Merlin's Furlong

by Gladys Mitchell

“Very good of you to say so, sir. It was only routine, all the same. Nothing like routine for bringing home the bacon. That’s what I always say.” The inspector assumed a slight smirk of self-appreciation.

  Mrs. Bradley’s dampening thought, that it was not much good bringing home the bacon if the bacon was already rancid, she did not utter, but congratulated the inspector upon his painstaking work. Then she said:

  “A slightly different reconstruction of the known facts would be that Professor Havers murdered old Mr. Aumbry in revenge for the theft of the diptych, and that Godfrey murdered the professor in revenge for his uncle’s death which (although Professor Havers could scarcely have known this) deprived Godfrey of his inheritance.”

  “Oh? So you think Havers murdered Aumbry?” demanded the Chief Constable.

  “I did not say that I thought so. I was merely offering a theory slightly different from, and, if I may say so, slightly more psychologically sound than, your own.”

  “But that would let Richmond out entirely!”

  “I see no reason why he should not be let out.”

  “But the motive! It still sticks out a mile!”

  “Nothing on earth does that…yet. You may be right about Richmond, of course. Everybody has it in him to murder somebody, but I must insist that Richmond would be very unlikely to murder for financial gain.”

  “Have it your own way,” said the Chief Constable good-humouredly. “Another theory, of course, is that Godfrey and Richmond were in collusion over both the murders, but that seems a little far-fetched. But if you don’t agree with our conclusions, let us know what you’ve got up your sleeve.”

  Mrs. Bradley did not reply that she had nothing up her sleeve.

  “I’ve some way to go yet before I can prove my points,” she said, “but there are one or two things to which I can draw your attention. Let us suppose, for the moment, that all Mr. Aumbry’s nephews are telling the truth. That, you’ll agree, would put a different complexion on everything.”

  “It would indeed! But why all the nephews? We’ve no reason to suspect Lewis and Frederick, except on the doubtful hypothesis that Lewis killed the old man for his brother Richmond’s sake, or that Frederick the Drone killed him for the little bit of cash which he expected to, and does, in fact, inherit.”

  “Quite,” said Mrs. Bradley patiently. “Now then: let me, as you yourself suggested, begin at the beginning. The beginning seems to me to be the death of the undergraduate, Mr. Catfield.”

  “Suicide. The poor young idiot cut his own throat. We’ve gone into all that. He was in debt all round at college and dared not go to his uncle for the money.”

  “Wicked and parsimonious uncles seem to abound in this case,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And there is no doubt, as you yourselves know, that the body of young Catfield has been removed from its place of interment and reburied at the top of Merlin’s Fort.”

  “Granted and agreed; and any form of body-snatching is a crime. Go on.”

  “Next comes the extraordinary affair of Professor Havers’ advertisement for some person or persons to restore to him his allegedly stolen diptych, which, by the way, I have found.” She produced it and laid it on the table. The Chief Constable picked it up and examined it.

  “I wouldn’t mind stealing it myself,” he said. “It’s a unique and beautiful thing. But I’m interrupting.”

  “That strange advertisement was answered by my three undergraduates, led, I imagine, by the enterprising Mr. Waite, whom I suspect, incidentally, of having worded the thing himself.”

  “Just his idea of a rag?”

  “I doubt it. But, mark this: those three young men had heard rumours of Professor Havers’ unsavory reputation.”

  “You mean they ought to have rumbled him sufficiently to keep clear? That type don’t, you know. If the rag seems a bit dangerous…”

  “Granted. The next point, however, is incontrovertible. In each of the houses which those young men elected to enter, a man was found dead.”

  “Extraordinary coincidence, I know. But we’ve been into all that before. You’re not inferring that, after all, they were the murderers, are you? Because I just simply don’t believe it! Besides, you said yourself…”

  “I know I did. But I did not know then about young Catfield.”

  “What’s Catfield got to do with it?”

  “I wish I knew,” said Mrs. Bradley sincerely, “but it is only a matter of time before I find out.”

  “You and Time seem to be old friends!”

  “Alas, yes! It is only Eternity and I who seem to be on opposite sides of the street. But think over what I have said. There are pieces missing in the jigsaw, large and important pieces and also tiny, exasperating pieces, but, although they may be missing, they can’t be lost.”

  “Like the teapot,” said the Chief Constable. “But go on about Aumbry’s nephews. The idea that they might be telling the truth interests me far more than the story of those three half-baked idiots of boys!”

  “There you are not altogether wise, but supposing that the Aumbry nephews are telling the truth, we get this: Godfrey, who is not without brains, may have realised as perfectly as his cousin seems to have done, that old Mr. Aumbry, in the end, decided to leave his property to his early favourite, Richmond. You see, apart from anything else, Richmond is the only one of the four who has children. It may well be that the old man wanted to be certain that his wealth would be kept in the family. Family feeling is an extraordinary and powerful emotion. No one can estimate its strength. Even Frederick Aumbry, whom one would scarcely list as a sentimental man, possesses it in some measure. As for the brothers Lewis and Richmond, they are devoted to one another and do not mind everybody knowing it.”

  “Godfrey’s a pretty cold fish, though,” put in the Chief Constable, “and if you’re right, and the whole four of them are telling the truth, we’ve got to look elsewhere for our murderer.”

  “Not necessarily; and I am not claiming that they are all speaking the truth. I merely wish to assume it for the sake of my argument, which is that not all the factors of this baffling affair can be explained by any theories which, so far, you have put forward. Just let us take the Aumbry evidence in detail, not questioning its veracity, and see what else emerges.”

  “Well, we can do that, of course. What emerges, however, isn’t helpful. Take Godfrey first, for example. His story begins where he claims to have been hit on the head whilst he was roughing out the draft of a will which was to make him his uncle’s heir. His papers were abstracted while he was still unconscious.”

  “You say that he claims to have been hit on the head, but that attack on him has never been disputed. The uncle accused the cousins, and Frederick Aumbry protested, apparently vigorously.”

  “And Frederick suggested to you that old Mr. Aumbry himself may have crept back into the room and laid Godfrey out. But why should he do such a thing?”

  “I think he distrusted everybody, Godfrey (the repository of some of his secrets) most of all. I think we may take it that among Godfrey’s papers was a document which made the old man think he was justified in what he had done, and I think we may put the altered depositions partly down to the fact that he thought he had caught Godfrey out in some sort of double dealing.”

  “So you really think the last will, the one in Richmond’s favor, was intended to stand?”

  “I propose to assume so for the moment.”

  “But what could Godfrey have found out?”

  “For an answer to that question I will refer you to a very interesting sentence in Godfrey’s evidence. According to what the inspector has in his notes, Godfrey reported that his uncle said, referring to the special treasure he had promised to show him, ‘It was the apple of the fellow’s eye that had it last.’ Knowing what we did know, we assumed that he would have been referring to the Isaurian diptych, and that the previous owner was Professor Havers, but has it not occurred to you that he may not have meant the diptych, and that, even if he d
id, the previous owner need not necessarily have been Havers?”

  “I hadn’t thought like that, but I see your point, of course. The only thing is that, whatever the treasure was, it can’t have any bearing on the murder of Aumbry, can it? He can’t have been killed so that somebody could gain or regain possession of the diptych, because here it is in front of us, and you found it still among Aumbry’s hoard at Merlin’s Furlong. That hoard has proved interesting, incidentally. It was, as you suspected, nearly all stolen property, which has now been identified and returned. He must have been a receiver in a big way, and, from what we can gather…Godfrey, who went through secret papers which even he had never seen before (or so he says) was our chief informant…the old man used to act as fence to the big gangs on condition that they always stole something which he could add to his collection of religious objects.”

  “Fascinating,” said Mrs. Bradley. She rose. “I’ll leave the diptych with you. It will be better. There’s just one thing before I go to meet my undergraduates.” She picked up the diptych and opened it, laid it down again, took from her skirt pocket the watchmaker’s eyeglass she had found attached to it, opened a fine penknife, and, screwing the glass into her eye in professional fashion, she delicately inserted the tip of the knife-blade between the inside and the outside of the first of the two panels. There was a very faint click, and the top picture slid aside. Beneath it was a scene of such astonishing obscenity that the Chief Constable recoiled as though a snake had bitten him.

  “Good God!” he said.

  “Not God, not even the devil, but merely perverted genius,” said Mrs. Bradley. She pushed the little panel into place again, and the plump, imperial features of the Emperor Justinian and the gracious, vacant face of Theodora immediately hid the horrid revelation from view.

  “Well!” said the inspector. “And I thought I’d seen a few!”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, some of whose patients had, from time to time, introduced to her notice their collections of erotica, “it is an interesting example.”

  “No wonder an old satyr like Havers was anxious to have it back,” said the Chief Constable. “I wonder how he came to get hold of it in the first place?”

  “That is just the point. Another is that Frederick Aumbry, who stole it, was extremely anxious to get rid of it again. He slipped it back among the treasures while Mr. Harrison and I were there, you know, but one can understand that Frederick was able to blackmail his uncle on the strength of it. The biter bit, in fact!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Merlin’s Fort

  “With tapers let the temples shine,

  Sing to Hymen hymns divine;

  Load the altars till there rise

  Clouds from the burnt sacrifice.”

  —Michael Drayton, The Fay’s Marriage

  Mrs. Bradley did not go back at once to the Fort. She and the three young men went to her house at Wandles Parva and there they told her something of Professor Havers and his iniquities. It did not amount to much.

  “There were rumours, you know, as there always are,” said Waite, “and some of them weren’t too sweet.”

  “Do not attempt to spare me on account of my age and sex,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I know something about most of the sins of this world, and in witchcraft I have always taken interest.”

  Waite could well believe this. He eyed her intelligently, and then observed:

  “Did you ever attend a Walpurgis Night?”

  “In my own person, no,” Mrs. Bradley responded, “but I believe I had an ancestress who did.”

  “I wish I’d had one like that,” said Harrison. Mrs. Bradley shook her head.

  “I don’t think you do,” she remarked. “Consider, Mr. Harrison, and, until you have considered, do not speak. Remember the golden books of Lucius Apuleius, and do not comment upon that of which you have no cognizance.”

  “Oh, that!” said Harrison, to the astonishment of his companions. “We know all that old stuff.”

  “We know of it intellectually,” said Waite in a tone of rebuke. “We do not know of it personally…or do we?”

  Piper developed this theme.

  “I know what I think,” he observed, “and I think on my feet.”

  “As no true sage has done,” said Mrs. Bradley, “from the time of Diogenes onward. Serious thought does not and cannot emanate from the feet, the root of all pain and evil, but from the stomach, wherein reposes the fount of appreciation and the true justification of mankind, likewise his death and damnation.”

  “But about Havers,” said the practical Waite. “I’ll admit that most of what I know is merely hearsay, but there’s no doubt young Catfield was mixed up in something rather nasty. He was a lonely sort of cuss, and gravitated naturally, I suppose, towards anything sociable. There used to be parties…reading parties, they were called…held by Havers out of term-time…and most of my information comes from a man at St. Swithin’s who went to one of them. Havers was at St. Swithin’s, you know, and nearly all his devotees came from there. I don’t think anything much happened during term except on Midsummer Eve, but most people are pretty busy about then, so not much was noticed, I suppose. This man…you don’t want his name, do you?…I mean, I know he only went to the one and decided, on that, that it wasn’t his kettle of fish.”

  “His name doesn’t matter. What put him off, do you think?”

  “Well, he didn’t care for any of it much. Old Havers appears to have mixed up voodoo and the leopard men with a spot of goat worship, and he procured a few rather disreputable ladies to chuck in for good measure. It appears there were strange and wonderful dances in the lee light of the moon.”

  Mrs. Bradley did not ask for a detailed description of the revels, and Waite, after a thoughtful pause, turned to Piper.

  “Contribution similar,” said Piper, “as Polly and I were together at the above recital. It was all, on the surface, a bit childish, you know, and, like lots of childish things (say the bat-eyed righteous what they may), a bit nasty. Anyway, underneath, you may take it, it was foul. This man who took us said he thought drugs were used to induce the party spirit and supply the requisite energy, and there appears to have been some pretty massive atrophy of the pleasanter notions of civilised motivation.”

  “Yes,” put in Harrison. “Havers came in tight (or drugged) to a lecture once, and somebody got him on to his favourite subject by putting an adroit question destined (with the worthiest intentions, incidentally) to divert Havers’ remarks from the matter in hand, which was of dim and doubtful interest, to the question of Roman reliance upon astrology. The answer Havers gave, although, in one sense, astonishingly interesting, was also astonishingly rude. Some of the mob thought it staggeringly funny, of course. Personally, I had nightmare after it. Two men, destined for the Church, walked out. The queer thing is that although I ’ad the complete ’orrors, I can’t actually recollect a word that Havers said on that occasion.”

  “And Mr. Catfield?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well, there were rumours that his uncle got to know the way things were moving,” said Waite. “There was a school of thought in St. Swithin’s that wanted to gag Catfield at night because he used to yell and shriek in his sleep. The inference some of us drew was that he may have done the same thing at home—yelled and shrieked, I mean—and that may have meant that he let a few cats out of bags. Anyway, he was sent down, but he still stayed in Wallchester, apparently, and a fortnight afterwards we heard of his suicide.”

  Perceiving that the young men would tell her little more, Mrs. Bradley dismissed them to their slumbers, whereon her maid Célestine took it upon herself to observe, as she sympathetically watched their progress upstairs, “Ah, these poor little ones! How one carries oneself grandly in youth, and how one undoes oneself with age!”

  Rightly disregarding this sentimental utterance, Mrs. Bradley betook herself to her chauffeur George and suggested that he should drive her to Moundbury.

  �
�For there alone,” she said, “and only there shall we come upon the solution of one of these mysteries.”

  George was interested, and alertly observed:

  “The young gentlemen, madam, lacking discretion and experience…”

  “Not altogether,” said Mrs. Bradley. “One of them, at least, does not lack some kind of experience, and although one hesitates to believe that witchcraft still flourishes in the rural districts of southwest England, one’s mind, I feel, should never be closed to exclude latent possibilities.”

  They drove, at Mrs. Bradley’s orders, straight to Merlin’s Fort. Instinct had not played her false, for at Merlin’s Fort strange rites appeared to be in progress. The first inkling that she and her chauffeur had of this was that the landscape seemed to be on fire.

  George pulled up on the edge of the Downland turf and helped Mrs. Bradley out.

  “Up the side of the hill outside the fort. We can probably see from the top,” said Mrs. Bradley. There was a rough path worn by hikers and bounded by a stone wall. She and her man used torches, for here and there the path went up in a series of natural steps formed by outcroppings of the limestone. It was a steep, stiff climb and they did not attempt to hurry.

  When they reached their vantage point they could see across the abysmal banks and ditches which guarded the plateau to the source of the devilish illumination which they had been able to see from below. It was caused by a number of flaring and smoking torches which cast a light of orange, brown, and red to light about forty dancing figures. Towards the watchers was borne an acrid tang as the torches burnt down lower and their showers of sparks flew more wildly, and across the gulf came the sound of discordant chanting, as though Plainsong were being distorted by the cozens of Evil.

  George and Mrs. Bradley watched and listened, and after about five minutes she remarked that she was about to storm the fortress, but would return first of all to the car. They scrambled and slid down the stone or picked their way carefully over the scree, and shortly reached their parked vehicle.

  “Splendid,” said Mrs. Bradley. “You know, George, I shouldn’t be at all surprised to find that all those people had blackened their faces, as poachers and the stealers of Christmas trees often do.”