The Crozier Pharaohs mb-66

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Why have we been summoned? Your remark concerning Queen Jezebel indicates that we are invited to call at Crozier Lodge and be eaten by dogs.’

  ‘It’s a Mayday Mayday cry of distress. They don’t like the look of things and are asking for expert advice. I said I would ring back when I had spoken to you.’

  ‘What aspect of the matter has alarmed them?’

  ‘Morpeth said she would tell us the whole story if we would go over there. Do you feel inclined to brave these Hounds of the Baskervilles some time tomorrow?’

  ‘We must not be found wanting in womanly sympathy. I suppose they have notified the police?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s what’s worrying them.’

  ‘Well, one hardly likes to suppose that Susan hit the man over the head and stole his trousers. She has trousers of her own.’

  ‘I suppose you do intend to go and see the Rants?’ said Laura, ignoring this piece of persiflage.

  ‘Nothing would keep me away. The sisters are interesting persons, Susan is a somewhat mysterious figure. The hounds, I trust, will be under restraint when we arrive and I cannot wait to hear the whole story — if possible, from Susan herself.’

  This was told them when they arrived after lunch the following day at Crozier Lodge. The dog hounds were in their stables compound, Isis and Nephthys were occupying two armchairs in the study with the door closed on them, and Sekhmet, who appeared to think that she was in bad odour, had accompanied Susan to the main gates when the visitors rang the bell. She gave every indication of wanting to ingratiate herself with them, but refused to accompany them up to the front door.

  ‘I think she’s saying she’s sorry she stole the trousers,’ said Susan, ‘but it’s a bit late for that now. Bryony and Morpeth think she may have landed us in for trouble, but I don’t see how that can be. Oh, well, I’ll leave you with them. They know everything that I know.’

  ‘That will not do, ’ said Dame Beatrice firmly. ‘We have had their version and have been called into consultation. What we need now is a first-hand account from a primary source. The police will not allow matters to rest where they are. Speak freely and at whatever length you like.’

  ‘Leaving out no detail, however slight,’ said Laura. ‘Your story will be of the utmost interest.’

  Susan repeated the account she had given the sisters. The listeners heard her without interrupting the narrative and then Dame Beatrice asked, ‘Would Sekhmet have turned savage in her desire to obtain possession of the trousers?’

  ‘Never known her to go nasty on anybody,’ said Morpeth.

  ‘But, then,’ put in Bryony, ‘I don’t think she has had much opportunity to show her seamy side, if she’s got one. Nobody ever comes across the garden. The tradespeople won’t approach the house. We have to go along and take in the post and the goods, or whatever, when the bell rings. We are not exactly popular in the village.’

  ‘The man must have been in a panic to have abandoned his trousers,’ remarked Dame Beatrice.

  ‘What on earth would the police have to say if he walked into the next village in his underpants?’ said Laura.

  ‘I shall never believe Sekhmet scared him so much that he let her have his trousers,’ said Morpeth. ‘Actually, she’s affectionate to the point of being a nuisance, but she would never frighten anybody.’

  ‘The fact remains that he did part with the trousers and he even seems to have dashed into the river to get away from her, ’ said Laura.

  ‘That does appear to have been an unnecessary proceeding, ’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘if the trousers were all the dog wanted. Were they dry or wet when you found Sekhmet sitting on them?’

  ‘Dry, except where she’d slobbered over them,’ replied Susan. ‘He would hardly have taken them off in the river, especially as he had slipped and bashed his head.’

  ‘Can you prove at what time you left Abbots Bay to walk up here yesterday morning?’

  ‘Not unless somebody saw me leave my cottage,’ said Susan, surprised and somewhat disconcerted by the question. ‘I walked up from Abbots Bay — I usually do, because the cliff railway doesn’t function so early in the morning — and I don’t remember meeting a soul. I saw nobody on the path to Watersmeet, either. I suppose I shall have to give evidence at the inquest.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You cannot say for certain that the trousers the dog was guarding are the trousers which belonged to the dead man. You never saw him wearing them.’

  Susan looked surprised and disconcerted again.

  ‘They must have been his,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t wearing trousers when I saw him in the river.’

  ‘Which proves nothing. What was to prevent an attacker giving the hound another pair of trousers sprinkled with aniseed to keep her occupied while he removed the garment from his victim’s dead body, and made off with whatever was in the pockets?’

  ‘Oh, but, surely that is a fantastic suggestion!’ exclaimed Morpeth.

  ‘I merely throw it out as such,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Did you find the square of cloth which had been so neatly cut out of the trousers?’ she added, turning to Susan.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Would Sekhmet have gone into the stream after the man?’

  ‘No. For one thing, the sound of the rushing water would have put her off, I’m sure. In any case, she was quite dry when I found her.’

  ‘Well, we must see what the police think of it all,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You will have to answer a good many questions, I am afraid.’

  ‘You’ll stand by us, won’t you?’ said Morpeth.

  The inquest, held in the parish hall, was sparsely attended, for it happened on a Tuesday and began at ten in the morning when the villagers were out at work or busy in the house or looking after summer-holiday guests. In any case, not much interest was taken in a drowning fatality. Such deaths were far from unknown to the twin villages. The coast was inhospitable and dangerous and the river, in a never-to-be-forgotten spate in the year 1952, had shown what it could do in the way of danger to life and the destruction of property.

  There would have been more interest shown had the man been a native of the place, but in this case the dead was a stranger and, to that extent, expendable. In fact, the first difficulty the coroner encountered was that, so far, the corpse remained unidentified. Nobody had come forward to say who he was or where he came from. Though his face had been badly disfigured, a rough artist’s impression had been posted up outside the police station. There had been appeals in the local press and the police had made patient house-to-house and hotel-to-hotel enquiries, but without result. An enterprising young reporter had even suggested to his editor that the Kennel Club should be approached with a request for the names and addresses of the known breeders of Pharaoh hounds, but this suggestion had been turned down.

  ‘We could land ourselves in trouble,’ said the editor, ‘if it seemed we were implying that one of these breeders employs a dog-stealer, and that’s what your half-baked notion amounts to, my boy.’

  The police had not been able to find the square of cloth which had been cut from the trousers, but the medical evidence was clear as to the cause of death. The man had not been savaged by the dog. He had died from concussion followed by drowning. There were no marks of a dog’s teeth on the body, and when the trousers were produced it was clear that these had not been attacked by Sekhmet, either, as no dog could have effected so neat a hole in the material.

  Susan was called upon to testify to her discovery of the body. She went on to assure the court (and was backed up firmly but unofficially by Bryony from the public benches) that Sekhmet had never attempted to attack anybody, but had been fascinated by the smell of the aniseed which had been sprinkled lavishly on the trousers.

  The vet from Axehead testified that he was called occasionally to Crozier Lodge to inoculate puppies against the various diseases to which puppies are liable and, later, to give the necessary ‘boosters’. The adult dogs, he said, were amen
able and without vice, good guard dogs, but trustworthy, well cared for and well trained.

  The police sergeant agreed. He had been present with the inspector and had seen the body in the river. There had never been any complaints about the behaviour of the Crozier Lodge hounds. He had a dog of his own and knew that dog-stealers often sprayed aniseed on their trousers. Dogs would follow the scent of it anywhere.

  ‘Let us look,’ said the sergeant — a young man who was well read, ‘at The Episode of the Dog McIntosh.’

  ‘The dog did what?’

  ‘No, sir. McIntosh was the name of the dog in question.’

  ‘That is not the name given me by the last witness.’

  ‘I refer, sir, to the dog in the Episode.’

  ‘Oh, I see. A scottie, I suppose.’

  ‘An Aberdeen terrier, sir, yes.’

  ‘Prefer West Highland myself,’ commented the coroner, ‘but what has that dog to do with this present enquiry?’

  ‘I advanced it as an instance of the effect the smell of aniseed has on the canine population. The Episode concerns the, abstraction of the dog McIntosh from a London apartment (to which it should not have been taken) by means of this same device, sir.’

  ‘What same device?’

  ‘The device of sprinkling aniseed on the trousers, sir.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve got to the point at last, have we? Has it ever occurred to you, sergeant, that you are wasted in the police force and would stand an excellent chance of getting into Parliament and wasting the time of the House instead of my time?’

  (In parenthesis it may be revealed that the well-read sergeant did leave the Force. He took a course in teacher training, became a schoolmaster and later the head of a school. In the course of time he also was appointed to serve on the local Bench, where he was the terror of young constables who were called upon to give evidence. It was his habit to warn them: ‘Now, be very careful, officer. I have been a member of the police force myself and know all the dodges.’)

  The medical examination had concluded that, although the head wound had not been fatal in itself, it had been the contributory factor in the subsequent drowning. There was nothing to show whether a piece had been cut from the trousers at the scene of the accident or previously, so there was no proof that another person had been present before Susan saw the body.

  The inference that the man, embarrassed by the attentions of Sekhmet, had abandoned his trousers to her and had leapt into the river to get away from her, still stood, ridiculous though it sounded. The verdict was that, in doing so, he had slipped on the treacherous boulders, knocked himself unconscious and had subsequently drowned as the result of this accident.

  5

  Theories and Speculations

  « ^ »

  So we suspect that there has been dirty work at the crossroads or, in this case, at the confluence of the waters,’ said Laura, when she and Dame Beatrice were back at the Stone House. ‘What are you going to do about it? According to the verdict we heard pronounced, the answer is a lemon.’

  ‘There are various ways of dealing with dirty work,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Name two.’

  ‘Well, there is the way adopted by the priest and the Levite in the story of the good Samaritan — pass by on the other side of the road and so avoid all chance of becoming implicated. Another way is to proceed with some dirty work of one’s own. I fail to see how lemons come into the matter.’

  ‘Just a manner of saying that the verdict has shut all doors to further investigation of that de-trousered fellow’s death.’

  ‘Not necessarily. The circumstances are bizarre and therefore, to that extent, interesting. Further interest is added by the fact that Bryony shares our suspicions.’

  ‘It’s a pity Sekhmet can’t talk.’

  ‘I hardly think Susan would agree with you.’

  ‘Do you think the dead man was the Crozier Lodge prowler?’

  ‘Time will tell, perhaps.’

  ‘It seems a bit much to suspect Susan on no evidence at all.’

  ‘We have only Susan’s word for it that the man was dead when she got to Watersmeet. Her wet jeans could be (and no doubt were) explained by her statement that she waded into the river to look at the body. She is the one person, apart from the two sisters, who could be quite sure that Sekhmet would not attack her, whatever she did.’

  ‘The evidence is that Sekhmet would not attack anybody.’

  ‘I am acting as the Devil’s advocate, as usual, but one must always be prepared to look at a problem from all sides.’

  ‘You don’t deny that somebody enticed Sekhmet away with intent to steal her, do you?’

  ‘I have an open mind about the question of stealing her. Why steal a comparatively valueless Labrador bitch when there are two pedigree Pharaoh hounds of the same sex at Crozier Lodge? It does not strike me as a very sensible procedure.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes, there is that, I suppose. The smell of aniseed would have attracted the other hounds as much as it did Sekhmet, but, of course, the answer is that all the Pharaohs were shut safely away, so Sekhmet was the only dog available.’

  ‘We come now to the question of the mutilated trousers.’

  ‘Well, if the circumstances of the death were more suspicious than the inquest verdict would have us believe, there is no doubt why that particular chunk was chopped out of them, although there is no reason to think Susan did that. It would have shown the name of the tailor or outfitter who had supplied the pants and the police are pretty hot at tracing people when they’ve got that much to go on. On the other hand, if the death was purely accidental, surely somebody will turn up at some time and report this man as missing.’

  ‘A question which ought to have been raised at the inquest is whether the trousers on which Sekhmet was sitting were the trousers of the dead man or of somebody else. They could be the murderer’s own trousers (if murder has been committed) and he could have gone off in the victim’s garments.’

  ‘Well, that would let Susan out, surely?’

  ‘Who can tell? The Rant sisters could say what she was wearing when she went off to Watersmeet, no doubt, but — ’

  ‘I think you are trailing your coat. What do you expect me to do about it?’

  ‘Tread on the tail of it, of course, and challenge every suggestion I make. The more we argue, the more likely we are to arrive at some aspect of the truth.’

  ‘You really do believe this is a case of murder, don’t you?’

  ‘Believe is too definite a word. I certainly think there are strong reasons for keeping the possibility of foul play in the forefront of our minds. Presumably the man and the hound had been in amicable relationship on their walk, so it seems strange that he panicked at Watersmeet, discarded his trousers — surely not easy if the dog was paying him the close attention which has been postulated — and then that, having bestowed the garments on her, he leapt into the torrent. The whole suggestion seems to me bizarre in the extreme.’

  ‘But so is your own suggestion that the murderer hit the man over the head, changed into the man’s trousers and then wedged the body among the boulders in the river.’

  ‘Touché! said Dame Beatrice, leering at her secretary. ‘Both theories are idiotic. We must return to the subject later.’

  ‘No, honestly, tell me what you really think happened.’

  ‘My thoughts do not appear to impress you.’

  ‘Well, you’ve admitted that they do seem a bit far-fetched. Don’t you think the verdict of accidental death may be the right one after all?’

  ‘I might, were it not that possible evidence of identity had been cut out of the trousers. I do not see how the significance of that can be overlooked.’

  ‘The coroner and the police seem to have overlooked it.’

  ‘They may have thought that the trousers had been made to fit more comfortably when the piece of the waistband was removed. I daresay that if you asked the opinion of that erudite young detective-sergeant, h
e would quote you the case of The Aunt and the Sluggard.’

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘I seem to remember that, when Rockmetteller Todd borrowed Bertram Wooster’s dress clothes, he split the waistcoat up the back in order to make it more comfortable to wear.’

  ‘You think of everything,’ said Laura, in mock admiration.

  ‘All the same, having made my point, I will now retract. I do not believe that anybody had chopped a piece out of the waistband of those trousers for the purpose of making them more comfortable to wear. I do think there has been murder committed and I am sufficiently interested to pursue the matter further, although I shall not assume Susan’s guilt unless or until I can find proof of it.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness that’s all over,’ said Bryony. She glanced at the clock. ‘Isn’t it time you took Amon and Anubis out for their run?’

  ‘Can’t we shut Isis and Nephthys and Sekhmet in the house and give my two the run of the garden just for once?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t feel like going out.’

  ‘Not feeling seedy, are you?’

  ‘No, just disinclined to leave the house, that’s all.’

  ‘Suit yourself. It’s no good letting this wretched drowning get you down, though, you know. If that man had not tried to steal poor old Fret, he would still be alive, no doubt.’

  ‘I know. I just don’t fancy going out, that’s all.’

  ‘You ought to watch yourself, Morpeth.’ Bryony looked at her sister with sympathy mixed with slight exasperation and a certain amount of anxiety. ‘Once you start this kind of opting out, you may find it grows on you. You don’t want to end up with agoraphobia.’

  ‘You always fly to extremes when you criticise me. The fact is, I can’t get that strange Ozymandias man out of my head. I don’t intend to get mixed up with him again, and somehow I can’t help connecting him with this drowning.’

  ‘Absolute nonsense!’

  ‘Suppose he were to pop out on me when I was out with the dogs and begin gibbering at me! I should be shattered with terror.’