in sorrowful and restored his goloshes to their usual

resting-place on the verandah by the french window. He put the chessmen

away and the cat out and locked up the cottage – for he lived quite alone,

with a woman coming in by the day. Then he went up to bed with his mind

full of the Folly, and presently he fell asleep and dreamed.

He was standing in a landscape whose style seemed very familiar to

him. There was a wide plain, intersected with hedgerows, and crossed in the

middle distance by a river, over which was a small stone bridge. Enormous

blue-black thunderclouds hung heavy overhead, and the air had the electric

stillness of something stretched to snapping point. Far off, beyond the river,

a livid streak of sunlight pierced the clouds and lit up with theatrical

brilliance a tall, solitary tower. The scene had a curious unreality, as though

of painted canvas. It was a picture, and he had an odd conviction that he

recognised the handling and could put a name to the artist. ‘Smooth and

tight,’ were the words that occurred to him. And then: ‘It’s bound to break before long.’ And then: ‘I ought not to have come out without my

goloshes.’

It was important, it was imperative that he should get to the bridge. But

the faster he walked, the greater the distance grew, and without his goloshes

the going was very difficult. Sometimes he was bogged to the knee,

sometimes he floundered on steep banks of shifting shale; and the air was

not merely oppressive – it was hot like the inside of an oven. He was

running now, with the breath labouring in his throat, and when he looked up

he was astonished to see how close he was to the tower. The bridge was

fantastically small now, dwindled to a pin-point on the horizon, but the

tower fronted him just across the river, and close on his right was a dark

wood, which had not been there before. Something flickered on the wood’s

edge, out and in again, shy and swift as a rabbit; and now the wood was

between him and the bridge and the tower behind it, still glowing in that

unnatural streak of sunlight. He was at the river’s brink, but the bridge was

nowhere to be seen – and the tower, the tower was moving. It had crossed

the river. It had taken the wood in one gigantic leap. It was no more than

fifty yards off, immensely high, shining, and painted. Even as he ran,

dodging and twisting, it took another field in its stride, and when he turned

to flee it was there before him. It was a double tower – twin towers – a

tower and its mirror image, advancing with a swift and awful stealth from

either side to crush him. He was pinned now between them, panting. He

saw their smooth, yellow sides tapering up to heaven, and about their feet

went a monstrous stir, like the quiver of a crouching cat. Then the low sky

burst like a sluice and through the drench of the rain he leapt at a doorway

in the foot of the tower before him and found himself climbing the familiar

stair of Striding Folly.

‘My goloshes will be here,’ he said, with a passionate sense of relief.

The lightning stabbed suddenly through a loop-hole and he saw a black

crow lying dead upon the stairs. Then thunder … like the rolling of drums.

The daily woman was hammering upon the door. ‘You have slept in,’

she said, ‘and no mistake.’

 

Mr Mellilow, finishing his supper on the following Wednesday, rather

hoped that Mr Creech would not come. He had thought a good deal during

the week about the electric power scheme, and the more he thought about it,

the less he liked it. He had discovered another thing which had increased

his dislike. Sir Henry Hunter, who owned a good deal of land on the other

side of the market town, had, it appeared, offered the Company a site more

suitable than Striding in every way on extremely favourable terms. The choice of Striding seemed inexplicable, unless on the supposition that

Creech had bribed the surveyor. Sir Henry voiced his suspicions without

any mincing of words. He admitted, however, that he could prove nothing.

‘But he’s crooked,’ he said; ‘I have heard things about him in Town. Other

things. Ugly rumours.’ Mr Mellilow suggested that the deal might not, after

all, go through. ‘You’re an optimist,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Nothing stops a

fellow like Creech. Except death. He’s a man with enemies …’ He broke

off, adding, darkly, ‘Let’s hope he breaks his damned neck one of these

days – and the sooner the better.’

Mr Mellilow was uncomfortable. He did not like to hear about crooked

transactions. Business men he supposed, were like that; but if they were, he

would rather not play games with them. It spoilt things, somehow. Better,

perhaps, not to think too much about it. He took up the newspaper,

determined to occupy his mind, while waiting for Creech, with that day’s

chess problem. White to play and mate in three.

He had just become pleasantly absorbed when a knock came at the

door front. Creech? As early as eight o’clock? Surely not. And in any case,

he would have come by the lawn and the french window. But who else

would visit the cottage of an evening? Rather disconcerted, he rose to let

the visitor in. But the man who stood on the threshold was a stranger.

‘Mr Mellilow?’

‘Yes, my name is Mellilow. What can I do for you?’

(A motorist, he supposed, inquiring his way or wanting to borrow

something.)

‘Ah! that is good. I have come to play chess with you.’

‘To play chess ?’ repeated Mr Mellilow, astonished.

‘Yes; I am a commercial traveller. My car has broken down in the

village. I have to stay at the inn and I ask the good Potts if there is anyone who can give me a game of chess to pass the evening. He tells me Mr

Mellilow lives here and plays well. Indeed, I recognise the name. Have I

not read Mellilow on Pawn-Play? It is yours, no?’

Rather flattered, Mr Mellilow admitted the authorship of this little

work.

‘So. I congratulate you. And you will do me the favour to play with

me, hey? Unless I intrude, or you have company.’

‘No,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘I am more or less expecting a friend, but he

won’t turn up till nine and perhaps he won’t come at all.’

‘If he come, I go,’ said the stranger. ‘It is very good of you.’ He had

somehow oozed his way into the house without any direct invitation and

was removing his hat and overcoat. He was a big man with a short, thick

curly beard and tinted spectacles, and he spoke in a deep voice with a slight

foreign accent. ‘My name,’ he added, ‘is Moses. I represent Messrs. Cohen

& Gold of Farringdon Street, the manufacturers of electrical fittings.’

He grinned widely, and Mr Mellilow’s heart contracted. Such haste

seemed almost indecent. Before the site was even taken! He felt an

unreasonable resentment against this harmless Jew. Then, he rebuked

himself. It was not the man’s fault. ‘Come in,’ he said, with more cordiality

in his voice than he really felt, ‘I shall be very glad to give you a game.’

‘I am very grateful,’ said Mr Moses, squeezing his great bulk through

into the sitting-room. ‘Ha! you are working out the Record’s two-mover. It

is elegant but not profound. You will not take long to break his back. You

permit that I disturb?’

Mr Mellilow nodded, and the stranger began to arrange the board for

play.

‘You have hurt your hand?’ inquired Mr Mellilow.

‘It is nothing,’ replied Mr Moses, turning back the glove he wore and

displaying a quantity of sticking-plaster. ‘I break my knuckles trying to start

the dam’ car. She kick me. Bah! a trifle. I wear a glove to protect him. So,

we begin?’

‘Won’t you have something to drink first?’

‘No, no, thank you very much. I have refreshed myself already at the

inn. Too many drinks are not good. But do not let that prevent you.’

Mr Mellilow helped himself to a modest whisky and soda and sat

down to the board. He won the draw and took the white pieces, playing his

king’s pawn to king’s fourth.

‘So!’ said Mr Moses, as the next few moves and countermoves

followed their prescribed course, ‘the giuco piano, hey? Nothing

spectacular. We try the strength. When we know what we have each to

meet, then the surprises will begin.’

The first game proceeded cautiously. Whoever Mr Moses might be, he

was a sound and intelligent player, not easily stampeded into indiscretions.

Twice Mr Mellilow baited a delicate trap; twice, with a broad smile, Mr

Moses stepped daintily out between the closing jaws. The third trap was set

more carefully. Gradually, and fighting every step of the way, black was

forced behind his last defences. Yet another five minutes and Mr Mellilow

said gently, ‘Check;’ adding, ‘and mate in four.’ Mr Moses nodded. ‘That

was good.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘One hour. You give me my revenge,

hey? Now we know one another. Now we shall see.’

Mr Mellilow agreed. Ten minutes past nine. Creech would not come

now. The pieces were set up again. This time, Mr Moses took white,

opening with the difficult and dangerous Steinitz gambit. Within a few

minutes Mr Mellilow realised that, up till now, his opponent had been

playing with him in a double sense. He experienced that eager and palpitating excitement which attends the process of biting off more than one

can chew. By half-past nine, he was definitely on the defensive; at a quarter

to ten, he thought he spied a way out; five minutes later, Mr Moses said

suddenly: ‘It grows late: we must begin to push a little,’ and thrust forward

a knight, leaving his queen en prise.

Mr Mellilow took prompt advantage of the oversight – and became

aware, too late, that he was menaced by the advance of a white rook.

Stupid! How had he come to overlook that? There was an answer, of

course … but he wished the little room were not so hot and that the

stranger’s eyes were not so inscrutable behind the tinted glasses. If he could

manoeuvre his king out of harm’s way for the moment and force his pawn

through, he had still a chance. The rook moved in upon him as he twisted

and dodged; it came swooping and striding over the board, four, six, eight

squares at a time; and now the second white rook had darted out from its

corner; they were closing in upon him – a double castle, twin castles, a

castle and its mirror-image: O God! it was his dream of striding towers,

smooth and yellow and painted. Mr Mellilow wiped his forehead.

‘Check!’ said Mr Moses. And again, ‘Check!’ And then, ‘Checkmate!’

Mr Mellilow pulled himself together. This would never do. His heart

was thumping as though he had been running a race. It was ridiculous to be

so much overwrought by a game of chess; and if there was one kind of man

in the world that he despised, it was a bad loser. The stranger was uttering

some polite commonplace – he could not tell what – and replacing the

pieces in their box.

‘I must go now,’ said Mr Moses. ‘I thank you very much for the

pleasure you have so kindly given me … Pardon me, you are a little

unwell?’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘It is the heat of the fire and the lamp. I

have enjoyed our games very much. Won’t you take anything before you

go?’

‘No, I thank you. I must be back before the good Potts locks me out.

Again, my hearty thanks.’

He grasped Mr Mellilow’s hand in his gloved grip and passed out

quickly into the hall. In another moment he had seized hat and coat and was

gone. His footsteps died away along the cobbled path.

Mr Mellilow returned to the sitting-room. A curious episode; he could

scarcely believe that it had really happened. There lay the empty board, the

pieces in their box, the Record on the old oak chest with a solitary tumbler

beside it; he might have dozed off and dreamed the whole thing for all the trace the stranger’s visit had left. Certainly the room was very hot. He threw

the french window open. A lop-sided moon had risen, chequering the valley

and the slope beyond with patches of black and white. High up and distant,

the Folly made a pale streak upon the sky. Mr Mellilow thought he would

walk down to the bridge to clear his head. He groped in the accustomed

corner for his goloshes. They were not there. ‘Where on earth has that

woman put them?’ muttered Mr Mellilow. And he answered himself,

irrationally but with complete conviction: ‘My goloshes are up at the Folly.’

His feet seemed to move of their own accord. He was through the

garden now, walking quickly down the field to the little wooden foot-

bridge. His goloshes were at the Folly. It was imperative that he should

fetch them back; the smallest delay would be fatal. ‘This is ridiculous,’

thought Mr Mellilow to himself. ‘It is that foolish dream running in my

head. Mrs Gibbs must have taken them away to clean them. But while I am

here, I may as well go on; the walk will do me good.’

The power of the dream was so strong upon him that he was almost

surprised to find the bridge in its accustomed place. He put his hand on the

rail and was comforted by the roughness of the untrimmed bark. Half a mile

uphill now to the Folly. Its smooth sides shone in the moonlight, and he

turned suddenly, expecting to see the double image striding the fields

behind him. Nothing so sensational was to be seen, however. He breasted

the slope with renewed courage. Now he stood close beneath the tower –

and with a little shock he saw that the door at its base stood open.

He stepped inside, and immediately the darkness was all about him

like a blanket. He felt with his foot for the stair and groped his way up

between the newel and the wall. Now in gloom, now in the gleam of a

loophole, the stair seemed to turn endlessly. Then, as his head rose into the

pale glimmer of the fourth window, he saw a shapeless blackness sprawled upon the stair. With a sudden dreadful certainty that this was what he had

come to see, he mounted further and stooped over it. Creech was lying there

dead. Close beside the body lay a pair of goloshes. As Mr Mellilow moved

to pick them up, something rolled beneath his foot. It was a white chess-

rook.

 

The police surgeon said that Creech had been dead since about nine

o’clock. It was proved that at eight-fifty he had set out towards the wicket

gate to play chess with Mr Mellilow. And in the morning light the prints of

Mr Mellilow’s goloshes were clear, leading down the gravelled path on the

far side of the lawn, past the sun-dial and the fish-pond and through the

sunk garden and so over the muddy field and the footbridge and up the

slope to the Folly. Deep footprints they were and close together, such as a

man might make who carried a monstrous burden. A good mile to the Folly

and half of it uphill. The doctor looked inquiringly at Mr Mellilow’s spare

form.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘I could have carried him. It’s a matter of

knack, not strength. You see –’ he blushed faintly, ‘I’m not really a

gentleman. My father was a miller and I spent my whole boyhood carrying

sacks. Only I was always fond of my books, and so I managed to educate

myself and earn a little money. It would be silly to pretend I couldn’t have

carried Creech. But I didn’t do it, of course.’

‘It’s unfortunate,’ said the superintendent, ‘that we can’t find no trace

of this man Moses.’ His voice was the most unpleasant Mr Mellilow had

ever heard – a sceptical voice with an edge like a saw. ‘He never come

down to the Feathers, that’s a certainty. Potts never set eyes on him, let

alone sent him up here with a tale about chess. Nor nobody saw no car

neither. An odd gentleman this Mr Moses seems to have been. No footmarks to the front door? Well it’s cobbles, so you wouldn’t expect none.

That his glass of whisky by any chance, sir ? … Oh? he wouldn’t have a

drink, wouldn’t he? Ah! And you played two games of chess in this very

room? Ah! very absorbing pursoot, so I’m told. You didn’t hear poor Mr

Creech come up the garden?’

‘The windows were shut,’ said Mr Mellilow, ‘and the curtains drawn.

And Mr Creech always walked straight over the grass from the wicket

gate.’

‘H’m!’ said the superintendent. ‘So he come, or somebody come, right

up on to the verandah and sneaks a pair of goloshes; and you and this Mr

Moses are so occupied you don’t hear nothing.’

‘Come, Superintendent,’ said the Chief Constable, who was sitting on

Mr Mellilow’s oak chest and looked rather uncomfortable. ‘I don’t think

that’s impossible. The man might have worn tennis-shoes or something.

How about fingerprints on the chessmen?’

‘He wore a glove on his right hand,’ said Mr Mellilow, unhappily. ‘I

can remember that he didn’t use his left hand at all – not even when taking a

piece.’

‘A very remarkable gentleman,’ said the superintendent again. ‘No

fingerprints, no footprints, no drinks, no eyes visible, no features to speak

of, pops in and out without leaving no trace – a kind of a vanishing

gentleman.’ Mr Mellilow made a helpless gesture. ‘These the chessmen you

was using?’ Mr Mellilow nodded, and the superintendent turned the box

upside-down upon the board, carefully extending a vast enclosing paw to

keep the pieces from rolling away. ‘Let’s see. Two big ’uns with crosses on

the top and two big ’uns with spikes. Four chaps with split-open ’eads. Four

’orses. Two black ’uns – what d’you call these? Rooks, eh? Look more like churches to me. One white church – rook if you like. What’s gone with the

other one? Or don’t these rook-affairs go in pairs like the rest?’

‘They must both be there,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘He was using two white

rooks in the end-game. He mated me with them … I remember …’

He remembered only too well. The dream, and the double castle

moving to crush him. He watched the superintendent feeling in his pocket

and suddenly knew that name of the terror that had nickered in and out of

the black wood.

The superintendent set down the white rook that had lain by the corpse

at the Folly. Colour, height and weight matched with the rook on the board.

‘Staunton men,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘all of a pattern.’

But the superintendent, with his back to the french window, was

watching Mr Mellilow’s grey face.

‘He must have put it in his pocket,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘He cleared the

pieces away at the end of the game.’

‘But he couldn’t have taken it up to Striding Folly,’ said the

superintendent, ‘nor he couldn’t have done the murder, by your own

account.’

‘Is it possible that you carried it up to the Folly yourself,’ asked the

Chief Constable, ‘and dropped it there when you found the body?’

‘The gentleman has said that he saw this man Moses put it away,’ said

the superintendent.

They were watching him now, all of them. Mr Mellilow clasped his

head in his hands. His forehead was drenched. ‘Something must break

soon,’ he thought.

Like a thunderclap there came a blow on the window; the

superintendent leapt nearly out of his skin.

‘Lord, my lord!’ he complained, opening the window and letting a gust

of fresh air into the room, ‘How you startled me!’

Mr Mellilow gaped. Who was this? His brain wasn’t working properly.

That friend of the Chief Constable’s, of course, who had disappeared

somehow during the conversation. Like the bridge in his dream.

Disappeared. Gone out of the picture.

‘Absorbin’ game, detectin’,’ said the Chief Constable’s friend. ‘Very

much like chess. People come creepin’ right up on to the verandah and you

never even notice them. In broad daylight, too. Tell me, Mr Mellilow –

what made you go up last night to the Folly?’

Mr Mellilow hesitated. This was the point in his story that he had

made no attempt to explain. Mr Moses had sounded unlikely enough; a

dream about goloshes would sound more unlikely still.

‘Come now,’ said the Chief Constable’s friend, polishing his monocle

on his handkerchief and replacing it with an exaggerated lifting of the

eyebrows. ‘What was it? Woman, woman, lovely woman? Meet me by

moonlight and all that kind of thing?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Mellilow, indignantly. ‘I wanted a breath of

fresh –’ He stopped, uncertainly. There was something in the other man’s

childish-foolish face that urged him to speak the reckless truth. ‘I had a

dream,’ he said.

The superintendent shuffled his feet, and the Chief Constable crossed

one leg awkwardly over the other.

‘Warned of God in a dream,’ said the man with the monocle,

unexpectedly. ‘What did you dream of?’ He followed Mr Mellilow’s glance

at the board. ‘Chess?’

‘Of two moving castles,’ said Mr Mellilow, ‘and the dead body of a

black crow.’

‘A pretty piece of fused and inverted symbolism,’ said the other. ‘The

dead body of a black crow become a dead man with a white rook.’

‘But that came afterwards,’ said the Chief Constable.

‘So did the end-game with the two rooks,’ said Mr Mellilow.

‘Our friend’s memory works both ways,’ said the man with the

monocle, ‘like the White Queen’s. She, by the way, could believe as many

as six impossible things before breakfast. So can I. Pharaoh tell your

dream.’

‘Time’s getting on, Wimsey,’ said the Chief Constable.

‘Let time pass,’ retorted the other, ‘for, as a great chess-player

observed, it helps more than reasoning.’

‘What player was that?’ demanded Mr Mellilow.

‘A lady,’ said Wimsey, ‘who played with living men and mated kings,

popes and emperors.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘Well –’ he told his tale from the beginning,

making no secret of his grudge against Creech and his nightmare fancy of

the striding electric pylons. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that was what gave me the

dream.’ And he went on to his story of the goloshes, the bridge, the moving

towers and death on the stairs at the Folly.

‘A damned lucky dream for you,’ said Wimsey. ‘But I see now why

they chose you. Look! it is all clear as daylight. If you had had no dream –

if the murderer had been able to come back later and replace your goloshes

– if someone else had found the body in the morning with the chess-rook

beside it and your tracks leading back and home again, that might have

been mate in one move. There are two men to look for, Superintendent. One

of them belongs to Creech’s household, for he knew that Creech came every

Wednesday through the wicket-gate to play chess with you; and he knew

that Creech’s chessmen and yours were twin sets. The other was a stranger – probably the man whom Creech half-expected to call upon him. One lay

in wait for Creech and strangled him near the wicket gate as he arrived;

fetched your goloshes from the verandah and carried the body down to the

Folly. And the other came here in disguise to hold you in play and give you

an alibi that no one could believe. The one man is strong in his hands and

strong in the back – a sturdy, stocky man with feet no bigger than yours.

The other is a big man, with noticeable eyes and probably clean-shaven,

and he plays brilliant chess. Look among Creech’s enemies or those two

men and ask them where they were between eight o’clock and ten-thirty last

night.’

‘Why didn’t the strangler bring back the goloshes?’ asked the Chief

Constable.

‘Ah!’ said Wimsey; ‘that was where the plan went wrong. I think he

waited up at the Folly to see the light go out in the cottage. He thought it

would be too great a risk to come up twice on to the verandah while Mr

Mellilow was there.’

‘Do you mean,’ asked Mr Mellilow, ‘that he was there, in the Folly,

watching me, when I was groping up those black stairs?’

‘He may have been,’ said Wimsey. ‘But probably, when he saw you

coming up the slope, he knew that things had gone wrong and fled away in

the opposite direction, to the high road that runs behind the Folly. Mr

Moses, of course, went, as he came, by the road that passes Mr Mellilow’s

door, removing his disguise in the nearest convenient place.’

‘That’s all very well, my lord,’ said the superintendent, ‘but where’s

the proof of it?’

‘Everywhere,’ said Wimsey. ‘Go and look at the tracks again. There’s

one set going outwards in goloshes, deep and short, made when the body

was carried down. One, made later, in walking shoes, which is Mr Mellilow’s track going outwards towards the Folly. And the third is Mr

Mellilow again, coming back, the track of a man running very fast. Two out

and only one in. Where is the man who went out and never came back?’

‘Yes,’ said the superintendent, doggedly. ‘But suppose Mr Mellilow

made that second lot of tracks himself to put us off the scent, like? I’m not

saying he did, mind you, but why couldn’t he have?’

‘Because,’ said Wimsey, ‘he had no time. The in-and-out tracks left by

the shoes were made after the body was carried down. There is no other

bridge for three miles on either side, and the river runs waist-deep. It can’t

be forded; so it must be crossed by the bridge. But at half-past ten, Mr

Mellilow was in the Feathers, on this side of the river, ringing up the police.

It couldn’t be done, Super, unless he had wings. The bridge is there to prove

it; for the bridge was crossed three times only.’

‘The bridge,’ said Mr Mellilow, with a great sigh. ‘I knew in my dream

there was something important about that. I knew I was safe if only I could

get to the bridge.’