“If only we’d moved the stuff out instead of my taking time off to go out in my car to visit Hetty Pegler’s Tump!” I said remorsefully.
“Nonsense, my dear chap. I put the job off myself because I wanted the fallen leaves swept off the lawn. But this business is the very devil. One of the wretched gang of youths who thought they would amuse themselves by setting fire to the place must have been trapped by the flames or overcome by the smoke, and his mates ran off and left him to it.”
It turned out to be even worse than that. The fire must have been started with the deliberate intention of covering up a murder, and the corpse was not that of a boy, but of a woman.
We did not know this at first. At the preliminary interview which Anthony had, the uniformed inspector who called took a most unexpected line. I was not present, of course, but got a full account later. The inspector asked whether Anthony had ever suspected that the old house had been taken over by squatters.
“Most certainly not,” my friend replied. “The house was quite unfit for human habitation. Besides, I have had an offer for it from somebody who was prepared to do it up—the headmaster of the preparatory school next door. He has been inside it more than half a dozen times during the past month or so and would have informed me at once of any tenants. Apart from that, my gardener would have known if anybody had been living there. Besides, I myself passed the house every time I went to the garage for my car. What makes you ask about squatters?”
“In a corner of the cellar which the fire had hardly reached we found empty tins which had contained food and beer, sir.”
“Sounds more like a passing tramp. Anyway, I’m certain the house had not been taken over by squatters.”
“Have you missed any food lately?”
“You had better ask my cook. She has made no mention of anything missing from her stores.”
“Oh, well, that can wait, sir. I mentioned we have evidence that the house was occupied. I take it you have heard of the body discovered among the débris?”
“My wife would hardly have telephoned you if we had not. The body must be that of some unfortunate tramp, or one of the fire-raisers who didn’t get away in time. A truly dreadful business, Inspector, and I’m glad the body was removed before I saw it.”
“I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to take a look at it, sir. The fire was not the cause of death. We are investigating a case of wilful murder. There will be a pathologist’s report, but our own police surgeon says that accident or suicide can be ruled out. Our immediate aim is to get the dead person identified. That is partly why I asked whether you had been aware that you had squatters on your premises. Now, in the face of your denials, it’s a long shot, I know, but I would like you to accompany me to the mortuary to see whether you can identify the corpse, as your gardener informs me you had people staying here.”
“But my denials are absolute. I can’t possibly help you. I assure you that I have never known that anybody was occupying the old place, let alone ever having seen anybody there. As for my guests, they all left safely and can be accounted for. The only one who is still here is Mr. Stratford and he is hale and hearty enough.”
“And you are sure there were no squatters?”
“Only a few days ago some friends of mine went in to look at a portrait which had hung in one of the downstairs rooms for years. They would most certainly have told me if they had suspected that the house was occupied. The headmaster who has an option to purchase was one of them—he has a key. As I told you, I’m sure he would have known if squatters had taken over the building. No, no, a gang of young hooligans is far more likely and I should not be able to recognise any of them.”
“Just so, sir. All the same, I would like you to take a look at the body that was found. We need to get it identified.”
“But how the hell can I identify a person who was entirely unknown to me?”
“The body was found on your premises, sir. This is more like an elimination than an identification.”
“Elimination? Oh, but, dammit, look here—!”
“I’m afraid I must insist, sir.”
“Is the body—well, is it, as it were, very badly—er—?”
“You need take only a quick look, sir. There is one special feature which may help with identification. It should be sufficient for our purpose.”
“May Mr. Stratford come with me? He has been staying in the house, as I told you, and is still here.”
“We may be glad of him for confirmation, sir. Are there no other persons in the house?”
“Two women servants and my wife, but I’m not going to have them look at any dead bodies.”
“We would be loth to submit females to such an ordeal, sir.”
“If you think this person was a squatter and as I have assured you, I know nothing of any such, what is the point of taking me along to look at this body of yours? I repeat that I cannot help you.”
“A matter of routine, sir, as the corpse was found under very suspicious circumstances on premises belonging to you, as I have explained. The singular feature to which I alluded should settle the matter of identification if the person should turn out to be somebody you know.”
I had been uneasy in my mind ever since the inspector’s arrival and when Anthony told me of this reference (the second one) to what the police seemed to think was an unmistakeable feature, my thoughts went to the red and black hair of Gloria Mundy, that uninvited and unwelcome interloper. The same idea presented itself to Anthony, I think, for he said in an aside to me after I had been sent for, “Je pense que les gendarmes ont quelque chose debout leur manche.”
I nodded. The inspector smiled and said, “I ought to tell you that I understand French, sir. Even yours,” he added unkindly, “and I assure you that we have nothing up our sleeve. Shall we go, sir? You and Mr. Stratford will be shown the body separately, of course.”
“I must let my wife know where I am going.”
“Of course, sir.”
We went in a police car. Nothing was said on the journey. What Anthony’s thoughts were I do not know. Personally I was nerving myself for what I knew would be the most unpleasant experience of my life. At the same time I was aware of a sick sort of curiosity of which I was ashamed but could not dismiss.
Anthony was first and they let him out by another door, for I saw nothing of him before it was my turn. The mortuary smelt heavily of disinfectant, an odour I detest, and it did not help my already queasy stomach.
“Just a glance, sir,” said the inspector encouragingly. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Sez you!” I thought grimly, swallowing in order to rid myself of my horrid feeling of nausea. The attendant drew back the sheet from the face, or what had been the face. It was blackened and quite unrecognisable. The feature referred to twice by the inspector was only too plain to see, however. On the otherwise unidentifiable head of the corpse was the slightly scorched red and black hair which was what I thought of as the trademark of Gloria Mundy. The inspector covered up the horror which lay on the mortuary slab and led me away from it.
“Well, sir?” he said, with a briskness which I suppose was an indication that I must pull myself together.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s—there’s nothing to go on but the hair, and that doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“No, sir?”
“I mean, if the head is—is like that, the hair ought to be shrivelled right up and you wouldn’t see the two colours and all that, would you?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, sir, so if I may know what your verdict is?”
“Oh, the identification. I suppose the body is that of Gloria Mundy, but—”
“You need go no further, sir. Thank you for your help.”
All was not yet over. We were taken to the police station, where Anthony was escorted to the interview room and I was given a seat opposite the desk sergeant’s counter. He asked me whether I would like a cup of tea. I thought this appare
ntly kind suggestion was an indication that I might need to be fortified against my next ordeal.
I refused the tea and asked whether I had long to wait. He answered, in the elliptical manner of which the police are pastmasters, that these things took a little time. He offered me a newspaper to read.
I took it and thanked him, but it is hardly necessary to say that, although I looked at it for courtesy’s sake, I did not read a single word. I was still wondering what Anthony had thought when he was shown Gloria’s hair and her ravaged face, and what he was saying at that moment in the interview room.
At last it was my turn. They led Anthony past me and saw him out and then a constable touched me on the arm and said, “This way, sir.” In the interview room he positioned himself against the door. The inspector was not there. A mild-looking man in plain clothes gave me a seat opposite him at a table, drew a writing-pad towards himself, took up a ballpoint, and said, with what I thought (with even worse misgivings than before) was a kind of gruesome cheerfulness, “Well, now, sir, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, shall we? Then we can both have our lunch.”
“I suppose it’s no good to ask you what my friend has told you,” I said.
“The same as I hope you are going to tell me, sir. You say that you recognised the body as being that of a Miss Gloria Mundy. How well did you know her?”
“Only well enough to recognise her rather unusual two-coloured hair. She was my fellow guest at lunch a few days ago.”
“The lunch being where, sir?”
“At Mr. Wotton’s house. I had been invited to pay him a visit and Miss Mundy turned up unexpectedly and was offered lunch. She took umbrage at the table manners of another guest and left before the end of the meal. I never saw her alive again, and I had never met her before that day.”
He pushed a writing-pad towards me. Another plain-clothes man had been making notes at a small table in a corner of the room.
“Would you read what the detective-sergeant has written down, sir, and sign it as a true report of what you have told me?”
That was all. I was thanked—the deadly courtesy of the English police is far more terrifying than the bullying methods adopted by some other Forces—and Anthony and I were driven back to Beeches Lawn. Celia was anxious to know what had happened.
“I don’t like it,” she said, when she heard what Anthony had to say. “As for that awful Gloria, if she had been camping out there, somebody would have seen her and told us. What about Platt and the boy who helps him in the garden?”
“They can’t have seen anybody, or they would have mentioned it. All the same, the police found empty tins in the cellar to back up their story about squatters. Now we know it was Gloria, she must have been living there.”
“Those things could have been down there for years. There’s no water or lighting or sanitation in the old house. People couldn’t live there. The dreadful thing is that, if there were no squatters, somebody else killed Gloria. You and Corin had to say you knew her. They’ll probe—the police, I mean—and goodness knows what they’ll come up with. How well did you know her?”
“I told you ages ago. I had a lighthearted flirtation with her. It was nothing more. I met her on a Mediterranean cruise. She only wanted to get free drinks on board and her shore outings paid for. I was the unattached member of my party, so I went along with her.”
“Old Hara-kiri seems to have had the same sort of experience,” I said, backing him up. “Gloria seems to have been adept at picking out the suckers,” I added, less graciously.
“And what about you?” asked Celia, resenting, as I had guessed she would, my slighting reference to her husband.
“Me?” I said. “I don’t like skinny wenches. When I take a girl I want an armful. To get back to the point at issue, what happens next? If squatters are out of it, perhaps Anthony was unwise to stick to the story that there was nobody camping out in the old house.”
“Oh, they’ll question the gardeners and the tradesmen, I suppose,” said Celia. “I hope they won’t bother poor old Aunt Eglantine while she’s in hospital.”
“If she had been minding her own business instead of breaking into empty houses and climbing rickety staircases, the meddling old so-and-so wouldn’t be in hospital. And of course they’ll question her,” said Anthony. “What’s more, they’ll round up everybody else who has been staying in the house and was here when Gloria turned up to lunch. Our name will be a hissing and a by-word among our friends. ‘Don’t, whatever you do, go and stay with the Wottons unless you want to be had up for murder.’ That’s what will go around.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Celia. “This business is bad enough without your getting hysterical over it. Why on earth, when Gloria knew the place was on fire, didn’t she run off? Could she have been drunk or drugged?”
“She had been stabbed. That much the police did let us know. She was dead, they think, before the fire started.”
“Then it was started to try to cover up the murder—or could it have been suicide?”
“According to what the chap told me in the interview room, the doctor thinks she was stabbed in the back.”
“That being so,” I said, “a thought occurs to me. Most probably she wasn’t killed in the old house at all. She could have been murdered elsewhere, the body brought to the old house and the fire started to cover up the crime, as Celia says.”
“But who would have known that the old house was available and that there was a pile of chopped wood waiting to be made into a bonfire?” Anthony demanded. “If you ask me, I’m in the devil of a spot. I gave the order for the wood of the staircase to be chopped up; it was my house, and I knew Gloria from the old days and had ditched her and, like the bad penny she was, she bobbed up again. I might have had a very good reason to get rid of her—or so the police will think.”
“She was in your house for less than a couple of hours,” I said. “I saw her arrive, you know.”
“And how long is it going to take the police to find out that she was the cause of a first-class row between Celia and me?”
“How can they find out? Neither of you will tell them, and I certainly shan’t,” I said. “Besides, it wasn’t a first-class row; just a border skirmish such as all married couples indulge in from time to time. You’re fretting unnecessarily, old man.”
“One never knows what the servants may have overheard,” said Celia, “and we did go it rather hammer and tongs after you had left the room, Corin, and again in bed. They say the walls have ears, so I think there is some cause for worry, although not as much as Anthony believes.”
“The detective-superintendent at the police station asked me for the names of everybody who had been staying in the house during the past week,” said Anthony. “That’s why I said they are certain to question Aunt Eglantine. She claims to have seen Gloria in the old house and so do those two youngsters. McMaster saw her in the grounds, too, so we know she couldn’t have left when we thought she did.”
“Proves that Gloria was alive at those times,” I said.
“A fat lot of use that’s going to be,” Anthony retorted. “Oh, well, nothing for us to do but wait for the inquest, I suppose. You’ll have to stay on for a bit longer, Corin, as the police seem to have involved you in the beastly business.”
“We shall be thankful to have you,” said Celia.
“But I’ve got a job to finish for old Hara-kiri,” I protested. “I can’t stay here much longer.”
“You may have no option, old man, until this business is cleared up,” said Anthony.
“You wouldn’t desert us at a time like this, would you?” said Celia. Anthony kicked the leg of a chair.
“What a hell of a nuisance that girl is!” he said. “She was a hell of a nuisance when she was alive and she’s the hell of a nuisance now she’s dead. I don’t like that inspector’s manner and I didn’t like that chap who interviewed me at the police station. They’ll ferret around and uncover things.”
“Su
ch as your little, short-lived affair with Gloria?” I said. “Don’t be an ass, man! You weren’t the only one. What about Hara-kiri? And, from what I gather, there could have been a dozen men that she’d had on the hook at some time or other.”
“She wasn’t killed on their premises, though. That’s the rub. She turned up here, left in a huff because of Aunt Eg’s inexcusable behaviour, and then somebody killed her.”
“Well, nobody killed her without a motive.”
“But I had a motive, Corin. She came here with the intention of blackmailing me. She wanted to give up her job and go abroad. She told me so almost as soon as she arrived. That’s why she came for money.”
“Did she threaten you? And did anybody overhear the conversation?”
“She made her intention quite plain. The interview was only between the two of us, but I don’t suppose I moderated my voice. I don’t when I lose my temper, and lose my temper I did.”
“What sort of job did she do?”
“She was a sales assistant at that fashion shop called Trends.”
“How could she afford a cruise that other time?”
“It was a one-class boat and she had a cabin right down in the depths. That’s why I let her share mine, on the strict QT.”
“Why didn’t you kick her out of the house straightaway that day? Why ask her to stay to lunch?”
“I did that,” said Celia. “I was curious about her. I wanted to find out what Anthony had ever seen in her.”
“Nothing, of course,” said Anthony morosely. “I never saw anything in her. She just happened, like any other disaster.”
“But she couldn’t have blackmailed you merely on the strength of a ship-board flirtation. What else have you got on your conscience?” asked Celia.
“Nothing, of course.” But to me his denial did not ring true and I was worried. I tried another tack—or, rather, I returned to one we had tried earlier.
“Look,” I said, “there’s nothing to show that she was killed in the old house. Let’s sort this out a bit. At least two days elapsed between the time Aunt Eglantine saw her and the time the body was found after the fire. She couldn’t have been living in the old house without somebody knowing she was still there. She could have been killed—mugged, as likely as not—anywhere in the neighbourhood and the body brought back here and the fire started to cover up the murder. What’s wrong with that theory? It seems utterly likely to me.”
Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 7
