Merlin's Furlong (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Harrison was interested and alarmed.

  “I wish the cat didn’t remind me of Waite,” he observed.

  “Cats and parrots are all very well in their way,” said Mrs. Bradley, “but what we find is a monkey. Give me your observations upon that.”

  Harrison grinned.

  “I could make lots of observations,” he remarked. “The wretched thing bit me. I would hate to tell you what I said when that happened, and what I could say even now.”

  “You have my sympathy, dear child. But what do you make of all this?” She waved her arm around to indicate the coach-house and its peculiar, not to say curious, decorations. Harrison sniffed the air and looked dubious.

  “Metaphorically a nasty smell,” he replied.

  “I agree. And this is where Professor Havers’ body was found, and between the deaths of Professor Havers and of Mr. Aumbry there was only a very short time. Who else besides the professor himself knew that you were going to Merlin’s Furlong for the diptych?”

  “Nobody, as far as I know. Of course, the black servant girl could have listened at the keyhole, but I should have thought that the professor’s references were pretty obscure, you know; and I’m afraid both of us…Peter and myself…were more or less playing the fool. I shouldn’t really think she could have gathered what was in the wind unless the professor had previously tipped her off, and that doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “I agree. It doesn’t seem likely at all. The chances, then, are in favour of the notion that nobody except the professor and your three selves knew of the proposed expedition. Well, I think we’ve seen everything here that is likely to help us. Let us on to Merlin’s Furlong.”

  “What about the monkey? Won’t the wretched beast starve?”

  “I doubt it very much. He seemed well-nourished.”

  “Then, you mean, somebody comes here every day?”

  “Well, somebody feeds the monkey, and somebody put those dolls’ heads in that cupboard.”

  “But who could it be?”

  “I will hazard a guess. I think it might be Bluna’s young man, given previous orders.”

  “But wouldn’t he be afraid of Havers’ ghost?”

  “He would be more afraid of not carrying out Havers’ instructions, I imagine. Never mind. Both the parrot and the monkey are safe.”

  They were soon at Merlin’s Furlong. The police had done with the place, and so, apparently, had Mr. Aumbry’s nephews, for it was deserted, and they pulled at the gatehouse bell for half a dozen times in vain. Harrison gazed up at the twin towers.

  “I suppose everything is locked up,” he observed. “Any point in my trying to break in?”

  He sounded so half-hearted in making this suggestion that Mrs. Bradley laughed.

  “No,” she said. “Why should we trouble when here comes somebody who will admit us?”

  Harrison swung round. A small car had turned into the drive. It drew up and out stepped Frederick Aumbry. If he was surprised to see them he did not show it. He raised his dark green hat, brushed down his small moustache, and greeted Mrs. Bradley cheerfully.

  “Want to go inside again?” he asked. “We all packed up as soon as Godfrey and Lewis had gone through the old boy’s papers. Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid. I’ve been over to see Richmond. The poor old chap is very down in the mouth, but I think I’ve cheered him up quite a bit by referring to your capacity for getting the right person hanged. ‘If Mrs. B. is on your side, you’ve nothing to worry about,’ I told him.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I came to see that hole in the floor of the Queen’s Bedroom which, you remember, you described to me.”

  “Oh, ah? As a matter of fact, I went over to old Rickie to find out whether he’d permit me…Rickie being the heir, don’t you know…to do a spot of investigating there myself. He agreed, so long as I took along the boodle to the police to see whether they recognised any of it as stolen property. ‘I don’t want to be charged with grand larceny if the murder charge fails, by some miracle, to materialise,’ says the old lad. So here we all are, and can witness to one another’s findings. I see you’ve brought your own witness, anyway. Jolly sensible, if I may say so. I ought to have thought of one for myself.”

  Mrs. Bradley introduced the two men, and then Frederick produced keys and soon they were all three climbing the stair which led to the room which the three undergraduates had visited first in their tour of Merlin’s Furlong, and from which led the passage into the occupied rooms along the courtyard.

  “Interesting old bed,” observed Frederick, who, if he had hoped to remove something from his late uncle’s hoard for his own benefit, was putting a very good face on things. “The hangings are made from tapestry supposed to have been worked by Berengaria of Navarre. It really does belong here…unlike some other things I could mention!”

  He turned towards the middle of the floor-space and took out a small screwdriver. The worn carpet was soon up and pulled aside, and the trap door opened. It had covered a cavity about three feet deep.

  “Surely,” said Harrison, peering in, “there’s some indication downstairs of the existence of this thing? There must be a drop in one of the ceilings the size of a biggish cistern!”

  “Ah, that’s where the old boy was clever,” said Frederick, prostrating himself on his stomach and reaching down into the hole, which appeared to be absolutely empty. “I’ll show you. I found this out by accident. It’s very nibby. Very nibby indeed. The old chap used to keep a selection of silverware in the top part. Good stuff, you know, but nothing that couldn’t be matched in a couple of hundred old houses, if not more. Then, under the silver, there was this. It goes down to an ancient guard-room, long since bricked up from outside.”

  His groping fingers produced a sudden result. There was a slight click, and then what appeared to be the floor of the hole slid away to the left and disclosed another hole, very much deeper than the first.

  “I’d better go first,” said Frederick. He rose, dusted himself down, and then climbed into the hole. Apparently there was a wall-ladder, for gradually his body began to disappear and at last from the depths came a click, and Harrison, who was lying flat with his head over the hole, and Mrs. Bradley, who was squatting like a toad beside it, saw a light come on and then Frederick’s face looking up at them from a drop of some twenty feet. “You can come down now,” he said. “The trap door is not very big, but there’s plenty of room down here.”

  Harrison had once visited a Neolithic flint mine. Old Mr. Aumbry’s treasure-house was, to his mind, rather similar. The narrow descent widened at the bottom into a room about eighteen feet by ten, from which three narrow passages opened out. He stared around him with interest. The room was shelved like a wine cellar, and on every shelf was an assortment of objects which, for the most part, would rarely be matched outside a museum or those treasures still in the possession of the Church.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?” said Frederick. He picked up a jeweled miter in one hand and an ivory Madonna in the other. Putting them down and moving on, he lifted up the gold top and crook of a pastoral staff and a fourteenth-century chalice. In fact, so far as Mrs. Bradley could see, every one of the precious objects in Aumbry’s hoard had some religious significance. She mentioned this to Frederick. He agreed at once.

  “Yes, quite right,” he said. “Makes the things very difficult to pawn. Besides, I imagine that most of them would be on the police list. It beats me how the old devil got away with all this red-hot loot.”

  “But you thought he was a receiver of stolen goods in another sense,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well, one was bound to think so. The secrecy, the queer coves he used to do business with, this cover of his at Wallchester, affecting to be a learned crank but one quite above suspicion…”

  “He must have been learned, in a sense,” put in Harrison, “if this was his idea of a collection of valuable objects.”

  Frederick moved on without replying. It was c
lear that he was wondering how soon he could get rid of them. Mrs. Bradley loitered, ostensibly examining the collection with the eye of a connoisseur, but, all the time, keeping Frederick under scrutiny. Suddenly, as Frederick, on the opposite side of the room, was weighing the respective merits of an ivory carving of the late fourteenth century, a fifteenth-century pendant, and a large, jeweled brooch of the same period, she stretched out a yellow claw and picked up an old leather handbag. She opened it and, not to her surprise, found that it housed a gold and enamel diptych. What interested her was that it was accompanied by a watchmaker’s eyeglass. She slipped both articles into her skirt pocket and put the leather bag back into its place. She thought that Frederick Aumbry sighed with relief.

  “But how on earth did you guess?” demanded Harrison, when they were driving off, leaving a satisfied Frederick in possession to loot the hoard as he pleased.

  “I thought it might be worthwhile to contact Frederick Aumbry, the human jackdaw,” Mrs. Bradley replied.

  “You mean we met him by design, not accident?”

  “Quite so, child.”

  “Then we need not have gone to Merlin’s Castle? We were just killing time until Aumbry was due to rum up?”

  “Not at all. I wanted to visit Merlin’s Castle at a time when I guessed it would be empty.”

  “Except for that beast of a monkey!”

  “Except for that beast of a monkey.”

  “But what about this Negro who looks after it?”

  “If he had been there I should have produced my police permit.”

  “Oh? Have you got one?”

  “False, of course, but it would deceive the casual and possibly frightened observer. My secretary effected it. A capable girl with a very strong sense of humour.”

  “So Frederick had the diptych after all! But how did you know?”

  “I didn’t know, but I put an advertisement in the Personal column of The Times, asking Frederick (no surname, of course) to meet me outside the Ministry of Fisheries and giving the time. I added that he should bring uncle’s snuffbox with him as I wanted to show it to Roberts.”

  “Polly ought to take your correspondence course,” said Harrison.

  “He has no need to do so. I very much admired the advertisement which brought you to Professor Havers’ lodgings in the first place.”

  “But Havers wrote that himself!”

  “Did he? I take leave to doubt it. It is true that I have not seen very much of Mr. Waite, but I admire (without liking) his sense of the macabre.”

  Harrison laughed uncertainly.

  “Polly’s pretty good fun,” he said. “Did he really word that advertisement himself and stick it in the paper? But, if he did—I mean, old Havers didn’t turn a hair when we two blew in, you know.”

  “No. He badly wanted to get rid of that doll,” said Mrs. Bradley. “It was sufficient warning.”

  “Then you mean it didn’t represent Aumbry?”

  “From what I saw at Merlin’s Castle in Professor Havers’ room, I should say that it represented him in the clothes he sometimes put on in the country.”

  “But the doll wore a little Imperial.”

  “The doll wore a goat’s beard, child. I have examined it carefully. That was not human hair.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Merlin’s Cat

  “…there had been something more than acquaintance between them, as the gift of a necklace shows…”

  —Helen Simpson, The Spanish Marriage

  The road to Merlin’s Fort seemed shorter than Harrison would have believed possible. He had spent the night in Moundbury; Mrs. Bradley with friends she had in Blandford. At ten o’clock next morning they met by appointment at the Seven Stones circle along the road which led to Merlin’s Castle, but the car, driven by Mrs. Bradley’s man George, soon bumped its way off the road and took a long and seemingly endless turning at the end of which could be described, from far-off, a lofty and imposing hill.

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Harrison, “and here’s where we met that fellow who misdirected us. Well, at least, no, perhaps it’s not fair to say that. He did his best, I suppose.”

  The car bumped on and came to rest on a patch of turf below the frowning heights of the Iron Age fort. Mrs. Bradley and Harrison got out, and George turned the car.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Bradley, “for the most curious part of our adventure.” Harrison, who, for some time, had felt himself bewitched, made no reply, but followed her up a steep slope to where one of the entrances to the fort showed a trench the width of a farm-cart between two enormous bastions of earth. Behind the bastions ran a deep, wide ditch which was filled with sinister shadow.

  “Queer sort of place,” said Harrison, following his guide up an incline which turned off to the right and led to a concealed entrance to the inner ramparts of the fort. His observation was just, for, even in broad daylight, the place had a morbid fascination. As they penetrated deeper among the prehistoric Iron Age defences, although the sun shone brilliantly on all the surrounding country, not a single ray appeared to illumine the vast, incredible walls and the deep, steep, stone-lined ditches.

  The entrances, all concealed, led further and further into the intricate fort, winding first one way and then another past rampart upon rampart.

  “Well, the builders of concentric castles had nothing on these blokes,” said Harrison, when at last they had penetrated to the heart of the stronghold and found themselves on a plateau of virgin turf. “What are we aiming for now? The spot marked with a cross?”

  “Yes.” She took out a pocket compass.

  “View was from the north,” said Harrison, helpfully. “From where we parked the car that night, I mean.”

  “And where two slept in the heather,” said Mrs. Bradley. She put away the compass and they made their way over the wide stretch of what had been cattle pasture in the time of Iron Age war to where, in the turf, was an unexpected feature, a maze made of baulks, flat on the ground but of obvious intricacy and cunning. Harrison, obeying a childish, comprehensible impulse, began to walk it.

  “Hullo!” he said. “Ground been disturbed in the center, and fairly recently, I imagine.”

  Mrs. Bradley had already noticed the different color of the turf in the middle of the maze. Stepping over the baulks, she approached the patch where the grass was withered, and studied it whilst Harrison continued his perambulation of the seventeenth-century opus. The withered patch, from which, it seemed clear, turf had been taken up and afterwards re-laid, measured, so far as she could judge (and her eye was accurate), about eight feet by five.

  “How handy are you with a turfing iron?” she enquired of Harrison. He stood still, stated, “I think I’ve walked half a mile already,” and then answered that he had never handled one.

  “Disgraceful!” said Mrs. Bradley cheerfully. “When you have completed your exploration of the Minotaur’s den George will drive us to a shop in Moundbury where tools may be obtained on payment of the requisite sum, and you shall learn, under his expert guidance, a useful and interesting art.”

  “There’s no such thing as a useful art,” argued Harrison, continuing his peregrination, or, as Mrs. Bradley saw it, his pilgrimage. “If it’s art it isn’t useful, and if it’s useful, it isn’t art.”

  Mrs. Bradley invoked the shades of the Union Debating Society and ignored the gambit. She retired to the edge of the maze and seated herself on the short Downland grass. From where she sat she could see the ground-plan of a Roman temple and near it some rough fillings of what she supposed had been recently-excavated storage pits of the Iron Age village when it had had to retire to this stronghold because of danger below. Patiently she sat and brooded upon old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago until Harrison, skipping like the ram under whose sign he had been born, leapt from baulk to baulk and came to join her.

  “We needn’t go at once, need we?” he asked. “Couldn’t we walk all round this place and count the tumuli
outside it? I’ll collect disc barrows and you can have bell barrows, and that’s rather chivalrous of me because you’ll find lots more of yours than I shall of mine. We ought to be able to spot them for miles from up here.”

  Engaged in this simple, satisfying occupation, they encircled the fort, and returned, after a long walk, to the entrance by which they had come in. They drove slowly to the main road and then swiftly to Moundbury, where George, who seemed to have an instinct in such matters, took them without loss of time, or any retracing of his route, to a shop which sold every type of gardening implement and agricultural machine. Two turfing irons and a stout spade were acquired, and then Mrs. Bradley rang up the Chief Constable.

  “Have you any objection to my taking up about forty square feet of turf on the top of Merlin’s Fort?” she enquired. The Chief Constable replied in a doubtful tone that it was the Office of Works’ pigeon. “Oh, I’ll be sure to put it back,” she blithely promised. “Who has already done all that, and recently? Do you know?”

  The Chief Constable disclaimed any such knowledge, begged her not to get him into trouble, bade her good-bye, and rang off, and she rejoined Harrison and her chauffeur grinning with hideous cheerfulness. They lunched and then drove again to Merlin’s Fort. They waited in the car whilst a shepherd descended with his flock and a couple of hikers concluded their picnic meal and moved off, and then, George carrying spade and a turfing iron and Harrison the second turfing iron, they penetrated the fastness once more and in due course arrived at the maze.

  The turfing iron, to Harrison’s relief, proved simple to manipulate, and after some manful work the withered turf was all removed, and, whilst he sat down beside Mrs. Bradley and wiped the sweat from his face and neck, George busied himself in a practical, accustomed manner with the spade and burrowed into the meager depth of soil and the rubble of chalk beneath it. His spade struck upon wood.