St. Peter's Finger (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  At twenty minutes past twelve, to the tick, therefore, Bessie was able to go up and wake Mrs. Bradley.

  “You wasn’t very deep off,” she announced with disapproval. “Woke up at a touch, you did. Guilty conscience, or something, I should call it.”

  Mrs. Bradley got up and tidied her hair, and grinned kindly at Bessie, whose crude manifestations of affection touched and pleased her.

  “I’ve a job for you, Bessie,” she said.

  “Oh, ’elp,” said Bessie tartly. “I’m up to me eyes for Mother Saint Jude and Mother Saint Ambrose and Sister Genevieve and Sister Lucia already. The Bishop don’t come very often, but when he do—visitation, they calls it. More like the Last Day, I reckon!”

  “I hope,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that you do not betray those racy opinions to Mother Saint Ambrose and Mother Saint Jude.”

  “Oh, Mother Saint Jude wouldn’t mind, although she’s as flighty as any of ’em when it comes to the Bishop,” said Bessie. “And Mother Saint Ambrose don’t really like nothing that upsets what she calls the routine. Well, what you want me to do?”

  “Retire from the guest-house when I do, and take up a job I’ve found for you with a friend of mine,” Mrs. Bradley answered concisely. She described to Bessie the work which she had in mind. Bessie’s face became transfigured.

  “Blimy, if I couldn’t give you a smacker,” she pronounced, in accents of awe. Mrs. Bradley, who had not kissed anyone for more than twenty years, recoiled in alarm, and Bessie, both diverted and restored by this sight, grinned devilishly and opened the door for Mrs. Bradley to go to the bathroom to wash.

  She turned at the door and said:

  “Who uses bath salts here, Bessie?”

  “Why, that there Mrs. Maslin,” Bessie promptly replied.

  “Ah, yes. I might have deduced that,” Mrs. Bradley observed. She dried her hands, went downstairs to the dining-room, and took the chair that was empty. All the other guests were assembled. The chair happened to be between Miss Bonnet and Mrs. Maslin.

  “So you haven’t seen fit to take away Mary?” Mrs. Bradley observed to Mrs. Maslin. “May I say that I think you are unwise?”

  “We shall go as soon as Ulrica is settled,” Mrs. Maslin responded, with her vacant, insincere smile. “I shall go to the docks, of course, to see her off, and shall probably take Mary along. Perhaps you didn’t know, but she and I and her father are going out by the next boat. We can’t afford to let Ulrica have it all her own way now that poor little Ursula is dead. After all, what’s a will, if not subject to alteration?”

  “You won’t need to get this one altered,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I fancy it is altered already.”

  CHAPTER 24

  CONFLAGRATION

  “But these all night,

  Like candles, shed

  Their beams, and light

  Us into bed.

  They are indeed our pillar-fires,

  Seen as we go;

  They are that City’s shining spires

  We travel to.”

  HENRY VAUGHAN: Cheerfulness.

  As soon as tea was over, George drove Mrs. Bradley and Ulrica Doyle towards Hiversand Bay to spend the night again at the hotel, but before they had gone very far it was fairly obvious that they were being followed. Acting on instructions, therefore, murmured by his employer down the speaking-tube, George accelerated, and drove on to the main road to Kelsorrow. He swung left just before they reached a bridge over the river, skirted the town, found a by-pass road, and then drove along it at fifty miles an hour. Mrs. Bradley looked back. About a hundred yards behind them on the straight, wide road, a red sports car was bursting along at a speed great enough to overtake them, at their present rate, before the wide road ended at the entrance to the next town.

  “Better pull up, George. I don’t recognise the car,” said Mrs. Bradley. “They may not be following us, but if they are I think we’d better see what they want.”

  George pulled in to the grassy edge of the road. The sports car drew up ten yards in front of them, and out of it got a man whom Mrs. Bradley had never seen before. Ulrica, however, recognised him, and leaving Mrs. Bradley and George, who were standing by the roadside, she walked to meet him.

  “Why, Uncle Percival! Is anything wrong?” she said. Mr. Maslin took hold of her hand as though she had been a small child. He did not answer, but walked up to Mrs. Bradley and addressed her by name.

  “Mrs. Bradley, my little girl! Will you please return at once to the convent? Mary has gone! I know it’s unreasonable to ask you to do any more. My wife has confessed that you urged her to take the child home, but—will you come back with me, please?”

  “I am concerned with Ulrica’s safety. That is my first responsibility,” Mrs. Bradley told him. “But, of course, I will do what I can. George, take Miss Doyle as before, and I’ll telephone you, later on. Remain there until you hear from me.”

  “Very good, madam.” He walked to the car, and returned with a small revolver. “I have a licence for this, madam. Please take it. I have another.”

  “Good heavens, George!” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “There’s such things as put-up jobs,” said George, glowering solemnly at Mr.Maslin, “and the party of the second part might just as well know exactly where they get off.”

  With these admirable sentiments he went back to the car and opened the door for Ulrica. Then he took his place at the wheel, turned the car in the wide road in one magnificent arc, and drove back towards Hiversand Bay.

  “Now, Mr. Maslin,” said Mrs. Bradley, when her own car was out of sight, “don’t worry too much. How much is known about the disappearance?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. Look here, jump in, do you mind?—I’d like to get back to the convent. I’ve rung up the police, so that’s something. I don’t know the district, unfortunately, but I’ll comb out every inch—” The car shot away.

  It was obvious, from the moment of their arrival, that something was seriously wrong. Mrs. Bradley clearly remembered the last occasion on which she had searched for Mary Maslin. This time (she was informed by the white-faced sister portress at the gate) Miss Bonnet, who had actually got into her car to drive back to Kelsorrow, had got out of the car again, put on her trousers, borrowed a hoe from the gardening shed, and had gone off, followed by the ironic applause of Bessie and the hysterical giggles of Kitty, to conduct a search on her own.

  “Which way did she go?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “Quick, I’ll show you,” said Bessie. “Lor’, she didn’t half look a cutie!”

  “You run off and find Sister Genevieve and ask her to get hot blankets ready,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning away from Bessie towards Mrs. Maslin. “I suppose the buildings here and the grounds and the garden have been searched?” she said. “When was the girl first missed?”

  “She was to have had tea with her father and me in the guest-house,” said Mrs. Maslin, more foxy-looking than ever with fright and anxiety. “It was all arranged, and when she didn’t turn up I thought she must have been kept after school or something. How was I to know that they don’t keep the children in? We were always kept in!” she added, peevish with fear.

  “And at what time did you become anxious?”

  “At half-past five, just after you had gone off with Ulrica, and now I find that she hasn’t been seen since the end of afternoon school.”

  “Let’s see—she would have been having a games lesson with Mother Saint Benedict,” said Mrs. Bradley rapidly. “Go and find Mother Saint Benedict, Mrs. Maslin, and ask whether Mary had a fall or sustained any injury during the game. That might help a little, do you see?”

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear! This violence! And all this dreadful secrecy about Ulrica! Whatever shall we do? It’s too terrible,” said Mrs. Maslin, going off to find Mother Saint Benedict.

  It was too terrible for Mr. Maslin, as Mrs. Bradley could see. He had been pale when she had first met him; he was now a dreadful grey colour; his nostrils were pinched a
nd his cheeks seemed to have fallen in.

  “For God’s sake,” he kept muttering. “For God’s sake! For God’s sake!”

  “Mr. Maslin,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I want you, please, to drive me to the village, and not to worry. Everything is going to be all right.”

  At the village post office there was a telephone. The post office itself was closed, but the shop was still open, and there was no difficulty about calling up the hotel at Hiversand Bay.

  “Here, madam, right in the entrance lobby,” George’s voice responded. “Nobody can come either in or out without I see them. The young lady went straight to her room on arrival, and says she doesn’t want any food. The other young lady has had a dinner sent up, madam, so the head-waiter tells me. It’s a homely little hotel, madam, and I am already in fairly close touch with most of the staff. I don’t think we need have much fear, madam, but what the young ladies will be safe.”

  “Excellent, George. As soon as the inspector arrives, you can come on here and have your own supper. I’m telephoning him now.”

  She telephoned the inspector, and went back, grimly smiling, to the almost frantic Mr. Maslin.

  “The inspector thinks his men are well on the trail. Probably a bare-faced bit of kidnapping, he says,” she observed. “Somebody who’s heard that she’s Timothy Doyle’s granddaughter, I suppose.”

  “They may kill her!”

  “They won’t kill her. The police know where she is.”

  “Know where she is? Why the devil don’t they get hold of her, then?”

  “All in good time,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Back to the convent, please.”

  The convent had been searched from the attics in the Orphanage to the cellars beneath the frater. The nuns were in groups in the Common Room, the frater, the children’s refectory, and the cloister. The guests had congregated miserably in the guest-house parlour; the orphans, under the jaundiced eye of Mother Saint Ambrose, were sitting in close rows in the Orphanage playroom, doing needlework with hands that were sticky with the sweat of excitement; the boarders, let off preparation, had been given freedom to help in the search of the school and the grounds. Mother Saint Francis was shut away in her room, because she and the Mother Superior (calm among her daughters, as behoved the head of the house) were the only members of the Community who knew that Mary Maslin was safe at Hiversand Bay, and while Mrs. Bradley knew that nobody would suspect that the benignity of the Reverend Mother Superior hid anything but an anxiety that was natural and general to everybody, she had not the same faith in the dramatic abilities of the volatile Mother Francis.

  Meanwhile, the object of all the care and suffering was sitting at a small bedside table eating a four-course meal with every appearance of appetite, breaking off occasionally to observe in rapturous tones:

  “I say, isn’t this a rag! I say, won’t the girls be sick!”

  “I should think you’ll be the one to be sick,” her cousin coldly observed. “And I refuse to go to sleep with a policeman in the room.”

  It turned out to be a policeman’s wife, however, a young and cheery creature, whose husband, a large, young sergeant, was posted on the landing outside the bedroom door, with a chair, a bottle of beer, some tobacco, a tumbler, a large ash-tray, a book, and a plate of cold beef, cold ham, mustard pickles, and bread. He was there unofficially, having been, however, officially released from duty so that he could be “lent” to Mrs. Bradley as a watchdog.

  George, whose task was done, took his leave, and at a leisurely twenty-eight miles, drove over to Blacklock Tor, and garaged the car at the inn. He had a half-pint, went out for a walk on the moor, had another half-pint before they closed, then went up to his room. He was on the second floor, and his window looked over the sloping hill-side of moor towards the convent. He went to the window and looked out, but except for the steady light of Saint Peter’s Finger which shone from the church tower lantern, there was nothing else on the landscape visible except the dark stretch of the moor.

  He went to bed at a quarter to eleven, gave a last glance at his watch before he put out the light, turned his face towards the window, and closed his eyes. At five minutes to eleven he went to sleep.

  He did not know what woke him. No light was shining on to his face, and no sudden noise had startled him, but through the uncurtained window he could see that the sky was alight with a deep, red glow. He got out of bed very quickly, and went to look out. A minute later he was putting on his flannel trousers, a lounge jacket, and his boots, and a minute later still he was running downstairs to get the car.

  The garage was a lock-up, and he had a key of his own. He switched on his lights, drove carefully on to the road, and then put the car at the moorland track at such a breakneck pace that it bounded over the ruts, the heather, and the boulders like a car in a comic film.

  (2)

  Of all the searchers for Mary Maslin, the most feverish, apart from the Maslins themselves, who had been into Kelsorrow to interview the police and then had scoured the country-side in the fast red sports car for clues, were Mother Benedict and Miss Bonnet. Fortunately, the useful rule of obedience could be brought into play to prevent the nun from continuing the useless search, but not even the news that the police were on the track of the missing child (brought back from Kelsorrow police station by a greatly relieved Mr. Maslin as additional information to that supplied by Mrs. Bradley) could abate Miss Bonnet’s ardour or allay her obvious anxiety. In the end, even she gave up, and a bed was found for her in the Orphanage on the top floor where Sister Bridget, now practically recovered, lay attended, as usual, by the Infirmarian, in the large infirmary ward.

  On the floor below slept the orphans, some thirty-six of them, their ages ranging from three to seventeen or eighteen. They were in five dormitories, and in each dormitory slept a nun. Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude were always on duty, and the rest of the Community slept week by week in the Orphanage dormitories by rota, with the exception of Mother Francis, who remained in charge of the private school children in their cubicled dorters on the west side of the cloister.

  Before the attack with the hammer Sister Bridget had been a heavy sleeper, but her sleep had been fitful during her sojourn in the Infirmary. Since she had recovered consciousness she had thought a good deal, in her rambling non-consequential way, about her mouse, and had mentioned it once or twice to Mrs. Bradley. Mrs. Bradley had soothed her with accounts of its well-being, and had suggested to Mother Ambrose that it should be imported into the Orphanage. Mother Ambrose, however, with courtesy and finality, had declined to have the mouse brought anywhere near the house of which she was in charge.

  “It will breed,” was her last and unarguable dictum. So the mouse remained in Mrs. Bradley’s room, and she fed it and grew accustomed to its company and to finding it on her pillow, in her shoe, climbing the curtains, and almost drowned in the ewer. On the Tuesday night, when Mary Maslin was missed, the general excitement even penetrated to the Infirmary, for its guardian had joined in the search with everyone else, and had come back, tired and flushed, to sleep a good deal more soundly than usual.

  Sister Bridget was wakeful and excited. She was aware of vague cravings, and these crystallised themselves, at about half-past eleven, into a violent desire for the companionship of her mouse. She knew that it was of no use to call her mouse, as she had been wont to do when she slept in her bedroom at the guest-house, for, although she was extremely vague as to where she was, she did know that she had called it, and called it in vain, a good many times just lately, so she made up her mind to go and look for it.

  She had managed to steal and secrete two boxes of matches since the accident. She crept from her bed, leering happily, since, childishly, her happiness was rooted in action, not contemplation, and, opening the window, put her hand out between the bars—for all the second- and third-floor windows in the Orphanage were barred—and brought in a box of matches.

  Then she waddled, bare-footed, to the door, and went to look for her m
ouse. She began on the bottom floor—not for any reason, but because she forgot, half-way, what it was she was going to do, and the endless stairs, from the third floor down to the ground, became a kind of pilgrimage which could be undertaken without thought. There were exactly the same number of stairs in each flight, and there were two flights, with a turn, between each floor. She sat down, as a baby will, and shifted her seat from stair to stair, clutching hold of the banisters in the darkness to reassure herself, and so that she did not fall.

  When she got to the bottom and found there were no more stairs, she began to whimper. Then she remembered what she had come for, and, striking matches and dropping them, began to look for her mouse.

  (3)

  Mrs. Bradley had given up her room in the guest-house to Mr. Maslin, for the guest-house had no double rooms. She herself had received accommodation, as before, in the Orphanage, and had gone to bed at eleven, happy in the belief that her responsibilities for the night were over, and that Mary Maslin and Ulrica Doyle were safe at Hiversand Bay.

  It was with a feeling of unaccountable anxiety, therefore, that she woke at about midnight, and sat up in bed. She listened, but there was nothing to be heard. She got out of bed and walked to the window, but there was nothing to be seen. She went back to bed again, lay down, and tried to go to sleep. It was useless.

  She went to the door, which she had locked, and turned the key. Then she knew what had awakened her. Somewhere, lower down in the house, was a muffled crackling and roaring. Mrs. Bradley took George’s revolver from under her pillow, put on her peacock dressing-gown and a pair of stout shoes which she used when she walked on the moors, and descended the stairs to find out the cause of the noises.