Spotted Hemlock mb-31

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Having achieved the status of wife,’ said Laura primly, ‘my first thought should be for my husband’s child. However, as the said child has no particular use for me—Célestine can dish him out his meals and see to his general needs—I will accompany you with pleasure, unless my services are required here.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You run along. I’ll see to Ian Alastair Hamish, bless his heart.’

  ‘Oh, well, he likes you ever so much better than he does me, so that’s all right. Where are you going to give me lunch?’ said Laura, addressing the statement to Dame Beatrice and the question to her husband.

  Your favourite Helmsdale Arms, if we start at once. I need not phone them to keep a table. They’re not likely to be full up at this time of year.’

  Dame Beatrice packed up the purloined photograph and returned it by registered post but without a covering letter. It was better, she decided, that Mrs Biancini should have her curiosity left unsatisfied rather than she should think that her husband had been suspected of deceiving her with her own daughter. On the ethics of the means she had used to obtain possession of the photograph she was too realistic and far too honest to dwell. She had needed the picture and the end—that of proving Mr Biancini’s innocence in respect of the matter under immediate review—appeared to have justified the means. The Jesuits, after all, had a word for it.

  She telephoned Miss McKay.

  ‘I have some enquiries to make which cannot be made over the telephone. Where can I meet you, and when?’

  Her second call was to the aunt who managed the small hotel at Harrafield.

  ‘Can you possibly give me the address of Mr Biancini’s relatives in Italy?—the people with whom he spent part of his summer holiday?’ The aunt could and did. ‘And do you know of the hotel to which, at Mrs Biancini’s request, they transferred themselves?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what it’s like. It’s a place just outside Naples, on the road south. My sister didn’t care for the relations, so they went there. The Vittorio, it’s called, but I don’t at all know whether it would suit you. People have such different ideas.’

  ‘If it’s on the road to Pompeii, it will suit admirably, I’m sure.’

  ‘Of course, if you like those old ruins. Well, mind, I can’t recommend it. Of course, you get choosy when you’re like me and keep a nice place of your own, but my sister thought very well of it, although she said it was gloomy. One of Tony’s relations works there, I believe.’

  Dame Beatrice rang up the travel agency and booked two seats on an aeroplane going to Rome. There was no need to rush to Naples. She had learned and disputatious friends in Rome who would expect her to visit them. She wondered whether Miss McKay could be suborned into taking the extra seat on the aeroplane, but that was but a secondary reason for her visit to the Principal of Calladale.

  The first person she saw as the car turned in at the college gates was the girl who had informed her that the former Norah Palliser had become Norah Coles. Dame Beatrice stopped the car and got out.

  ‘Oh, good afternoon, Dame Beatrice. Did you want Mr Lestrange?’ asked the student.

  ‘Not particularly. I have an appointment with Miss McKay.’

  ‘He’d be very disappointed to miss you. He tells his students an awful lot about you. I wish I took Livestock. He must be a lovely change after Piggy Basil.’

  ‘Piggy…?’

  ‘Well, we never really knew whether Basil was his first name or not. They don’t put our lecturers’ names on the college prospectus. Miss McKay’s goes on, but not the others. Look, must you go and see her at once? Mr Lestrange is lecturing on castration, and they all loathe it, anyway, and say they’d always get the vet. It’s the most dreaded thing in the syllabus, but, of course, it’s part of it all, so Mr Lestrange has to show them how it’s done.’

  ‘I am not at all sure that I would not prefer to be a trifle early for my appointment with Miss McKay. I should hate to interrupt my nephew at such a moment. Incidentally, I must be interrupting you, too.’

  ‘Oh, our lot are only supposed to be filling in the root holes of mulberries with compost. I’ve plenty of time. The others can carry on quite well without me. It’s not a bad job, so they won’t mind. The compost we’re using is only a mixture of loam, leaf-mould and soil. It even smells quite nice.’

  ‘Mulberries? Do you rear silkworms on the leaves?’ Dame Beatrice asked, beginning to walk up the path.

  ‘One or two cranks have permission. Personally, I couldn’t be bothered.’

  ‘Which species of mulberry do you cultivate?’

  ‘Oh, the Black Mulberry. It’s supposed to fruit the best. Well, here we are. I’d better not come any further.’ She glanced down at boots heavy with the rich, damp soil of autumn. ‘I’ll tell Mr Lestrange you’re here.’

  ‘Tell me one thing. This Mr Basil was unpopular, did you indicate?’

  ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that. He was pretty well liked, on the whole. Of course, his jokes were rather grubby and he was always asking people to go out to dinner with him, not in Garchester, where we’re known, but in little road-houses and rather furtive sort of riverside pubs. Incidentally, he used to meet Norah Coles quite a lot. It can’t matter telling you that.’

  ‘X?’ said Dame Beatrice, under her breath. ‘I think I would like to see Mr Lestrange before I contact Miss McKay,’ she added aloud. ‘I can find my way to the piggeries, so please don’t let me keep you from your mulberries.’

  The girl laughed, and tramped away, gallant and somehow pathetic in her heavy boots, leggings and stout, unglamorous breeches. Dame Beatrice gazed after her for a moment, and then walked round the side of the main building. There were students at work in the kitchen garden who directed her.

  Operation Eunuch was over by the time she arrived, and Carey was washing his hands beside a tap on the end wall of the pig-house. Dame Beatrice was reminded irresistibly of the Jackdaw of Rheims, in which, when the Cardinal washed his hands, various nice little boys held the various toilet requisites. Except that her nephew looked not at all like a cardinal, and that the nice little boys were sturdy girls and students of farm procedure, the analogy was exact. One obsequious student held the towel, another the soap-dish, another the bowl of very hot water in which the preliminary ablutions were being performed, and another a second bowl which she brought from under the tap at which still another student stood ready to turn the water off.

  ‘Well, girls,’ Dame Beatrice heard her nephew say, ‘you may find yourselves raising hogs in the backwoods of one of the outposts of the Commonwealth one of these days, and if you do, this little bit of exposition will come in very useful, because you mayn’t be in touch with a vet. at all when it comes to the right time to turn Nature’s boars into civilisation’s bacon pigs, and that’s a job that’s got to be done when they’re six weeks old. Oh, hallo, Aunt Adela! Scatter, you children, and let me have all your notebooks in by tomorrow at twelve, don’t forget’

  The students groaned and laughed, and left him alone with Dame Beatrice.

  ‘I won’t keep you,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re busy.’

  ‘My next lot come along in a quarter of an hour. Come and have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Thank you, but I am due to visit Miss McKay. There is, however, something I want to ask you. What have you been told about the man whose place you are taking?’

  Carey looked surprised.

  ‘The chap they call the Piggy? Not a lot.’

  ‘Would you be surprised, from what little you have heard, that he would be capable of persuading one of these girls to go on holiday with him?’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours about him, but, under the particular circumstances in which I find myself, I’ve felt rather bound to scotch any information of that sort. Why?’

  ‘I think I’ve found X, and he appears to add up, as Laura would say, to your predecessor, Mr Basil.’

  ‘Good Lord! You don’t mean the murderer?’

  ‘I don’
t know whether I mean that, but, of course, one can’t be sure. What are you going to do when you’ve drunk your tea?’

  ‘Explain what you do when your pigs contract scouring, swine fever and tuberculosis.’

  ‘Surely not at one and the same time? That, I feel, would make medical history, even among pigs.’

  ‘Too right it would. It’s an either/or proposition.’

  They strolled towards the main college building. At the foot of the steps they stopped.

  ‘Well,’ said Carey, “bye-bye for now, as one of my students rather regrettably puts it.’

  He sauntered off. His aunt leered affectionately at his retreating figure, and then went off in search of the student from whom she had heard that Norah Palliser was married. She found her, as she had hoped, among the mulberries.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘when Mrs Coles told you that she was married, did she happen to mention why she had decided to embrace the holy estate without waiting to finish her college course?’

  ‘Actually, yes. I couldn’t help sympathising, either. I mean, you can’t trust anybody nowadays, can you?’

  ‘I may be old-fashioned, but I confess that that seems to me a remarkably pessimistic point of view.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. People are always letting other people down, particularly the sexes. You’d be surprised how many people here have more or less broken hearts through being let down by some man or other. The Highpeppers are especially prone to it. Sometimes I think they aren’t serious types at all.’

  ‘Have you yourself…?’

  ‘Me? Oh, no. I’ve got a steady back home. He works for my father, so I’ve got the tabs on him all right. No, I was just speaking generally. If you’d tried to mend as many broken hearts as I have…’

  ‘Dear me! And Miss Palliser did not intend to have a broken heart, I take it.’

  ‘Miss Palliser? Oh, of course, you mean Mrs Coles. Too right. She was pretty hard-boiled, was poor old Norah, and she told me she had got Coles hooked while he was still impressionable. “He’s not going to be the one that got away,” she told me. Of course, she swore me to secrecy, but, well, you know how it is! I expect she swore a good many other people to secrecy as well. Do they—do they think he killed Palliser?’

  ‘Up to the present, there is no evidence to speak of. And now I must go and see Miss McKay.’

  ‘Are the police getting anywhere, do you think?’

  ‘I am not much in their confidence, but I think we may expect developments shortly.’

  ‘Of course, if he wasn’t laid up with a broken leg, I wouldn’t put much past Piggy Basil,’ said the student thoughtfully. ‘He was a proper wolf and, though harmless, may have got into a mess.’

  Dame Beatrice did not comment. She waved a cheerful, valedictory claw, mounted the steps and was about to ring the front door bell when another thought came to her mind.

  ‘Miss Bellman!’ she called after the retreating student. Miss Bellman turned and came back. ‘You mentioned the Highpepper students, and it is clear to me, of course, that there would be a considerable field of mutual interest, let us say, between the two colleges. But how did Mrs Coles, née Palliser, whose home is not far from Northampton, come to be acquainted with Mr Coles, who lives in lodgings in London?’

  Miss Bellman shook her head sadly.

  ‘It was one of those pick-ups,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She picked him up at a dog show—Crufts, I think it was— the spring before she came here in the September. He’d gone to draw dogs, and she’d gone to show a couple of Pekes. Then they met again lifting potatoes.’

  Before she sought out Miss McKay, Dame Beatrice had a word with the college secretary.

  ‘Yes,’ said the secretary, in answer to a question, ‘a letter did come for Mr Basil. Only one. I re-addressed it to the hospital.’

  chapter twelve

  See Naples and Die

  ‘… our road led us suddenly into the most delightful country you can imagine.’

  Ibid.

  « ^ »

  Vesuvius, with its pillar of cloud by day and its lurid glow by night, dominated the sky to the south of the city and gave a Satanic welcome to travellers, reminding them of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the state of their own souls.

  In the end, it was Carey who had accompanied Dame Beatrice to Rome and southwards, for Miss McKay had decided (reluctantly, she admitted), that it would be unseemly and frivolous for her to leave Calladale in the middle of term in order to disport herself in Italy.

  Before leaving the college, Dame Beatrice had had a long talk with her and had ascertained that the absent Mr Basil was in hospital in Scotland; that he had broken his leg by falling down in the Cairngorms; that Miss McKay thought it most unlikely that he would have attempted to take a girl student as his sole companion on holiday, but that she was prepared to believe anything of anybody in these days; that he would have been in no jeopardy of losing his post at the college as long as the student had gone with him voluntarily; that the college was a nursery for plants but not for silly girls, and that, if the students of agriculture and dairy farming did not know enough to come in out of the wet, she felt inclined to wash her hands of them and their affairs and write the college off as a failure.

  ‘But would your staff know that those are your views?’ Dame Beatrice had enquired. Miss McKay had shrugged the question aside, with an intimation that it was scarcely the sort of thing about which she could be expected to make a public announcement.

  ‘Of course, if parents or guardians complained, I should have to take a line,’ she had concluded, and had added, as an afterthought, that it was all a great nuisance.

  ‘I expect your absence from the college in the middle of the term is also a great nuisance,’ Dame Beatrice remarked to her nephew, as, in a taxi driven by an extremely fat Neapolitan, they took the road southwards on the morning after their arrival in Naples from Rome. They were driving to the hotel at which Biancini’s relative was known to have worked.

  ‘I say, though,’ Carey had volunteered, at one point, before they left England, ‘is our journey really necessary? This holiday the Biancinis took doesn’t cover the time of the murder. That came after their return.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dame Beatrice had replied, ‘that is the case, certainly.’ But, in spite of her ready acceptance of the fact, she still seemed to think that the visit to Naples was necessary. Carey, pleased with the chance of a short break in routine, had said no more. He had gone sightseeing by himself in Rome while, for three days, Dame Beatrice visited her learned friends, and now he was prepared to escort her to what he thought would turn out to be a hostelry of only modest if not actually of dubious type.

  In this he was mistaken. After the squalor of some of the city streets, the lines of washing hung high from tenement to tenement, the careless heaps of fish and fruit in the markets, the Hotel Vittorio came as a pleasant surprise. Its façade was gloomily magnificent. Its interior gave the impression of a monastery, and this was not at all strange, as that is what it had been up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was cool and pleasantly shadowed. The clerk at the desk greeted them in English.

  ‘Good-day. You have reservations?’

  They had reservations. Dame Beatrice was shown to a stone-flagged chamber, immensely vast, which contained, besides the bed, a washstand of nineteenth-century veneered mahogany and a dressing-table in bog-oak. There was also a wardrobe of indeterminate wood, capable (she thought) of housing ghosts, coffins, corpses or the whole of the hotel’s store of linen.

  She unpacked, bathed and changed, and was downstairs before Carey was ready to join her. The hotel possessed a long balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples. An elderly waiter came up.

  ‘The signora would care for some wine? Lachryma Christi, perhaps? Orvieto? Santa Catarina? Chianti?’

  Dame Beatrice, with memories of a honeymoon of long ago spent at Amalfi, plumped for Santa Catarina, and sat for half an hour watching the
Neapolitan sea.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said to the hovering, elderly waiter when he had reappeared to tell her the time of the next meal, ‘have you had here a Signor Biancini and his wife?’

  ‘And daughter, signora. Yes, yes. The wife and daughter are English, a second marriage, as I understand from Giovanni Biancini, who works here but is off duty today. The daughter is of her mother’s first marriage, and was born, one would suppose, when the woman was very young.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘She was of thirty years, this daughter. Giovanni Biancini told me so, and one could well believe it.’

  ‘Indeed? It is this daughter in whom I am interested.’

  ‘The signora is thinking of engaging her as a companion? But that needs one who is virtuous and of a quiet and docile disposition. This young woman was not quiet or docile. I have heard her revile her mother. Besides, unwisely she liked her stepfather, I think. The signora will understand. It is not nice to explain.’

  This remark terminated the conversation and Dame Beatrice went to the dining-room.

  ‘You seem very quiet tonight,’ said Carey, as they sat, after dinner, on the terrace with their coffee. ‘Scarcely a cheep out of you during the whole of the evening. Are you tired?’

  ‘By no means. I have found out what I came to find out, but how much use it will be to me and to the police is problematical.’

  ‘You haven’t been long about it. Does that mean we go home tomorrow?’

  ‘No, no. Why should we not enjoy ourselves here while we can? The news I have gained will not stale for the keeping. We will visit Pompeii. We will study Herculaneum. We will climb to the crater of Vesuvius and go to see the bubbles of volcanic mud at Solfatura. We will demand spaghetti cooked as they do it in Sicily, with bacon, mushrooms, onions, garlic, black olives and anchovies, with the Parmesan cheese on a separate dish. We will eat pollo in padella con peperoni and pigeons prepared after the Roman fashion. If we can get it (but the time of year may not be right) we will have a hare washed in vinegar and sauté in butter with sliced onions, ham, sugar and vinegar, grated chocolate for colouring, almonds shredded fine and some raisins.’