The Creeping Jenny Mystery by Flynn Brian

Author:Flynn, Brian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: amazon

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Having dropped the epistle in an out-of-the-way pillar box (Peter had resolved to take no risks in the matter but to post it himself) he started to cross the broad expanse of heath and common that lay between him and “The Crossways.” He had over three miles to cover as he had purposely come some distance for his postal tryst. For a matter of twenty minutes or so he had swung along jauntily thinking over his letter to Anthony Bathurst and the sinister events of the last few days. It was quite on the cards, he reflected, that Bathurst would see a glimmer of light shining through the haze of the puzzle as he had presented it to him and be able to put him on the road to a solution. It was amazing how old Bathurst could pick out the right strand from the tangled ends of problems like this one and although on this occasion his attack would be as it were from a distance, Peter hoped secretly that his précis of the case would be sufficiently illuminating to counteract this condition and achieve results by correspondence. He was so engrossed in this traffic of thought that he was hardly conscious of the approach across the coarse, tussocky grass of the man who accosted him.

“Pardon me,” said the stranger, raising a broad-brimmed hat, “but would you be good enough to tell me if I am going in the right direction for ‘The Crossways’? I’ve come over from Cranwick and I seem to have gone amiss somewhere. I’m not sure that I haven’t taken the wrong turning somehow or the other.”

Peter looked at him curiously. The man was a gentleman—that is to say in the usually accepted sense of that much-abused word. His speech was cultured and his clothes, although old, “right.” He was fair with a fresh complexion and “toothbrush” moustache. Peter put him down as somewhere in the early twenties, a year or so junior to himself.

“Certainly,” he replied. “But you need not worry. You can make ‘The Crossways’ quite easily this way. When you get to the edge of the heath cut across the road that you’ll find directly in front of you and then cross the stile and turn sharply to your left. Carry straight on from there, past the church and then on beyond an old cow-byre and you can’t miss it.”

“Thank you,” said the young man. “Thanks awfully. Sorry to have—”

Then Peter said something which, immediately it had been spoken, he regretted and also the impulse that had prompted it.

“As a matter of fact,” he said carelessly, “I happen to be going to ‘The Crossways’ myself. I’m staying there as it happens. If you care to accompany me—delighted.”

At once he could have sworn that the young man was taken aback and that a strange look of something very much like annoyance flitted across his face. Simultaneously Peter Daventry began to wonder—that look—that expression—where the devil—

But his period of wonderment was very brief.

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