A loose floor-board cracked; John’s fists clenched unconsciously, but a warning hand coming from out of the curtains and pressing his shoulder kept him otherwise motionless.
Someone was coming inch by inch towards the bed: someone who knew the disposition of the furniture so exactly that he made no blunder. The heavy coverlet stirred over John’s limbs, and, as his hands came up instinctively, smothering folds were over his face, pressed down and down over nose and mouth. He grabbed at this new assailant’s wrists, but before his fingers could close on them the pressure abruptly left his face, and he heard a sudden scuffle, a strangled, startled oath, and the quick shifting of stockinged feet on the floor.
He flung the quilt off, groping for the tinder-box, which he had dropped on the bed.
‘The glim! light the glim!’ panted Waggleswick.
A chair went over with a crash; something was knocked flying from the dressing-table, as the two men swayed and struggled about the room. John’s desperate fingers found the tinder-box, and as with trembling fingers he contrived to strike a light from it, a heavy thud shook the room.
The tiny flame flared up; the landlord and Waggleswick were writhing and heaving together on the floor, silent but murderous.
John lit the candle, and tumbled out of bed, hurrying to Waggleswick’s aid. The treatment he had suffered during the last few minutes had considerably shaken him, and he felt rather dizzy, nor did a wild kick from one of Fyton’s plunging legs do anything to improve his condition. The landlord was immensely strong, and for several minutes he made it impossible for the two other men to overpower him. He and Waggleswick rolled on the floor, locked together, but at last John managed to grab one of his arms, as he was attempting to gouge out Waggleswick’s eye, and to twist it with all his might. Waggleswick, who happened at that moment to be uppermost, was thus enabled to drive home a shattering blow to the jaw. This half stunned the landlord, and before he could recover Waggleswick had vigorously banged his head on the floor. This deprived him of his wits for several minutes, and by the time he was at all able to continue the struggle a pair of handcuffs had been locked round his wrists.
‘Bide, and watch him!’ commanded Waggleswick, out of breath, much abraded, but still surprisingly active. ‘Take my barker and don’t stand no gammon!’ With that, he thrust a pistol into Mr Cranbrook’s hand, and dived into the cupboard, adding over his shoulder: ‘Hit him over the head with the butt, if he don’t stay still! I don’t want him shot: he’s one for the Nubbing Cheat, he is!’
John found that his knees were shaking. He sat down, and curtly bade the landlord, who seemed to be trying to get up, to stay where he was. He had only just recovered his breath when a glimmer of light shone through the cupboard door, growing brighter as footsteps approached. Mr Waggleswick came back into the room with a lamp.
‘All’s bowman!’ he announced, taking his gun away from John. ‘Caught both the bites red-handed. She’s as bad as he is, and worse! Get up, hang-gallows!’
He endorsed this command with a kick, and the landlord heaved himself to his feet. A settled, dogged expression had descended on to his face; he did not speak, but when John met his eyes he saw that there was so malevolent a look in them that it was almost impossible to believe he could be the same man as the comfortable, smiling host of a few hours earlier.
John shuddered, and turned away to pick up his breeches. When he had pulled these on over his nightshirt, and had thrust his feet into a pair of shoes, Waggleswick invited him to come down and see what had awaited him in the wash-house below his room.
‘Jem and me’ll lock the cull and his moll in the cellar till morning,’ he said. ‘Taken me a rare time to snabble you, my buck, ain’t it? You’ll pay for it! Get down them dancers, and don’t you go for to forget that this little pop o’ mine is mighty liable to go off! Mighty liable it is!’
He motioned the landlord to go before him into the cupboard, grinning at John’s face of horror. ‘Didn’t suspicion what there was behind these here doors, did you?’ he said.
‘I never tried to open them. Good God, a stairway?’
‘Down to the wash-house. Took me three visits to get a sight of them, too! Ah, and you’d have gone down ’em feet first if I hadn’t have been here, master, like a good few other young chubs! To think I been here four times, and never a blow come worth the biting until you walked in tonight, with your pocketbook full o’ flimseys, and your talk of no one suspicioning you was in England! Axing your pardon, you was a regular noddy, wasn’t you, sir?’
Mr Cranbrook agreed to it humbly, and brought up the rear of the little procession that wound its way down a steep, twisting stair to a stone-flagged wash-house, where a huge copper was steaming in one corner, and the tapster was standing over Mrs Fyton, loudly protesting her innocence of evil intent in a chair in the middle of the room.
‘My assistant – junior, o’ course, but a fly cove!’ said Waggleswick, jerking a thumb at the tapster. ‘All right, Jem: we’ll stow ’em away under hatches now!’
John, whose revolted gaze had alighted on a chopper, lying on a stout, scrubbed table, was looking a little pale. He was left to his own reflections while the prisoners were driven down to the cellar; and his half-incredulous and wholly nauseated inspection of the wash-house made it unnecessary for Waggleswick to inform him, as he did upon his return with Jem, that it had been the Fytons’ practice to chop up the bodies of their victims, and to boil down the remains in the copper. ‘Though I don’t rightly know what they done with the heads,’ added Mr Waggleswick thoughtfully.
John had heard tales reminiscent of this gruesome disclosure, but he had imagined that they belonged to an age long past.
‘Lor’ no, sir!’ said Waggleswick indulgently. ‘There’s plenty of willains alive today! We’ve had this ken in our eye I dunno how long, but that Fyton he was a cunning one!’
‘Ah!’ nodded Jem, signifying portentous assent.
‘You might have told me!’ John said hotly.
‘Well,’ said Waggleswick, scratching his chin, ‘I might, o’ course, but you was in the nature of a honey-fall, sir, and I wasn’t so werr
y sure as you’d be agreeable to laying in your bed awaiting for Fyton to come an’ murder you unbeknownst if I was to tell you what my lay was.’
A horrible thought crossed John’s mind. ‘Miss Gateshead!’
‘She’s all right and tight! She was knowed to be putting up here, and Fyton never ran no silly risks.’
‘’Adn’t got no ’addock stuffed with beans neither,’ interpolated Jem, somewhat incomprehensibly.
Waggleswick said severely: ‘Don’t talk that cant to flash coves as don’t understand it, sap-head! What he means, sir, is she hadn’t no full purse, like you told us all you had!’
‘Not but what Fyton might ha’ done a bit in the body-snatching line,’ suggested Jem.