HAT the most desperate adventures of our lives are those into which we are plunged without warning is, I fancy, the belief of all men in whose careers adventure has played a considerable part. There are times when a man is prepared for adventure of the supremely dangerous sort, and as often as not those times yield nothing very exciting; there are others when he is expecting nothing but the ordinary, and suddenly finds himself confronted by a situation that will try his nerve to the last degree of endurance. Certainly, the most desperate situation I ever found myself in, during my career as a specialist in criminology, was forced upon me as suddenly as a lightning flash breaks out of a summer sky. At one moment I was wrapped in a confident security, the next I was facing death.
It was in the late summer of 19— that I had occasion to travel down to the North of England in connection with a certain notorious blackmailing case. My business obliged me to remain overnight in a small seaside resort, Greyscale, the one place of any size (and it was no more than a village) on Wearcombe Bay, an inlet of the Irish Sea, which has a reputation for its sudden and violent storms.
The season at Greyscale was over; it had been a particularly wet and unfriendly summer, and in the little hotel to which I betook myself there was no other guest. And as it was barely five o’clock when I arrived within its doors, I decided, rather than wait for dinner, to have an old-fashioned, north-country high tea, and afterwards, the September evening then promising to turn out finely, to explore the neighbourhood as well as I could while the light lasted. Over an excellent cold ham I asked the waiter what there was of special interest in the vicinity. He shrugged his shoulders.
“No old ruins—castles, churches, eh?” I asked.
“Nothing nearer than Burton Abbey, and that’s twenty miles off, sir,” he answered. “No, sir, there’s nothing to see here; and nothing to do, either,” he added with another shrug.
“What do the people do who come here, then?” I asked.
“There are only two sorts do come here, sir,” he answered. “One’s invalids and the other’s children. The children play on the beach, and the invalids go driving to the Head.”
“The Head? What’s that?” I enquired.
He turned, pointing out of the coffee-room window to where a great, black, frowning promontory jutted out into the sea at the northern arm of the bay. It was shaped like a whale, and there was something in its appearance that was sinister and forbidding. It looked strangely mysterious.
“Hardress Head, sir,” said the waiter. “Parties is very fond of driving up there. Splendid views from the top, sir. They do say as how you can see the Welsh mountains from there. I ain’t never seen them myself, but I’ve seen the Isle of Man.”
There was a solitary fly standing in front of the hotel when I went out, and I got into it and told its driver to take me up to the Head. The road lay along the northern shore of the bay, and at first was flanked by the usual rows of seaside houses and villas. But before we had gone a mile it became solitary enough, and I begun to realise that before Greyscale had sprung into existence, Wearcombe Bay, on that side, at any rate, must have been a veritable wilderness.
Now and then we passed a fisherman’s cottage; then we came to a wide-spreading marsh, at the foot of the promontory, on which there was not even a hut to be seen; the promontory itself, seen at close quarters, looked wilder, gloomier, more sinister than ever. I have, however, a strong liking for the wild, and I began to be fascinated by this vast mass of earth-clad rock, which lay between land and sea like some mighty survival of the long-dead ages, silently watching for its prey.
There was a winding road up the promontory at the end of the houseless marsh, and at its foot my driver dismounted, and began the ascent, walking at the side of his horse. The horse was a poor, nearly worn-out animal; I soon recognised that I could walk thirty miles while it staggered up ten. And so I sprang out of the ramshackle conveyance, told the man I would walk, and drew out some loose silver wherewith to pay him. He looked at me in some surprise.
“Don’t you want me to come up to the top and wait, sir?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I answered. “I shall walk back. I want a walk.”
He stared at me again, and then looked up at the sky.
“This is a queer part of the world for storms, sir,” he said. “I’m thinking there may be one to-night. And it’ll be dark soon, and the Head’s a wild, queer place. You’d better let me wait.”