The Death-Cap Dancers (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Yes, indeed. Her sudden appearance in that dressing-room may have saved your brother’s life. I also think she may have seen her murderer face to face.”

  “So you want to know who else might have gone into that room besides Peggy after the show was over. My account won’t help you. I’m sure that, whoever killed Judy and Peggy, it wasn’t one of our lot.”

  “It’s a dirty bird that fouls its own nest. Your loyalty does you credit, but is not likely to be helpful.”

  “It isn’t loyalty. It’s absolute conviction.”

  “So be it. At what time did your Saturday begin? We may exclude breakfast.”

  “We didn’t get away from Mrs. Beck and the hostel much before ten. Ten o’clock in the morning is the deadline, you see, for hostellers. The boys had loaded up the trailer which carried costumes and props—the wooden swords, Willie’s claymores and kilt, the morris sticks, and all the rest of the gear. We had put all those things ready the night before, so that the trailer had only to be hitched on behind the tandem in the morning. All our individual private gear had to be left till last. The men’s bikes have those long, capacious leather holdalls, but we, the girls, have only a smallish saddlebag behind us and a basket on the handlebars, but everybody carries a rucksack or a haversack as well.”

  “So you left at about ten.”

  “And rode our bicycles straight to Gledge End and took over the church hall as arranged. We needed a rehearsal because, except for Giles and Plum, who had gone over on Thursday to arrange the seating, none of us had seen inside the place to know how much space was available for the dances or where the piano and the musicians were going to be put. We had a picnic lunch in the hall, then a rest for about an hour after we’d swept up the crumbs—”

  “You swept the floor?”

  “Oh, yes. Giles found a soft broom in the broom cupboard where—well, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. So Giles knew that the cupboard was unlocked. Did any of the rest of you know?”

  “He came back into the hall with the broom and Plum took it back and put it away, so he would have known.”

  “Oh, well, I shall be talking to both of them later on.”

  “Then we rehearsed and had another rest and then we changed for the songs and I put on my beard and the caretaker came to ask whether we were ready to open the doors for the audience to come in, and that’s about all I know.”

  “I see. My next question is important, so please answer it carefully. You may prove to be extremely helpful. Your part in the programme was as flautist, you told me, with an occasional gravitation to the piano. Did you at any time notice whether anybody in the audience left the hall during the performance?”

  “I wouldn’t know whether anybody left during the last item because I was doing the hobby-horse and I had to concentrate like mad so that I didn’t get in the way of the dancers. I hadn’t a chance to notice anything except what they and I were up to.”

  “Yes? Well, now, to return to my vital question: you may not have noticed anybody leaving the hall during the last item, but what about earlier on?”

  “I think one or two slipped out, but I never notice the audience when I’m playing. You don’t, with a flute, you know. It’s sheer concentration on my part.”

  “Did you recognise anybody in the audience when they first came in?”

  “Oh, yes. Farmer and Mrs. Ramsgill came. They brought their lodger with them, but they didn’t all sit together. Perhaps they had not bought the same priced seats. Adam—the boy who has been lodging with them—went up on to the platform first of all, but was soon headed off, so I suppose he took umbrage, as he did when I wouldn’t go out with him. When I looked up from arranging my music I noticed that he had taken an absolutely back seat near the door. I think he is rather a spoilt, sulky boy. He didn’t take it too well at all when I wouldn’t sit on the pillion of his motorbike.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last Thursday when I was visiting the farm.”

  “Ah, yes, everything seems to go back to that Thursday.”

  “You mean because that was when Judy . . .”

  “Yes, indeed. Well, Miss Marton, I think that is all. I will arrange for you to see your brother as soon as the doctors allow him to have visitors.”

  “We weren’t all that close, but . . .”

  “Of course you are anxious about him. Oh, there is one other thing. Would you prefer to be lodged separately, away from your companions?”

  “Oh, please, no! I know the police think one of us killed Judy and Peggy, but we didn’t. I’m positively certain we didn’t. There’s a criminal lunatic at large and the police have got to find him before other people get killed.”

  “I sympathise with your point of view, but is it not significant that nobody outside your company seems to have been attacked?”

  “I know it looks bad for us, but have the police found the tandem?”

  “An apt answer to my question and one which goes some way towards proving your point. Could any of your party have been absent long enough from the rest of you to have pedalled it away? Please set aside your prejudices and answer me accurately.”

  “We are all pretty good cyclists and a man, especially, could get quite a long way, even riding the tandem solo, in under five minutes, but then he would have had to walk back to the hall, and I’m sure nobody was absent for as long as that.”

  “Has your group, so far as you know, made any enemies?”

  “Enemies? No. Some gang once tried to rough us up, but Plum is a heavyweight boxer and Willie is a black belt, so nothing came of it, and we never give our shows at night, anyway, and that’s when trouble starts.”

  “Would either Mrs. Tyne or Miss Raincliffe have had, perhaps, a jealous lover?”

  “Not so far as I know. Judy was married, of course, but separated. I can’t really imagine anybody fancying Peggy, but, of course, you never know. I think my brother was her last hope, but she didn’t make first base, as the Americans say, with him. The only company Micky wants at present is Willie’s. He admires him very much. They are not gay. It’s hero-worship and when Mick is older he’ll get over it and settle down with a girl, I’m sure. Willie has got a girl, anyway, but he likes Mick and acts as a father to him, and to anybody as weak as Mick it’s real protection. We’re orphans, you see, and Willie manages Mick’s finances for him. Willie teaches economics at a polytechnic and is ever so good with money matters.”

  “The Scottish blood, perhaps?”

  “Oh, Willie is a Highlander, but I believe his mother comes from Peebles. He is a very quiet boy, but the rest of us respect him.”

  “You must forgive my next question, and I shall understand if you refuse to answer it. Is it possible that your brother, in a fit of irritation, could have attacked Miss Raincliffe and then hit himself on the back of the head to make it look as though he himself had been attacked?”

  Instead of the indignant denial which might have been assumed, Pippa considered the question.

  “He might have attacked Peggy,” she said, after a pause. “She made herself an awful nuisance to him. I don’t believe he would have hit himself over the head as a cover-up, though, anyway, not so hard as to make himself a hospital case. He is a physical coward and, besides that, Peggy was much heavier and stronger than he. You think Peggy and the murderer met face to face, but Micky would never have risked having a go at her if that was so. He wouldn’t have stood a chance. Oh, no, to fight anybody wasn’t and never will be Micky’s scene.”

  “So what do we make of Miss Pippa Marton?” asked Dame Beatrice, when Pippa had been released.

  “That she doesn’t think much of baby brother and isn’t all that fond of him,” Laura replied. “As for the rest of what she said, I don’t think she knows who killed the two girls, but she certainly seems to dismiss any suggestion that it could be one of her own lot.”

  “And your own opinion about that?”

  “I can’t express one until we’ve seen th
e rest of them.”

  “Cautious woman! Would you step to the door which Miss Marton has just closed behind her and ask for Mr. Giles Tranmire?”

  Giles, conscious of his position as the leader of Wild Thyme, was in a state of mild indignation.

  “Look here, you know,” he said, “by what right are we held here like this? What about the liberty of the subject and all that, you know?”

  “Yes, I do know, and I sympathise,” said Dame Beatrice. “The alternative, however, has been pointed out to you. The police are permitted to hold you in custody for forty-eight hours as suspected persons. You would not prefer it to be in a police-cell, would you? Sit down, Mr. Tranmire and let us get on with the business. ‘The sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep,’ as the Reverend Charles Kingsley somewhat optimistically stated. Are you capable of unbiased thinking?”

  “No. If you’re going to ask me which of our lot could have killed those two girls and bashed up young Mick, my answer is that any of us could—I mean, we were all there, so to speak—but none of us did.”

  “You and Mr. Redman are one another’s alibi for the first murder, I believe?”

  “Old Plum may look like an all-in wrestler, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I wonder why a fly is chosen for that particular tribute to a person’s gentle nature? No matter. Thank you, Mr. Tranmire.”

  “Is that all, then?”

  “Oh, yes. Would you send in Mr. Nicolson?”

  “I have given the matter some thought, as is the way of it with me,” said Willie, when he had seated himself, “and my thought is that the tandem is at the root of the mystery.”

  “That is interesting, Mr. Nicolson. Would you care to enlarge upon that statement?”

  “I’ll do that. The theft of the tandem was no wanton matter of person or persons concerned with stealing a means of transport. It was calculated to deceive the police into thinking that two persons were involved in the crime.”

  “And from this you deduce?”

  “Ask yourself, woman! At the time when Peggy was killed and wee Micky injured—and if ever I get my hands on whoever did that—!”

  “Yes, at the time when . . . ?” Dame Beatrice prompted him.

  “Well, now, there were the two of them, away from the rest of the party, leaving six of us in the main hall. The photographer was getting impatient and soon left us, we five men and the lassie. Do you not think it would have been very noticeable if another of us had absented and gone into the changing-room just then?”

  “You are going on the assumption that the attacks on Miss Raincliffe and Mr.Marton took place at approximately the same time, are you?”

  “They could only have been minutes apart and I will be prepared to swear, in court or anywhere else, that the six of us were together in the hall while those attacks were taking place.”

  “How long was Miss Raincliffe absent before you all decided that she and Mr. Marton had taken the tandem and gone off together?”

  Willie shook his head. A matter of minutes, he thought. He added that he, for one, could not bring himself to accept what, at the time and before Peggy’s body was found, the others had thought, that the two had gone off together.

  “He could not thole the lassie any one way,” he said, “but there it was. No sign of either of them and, when we went to get our cycles, the tandem gone. What were the others to think? And the back door to the changing-room wide open at that.”

  “Miss Raincliffe’s body was hidden in the cupboard, of course, a cupboard to which, I understand, Mr. Tranmire and Mr. Redman had had separate access before the performance began.” She waited for a response to this statement, but Willie remained impassive, so she went on: “As the back door was wide open, was it not strange that the caretaker seems to have found Mr. Marton unconscious in the bushes, whereas none of the rest of you noticed him there?”

  “When we found the dressing-room empty and the door open which had been shut and bolted before the show began, the others jumped to conclusions. Then, when we found the tandem gone, too, and the time getting on and ourselves due at Lostrigg by ten o’clock and forty miles to go, well, I could understand what the rest of them thought, loth though I was to believe it, as I will be telling you.”

  “But surely you must have believed what appeared to be the evidence of your own eyes?”

  “The lassie was strong-willed and resolute. I was all the while trying to put out of my mind a suspicion that she had killed Judy, but the others thought maybe she had asserted herself over Mick and carried him away.”

  “The captive of her bow and spear?”

  “The tongue that lassie had on her you would scarce believe. She could wheedle, aye, and she could scold. The others doubted whether she had been too much for the poor laddie. As for the caretaker, we have been told very little, but I would take it as a mathematical certainty that from the first he had his suspicions of that open back door and went out to see what it was all about, and had a better look round than Giles had done.”

  “Yes, the back door is interesting. Who opened it, do you suppose? It must have been one of your own party. Nobody else had access to it from the inside.”

  “That will have been Mick. He is claustrophobic. He rallied when the rest of us were there, but, left by himself, my theory would be that he not only opened the door, but stepped outside to get some air and found the murderer lurking.”

  “But why? Why should he have been lurking?”

  “Is it that you think I can read his mind? Maybe he was hoping the door would be opened and he to get inside and steal any money we had.”

  “Well, that didn’t seem to yield much,” said Laura, when the rest of the members of Wild Thyme had been interviewed. “What comes next?”

  “My recommendation to Inspector Ribble is to check on the home addresses these young people will have given him and then to release them. If anything more transpires he can always apply to them again. It was purely for our convenience that they were gathered together here. There is really no good reason for detaining them any longer.”

  “If I had to pick one of them out for further questioning, it would be my compatriot Nicolson, sorry though I am to say so. I always think there’s something not too healthy about this ‘wee laddie’ protective stuff. It’s all right when it’s women. Most of us, I guess, have a strong mother-complex, but between men it’s more than a bit fishy, don’t you think?”

  “Miss Marton stated, without being asked, that Nicolson and Marton were not ‘gay,’ but I think your point is a valid one. We have to face the fact that both the women who wanted to mother Mr. Marton have been murdered, and, after all, murder is a final solution when it comes to getting unwanted persons out of the way.”

  “All the same,” said Laura, “you don’t think Nicolson did it, do you?”

  “I have Inspector Ribble’s notes to go on. First, it seems that it could have been only by the most extraordinary coincidence either that the two men met Mrs. Tyne on the moors that Thursday and killed her, or that one or other of them did.”

  “Yes, you let me see the notes, but there doesn’t seem any proof of how Nicolson and Marton actually spent that Thursday. Some bits of their story Ribble seems to have been able to check, but there still seems to be a lot of time unaccounted for, except for their own uncorroborated explanations.”

  “True, but I would be far more suspicious of a story which dove-tailed in every particular. As for the affair at the Gledge End church hall, we are given no evidence whatever that Nicolson could have killed that woman, still less that he would have injured his protégé.”

  “Do you think claustrophobia accounted for that door being opened?”

  “It is possible. Far more likely, though, that the murderer knocked and Mr. Marton let him in.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “To place Miss Pippa Marton under police protection as soon as Inspector Ribble, under directions, no doubt, from his Chief Constable, tells thes
e young people that they are free to go. Then I want to talk to Miss Tamsin Lindsay, John Trent, and my great-niece. I have a feeling that they are the people who can convince me that I have come to the correct conclusion.”

  “Do you mean that you can name the murderer?”

  “I can produce a name, yes. Proof is a different matter. The evidence I have gathered is purely psychological and would never be accepted in a court of law. This is a classic case of rejection followed by vengeance.”

  “So it’s a woman’s crime?” asked Laura. “I could believe that if I didn’t know that both the obvious murderers are dead.”

  — 15 —

  TROMPETTE DES MORTS

  “I don’t see why Erica should know something the rest of us weren’t told,” said Hermione, when she and Isobel were in the latter’s London flat, “or why my great-aunt made us promise not to ask her any questions.”

  “Erica wouldn’t have answered them, anyway,” said Isobel. “She has been trained to keep her head closed when delicate negotiations are to be undertaken. I can tell you one thing, if you really want to know. I’m pretty sure Dame Beatrice told her the name of the chief suspect.”

  “But why should she have done that?”

  “Obviously to make sure that Erica gave up the tenancy of the cabin and so got the four of us out of the forest toot sweet.”

  “But why?”

  “Because we are of feminine gender and the murderer seems to have a down on defenceless females.”

  “Yes, but only on the defenceless females in the Wild Thyme gang. There is no suggestion that he has ever attempted to attack anybody else.”

  “There is time for that, I suppose.”

  “It must be one of that lot. I wonder which? What bothers me is that boy who has been taken to hospital. I know he was dressed as a girl when he was set upon, but none of his own set would have mistaken him for one.”

  “I think the likely explanation is that, when the real girl was set upon by the murderer, he went to the rescue, got clobbered and then the murderer returned to the task in hand and finished the girl off.”