Read The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs for Free Online

couple of minutes and your railway thief would have tumbled me from the car, hidden himself once again, and knocked you on the head as well, or Hasbro, when one of you came along. Robbery was convenient, but perhaps it wasn’t the motive.”
    “And that’s why the blighter was setting in to finish you off when I dealt him that blow,” Tubby said. “He’d already taken your purse, after all. There was no point in murdering you for mere sport.”
    “No point at all,” I said.
    “One might say that he was attempting to hack the legs off the elephant before it lumbered into Heathfield.”
    “There’s perhaps more truth than poetry in your phrasing, but it’s as you say. There’s a good chance I owe you my life.”
    “As well as the half crown I gave the boy just now.”
    “That was no half crown,” I said, calling his shameless bluff. “I clearly saw you give the boy a shilling.”
    “God’s rabbit!” Tubby said. “I’ll need that breakfast directly. My big guts are eating my little guts, and without salt.” As if his command were a wish on a genie’s lamp, breakfast arrived, interrupting our parlay.
    Maddeningly, there was nothing for it but to wait. St. Ives had declared it necessary. The absence of asbestos caps declared it necessary. The two of us would sit on our hands in Blackboys and be satisfied with our lot, hoping to God that the Tipper would appear, and quickly, although to my mind it was a long shot. Like as not the Tipper was just another rum mug in the employ of Ignacio Narbondo—another person for St. Ives to knock on the head if he were to prevail in Heathfield.
    We idled away the balance of the morning browsing through the books in the inn parlor. I made inroads into Southey’s Life of Nelson . Tubby dipped into Andrew Marvel’s Bachelor , perpetually interrupting himself to look out of the windows with an expectant squint in his eye. Now and then he stood up, grasped his stick, and flailed away at an enemy that only he could perceive. Hours later, after endless rounds of two-handed Whist and flagons of tea, we ate a roasted duck stuffed with potatoes while watching ever more intently for the door to open and the Tipper to walk in and announce himself. But although the door did just that off and on, and any number of people walked in or walked out, there was no sign of the Tipper. We whiled away the last hour of daylight at a table near the fire over a beaker of port, the rain still falling, half a dozen people sitting around the parlor taking their ease.
    The inn door slammed opened, and, as you can imagine, we both looked up sharply. Once again, it wasn’t the Tipper. It was Alice, looking like a wildly beautiful Ophelia, her dark hair windblown, her dress and coat splashed with mud, a haunted look in her eyes. In her hand she clutched what could only be one of the asbestos caps. She gaped at the two of us, cried out, “Oh, Jack!” and fell to the floor in a dead faint.



Chapter 5
     
    Treachery in 
    Heathfield

     
    That same morning, while the sun was still low on the horizon and Tubby and I slept, St. Ives followed the Tipper into the woods. It was nearly dark beneath the oak trees and the Scots pine. Steam rose from the wet leaves and needles that covered the forest floor, creating a ground fog. St. Ives carried an asbestos hat, but the Tipper told him that until they were on the very outskirts of Heathfield itself, the cap was of no value to him. In Heathfield it would be priceless. He declined to respond to the questions St. Ives put to him. He had been paid his fee to take St. Ives into Heathfield, he said, not to palaver like a jackdaw.
    Soon the ground itself grew black with coal dust, and the forest opened onto a heath as blighted as the Cities of the Plain after the hail of brimstone. There were mountains of coal dug out of the pits, which descended some 150 fathoms into the depths of the earth—deep enough, the Tipper pointed out, to bury a mort of corpses. Rusting