Late and Cold (Timothy Herring)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Only because I’d have funked being found out.”

  “You know, Timmy, I only held myself in at the actual time because of my darling Hugo. I didn’t want to get his galleries a bad name. I call him my darling Hugo because, except for you, he’s the only man I know whom it would be impossible for me to seduce.”

  “You’re a bitch,” said Timothy, admiringly.

  “And you’re the sea-green incorruptible,” she retorted.

  “Oh, no,” said Timothy, grinning. “Merely a shy gazelle.”

  “Other business?” asked the president, who was in the chair at the committee meeting.

  “Yes,” said Timothy. “Got the dope there, Coningsby? Thanks. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, you will remember that in the late summer or early autumn of last year, I invited members of the Society and their friends to partake of a so-called medieval banquet at a place in North Wales.”

  “Nanradoc Castle. Most enjoyable,” said a member.

  “Perfectly thrilling! And so marvellously romantic afterwards, walking about among the ruins, especially in that delightfully creepy old tower!” said a woman member.

  “Yes,” said Timothy, “and it became even more delightfully creepy a bit later on, didn’t it?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! Tactless, tactless,” said the woman member, distressed.

  “Not at all,” said Timothy. “The subject of its creepiness had to come up before this meeting ended. Well, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked by a number of those who were present on that occasion to make it an annual affair, but by subscription.” There was polite applause. “If enough people want it—that is to say, if a sufficient number of the members of this committee think it a good idea . . .”

  “Just a moment,” put in the member who liked to think himself a thorn in Timothy’s flesh, “pardon the interruption, Herring—Mr. Honorary Secretary, I should say—but, Mr. President, sir, hadn’t we better decide, before Mr. Herring goes on, exactly what is meant by ‘a sufficient number’? I speak, of course, under correction, but would it not be best to define our terms?”

  “By all means,” said the president. “Well, there are thirty members present, besides myself. Will somebody make a proposal?”

  It was finally agreed that if twenty of those present decided that the Nanradoc banquet would be a desirable annual event, Timothy would arrange it. The voting was twenty-five in favour, four against, and one abstention—Timothy.

  “Right,” he said. “We can leave the date open for the present. This brings me to my next point. Mr. Pembroke Pritchard Jones, the owner of the Nanradoc estate, is prepared to let us have Nanradoc at a peppercorn rent, provided that we will do up the house and keep it in repair and the grounds in order. The details, of course, would be a matter for the solicitors on both sides to arrange if we decided to accept what I personally believe to be a very generous offer.”

  “I hope the honorary secretary is not suggesting that this meeting should decide, here and now, whether or not to accept this ‘very generous offer,’” said the thorn in Timothy’s flesh.

  “Of course not,” said Timothy, smiling kindly at him. “You mustn’t over-excite yourself, my dear chap. Bad for the blood-pressure. With the consent of Mr. President and this committee, I shall circulate—or, rather, poor old Coningsby will circulate—a full description, to all members, of the house and the estate, complete with plan and elevation, and copies of the very fine photographs he took of the castle at one time, and call for a postal vote. Should the result be favourable, I shall have certain suggestions to put before the next committee meeting. The castle, which I have already purchased, I shall make over to the Society in any case, but with one proviso.”

  “That we fill in the horrible well!” said the woman member who had found the castle thrilling, romantic, and delightfully creepy.

  “Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed a youthful member. “Spoil the whole thing! Where’s the point, anyway? The—what was found in it has been decently buried, and the well,” he concluded, with the relentless logic of the young, “will still be there, whether you fill it in or not.”

  “We have not allowed Herring to finish what he was saying,” the president mildly pointed out.

  “I was only going to say,” said Timothy, “that, having gone to a considerable amount of trouble . . .”

  “And expense,” said a member who was, himself, an extremely wealthy man.

  “All right, and expense,” Timothy agreed, “to have the castle reasonably well restored, I want to open it to the public at a small fee, the money to help pay a curator.”

  There was no suggestion of disagreement over this. Even the thorn in the flesh conceded that of course the public must be allowed the privilege of visiting a genuine Welsh-Welsh (as opposed to an English-Welsh) castle.

  Timothy, whose ethics (as opposed to his morals) were never entirely above suspicion, inserted a statement in his circular which had not received the consent of the committee for the good and sufficient reason that he had not brought it before that body. This was that, in the event of the postal vote being in favour of acquiring the lease of Nanradoc House and its grounds on such advantageous terms as were set out in the folder, would members also vote on the question of whether they would like to consider turning the house into a country club for members and their families on terms more reasonable than would be the case for comparable accommodation elsewhere. There would be a full time staff, including a first-class cook and a resident housekeeper.

  He and Coningsby sent off the circulars, Timothy with his fingers crossed, Coningsby in a flutter of mingled horror and joy in respect of his own connivance at immorality, for, to go even half-way behind the committee’s back was, to him, indescribably, delightfully wicked. Timothy’s fingers were crossed because he proposed to offer Marion the job of housekeeper at Nanradoc, and to employ a resident chauffeur to meet visitors who did not possess cars, and whose duties would include taking Marion’s children to and from school every day. He had a feeling that this would clear his conscience.

  While he was waiting for the replies to come in, he lived at his club and went along every morning to help Coningsby check the post and count the members’ votes. One day the postman was later than usual, so Timothy was glancing over the morning paper while he was waiting. A paragraph caught his eye. Ignatius and Claribel Birds had been sentenced to seven years and five years, respectively, for uttering counterfeit notes. The actual forgers had not been discovered so far, but the police expected to make an arrest at any moment.

  “Poor old Woodpecker and Crow,” thought Timothy. “Stepped out of their class at last.” All the same, it was with a sense of relief that he realised that they were accounted for and might be considered to have gone out of his life for good. The activities of Father Ignatius at the Phisbe headquarters still puzzled him, however. He said to Coningsby,

  “Can you think of any reason why anybody should want to charge about this house at night and fling furniture about.”

  “Oh, that! It still goes on, Mr. Herring. Mrs. Dewes was telling me about it. It’s only a mild visitation, and she’s getting used to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The phenomena would suggest that we have a poltergeist, sir. It does no harm. Its most frequent manifestations are to make a certain amount of noise in the committee room and to leave a poker on the Dewes’s bed.”

  “Oh, rot!” said Timothy, startled.

  “The evidence of poltergeist existence is very convincing, sir. The interesting thing about this one is that the phenomena are persisting—although, Mrs. Dewes tells me, in a continually weakening form—even though the children—children are usually the unwitting vehicles, so to speak, of poltergeist activity—have been gone now for a very considerable time.”

  “Oh, well!” said Timothy. “More things in heaven and earth, and all that, I suppose. Hullo! That sounds like the postman!”

  On both counts, when the time-limit had
been reached, and all the returns which might be expected had come in, the voting was almost wholly favourable. The committee was not inclined to be critical of Timothy’s plan for the use of the house—very far from it, in fact. They also proved to be enthusiastic about Timothy’s plan to instal Marion as housekeeper at Nanradoc, but some added that they thought the well ought to be filled in.

  Most of the members of Phisbe, however, accustomed to the discovery of skulls in church crypts and to the examination of the stomach-turning rebuses in some of our great cathedrals, had no scruples about leaving the well as it was.

  Besides, although, to do it justice, the Society was far too dignified to wish for such advertisement, the fact that Olwen Jones’s body had been found in a well, down which (protected by a strong iron grill) the morbid-minded public was empowered to gawp, did bring the customers along to Nanradoc in considerable and lucrative numbers, as things turned out.

  “After all,” as one well-satisfied tourist remarked to the custodian, “it does somehow seem to make it a sort of place of pilgrimage, you know.”

  Anxious to put his proposition about Nanradoc to Marion, Timothy reached his home in the Cotswolds at well past midnight, but there was a light in a downstair window. He let himself in, certain that the servants would be in bed, and found Marion seated by a fire that was almost out. She turned, with a startled exclamation, when he came in, jumped up out of her chair, then stretched out both hands to him. Timothy took them in his own and said lightly,

  “So you found your way all right?”

  “Pembroke brought us as soon as the police had done with me. Oh, Tim, we couldn’t possibly have gone on staying there! It was horrible! They did nothing but bicker, and there was more than one downright scene. It was so awfully bad for the children. One thing it taught me, though.”

  “Oh?” said Timothy, leading her back to her chair and putting her gently but inexorably into it. “What was that?”

  “That Leonie was the person who stabbed Pembroke. Of course, she adores him really. It was one of those passionate Italian-style stabbings, I believe. It was when they’d had a row over Miranda. Pembroke wanted his baby, but Leonie wanted Pembroke all to herself. You know, Tim, she’s like a tigress.”

  “I think she probably is a tigress,” said Timothy. “Now, look, aren’t you very tired?”

  “Only of being questioned by the police, though I must say they were very nice to me. I mean, they kept giving me cups of tea and cigarettes, and they didn’t grill me, and two men and a policewoman took me back to Mold each day, and came and fetched me again in the morning. I suppose they could have kept me at the police-station if they’d wanted to.”

  “Obvious they were pretty certain you hadn’t done anything wrong. What made them finish with you in the end?”

  “Well,” she said, twisting her hands together, “I referred them to school, and all that, and they found that, at about the time they think Olwen was killed, I wasn’t even in England.”

  “Oh, really? That’s interesting. Where were you, then?”

  “It was just before I took on Bryn and Bron, and ages before I had Miranda. I was on a year’s exchange, and teaching in Australia. It’s a scheme whereby teachers in the two countries swap jobs for twelve months. It’s supposed to be a good thing, and it certainly turned out to be a good thing for me, as it happened.”

  “Yes, indeed. I suppose the police had to keep the tabs on you while your statement was being investigated. Now, before I pack you off to bed, where you ought to have been hours ago, here’s how I see the future . . .”

  “Please—not tonight, Tim.” She stood up and faced him.

  “All right. Up you go, then. Good night—although, by what my watch tells me, it’s good morning, so I shan’t bother to go to bed.”

  “May virtue be its own reward!” said Marion bitterly, as she turned away.

  About the Author

  Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, Oxford, in April 1901. She was educated at the Rothschild School in Brentford, the Green School in Isleworth, and at Goldsmiths and University Colleges in London. For many years Miss Mitchell taught history and English, swimming, and games. She retired from this work in 1950 but became so bored without the constant stimulus and irritation of teaching that she accepted a post at the Matthew Arnold School in Staines, where she taught English and history, wrote the annual school play, and coached hurdling. She was a member of the Detection Club, the PEN, the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. Her father’s family are Scots, and a Scottish influence has appeared in some of her books.