I have also to report that, on being questioned as to his movements, Mr Questing has returned evasive and even lying answers.
I conceived it my duty to report this matter to the local police authorities, who displayed a somnolence so profound as to be pathological.
I have the honour to be,
Yours faithfully,
JAMES ACKRINGTON, MD, FRCS, FRCP
The servant brought the drink. Dr Ackrington accused him of having substituted an inferior brand of whisky for the one ordered, but he did this with an air of routine rather than of rage. He accepted the servant’s resigned assurances with surprising mildness, merely remarking that the whisky had probably been adulterated by the makers. He then finished his drink, clapped his hat on the side of his head and went out to post his letters. The hall porter pulled open the door.
‘War news a bit brighter this morning, sir,’ said the porter tentatively.
‘The sooner we’re all dead, the better,’ Dr Ackrington replied cheerfully. He gave a falsetto barking noise, and limped quickly down the steps.
‘Was that a joke?’ said the hall porter to the servant. The servant turned up his eyes.
II
Colonel and Mrs Claire had lived for twelve years at Wai-ata-tapu Springs. They had come to New Zealand from India when their daughter Barbara, born ten years after their marriage, was thirteen, and their son Simon, nine years old. They had told their friends in gentle voices that they wanted to get away from the conventions of retired army life in England. They had spoken blithely, for they took an uncritical delight in such phrases, of wide-open spaces and of a small inheritance that had come to the Colonel. With most of this inheritance they had built the boarding house they now lived in. The remaining sums had been quietly lost in a series of timid speculations. They had worked like slaves, receiving good advice with well-bred resentment and bad advice with touching gratitude. Beside these failings, they had a positive genius for collecting impossible people, and at the time when this tale opens were at the mercy of a certain incubus called Herbert Smith.
On the retirement of her distinguished and irascible brother from practice in London, Mrs Claire had invited him to join them. He had consented to do so only as a paying guest, as he wished to enjoy complete freedom for making criticisms and complaints, an exercise he indulged with particular energy, especially in regard to his nephew Simon. His niece Barbara Claire had from the first done the work of two servants and, because she went out so little, retained the sort of English vicarage-garden atmosphere that emanated from her mother. Simon, on the contrary, had attended the Harpoon State schools and, influenced on the one hand by the persistent family attitude of poor but proud gentility and on the other by his schoolfellows’ suspicion of ‘pommy’ settlers, had become truculently colonial, somewhat introverted and defiantly uncouth. A year before the outbreak of war he left school, and now was taking the preliminary Air Force training at home.
On the morning of Dr Ackrington’s visit to Harpoon, the Claires pursued their normal occupations. At midday Colonel Claire took his lumbago to the radioactivity of the mud pool, Mrs Claire steeped her sciatica in a hot spring, Simon went into his cabin to practise Morse code, and Barbara cooked the midday meal in a hot and primitive kitchen with Huia, the Maori help, in attendance.
‘You can dish up, Huia,’ said Barbara. She brushed the locks of damp hair from her eyes with the back of her forearm. ‘I’m afraid I seem to have used a lot of dishes. There’ll be six in the dining-room. Mr Questing’s out for lunch.’
‘Good job,’ said Huia skittishly. Barbara pretended not to hear. Huia, moving with the half-languid, half-vigorous grace of the young Maori, smiled brilliantly, and began to pile stacks of plates on a tray. ‘He’s no good,’ she said softly.
Barbara glanced at her. Huia laughed richly, lifting her short upper lip. ‘I shall never understand them,’ Barbara thought. Aloud she said: ‘Mightn’t it be better if you just pretended not to hear when Mr Questing starts those – starts being – starts teasing you?’
‘He makes me very angry,’ said Huia, and suddenly she became childishly angry, flashing her eyes and stamping her foot. ‘Silly ass,’ she said.
‘But you’re not really angry.’
Huia looked out of the corners of her eyes at Barbara, pulled an equivocal grimace, and tittered.
‘Don’t forget your cap and apron,’ said Barbara, and left the sweltering kitchen for the dining-room.
Wai-ata-tapu Hostel was a one-storeyed wooden building shaped like an E with the middle stroke missing. The dining-room occupied the centre of the long section separating the kitchen and serveries from the boarders’ bedrooms, which extended into the east wing. The west wing, private to the Claires, was a series of cramped cabins and a tiny sitting-room. The house had been designed by Colonel Claire on army-hut lines with an additional flavour of sanatorium. There were no passages, and all the rooms opened on a partially covered-in verandah. The inside walls were of yellowish-red oiled wood. The house smelt faintly of linseed oil and positively of sulphur. An observant visitor might have traced in it the history of the Claires’ venture. The framed London Board-of-Trade posters, the chairs and tables painted, not very capably, in primary colours, the notices in careful script, the archly reproachful rhyme sheets in bathrooms and lavatories, all spoke of high beginnings. Broken passe-partout, chipped paint and fly-blown papers hanging by single drawing pins traced unmistakably a gradual but inexorable decline. The house was clean but unexpectedly so, tidy but not orderly, and only vaguely uncomfortable. The front wall of the dining-room was built of glass panels designed to slide in grooves, but devilishly inclined to jam. These looked across the verandah to the hot springs themselves.
Barbara stood for a moment at one of the open windows and stared absently at a freakish landscape. Hills smudged with scrub were ranked against a heavy sky. Beyond them, across the hidden inlet, but tall enough to dominate the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi’s Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the nearby hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools. These lay close at hand, just beyond the earth-and-pumice sweep in front of the house. Five of them were hot springs hidden from the windows by fences of manuka scrub. The sixth was enclosed by a rough bath shed. The seventh was almost a lake over whose dark waters wraiths of steam vaguely drifted. The eighth was a mud pool, not hot enough to give off steam, and dark in colour with a kind of iridescence across its surface. This pool was only half-screened and from its open end protruded a naked pink head on top of a long neck. Barbara went out to the verandah, seized a brass schoolroom bell, and rang it vigorously. The pink head travelled slowly through the mud like some fantastic periscope until it disappeared behind the screen.
‘Lunch, Father,’ screamed Barbara unnecessarily. She walked across the sweep and entered the enclosure. On a brush fence that screened the first path hung a weather-worn placard: ‘The Elfin Pool. Engaged.’ The Claires had given each of the pools some amazingly insipid title, and Barbara had neatly executed the placards in poker work.
‘Are you there, Mummy?’ asked Barbara.
‘Come in, my dear.’
She walked round the screen and found her mother at her feet, submerged up to the shoulders in bright blue steaming water that quite hid her plump body. Over her fuzz of hair Mrs Claire wore a rubber bag with a frilled edge and she had spectacles on her nose. With her right hand she held above the water a shilling edition of Cranford.
‘So charming,’ she said. ‘They are all such dears. I never tire of them.’
‘Lunch