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by Gladys Mitchell

  “Stand clear,” said Justus. “Here we come.”

  The body crashed horribly into the fireplace. They dragged it out on to the floor, and removed the rope from underneath the arms.

  “Who is it?” enquired Mrs. Bradley.

  “It’s the little German, Simplon. This is a funny business. What do you suppose we do now, besides ’phone the police? Bloke is dead, I presume?”

  “Oh, no. He’s not dead. We shall bring him round all right. He’ll be out of action for a week or two, though, I imagine,” said Mrs. Bradley, examining a bump on his head. “We’d better get him to hospital. Ring the police, and ask them to see about an ambulance.”

  •3•

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Carey.

  “On the contrary, it makes complete sense,” replied his aunt. “What is more, we have gained, through Justus, who is destined, I feel, to go far, some very important and interesting information. There is police news, too, according to the morning paper upon which, I perceive, you are sitting. The police have taken a statement from Mrs. Saxant, in which she declares that Mr. Carn’s ears were pierced for ear-rings, and—”

  “So the police have decided that, in spite of its identification by the younger Carn, the corpse was not, in short, that of Carn? Aunt Adela, you’re a marvel. And now I suppose they’ll discover, when once more they exhume the corpse, that its luxurious hairiness was merely the wilfully misleading hairiness of Jacob, and, in short, that they’ve been sold a pup. I suppose you’ve been on to the chief constable?”

  “I was at school with one of his aunts,” Mrs. Bradley replied.

  “Talk about wax lights and the corpse being discovered in a ditch! But I still can’t think what makes you think I shall find Carn at this nudist colony.”

  “Merely, as I said before, that I cannot think of a better place to hide. One’s friends seldom visit one there, and the strictest watch is kept against trespassers. One is assured of perfect privacy. ‘The Garden of Eden Pre-Fall Holiday Relaxation and Greek Cultural Physical Recreation Sanctuary’ is the full name of the institution. It is, needless to say—”

  “Run by an American quack doctor of Puritan New England descent. I know. All right. I’m prepared for anything.”

  “There’s a good boy,” said Bassin, joining them. “Well, you were right about our little friend, Mrs. Bradley. He’ll pull through. Nasty knock on the head. Hasn’t regained consciousness yet, but they say they’ve had worse cases from the riding school. But what’s the idea of it, I wonder? I wonder whether Carey’s visit upset him, and this is his idea of retaliation?”

  “I was about to tell Carey of your discoveries about the manuscript and the typescript.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bassin, retailing them. “Funny that neither of us thought of getting at it that way. I think I ought to pursue the thing along those lines at once. They ought to be in the House by the Brook, unless they’ve been deliberately destroyed. What do you think, Lestrange?”

  “Absolutely. I wish I could come with you. I’m funking this nudist stuff.”

  “One on a job like this is probably better than two,” said Bassin reasonably. “I mean, where one can worm his way in with a certain amount of success, two would arouse suspicion.”

  Carey, putting his toothbrush into his pocket, and observing gloomily that he supposed it was the only thing he would need, and that if he chewed enough bones he supposed he wouldn’t need that, took a pathetic farewell of his aunt, reminded her that he was a married man with a child, and, in broken accents (much appreciated by George, seated impassively in the driver’s seat of Mrs. Bradley’s car), besought her never to tell his mother what he was proposing to do. The effect of all this passionate pleading was slightly marred by the fact that he was obviously looking forward with some amusement to the experience.

  The nudist colony existed on the slopes of a forested hill. Why forestry should be deemed an indispensable adjunct to nudism had never been clear to him, Carey observed, as they approached the entrance to the Sanctuary. In fact, he confided to Mrs. Bradley, to come upon people suddenly from behind trees would be, he felt, a shock from which he would take years to recover.

  The car dropped down into deep lanes between hedges perched on steep banks, then climbed abrupt slopes between the forest trees and soon reached gates set slantwise off the road.

  At this evidence that they had reached, at any rate, the outskirts of their destination, Carey moaned feebly and closed his eyes. Mrs. Bradley poked him, and told him to sit up and look pleasant.

  “They are expecting us, child,” she said.

  “Don’t. I feel sick and bad,” said her nephew feebly. “What a horribly callous old party you are. Does your kith and kin mean nothing to you at all? What do you suppose my lamentable Aunt Selina will have to say to all this? And young Sally Lestrange? She’ll scream her head off. In fact, they both will, only in different ways.”

  “It is all means to an end, child. Nobody understands the moral significance of such a policy better than your Aunt Selina.”

  “First catty thing I’ve ever heard you say,” observed her nephew, with relish. “But, O my Lord, what a morning!”

  As he spoke, the car, which had been gliding around serpentine curves of a mossy, grass-grown drive, now came to a standstill beneath the benign, grey branches of a beech tree. A gentleman in formal morning dress, except that he was bareheaded, came forward from a kind of garden shelter close at hand. From the car the occupants could also see patches of lawn surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and, beyond the immediate terrain, the top half of the facade of a large house.

  “Welcome, strangers,” said the gentleman, in a pronounced American accent of, Mrs. Bradley rather thought, the Bronx district of New York. “We are sure glad to see you.”

  Carey felt that he could not, with any marked sincerity, return the compliment, but sat back in the car, gazing with fascinated horror at the gentleman’s companions, one of whom was a human being and the other a chimpanzee. They were holding hands, and, of the two, the ape appeared to better advantage than the human being, for not only had he an intelligent face and an impressively muscular body, but he was without the disadvantage of having to pretend that he did not know that he was naked.

  The young man, with his companion and (as the frock-coated American gentleman not too happily expressed it) blood-brother, approached the car.

  “These two—Childe Roland sure is Mr. Shoot’s second self; you couldn’t separate them without they would just bleed silently to death in their hearts—yes, sir—are to be your hut comrades and chain fellow, fellowship, devoted, freelance, ethical companions,” the gentleman continued, smiling.

  “Therefore,” said Mr. Shoot, in a tired voice, “if you will trouble yourself to descend from your automobile, Mr. Lestrange, I will, of course, show you our way of doing things. No doubt, to accustom yourself, you will prefer to retain your bathing trunks, just to break the ice, as we say, but that can only be permitted for the first two days. Most people,” he added encouragingly, as the American gentleman, opening the door of the car, watched Carey step out as though he were watching the antics of his infant son, “discard them in one day, and our record case—of which we are very proud—”

  “Came clean,” interposed the American cheerily, “after one half-hour. Yes, sir.”

  Carey muttered, and, turning to his aunt, rolled his eyes horribly at her before bidding her a broken-voiced farewell. The young man (who had the aloof, goat-like expression of the highbrow who does not publish because he does not write for the vulgar), assisted ably by the ape, which offered Carey its leather-coated palm to hold, took the new arrival in hand and led him towards the very heart of the Sanctuary.

  “Nice day,” said Carey. The ape squeezed his hand, but ambled purposefully onwards without turning its head. Mr. Shoot did not take even this much notice of the sound of his human companion’s voice, but, with brows knit in stern nobility and stomach conscientiously drawn in
, walked with the ungraceful carefulness of a man who has stubbed his bare toes before and feels pretty sure that he will shortly stub them again.

  After a walk of about a quarter of an hour, they were through the rhododendron bushes and had come out upon a stretch of uninterrupted grassland in the centre of which was a pond. Several of the nudists were bathing. All, so far as Carey could make out at that distance—some forty yards—were of indifferent physique, and many of the men were bearded. They gave up their pursuit of health, cleanliness, and pleasure as soon as he drew near, and stared seriously at him as though to make sure that when he became one of them, they would be able to recognise him again. Carey grinned amiably at the younger men, and, accustomed to years of life-drawing at art schools, summed up all the women in sight as, frankly, uninteresting. The younger men smiled politely. Among most of the women and some of the men there was the peculiar self-consciousness he had already noticed in Mr. Shoot. This, it was obvious, was not because of the fact of their nakedness, as such, but because they were uncomfortably aware that their naked bodies showed undisguisable faults of figure and of posture.

  Mr. Shoot touched Carey’s arm.

  “Come along,” he said, wearily. So they passed on over the greensward, Carey feeling like the hero of some ridiculous Pilgrim’s Progress, and through a gap in a low-cut privet hedge behind which there was a lane, a higher hedge, trees, a clearing, and a hut.

  “Here we are,” said Mr. Shoot. The ape loosed Carey’s hand and suddenly swung itself up by a branch to the roof of the hut, where it seated itself. From this position it leered matily, and made a few remarks of what appeared to be a personal nature. It then caught a flea, which it held between finger and thumb and gently admonished.

  Mr. Shoot urged Carey into the hut, and then seemed struck by the fact that the new arrival had no luggage with him.

  “I say, you know. Your bags, you know,” he said.

  “I know. I’ll soon have them off,” said Carey soothingly.

  “No, no. Your baggage. Your kit. Your suitcase and whatnot. I mean, what?”

  “Kit?” said Carey blankly. “I’ve got my toothbrush and my shaving things. What the devil else should I want?”

  He went irritably into the hut, cast off his shirt, trousers, and underwear, kicked off his shoes, dragged off his socks, dribbled the whole lot into an untidy but smallish heap in a corner, and walked out into the light of day.

  “Do you get mosquitoes here?” he enquired.

  “I say, you know, what?” said the apparently highly gratified Mr. Shoot. “I say, you know, stick to it, you know, and you hold the record, what? Oh, well played, sir,” he concluded, on a still mournful, but obviously congratulatory note. “Oh, I say, the Leader will be pleased.”

  He stepped a pace or two away, and subjected his companion to keen scrutiny.

  Mrs. Bradley had not seen her nephew without his clothes since he was a tiny child. Coming up now, with the frock-coated American gentleman, she congratulated him sedately upon his appearance, which, indeed, was considerably more pleasing in its lean and graceful strength than that of most of those people she had seen as she passed by the pool and through the grounds, and, turning, remarked to her escort:

  “A pity all young people don’t come here in the summer. What is your average attendance?”

  “Oh, it depends upon the weather and upon politics, what?” said Mr. Shoot, forestalling the American, who was prepared to give a reasoned, statistical reply. Mrs. Bradley said absently that it was very interesting, and that she hoped the beds were aired, and then, to Carey’s relief, she departed in the wake of her guide to visit the sunray parlour, the special foam and brine baths, and the married quarters.

  “But what happens if passion or lust should eclipse their gentlemanly feelings?” Carey heard her enquiring, from the distance of twenty yards, in her beautiful, deep voice.

  “We find,” the morning-coated gentleman boomed in reply, “the nude female figure to hold no glamour whatever for the nude male. Therefore we get no petting, and without petting, well, you lose the last tickle of the cat’s whiskers, I’ll say, and where are you then? Still moral, I opine.” Mrs. Bradley said that she did not know enough about the subject to subscribe to, or disagree with, this opinion, and an interesting conversation passed beyond earshot of Carey, who picked up a fir-cone and tossed it up at the chimpanzee, who—one could scarcely withhold the pronoun from so kindly and intelligent a creature—thereupon scrambled from the roof with great agility, took Carey’s hand, and led him to the open field on which a game of leap-frog was in progress.

  Here Carey was greeted with a mild but genuine cheer. No fewer than five persons, three male and two female, informed him that he was now the holder of the Sanctuary record. Two others obligingly offered to make a back for him to leap over, three more asked him whether he could swim, an old, stout gentleman in sun-glasses and a pair of tennis shoes asked him his opinion on Malthus, and a middle-aged woman with a bad skin invited his views on Ruskin, vegetarianism, The Soul’s Awakening and Disraeli’s novels. Altogether he was made to feel thoroughly welcome and at home.

  • CHAPTER 9 •

  The Written Word Remains

  “‘This shall not end so,’ cried Sir Moder de la Dart; ‘now have I lost a noble knight of my own blood, and for this despite and shame I will be revenged to the uttermost.’”

  As he walked along the church path beside the brook, Bassin was vividly reminded of his swift walk, by the same path, to the house on the day of Mrs. Carn’s death. The day was younger, for it had been afternoon, and he had lunched on the train, on the previous occasion. Now it was barely ten o’clock, and there were fewer nursemaids although just as many children. The way seemed longer than it had done on his first visit, and this seemed to him curious, because by this time he well knew the way, and where to find the house. His schoolboy visit had left no impressions of time, distance, and locality on his mind, but he remembered now, very vividly, the white gates and their bridges, the tethered lamb, the hustling, weed-fringed waters of the brook; and yet the way seemed long.

  The house looked exactly the same. He did not know what differences he had anticipated, for it was not as though this were the first time he had visited the house since Mrs. Carn’s death, and yet it gave him a feeling of surprise that the smooth lawn should be just as green and kempt as before, the brook wall be as neat, the trim garden as formal and pleasant, the house as mellow and familiar.

  He crossed the bridge and experienced a sudden nervousness in approaching the quiet house. He would not go up to the French window (now mended) through which he had seen the body, and nobody this time was in the garden to save his applying at the house, so he walked steadily to the broad Queen Anne front door and knocked, although his heart was knocking too—knocking against his ribs with a fear which he would not acknowledge.

  The same girl opened the door. Her eyes opened wide at the sight of him, and this time they held no welcome.

  “Oh, sir! It’s you!” she said. Leaving the door open she ran back into the house, and Justus could hear her voice, raised high with excitement. Then a man came striding to the door, and Bassin recognised the younger Mr. Carn, who greeted him noisily and nervously.

  “Ah, come in, Bassin,” he said. “You’re the image of your father, you really are. I’d know you anywhere. You’ve heard of this foolery the police are up to now? Fortinbras isn’t dead; he murdered Myra, and he’s in hiding somewhere, having chopped off a hand and cut off the ears of a corpse! Did you ever hear such a story?”

  He led the way along the passage, talking as he went, and opened the door of a room in whose entrance Bassin instinctively drew back.

  “Come in, my boy, come in,” his host exclaimed. Bassin, shrugging off the clammy fingers of fear, went in and shut the door behind him. Yes, it was just the same. It was the room in which he had been told all about those stupid anonymous letters whose threats had been so drastically fulfilled. It was the
room from which he had gone out to telegraph to his father not to expect him home that night. It was the room into which he had peered—attracted by the smashed window, visible from the gate. It was the room in which he had seen Mrs. Carn’s dead body, the blood clotted dark on her brow.

  It had not been so bad to come to the house with Carey; to interview the kindly but highly individual cook; to talk the thing over as though it were simply a puzzle to be solved; but to come alone, and to sit in the room was horrible. He looked up, conscious of scrutiny, and realised that his host’s pale eyes were watching him keenly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking. I was with Mrs. Carn, you know, the day that she was killed.”

  “Oh, yes, you’ve come about that again, of course,” said Thomas Carn.—“As cheerily as though I were the vicar come for an annual subscription to some charity,” thought Bassin, waking up to the fact that he strongly disliked Carn’s brother.

  “If you’ve no objection, yes. We’re on the verge of important discoveries, but can’t get any farther because we can’t get a copy of the book,” he said, meeting the eyes.

  “The book?”

  “It all hinges on that. Must do. You remember that the anonymous letters suggesting that your brother would do better not to have his book printed, and the set of corrected galleys in Mrs. Carn’s possession, were probably the motives for the crime. The murderer scooped them up and made off, and, with the exception of a child and a half-wit at the farm next door, nobody seems to have seen him.”

  “Quite a likely thing, here. He’d only need to have a car waiting opposite the church, and he could hop in with the letters and proofs and things, and be off in ten seconds without anybody being the wiser.”

  “I’d never thought of a car by the church,” said Bassin, “until—”

  “My dear fellow, nothing easier. Come outside, and I’ll show you.”