Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  Thursday. Dinner at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where we also spent the night. The drains were being attended to at the house.

  Friday. Still at the hotel. No news about the drains.

  Saturday. Returned to the house for lunch, the drains having been passed by the sanitary authority.

  Mrs Bradley read it again very carefully. There could be no doubt about it. The drains had never been touched. It was on the Thursday, after tea, whilst she had been disporting herself with the Czecho-Slovakian professors and their wives, that Armstrong had been lured to the house and deliberately murdered. The death had been planned then; it had not been accidental. She had known that all along.

  She went to Marie Hopkinson again.

  ‘Who were in to tea on the Thursday before we went to Ephesus?’ she asked.

  ‘Tea? Why, weren’t you there?’ Her large, untidy hostess frowned in recollection.

  ‘I went out to tea. Don’t you remember the day the drains were done?’

  ‘I remember, yes, of course I remember. It wasn’t the drains, though, Beatrice. It was the body.’

  ‘So I imagined. Dish has told me nearly everything.’

  ‘I shan’t add anything to what he had to tell you. I don’t think it’s fair to you to burden you with the knowledge. I mean that, Beatrice. I’d love to confide in you really.’

  ‘I see. It was one of the family, of course?’

  ‘Yes. It was one of the family. You had better take it for granted that I did it. I’m capable of it, my dear.’

  ‘Yes, but not of premeditating it. This death was planned. It would be too much to expect of Providence that anyone as bitterly disliked as Armstrong should conveniently be killed by accident. And I do know it wasn’t Rudri.’

  ‘Yes, so you said before. But how do you know?’

  ‘I have had him under psycho-analytic treatment. If he had committed murder, or even killed by accident, I should have had to know it. He couldn’t have kept it hidden. That isn’t proof positive from a legal point of view, but you can take it that it’s the truth.’

  ‘I see,’ said Marie Hopkinson.

  ‘That leaves us Gelert and Megan,’ Mrs Bradley continued briskly.

  ‘Gelert and Megan, yes. Beatrice, do give it up and try to forget all about it. Gelert will be in America this time next year. That’s not a new idea, mind. He’s had it planned out since the spring. As for Megan – well, she’ll be going back to England if she marries Ronald Dick. He’s been given an appointment in Manchester. And it’s better for everyone – I’m sure of it – if we keep the whole thing inside the family. Both of the children are fond of their father – at least —’

  ‘At least, Gelert isn’t,’ said Mrs Bradley calmly. ‘You didn’t see the entrails of poor Io, Marie, did you, spread out like the letter A?’

  ‘I am glad to say I did not. Who was Io, anyway?’

  ‘Io was the cow; an engaging, lovable animal.’ She pondered. ‘I believe, you know, Marie, that Io was the match that set light to the train of gunpowder.’

  ‘Armstrong killed this cow, did he?’

  ‘I think he tortured it. Then I think it was killed by someone who knew the Homeric ritual, and its entrails (always inspected, even into Roman times, by augurs anxious to know the will of the gods) were laid out in the initial letter of the name of the man to be murdered. Several of us were absent from the camp the night that the cow was killed, so all this is only surmise.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about the cow. It’s nasty,’ said Marie Hopkinson.

  ‘Well, so is murder,’ said Mrs Bradley reasonably. Having made this concession to popular prejudice, she resumed briskly.

  ‘Of course it was Megan who killed Armstrong. She invited him to tea that day, didn’t she? They played with the bow after tea, and then she made her opportunity. She must be a good shot, Marie. Does Dish know that Megan did it?’

  ‘He may have guessed. I haven’t told him. What a mercy it is that I know you well enough to be sure this won’t go any farther! Of course it was horribly wrong of Megan, but, really, it saves so much trouble! But what about Dish? Does it matter whether he knows?’

  ‘I think he would like to congratulate Megan. He thought it a very fine shot. It was Ronald Dick who took the head to Ephesus. It was because he did so that I could deduce the weapon. Psychologically he was the only person who would have seen it his social duty to kill the adders at Ephesus before he used their box. Then Megan gave him away, without intending to do so. She told him not to try to hide the Artemis clothing as he was not good at hiding things! “Things” obviously meant the head. A consideration of Dick as the accessory after the fact gave me the ibex horns, which he had purchased in Athens. The horns gave me the bow. Dick as accessory, the bow as lethal weapon, the Homeric ritual connected with the death of Io, all gave me Megan as the murderer.’

  ‘But why couldn’t Dick be the murderer? He knows all about the Homeric ritual, too.’

  ‘Dick could not bend the bow,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  5

  Mrs Bradley wrote up her case-book. She wrote quickly and without hesitation. Motive was clear; the character of the criminal was in accordance with the deed; the evidence all hung together. ‘And yet,’ she said to herself, ‘in the back of my mind I know there’s a clue that I haven’t put down. I wonder what it can be?’

  But she did not stop writing. Her pen flew over the paper, making the neat, indecipherable hieroglyphics which proved the case against Megan Hopkinson.

  ‘Passionately loyal to her father, and could not stomach the thought that he might be under Armstrong’s thumb.

  ‘Of determined and ruthless character. Her own mother called her “utterly crude and heartless”.

  ‘Had the strength to use the bow of ibex horns. Incidentally, had I not foreseen the bow as soon as I heard of the ibex horns, I wonder how long it would have taken me to solve the problem of the weapon which apparently left no traces?

  ‘Megan was superstitious; confessed on several occasions that she did not like “mucking about” as her father was doing, but thought something unforeseen and harmful might come of it. She sacrificed the cow, the animal sacred to Hera, and, to underline her resolve, drew Hera’s peacock beside Armstrong in the dust as he slept at Mycenae.

  ‘She was acting in self-defence as far as she knew. She had heard (probably from Armstrong himself) that a marriage was to be arranged between them as a means of getting Sir Rudri out of his difficulties. Neither she nor Sir Rudri knew that Armstrong was already married.

  ‘Gelert, too, was involved with Armstrong to a certain extent. A girl of this age would probably visualize herself as the family saviour. A pity the men of the family hadn’t more courage.

  ‘Dick, of course, confessed to the deed because he knew Megan had done it. It was interesting to note that although he had not decapitated Armstrong, his fears for the safety of the party had caused him to decapitate the vipers. The recollection of the deed made him sick, whereas all my references to the decapitation of the corpse (which Dish, not he, had accomplished) made little or no impression upon his sensibilities.

  ‘I wonder how she had planned to commit the murder? She wouldn’t have known about the bow until after we got back to Athens, whereas she made the vow before Hera at Mycenae.’

  Mycenae! The clue came suddenly, illuminating everything. That dark glen, with its dreadful tradition of bloodshed, that was the factor which, all the way through, had been eluding her. Had the party not gone to Mycenae, she wondered whether the murder would ever have been committed. She laid down her pen, closed her eyes, and moved her lips as though she prayed.

  She remembered the fall of night on foothills below the mountains, and the rock-built citadel built at the apex of the plain. She saw a tall girl, heavily cloaked in the darkness, standing on top of a massive gateway wall; standing and staring over a winding road and seawards over a plain as old as history. It was Megan Hopkinson, having a last look round as the night
gathered in on the Lion Gate and over the Argive Plain.

  But was it not also Clytemnestra, commanding the way to Mycenae; watching to see the beacon flares that told of the fall of Troy; listening to hear the chariot wheels coming crisp on the sandy roadway; plotting the death of the king of men coming home from a ten-years’ war?

  Outside the window an owl flew across the moon. Impressed, again, by this sign that the goddess Athena still guided and guarded the city, Mrs Bradley recited a prayer from the Greek Anthology before getting into her bed, and, as she put out the light, she followed it up with the only requiem that Armstrong seemed likely to receive:

  ‘Weep not for him who departs from life, for after death there is no other accident.’

  Then she composed herself for sleep. But her thoughts were still upon Megan Hopkinson, and it did not surprise her in the morning to find, when she stripped her bed, the piece of Mycenean gold come flickering out from underneath her pillow.

  She turned it over in her yellow hands. She supposed she held the motive for the murder. She meditated, holding it, then said:

  ‘Megan! Where are you? Come here!’

  The tall girl came in from the little balcony.

  ‘Don’t complicate the issue, child,’ Mrs Bradley continued, matter-of-factly. ‘Nothing would be gained by anyone if you killed yourself. When did you get home?’

  ‘I didn’t go,’ said Megan. Mrs Bradley nodded. ‘I wasn’t running away. Nobody need think that.’ She came up to Mrs Bradley and received the gold from her thin and yellow claw. ‘Ronald wanted it. That beast had taken it. I got it back,’ she said. Mrs Bradley nodded approval of this calm recital of the facts.

  ‘And what now, child?’ she said.

  Megan did not attempt to reply. She said:

  ‘You remember you asked me about a white figure that the boys said they saw at Epidaurus?’

  ‘Aesculapius, god of healing, child; the one positive result of all Sir Rudri’s experiments.’

  ‘And father didn’t see him! There’s death in that … after all he tried to do.’

  Mrs Bradley nodded very slowly.

  ‘Not death, but only a summing-up of life, child.’

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  Copyright © the Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1937

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