Adders on the Heath (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Titles by Gladys Mitchell

  Speedy Death (1929)

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929)

  The Longer Bodies (1930)

  The Saltmarsh Murders (1932)

  Death at the Opera (1934)

  The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935)

  Dead Men’s Morris (1936)

  Come Away, Death (1937)

  St Peter’s Finger (1938)

  Printer’s Error (1939)

  Brazen Tongue (1940)

  Hangman’s Curfew (1941)

  When Last I Died (1941)

  Laurels Are Poison (1942)

  Sunset Over Soho (1943)

  The Worsted Viper (1943)

  My Father Sleeps (1944)

  The Rising of the Moon (1945)

  Here Comes a Chopper (1946)

  Death and the Maiden (1947)

  The Dancing Druids (1948)

  Tom Brown’s Body (1949)

  Groaning Spinney (1950)

  The Devil’s Elbow (1951)

  The Echoing Strangers (1952)

  Merlin’s Furlong (1953)

  Faintley Speaking (1954)

  On Your Marks (1954)

  Watson’s Choice (1955)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956)

  The Twenty-Third Man (1957)

  Spotted Hemlock (1958)

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)

  Say it With Flowers (1960)

  The Nodding Canaries (1961)

  My Bones Will Keep (1962)

  Death of a Delft Blue (1964)

  Pageant of Murder (1965)

  The Croaking Raven (1966)

  Skeleton Island (1967)

  Three Quick and Five Dead (1968)

  Dance to Your Daddy (1969)

  Gory Dew (1970)

  Lament for Leto (1971)

  A Hearse on May-Day (1972)

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie (1973)

  A Javelin for Jonah (1974)

  Winking at the Brim (1974)

  Convent on Styx (1975)

  Late, Late in the Evening (1976)

  Noonday and Night (1977)

  Fault in the Structure (1977)

  Wraiths and Changelings (1978)

  Mingled with Venom (1978)

  Nest of Vipers (1979)

  The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)

  Uncoffin’d Clay (1980)

  The Whispering Knights (1980)

  The Death-Cap Dancers (1981)

  Lovers Make Moan (1981)

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982)

  Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982)

  The Greenstone Griffins (1983)

  Cold, Lone and Still (1983)

  No Winding Sheet (1984)

  The Crozier Pharaohs (1984)

  Gladys Mitchell writing as Malcolm Torrie

  Heavy as Lead (1966)

  Late and Cold (1967)

  Your Secret Friend (1968)

  Churchyard Salad (1969)

  Shades of Darkness (1970)

  Bismarck Herrings (1971)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1963.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle 2014

  www.apub.com

  First published in Great Britain in 1963 by Michael Joseph

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  E-ISBN-13: 9781477869062

  A Note about This E-Book

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original British edition and includes British vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation, some of which may differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, with only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  To TESSA NIVEN with love

  Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. As he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unexpected, short cuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Contents

  Prelude

  CHAPTER ONE Tent on the Common

  CHAPTER TWO Hounds of the Law

  CHAPTER THREE Waiting for Denisot

  CHAPTER FOUR In Search of a Body

  CHAPTER FIVE Sacred Status of Great-Aunt

  CHAPTER SIX Inquests Are Odious

  CHAPTER SEVEN Buckler’s Hard

  Interlude

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Gen, the Dope, the Low-Down

  CHAPTER NINE Dame Beatrice States the Case

  CHAPTER TEN The Superintendent Reviews It

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Headmaster and Staff

  CHAPTER TWELVE Woman and Child

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Faint Gleams of Unexpected Light

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Despatches from Three Fronts

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN War on Four Fronts

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Peaceful Encounters

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Liberty Lee

  Second Interlude

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Hamish Rides Again

  CHAPTER NINTEEN The Return of the Prodigals

  CHAPTER TWENTY Escapade

  Fugue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prelude

  I hope they kill nothing in the woods but foxes.

  The Verney Letters, 1738

  Members of the Scylla and District Social and Athletic Club are rarely seen in action at the White City. Still less often, if at all, do they represent the A.A.A. against Oxford or Cambridge. They are present at the Olympics, (provided that they can afford to be present), as spectators, not as competitors.

  Yet the club is a keen one, has a treasurer apt at collecting subscriptions, and is not without its aspirants to county honours, for now and again the county will call a member or two for trials, the club’s own time-keeping being unreliable.

  One candidate for this honour did not impress the judges, who considered his tactics in the two-mile race rather suspect. As he had won it, both he and his girlfriend were very much annoyed and referred (in broader and less printable terms) to the bias and favouritism of the chief judge. The girlfriend was a club-mate, for the Scylla and District admits women members. It took a very stormy A.G.M. to achieve this, but the treasurer carried the day.

  “We’re a bit short this year, and you can always bully women into paying the sub,” he said. “After all, they need only use the facilities once a week. We can make that a rule.”

  “They’ll be more nuisance than they’re worth,” said someone, but this was only partly true. The club, in fact, had shown a certain amount of enlightenment and good sense in admitting women to membership, but this was allied, perhaps, to an equal lack of caution, for the ladies (God bless them!) were apt to be both critical and partisan. In addition, those ladies who joined the Scylla and District proved to be a vociferous, enthusiastic body, sometimes (alas!) divided among themselves, as when Aileen Crumb got a flyer over Doreen Dodds and beat her by three yards in the two-twenty—(“Crumb’s got the crust of Old Nick, and, of course, the s
tarter was her uncle,” ran the ugly comment of the Dodds’s supporters)—and there were other incidents which divided the ladies into two camps. Still, taken on the whole, they were as close-knit a body as the Amazons, although following a somewhat different ideology, as they warred only on other women and never attempted to tackle Theseus and his men.

  All the same, there had always been one exception to that which, otherwise, was their fixed rule. When lined up for the high hurdles or the short sprint, they were adept at not quite beating the gun, and so were the terror of the timid, red-blazered starter.

  “Still,” said Corinna May to her fellow-hurdler and second string, Dulcie Cobham, “it takes the males to spike each other on the bends, and, personally—and I have it for a fact because he told me so himself—I happen to know that poor old Bert was spiked, yes, and jostled, too, by that pot-bellied so-and-so in the two miles this afternoon. Bert could of won, and he certainly did ought to have done, and, if he had, he’d of stood a good chance of being picked for the county at the White City British Games, Whitsun. It was a damn’ shame!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Dulcie, who was a fair-minded girl except where her own boyfriend was concerned. “It’s easy enough to jostle and even spike people without really meaning to. I mean, you’ve got to do the best you can for yourself, haven’t you? Anyway, they ought to start the distance races further back up the straight, and then there wouldn’t be that fight for the inside place at the first bend.”

  “All the same,” said Corinna, sticking to her guns, (for she was hoping to go steady with Albert when, at the age of twenty, she retired from the track), “poor old Bert was jostled and he was spiked, and it was done by that bitchy Lord Haw-Haw that everybody hates and despises. He never does run fair. I don’t know why we still have fixtures with that bloody lot, I don’t really!”

  “Oh, I don’t know. They’ve got some quite good runners,” said Dulcie, biting back her opinion of Albert Colnbrook’s own shady mannerisms on bends screened by water-jump hedges. “Quite good runners,” she repeated.

  “Oh, you!” exclaimed Bert’s girlfriend, exasperated, but, so far, unwilling to quarrel, since she was expecting Dulcie to act as pace-maker over the first two hurdles in the inter-club competition. “You’d stick up for Satan if he was a long-distance runner!”

  “Well, anyhow, he’d probably burn up the opposition,” retorted Dulcie, who had been brought up on the Bible.

  Corinna’s sentiments (or something remarkably like them) were being expressed in a men’s dressing-room some weeks later.

  “Bumping and boring are a recognised part of their technique on the track, and one expects this and makes allowances. And, of course, some of those blighters know exactly what to do behind the little hedge at the water-jump. But when it comes to cross-country running and an ugly great lout offers to put a fist in your face because, in jumping a brook just ahead of him (and that, of course, was what he couldn’t stand), you happen to throw a bit of soft mud in his eye, well, give me Heton and ’Arrer, or even Ox and Tab. Why, the poisonous bounder actually threatened to murder me!” complained a young man named Richardson.

  “What did you do?” asked his audience, towelling themselves vigorously and indicating that they were not particularly stirred by these disclosures.

  “Me? Well, I said, “Sorry, old boy. See you later for a drink.” You have to play soft with these yobs, and the match was only a friendly. But would he play ball? No.”

  “So then?” asked someone, in a bored tone.

  “He took it upon himself to tell me how I was raised and reared.”

  “And you?” asked Mr. Bones, still unenthusiastic.

  “I slapped him in the kisser and told him I would remember him in my will.”

  “Meaning you’d twist his head off?” This question came from a dried-and-dressed as he parted his hair.

  “Well, actually, he fell in the brook, so I cantered lightly on, but took jolly good care I didn’t sit next to him at that rather decent supper they gave us, if you noticed.”

  “What was his name?”

  “A. B. Colnbrook, but I shouldn’t think he’d ever been to sea!”

  “Albert Basil. My second cousin knows him, in a way. She did a lot of research last year on people’s psychological reactions to winning and losing, and A.B.C. was one of her favourite guinea-pigs.”

  “Good Lord! It’s a small world!”

  “So the angels probably say from their rather precarious seats in outer space. It must look a small world to them.”

  “Did your second cousin concentrate on studying athletes?” asked a chunky long-jumper, pulling on his sweater.

  “Lord, no! Bingo, the dogs, the flat, steeple-chasing, the pools—everything was grist to her mill.”

  “And what did she do with her notes?” asked a high-hurdler. The audience, almost fully dressed, was alert at last.

  “Sent them to some bloke who was doing a book on how to tame hyenas.”

  “And how do you?”

  “I haven’t read the book. I don’t know.”

  “Did Albert Basil figure as a hyena?”

  “So far as I was concerned, he figured as a bloody great gorilla.”

  “Oh, he isn’t as chesty as all that!” objected a shot-putt man from a corner of the dressing-room.

  “Beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, said the privates!” carolled and quoted an anxious voice; and the dressing-room emptied rapidly.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tent on the Common

  Camping without a permit is an offence against the New Forest Bye-laws.

  Forestry Commission Guide to the New Forest

  Her Majesty’s Stationery Office

  Richardson was in another hostelry some few weeks later. The handsomely-appointed bar—drinks (praise be!) at pub prices—occupied the segment of a circle at the south-west angle of the lounge. The furniture in the remainder of the large, light room was pleasant and, considering its raison d’être, supremely functional. At each polished table there were two small, hard-seated, red-leather, hip-fitting armchairs and two deep and comfortable fauteuils loose-covered in a gaily-patterned chintz which pictured riders, horses, and hounds.

  There were more horses and hounds on the lampshades and on the long curtains. The fire-irons depended from a stand in the shape of an outsize horseshoe and on the walls four early-nineteenth-century prints demonstrated various stages in a fox hunt.

  Additions to the furniture included a deep, wide settee upholstered to match the armchairs, and two high-backed wooden settles whose Spartan discomfort was only partially alleviated by the addition of the mattress-like cushions which covered their seats. A bright fire burned in a modern brick-built fireplace and the arch of this fireplace was decorated with some highly-polished and unusual horse-brasses.

  Richardson—Tom to his very few friends—was drinking a pint of bitter and looking forward to his lunch. He had travelled from London that morning by train, had hiked, pack on back, from the station to the common, had erected his tent, and then had come back to the hotel for his meal. Deliberately he had left his car with a friend who was going to join him later. His lonely, very short holiday was to be spent on foot until the friend arrived, and then would stretch itself out to a fortnight or more.

  Lunch was at one o’clock. He was given a table which faced the garden. The time was the Thursday of the third week in September, but the only tree which showed even the first touch of autumn was a huge horsechestnut whose leaves here and there glowed bronze against the green.

  The lawn, broken only by a couple of circular flowerbeds and some bordering trees, appeared to stretch into infinity, for, either by good fortune or careful landscaping, the end of it could not be seen from the dining-room windows because it took a turn to the right by some tall Scots pines, a cypress, and a circle of rhododendron bushes.

  The flower garden, rich in many varieties of dahlias, Michaelmas daisies, late carnations, and some roses,
was also out of sight of the dining-room—at any rate from where Richardson sat—so, his satisfying lunch over, he took a turn in the garden before he left for his encampment on the common. He discovered that the lawn he had seen from his seat at table was bounded by a short wattle fence at the end of a hedge of yew. A magnificent and friendly collie joined him in his perambulations and in company with the dog he traversed the lawn, picked up a couple of fir cones from beneath the dark trees which bordered the gravel walk, came back across the lawn past the great horsechestnut tree, idly picked up a burr in whose prickly sheath the hard nut gleamed and shone, turned into the flower garden, glanced at the geraniums and tomato plants in the greenhouse, and wondered whether the stables still contained horses. Then he went into the house and drank coffee, paid his bill, and made his way back to camp.

  The road went very slightly uphill and was bordered by oak, thorn, hazel, birch, and holly. On his right these screened a wide stretch of open land (known locally as a lawn), on which were cattle and Forest ponies. To his left the undergrowth, trees, and brambles grew as thickly as in the woods, but here and there a gravel path led to a fairsized house. Civilisation thus encroached upon the wild, but, a little farther on, past a fenced enclosure whose use he did not, at that time, understand, came a vast expanse of open commonland around which the distant woods made a bluish, saucer-like rim.

  Richardson struck off to the right, and, skirting a rough road with a surface of loose gravel, he followed a clear track which ran for a few hundred yards alongside the road and then left it for a well-defined causeway. This crossed a newly-planted area of young pine-trees and was bordered by shallow ditches along whose edges the bell-heather and the ling were still in flower.

  The causeway reached a woodland path and then a clear brown stream. There was a rustic bridge with a handrail and on the opposite side a narrow track ran roughly east and west along the river. Richardson turned to the right to skirt the wire-fence boundary of an enclosure and swung left with the path at the end of this fencing to find himself upon a veritable waste of heath across which stretched a broad, grassy ride. This crossed a gravelled road which led, on the left, to a house and on the right to a fairly wide bridge.