Death of a Burrowing Mole mb-62

by Gladys Mitchell

  Death of a Burrowing Mole

  ( Mrs Bradley - 62 )

  Gladys Mitchell

  Death of a Burrowing Mole

  Gladys Mitchell

  Bradley 62

  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  Contents

  Chapter 1: A Rumour of Buried Treasure

  Chapter 2: Castle in the Sand

  Chapter 3: Donkey-Work

  Chapter 4: Little Rifts Within the Lute

  Chapter 5: Attempts to Get Arbitration

  Chapter 6: Humpty Dumpty

  Chapter 7: Alibis

  Chapter 8: Interested Parties

  Chapter 9: Retractions and Explanations

  Chapter 10: Edward, Nicholas and Susannah

  Chapter 11: Private and Other Conversations

  Chapter 12: Disappearance of the Hired Help

  Chapter 13: Vandalism

  Chapter 14: Interim Reports

  Chapter 15: A Body in the Woods

  Chapter 16: Secondary Burial

  Chapter 17: Ways and Means

  Chapter 18: Lordly Dishes

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  speedy death • spotted hemlock

  mystery of a butcher’s shop • the man who grew tomatoes

  the longer bodies • say it with flowers

  the saltmarsh murders • the nodding canaries

  death at the opera • my bones will keep

  the devil at saxon wall • adders on the heath

  dead man’s morris • death of a delft blue

  come away death • pageant of murder

  st. peter’s finger • the croaking raven

  printer’s error • skeleton island

  brazen tongue • three quick and five dead

  hangman’s curfew • dance to your daddy

  when last i died • gory dew

  laurels are poison • lament for leto

  the worsted viper • a hearse on may day

  sunset over soho • the murder of busy lizzie

  my father sleeps • a javelin for jonah

  the rising of the moon • winking at the brim

  here comes a chopper • convent of styx

  death and the maiden • late, late in the evening

  the dancing druids • noonday and night

  tom brown’s body • fault in the structure

  groaning spinney • wraiths and changelings

  the devil’s elbow • mingled with venom

  the echoing strangers • nest of vipers

  merlin’s furlong • mudflats of the dead

  faintley speaking • uncoffin’d clay

  watson’s choice • the whispering knights

  twelve horses and the hangman’s noose

  the twenty-third man • the death-cap dancers

  here lies gloria mundy • death of a burrowing mole

  Michael Joseph LONDON

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd

  44 Bedford Square, London WC1, 1982

  © 1982 by Gladys Mitchell

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner

  ISBN 0 7181 2158 9

  Printed by Hollen Street Press Ltd, Slough, Berkshire and bound by Hunter and Foulis, Edinburgh.

  Two undergraduates decide to spend the long vacation searching for treasure which local legend indicates was buried in a castle well during the Civil War.

  When the youths get to the site they are dismayed to find that other parties have also obtained permission to work there. Some archaeologists are hoping to excavate a Bronze Age barrow and two architects, with their helpers, intend to attempt a partial reconstruction of the walls and flanking-towers of the castle.

  One of the archaeologists is also an amateur astronomer. One night, while studying the stars, he falls from the top of the keep… to his death.

  The fall is regarded with suspicion when the police discover that all fingerprints have been cleaned off the dead man’s telescope. Then two brutal murders are committed on the site and it falls to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and the local police to solve the mystery of the deaths.

  The treasure? Well, the castle is easily identifiable, so no metal detectors please!

  To MILLICENT AND PATRICK

  with the love and best wishes of their eccentric aunt

  AUTHOR ’S NOTE

  My warmest thanks to Sister Mary Martina McKeown, O.P., who sent me the newspaper cutting on which this story of buried treasure is based.

  1

  A Rumour of Buried Treasure

  ^ »

  Dear Godmother,’ (wrote Bonamy Monkswood), ‘thank you very much for my birthday cheque. As usual it will come in uncommon useful. I wonder, though, whether I’ve collared it under false pretences, as Tom Hassocks and I have changed our minds about going to Greece. Instead, we are planning to spend the whole of the summer vac hunting for buried treasure.

  ‘What happened was this: towards the end of the term Tom was rooting about in a secondhand bookshop in search of material for his thesis on sheepfarming, when he came upon this folder containing half a dozen numbers of the county magazine. The copies were nice and clean and the folder, which was one of these clip-in affairs which are nearly as handy as having a bound volume, looked as good as new, so Tom thought that, when he had done with it, it would make a present for an uncle he is keeping in with, the old boy being a bit of an enthusiast for old customs and local legends and so forth, and the mags are crammed with such.

  ‘Well, Tom thumbed them through and, although there was nothing much which would help his thesis along, there was this account of a ruined castle and its hidden treasure. I know these romantic stories are two a penny, but this particular one seemed more authentic and more likely than most.

  ‘The castle, built by the Normans on a hill which had been an early Saxon stronghold abandoned after the end of the Danish wars, was enlarged and altered during the Middle Ages and was held by the Royalists against Cromwell’s troops during the Civil War.

  ‘Well, the story told in the county magazine was that gold, silver and jewels had been collected from various Royalist sources and stored at the castle until they could be melted down or sold abroad to aid the Royalist cause.

  ‘When the garrison realised that the castle could not withstand further siege, but would have to surrender in the end, the treasure was dropped into a castle well in the hope that it would be safe there until the king got on top (which, of course, he never did) and the treasure resurrected and used to carry on the war.

  ‘When the castle was surrendered and evacuated, the Parliamentary army never found the stuff because, out of spite for having been kept at bay so long, they trained their artillery again on the empty buildings and reduced them more or less to rubble. The fallen masonry blocked the well so effectively that nobody knew where it had been and so the treasure, according to the account in the magazine, has never been found and must still be there. Apparently there is a cryptic reference to it in the county records.

  ‘I’m not saying that I regard this as anything more than a fairy-tale; on the other hand, there may be something in it. Very few people inside the castle itself knew anything about the disposal of the treasure or even of its existence, and it is quite likely that those few who had been trusted with the secret were killed when the castle was taken.

  ‘Tom has written to the owner of the estate on which the shell of the castle stands and has received permission to do a l
ittle restoration work. No mention of the treasure, of course, but I suppose that, if we do find anything, it will be crown property unless the coroner decides it belongs to the landowner. I am not up in these things, and anyway we have not found the stuff yet!’

  ‘And I shall be mighty surprised if they do,’ said Laura Gavin, when Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, the godmother to whom the letter was addressed, gave it to her to read. ‘If Bonamy wants a fortune, he should join an American tennis circuit or rob a bank.’

  ‘He does not appear to be a fortune hunter, but I hope he will keep us in touch with his activities,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I can think of no pastime more enchanting than looking for buried treasure. I even envy beachcombers. Theirs must be the happiest of existences, don’t you think? Bonamy does not name the castle. I wonder which one it is?’

  ‘I know which one it is – at least, I think I do,’ said Laura. ‘From the clues he gives, it must be Castle Holdy. I remember taking Hamish there one afternoon when he was nine. He enjoyed scrambling about among the ruins and the lower part of a newel staircase in the keep is still there. He climbed up as far as it went and I exercised great self-restraint and forbore to warn him to be careful. The staircase ended rather abruptly and there was a sheer drop of thirty feet with a mass of broken masonry at the bottom.’

  ‘You did well to issue no warning, but I would not be surprised to hear that you stationed yourself on the fallen masonry to catch him if he overbalanced.’

  ‘I did, but I didn’t utter a word except to answer him when he emerged and called down to me, “Here I am.” I have a theory that it makes children unsure of themselves if you tell them to be careful. Of course, accidents do happen, but, in my opinion, a self-confident, self-reliant child is a safe child. Kids know pretty well what they can do and what they can’t do. The trouble comes when they’re given a “dare”. I brought Hamish up to say, “I’ll do it, if you’ll do it first.” I’m not at all sure that he took the advice, though.’

  ‘If you and Hamish were able to scramble about on the hill and climb the ruins, I take it that the castle is open to the public.’

  ‘You mean we might go along and take a look? Yes, the ruins are open to the public all right. What’s more, there is no charge for admission, so far as I remember.’

  ‘So we shall enrich our experience and save our pockets at one and the same time, and that constitutes a bonus so unusual that it would be a pity not to take advantage of it.’

  ‘When do we go?’

  ‘Well, the weather is clement, the school holiday season is not yet upon us and we have no outstanding commitments.’

  ‘If Castle Holdy is the one I think it is,’ said Laura, ‘there is a pleasant seaside town not so very far from it. We could lunch there and visit the ruins in the afternoon. The place is called Holdy Bay. It’s a quiet, modest little town and will remain peaceful until the school summer holidays begin, and those are still nearly three weeks off, I think. The town itself is more bracing than other places near by, because, owing to the irregularities of the coastline, it faces almost due east instead of south. It would do us no end of good to take the air there.’

  ‘It sounds delightful. It is a long time since I spent a day in an English watering-place.’

  ‘I hope it has remained as it was, that’s all. It’s years since I took the children there. Gavin looked after Eiladh on the beach while I took Hamish to Holdy Castle, I remember, but mostly we stayed on the sands.’

  ‘The university term still has a day or two to run, so the boys will not have begun their search yet. Let us go to Holdy Bay tomorrow, and survey the castle ruins at our leisure on the following day.’

  Except for a housing estate on its outskirts and a caravan park on the seaward side of this estate, Holdy Bay had remained unspoilt. Its streets were narrow, its houses were old, and its two hotels were solid, unpretentious and comfortable. Laura booked two rooms for two nights at the Seagull and after lunch she left Dame Beatrice at the hotel and went out to renew her memories of the town.

  There was now a small yacht station in the arm between the old stone jetty and where the promenade ended, and at the landward end of the jetty there was a training school for deep-sea divers, but there were still the firm, flat sands, the bold headland to the south, the long, tapering peninsula to the north, and behind the promenade the grassy banks with park benches. There were no ugly shelters on the promenade, no beach huts, and the two hotels were back in the town.

  She walked to the end of the jetty, to where the local pleasure steamer tied up during the holiday season, and then returned to the promenade, left it at the coastguard station and walked up the hill at that end of the town. At the top she took her binoculars out of their case and raked the landscape until she picked out the remains of the castle keep. As the crow flies, the castle was surprisingly close at hand.

  On the following morning she and Dame Beatrice drove along winding roads to visit it. They were quickly out of the town and before they entered the next village the road appeared to double-back upon itself to curve round the foot of the hill which culminated at the high cliff Laura had seen from the promenade. Soon it crossed a bridge over a disused railway line and, a few miles further on, Laura stopped the car at a viewpoint from which there was a sight, in the far distance, of the castle. It was away to the left of the panorama which was spread out in front of and below the sightseer, for the road wound among low hills and was well above sea level.

  An expanse of unbroken moorland was bordered by an even greater expanse of shimmering water. The lay-by into which Laura had driven the car was protected from a long drop to the moor by a stone wall. She got out to admire the view. Beyond the moors and the brackish tidal estuary below her, she could see a town, but the chief point of interest was the castle keep. It stood out, a melancholy but dignified shell, on top of the hill she remembered from years back. She returned to the car and said, before she backed it carefully on to the narrow road, ‘Hamish is going on for thirty now.’

  ‘Eheu!Fugaces labuntur anni,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘True, but how sad! One feels with the poet:

  ‘Brightness falls from the air,

  Queens have died young and fair,

  Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.’

  They drove on in silence. There were banks with their tall, summer grasses, birdsfoot trefoil, horse-shoe vetch, scabious, purple milk-vetch, ragged robin and ox-eye daisies, and on the hedges, which had been left untrimmed, there was wild clematis. Blackberry bushes were in flower and, at one place, there was a copse of hazels.

  Laura pulled up again, got out of the car, jumped a ditch and returned with a spray of three hazel nuts in their green bracts accompanied by two heart-shaped, double-toothed leaves. She presented the spray to Dame Beatrice, who pinned it to the lapel of the summer jacket she was wearing and said, ‘Three wishes!’

  The narrow road made a last bend, went under instead of over the next railway bridge, and then it made a T-junction with the road which led one way to the village of Holdy and the other way further inland to the town Laura had seen from the viewpoint.

  She followed the signpost to the village. A stream ran alongside the road and there was a small waterfall. The village, stone-built and unspoilt, offered a parking-space for the car and in the small square there was a tea-shop which Laura marked down for future reference. She locked the car and then she and Dame Beatrice followed the little stream round the foot of the castle mound, climbed the slope and picked their way through the arch of the castle gatehouse, which was partially blocked with fallen masonry.

  Beyond this there was an expanse of almost level ground. Then came the steepest part of the hill crowned by the remains of the keep. Dame Beatrice looked at the fallen blocks of stone.

  ‘I am reminded,’ she said, ‘of a remark overheard by E. M. Delafield at Corfe Castle in Dorset and immortalised by her in The Diary of a Provincial Lady. A woman standing near the “Lady” said to her companion, “That bit looks
as if it had fallen off somewhere.” ’ Laura surveyed the debris with an indulgent eye. ‘There is enough work here to keep the young men out of mischief for weeks,’ she said, ‘never mind what’s fallen off where.’

  Shortly after returning home, Dame Beatrice received another letter from Bonamy:

  ‘Dear Godmother,

  ‘We have been outflanked! What do you think? Tom and I had hardly made our preliminary survey when two other interested parties turned up, although, thank goodness, they are not treasure-hunters like ourselves and neither will they be given any clue to our intentions.

  ‘One party seems to consist of a man and four women. The plump woman is his wife, then there are a gorgeous one, a little, thin one and a six-footer – a most intimidating young female, from whom, I should think, John Betjeman drew his portrait of the Olympic Girl. She makes me feel like the ‘unhealthy worm’ he refers to as himself.

  ‘The first hint we got that this gang were on the premises was when Tom spotted the caravan parked at the foot of the hill. The other party consists of two men and the first we knew of them was on our return from lunch at a pub-cum-hotel in the village. A couple of workmen were putting up a notice outside the gatehouse which read: Scientific work in progress. No admittance.

  ‘Of course Tom asked what the hell and the men said they didn’t know. They were only carrying out orders. While we were arguing, the other parties turned up and warned us off. I took over from Tom, as there were ladies present and his language, even in these lax times, is apt to be unguarded, and pointed out that we had a vested interest and must be allowed admittance to the site. I informed them that we were undergraduates and that we had permission from the landowner to work on the ruins. I spoke of vacation commitments and a thesis we had to write. I spoke well and eloquently.