“I hope so, too. To have left one body behind us may be excusable; to leave two, as Lady Bracknell said of Ernest Worthing’s lost parents, looks like carelessness.”
Nobody spoke for a while. Then Capella said:
“It could have been a body.”
“Probably a sheep or a dog which somebody had run over and didn’t want to report, then,” said Laura. “It would be too much of a coincidence if the three of us found two bodies within the space of a few days and both of them lying in prehistoric graves.”
“Graves?” said Capella. “Oh, yes, of course. The Knights are the ruins of a burial chamber and the Callanish woman was lying across the remains of a chambered tomb. I knew how it would be. I said I knew. It wasn’t coincidence. It had to happen and I had to be there when the bodies were found.”
“I wonder whether that first body will be found,” said Laura. “The police were pretty sceptical when they went along to Callanish and it wasn’t where we had said it was. If we had been men they might have believed us, but, although they were polite, I think they wrote us off as three fanciful women whose eyes played tricks in the moonlight.”
“I think they will look for the body,” said Dame Beatrice. “Whether they will find it is another matter. It depends upon how thorough the search is and how well the murderer knows the island.”
“Now I come to think things over,” said Laura, “I can see a nasty sense of humour behind all this. Capella has had a lot to say about bodies lying inside rectangles and I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody has taken her up on it.”
“But that would mean that somebody in our party is a murderer!” said Capella.
“I know. Think it over,” said Laura.
CHAPTER 12
INVESTIGATION, LIKE CHARITY, BEGINS AT HOME
“. . . not being a person who contrived or actually committed the murder, who shall give such information and evidence as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of the person or persons who committed the murder.”
Police Notice in connection with the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, presumably by Jack the Ripper
They dropped Capella at her father’s house in the Woodstock Road in north Oxford, spent the night at the Clarendon, and returned to the Stone House on the edge of the New Forest in time for lunch next day. Dame Beatrice had rung up from Oxford on the previous evening, so she was not surprised when, having inserted her key in the front door and opened it, she and Laura were met in the hall by an excited French servant. She had not rushed out from the kitchen merely to welcome them home, however, although this came first. Then she burst dramatically into her news.
The police, it seemed, had rung up not once but many times. Every day for the past—Celestine counted on her fingers—for the past five days the telephone had rung and always the police had been told that Dame Beatrice was still on holiday and was travelling and could not be contacted.
“I have told them, not once, but many times, that Madame disports herself here, there, everywhere and that I have no address I can give them. They must be tranquil, I tell them, until Madame returns.”
“Police?” said Dame Beatrice. “Oh, dear!”
“What police?” asked Laura.
“From Loos, they say.”
“O Lord! Our Callanish body!” said Laura. “Oh, well, they’ll have to ring again, that’s all.”
“What makes you connect Callanish with Loos?” enquired Dame Beatrice.
“Islanders call it The Lews. It’s only the English who pronounce it like that lovely little town behind Brighton.”
“Oh, I see. How fortunate that I did not need to refer to the island by name in the presence of its inhabitants! Nothing stamps one as a philistine so soon as a wrong pronunciation in the faces of those who know the right one.”
“Cholmondeley, Marjoribanks, Menzies, Colquhoun, sine die, and Prinknash,” said Laura. “I suppose they have found our body. Let’s hope they don’t want us to go up to Stornoway to identify it.”
“To identify it? Well, we could hardly be of any real help so far as that is concerned. Neither of us had ever seen the woman before.”
The call, when it came next day, was not a request for them to return to Stornoway. A body had been found washed up on the shores of Loch Roag. All that the police wanted was as detailed a description as they could manage to supply from memory, of the way the woman had been dressed.
“So they are pretty sure it isn’t one of their own islanders,” said Laura, “or somebody would have given it a name by now. Besides, I expect that in these days murder is almost unknown up there.”
“Even murder as a crime of passion?” asked Dame Beatrice.
“Love in a cold climate? I wouldn’t know, but if the police are satisfied the dead woman was a tourist they may have the devil of a job tracing where she came from. The ferry we took when we went over there was crowded, and I don’t suppose anybody took any particular notice of any passengers who landed up at Stornoway airport, either.”
“As I said at the time, she had been dead for a very short time when we found her, but there is nothing, so far, to show how long she had been on the island before she was murdered.”
“She must have booked accommodation on the island, though. Some hotelier or smallholder will have missed her. How old would you say she was?”
“Oh, between thirty and forty. I am unwilling to commit myself to a closer estimate than that.”
“I wonder whether her clothes themselves furnish any clues. Manufacturers label their goods as a rule.”
“The trouble the police may have to face,” said Dame Beatrice, “is that, in these days of mass production, makers’ labels are not of much help. Then, of course, she may not have booked accommodation on the island at all.”
“Oh, but, surely she must have done!”
“Not necessarily. I think the chances are that she was murdered before she got to any hotel, boarding establishment, or croft. Had I been the murderer, I should most certainly have taken that sort of precaution. As I see it, the murderer and his victim could have come to the island either by sea or by air, the murderer having booked accommodation on the island only for a single visitor—himself. Arrived at Stornoway, he and his victim could have driven off in a car—there must have been a car to get them to Callanish from Stornoway—but instead of going straight to the hotel, or wherever it was that he had booked a room for himself, he could have taken his victim to some remote spot—not a difficult matter, in spite of the number of crofts on the island—strangled her, hit her on the head for good measure, and hidden the body until dusk before dumping it in the stone circle.”
“Wouldn’t they have had to get a meal somewhere, if they didn’t go straight to a hotel or wherever the woman thought they were going to stay?”
“With murder planned, I do not think he would have risked having a meal in public. If he did anything, he would have bought simple food and cans of liquid refreshment and arranged a picnic. The important thing was for him not to be seen with the woman after they had left the boat or the aeroplane. He may even have made sure that they did not disembark together. That could easily be managed from a crowded ferry.”
“But they both had to enter the car, and somebody might have seen them do that.”
“On a busy quay or at an airport?”
“Ah, but that’s another thing; they couldn’t have come by air. If he brought his car they must have come over by ferry from Ullapool or Uig, and somebody is sure to have seen them together on the boat. I mean, the victim must have been quite unsuspecting, or she would never have come with him at all, so she would have stuck with him during the crossing.”
“If they came by boat,” said Dame Beatrice, “then Capella’s claim to have recognised the body becomes absolute nonsense.”
“Well, we’ve been a bit suspicious about her and her flitting spectre all along, haven’t we? But how do you mean about the nonsense?”
“If Capella really thought sh
e recognised the dead woman—and she could only have done so, one would think, by the way the woman was dressed—that implies some connection in Capella’s mind with our party.”
“Just one of her irrational fancies. She gets an idea from Sister Veronica that we are being followed around by a spook, she has—or says she has—these sightings of dead bodies laid out in rectangles, and when, by what must be the most bizarre of coincidences, we actually come upon a body laid out exactly where she claims to have seen one, of course she thinks she recognises it. Come to that, if we didn’t know it was an impossibility, I might conclude she’d put the body there herself.”
“Fortunately we do know that that is impossible. From Inverness onward the girl was never out of our clutches. You and she even shared a room.”
“To go back a bit, if we may, you still haven’t explained about the nonsense. What has the boat versus aeroplane to do with it?”
“We left Professor Owen, Mr. Stewart, and the two Sisters in Inverness and, at the time of our own departure, we assume, from what was said, that Miss Catherine, Lionel, and Clarissa were on their way to the Border. We had been on the island for so short a time when we came upon the body—a body, I must stress, which was not yet subject to rigor mortis—that, if one of our party was involved, as Capella’s declaration surely suggests, that person or those persons must have flown over.”
“Granted. So what?”
“A car was a necessity, whether the woman was dead or alive when the murderer took her to Callanish. He could not have brought a car over by plane.”
“So he hired one when he and the woman landed at Stornoway airport.”
“It sounds a dangerous thing to have done, but murderers do make mistakes and your logic is faultless.”
“But all this only obtains if the murderer is Owen, Stewart, Sister Pascal (I really can’t include Sister Veronica), Lionel, and/or Clarissa, or Catherine,” said Laura, “and that’s what the nonsense amounts to. Besides, we know the last three were on their way south before we ourselves, with Capella, left Inverness. You have said so.”
“There is an airport at Renfrew, Glasgow, as we know. The flight from there to Inverness takes forty-five minutes, and from Inverness to Stornoway forty minutes, with a short wait of about thirty minutes to change planes.”
“But why choose Lewis for the murder when they all knew you were going there?”
“It would not be the first time I have been challenged. There is a certain type of mind which is never happy unless it is trailing its coat.”
“So that’s the real reason for you to connect the murder with somebody in our party! You know, I still wonder what was in that sack at the Rollright Stones. It’s beginning to look dashed sinister.”
Laura had not long to wait. Two days later a report in the newspapers described briefly but sufficiently what had been the contents of the sack. The accounts varied only in the telling. The more serious and responsible journals confined themselves to a laconic statement that the body of a woman judged to be between the ages of thirty and thirty-five had been found in a field on the Oxon-Worcester border. The livelier reports mentioned the sack and the venue in which it had been discovered and followed this up with a suggestion that the old pagan rites had returned to rural England, linking these rites (whatever the reporters thought they may have been) with the desecration of graves by Satanists and with the Druid observances at Stonehenge.
“One would guess at the beginning of the Silly Season,” said Laura, “except that this is a case of murder.”
During the next two days more detail followed. Separating the sober facts from the merely sensational guesses, the reports boiled down to these: the body when found had been completely clothed; the death had been brought about by strangulation, probably with a ligature of some kind, followed by a blow on the head, and there were signs that a ring had been wrenched from the left hand of the corpse, the third finger of which had been broken.
“It looks as though we have work to do,” said Laura. “The police, according to the last report I read, are appealing for three ladies, one elderly, one middle-aged, and one young, who actually saw the sack in situ and reported it. They are asked to get in contact with their local police-station. That means us, from the description, I’m afraid. To think that I should live to see myself described in print as being middle-aged! Is truagh mo chàradh!”
“Mine, too.”
“How come you knew I meant ‘Mine is a sad case,’ when you don’t know a word of Gaelic?”
“I study to improve, and I have been delving into the admirable John MacKechnie’s Gaelic Without Groans which you are good enough to leave on the library table.”
“Oh, well, be that as it may—although I think you might have left me with one advantage over you—do we offer ourselves up at the police station?”
“No. We are asked to get in contact. We can do that over the telephone. The mountain must come to Mahomet.”
The mountain did so in the form of a smart young police sergeant who took notes and who was succeeded on the following afternoon by the Chief Constable of the County. He was an old friend and greeted Dame Beatrice with simulated astonishment and awe. He was accompanied by a uniformed inspector.
“Not you again!” he said. “How do you come to be mixed up in this gruesome affair? I suppose you couldn’t perform a miracle and identify this unfortunate woman, could you? The Oxfordshire chaps—oh, this is Inspector Marsh of the County Constabulary—would be no end grateful. They haven’t a clue who she is. They’ve made every enquiry at the Rollright Stones and put out a poster with a photograph on it, but nobody has come forward to identify her, and, not unexpectedly, the owners at Rollright know nothing and certainly do not recognise the photograph.”
“Then it is most unlikely that Laura or I will be able to do so, but I have a morbid streak in my nature and should like to see what the sack contained.” She looked at Inspector Marsh interrogatively. “The fatal injuries are strangely reminiscent of the murder which took place on Lewis recently.”
He nodded. “It’s a bit odd that nobody has come forward in either case,” he said. “It’s not as though our body is that of a vagrant or a drop-out. The doctors have done a post-mortem and the woman was healthy, clean (except for the coal-dust which had clung to her from the interior of the sack), well-nourished, well-tended as to hands and feet, and (again apart from the coal-dust) her hair was in first-rate condition, too. The Stornoway body appears to have been that of a tourist.”
“There was a report of a missing ring.”
“Yes, from a broken finger. Seems as though somebody was in a great hurry to get the ring off. Either it would have been a means of identifying her, or else the motive behind her death was sheer robbery and the thief took her ring as well as her handbag, her wristwatch (she must have worn one, because the skin around her left wrist is quite white on an otherwise sun-browned forearm), and any other jewellery she may have had on her when she was killed. We have found nothing.”
“Strangulation, but not manual strangulation, I believe, was the cause of death. At least, that is what the newspapers have given us to understand.”
“The doctors say a ligature was used, something in the nature of a thin silk scarf or possibly a stocking or a pair of tights. There are no marks of thumb-prints such as one finds in manual strangulation. As for the ring, although it must have been on the finger which got broken, we doubt whether it was a wedding ring. The woman was certainly a virgin. If she was married, the marriage had never been consummated. Our view is that the ring was most likely an engagement ring, or one worn on that particular finger for sentimental reasons connected with a dead lover or something of that nature.”
“Perhaps the ring wouldn’t fit any other of her fingers,” said Laura.
“Ah,” said the inspector. “Now we never thought of that. Not that it makes any difference. A ring is a ring.”
“So when can we see the body?” Dame Beatrice enquired.
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“The sooner the better, madam,” said the inspector. “Do you need transport to Oxford?”
“No, thank you. Perhaps you can meet us somewhere there and conduct us to wherever it is we have to go.”
At the mortuary next day a great and most unpleasant surprise awaited them. In spite of the ravages it had suffered both from the murderer and the dirty sack, the corpse was recognisable enough. It was that of Owen’s cousin Catherine, one of their companions on the tour of the stone circles, as Dame Beatrice explained to the Chief Constable in the inspector’s presence. The inspector could hardly have been more gratified.
“This is a rare bit of luck for us, madam,” he said, as he escorted them back to their car. “Funny that nobody has missed her and come forward, though. She’s been dead for several days. Do you know of anybody with whom we can get in contact?”
“Oh, yes, but I think the fact that nobody has come forward is very easily explained. She left the tour early because she was due to go over to the United States. She was to lecture there. Presumably her friends have taken it for granted that that is where she is, although they may be surprised that they have not heard from her. Sooner or later, I am sure, they would have been making enquiries. I can put you in touch with her cousin, although I am not certain whether he will be at home. We left him in Inverness to continue his study of stone circles. I could give you the address of the hotel at which we all stayed the night before the party broke up, but, of course, I cannot guarantee that he is still there.”
“If we might have his home address, madam, no doubt we can get in touch with him wherever he is.”
“Casting my mind back to a very wet evening in Penrith,” said Laura, when they were back in the Stone House, “a certain thought strikes me.”
“You are thinking about the Truth Game, a curious and unusual version of which was invented and prepared by Professor Owen. You are thinking about Catherine’s answers and the forgery which was substituted for them. You are wondering about the surmises of Mr. Stewart, who contrived to infiltrate among the more suggestible of the company that my inclusion in the party was for reasons unconnected with either a pleasant, relaxing little holiday or an archaeological expedition to contemplate stone circles.”
The Whispering Knights (Mrs. Bradley) Page 14
