Sheiks and Adders Read Free

presently found himself drawn up in a parking place and scrambling from the car.
    Enter those enchanted woods, you who dare… There was no reason to suppose the rather grandly named Forest of Drool to harbour much in the way of enchantment, nor did Appleby feel he had to dare anything as he negotiated a stile and plunged within its shades. He wasn’t even risking being taxed with trespass: behaviour which a retired policeman should particularly seek to avoid. There was a perfectly well-defined footpath before him, and above his head one of the little signposts made the point, as it were, over again – like a bath mat that says ‘bath mat’ in case you should mistake it for a drawing-room rug. Nevertheless Appleby did faintly feel that he was being adventurous, and the absurdity of this sensation actually occupied his mind for the first hundred yards or so of his stroll. As a small boy, he supposed, something had happened to him in a wood. He might have come upon some wild creature horrifyingly caught in a trap. A fox might have startled him. A nasty old man might have made faces at him. An equally nasty old woman might have begged the little gentleman to spare a copper, but at the same time have betrayed the fact that she was a witch. Or perhaps he had played exciting Robin Hood games with rather bigger boys, and been more scared of the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men than he had cared to admit. Very probably he had been told that, if captured, he would be hanged.
    These were idle fancies. Yet it is true, Appleby told himself, that one can suddenly be aware of experiencing – although never for more than the briefest moment – a sharp recrudescence of sensation which one knows perfectly well to have attached to some specific occasion years ago. One tries to identify the occasion, but the elusive memory vanishes, leaving the mind a total blank. If Appleby was interested in this phenomenon it was perhaps because the practice of criminal investigation turns up something similar from time to time. A tiny signal arrives from the region of buried memory; catch it and hold it and you have solved your mystery. But too often it dissolves away again in the instant that you put out your hand. This, however, was past history so far as he was now concerned. Scotland Yard had become, for all practical purposes, as far removed from him as was the Taj Mahal. He was an elderly individual taking a late afternoon stroll amid sylvan scenes remote from any sort of mystification whatever. He was certainly meandering – the word came back to him from that pedantic old professor’s visit – but it had been absurd for Judith to say that, when so employed, he had the knack of persuading untoward situations to come bumping into him. His business now was to note with satisfaction the various appearances of external nature in evidence.
    But what next caught his attention was the handiwork of man. It was a square board nailed to a tree, and lettered in a much bolder fashion than had been the signposts of his first observation. And whereas they had invited carefree pedestrianism in the Forest of Drool, this one was distinctly forbidding. It read simply:
     
    ADDERS
    KEEP OUT
     
    Appleby received this injunction with displeasure. He was offended, in the first place, by the irrationality of being bidden to keep out of something he must already be near the middle of. It was of course possible that the present location of the notice was a product of the same species of juvenile rustic humour as frequently occasioned the turning of signposts the wrong way round. Or conceivably Appleby had arrived at a point, not otherwise demarcated, at which one landowner’s territory gave place to that of another more nervously disposed. Or the assertion might be quite untrue, like the ones saying ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, but more effective than that hackneyed kind, all the same. An authentic proliferation of adders was surely improbable. However all