“Going on the assumption that Gloria Mundy knifed this so-far-unknown woman, burnt the body in that car, and somehow—heaven knows how!—got the body back to the old house—well, if I can swallow all that, I can see various possibilities,” I said. This was not strictly true. What came into my mind were not possibilities, but wild flights of imagination into which, fortunately, perhaps, Dame Beatrice did not enquire.
She said, “Let us pick up the threads again. Now then, we know that Miss Mundy was at Beeches Lawn on the Sunday. The host, the hostess, and all the guests (yourself included) say so. Now what evidence have we that she did not leave the neighbourhood as soon as she had left Beeches Lawn after the soup incident?”
“Are you serious in asking that?”
“Please answer me.”
“Well, there is the evidence of Roland and Kay, who saw her standing at the window of the old house.”
“In pouring rain and gathering darkness, remember, and themselves, I imagine, intent only on reaching the shelter of Mr. Wotton’s hospitable home.”
“But it wasn’t raining, nor was the girl inside the old house, when McMaster saw her among the bushes as he crossed the kitchen garden. Of course he only saw the top of her head, I believe.”
“But it was, as you say, her head he saw, and her hair was, to him, unmistakable.”
“He didn’t have the help of it at Trends.”
“Nevertheless, I believe him and I believe Mr. Thornbury and Miss Shortwood. It was Miss Mundy they saw.”
“I thought you were doubtful about Kay and Roland.”
“Not if my interpretation of the known events is correct. I think the murder was committed on the Saturday night, the night before Miss Mundy presented herself at Beeches Lawn.”
“She would never have dared leave a stabbed and burnt body in that car. The police would have found it when the man who rented the old convent building reported the obstruction.”
“The car, I believe, was not drawn to their attention until the Monday or Tuesday.”
“That’s true. They hadn’t got rid of it even when Celia Wotton came back from the hospital after Miss Brockworth’s accident. I suppose they were still trying to trace the owner, so wanted to have the car all in one piece, which it wouldn’t have been, perhaps, if they’d moved it. Did Gloria steal the car as well as burn it?
“No, I think it was her own car and an old one which she was prepared to sacrifice in order to further her own ends. The number plates, I am told—I have been in conference with Detective-Inspector Rouse, as you know—had been removed. My reading is that this was done to prevent the car’s being traced to Miss Mundy, not that the vehicle had been stolen.”
“There are other ways of identifying cars, apart from their number plates,” I pointed out.
“No doubt she trusted that the fire would eliminate other clues. I will let you know how I get on at Trends. Where will you be during the next few days?”
“At Beeches Lawn, if I am not in my flat. The Wottons have invited me for another visit.”
The shell of the old house was a grim reminder of the days of my first visit to Beeches Lawn. What remained of the roof had been removed for reasons of safety, I supposed, so that, apart from the ravages which it had suffered from the fire, the house was now completely open to the weather. I wondered what Anthony proposed to do with it. I supposed that it was not impossible to renovate it, but in his place I would have pulled it down.
Celia opened the subject at lunchtime. She said that the house now gave her the horrors, but that Anthony wanted to preserve it. The contractor was coming that afternoon to make another survey.
“Now that the roof has gone, something must be done soon if I am to save the rest of the structure,” said Anthony, “but Celia is too emphatic. The trouble is that, before I came into the property, a preservation order was slapped on the old place, so I’ve got to find out where I stand now with regard to that.”
“While Anthony and the man are confabulating, will you take me out in your car, Corin?” asked Celia. “It’s either that, or both of us staying indoors all the afternoon. I don’t suppose the survey will be over until teatime at the earliest.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Oh, anywhere. Just out and around. Anywhere you would care to take me.”
“Don’t keep her out after dark. I don’t trust bachelors,” said Anthony. I laughed as I thought of Imogen.
“I’ve got myself a girl of my own,” I said. Celia was all speculation and curiosity, but I said that, as the evenings were shortening and I had received my orders not to keep her out after dark, I would unburden myself to her uttermost satisfaction when we were in the car.
“Where are we going?” she asked, as I took the Cheltenham road.
“Can you climb a hill?”
“I hope so.”
“And visit a church?”
“If I have to.”
“Right. We’ll climb up to Belas Knap and then go and look at Elkstone.”
I was surprised that she had never seen either, but then I remembered some American friends of mine who had been astonished to find how little I knew of historical London, a city in which I had spent the best part of my adult life.
I locked the car and we left the road and made the steep climb by way of a route marked out by the National Trust. A thousand feet up the shoulder of the beautifully named Cleeve Cloud was the long barrow, a grass-covered mound with an impressive forecourt, a false entrance, and, round at the sides, the burial chambers in which, four thousand years ago, Neolithic men had buried the dead. I crept inside one of the short passages, but Celia remained outside.
“How did they make such a place?” she asked, when I emerged.
“Drystone walls made of limestone blocks,” I answered. “The Cotswolds haven’t changed.”
“You’ve changed,” she said, as we stood together in the wind which was driving ragged autumn clouds across the sky. “Are you very happy, Corin?”
“As happy as a man contemplating matrimony can expect to be,” I replied. She laughed.
“A two-edged answer,” she said. “Race you down the hill.”
“No, you won’t. You’d find the slope too steep for safety. You’d tumble over and get covered in cowpats. I’m not going to have my car stinking like a midden.”
“Are you practising being a stern and bossy husband?”
I had a vision of Imogen with the gold lights in her dark hair and her answer to my proposal of marriage. “I’ll have you, but I’m going to write my book first.”
“Stern and bossy? I’d never get away with it,” I told Celia.
“It’s old-fashioned, anyway,” she said. “What’s her name?”
“Imogen Parkstone.”
“Not the novelist?”
“Yes.”
“But I’ve read her! She’s really good.”
“Is she? I don’t read other people’s novels for fear they are better than my own.”
“Does she earn a lot of money?”
“I’ve never thought about it. Maybe she does.”
“More money than you do?”
“Quite likely.”
“Will you mind if you find that she does?”
“No, it wouldn’t make any difference. We should have an agreement to pay a certain amount into the housekeeping and keep the rest for ourselves, I suppose, to spend as we liked.”
“And take separate holidays?”
“That might come later.”
“I wish Anthony had never gone on that cruise. The knowledge that that awful girl is still alive haunts me.”
“Forget it. She is not likely to show up at Beeches Lawn again. Besides, Anthony got over that brief interlude of idiocy years ago.”
We found some blackberries in the lane, great luscious whoppers on bushes fertilised, I suppose, by the cows.
“Don’t touch them,” said Celia, as I stretched out my hand for the fruit.
“Why no
t?”
“There’s a country superstition that by this time in the year ‘the devil’s drawed ’is tail over ’em,’ ” she told me, with a fair shot at the local intonation.
“Oh, ah?” I said, imitating it. “So ’ow do ’ee come to know that there, then?” But I did not touch the blackberries. I thought of Aunt Eglantine and laughed as I unlocked the car. On the way to Elkstone I asked how Marigold Coberley was getting on.
“She is feeling much more hopeful,” said Celia. “Mr. McMaster wrote to her to tell her that he had seen Gloria Mundy alive and working at Trends.”
“Not her ghost?”
“No. He is convinced now that she is still in the flesh. The police are after her.”
We bypassed Cheltenham at Prestbury and followed the by-roads almost to Andoversford. Then I headed the car south-west to Seven Springs and after that it was due south to Elkstone.
The village was high up above the valley of the Churn and as harsh and uncompromising as the church itself. The edifice had been built roughly at the same time as Kilpeck, but, except for the chevron moulding around the broad chancel arch and an inner archway to the sanctuary, no two interiors could have been more different, neither were the south doorways comparable.
For one thing, both Celtic and Viking ornament were missing here. Elkstone was as brutal and as stern as the Normans who built it. There was Norman ruthlessness and cruelty in the hideous, warning sculptured faces at the crossing of the vault ribs of the chancel, and Norman thrift in the provision of a large dovecot under the roof, a dovecot which, when we had squeezed our way up a narrow stair, proved to be as large as the chancel below it.
When we were back in the car it occurred to me that we were so near Will Smith’s cottage (as I still thought of it) that I might as well show it to Celia.
I guessed that my beloved lane would be knee-deep in wet vegetation and probably very muddy, but there was a made road up from the stables. These had been converted into classrooms and changing-rooms by the school, and some boys were just emerging as I left the car in the road. A young master was with them.
“Is it all right if we take this road to the gamekeeper’s cottage? I used to know him,” I said.
“Oh, go ahead,” he responded; so we took the straight road to where the cottage stood at the top of the low hill. The slope was grassy and in front of the building Will had contrived a little unfenced garden, but this had run riot now and was covered in weeds. At the back were the woods where he and I had so often walked and talked.
Celia was enchanted with the cottage. I told her I wanted it for my own.
“Would you live here all the year round?” she asked. “If so, you would need electric light and you would have to build a bathroom, wouldn’t you? I would love to go inside.”
I began to demur, but then it occurred to me to try the back door, for country people seldom lock up. It did not yield, however, so we went round to the front, but that was fastened, too. I suppose the authorities did not want the property invaded by boys who wanted a quiet smoke.
“I expect we shall have to spend a lot of our time in London to keep in the literary fishpond,” I said in answer to Celia’s question, “but that will depend on Imogen.” I looked about me. On the sloping ground below, a drystone wall marked off a stretch of pasture and I remembered I had once seen a couple of bottle-fed lambs come bounding up to the farmer like pet dogs and there was still a grey mare in the paddock, although hardly the one on whose back I had been given a ride. “For myself, I wouldn’t care if I never saw London again,” I added.
“It’s better for children to be brought up in the country. Are you planning to have a family, Corin?”
“Good heavens, we haven’t got that far! Give us a chance,” I said. “Anyway, at present, Imogen, I am sure, is far keener on producing books than children.”
16
Attempt at a Volte-Face
My activities following my return from Beeches Lawn to my flat were of no interest except to myself until I went to visit Miss Brockworth again. I took Imogen to look at Will Smith’s cottage and outlined the improvements which would be needed if the school would let me have it. To my surprise she vetoed most of them.
“Electricity, yes,” she said. “I expect they have it already in the village. I noticed a doctor’s brass plate on that nice house as we turned into the lane; he is sure to have electric light. As for a bathroom and indoor sanitation, no. I am not going to spoil the character of the cottage like that. We will look about for an old-fashioned hip-bath, boil kettles of water over the fire, and I will wash your back and you can wash mine.”
“Before or after we’re married?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You won’t like going to an outside privy in the snow,” I pointed out.
“We shall spend the summers here and the winters in London, so that question will not arise.”
I felt I had crossed the Rubicon and sold myself not to a pitched battle but into slavery. There was no going back. One good thing had happened while I was with the Wottons. I had met Marigold Coberley again and discovered that, greatly though I still admired it, her remarkable beauty made no emotional impact on me at all. In fact, studying her from what I hoped was an unprejudiced angle, I thought I could detect, in her wonderful eyes and her beautiful mouth, the ruthlessness which had led her to kill her first husband.
My effort at Trends and at Culvert Green had been fruitless so far as tracing Gloria was concerned, and, Imogen having retired to her sister’s house to write, I found myself at a loose end and not in the right mental state to settle down to my own new book. Having time to kill, therefore, before the compulsion which all writers know came upon me again, I decided to go and visit Miss Brockworth, who was still immobile. I knew which were Celia’s visiting days, so I was fairly certain that I could get the old lady to myself for an entertaining chat.
There was no doubt about her pleasure at seeing me and she received my package of peppermint creams and a perfume spray with approval. She then grinned wickedly at me.
“You have not come courting me, I hope,” she said. “Chaucer’s prioress is not for the marriage market, even though she be called madame.”
“Dear Madame Eglantine, I wish I had thought of you in time,” I said, “but, alas and alack!—I am bespoke.”
“ ‘And a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch,’ ” said the reprobate old lady, with hearty laughter. So, when she quietened down, I told her about Imogen.
“Is she good enough for you?” she asked.
“Much too good.”
“Well, I would trust you to pick out a sound apple from a basket of bruised ones,” she said. “I should like to meet your Imogen. Did I tell you I had a visit from a priest yesterday?”
“Good heavens! You mustn’t indulge in these morbid fancies. You’re as sound as a bell.”
“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t send for him. He came of his own accord to ask me some questions I couldn’t answer. They were about his brother who was supposed to have committed suicide a year or two ago.”
“Not an Italian?”
“Yes, of course an Italian. What a volatile people they are! And so disorganised.”
“I wonder why he came to see you? You didn’t know this man who committed suicide, did you?—or know that it was because of Miss Mundy?”
“Certainly not. I should not dream of knowing the type of person who commits suicide. Apart from its being extremely wicked, it is in mighty poor taste. It gives the impression that one thinks it matters whether one lives or dies.”
“I suppose it matters to the individual concerned, but what did this priest have to say?”
“He said he was the brother of an artist whom the witch took up with and then murdered.”
“Suicide, not murder.”
“I know better and so does the priest. Tell me more about this Imogen of yours. When do you intend to marry her?”
So we abandoned
the subject of the Italian priest and the remainder of my visit was passed in questions and answers about Imogen and authors’ clubs and literary societies. I also gave her a description of Will Smith’s cottage, which I hoped to purchase or rent from the school. On my way out I met one of the doctors.
“I wonder,” I said, “whether you can confirm something the patient in there”—I gestured towards Eglantine’s room—“has just told me.”
“Oh, Granny Brockworth will say anything,” said the young man. “Not that we dare call her Granny to her face. Sister tried it once to make her feel at home here, you know. She wanted to let the old lady feel that we would look after her, but she said that Sister had “impugned her honour and conferred on her a title of ignominy.” She had never married, she told us, and certainly had never had children, let alone grandchildren. If she has said anything in complaint of her treatment here, you can disregard it, because it simply isn’t true. She’s a holy terror to the nurses, but she lacks for nothing in the way of care and attention, I can assure you.”
“It was nothing like that. She declares she has had a visit from an Italian priest and there are reasons why I would like to know whether that is true.”
“Dashed if I know. Patients’ visitors are no concern of mine unless they upset the patient and I have to give orders that that particular visitor shall be discouraged from coming here. You had better see Sister if this priest was a nuisance.”
Sister was forthright.
“Her visitors have been yourself and, twice a week, her niece. Nobody else has been. She seems rather friendless, and that’s not surprising,” Sister said.
“The priest couldn’t have slipped in without your knowledge?” I asked.
Sister froze me with a glare which would have turned Medusa herself to stone. I apologised and made my way out, wondering what story old Eglantine had got hold of and how she had come to know about the suicide at all. I discounted her claim that it had been murder. The verdict must have been clearly given at the time and had gone unquestioned ever since, so far as I knew. I decided to go back to Beeches Lawn to find out how Aunt Eglantine had come by her knowledge of the suicide.
Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 16
