Pageant of Murder mb-38

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I don’t know. They dug out of us all we knew, which was precious little, and I think they’re going to contact the charwoman and the school—oh, and Spey’s wife, of course, in case she knows where he is. They’ve got her address. It was wedged into a corner of the blotter on Spey’s desk.”

  “Did Gordon give any indication of what Spey seemed like at school on Friday?”

  “I asked him that, Auntie Laura, and he said that Spey and he had a communal belly-ache in Spey’s empty classroom at morning break about the way the police were persecuting them about Luton’s death, but that, otherwise, he seemed as usual.”

  “I wonder where the real sword came from—the one the police think was used on Falstaff,” said Laura.

  “Oh, that’s easy enough, I should say. Somebody must have borrowed it from Squire’s Acre. I noticed, when we had tea there on the day of the pageant, that old Batty-Faudrey has a positive armoury on his long gallery walls,” said Perse.

  “Yes, so he has,” agreed Kitty. “Not that I took much notice, but now you mention it…”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Laura, “is why the police have fastened on Gordon and Spey.”

  “I don’t think they’ve been victimised any more than others of the cast,” said Perse. “But, as teachers, they’re more vulnerable than some of the rest, I suppose, or perhaps more sensitive. Anyway, I thought you’d like to hear the latest news.”

  It was not quite the latest news, however. On the following evening Twigg came in with an evening paper and asked whether Kitty and Laura had seen it.

  “How can we have seen it?” his wife enquired.

  “Well, here you are.” He handed over the paper. “Here, where my thumb is.”

  “Good Lord!” said Kitty, scanning the paragraph. “They’ve found the body of that man Spey, but it’s minus its head!”

  “Then how do they know whose body it is?” asked Laura.

  “Well, it was dressed in the Henry VIII costume, and Spey is reported missing,” said Kitty. “So there it is.”

  “Still, if it hasn’t got a head, I don’t see that they can prove it’s Spey, costume or no costume.”

  “But, Dog, who else would have worn it?”

  “Almost anybody, I should have thought. Far more likely that Spey’s the murderer of Falstaff. After all, the usual reason for decapitating a corpse is to confuse the issue. Spey did in poor little Falstaff and now he’s killed another harmless bloke. That’s my reading of the evidence.”

  “I thought we’d agreed it wasn’t Gordon or Spey. You don’t think perhaps there were shades of Anne Boleyn?”

  “Shades of Anne Boleyn? How do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s true that, in the script, Falstaff’s basket, with him in it, was stuck into Thames mud, but Falstaff, in Shakespeare’s play, wasn’t stabbed. As I remember it, he died in bed. As for Henry VIII, well, he cut other people’s heads off, not his own.”

  “Rather difficult to cut your own head off, what?”

  “I’m serious, Dog.”

  “I know you are. Despite the flippancy, so am I. But it’s really no business of ours.”

  “I was responsible for organising the beastly pageant. I feel it all began with that.”

  “Stop having this feminine guilt-complex. You didn’t think up the pageant. It was wished on you, so it’s nothing to do with you if these burghers do one another in.”

  “Oh, Dog! How can you?”

  “What now?”

  “You shouldn’t have called them burghers.”

  “Why not? I suppose that’s what they are, now Brayne is a borough, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t help thinking of the Burghers of Calais. You know—ropes round their necks, and all that! And that other man, Gordon, was Edward III, don’t forget.”

  “You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

  “No, Dog, it isn’t my imagination; it’s my deep-rooted instinct that, from the very beginning, there’s been a jinx or a gremlin or some extraordinary hoodoo brooding over this pageant. You can see now how things are going to tie up. Everybody who gets murdered is going to be dressed in the costume they wore at the pageant. It’s enough to give me a permanent nightmare.”

  “Oh, rot! Look here, snap out of it. If Luton had got to be murdered there and then, he’d have to be killed while he was wearing the Falstaff costume. That’s if he was murdered. We don’t even know that for certain, although I’m bound to admit that this new development doesn’t leave much room for doubt.”

  “That’s all right about Falstaff, but why, after the pageant is over, should Spey have been trotting around looking like Henry VIII?”

  “I wonder exactly what he did when he left school on Friday afternoon—because, obviously, he didn’t go home.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Councillor Perse Takes a Hand

  “…and the fourth horse, inscribed Broken Down, represents the position of Mr Roche.”

  « ^ »

  Laura returned to Kensington on the following afternoon, there to await her employer, who was not expected in London until the next day. Henri and Celestine, the domestic staff, welcomed Laura. It had been a dull week, they said.

  Dame Beatrice returned at the appointed time and she and Laura were kept busy at the London clinic until the second week in June, when most of the patients recovered sufficiently to take their summer holiday, a phenomenon which occurred yearly. Dame Beatrice and Laura, therefore, cruised in a large liner and visited the West Indies, returning to the Stone House in the Hampshire village of Wandles Parva towards the end of July.

  Here they were blessed by the society of Laura’s son Hamish and two schoolfellows, named Gibbs and Honeybun, until all three went off on a school outing to Yugoslavia by sea.

  “Schools are a big improvement on what they were,” said Laura, when she returned from having seen the children safely into the care of a young master of angelic aspect but commanding eye. “It’s too marvellous to get rid of Hamish so easily and for three glorious, carefree weeks. I’m glad they’re not going to fly, though. I don’t like aeroplanes.”

  “It is as well, then, that Hamish shares your passion for the sea,” said Dame Beatrice. “By the way, a letter came for you. I think it must be from our dear Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg, from what I remember of her handwriting.”

  The letter was indeed from Kitty, and it struck a protesting and mournful note. Laura read it twice and then passed it to Dame Beatrice.

  “Wouldn’t you say that this is an epistle written by a woman wailing for her demon lover?” she enquired. Dame Beatrice handed back the letter as soon as she had read it.

  “Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg certainly appears to be somewhat agitated,” she said.

  “Yes. Just fancy her wretched nephew wanting to hold another pageant! Thinks it may help to bring something to light! Furthermore, thinks the last one didn’t really do justice to the history of the borough.”

  “Well, child, from what I have gathered, it did not do justice to the history of the borough. I became interested and made a few notes. It seems that, apart from the Romans and Saxons in general, the Roman commander Aulus Plautius visited the place with elephants. Later on, it was known to Offa of Mercia and was ravaged by the Danes. A synod of the Church was held there, and there Saint Dunstan was given a bishopric. Two kings, Edmund Ironside and Canute, fought a battle at Brayne, the Norman knight Maurice de Berkeley was connected with the place and, in its later history, it housed a Chapter of the Garter. Shakespeare refers to one of its inns, a battle of the Civil War was fought in its streets and it was well-known, during the eighteenth-century elections, to John Horne Tooke and John Wilkes. Tooke, in fact, was the vicar of Brayne at the time.”

  “Golly!” said Laura, awe-stricken. “But what does he mean about a Hock Day? Some sort of local jamboree and get-together, I suppose? But why hock? I should have thought beer would be more in keeping—or, possibly mead.”

  “The original Hock Day
s were festivals held between Easter and Whitsun for the purpose of collecting money. Parts of the town were barred off with ropes and people wishing to enter such streets were mulcted of a small fee before being allowed to go on their way.”

  “But you couldn’t do that sort of thing nowadays! It would create chaos. Think of the hold-up of cars! I think Kitty’s nevvy ought to be certified!”

  “She will talk him out of the Hocking, I dare say. If she doesn’t, the police will. However, she needs comforting. Invite her to come and stay for a bit. I wonder how soon, if at all, Mr Perse intends to stage this second pageant?”

  This question was answered by Kitty herself when she arrived on the following day.

  “He’s spending the whole of his summer holiday getting it all taped out,” she said, “and he’s going to begin rehearsing for it at the end of September, because he wants to have the school-children in it again, and they’ll be finished with holidays by then. I don’t grudge him his bit of fun, and he’s done heaps of research and all that, but he’s planning to do things that make my inside go cold every time I think of them.”

  “Such as?” Laura enquired.

  “Well, there’s this Hocking business.”

  “Don’t worry about that. The police will never let him get away with it.”

  “Then there’s this dancing round the sacred oak.”

  “What sacred oak?”

  “Just outside Brayne there’s a sportsground. It’s part of Brayne Common. Well, in the very middle of the sportsground there’s an oak tree, and one story goes that it had to do with the Druids and is sacred. Anyway, he’s going to have dancing round it, with pagan rites and what-have-you. It’s so heathenish of him.”

  “Hardly the original tree, do you think?” asked Laura, declining to comment on the religious aspect.

  “I’ve no idea, Dog. Wouldn’t you have to cut it down and inspect its vascular bundles or its annual rings, or something, to establish that? Anyway, another theory is that it used to be the hangman’s tree, and the local criminals were strung up on it, and that’s not very nice either—leathery corpses hanging in chains, and all that. I don’t like it. I can’t forget what happened at the last pageant, and I call it flying in the face of Providence to hold another one.”

  “Have they discovered any more about those two deaths? I’ve rather lost touch since Mrs Croc. and I went on that cruise. It’s true the purser or someone used to pin up a daily news-bulletin, but it was never about anything but politics and pop-groups. Not a word about anything interesting.”

  “Well, there were the inquests, of course. My god-forsaken nephew went to both of them. Death by Misadventure in the case of poor little Luton, and murder, by person or persons unknown, in the case of the school-master Spey.”

  “Have they found his head?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Gordon, and another master, and one of the doctors at the hospital where he had his appendix out, all identified the body (separately, because I think the police still have their eye on Gordon) and swore to a birthmark on his chest. The doctor had seen it in hospital and the others had been swimming with him. They didn’t bother the wife. She was sufficiently upset as it was.”

  “The police have to accept the verdict in Luton’s case, I suppose, but I bet their files are still open. I don’t see how the jury could have come to such a conclusion. It was manslaughter, if nothing worse. Death by Misadventure my foot!”

  “Well, it was known that some of the cast went over to the pub both before and during the interval, so the coroner put out the suggestion of beery horseplay and the jury accepted it, I suppose. Of course, the fact of the matter, as I now maintain, is that, beery or not, Gordon did in Luton and then had to finish off Spey because Spey knew all about it.”

  “Well, it’s possible, I suppose. By the way, did the real sword come from Squire’s Acre?”

  “Oh, yes, it was one of a set of four.”

  “Four?”

  “Yes, four duelling swords. You know—choice of weapons and all that.”

  “Have the Batty-Faudreys been given it back?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose so.”

  “It wasn’t used after the interval because they didn’t do their second scene, so where did the sword get to? Where was it found?”

  “Again, Dog, I simply don’t know.”

  “Well, get your nephew to find out.”

  “All right, I will. Being on the Council doesn’t necessarily admit him to the counsels of the police, though.”

  “Extremely well expressed, if I may so so.”

  “Oh, well, in my job I sometimes have to make speeches, so I’ve collected a few useful words such as “necessarily” and “counsels”, and “erratic” and “influential” and “trends”. You’d be surprised how often you can bring them in.”

  “No, I shouldn’t. Any more available information?”

  “No, but I’ve got a theory.”

  “Not another one?”

  “It’s about cutting off that head. Could it have been done with one of the Saxon swords? They were long and heavy, weren’t they?”

  “The real ones were, yes, but I doubt whether any of them would be any good nowadays. Besides, the Saxons in the pageant were long-haired school-girls who wore swords made from laths, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, of course. Could the murderer have been disguised as a girl, do you think?”

  “Come, come! Teenage girls would have spotted him a mile off and raised hell, if only with screams of laughter. Be your age, dear, do!”

  “You don’t say that any more, Dog. It’s out of date.”

  “Maybe, but it wasn’t a bad old slogan, all the same. It said what it meant, which is more than most of the slogans do nowadays.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  “About what?”

  “About stopping Julian from putting on this beastly second-time-of-asking pageant, of course.”

  “I don’t see that there’s anything to do.”

  “But somebody else may be killed!”

  “Most unlikely, Old Sobersides. Don’t be so fanciful, and, above all, don’t worry.”

  “I don’t like the way nothing’s come out about those other deaths, and I don’t like playing with fire, Dog.”

  “Why not? I bet you went mafficking on Guy Fawkes Night with the rest and the best of us, didn’t you?”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know it isn’t, but don’t get all tensed up.”

  “I’ve got a feeling.”

  “Yes, so have I, but that’s nothing to go by. I’ve often had one, and nothing’s happened at all.”

  “You may not have known about it. Something may have happened and you not know it.”

  Dame Beatrice, who had listened with interest to the conversation, decided to intervene.

  “I should like,” she said, “to be more definitely informed about the deaths which have already taken place. The drama club appears to be involved up to the hilt, and yet, if it was some one or more of them, I should have thought…”

  “Yes, I do agree,” said Laura. “The police would have had the edge on him or them by now. But if not the drama club—well, who?”

  “That’s just it, Dog,” agreed Kitty. “I know there were arguments and jealousies and general eye-scratching and back-biting, but nothing that would justify murder, unless the murderer was mad.”

  “Any signs of anybody actually trying to bite holes in the carpet?”

  “No, there aren’t, so far as I know. Of course, I don’t know what blood-feuds may have been going on before the actual rehearsals for the pageant, but I do know there was pretty bad feeling then.”

  “I wonder whether anything definite touched it off? It might be very interesting to know.”

  “All I know is,” said Kitty, forcefully, “that I’ve shaken the dust of Brayne well and truly off my non-stiletto heels and nothing will induce me to go there again, plead my nephew never
so pathetically.”

  “A pity,” said Dame Beatrice. “I was hoping to persuade you and Laura to accompany me there and show me round.”

  Kitty looked horrified . Then, as Laura laughed, her expression changed.

  “You mean you intend to look into these murders?” she asked.

  “Say rather that I intend to look into the environment in which these murders took place,” replied Dame Beatrice.

  “I know what that means,” said Kitty. “All right, then. I’ll be led to the slaughter, if that’s what you want.”

  “There is something else, if you can arrange it. Would it be possible, do you think, for me to meet your nephew before we go?”

  “You think you may be able to pump some information out of him? I doubt whether he knows very much, but you could try. Will you and Laura come to dinner at my flat one evening? I can easily put you up for the night, now that the children are with my sister in Cornwall.”

  There were six people in all at the dinner. Kitty’s husband had invited a colleague who devoted himself to Kitty during the meal and talked fly-fishing with her husband for the remainder of the evening. Kitty’s husband talked mostly to Laura during the meal, and Kitty and Laura talked jobs, children and old times when it was over. Councillor Perse attached himself inexorably to Dame Beatrice both during the dinner and until he left for his lodgings in Brayne at just after eleven p.m., and talked almost incessantly to her, pausing only when she asked an occasional question.

  “Did you find out anything useful?” Laura enquired, when he and the other man had gone, and Kitty and her husband were organising sandwiches and drinks.

  “I think I must have found out all that Mr Perse knows and everything that he suspects. He was extremely expansive.”

  “Yes, I noticed that.”

  “Whether what he was able to tell me will be useful, is more than I can say at present. However, he was good enough to promise that he will have a word with the Town Hall staff, so that I shall be allowed every facility to study the stage, the dressing-rooms, and the door which opens on to Smith Hill.”

  “Oh, well, that’s definitely something.”

  In company with Kitty, they visited Brayne on the following evening between afternoon tea and dinner, to find that young Mr Perse had been as good as his word, and that they were indeed to have “every facility”. The caretaker recognised Kitty at once, saluted the party courteously and asked where they would like to go. He conducted them ceremoniously to the auditorium, told them that the dressing-rooms were unlocked and that there was nothing to do to the outside door except to turn the handle, and then, with another salute, added that it was all theirs.