Merlin's Furlong

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Careful, George. This is it,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “What is it, madam?” enquired George, resting for a moment from his labours.

  “I don’t know, but it’s possible that it’s a coffin. Probe about a bit. Here, we might as well help you. These will do, at a pinch.” She picked up a turfing iron, Harrison seized his, and whilst George stood aside until the size and nature of the find should be disclosed, they delicately slid aside the rubble. A modern coffin was disclosed. Mrs. Bradley laid aside her turfing iron, squatted down, and rubbed away the chalky film which covered the small brass nameplate.

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed Harrison. “It’s young Catfield! How the devil did he get up here?”

  “I can guess,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But to work, that the dust be once more equal made by the poor crooked scythe and spade. Not quite a quotation!”

  By the time that they had finished, the place presented nothing markedly different from its previous appearance. George and Harrison, with ruthless, masculine shoes, stamped on the contiguous edges of the turves until even the meticulous chauffeur was satisfied that they could do no more to restore the status quo of the strange, unlawful grave. In silence they returned to the road and it was not until they had reached the end of the bumpy trackway that Mrs. Bradley caused George to pull in on to the grassy edge and Harrison to tell the story that seemed to set the seal on Professor Havers’ villainy.

  “But Polly and Peter know more about it than I do,” he concluded.

  “We must contact them, and anybody else who can add to our knowledge. And, George, you are interested in gardening and are knowledgeable about such things as grass…how long ago was that turf removed and put back before we touched it, would you say?”

  “A matter of twenty-four hours, madam, in my opinion.”

  “I thought the same. These are deep waters, and we must navigate them to the best of our ability. How long will it take you to get in touch with your friends, Mr. Harrison?”

  “I can do it as soon as I get back to the hotel, and, if I know anything about them, they’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Not here. Ask them to meet us for lunch at the Bell in Wallchester, and then we can all go together and find out why there has been no report about the disturbing of a grave.”

  “Catfield wasn’t buried in the churchyard, but in the grounds of his own house, I believe,” said Harrison. “And I believe he was an orphan and lived with an elderly relation of the same name.”

  “I see. Have you any idea where we can find this elderly relation?”

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t, but I expect Waite would know. He seems to know everybody’s business.”

  Mrs. Bradley noticed that he no longer referred to Waite by his nickname of Polly.

  The village, its name supplied by Waite, proved to be called Titmouse. George purchased an ordnance map and announced, after a brief glance, that he thought he could find his way. This he did with so much success that it was barely three o’clock when the car pulled up in front of the stone-built post office and he got out to ask the way to Mr. Catfield’s house.

  “That be Marsh Hanger you be warnten,” said the post-mistress. “Straight on tell ee yurs the brook babble, and then take the left-’and turnen, like, and I don’t thenk ee can mess et. Great beg ’ouse, and sets etself down, like, en the trees.” She eyed him with considerable curiosity but had far too much native courtesy to ask questions. She did, however, come out from behind the grille and follow him to the door to get a glimpse of Mrs. Bradley’s car and its occupants before they drove away.

  Following her directions George soon found the house. It was indeed embosomed among trees, for tall elms hid it from view. There was a lodge but this seemed to be empty, and the gates were wide open and looked as though they had been so from time immemorial. George drove in and the car slowly followed a curved drive bordered by the elms until the facade of a house appeared. It had a dilapidated, unlived-in look, but that it was occupied there was no doubt, for, as the car drew up, an old man came out on to the terrace and stood waiting.

  It had been arranged that Mrs. Bradley should make the first sortie alone, so, while George sat like a statue at the wheel after he had assisted her to get out, and the three young men, reunited, looked on with polite interest, she mounted the steps to the terrace and advanced towards its occupant. He did not move, except to turn towards her, and she had to go right up to him before he made any other acknowledgment of her presence. When she reached him, he said, pushing his head forward and back as though he were a tortoise, which, facially, he somewhat resembled:

  “I didn’t suggest that they should send a woman! I don’t know what things are coming to!”

  “You do not subscribe, then, to the theory that the sexes, although complementary, are equal?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “Complementary my foot! Equal? Bah!” observed the tortoise. “What good can you do now you’ve come? Oh, well, we’d better go inside, I suppose.”

  He was leaning on a stick, and he tapped irritably with it as he led the way through the open front door.

  “I don’t think, you know, that I’ve come on the errand you have in mind,” said Mrs. Bradley when she had seated herself in the chair he grudgingly offered. She looked round the large and handsome library. It was obviously used as a bed-sitting room, for, in addition to an enormous collection of books and the usual furnishings, there was an old-fashioned, brass-railed bed in one corner, and an old-fashioned wardrobe in one of the fireplace alcoves. Although the day was warm and fine, a fire burnt on the hearth and the old gentleman was wearing a loose tweed overcoat on top of a hairy tweed jacket. A muffler was around his neck and his socks were of thick blue wool.

  “Haven’t you come from the lawyers?” he asked. Mrs. Bradley smiled, a response which he seemed to dislike. “Well, yes or no?” he demanded.

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley, “No, would appear to be the answer. I do not come from the lawyers. I come to inspect a despoiled grave.”

  “What?”

  “A despoiled grave,” she repeated. “Can it be without the sphere of your cognizance that your relative, Mr. Catfield, has been removed from his secure resting-place in these grounds and transported to a hilltop in an adjacent county?” Waite had been convincing on the subject of Catfield’s previous interment.

  The tortoise blinked at her.

  “You refer to my grandnephew, the suicidal Catfield?” he demanded. Mrs. Bradley nodded.

  “I imagine so,” she responded. The tortoise sighed.

  “I knew he would still be a nuisance,” he remarked.

  “Still?”

  “Oh, yes. What did he do at the university? Got himself involved in the troubles and was liquidated. Be that as it was…”

  “What troubles?”

  “Oh, the Town and Gown rows. They went on in my grandfather’s time and they went on in mine. Do not mention that young man to me. I have cast him out of my thoughts.”

  “Did you not love him?”

  “Love a boy who got into a mess and killed himself to get out of it? No, madam, I did not.”

  “A pity,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I have an idea that he did not kill himself. I think he was murdered.”

  “By me, madam?” demanded the old man, irritated but not shocked by her announcement.

  Mrs. Bradley considered him carefully, and then shook her head.

  “I hardly think so,” she replied. “Suppose you tell me about it. All I know at present is that he formed one of a coterie of young men who sat at the feet of the late Professor Havers, who, according to such evidence as I have in my possession, was not so much a professor of history as a professor of the base and disreputable art of necromancy.”

  “An evil genius, madam!”

  “Evil, undoubtedly. Genius…I don’t know.”

  “May I ask why you have come here, if you’re not from the lawyers?”

  “Certainly you may. I have come here to insp
ect the place where first you buried your relative, and to prove to you that the coffin has been taken away.”

  “Utter rubbish!”

  “Not at all. Let me explain, and, when you have heard me out, I shall hope to have your co-operation in gaining some further information.”

  “I promise nothing.” He picked up a poker and irritably prodded the fire. “Besides, I’ve no time to waste.”

  “Cannot you spare time to listen while I tell you that your young relative’s body has been conveyed from the grave in which you laid it, and the coffin taken to the top of a prehistoric earthwork in the county of Moundshire.”

  “Again, madam, I say it is rubbish!” He replaced the poker as carefully as if it had been made of glass, and turned to face her. His grey old face had expressed disbelief, but this gave way to fury. “Who has dared to tell you such lies!”

  “No one. I am reporting upon what I know. Sit down, Mr. Catfield, and listen.”

  He obeyed her, pushing out his long lips and drawing them in again, and looking, suddenly, a senile, helpless old man.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “But how can such things be done in a country as well policed as this?”

  Mrs. Bradley told him as much of the story of the diptych as served her purpose, and when she had finished and had described the finding of Catfield’s coffin, she concluded, “And now I would like you, if you will, to tell me what you know. I am investigating two murders, and I believe young Mr. Catfield’s death was a third.”

  He stared into the fire for some minutes. Mrs. Bradley watched him and waited. At last he roused himself.

  “Suicide. His suicide. His disgraceful suicide. Dishonour, corruption, and then death. My grandnephew had feet of clay.”

  “He was certainly led astray.”

  “But I tell you…No! Why should I lie? All is not quite as you think.”

  “But I don’t think,” said Mrs. Bradley patiently. “I only want to know. And, surely, for your own sake, and the sake of the family name, it would be better, in a sense, that your grandnephew should have been murdered rather than that he should have died the dishonoured death which has so far been attributed to him? Meanwhile, will you give me permission to visit the grave in which you laid him?”

  The old man looked doubtful.

  “I am what I am,” he said. “If I should be that which I follow, then I could not be that which I am. I do not intend to die yet. I will not show you his grave.”

  “Then may I go and find it for myself?”

  He hesitated again, and then raised his hand and pointed. Mrs. Bradley thanked him, and rejoined her three undergraduates…or, rather, two of them. Waite, Piper explained, was bored and had gone for a walk. Mrs. Bradley nodded and led the way. They had to pass through a grove of trees in the midst of which stood a small stone altar. It was inscribed in French.

  “Attendez et Voyez? Crude, surely?” remarked Harrison. “Wait and see. Well, poor Catfield didn’t wait here very long.”

  This observation was justified. Behind the altar, and visible over its flat top, was a hole in the ground which had been filled in only roughly. On top of this inefficient or careless bit of gardening a dead cat had been tossed. Harrison, who was squeamish, recoiled. Piper picked up a bit of stick and proposed to inter the cat by pushing away some of the light, loose leaf muld which had been used to fill in the hole; but Mrs. Bradley bent down and studied the cat.

  “Dead less than half an hour, I should say,” she remarked. “Wait and see. Remarkably interesting. And now, Mr. Piper, if you would be so good…”

  Piper buried the cat and had scarcely finished his task when old Mr. Catfield appeared on the narrow path through the grove. He came up and looked at the disturbed soil.

  “But it wasn’t like this when we left him,” said the old gentleman. “Who could have done all this?”

  Mrs. Bradley had her own answer to this question, but she did not supply it aloud. Silently she accompanied her host to the terrace and there took leave of him.

  “What did you gather?” asked Harrison, who had sent Piper in search of Waite to let him know that the party was ready to leave. “Or wasn’t there anything to gather?”

  “I think there was,” Mrs. Bradley soberly replied, “but I did not gather it all because I thought it better not to ask too many questions at one time.”

  “What didn’t you gather?” asked Harrison.

  “I did not gather whether old Mr. Catfield had a cat, and, if he had, what has become of it.”

  “Oh, the dead pussy! By the way (don’t harrow my feelings if the answer’s horrid), how did it come to die?”

  “By manual strangulation, child.”

  “Good Lord! But…”

  “No, I can’t answer any more questions at the moment. Time for that when you and I have visited Merlin’s Fort.”

  “Merlin’s Fort? We don’t need to go there again!”

  “Don’t you want to meet Morgan le Fay, child?”

  Harrison said that he was not at all sure that he did, and decided not to ask the question which had come into his head. His knowledge of Mrs. Bradley’s mind was not profound, but he felt sure that, to her, Morgan le Fay had another name, a name which he would recognise if he heard it.

  Piper came back with Waite, who apologised charmingly for having forsaken the party but claimed a slight previous acquaintance with old Mr. Catfield which he did not wish to renew. Mrs. Bradley accepted this explanation as the truth (which she felt convinced it was) and the quartet got into her car and drove away. She could not help reminding herself, however, that Waite had also preferred not to contact Professor Havers. Waite knew too many people, she concluded, for his own safety.

  The village of Titmouse was within easy reach of Wallchester, and Mrs. Bradley suggested that as she had a standing invitation to visit friends in the north of the city, the three young men might care to go to a cinema or otherwise amuse themselves, and then meet her again at about seven o’clock in the evening. The three were in favour of this arrangement, and the party separated, Mrs. Bradley to ring up the inspector in charge of the case, and the three undergraduates to engage themselves as they would. In answer to her message the inspector turned up with the Chief Constable and Mrs. Bradley’s friends put a room at their disposal.

  “Begin from the beginning and go on…I won’t say to the end because the end is not yet…but go on to where you think we’ve got to,” the Chief Constable suggested. “Not that I think there can be anything now to upset our own conclusions. We’ve got the thing pretty well taped.”

  “We begin,” said Mrs. Bradley, “with the nephews of the murdered Mr. Aumbry.”

  The Chief Constable made no objection to this. In fact, he endorsed it.

  “Right. There can’t be any doubt about the nephews. As I see it,” he said, “we have only two suspects: Mr. Richmond Aumbry and Mr. Godfrey Aumbry; in each case the motive is clear. Unfortunately we have not sufficient evidence to arrest either of these men, and so we are holding our hand. The way we look at it is this: Godfrey believed that he would inherit most of the old man’s goods. In a moment of…call it whimsy…the old man suddenly decided to nominate Richmond as his heir. Before he could change his mind, Richmond killed him and, unless we can prove that he did so, now inherits everything which Godfrey thought of as his own. Godfrey, furious, would have liked to murder Richmond, no doubt, but to do that would not have helped him. While Richmond was alive he could at least borrow from him (we’ll say) on the strength of being unjustly dispossessed; he might even be in a position to blackmail him, for all we know. Anyhow, Godfrey had to vent his spite on somebody, so he selected old Professor Havers, of whose malpractices he had known from his uncle. Godfrey had had access, by his own showing, to all his uncle’s papers, and there seems to be plenty of evidence that the two old men had been firm friends at one time. What do you say to that? You believe in the sublimation of natural instincts. I suggest that Godfrey sublimated his hatred and disapp
ointment by killing Havers.”

  “What do I say to it? One thing only,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “I say that you must have been able to prove something which I guessed but had no means of proving.”

  “Good heavens! Don’t tell me you’d already tumbled to it!”

  “I certainly had, if you mean that the elusive and respectable manservant whom my three undergraduates drove to the station was really Godfrey Aumbry.”

  “What’s more, ma’am, he’s admitted it,” said the inspector, “but he denies all knowledge of the murder and says that while he was in Professor Havers’ castle he did not even see the body.”

  “If he didn’t kill Havers, there’s just a chance he might be telling the truth,” put in the Chief Constable, “because those three young fools don’t seem to have seen it either.”

  “What reason does Godfrey Aumbry give for having been in Merlin’s Castle at the time?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “Says he had a telephone message from somebody, who claimed to be speaking on the professor’s behalf, asking him to go over there, and telling him how to dress. Declares he thought the message genuine, as the professor was known to be a crank if not actually a lunatic, and hoped it was a preliminary to his uncle and the professor making up their quarrel. He was anxious for this, he says, because it might mean he would get the professor’s affairs into his hands again. He had lost a client, it seems, when the old men quarreled.”

  “But you haven’t arrested him on suspicion of having murdered Professor Havers?”

  “No. We’ve insufficient evidence to put before a jury. Besides, we want to get Richmond as well. Why did he take in that black girl, Bluna, unless she knew something he wanted to keep secret? Very fishy, you know, that business. I know he explained it by saying the girl had a letter from somebody advising her to apply to him for domestic work, but my guess is that he sent the letter himself. It’s all mostly guesswork, so far, I admit, but I do think we’re a long step forward now that we’ve settled the identity of that manservant. It makes quite a story, doesn’t it, Inspector?”