Death and the Maiden mb-20

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Allow me to point out,’ he began; but he was interrupted by the entrance of Thomas, who bore in his arms a fine log of wood, and was followed by Pollen carrying a bucket of coal.

  ‘Ye’ll pardon me, madam,’ said Thomas, pausing in his stride and holding the log in the experienced but slightly absent-minded and off-hand manner of the officiating clergyman with a baby at its baptism, ‘but there is a kind of a body wishing tae speak wi’ ye in the smoke-room. I wad hae shown him in here, but he isna fit for the lounge carpets. That yin in the smoke-room is no great matter.’

  ‘Has he been fishing, Thomas?’

  ‘I dinna ken. He has nae rod. He is after fa’ing into the burn, mair like, frae the look o’ him. But ye’d better gae and speir at him yoursel’ whit way he’s as weet as he is.’

  ‘It sounds like you, Mr Tidson,’ said Mrs Bradley, preparing to take her departure. ‘Didn’t you fall into the river? I had better see him at once. One figures to oneself that he MUST HAVE SEEN THE NAIAD!’

  She suddenly bellowed these words into the unfortunate Mr Tidson’s right ear, so that he jumped like a gaffed salmon and had the same expression on his face as one sometimes sees on a dead fish – at once surprised and peevish.

  ‘Really!’ he said, when Mrs Bradley had gone. He rubbed his ear and then stared angrily at the door through which she had passed, and then more angrily at Alice, who was struggling with a sudden fit of hiccups, with her a nervous reaction which was apt to appear at awkward moments. ‘Really! You know, Prissie,’ he added, turning round on Miss Carmody, ‘I don’t understand Mrs Bradley! I don’t understand her at all.’

  The visitor, of course, was Detective-Inspector Gavin, as Mrs Bradley had supposed.

  ‘I’ve got something, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, so have I,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Swop?’

  ‘Swop.’

  ‘Well, then, you know this second boy’s home was in Southampton? I’ve been there and interviewed the parents. They swear they had no idea that the kid had gone to Winchester. He’d run away from an Approved School the night he was killed. That all came out at the inquest, of course, as you know. But that isn’t all. I’ve also found out that the parents were very glad to be quit of the boy. He was always a difficult kid, and it also appears that his grandfather left him a bit of money. Not much – forty-five pounds, to be exact. Curiously enough, the father was in debt, and the forty-five pounds, which he took from under the floorboards in the boy’s room, will clear him nicely, and give him twenty pounds to spare. I had to bounce the information out of him, but there it is. What do you think about that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I can’t see why he didn’t steal the boy’s money before. Is there any evidence that the creditors were pressing him to pay?’

  ‘Well, he owed it to a bookie at Brighton, and there had been some loose conversation about a razor-slashing gang. It all adds up, you know, doesn’t it? The whole family are rather bad hats. The father’s been in quod twice for house-breaking, and it seems that the boy was taking after him.’

  ‘I’m still more surprised that the father left the money under the floor, and did not steal it sooner.’

  ‘He may have been scared of the kid. You never know. But it does all add up, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t think it adds up with the unopened tins I found on Saint Catherine’s Hill, but, of course, it might,’ said Mrs Bradley, without much enthusiasm. ‘And housebreaking isn’t murder, although I know there have been cases of violence lately. Still, the money, no doubt, was very useful if the father was mixed up with a race-gang, and apart from any question of foul play, may be one of the reasons for not reporting the death. My own news is rather different.’ She referred to the strange behaviour of the Tidsons and Miss Carmody in affecting to leave the hotel and coming back to it next day, and then mentioned the discovery of the dead animal among the bushes beside the weir, and the Tidsons’ fishing with the boot.

  ‘But you haven’t told me yet how you come to be half-drowned,’ she added. ‘I do hope you won’t catch cold.’

  ‘I never do, thanks, and that bit of news isn’t very important, I’m afraid. It’s interesting, though, in its way. I saw the nymph, and went in after her. No, please don’t laugh! I really did think it was she. It couldn’t have been, of course, but it gives some colour to old Tidson’s raptures, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But what did you see? – And how do you account for having seen it, and been deceived?’

  ‘Oh, I hardly know how to describe it. Just some trick of the light and shade upon the river, and somebody talking near by. I’d like to tell you more about it later. Now, I should think this dead animal must be a coincidence, shouldn’t you? Still, it wouldn’t hurt to go and take a look. What animal was it – a dog?’

  ‘I haven’t been told. I don’t think the girls stayed to see. They didn’t like the smell, I imagine. But there’s one other thing. I am wondering whether it could possibly be the dog Mr Tidson lost some days ago.’

  ‘Really? Well, if you’re game, let’s go and investigate. It would be interesting to find out why the animal died so near to where Biggin’s body was found, whether it’s Tidson’s dog or not.’ He glanced at the rain. ‘At seven to-morrow?’ He glanced at his clothes. ‘And now I’d better go and get changed.’

  They were descending the High Street next morning at seven o’clock, and, crossing it, they walked past the west door of the Cathedral and were soon in the Close. After the rain the day was flawless, although there were pools and puddles everywhere, for the night had been very wet.

  ‘So Miss Menzies tried ducking Tidson?’ said the Inspector. He chuckled in an unpolicemanlike way. ‘What exactly was the object of that?’

  ‘To give him due warning,’ Mrs Bradley replied, ‘and to persuade him that we know he’s a liar. All pure kindness really. Unfortunately, he seems disinclined to profit by it, and at present we should find it embarrassing to be more explicit, I fear.’

  ‘A nod and a wink to a blind horse?’

  ‘Exactly. Well, he should have resisted the temptation to come here and look for his naiad. Trouble was bound to follow, either for himself or the nymph. But possibly I wound you? You, too, have sighted the naiad.’ She cackled harshly. They turned at the end of College Street and were soon beside the water. The Inspector suddenly laughed.

  ‘I may see her again! This seems the place for naiads. It certainly isn’t the spot for two murders, is it? I do think Cathedral cities, and these water-meadows, ought to be immune from horrors, and policemen, and nasty little brutes like Tidson.’

  ‘Not every policeman would confess to having glimpsed a naiad,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘And these murders are not native to the place. They have been planted here by the devil, or some of his agents.’

  ‘By the power of witchcraft, more likely. Strange, when you come to think of it, how many people must have believed in witches.’

  ‘I had a remote ancestress who was a witch,’ said Mrs Bradley with great complacence. The inspector, stealing a glance at her black eyes, and at the yellow countenance whose bones had been the architecture of a beauty now fallen into decay, felt very much inclined to believe it.

  ‘She was tried in Scotland in the time of James I,’ Mrs Bradley continued, ‘but was let off by the favour of the presiding magistrate, whose paramour she was said to be when the devil was occupied elsewhere and her incubus not in the mood. It’s a very odd story. Rather well documented, too.’

  ‘Was she young?’ the inspector enquired.

  ‘Oh, yes. At the time of her trial she was barely nineteen, it is said. One day I ought to get someone to write her story.’*

  ‘I shall look forward to reading the book,’ said the inspector. He looked abroad upon the lovely waters, their sedgy meadows, the hill beyond the meadows, the Winchester College playing-fields, the wet long grass and the willows. He sighed deeply. Mrs Bradley said no more, and very soon, crossing
the bridge from which Mr Tidson had been translated into something new and strange, an animal scarcely aquatic and certainly terrified, they reached the further stream and took the narrow path beside it to the road-bridge nearer the hill.

  They dropped down on the other side of the road-bridge and walked, rapidly still, along an asphalt path to the weir.

  The inspector, regardless of his natty shoes, lowered himself to the concrete platform and crossed the swiftly-rushing but shallow water.

  ‘It’s a dog all right!’ he called back from the bushes amongst which he had plunged after scrambling up the bank on the opposite side of the stream. ‘He’s not very nice. The rats have been at him, I think.’

  ‘Has he been knocked on the head?’ asked Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Difficult to say. I shouldn’t come, if I were you. He isn’t any sight for a lady, and the smell is enough to make you ill!’

  But Mrs Bradley was already halfway across.

  ‘Yes, I could smell him some distance away,’ she said calmly.

  ‘A post-mortem on a dog, ma’am?’ said the local superintendent dubiously. ‘Well, yes, I daresay he would, if you thought it necessary.’

  ‘I do think it necessary. I want him to check my findings.’

  ‘And those, ma’am, are—’

  ‘I prefer not to say until the police doctor has examined him.’

  ‘Very good, ma’am. I’ll have him come along. We can’t take the dog to the mortuary, though, I’m afraid. Was Inspector Gavin having a joke when he suggested it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He’ll do very well here. We shall want a deal table, of course, and, for your own sakes, you had better spray some disinfectant about.’

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ said Gavin. ‘That’s what was said, I believe. I don’t know how you could stick that postmortem! I’m thankful to get away from that dog, and that’s a fact. Knocked on the head like the boys? I wonder what the murderer uses?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s very much doubt. It must be a fairly heavy stone. We can’t tell whether the same hand killed the dog and the boys, you know, but a stone was used in both cases.’

  ‘Thanks for the information, which had occurred to us as a probability after the earlier reports. The local people have made a preliminary search, and they’ll find that stone eventually if they have to examine every pebble between here and Southampton. They’re particularly keen to have an end to this beastly business. And when they do find it? What then?’ And he shrugged his shoulders.

  They parted, and on the way back to the hotel Mrs Bradley met her chauffeur in Jewry Street, where he was gazing in at the window of a confectioner’s shop.

  ‘Yes, the chocolates are excellent here,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘You are well advised to consider parting with your personal points, George. I also have a few left. Let us go inside, and, in the shop, you can give me what I would not take from you yesterday at the hotel.’

  The document changed hands whilst the shop-assistant was weighing out the sweets.

  ‘I sometimes feel I am dogged by Mr Tidson,’ Mrs Bradley continued, as they left the shop and began to walk back to the hotel. ‘For a short time I have shaken him off. I would not like him to know what I have in my possession. It might look to him a little odd, and to Miss Carmody, too, that I should possess the facts of the Preece-Harvard will. I shall want the car after lunch, George. We must go to Alresford and then, very likely, we shall need to go on to Andover. Do you think we could make a détour, as though we were going somewhere entirely different? I am pretty certain to be watched, and we must not give too much away.’

  ‘Certainly, madam,’ said George. ‘And there is Mr Tidson coming along the street. I think he has been buying himself a hat. And the boys have identified that raft.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Mrs Bradley. She greeted Mr Tidson warmly, and walked back with him after offering him one of her chocolates.

  George took her to Alresford by the unusual route of the Botley Road and through Bishop’s Waltham, Corhampton and the crossroads north of West Meon. They did not need to go to Andover. The first person they met on the road between New and Old Alresford – it happened to be a greengrocer’s lad on a bicycle – told them where the Preece-Harvards lived and exactly how to find the house. It was more than two miles outside the village, and along a lane, but the car could find a track and went bumpily towards its destination.

  * A suggestion made recently by Mr Jeremy Scott.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Wormwood, Rosemary and Lavender, of each a like quantity, and Charity, two Handfuls.’

  Mrs SARAH HARRISON (The Housekeeper’s

  Pocket Book, etc.)

  ‘An occasional fish rose, one, indeed, at an artificial mayfly, but was not hooked.’

  J. W. HILLS (A Summer on the Test)

  THE PREECE-HARVARDS, as Mrs Bradley had expected, were away from home. The housekeeper, impressed by the car and also by the staid respectability of the uniformed George, readily supplied their address as soon as Miss Carmody’s name was mentioned. She remembered Miss Carmody well. Miss Carmody had called there not so long ago, and had been told that the Preece-Harvards were in Bournemouth.

  ‘I suppose you remember Miss Connie Carmody, too?’ Mrs Bradley enquired. ‘Although no doubt it is some time since you saw her?’

  ‘Oh, I remember Miss Connie clearly,’ the housekeeper answered; and then closed her lips in the manner of her kind when they intend to indicate that they could add to their replies if they chose, and hope to be asked to do so.

  ‘A dear girl,’ said Mrs Bradley carelessly.

  ‘Handsome is that handsome does,’ replied the housekeeper; and, with this sidelight upon the relationship between Connie and the housekeeper, Mrs Bradley went back to the car.

  ‘How long will it take us to get to Bournemouth, George?’ she demanded.

  ‘A matter of an hour and a quarter, if I am to push along ordinary, madam. I could do it in less, but—’

  ‘That will do charmingly, George. We shall get there in time for tea at the hotel. I have a feeling that a widow with a schoolboy son will go in to tea at her hotel, especially in Bournemouth, where the teas are often so good. Very convenient indeed.’

  Mrs Bradley’s deductions proved to be correct. It was a quarter to four when she went into the lounge of Mrs Preece-Harvard’s hotel, and at five minutes to four a tall, thin woman accompanied by a tall, fair boy of the required age came and sat at a table near by. Mrs Bradley immediately joined them, a proceeding which, much to her surprise, was welcomed and not resented.

  ‘Ah!’ said the woman. ‘So nice of you. Hotels are rather lonely places, aren’t they? Are you staying here long? I do hope so.’

  ‘I have only just arrived,’ said Mrs Bradley with truth. ‘I have been staying in Winchester at the Domus.’

  ‘Good gracious! You must know Priscilla Carmody! My late husband’s cousin. A dear person. Hasn’t she been staying there too?’

  ‘Yes, with a Mr and Mrs Tidson, I believe.’

  ‘Quite a nest of my husband’s relations! My late husband, I should, of course, say. This is my son, as no doubt you can see by his expression. It’s no good looking daggers at me, darling. I must have a little gossip sometimes with people you don’t think you care for.’

  ‘Oh, but, mother!’ said the boy, scandalized, as well he might be, by this tactless and crude piece of thought-reading.

  ‘You are at school in Winchester, I believe?’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Tell me, do you go in for cross-country running?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sometimes.’

  ‘I think these games they play make them too thin,’ said Mrs Preece-Harvard, with a bold disregard for the effects of heredity on her son. ‘Football, cricket, hare-and-hounds, or whatever they call it – why can’t they go fishing, like their fathers? I’m sure my poor Arthur doted upon the little trout and things he used to catch with his rod. And the Itchen is quite a nice river. Lord Grey of Falloden liked it, so why shouldn’t
you?’ She addressed the last sentence to her son.

  ‘But I do like it, mother,’ said the boy. He turned to a waiter and ordered tea for three. ‘Please excuse me. I want to go out for an evening paper.’

  He escaped. His mother gazed after him and sighed.

  ‘It isn’t easy for a widow to bring up a boy,’ she remarked. ‘He misses his friends. He wanted to go on a walking tour. Imagine! They are very clever boys at Winchester, and I think they overtax their brains. It was much better for Arthur to come here, just the two of us, for a rest, but you would scarcely believe the trouble I went through to persuade him. It’s really tiresome, the same trouble every year. Children are very selfish.’

  ‘I suppose he missed Connie Carmody at first,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘They were brought up together, I believe.’

  ‘I suppose he did miss her at first. But that was a long time ago. I should think he has forgotten her by now. Not a nice little girl. Very spiteful and rather bad-tempered. A nervous type, I suppose.’

  ‘Do they never meet?’

  ‘Oh, no. Priscilla doesn’t want it; and, as she took on Connie, I quite see what she means. Besides, I don’t know that it would be a good thing for us to see any more of Connie. It would bring back painful memories.’

  ‘To your son and Connie?’

  ‘I am afraid that, for once, I was thinking only of myself. You know who Connie is? Priscilla, no doubt, will have told you?’

  ‘You mean that Connie is your son’s half-sister?’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Preece-Harvard. ‘My late husband’s conscience troubled him about the girl. He thought he ought to provide for her – a deed of gift, you know – before he died. But I thought – and said – that an illegitimate child has no right to steal from a legitimate one, and my son had to come first. It would have been very wrong to deplete Arthur’s inheritance by a deed of gift, even had his solicitors sanctioned it, which, as the estate is strictly entailed in the male line, I do not think they would have done. You will realize, naturally, that this infatuation – I refer to my late husband’s passion for Connie’s mother – was two years prior to our marriage. I should not like anyone to think—’