The Devil at Saxon Wall

by Gladys Mitchell

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  Dedication

  Title Page

  First Manifestation

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Second Manifestation

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  End Papers

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A MRS BRADLEY MYSTERY

  Psychoanalyst and some-time detective Mrs Bradley advises her highly strung friend, Hannibal Jones, to retreat to a quiet, rustic village to find rest and inspiration for his writing. Saxon Wall seems the perfect rural retreat, and Jones is quickly intrigued by the odd characters among the villagers, their pagan beliefs, and by the mystery surrounding Neot House, where a young couple died soon after the birth of their first child.

  But when disagreements between the villagers and their vicar grow more malevolent, and a man is found bludgeoned to death, Jones calls in Mrs Bradley, who proceeds to root out the devil of Saxon Wall by her own unorthodox methods.

  About the Author

  Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin called her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

  Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

  ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL

  Speedy Death

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  The Longer Bodies

  The Saltmarsh Murders

  Death at the Opera

  Dead Men’s Morris

  Come Away, Death

  St Peter’s Finger

  Printer’s Error

  Brazen Tongue

  Hangman’s Curfew

  When Last I Died

  Laurels Are Poison

  The Worsted Viper

  Sunset Over Soho

  My Father Sleeps

  The Rising of the Moon

  Here Comes a Chopper

  Death and the Maiden

  Tom Brown’s Body

  Groaning Spinney

  The Devil’s Elbow

  The Echoing Strangers

  Merlin’s Furlong

  Watson’s Choice

  Faintley Speaking

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose

  The Twenty-Third Man

  Spotted Hemlock

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

  Say It With Flowers

  The Nodding Canaries

  My Bones Will Keep

  Adders on the Heath

  Death of a Delft Blue

  Pageant of Murder

  The Croaking Raven

  Skeleton Island

  Three Quick and Five Dead

  Dance to Your Daddy

  Gory Dew

  Lament for Leto

  A Hearse on May-Day

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie

  Winking at the Brim

  A Javelin for Jonah

  Convent on Styx

  Late, Late in the Evening

  Noonday and Night

  Fault in the Structure

  Wraiths and Changelings

  Mingled With Venom

  The Mudflats of the Dead

  Nest of Vipers

  Uncoffin’d Clay

  The Whispering Knights

  Lovers, Make Moan

  The Death-Cap Dancers

  The Death of a Burrowing Mole

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy

  Cold, Lone and Still

  The Greenstone Griffins

  The Crozier Pharaohs

  No Winding-Sheet

  To

  HELEN SIMPSON

  ‘Strength and honour are her clothing;

  She laugheth at the time to come;

  She openeth her mouth with wisdom,

  And the law of kindness is on her tongue.

  Give her of the fruit of her hands,

  And let her own works praise her.’

  Proverbs 31.

  GLADYS MITCHELL

  The Devil at

  Saxon Wall

  FIRST MANIFESTATION

  DOMESTIC INTERIOR

  ‘I have the Ratsbane ready. I run no Risque; for I can lay her death upon the Ginn, and so many die of that naturally that I shall never be called in question. But say I were to be hang’d—I never could be hang’d for anything that would give me greater Comfort than the poisoning that Slut.’

  JOHN GAY,

  The Beggar’s Opera. Act III, Scene VII.

  Chapter One

  ‘Here, for example, is a young woman with hysterical paralysis of the legs.’

  ROBERT S. WOODWORTH

  Contemporary Schools of Psychology

  IT WAS NOT until 1920 that Hanley changed. Constance could date the change; she fixed it from a certain afternoon in April of that year when he returned from what he referred to, vaguely, as a London conference. Constance did not find the reference vague, because she possessed the type of mind which automatically invents all that it does not know. She assumed that her husband had served during the war, presupposed, since the only kind of conference she had ever heard of was a medical one, that Hanley was a doctor and had been attached to the R.A.M.C., and, since it was obvious that he was not in practice when she married him, that he had sufficient private means to warrant his giving up the profession of medicine.

  Since her marriage Constance had been happy; not riotously, gloriously or even drunkenly happy, but merely royally happy, and having a sense of uneasiness all the time as befitted one who was wearing (truth to tell, unexpectedly) the matrimonial crown.

  She could not remember having been happy before, because she could not remember having been all her life anything but a failure. Even as a little girl at her first private school the only prize their consciences would permit them to secure to her (on the guiding principle of the private schools of her day that each pupil must be awarded at least one prize on Speech Day) was a Longfellow’s Poems for Ladylike Deportment, and, even then, in ascending the steps of the rostrum to receive the prize from the hands of the kind lady who had graciously consented to present it, Constance tripped, stumbled, shot a bag of spherical sweets out of the leg of her knickers and, in failing to regain her equilibrium, made a conspicuous hole in the knee of her left stocking. She slunk back to her seat (after one philosophical glance at her
mother’s mortified countenance) not a bit of use as an example of deportment, ladylike or otherwise.

  Certainly she had never expected to marry. Even her mother, a most sanguine and optimistic woman, had never expected that. Her mother, in fact, was inclined to shake her head over Constance, and to tell herself, without bitterness but also without the slightest fear of contradiction from any quarter whatsoever, that Constance was not a trier.

  Constance’s mother liked triers. She herself was one, and whether Constance was designed to counteract the excessive energy of her mother, or whether she began, out of almost inspired cussedness and at an unusually early age, to cease trying, it is idle to attempt to decide, for the result was the same, whatever the contributing causes. She failed at everything, including an attempt to pass the entrance examination of a girls’ public day school at the age of thirteen, and an attempt to commit suicide at the age of twenty-three.

  Constance’s father had made jam during the war, so that there was no particular reason, financially speaking, why she should attempt to earn a living, and at the age of twenty-four she accompanied her parents to Naples because her mother had heard that it was much cheaper to live in Italy than in England. It was impossible to go to Naples without visiting Pompeii, they discovered, and it was at Pompeii that Constance found Hanley Middleton.

  Her mother was seated despondently upon a ruined wall; her father, led by an incomprehensible but unyielding guide, had been taken to see the interior decorations of a first century brothel, and Constance was poking about, aimlessly enough, in a house whose floor was a mass of flowering weeds, when she became aware of a man who was gazing down a well. He turned his head and regarded her sombrely. Then he said:

  ‘Are you psychic?’

  Constance assured him nervously that she was not.

  ‘Then come and look down here,’ he said, ‘and tell me whether there’s anybody at the bottom.’

  Gingerly Constance approached the brink, and peered into the well.

  ‘Nothing there,’ she said, with great relief. The young man began to take off his coat and boots. Constance, sickeningly apprehensive lest he was preparing to commit suicide, emitted a faint shriek and ran to fetch her mother. Her mother, delighted at the thought of a little human interest in a place which, as far as she was concerned, was excessively boring and hot, (and whose entrance fee, she informed her husband and daughter angrily, she considered an unnecessarily high one considering the rate of exchange,) charged joyously to the rescue of the professor of hari-kari, and insisted upon retaining a firm grip of his coat sleeve until she got him back to her hotel.

  The young man, whose name was Hanley Middleton, proposed to Constance after dinner, and Constance accepted him, but did not tell her mother.

  Middleton had a place in Hampshire known as Neot House. Having fled with Constance to England, he married her at a registrar’s office in Kensington and then conducted her to her new home.

  Constance’s mother was delighted with everything she saw there. Her father, whom much jam-making had rendered hard, suspicious and untrusting, and who disliked the thought of the marriage, and said so, made a new will, one clause of which he was at particular pains to make public. It provided that not one penny of his quite respectable fortune was to come to his daughter in the event of his death. Only to one person (and that one was not a member of his family) did Constance’s father disclose the reason for this apparently harsh provision. He was willing, he said, for Constance to have a large allowance of money, as long as she lived. Provision had been made for that. But as he suspected her husband not of suicidal but of homicidal tendencies, it might be as well to ensure Constance’s safety as far as was humanly possible. He did not say this to his wife, and Constance’s mother had no idea of the way her husband’s mind was moving. She herself did not care for her son-in-law, but was pleased to think that Constance, the most unlikely candidate for matrimony that she had ever seen, was safely introduced into Hymen’s temple. Hanley’s somewhat anti-social trick of staring into the darkest corner of any room he was in as though he was watching something materialising out of the shadows, and a way he had of standing aside politely every time a door blew open as though to allow somebody to pass, seemed oddities of behaviour which she felt she ought to allow to pass unchallenged. His habit of making a long low mound of sifted earth at the bottom of the garden, and of planting a stick in it she attempted to dismiss from her mind, but his brooding silences seriously upset her nerves. She was a woman who believed in noise and activity.

  Constance however, seemed pleased, and if she felt the slightest twinge of misgiving and alarm when her father and mother left her with her husband in the large, old house surrounded by its garden and its park, she did not show it. Truth to tell, beyond the fact that she found her husband a silent and apparently preoccupied man, enamoured of long lonely walks and whiskey by the half-bottle (for which, incidentally, she noticed that he never appeared the better or the worse) Constance enjoyed married life as much as (with her almost visible limitations of mind and spirit) she would enjoy anything.

  Her mother wrote often; her father never more than once in four or five weeks; but while her mother’s letters were redundant with ‘tell Hanley’ this, that or the other, her father contented himself with the curt and, to his daughter, cryptic command to tell Hanley that he had not altered his will.

  Hanley appeared equally unimpressed by both parents’ efforts to interest him. He was always polite to Constance and never complained about his food. Once a month he attended a conference in London, and once, when Constance told him on his return, after an absence of five days, that she had sent for six London dailies and that not one of them had had sufficient initiative to report the conference, he had looked at her with such darkening suspicion that she had shrunk back in terror. But immediately his expression had altered. He had smiled and had informed her that what scientists in conclave had to say was of no interest to the newspaper-reading public.

  The village of Saxon Wall, where they had come to live, was in a remote part of Hampshire. It was an ugly, straggling place, and Constance disliked and feared the people. They were like no villagers that she had ever seen. She had a poor memory for verse, but every time she encountered any of the inhabitants of Saxon Wall there came into her mind the line ‘ugly, squat and full of guile.’ They had thick, dirty, fair hair, unkempt and more like frayed rope than anything else she could think of, narrow, shifty eyes under curiously straight brows, low foreheads, big splayed feet, as though they were unaccustomed to the wearing of hard leather boots, and large, coarse hands on the ends of abnormally long arms. Both men and women seemed stupid and ferocious, so that, mixed with her fear of them, was a good deal of disgust. Even the children were ugly, and most of them threw stones at her whenever they saw her.

  Hanley laughed when she told him how much she disliked the people. He himself never went into the village by daylight, although rumours reached her from her own kitchen of nocturnal excursions from which he returned too tired even to take his clothes or shoes off. For weeks Constance slept alone and breakfasted alone, and, from motives which she herself would not have been able to explain (since it was too unreasonable to admit even to herself that she was growing to be afraid of her silent husband) she did not question him nor make any reference whatever to his neglect of her.

  The vicar, an elderly man named Pullborough, called on her one day and persuaded her to consent to open the church bazaar in the autumn, but when Hanley knew that he had been up to the house and inside it, he flew into such passionate ragings that Constance, in more acute alarm than, so far, she had experienced, promised never again to admit the vicar and on no account to attend Church services. She would have promised anything at such a moment, for Hanley had cast himself on the ground and was knocking his head repeatedly against the side of the fireplace. Constance sat beside him, and, clutching his neck, wrenched his head to her bosom and begged him to desist.

  Eighteen months
passed, and then the first definite indication to Constance that Hanley had changed came with his return from one of his so-called conferences, not alone but with a woman called Wilmina Barrow. Constance, not knowing in the least how to deal with the situation, welcomed Miss Barrow, and ordered the most interesting meals she could think of because Miss Barrow affected to be an authority upon Spanish cooking, which she declared was immensely superior to the salt-and-water methods of the English.

  Looking back upon Miss Barrow’s visit, it appeared to Constance to have consisted of a series of excuses from Hanley for being out with Miss Barrow for most of the day—for more than a week he was more tractable, human and conversational than Constance had ever known him—and a series of heart-contracting noises—screams, bumps, stealthy footsteps and the like—after dark. Not once during the time the visit lasted did Hanley sleep in Constance’s room.

  Miss Barrow left before the end of a fortnight. She had contracted a nasty bruise under the left eye where she had walked into the grandfather clock in the dark, and was limping from a rather severe contusion on the left shin where she had tumbled against the sharp edge of the coal-scuttle when she and Hanley had been playing with the dog. Constance had witnessed neither accident. Hanley had never been talkative, but after Miss Barrow had gone he became positively morose. He had never been sunny-tempered, but now the slightest thwarting of his desires was sufficient to bring on a fit of ill-humour which lasted the whole day and sometimes for nearly a week. He ill-treated his dogs, and once threw the cat out of an upstairs window. When Constance got in his way he pushed, and, later, kicked her out of it. If she remonstrated, be it ever so timidly, he swore at her.

  He had given up his mud pies in the garden and seemed to have renounced the drinking of whiskey. It was like living with a savage, treacherous animal, for his fits of brooding moroseness lasted for days on end, only to terminate in a bout of crazy, snarling ill-temper which terrified her into locking herself within her room until he quietened down again. The odd thing was that he could always obtain servants. No sooner had a cook or a housemaid given notice than another would be installed. They were always village women, and, in an indefinable yet obvious way, they indicated their allegiance to Hanley and their detestation of Constance.