3. The Road to Blondeau Manor

THE HIDDEN FOREST - 3

It wasn’t next morning when the retired Detective took his taxi on the road to Drainport, a small town on the River Cumly, but later that same day. Once it had been what it’s name in part suggests, a port, but as a consequence of the increasing size of sea-going vessels it could no longer accommodate any but the titchy little boats that ploughed unprofitably up and down the river. But it was the road to Drainport that had been shown on the map that the objectionable and somewhat aromatic fat man had pointed at, and he had to start somewhere. So rather than wait for the company of the gross Paul Fairweather and eight o'clock the next morning he set off on the thirty mile drive to Drainport straight away for a reconnaissance.

It was a straight enough road, some saying it had been built by Roman soldiers around the first century and had remained virtually unchanged until the invention of the motor car, when it was gradually widened and tarmacked.

On one side was farmland and the other, nothing. He drove slowly, so slowly that a hearse behind him hooted its displeasure and he scowled at its sombre driver as it slowly overtook him. Once he had the road to himself he pulled up in a lay-by and walked across the road to see exactly what the nothing consisted of.

There was a narrow grass verge and thick, spiky and occasionally green vegetation that gave every impression of being impenetrable, so he decided to try to penetrate it.

He didn’t manage to force his way far before he gave up because what started off as difficult and, attacked by spiky weeds, painful, became impossible and he had no intention of mortally wounding himself in the arms of a natural version of hell. So he eventually returned to his car having decided that the nothing, though obviously something, was still nothing, and continued slowly along the road, eyes boring into the far side of the road, sure that there must be something in the midst of all that nothing. It made sense to him. Land was a precious commodity and there was no way a cash-greedy landowner was going to waste his nothing.

He was half way to Drainport when he spotted it.

At first he thought that it might be his imagination, but there was almost certainly a depressed shadow in the nothing that just might have been the decayed remnants of a lane or driveway. If it was, it was clearly now overgrown, and his imagination, when he stretched it, suggested that once upon a time it just may have been a way to somewhere or nobody would have used it.

He pulled up at the side of the road, wound down his window so that he could see better and smiled to himself. He could smell a fragrance that was partly hay mixed with cow parsley and other weeds and partly decay, the mixture unpleasant to his more refined senses, and it made him frown.

And he was so distracted by the aroma the that he failed to notice that he wasn’t alone. A car had quietly pulled up behind him, and he wasn’t paying anything like proper attention.

“Now sir,” said a policeman from the road outside his taxi, “what are we doing here, parked on a dangerous bend and all after driving like a snail for miles?”

“I’m looking for the manor,” he said, without politely referring to the policemen as ‘officer’, then adding,“and this road is as straight as a die to Drainport.”

“Really, sir? Been drinking, have we, sort of got ourselves sort of imagining things that ain’t there?” grinned the young policeman. “I mean, manor? Who ever heard of there being a manor here?”

“No,” he replied, his voice so crackly that it was a wonder the policeman didn’t start looking for a pile of broken glass, “I’m looking for Blondeau Manor which I believe is somewhere down that path,” and he pointed to the faint depression in the nothing.

“Down that mighty highway, sir? Is that where you fancy your manor is? With its toffs and gentry all parading around on the backs of mighty steeds and blowing on horns?” grinned the policeman, “and if you don’t mind, sir, just getting out of your vehicle and, let me see, what is it we have to do? Yes: blowing into this,” and he produced a breathalyser and held it towards Davey Frost.

Davey was not impressed. He had served Her Majesty in the police force for several years before the casual release of what to him was a dangerous criminal had driven him to resigning, and he wasn’t going to let a callow youth like this officer dominate him or, heaven help him, breathalyse him. Not that he had anything to be afraid of: although not strictly tee-total, he hardly ever partook of any liquid refreshment stronger than lemonade. But to him that wasn’t the point. In a previous life he’d been a Detective Chief Inspector, and surely that counted for something.

“You petty little squirt!” he almost shouted, and the sound of his voice exploding came as a shock to the officer, “don’t you know who I am?”

He knew the answer to that one. It was a few years since he’d left the police force in a fit of pique, and this young squirt would still have been in short trousers when he was arresting killers and maimers and other low life, and wouldn’t have known he existed.

The officer, though, had been asked that question before and it was always by men and even sometimes women who thought a great deal more of themselves than was realistic.

“You’ll have to come along with me, sir,” decided the officer because he had a distinct dislike of men who wanted him to know who they were, “no more nonsense, sir, but come along with me and we’ll get this sorted out in time for tea.”

There was another officer in the police car that had pulled up unnoticed behind him, and one of them drove his taxi back to Brumpton whilst the young squirt accompanied Davey in the police car.

Their arrival at Brumpton Police station was a jolly affair.

“Why, Davey, what are you doing here?” asked the sergeant on the desk when he saw who was being propelled through the door.

“Suspicion of drunk in charge, sir,” crowed the young officer, wondering why his sergeant was treating his prisoner with such a familiar smile.

“What? Davey? Pull the other one, lad,” grinned the sergeant, “what is it, Davey?”

“I was looking for a place belonging to my neighbour,” began Davey.

“What? Fatty Fairweather?” asked the sergeant.

“You know him? Yes, him, when this young twallop thought it only right and proper to breathalyse me without just cause,” he stated crisply, “and I want to make an official complaint!”

“Now, Davey, surely we can sort this out without blotting the lad’s copybook,” grunted the sergeant, “he’s not been in uniform for long and we all have to learn, don’t we? I mean I bet you had a few moments before you made it to DCI, didn’t you?”

Davey Frost relaxed, but only slightly. “He needs a bit of attitude training before he’s set loose on the public, then,” he grated. “Now tell me, Bert, have you heard of a place called Blondeau Manor?”

The sergeant went suddenly pale. “Blondeau Manor? What you got to do with an evil place like that?” he asked.

“It’s that neighbour of mine, Mr Fairweather,” he said, “he’s inherited a place called Blondeau Manor, and it’s straight. I’ve seen the papers.”

Sergeant Bert Sanders sighed. “Best of luck to him, Davey, that’s all I can say. I’ve never seen the place, but it’s there somewhere. Some say it’s haunted. Rotten with the spirits of the dead. But whatever the truth is I’ve never heard any good of the place. And they say, those who talk of ghosts as if there ever was such things, that it moves around like all good ghostly places do, here one day and there another. You tell your Fatty Fairweather to be careful when he goes to Blondeau Manor.”

© Peter Rogerson, 04.11.20