Faintley Speaking mb-27

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘That’s what it said. We had read it from the other side the day before. It got us sort of mad, so we thought we’d try to get in the other way round.’

  ‘How did you discover that there was another way round? You’ve never stayed here before. Your father said so.’

  Mark looked scared. He was determined neither to flatter nor to let down Laura by declaring that hers had been the moving spirit in the adventure, and the Inspector’s question flustered him. Into his desperation an idea came hurtling like a life-line.

  ‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘I felt sure there was a house up there somewhere, and they’d have to have grub, and perhaps they kept a car, and all that. There’d have to be some other way in, so we thought we’d look for it.’

  ‘I see. You thought you’d look for it. Very reasonable, especially as you’d never been there before.’

  This put Mark on his guard. When parents and teachers agreed with you, that was the time to keep your eye skinned. It stood to reason that they did not agree with you really. They always had something up their sleeve. He hedged.

  ‘It just seemed like that,’ he said. ‘Miss Menzies wouldn’t see it that way, I don’t suppose. She just wanted to get down to the beach. There’s the cliff railway, of course, but it wasn’t running so early, and we wanted our bathe, and it seemed such a sweat, going back all that way, or so we thought.’

  ‘I see. Thank you, Mark. Going in for the law, by any chance?’

  He departed, grinning. He left Mark feeling uneasy. To add to this uneasiness, on his way upstairs Mark encountered the yellow-skinned Mrs Bradley. He stood aside politely at the turn of the flight to let her pass, and trusted that he would escape notice, but, instead of passing him, she stood still and they met face to face.

  ‘Well, Sir Gareth!’ she said cheerfully. ‘How does the Lady Lyonours to-day?’ Mark looked and felt embarrassed and would have tried to slip past had he been even one year younger. As it was, he stood his ground like a man. He blushed and said:

  ‘All right, I expect. After you. It’s unlucky to pass on the stairs.’

  ‘I think that our paths should cross,’ said the ancient lady. ‘What is this trouble in which you have involved my secretary, amanuensis, and friend, Miss Laura Menzies? Account to me for the fact that you have set the bloodhounds on her trail.’

  ‘But I didn’t!’ said Mark indignantly, his voice shrill with fright. ‘In fact… as a matter of fact… well, that policeman jolly well third-degreed me, but I wasn’t going to give Laura away!’

  ‘Come with me.’ She led the way upstairs to her lair. ‘In here. Sit down. Comfort you with apples’ – she produced sweets and a bottle of orange juice – ‘stay you with flagons, although neither of us, thank goodness, is sick of love.’

  Mark nervously took a sweet and accepted the drink she poured out.

  ‘I don’t know anything about Miss Faintley, I swear I don’t,’ he said. Mrs Bradley clicked her tongue.

  ‘Who mentioned Miss Faintley?’ she demanded. ‘No, my dear Solomon, Miss Faintley is beside the point at the moment. Tell me about your school.’

  ‘School? But I thought Miss Faintley —’

  ‘Quite so. Whose form are you in?’

  ‘Mr Bannister’s.’

  ‘What manner of man may he be?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Mark, keeping his guard up.

  ‘What is his standing in the school?’

  ‘He doesn’t stand much. He sits, and fetches you out in the front.’

  ‘With what in mind? Are his intentions honourable?’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ repeated Mark. ‘Sometimes it’s your work, and he marks it and perhaps he keeps you in, and sometimes it’s the cane, and then you don’t get kept in, but nobody really grouses. He takes us for football sometimes.’

  ‘Ah! Nobody really grouses. A school of philosophers, I find. Now, what subject… no, never mind that at the moment, although I confess that I do not at present perceive the answer to what I was about to ask you. Now, Mr Plato, how many women teachers are there in the school?’

  ‘Well, there’s Mrs Rolls, Miss Ellersby, Miss Franks, Miss Batt, Miss Welling and Miss Cardillon. That’s all, except… well, Miss Faintley, of course. And, if you want to know, she takes us for Nature – it’s a sort of botany really.’

  ‘And the head-teacher’s name?’

  ‘Miss Golightly.’

  ‘A woman, eh?’

  ‘Worse luck!’ said Mark. He scowled. ‘She favours the girls.’

  ‘A woman of character, I feel. Another bite of the serpent’s tooth, dear Daniel?’ She handed over a dish and Mark accepted some chocolate.

  ‘I thought it was lions with Daniel,’ he observed, ‘not serpents. We had a poem… “Bite Daniel!” Rather good.’

  ‘Not only serpents, but every creeping thing,’ his terrifying hostess observed. ‘Did Miss Faintley teach zoology?’

  ‘No, botany and nature study. Tadpoles, and twigs and things, and bees and pollen, and that rot. I shall be jolly glad when I go up into the next form. Then we have Mr Roberts for science and do decent experiments and visit the gas-works and all that. He made the school a television set last term.’

  ‘What does Mr Bannister teach?’

  ‘Maths.’

  ‘And is it a favourite subject with you? I feel that as Mr Bannister is your form-master —’

  ‘It’s all right. I like geometry better than algebra. You can fool about with protractors and set-squares and things, and —’

  ‘No doubt with compasses, too?’

  Mark wriggled, as one who not only suspected irony but had recollected the stab of an ancient wound.

  ‘You can’t do much with Mr Bannister in that way,’ he replied. ‘Not if he’s in the room. It all goes on when he goes out.’

  ‘And his outings, I swear, are not frequent. But he takes the boys for football, therefore much is forgiven him.’

  ‘Yes, on Saturday mornings. I don’t think he’s got much to do with his time. I meet him sometimes, mooching about, but he has jolly decent holidays, I believe. Not like’ – he scowled at the recollection of Ellison and the fun they had planned to have in France – ‘not like at Cromlech, where there’s nothing to do except bathe.’

  ‘What sort of holidays would you call good ones?’

  ‘Well, I’d planned to go to France, these hols., with a friend of mine.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Girls are no good. I don’t mean Laura, but, then, she’s not a girl. She’s pretty old, I should think.’

  Mrs Bradley, who looked upon her secretary as a child, gravely conceded that Laura was in the sere and yellow leaf, and added:

  ‘France is a beautiful country, and I am not surprised that your plans included a visit there. Does Mr Bannister like France?’

  ‘I expect so. He’s been into those prehistoric caves. Lascaux, they’re called, I think. They’re in the south-west somewhere.’

  ‘Lascaux, yes. So have I. The Jumping Cow and so forth.’

  ‘Mr Bannister says it isn’t. It wouldn’t be jumping at all, except that the artist didn’t want to cover up the ponies that some earlier bloke had drawn, so he put its legs up.’

  ‘The cow jumped over the moon, according to popular legend. What thought he of the Apocalyptic Beast, on the main hall vaulting?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t mention that one. It comes in Revelations, doesn’t it?’

  ‘And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion,’ quoted Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Yes, I expect that’s the bit. He showed us pictures in a book he’d bought.3 There’s an awfully good one of a horse slipping over a precipice and another of some deer crossing a stream. He doesn’t often tell us things about his holidays, like some of the masters do, but he did tell us about how five French chaps lost their dog and found the caves. There was a hole where a tree had blown down, an
d I suppose the dog fell in the hole and the chaps went after it. I bet they were jolly surprised when they found themselves in that whacking big place with all those paintings on the walls! I bet it’s weird in there, isn’t it?’

  ‘Extremely weird.’

  ‘If my people hadn’t turned sticky about France, Ellison – he’s my friend – and I were going to cycle to Lascaux and have a look for ourselves.’

  ‘A worthy object of pilgrimage. I wonder whether Miss Faintley ever told you how she spent her holidays?’

  ‘We wouldn’t have been very interested in ladies’ holidays. They don’t often do much that you’d want to hear about, do they?’

  ‘Alas, no. Mine is a dull and deficient sex, I fear.’

  Mark looked alarmed, and began to sidle towards the door. Mrs Bradley smiled like a well-intentioned serpent and let him go. Mark walked straight into the Inspector.

  ‘Ah, Mark! The very man!’ said Vardon, with what, to Mark, sounded like satisfaction of a ghoulish and frightening kind. ‘Come into the little writing-room – there’s nobody there – and tell me all about your school.’

  Except for the bit concerning Mr Bannister and the Aurignacian wall-paintings (which he did not think Vardon would find interesting, even supposing that he had ever heard of them), Mark stolidly repeated the information he had given to Mrs Bradley.

  ‘So Miss Faintley taught nature study, did she? What was she down this way for? – to collect specimens for next term’s work?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Mark doggedly. ‘Why don’t you look at her luggage and see if she’d brought her botanical cases with her? They’re kind of tin things. Airtight, I think, when they’re fastened. They’re jolly expensive, I believe, because Jones fell off his bike once when she’d lent him one to take home some specimens after a nature ramble… it wasn’t bad: old Skipton got chased by a bull… and when Jones fell off his bike this botany case got itself dented and Miss Faintley moaned like billy-o when he took it back to her on Monday morning. He apologized, too, and, after all, he had done his knee in for games.’

  ‘And what were these rambles? What was their object?… just anything you kids picked up, or for anything special?’

  Mark looked round as Mrs Bradley came into the small room.

  ‘Well, she’d let us take anything we liked, I suppose, but ferns and things were her favourites. Old Bewston nearly broke his neck climbing down an old quarry one Saturday. It wasn’t bad fun when that sort of thing happened, of course, but mostly it was just punk, and we used to chase the girls with toads to get a bit of life into things.’

  ‘What’s the name of the headmaster, Mark?’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s a her.’

  ‘Woman head of a mixed school, eh?’ said the Inspector. He wrote it down. ‘What’s she like? A man-eater?’

  ‘She’s all right,’ muttered Mark.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Miss Golightly.’

  ‘And does she?’

  Mark, who related flippancy with sarcasm and therefore distrusted it, made no reply. He stared at the pattern on the rug, then raised his eyes and asked abruptly: ‘Do you know yet who murdered Miss Faintley?’

  ‘Not yet,’ the Inspector replied, ‘but it’s only a question of time, laddie. You didn’t, I suppose, see anybody up at that house?’

  ‘I didn’t go to the house,’ said Mark regretfully. ‘And your police won’t have me up there, because I’ve tried.’

  The house, it seemed, was an enigma. Inquiry showed that it had been built by a certain Colonel Arden who, at one time – about 1901 the savants thought – had occupied it in company with his wife and two daughters. After his death it had remained empty for several years and had been up for sale. Then, in 1914, the Army had had it, and when that war was over it had been bought by a private school but was found unsuitably dangerous for small boys because of its position on the top of the cliff. It had been put up for sale again without success. The police interviewed the owner and his agents, but could gain no further information.

  ‘And that’s as far as we can get,’ said Inspector Vardon when he had journeyed to the town of Kindleford, where Miss Faintley had lived. He was speaking to his opposite number at the Kindleford police station. ‘What can you tell us about this woman Faintley?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ replied Inspector Darling. ‘I’ve recently heard that she had some connexion with a small tradesman in one of the back streets here, a fellow we’ve never caught out, but have had our eye on for some time. We’ve an idea he’s a fence, but we’ve never been able to prove anything. Of course, she may have been coshed and robbed. You can’t rule that out in these days.’

  ‘It wasn’t robbery,’ said Vardon. ‘Her handbag was near the body and contained three pounds and some silver and coppers. The rest of her money she had given in at the hotel office for safe keeping.’

  ‘The murderer may have been disappointed with his haul and clocked her in a fit of temper.’

  ‘Could be, but she was wearing a pretty good wrist-watch on a wide gold bracelet. Must be worth every bit of thirty or forty pounds.’

  ‘Um, yes. You’d think he’d take that. Well, what about going along to her home? I don’t think it will help much, though. She lived with an aunt, whom I’ve already interviewed, but I expect you’d like to talk to her for yourself.’

  The aunt was a gaunt, sallow woman in her sixties. She seemed less grieved than annoyed by her bereavement, Vardon thought.

  ‘And who’s to pay the rent, or where I’m to go, is more than I can fathom,’ she said at the end of half an hour’s conversation during which she had told them nothing of any value. ‘When I came here to be a companion to Lily I never thought of being left with the place on my hands like this. Naturally I expected to go first.’

  ‘How long have you lived here, Miss Faintley?’

  ‘Only since Lily joined the school. We couldn’t get anything cheaper, and she never much liked the idea of lodgings. Always used to her own home until it was blitzed and her mother died, my brother having died several years before, of course, and Lily her mother’s sole support except for the pension.’

  ‘Did they live in London, then?’

  ‘Yes. After the house was blitzed they were given a requisitioned one, but my sister-in-law was very hard to please and never liked it.’

  ‘Oh, she wasn’t killed when their home was destroyed?’

  ‘No, neither of them was hurt, except the shock. But Mattie never got over the loss of her furniture and that. She brooded. I used to get cross with her and tell her she owed it to Lily to brace herself up, but it seemed she couldn’t bring herself. She died the year before last, and Lily tried lodgings and didn’t like them, so she persuaded me to bring my bits of things and we set up here. She’d nothing of her own except a bookcase and her writing-desk and chair, and those precious botanical cases which I believe have been more than half the trouble. I gave up my little house to do her a favour, and I shall never be able to get it back with the shortage like it is. I don’t know what I shall do!’

  ‘How long did your niece expect to stay at Cromlech for her holiday this year?’

  ‘That’s what’s so strange. I don’t know what she was doing in Cromlech at all! I mean, what is there in a place like that? We had a very nice private hotel booked in Torbury, where there would at least have been a picture palace if it turned wet, and a theatre if you wanted to fill up your evenings! But Cromlech hasn’t even a pier… just the beach huts and the cliff-railway. I was to have joined her in Torbury next week, and I was looking forward to it very much, my life being what you see… this flat, and the shopping, and Lily’s meals, and the washing. So why she was staying at a hotel in Cromlech is more than I can fathom. If she’d been younger, or the flighty kind, I would have thought the worst, for she’s never been as open with me as you would have thought, living together as we did and me having nobody to talk to for hours on end, but one thing I did know about her, she
had no use for men of any sort and at any time. She thought herself a cut above them… most of them, anyway.’

  Darling was tempted to refer to the cases of Miss Camille Clifford and other ladies whom their friends would not have supposed capable of some of the erratic and inexplicable emotions which had led to their being murdered, but he held his peace, hoping that something would pop up in the aunt’s whining, complaining monologue which would give a clue to Miss Faintley’s murderer.

  He was not nearly as certain as the aunt professed to be that there was not a love-affair at the bottom of the mystery. The fact, that, unknown to her aunt, Miss Faintley had purposed to stay in Cromlech when she was supposed to be staying in Torbury, was very significant, he thought. He glanced at Vardon. Vardon drummed on the table for a moment, and then asked:

  ‘Did you receive a letter from your niece after she left here?’

  ‘A postcard, not a letter. I would always like to know she’d arrived safely. Trains are such funny things nowadays, what with accidents and assaults and the drivers not stopping at the right stations and not troubling to look at the signal-boxes and always grumbling when they have to spend a night away from their wives. I never did think British Railways would work, and, of course, they don’t. I always used to like the old G.W.R. You could trust the G.W.R. as I always said.’

  ‘And have you kept the postcard?’ asked Vardon, damming the stream, or, possibly, blocking the track.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve got it. I shall always keep it now, of course, it being Lily’s last words. You won’t want to take it away with you, will you?’

  ‘I should just like to see it.’

  ‘It’s postmarked Torbury all right, if that’s what you mean. Think of the deceitfulness, if she was really at Cromlech!’

  She brought the card. The postmark was indeed Torbury, so there was not much doubt but that Miss Faintley had not intended to allow her aunt to know that she had spent any nights in Cromlech. Still, that was not evidence of any criminal intention.

  ‘It wouldn’t do if our relatives had to know everything we got up to,’ said Vardon soothingly. ‘We’re all entitled to a bit of private life sometimes. Don’t mean there’s any harm in it, although, in this case, it’s turned out very distressing indeed. You said your niece was living somewhere else in Kindleford before you took over her housekeeping, didn’t you? I’d better have the address of those lodgings.’ He took it down. ‘How long was your niece there?’