Death of a Burrowing Mole mb-62

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘It is only a suggestion that there may have been method in the seeming madness. I have an open mind.’

  ‘Slightly biased by what you know of human nature and its go-get instinct, though. Oh, I still haven’t finished reading Bonamy’s letter.’

  ‘The damage to the site is pretty considerable,’ Bonamy had continued. ‘Everybody is certain that it is the work of village hooligans, although I’m bound to say that, although we’ve now been on the spot for some time, we have never seen a sign of skinheads or other rumbustious gangs. However, something young Priscilla said, just as the gin, plus a poem she insisted on reciting to us, caused her to wash out the party atmosphere with some very embarrassing sobs and tears, has made me think a bit. She said that she is certain Tynant and Saltergate have had a worse row than the one Saltergate had with Veryan, and we know how that one ended up, although it would be libellous for me to make any obvious connection.’

  ‘He’s made one all right, though,’ commented Laura, ‘but we gave up suspecting Saltergate ages ago, and I thought Bonamy had too. Still, there’s the hint, for what it’s worth. As for the row, I’ve no doubt that Priscilla, the wan little half-portion, is right. There’s so little of her, and what there is is so quiet and unnoticeable, that perhaps she gets to hear things which would not be said in front of other people.’

  ‘I think you may be right about Priscilla, but I certainly refuse to believe that Mr Saltergate, however bitter his feelings, would stoop to the kind of revenge at which Bonamy hints. We may be able to come to firmer conclusions when we have seen for ourselves how much and what kind of damage has been done. Ring up Holdy Bay and find out whether our hotel can lodge us tonight and tomorrow night. I want to get to Castle Holdy before too much clearing up is done.’

  ‘Right. I love not to let the grass grow.’ Laura skipped to the end of the letter, folded it and handed it back. She returned from the telephone to report that rooms were available at the Seagull. ‘I suppose business has fallen off since they axed the local railway,’ she said. ‘Are we proposing to look at the castle before we clock in at the hotel?’

  ‘Certainly. We can lunch on the way down.’

  ‘Do you think I underestimate young Yateley?’

  ‘She may not have a head for gin and she may be affected deeply by poetry, especially when she is reciting it, but there is nothing wrong with her brains. So far as I know, she has made only one slip. According to the Chief Constable, she stated to Detective-Superintendent Mowbray that, during the fateful weekend when Professor Veryan died, she joined in some kind of political demonstration. Investigation proved that there were no London marches, political or otherwise, at that time. I wonder why she made a statement which could be disproved by the county police in contact with the Metropolitan branch? I suppose W. S. Gilbert has the answer.’

  ‘To lend verisimilitude, et cetera?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Bonamy’s reference to the damage was, as Laura put it, the understatement of the century. Tynant’s outer trench was a gaping, soil-scattered ruin. The pegs he had put in to mark the inner trench had been dragged out and thrown away and a pick and shovel had eliminated all traces of his carefully measured inner circle.

  ‘Looks as though the Gadarene swine have been out on a bender,’ said Laura. There was more to come, but of a very different nature. Mowbray’s posse, sent to search Goole’s shed and the woods, had found a motorcycle combination in a little clearing. Goole, although hard-pressed by Mowbray, strenuously denied all knowledge of how it had come to be there.

  ‘And I believe him up to a point, sir,’ said Harrow. ‘I don’t think he would have left it in the open. He’d have hidden it in that shed of his.’

  ‘But then he couldn’t have denied knowledge of it,’ said Mowbray.

  14

  Interim Reports

  « ^ »

  The moon is up, the stars are bright, the wind is fresh and free”,’ said Tom.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning, as Alfred Noyes went on to say, “we’re out to seek for gold tonight”, although not across the silver sea, but in the devastated area which used to be the outer bailey of Holdy Castle. Now that there is no star-gazer on top of the keep and no caravan at the gatehouse, the coast is most beautifully clear and we ought to take advantage of the fact.’

  ‘I thought you had given up all thought of the treasure. It seems impossible for us to clear the wells.’

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether other people besides ourselves have got wind that there may be something worthwhile among those ruins. I’ve been thinking about the mess somebody has made of Tynant’s trenches and trying to work out who was responsible for it.’

  ‘Village louts.’

  ‘There don’t seem to be any. Most of the residents are retired people with sufficient means to buy up the old cottages, convert them and pass a blameless old age adding various amenities to their dwellings, messing about with gardening and, when they want a bit of excitement, walking the dog and cleaning the car or having cream teas at the restaurant.’

  ‘Then who did vandalise Tynant’s trenches?’

  ‘Either Stickle and Stour or the two chaps who lost the chance of a job on the site when you and I volunteered to help out. You mark my words. A rumour has gone around. Chaps like Stickle and Stour would never believe that Tynant is doing all that digging just to find an old grave with a few mouldy bones and some bits of broken pottery or whatever. I bet there are plenty of folk-tales about buried treasure at the castle. There must be, or somebody wouldn’t have written that piece in the county magazine. What’s more, they think the stuff is buried in the outer bailey, otherwise Tynant, in their opinion, would be excavating wells, not methodically digging trenches. The point is, you know, they could be right.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t somebody had a go before this?’

  ‘Be yourself, man! The castle is on private property. Nobody would have dared to organise a dig for gold without permission, but now our lot have come along and begun the work, so the whole situation, so far as the natives are concerned, has changed.’

  ‘They’ve still no right to come and ruin Tynant’s work.’

  ‘Never mind about their rights. Of course they haven’t got any, but the fact that digging is being done, and quite deep digging at that, means that all the old stories will have come back to people’s minds. When I was getting the drinks at lunchtime today, the barman asked me whether we’d had any luck yet. “Luck about what?” I said. At that, he winked and laid a finger resembling a large pork sausage against his bulbous proboscis and then shook his head at me. Something has gone around and, if the next village has got wind of a treasure hunt, goodness knows what is seething underground in Holdy itself. I think we ought to take advantage of the moonlight to have a good look at the whole site while nobody else is about.’

  ‘I’m not too enthusiastic about being seen loitering about on the site at present. I think Tynant may suspect Saltergate is at the bottom of this destruction business. He doesn’t accept that it was done by louts or by Stickle and Stour. You remember that young Priscilla told us that Tynant and Saltergate had a bust-up last week. She heard Saltergate talking to Mrs Saltergate about it. I wonder whether my godmother has got the letter I posted this afternoon and what she will make of what I told her?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. Are we going gold-digging or aren’t we?’

  ‘I thought I had made my position clear,’ said Bonamy. ‘However, reluctant as I am to underline such remarks as I may deign to toss at you as fancy dictates and my blood-pressure allows, I will make myself clearer. I don’t go anywhere near those ruddy ruins at night, treasure or no treasure. I don’t intend to be mistaken for one of the blighters who messed up those trenches. Tynant is nearly crazy with fury about them.’

  ‘Who’s to see us?’

  ‘Probably half the village would see us. There must have been a couple of dozen gawpers there when we got to the site this m
orning, so the word will have gone round to everybody by now and, for all I know, there may be a couple of hundred at the site at this very moment, rooting around like pigs after truffles. Tynant will have to pay nightwatchmen with guns and dogs if he wants to keep people off treasure-hunting now. It will be worse than the Klondyke gold-rush.’

  ‘Tynant is as sick as mud, I agree, but, whatever Priscilla says, I don’t believe Tynant really thinks Saltergate is responsible for the damage. Nobody who has even the slightest knowledge of him would think for an instant that he would be capable of ruining another man’s work. If the boot was on the other foot I wouldn’t be so sure. Tynant is not my favourite man and I think him quite capable of playing nasty tricks.’

  ‘You’re biased because of his interest in Susannah.’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway, Fiona thinks that he has put his luck to the test and that Susannah has turned him down. That was a strange business about her and the gamekeeper and the motorbike thing. I wonder what the idea was?’

  ‘The idea of leaving the bike in those woods? It makes no sense at all, unless Stickle and Stour were Veryan’s killers and ditched the bike so that they couldn’t be traced through its being recognised.’

  ‘I might accept that if they had cleared out directly they knew that the police were not going to accept that Veryan’s death was accidental, but they stayed on through all the police questioning. It’s only over the last few days that we haven’t seen anything of them.’

  Mowbray had leant heavily on Goole when the police found the vehicle in the woods.

  ‘How did it come there?’

  ‘How should I know? It ain’t a part of the woods which concerns me and my work. Them trees and bushes isn’t nobody’s concern but the woodman’s, and he don’t have no call to go there till he’s told, and he won’t be told, not till the master gets back.’

  ‘The men who own that bike and sidecar have gone missing. What do you know about that?’

  ‘What men? I don’t know nobody what own a bike and side-car. Nobody don’t use them things nowadays. If I’d of found it, I daresay I’d have thought it belonged to the young lady.’

  ‘And if it had been hers, what were you going to do when she or a friend of hers came to claim it?’

  ‘I dunno. Just ’and it over, like, I reckon, so long as she could make good as it were hern.’

  ‘No doubt you would have expected to get something for your trouble.’

  ‘I don’t never think of no such thing. I’m honest, I am.’

  ‘All right, Goole, but you watch your step, that’s all. You’d be in dead trouble if the young lady had pressed charges of wrongful arrest, unlawful incarceration and improper intention to assault her.’

  ‘Garn!’ said Goole. ‘I on’y wanted to fritten her a bit.’

  ‘You threatened her with a lethal weapon.’

  ‘It’s my right if I cotches a poacher.’

  ‘Next time you catch a young lady in your woods, I’ll have you for behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace if you dare to threaten her.’

  ‘She blacked my eye. It was her as breached the peace.’

  ‘All right, we’ll leave it at that. I suppose you can’t give me any idea what time of the day or night the motorbike (which you now know did not belong to the young lady) might have been left in the woods?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been by night. I would be patrollin’ or if so be as I was a-bed, well, I sleeps very light and it would a-woke me. I reckon it must have been in daylight. Motors and tradesmen’s vans, and all that, comes up through the gates frequent, so I shouldn’t have tooken no heed to a motorbike, not in daylight hours I shouldn’t.’

  ‘All right, I’ll talk to you again later on.’

  Mowbray returned to the Holdy Bay police station puzzled and dissatisfied. He could think of no reason why Stickle and Stour should have abandoned their means of transport, or why, having done so, they had chosen to disappear. The logical procedure, if they had intended to give up working for Tynant, was to have asked for any wages due to them after they had worked out their week’s notice, and gone off on the motorcycle combination as usual, this time with no intention of returning. A possible explanation, which, although it persisted in his mind, he was unwilling to accept, was that one of them had killed the other and ditched the recognisable motorcycle combination before making a getaway. Like the two young men, he connected the vandalism with treasure-hunting, and what more likely, he was beginning to think, than that Stickle and Stour had been the vandals and had fallen out with one another to the point of a fight to the death? He realised though, that, but for Veryan’s death, this explanation would not have occurred to him.

  Dame Beatrice and Laura arrived in Holdy village soon after three and parked the car where the caravan had stood.

  ‘Well!’ said Laura, surveying the scene of devastation. ‘You’d think the place had been blitzed!’

  ‘Whoever the busy vandals were, they were in a very great hurry,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  There was nobody about except a massive policeman who walked down from the gatehouse to the car.

  ‘Dame Beatrice, ma’am?’ he asked politely. ‘We got word that you might be expected.’

  ‘Yes, I telephoned Detective-Superintendent Mowbray from the hotel where Mrs Gavin and I had lunch.’

  ‘I have instructions to give you access to the ruins, ma’am. We are keeping them clear otherwise, except for Mr Tynant and Mr Saltergate. We don’t even want the other members of their party tramping about until the two gentlemen can assess the amount of the damage and decide what’s to be done.’

  ‘I am no expert in these matters,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘so a closer inspection probably will tell me no more than I can learn from where we are standing. However’ – she walked up through the gatehouse and surveyed the scene at closer quarters – ‘it looks as though earth has been shovelled into what was the great ditch which formed a segment of Mr Tynant’s outer circle.’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am. The sides of the main trench have been kind of stove in and the soil dumped in the ditch.’

  ‘So I can see. Do you know where I can find Mr Tynant?’

  ‘Detective-Superintent Mowbray asked me to tell you he would be in the lounge of the Barbican along with Mr Tynant and would wait there till you came, ma’am.’

  ‘Splendid. Thank you, officer.’

  ‘Sounds as though Mowbray is keeping tabs on Tynant,’ said Laura, when they were in the car and heading for the Barbican. ‘Surely he can’t suspect him of making away with the two workmen?’

  ‘Did you notice that Mr Saltergate’s towers, two of them, had also been vandalised?’

  ‘Yes, I saw that, but only in a general sort of way. I mean, I wasn’t bothering whose work had suffered what damage, but merely getting a general impression.’

  ‘That rather destroys the theory that Saltergate was responsible for the damage, doesn’t it? I think it was the work of three men. One would have used a pick, and he could have worked quickly enough, I think, to keep two others busy with their shovels. Now for the Barbican.’

  Laura drove in under the archway entrance to the hotel car park and she and Dame Beatrice went into the reception hall. Mowbray rose from an armchair near the door and greeted them.

  ‘We have just come from the castle,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘The damage can hardly have been done by mice.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘I beg your pardon. The famous Bruce Bairnsfather cartoons of the 1914 war would have been long before your time. So you are looking for three men.’

  ‘Two, we thought, ma’am, those being Stickle and Stour.’

  ‘Three is more likely, but I do not insist upon that number. You told me, when I telephoned you at lunchtime, that you thought I might be of help. In what way? I intended to come merely because Bonamy Monkswood wrote to me.’

  ‘So I understand, ma’am, but there is a matter over which you can be a lot of help to us, if you will. The two
youngest ladies, Miss Broadmayne and Miss Yateley, have been to me with a half-told story which I should like to check, but Miss Yateley turned very timid and, indeed, got herself into what I can only describe as ‘a state’. I think she was almost dragged along to me by the other young lady and the interview turned into a horse-to-water episode which frustrated me and got the young lady herself into such a tizzy that I gave up questioning her. In the end she was repeating over and over again that she knew nothing, it was all her imagination, she had never meant any harm, Fiona was a traitor and a bully and a telltale, and so on and so forth, all very high-pitched and hysterical, until I told the other young lady to take her back to the cottage where they are now staying and put her to bed with a couple of aspirins.’

  ‘Did Miss Broadmayne offer an explanation of Miss Yateley’s outburst?’

  ‘No. All she said was that Priscilla had something to tell me about Professor Veryan’s death.’

  ‘Oh, not about the wreckage of Mr Tynant’s trenches?’

  ‘No, ma’am, nor of the damage to the foundations of two of Mr Saltergate’s bits of walling, that’s to say two of what he calls his flanking-towers. Somebody has pickaxed their foundations.’

  ‘So I could see. What is the present relationship between the two gentlemen?’

  ‘Much improved, according to Mrs Saltergate and Dr Lochlure. Each has absolved the other of what Mr Hassocks – a lively young gentleman that, ma’am – referred to as “dirty work at the crossroads”.’

  ‘That must be very gratifying to Mrs Saltergate and Dr Lochlure. Well, where shall I find Miss Yateley? Where is this cottage which I understand the two girls share with the two young men?’

  ‘I’ll take you along, ma’am. If Mr Monkswood is hoping to see you, he’ll be there.’

  ‘Where did you meet the two girls and when?’

  ‘At the police headquarters in Holdy Bay this morning. I heard about the damage to the trenches and walls from them. Mr Tynant phoned through while they were still with me, but I had had the news already, although I did not tell him that.’