Scarhaven Keep by J. S. Fletcher (best value ebook reader TXT) 📕

whisper, as Greyle led his party across the grass to the foot of the Keep. “I suppose it’s all up with the poor gentleman; of course? The doctor, he wasn’t in, but they’ll send him up as soon⁠—”

“Mr. Bassett Oliver is dead,” interrupted Greyle, almost harshly. “No doctors can do any good. Now, look here,” he continued, pulling them to a sudden halt, “I want all of you to take particular notice of this old tower⁠—the Keep. I believe you have not been in here before, Mr. Copplestone⁠—just pay particular attention to this place. Here you see is the Keep, standing in the middle of what I suppose was the courtyard of the old castle. It’s a square tower, with a stair turret at one angle. The stair in that turret is in a very good state of preservation⁠—in fact, it is quite easy to climb to the top, and from the top there’s a fine view of land and sea: the Keep itself is nearly a hundred feet in height. Now the inside of the Keep is completely gutted, as you’ll presently see⁠—there isn’t a floor left of the five or six which were once there. And I’m sorry to say there’s very little protection when one’s at the top⁠—merely a narrow ledge with a very low parapet, which in places is badly broken. Consequently, anyone who climbs to the top must be very careful, or there’s the danger of slipping off that ledge and falling to the bottom. Now in my opinion that’s precisely what happened on Sunday afternoon. Oliver evidently got in here, climbed the stairs in the turret to enjoy the view and fell from the parapet. And why his body hasn’t been found before I’ll now show you.”

He led the way to the extreme foot of the Keep, and to a very low-arched door, at which stood a couple of the estate labourers, one of whom carried a lighted lantern. To this man the Squire made a sign.

“Show the way,” he said, in a low voice.

The man turned and descended several steps of worn and moss-covered stone which led through the archway into a dark, cellar-like place smelling strongly of damp and age. Greyle drew the attention of his companions to a heap of earth and rubbish at the entrance.

“We had to clear all that out before we could get in here,” he said. “This archway hadn’t been opened for ages. This, of course, is the very lowest story of the Keep, and half beneath the level of the ground outside. Its roof has gone, like all the rest, but as you see, something else has supplied its place. Hold up your lantern, Marris!”

The other men looked up and saw what the Squire meant. Across the tower, at a height of some fifteen or twenty feet from the floor, Nature, left unchecked, had thrown a ceiling of green stuff. Bramble, ivy, and other spreading and climbing plants had, in the course of years, made a complete network from wall to wall. In places it was so thick that no light could be seen through it from beneath; in other places it was thin and glimpses of the sky could be seen from above the grey, tunnel-like walls. And in one of those places, close to the walls, there was a distinct gap, jagged and irregular, as if some heavy mass had recently plunged through the screen of leaf and branch from the heights above, and beneath this the startled searchers saw the body, lying beside a heap of stones and earth in the unmistakable stillness of death.

“You see how it must have happened,” whispered Greyle, as they all bent round the dead man. “He must have fallen from the very top of the Keep⁠—from the parapet, in fact⁠—and plunged through this mass of green stuff above us. If he had hit that where it’s so thick⁠—there!⁠—it might have broken his fall, but, you see, he struck it at the very thinnest part, and being a big and heavyish man, of course, he’d crash right through it. Now of course, when we examined the Keep on Monday morning, it never struck us that there might be something down here⁠—if you go up the turret stairs to the top and look down on this mass of green stuff from the very top, you’ll see that it looks undisturbed; there’s scarcely anything to show that he fell through it, from up there. But⁠—he did!”

“Whose notion was it that he might be found here?” asked Copplestone.

“Chatfield’s,” replied the Squire. “Chatfield’s. He and I were up at the top there, and he suddenly suggested that Oliver might have fallen from the parapet and be lying embedded in that mass of green stuff beneath. We didn’t know then⁠—even Chatfield didn’t know⁠—that there was this empty space beneath the green stuff. But when we came to go into it, we found there was, so we had that archway cleared of all the stone and rubbish and of course we found him.”

“The body’ll have to be removed, sir,” whispered the police sergeant. “It’ll have to be taken down to the inn, to wait the inquest.”

Marston Greyle started.

“Inquest!” he said. “Oh!⁠—will that have to be held? I suppose so⁠—yes. But we’d better wait until the doctor comes, hadn’t we? I want him⁠—”

The doctor came into the gloomy vault at that moment, escorted by Chatfield, who, however, immediately retired. He was an elderly, old-fashioned somewhat fussy-mannered person, who evidently attached much more importance to the living Squire than to the dead man, and he listened to all Marston Greyle’s explanations and theories with great deference and accepted each without demur. “Ah yes, to be sure!” he said, after a perfunctory examination of the body. “The affair is easily understood. It is precisely as you suggest, Squire. The unfortunate man evidently climbed to the top of the tower, missed his footing, and fell headlong. That slight mass of branch and leaf would make little difference⁠—he was, you see,