Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “She’s definitely unreliable,” Daphne agreed.

  “I had that impression,” Braydon agreed solemnly. “Now I don’t think I need trouble you any further, Miss Watson and Miss Loveridge. I believe I interrupted a drive?”

  “There was one thing I did want to ask,” said Sally; “though I don’t suppose you’ll tell me. What time was Miss Denning drowned?”

  “It’s not so much won’t as can’t,” Braydon confessed. “If we know, you’ll hear it at the inquest to-morrow.”

  “It was after three, wasn’t it?” Daphne inquired. “I’ve heard about that man Bayes seeing her go downstream under the Parks bridge after three.”

  “Oh!” Sally exclaimed.

  “There’s no secret about Bayes’s story,” Braydon informed them.

  “But do you believe it?” Daphne urged. “The man sounds very woolly! Why, first of all he thought it was a man coming down in the canoe!”

  “He did, did he?” Braydon commented. “First I’ve heard of that.”

  “You see, he is woolly,” Daphne insisted. “I shouldn’t think you could count on him at all.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Braydon sadly. “Really, I hate to keep you from your drive, and don’t you think, Miss Watson, that some of the City of Oxford police may still be attending to traffic problems and may be interested in the car which you left outside the door?”

  “Heavens!” exclaimed Sally, and dashed out of the room, followed by Daphne more sedately.

  Braydon smiled at Betty.

  “I hope my sister hasn’t been a nuisance,” said Betty. “I was awfully relieved when she told us that she had seen you on Saturday night and told you everything.”

  “I don’t think they’ve done any harm,” Braydon reassured her. “What I was more afraid of was that they might light upon something with implications that would really give them a nasty shock. One hopes, for their sakes, that no one they know is seriously involved, but one can never tell where clues, or what seem to be clues, may lead.”

  “I know,” Betty agreed with emphasis. “I hope they’ll keep out of it. I think they’re only going for a drive now, because Sally wants to play with my husband’s car.”

  “It’s a satisfactory toy,” Braydon agreed. “Mrs. Pongleton, I don’t want to seem horribly inquisitive, though that’s what I often have to be. But, you’ve talked to Miss Exe; I don’t want to bother the girl more than need be. I don’t know if there’s any connection between the alleged desire of Miss Denning to keep her away from Oxford and what has happened to Miss Denning. All things are possible. Did Miss Exe say anything to explain that policy of Miss Denning’s, which everyone seems to have heard of?”

  “She did talk about it,” Betty agreed. “It seems to have worried her a good deal. I think there’s no doubt that Pamela’s aunt had a definite intention of that kind. Pamela now thinks that Miss Denning’s idea was to keep her from meeting this Mr. Mort, who went to see Pamela at Cambridge last term.”

  “For any definite purpose, do you know?”

  “I think he was in Cambridge on some business and took the opportunity to look her up, because he had known her father. If he was interested in her for that reason, and Miss Denning really kept Pamela away from him deliberately, that would be a good opportunity of seeing her, of course.”

  “And Miss Exe was anxious to see him again?”

  “Yes; she liked him, and seemed to feel she could rely upon him in some way, and yet, I thought, she was a little scared about seeing him. But perhaps that’s because she seemed to have an idea that he could tell her more about her father; she wanted to know and yet was afraid of what she might hear. Miss Denning always seems to have made a mystery about Pamela’s father, but I think that may have been only because she thought Pamela’s mother was too good for him. Miss Denning has told Pamela vaguely that her father deserted her mother before Pamela was born. That’s all Pamela knows, and naturally she is reluctant to believe that her own father was a thoroughly bad lot, and wants to hear something in extenuation, but is afraid it may not turn out like that.”

  “Poor girl!” Braydon commented.

  “Yes; I’m awfully sorry for her. But it doesn’t seem to have much connection—or has it? Of course—” Betty hesitated. “There’s one thing that occurred to me; I wouldn’t say it to anyone else, but perhaps it may explain a certain amount. Perhaps Pamela’s father never married her mother. Pamela described Miss Denning’s ideas as rather old-fashioned, and Miss Denning might think it better not to tell her niece. But actually I don’t believe Pamela would mind knowing that nearly as much as not knowing anything. It doesn’t explain why Miss Denning should be so anxious to keep her away from Mr. Mort. Even if he knew, surely he wouldn’t tell the girl? It would be rather caddish.”

  “Under certain circumstances he might feel he had a right to tell her,” said Braydon, half to himself. “It’s a queer story. Thank you very much for telling me. I don’t know whether it explains anything, except Miss Exe’s visit to Mr. Mort just now.”

  “Yes, it does explain that quite naturally, doesn’t it?”

  “Quite. Miss Exe seemed more concerned to clear up the problem of her parentage than about the mystery of her aunt’s death?” Braydon asked.

  “I think she discussed that a bit with my husband in the car this morning,” Betty told him. “Naturally she finds it difficult to talk about that. After all, although she found her aunt rather difficult sometimes—well, people do find their parents difficult, don’t they? And yet they are fond of them; and Miss Denning was almost like Pamela’s mother.”

  “Yes; I’m sorry for the girl. I’m glad you’re looking after her, Mrs. Pongleton. Thank you for the help you’ve given. I must be off.”

  Betty sat alone by the fire, thinking everything over. What she thought of was not so much what had been said but the way in which Braydon had received the various items of news. He had been definitely startled when he heard that Pamela had gone to see Mr. Mort, and he hadn’t really been satisfied with her explanation of why Pamela had gone. He had particularly noticed Daphne’s remark about Bayes’s story of someone coming down in a canoe. But then Betty didn’t know what Bayes’s story was. Betty began to feel worried about Pamela, though she could not give any definite shape to her fears. It was just a vague feeling that the girl was in some danger. Who was this man, Mort? A don and perfectly respectable, Sally said. Someone you could trust, Pamela had implied. But girls were often mistaken; they could be perfect fools about men, Betty thought wisely.

  At this point Sally returned.

  “I took Daphne up to Cumnor,” she announced. “The Riley really is a dream! I’ve taken her back to college now, and I’ve garaged the Riley, and what about tea?”

  Betty rang the bell. “What about this man Bayes’s story?” she asked. “Daphne mentioned it, and I’d like to know what it is.”

  “Funny; everyone calls him ‘this man Bayes.’ Daphne’s told me; she had it from Owen. He asked her to lunch to tell her that, so he can’t have been so awfully fed up with her, but they seem to have had a row afterwards, and Daphne is so upset that she hardly knows what she ate, and that’s most unusual.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  GWYNETH CALLS ON AUNT SOPHIA

  GWYNETH picked from amongst a multi-coloured debris on her bed a small contraption of bright blue cloth and poised it at a remarkable angle on her golden curls, so that it became a hat; not a prosaic covering for the head or shade for the eyes, of course, but something which would have been instantly recognized in Bond Street as a hat. She considered her image in the dim mirror let into the narrow door of the wardrobe.

  “Definitely stir-making, but perhaps too much for Aunt Sophia,” she told the image, which shook its head mournfully.

  She tried another headpiece, which looked as if its creator, in despair of making it fit, had gathered up the slack at the top into casual folds and transfixed them anyhow with a quill just to keep them from flopping over the wearer
’s ears. Gwyneth adjusted it with great care.

  “Too, too new! I don’t suppose Aunt Sophia goes out into the world much, poor old dear. She might think it happened accidentally.”

  Gwyneth removed it tenderly. “Something definitely demure is indicated. M-m-m.” She surveyed the collection and at last selected something which so far conformed to the old-fashioned idea of hat as to have a distinguishable crown and brim. She was concentrating on the correct angle at which this must be set when someone knocked at her door.

  “Come in! That you, Mary? Am I appallingly late? Will I do?”

  “For Aunt Sophia? I think she regards all modern clothes in the same light as Baroque architecture—unfortunate, but one must just accept it.”

  “O-o-oh! In that case—” Gwyneth reached for the bright blue device which she had first rejected. “It makes me feel good, so if it’s not going to upset anyone—” She flicked off the little grey felt and turned to the mirror.

  When Gwyneth faced Mary Wentworth again the latter, who was a clever girl, but not in that direction, wondered that the effect of so many minutes of careful adjustment should be as if someone had flung the thing carelessly at Gwyneth’s head and it had stuck there.

  “Well?” inquired Gwyneth.

  “If you think it’s all right, then it’ll do. There’s no absolute rightness about hats,” said Mary.

  “Oh, but there is!” declared Gwyneth.

  “Come on,” urged Mary. “It’s nearly four.”

  Gwyneth snatched up bag and gloves and they started, crossing the river by the Parks footbridge and therefore just missing Daphne, who was deposited by Sally at the Mesopotamia bridge at about the same time.

  Gwyneth had particularly noted Nina’s remark on Saturday about Mary Wentworth’s North Oxford aunt who knew quite a lot about old Lond. Mary, Gwyneth knew, was the niece of old Mrs. Daker, who was even more famous in Oxford than her deceased husband, that Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy who, it was alleged, had always bought his trousers in the Caledonian Market. Gwyneth had cunningly disinterred from some memory of a country house party a moony young man called Tim Daker, who had surely told her to call on his aunt in North Oxford, and Mary had consented to identify Tim as a cousin and agreed to take Gwyneth with her to call on Aunt Sophia that afternoon, Sunday being earmarked in Oxford for these social activities. Gwyneth was vague about exactly when and where she had met Tim Daker; it was a sheer fluke that she remembered his surname. As for the alleged request that she should call on his aunt, “It’s the sort of addled thing he would say,” Gwyneth told herself.

  Mary was a plain, red-haired, self-satisfied second-year student. Any criticism of her was always modified by the chorus of “but she’s an absolutely dead-certain first.” She wore shapeless woolly jumpers and shaggy tweed skirts, and it was easy to imagine her blossoming later into one of the more notable Oxford oddities.

  Mrs. Daker lived in one of those remarkable houses by which Oxford in the latter part of the nineteenth century signified its appreciation of Mr. Ruskin and the Gothic tradition. Its tall yellow brick front was diversified on the ground floor by a bay and a porch, both of which broke out surprisingly into pseudoecclesiastical stone arches, in which sash windows and fanlight were uncomfortably fitted.

  The door was opened by an ancient family retainer, whom Mary greeted as “Lizzie.” Lizzie surveyed Gwyneth with disfavour and seemed at first disinclined to let her in. Mary charged ahead, however, and Gwyneth followed. Lizzie caught her by the sleeve.

  “There’s a glass in the hall, miss, if you’d like to put your hat straight!”

  Instinctively Gwyneth turned to the glass and was reassured to see, by the lurid glimmer which came through the blue and yellow fanlight, that no unkind breeze had disturbed the absolutely correct angle. She caught a malicious grin on Lizzie’s ancient countenance as she followed Mary into the drawing-room.

  Aunt Sophia sat erect behind a table which held an immense number of tea-cups and a shining display of silver.

  “This is Gwyneth Pane, from Persephone,” Mary explained. “She met Tim at—where was it, Gwyneth?”

  “He particularly asked me to call and see you when I came up,” Gwyneth hastily declared.

  “Remarkable effort of memory on Tim’s part!” said the old lady dryly. She had an extraordinarily weather-beaten face, with a long nose and whiskered chin, and the architecture of her massive grey hair was as typically nineteenth century as that of her house.

  “What did you think of Tim?” Mrs. Daker continued briskly.

  Gwyneth was seldom at a loss for an answer to any question that was not an inquiry for knowledge of an academic kind, but now she fumbled wildly in the dim corners of her memory for something definite about Tim. Was he the one whose pillow they had peppered? Or was he the one who had got under the sofa with her when they played Sardines?

  “I liked him,” she gasped feebly. “He’s very nice!”

  “Yes, he was nice when he came up to Oxford, and still nice when he went down. Can’t take in anything, not even vice! He’ll go on being nice to the end of his days. Do you like China or Indian?”

  “Do I—Oh, er—China, please.”

  Undergraduates arrived, paying duty calls, probably because their fathers had coached with old Daker, and they created a fortunate diversion. Each of them stumbled through his answers to Mrs. Daker’s fusillade of abrupt questions and found relief in handing round cups of tea and cakes. Presently Mrs. Daker again noticed Gwyneth, who was now happily telling one of the young men of the wizard time she had spent at Frinton last summer.

  “What are your interests—girl—I forget your name?”

  “Pane,” said Gwyneth meekly. “I’m reading English.”

  “For lack of any definite taste for other branches of knowledge, I suppose? And that’s your interest?”

  “Well, of course, it’s difficult to know before you come up what you are interested in. School work’s so different. But I’m keen on tennis, and I like the river, though I haven’t had a summer term yet. And—” the river reminded Gwyneth of her object in coming to see Mrs. Daker—“I’m awfully interested in old houses; I don’t know much about them, but there are so many here. It makes you wonder what it was like to live here in the middle ages, you know.”

  “I do; a good deal,” Mrs. Daker agreed unexpectedly. “Draughty and awkward and dirty. Any amount of aesthetic satisfaction and nowhere to wash! But better study old houses because you’re interested, than English Lang. and Lit. because you don’t know what else to read. Want any books?”

  “I suppose you haven’t got a book that describes Ferry House?” asked Gwyneth eagerly. “Passing by it every day we naturally get interested in it, and it looks rather—er—fascinating.”

  “But Ezekiel doesn’t, eh? I know. I could show you something. Perhaps I will.” She turned from Gwyneth to ask an unfortunate young man what he thought he had got out of five terms at Oxford.

  The undergraduates melted away as soon as they felt they had paid for their tea by a decent period of endurance. Mary Wentworth then had to answer many inquiries from Mrs. Daker on current family affairs. At last the family had been examined and laid aside, and Mrs. Daker turned to Gwyneth again.

  “What about Ferry House? Noticed the chimneys?”

  Chimneys! thought Gwyneth wildly. What would one notice about chimneys, except that they smoked.

  Mary came to her rescue with the comment, in a superior voice, that they were a particularly fine group, which puzzled Gwyneth, who had never thought of chimneys at all since she had ceased to believe in Santa Claus.

  “I suppose you remember the island before Persephone College was built?” Mary asked, because she knew that Aunt Sophia liked to talk of this event.

  “I do. And I remember how they wouldn’t take my father’s good advice about an architect. Adam Lond caused the sensation of his time in Oxford when he sold the island. A ladies’ college—only ladies could receive education in
those days—on Lond’s land! The Londs, who would as soon shoot a woman as let her set foot on their property!”

  “Shoot her! Gosh! Was that true?” Gwyneth asked.

  “As true as any popular saying. The Londs had no use for women. It must have stuck in their gizzards to find that their precious family couldn’t get on without ’em and that they had to admit at least one wife in each generation.”

  “Why did they sell it?”

  “Adam was short of cash. Ezekiel’s brother was a young rip; never having seen a woman except his mother, he didn’t know how to deal with them when he met them; he piled up debts—and then came this offer to buy the land. Temptation of the devil, Ezekiel called it, but Adam decided to let the women have the island, doubtless hoping they’d drown themselves as I understand one of them has just done.”

  “Yes, our bursar,” said Mary. “But it’s supposed that somebody drowned her.”

  “Causing a nasty lot of gossip, I’ll be bound. Ezekiel will be pleased. Does he live there still?”

  “No, but he hangs about there sometimes,” Gwyneth told her. “Please tell us more about him and his house.”

  “He flew into a fine rage with his father over the sale. When they began to build on the island, he went over there one night and tore down part of the wall and threw the bricks into the river—like the devil in church-building legends. But the Londs are full of talk and fine gestures; not one of them ever did anything effective. They think they must live up to the old rhyme and that’s the bee in their bonnets.”

  “What is the rhyme?” Gwyneth asked, with a gasp of excitement. “Mr. Lond met me on the footpath a few days ago and shouted out something at me that sounded like a rhyme, but I didn’t catch it all.”

  “It’s carved on the chimneypiece—a fine piece of Elizabethan work, the carving, I’ve heard. I was never allowed to see it, of course, being of the hated sex and not caring to marry Ezekiel!”

  “Carved on the chimneypiece!” Gwyneth gasped. “In the big room at the back?”

  “Have you been in?” inquired the old lady sharply.