Adders on the Heath (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Well, there is the evidence that Mr. Richardson did call, then. How otherwise could he have known they were not at home?”

  “He could have seen them go off, ma’am. The road between the house and the bridge, the only way a car could take, is visible from where he was camping. We’ve proved that.”

  “I still think he called at the house that night to try to telephone you. If he did, the girl is lying. I’d like to meet her and form my own conclusions. It seems a suitable task for a psychiatrist. What do you think?”

  “That if she is lying, ma’am, it is for the reason you yourself suggested. She’s been got at by her employers, who don’t intend to be mixed up in a case of murder.”

  “Yes. However, perhaps I can find a way of getting her to come, as my secretary puts it, clean. It seems an odd coincidence to me that two dead bodies should have been in the immediate neighbourhood of that house just when the owners of it happened to be away from home.”

  “Coincidence is known to have a long arm, ma’am.”

  “And ourselves a long leg, asking to be pulled, Superintendent. What did you make of the couple?”

  “Oh, about what one would expect. Well-off—you have to be, to buy even a moderate-sized estate in the Forest these days—easy-going, on the surface, but I fancy there’s a pretty hard streak underneath. The husband is obviously not quite a gentleman. The wife, I should imagine, married beneath her, as they say, probably for money. Still, they seem to get on well enough together. They received me civilly but showed me the door as soon as they possibly could. I don’t blame them for that. Nobody likes to have a policeman about the place—not that they’ve got neighbours to pry and speculate, that’s one thing.”

  “How did the domestics react?”

  “Oh, as we find servants almost invariably do. There was a mixture of nervousness and excitement and the usual urge to get their picture in the papers.”

  “Well, I still think I might find a visit to that house very interesting. You have no objection, I take it?”

  “None in the least, Dame Beatrice. If you do get anything useful, you’ll remember our agreement?”

  “You shall learn all. What is the name of these people?”

  “Campden-Towne.”

  Dame Beatrice did not take Laura with her, neither did she take the walk across the heath and by the stream. Her car, to the ill-concealed distress of her chauffeur George, turned off the road which led from the hotel on to the common and took the same vile, loose, pot-holed track as the police-car had used. George drove slowly, but soon they came to the bridge, after a turn to the left, crossed it, and made a stately progress, in spite of the gravel over which the car was crunching, up to the house.

  Dame Beatrice sent George to knock at the front door, having furnished him with the name which she had obtained from the Superintendent. He returned, very shortly, with the information that the householder himself was not at home, but that his wife would be happy to grant Dame Beatrice an interview.

  The maid—the same, presumably, as had refused Richardson the use of the telephone—showed her into a large, well-furnished room in which a strongly-built woman of between thirty-five and forty was standing looking at the only picture. She turned, as the maid announced the visitor, and Dame Beatrice noted that she had large, sad eyes and almost no chin.

  “How do you do?” the woman said. “Please sit down. I don’t think we’ve met before, have we?”

  “No, we have not,” replied Dame Beatrice, seating herself in the chair indicated, “and you may wish that we had not met now.”

  “Oh, dear! Are you asking for a subscription for something? I’m afraid my husband sees to all that kind of thing.”

  “I am not asking for a subscription. I am asking for help in a different kind of way. I am told by the police…”

  “By the police?”

  “Of course. I am consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office.”

  “Oh, dear! Well, what do you want to know?”

  “I want to know why you and your husband were absent from this house when a young man discovered a dead body in his tent on the heath.”

  “Well, really, Dame Beatrice! I don’t know that I understand you! My husband has told the police where we were, and our reason for being there. I can add nothing to what he said. It was the simple truth. In any case, I cannot see what is your own interest in the matter. It was all very horrid and very sordid, no doubt, but, really, it was nothing to do with us, as I told the Superintendent.”

  “I could wish that you and your husband had been at home that night, though.”

  “Exactly why?”

  “Because I am quite sure that you would have been only too ready to admit the unfortunate owner of the tent and that you would have allowed him to telephone the police.”

  “Most unlikely, at that time of night! In any case, except to oblige the young man, what difference could it have made?”

  “I can tell you, provided that you will undertake to confide it to nobody but your husband.”

  “Very well.”

  “The body which the police saw lying in the tent was not the body about which young Mr. Richardson wished to telephone the police.”

  “What!”

  “No. The first body was that which was stumbled upon (quite literally) by Mr. Richardson and his friend in the enclosure on the far side of the heath.”

  “Good gracious! What an extraordinary thing!”

  “By the way,” said Dame Beatrice, “I wonder whether I might have a word with the girl who answers the door. She did answer it, did she not, to Mr. Richardson that night?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so. I’ll go and get her. You won’t find her very intelligent, I’m afraid.”

  She went out of the room and left Dame Beatrice to gaze at the picture, which happened to be the coloured portrait of a florid, clean-shaven, thick-set middle-aged man whom Dame Beatrice took to be the husband of her reluctant hostess. The latter was gone for nearly ten minutes and returned with a scared-looking girl of about seventeen.

  “This is Myrtle,” she said. “I’d better leave you together.”

  “Thank you,” said Dame Beatrice. “Good morning, Myrtle. I don’t know whether you can help me.”

  Myrtle mumbled unintelligibly and twisted nail-bitten fingers in her apron.

  “You’ve read about these horrible murders, of course,” Dame Beatrice went on. “Well, now, I wonder whether you can describe a young man who called here on the night in question and wanted to use the telephone?”

  “The night in question, madam?” Myrtle abandoned the picking at her apron.

  “Yes, the night in question, Myrtle. You’re not always having young men call after dark asking to use the telephone, so do not deny that he came. I happen to know that he did.”

  “Oh, him! Well, I shut the door too quick to see much of him. I was scared, see, on account we was alone in the house.”

  “We being…?”

  “Cook, Shirl, and me.”

  “Oh, yes. Your master and mistress had gone to London, I believe.”

  “That’s right, and it was the master as told me to say as nobody called. He didn’t want to be mixed up in anything, he said.”

  “Well, now, what about this young man?”

  “He was out of breath, but he talked posh and his hair needed combing. You don’t mean…?” Her mouth fell open as her mind assimilated a new, delicious, terrifying idea. “You don’t mean as I’ve spoke with a murderer, do you?”

  “Well, we can’t go so far as that at present, but the police are keeping an open mind.”

  “The police are keepin’ an open mind,” repeated Myrtle, obviously memorising the phrase. “Coo, wait till I tells Cook and Shirl!”

  “And you can add nothing to your description?”

  “Art a mo.” She wrinkled her brow in deep thought, but was obliged to shake her head. “I don’t know as I can. You see, I shut the door quick as I could ’cos I was scared. I al
ways ’ave been scared of knocks on the door at night, without I knows who to expect.”

  “Very natural, in a lonely house such as this. How long have you worked here?”

  “I come here last March twelvemonth. Oh, I do ’ope the master won’t bawl me out, but it was missus as changed what I was to say.”

  “Is your home in the village?”

  “No. I comes from t’ other side the common, from the Children’s ’Ome over there.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Myrtle. Oh, there is just one more thing. I suppose you didn’t happen to notice what the time was when this young man called?”

  “Not to speak of it in the witness-box like.” It was clear that Myrtle already saw herself in a prominent position in court. “Still, we’d had our supper, which is nine o’clock by Cook’s alarm, and I’d finished washing-up which Cook won’t never allow no dirty crocks to wait over till the morning, but we hadn’t ack’chelly gone to bed, although I’d done me curlers so I suppose it would have been about ten o’clock when he come.”

  This tallied reasonably well with Richardson’s own story. Dame Beatrice returned to the hotel and telephoned the Superintendent. She invited him to lunch and, when it was over, they commandeered the small drawing-room lounge and she gave him an account of her visit.

  “You think that Myrtle was briefed before she was brought in to you,” said the Superintendent.

  “On her own admission there is nothing else to think. Mrs. Campden-Towne went out of the room to bring her, instead of ringing the bell, and was gone longer than one would have thought necessary. The girl made no attempt to deny that Mr. Richardson had called, she stated that her mistress had changed the tale, and her estimate of the time coincides, nearly enough, with his own.”

  “Hm, yes, it does look as though Myrtle had been got at both times. I wonder whether the Campden-Townes decided, after all, that they’d been foolish to tell her to keep her mouth shut, or whether it was her own idea in the first place and Campden-Towne agreed to it. Anyway, it confirms Mr. Richardson’s story so far as the attempt to telephone is concerned and, that being so, it does appear that he got in touch with us as soon as he could. So there’s that much in his favour. Oh, well, there’s plenty of work to be done in a routine sort of style. We’re still digging away at the friends and acquaintances of the two deceased. The thing that bothers us is that there must have been some closer connection between Bunt and Colnbrook than mere membership of that athletic and social club.”

  “I still propose to visit the school and I also intend to interview the last employers of Mr. Richardson.”

  “Oh, the private coaching job? I don’t think you’ll get much there, Dame Beatrice. Besides…” he grinned, “…I thought you were out to exonerate Mr. Richardson, not to push him further into the red. We’ve got it on pretty good authority that he got the sack from there.”

  Dame Beatrice cackled. She got up from her comfortable armchair. The Superintendent also rose, unlocked the door, which they had fastened against intruders, took down the notice marked Private which the manager had put up, refused Dame Beatrice’s offer of hospitality, and went out to his car.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Headmaster and Staff

  He made also ten tables, and placed them in the temple, five on the right side, and five on the left. And he made a hundred basons of gold. Furthermore he made the court of the priests, and the great court, and doors for the court, and overlaid the doors of them with brass.

  2nd Chronicles 3, Authorised Version

  The preparatory school at which Richardson had taught proved to be a show place on which, it was obvious to Dame Beatrice, (who, in her capacities as mother, grandmother, aunt, honorary aunt, great-aunt, and godmother, had visited many preparatory and public schools), a great deal of money had been spent. She suspected that mulcted parents had been compelled to contribute to the splendour. However, it was easy enough to see where the money had gone.

  The Headmaster, who appeared to know her not only by reputation but who claimed to have been present at a dinner where she had been the principal guest, welcomed her with the utmost cordiality. He received her in a large, beautifully furnished study whose windows overlooked the playing fields, and he insisted upon showing her over the school before he heard on what errand she had come.

  They visited the swimming bath, the chapel, and the library. To Dame Beatrice’s satisfaction, after they had looked in upon the various classrooms and the woodwork and metalwork rooms, they visited the laboratories. There were two of these, both equipped as though for postgraduate research. One was for biology, the other for chemistry.

  Dame Beatrice affected great interest in the first, despite her repugnance to the animals and birds, stuffed and defunct, which, exhibited in glass cases, appeared to be a prominent feature of the room.

  “Outside, of course,” said the Headmaster, “we keep our rabbits. The caretaker looks after them during the holidays. So good for the boys to learn to look after animals and it reduces sex instruction to the minimum.”

  He seemed about to enlarge upon this when he received an urgent message from someone who urgently desired his presence elsewhere, so, pausing only to apologise to Dame Beatrice for leaving her, and to promise to “send Stevens” to look after her, he departed.

  Stevens turned out to be the head boy, an extremely good-looking, scrupulously well-groomed child of about thirteen. He introduced himself.

  “Please, Dame Beatrice, I’m Stevens. The Head said to show you the chemistry lab. I don’t think you’ll find it very interesting. It’s only bottles and Bunsen burners and test tubes and beakers and retorts and those sort of things.”

  “I feel,” said Dame Beatrice, “that I might hurt the Headmaster’s feelings if I left it out. Is a class going on in there, I wonder?”

  “Almost bound not to be. It isn’t much used because we haven’t got a proper stinks master since the last one left.”

  “Dear me! How long ago was that?”

  “Soon after Mr. Richardson went.”

  “So I suppose a laboratory boy is no longer employed here.”

  “Well, actually, he still is. It isn’t easy to get a good lab boy, you see, because they’re not paid enough, so I think that’s why the Head has stuck to Borgia. He potters about in there, keeping things dusted, and he’s got to make a list of the stock, and things like that, and he keeps the two labs clean and feeds the rabbits and the aquarium fish and all that, so I suppose he’s worth his wages.”

  “I must make the acquaintance of this man of many parts. What is his name?”

  “Well, we call him Borgia. It’s rather apt, you see, because, well, his job is mostly in the stinks lab and, well, he does keep on about poisons. I don’t know his real name.”

  The chemistry laboratory was on the other side of a stretch of well-tended lawn and took up the first floor of a two-storied building of modern design.

  “The ground floor is a sort of drill-hall for chaps who’ve been sentenced,” Dame Beatrice’s guide explained. “If chaps cheek the prefects, or don’t come in quickly enough from games, and things like that, they get sentenced to run so many times round the drill-hall. A master is on duty to see they do their proper stint. If they slack, he has authority to speed them up with a cane. Otherwise we don’t, on the whole, get beaten. I mean, you have to do something really pretty bad. The only chap who’s really had it since I’ve been here was a rather sporting type who gave a pretty ripe adjective in an English lesson and, when asked to explain, said he was only quoting from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Obvious, we all thought, but he still got a stroking. Rather a dim shame, actually, to cane chaps for quoting the classics. I mean, look at the Latin authors, my father says.”

  “Indeed, yes,” Dame Beatrice solemnly agreed, “but written Latin, one surmises, was sometimes intended as a matter for mirth, rather than as an instrument for special pleading. What is your own opinion?”

  “I thought
Lady Chatterley howlingly funny. You had to skip the dull bits, of course, which were most of it.”

  They left the drill-hall by mounting a staircase. Swing doors opened on to the chemistry laboratory. Dame Beatrice prowled around and was examining one of the cupboards when the Headmaster reappeared.

  “Ah, boy,” he said, to Stevens, “run along now.”

  “Good-bye, Dame Beatrice,” said Stevens.

  “A good boy—a very good boy,” said the Headmaster, when the child had disappeared. “I hope he has shown you round. He is up for Charterhouse. He should do very nicely, I think. Well, now!”

  “Yes,” said Dame Beatrice. “He tells me that you have lost your science master.”

  “True, true, unfortunately only too true. An excellent teacher, but, of course…”

  “Yes?”

  “Industry, you know.”

  “Oh, he has gone into a factory, has he?”

  “Longer hours, shorter holidays, but with far more money and no necessity to keep school discipline. Keeping discipline, dear lady, is the bugbear and the despair of many science masters and some of the French teachers of French. The average boy seems to be inimical to French and to be several steps ahead of the teacher of chemistry. But I have a new man coming very soon, I hope.”

  “You had a young man named Richardson on your staff some time ago, I believe.”

  “Richardson? Richardson? Ah, yes, of course I had. A promising teacher, in his way, but he left us to go into private practice—a tutoring job, you know.”

  “You regretted parting with your chemistry master. Did you feel equally sorry to see Mr. Richardson go?”

  “I gave him a very good testimonial.”

  This professional gambit was not lost on Dame Beatrice. She cackled.

  “The man you want to get rid of gets the best testimonial,” she said. The Headmaster looked pained.

  “No, no, really,” he protested. “Of course, an Arts man is always very much easier to replace than a Science or Maths man.”