The Croaking Raven

by Gladys Mitchell

  “What’s the idea?” muttered Gavin, as he passed Dame Beatrice’s chair on his way to the sideboard for drinks. She shrugged her thin shoulders and addressed Dysey.

  “I think I had a visit from a relative of yours when I was in charge of the castle yesterday,” she said. “You may recognise the signature.” She produced the Visitors’ Book and handed it to him. “Can there be two people named Henrietta Dysey? This was a tall, thin, brown-haired (dyed, I think) woman who came on a bicycle and claimed to be a member of the National Trust. Can you place her?”

  Father and son—or uncle and nephew, as the case might be—exchanged glances. Both shook their heads.

  “There’s only one Henrietta Dysey that I know of,” said the older man. “And, talking of the Dysey women, you’d better get back, Henry, when you’ve downed your grog, and see what ours is up to. You know she hates to be alone in the place after dark.”

  “What about both of us going back, then?” suggested Henry.

  “No, no. You’ll be much quicker walking by yourself. I can come on a bit later at my own pace. Off with you, or the poor creature will be sitting on the kitchen floor with her apron pulled over her head.”

  Henry grinned, finished his drink, accepted a second one and, a little later, rose to go. Gavin saw him to the door. Henry said, in a low voice,

  “I expect that woman was my mother, but, of course, I don’t know. I don’t know who I am, and that’s a fact. But the old man recognised the description all right, I could tell that. Wonder what she came for?”

  “To remove a pound note and leave seventeen and six, apparently,” said Gavin, but he did not satisfy Henry’s curiosity by enlarging on this remark. He shut the front door and went back to the others. Dysey turned to him.

  “What poppycock has Henry been treating you to?” he demanded.

  “I don’t think he treated me to any,” Gavin replied. “What had you in mind that he might say?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing. He’s a strange boy. You don’t want to take too much notice of him.”

  Hamish, bored with the company, whose conversation had been anything but enlivening, had taken himself to his room half an hour earlier than usual. He now appeared in the doorway in pyjamas, dressing-gown, and slippers, and made masterful signs to his father to join him. Gavin got up at once, aware that something important to Hamish was in the wind. Hamish closed the door behind the pair of them and drew his father away from it.

  “I say,” he said, “there’s somebody flashing a torch or something from that tower opposite the one at the end of the kitchen garden. I thought, when I heard the front door being shut, that the Dyseys had gone, so I sneaked to the window at the top of the main staircase to make sure, but it was only one of them, and then, a minute or two later, I saw this light. Whoever was flashing it must have been crouching right down, because I couldn’t see anybody.”

  “Right. Nip back to the staircase window and keep watch,” said Gavin. “I’ll go out and have a look-see. Some lunatic fooling about up there, I expect. I’ll send him off with a flea in his ear.”

  He knew that Hamish would obey orders and remain on watch, out of harm’s way, at the staircase window, so he did not even wait for the child to mount the stairs, but went straight out by the front door and ran lightly across the courtyard to the flanking tower. It was one of the two which had a newel staircase. There was no door to bar the entrance, so Gavin, holding on to the guide-rope which did duty as a handrail, mounted as quickly and quietly as he could to the battlements. There was no one else on the stairs, and, at first, he thought that there was no one on the walls, either, until he saw a dark figure silhouetted against the sky near the tower opposite the one by whose stair he had mounted to the battlements. He called out sharply,

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hullo!” came the response. “I’m looking for Uncle Eustace.”

  It was Henry Dysey’s voice. Gavin made his way round to him.

  “What on earth…? I thought you’d gone home,” he said.

  “Sorry,” said Henry. “I was sure I’d spotted somebody up here, and, if so, I guessed I’d better investigate and report back. Merely intended as a neighbourly action.”

  “Well, look,” said Gavin, “if anybody is up here, it’s my business, not yours, I think, so, if you’ll excuse an inhospitable slogan, kindly push off and leave all intruders to me. I assure you that I am capable of taking care of them.”

  “Sorry,” said Henry again. “Righto, I’ll sling my hook. And you’d better chuck my uncle out, too. He’ll stay all night if you’ll let him. Cheerio, then. Be seeing you.”

  Gavin let him go first down the narrow, treacherous stair and then followed him. He watched him emerge from the gatehouse into the luminous night, and remained where he was for a good ten minutes to make certain that Henry did not come back. Then he returned to the house to find Dysey getting ready to leave. He saw him off and went upstairs to where Hamish was still at the post of duty.

  “It was only Henry Dysey,” he said to the boy. “They’ve both gone now. You’d better get back to kip. I hope you’re not cold?”

  “Not a bit, thank you,” said Hamish. “Good night, father. I’m sorry you’ve got to go back to London.”

  “Yes, so am I,” said Gavin. “But you’ll have Mr. Bradley and his wife.”

  “They let me call them Jonathan and Deborah.”

  “Congratulations. Goodnight. Sleep well.”

  He saw the boy back to bed, tucked him in, and went down to the two women.

  “What was Hamish being so mysterious about?” asked Laura.

  “Chap on the battlements. Turned out to be Henry Dysey. Claimed he’d spotted someone up there, and thought it might be Eustace. I chased him off with a few winged words. He apologised, but I didn’t like it much. I wonder whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to drop that couple, if you can manage it. There’s something about them that I don’t altogether like. They’re damned mysterious and they’ve got too many relatives. Do you think you can cheese them off, Dame B.?”

  “I am not sure that I want to drop them altogether,” said Dame Beatrice, “but we will see how things turn out. We can scarcely avoid the acquaintance (now that we have made it) without appearing discourteous, but a little slackening of the ties will be just as well, perhaps.”

  “One thing, old Jon can be relied on for a spot of terseness if he doesn’t like them,” said Gavin. “Come on, Laura, let’s go to bed. It may be many a long day before that busy old fool, unruly sun, finds us together on the connubial couch again.”

  “I wonder whose son Henry Dysey really is?” said Laura.

  “That may transpire in due course. Meanwhile, Dame B. has remembered of whom the woman on the bicycle reminded her.”

  “The one who whipped the pound note and signed herself Henrietta Dysey?”

  “The same. Dame B. says she must be the sister, or some other close relative, of Mr. Cyril Dysey’s housekeeper-wife.”

  “Whoever she is, she’s bats in the belfry, if you ask me,” said Laura.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Gardener Talks

  “O dinna ye see that bonny castell,

  Wi’ halls and towers sae fair?

  Gin ilka man had back his ain,

  Of it you suld be heir.”

  Fause Foodrage

  Laura was up early on the following morning to have breakfast with her husband before seeing him off to London.

  “What do you really think Henry was doing on the battlements last night?” she asked.

  “Probably just what he said. He spotted somebody up there, and I fancy he had a pretty good idea who it was.”

  “Eustace, you mean. I wonder whether he killed the man whose body was found at the foot of that tower? All these rumours we’ve been hearing mean people think it was a murder, whatever the verdict was at the inquest. All the same, couldn’t it have been an accident? It must be quite easy to miss your footing on one of th
ose newel staircases.”

  “That’s as may be. I saw the police photographs of the body, you know. They were pretty grim.”

  “But if he’d fallen from top to bottom?”

  “I don’t think it could be done on a winding stair. On an ordinary straight staircase, of course, it’s quite easy to cascade right the way down, and end up with a broken neck, but on a newel stair it seems to me that you could only fall just so far before you crashed against the side and blocked the thing with your body. This chap Tom Dysey was found right at the foot of the tower, remember.”

  “Somebody may have coshed him when he was almost at the bottom, I suppose.”

  “The multiple injuries didn’t suggest that. According to the police, they were more consistent with his having fallen from a considerable height. The chaps I’ve spoken to at the local headquarters are sure it was either suicide or murder.”

  “I wish Mrs. Croc. could get hold of a copy of the medical evidence. I wonder (if it was murder) which day of the week he would have died?”

  ‘How do you mean?’

  “Well, apparently Mrs. Dysey was under suspicion for a time, and that might apply to the rest of the house-party, but there’s this business of throwing open the castle on Wednesdays and Saturdays, isn’t there? That means that almost anybody could have killed him.”

  “I take your point, but I think it’s a doubtful one. There doesn’t seem much doubt that the victim had a definite assignation with someone. That note the police found—”

  “Yes, but the meeting could have been with someone who was not a member of the house-party and who had to be incognito—someone who came in by paying his half-crown and then simply lurked until it was time to meet this Tom Dysey. I think Mrs. Dysey is all mixed up in it, mind you. She led us to suppose that her husband was still alive when we booked up to take the place for three months, and, apart from that, she told us that her lease included this condition of opening the castle to visitors.”

  “What about it? Lots of old places have these clauses.”

  “Not if the property has belonged to the family for generations. There’s no question of a lease where Dysey Castle is concerned, except for birds of passage such as ourselves. It isn’t even as if Mrs. Dysey pockets the half-crowns which we collect. She said specifically that we could keep them.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. Oh, well, I’d better be off. They’re on the telephone at the home farm. Ring me up from there and let me know when Jon and Deborah arrive.”

  “After lunch,” said Laura, when her husband had gone, and Dame Beatrice and Hamish had had breakfast, “I want to try a little experiment.”

  “Will you need help, mamma?” asked Hamish. “I ask only because I’d thought of going over to the home farm this morning and I’ve been invited to stay for lunch. They’re having pig’s fry.”

  “No, I don’t need any help,” his mother replied. “Stay over there as long as you like, except after dark, of course.”

  “Right. Thank you. I’ll be off, then.” He buckled on a fearsome-looking sheath-knife, picked up the shepherd’s thumb-stick which the farmer’s son had given him, and went away. Laura watched him as far as the gatehouse and then turned again to Dame Beatrice.

  “Now I can get cracking,” she said.

  “Do you wish to have a witness of your experiment, or would you prefer to ‘go it alone,’ as I believe the expression to be?” enquired her employer.

  “Oh, would you really come and watch? I’d be ever so glad if you would. I’ll go and talk to the gardener, then, and let you know when I’m ready.”

  The gardener was in the kitchen garden arguing with—or, rather, laying down the law to—the cook.

  “My stick-beans,” he croaked, “got to be allowed to mature. You picks ’em before they got any body nor any length to ’em, not to speak of no goodness nor no fattenin’ of what’s inside the pods.”

  “Ladies likes their food young,” protested the cook.

  “So does cannibals,” retorted the gardener. “Which is not to say as they should be indolged. There’s them,” he went on, “as likes to eat sucking pig, but where’s the Christianity in that? Sucking pigs ain’t ’ad no sort of a chance at all if they’re going to get ate before they’re out of the cradle, as you might say. Now I arsts you, is that morl? Is that honourable? Is that what we’re put ’ere on this sinful earth to do—to pick off onripe beans and sucking pigs before they’ve’ ad a chance to develop theirselves? It bloomin’ well ain’t fair.”

  “Seem’ they’ll be ate in the end, anyway, I don’t see it matters. Ladies likes young veg,” persisted the cook, worsted in the conflict, but with her hat still in the ring. “Why, some of them foreign restaurongs up to London even whittles down their old potatoes to make ’em look like noo ’uns.”

  “Foreigners will do anythink,” said the gardener austerely, “but that ain’t the British way of life. To my mind, the only spring onions—so-called, them still being sold be the shops in August—should be the thinnin’s out. Ah, the thinnin’s out, and no more. Onions, same as stick-beans and sucking pigs and anythink else you might care to mention, did ought to be allowed to mature. ’Ow would you like it,” he thundered, “if you was a nimmature stick-bean or a sucking pig or a spring onion, to be cut off…”

  “In the flower of your youth?” said Laura, whom, up to that point, the adversaries had either not noticed or had ignored. The cook, obviously glad to be relieved of the responsibility of keeping up her end of the argument, asked hopefully,

  “Did you want me, madam?”

  “Not you, Mrs. Noakes. I want Bellairs. Bellairs, I need a large sack—the largest possible sack—stuffed tightly with straw. Can you lay your hands on such a thing? Don’t bother, if you can’t. Anyway, I don’t want it until after lunch.”

  She realised that the belligerent Bellairs would be unlikely, in his present mood, to refuse a challenge in the presence of Mrs. Noakes.

  “I don’t know but what I couldn’t oblige, mam,” he said, “if you’ll just let me know ’ow big a sack. And you bear in mind what I been a-tellin’ of you about my stick-beans,” he added fiercely to the cook before he turned away. “That cook!” he confided to Laura, as they walked towards the bottom of the kitchen garden and made for the flanking tower there. “I tells you, Mrs. Gavin, mam, as she ain’t no more of a cook nor what I am.”

  “She does pretty well,” said Laura. “What makes you say she isn’t a cook?”

  “’Cos she’s a waitress down to Warwick. Only come ’ere while the ’ouse was let.”

  “Has she ever been here before?”

  “No, course she ’ain’t. They’re all noo ’ere. Advertised for, they be. Cook, parlourmaid, ’ousemaid, kitchenmaid. It’s like a kind of an ’oliday for ’em, you see—what’s more, an ’oliday with pay. Some on ’em makes for the seaside ’otels and some on ’em makes for ’ere, and likewise for other places as needs servants.”

  “Oh, I see. But surely they don’t take three months’ holiday a year?”

  “No, course not. They gets a paid week from their last employment, and that’s their lot, but, of course, they does pretty well on their ’oliday money.”

  “But—don’t they get the sack when they try to go back to their job, if they stay here the whole three months?”

  “No, course they don’t. On’y too glad to get ’em back, I reckon. If not, there’s plenty other jobs as they can go to. Dermestic staff such as waitresses and chambermaids, ’specially in town ’otels, why, they’re like gold, Mrs. Gavin, mam. You just can’t get ’em.”

  “So what happens when the castle is no longer let for holidays?—during the winter, for example. What does Mrs. Dysey do then?”

  “Her manages on ’er own with a woman from the village what is also employed on the ’ome farm, and even ’er on’y comes ’ere twice a week for a couple of hours, and, what’s more, ’er wouldn’t come at all assept ’er’s—well, you know.” He tapped his forehead. “
Otherwise, well, Mrs. Dysey, she manages.”

  “But you’re permanently employed here, I take it?”

  “Ah. It kind o’suits me, this place do. What’s more, me wages is right. I knows too much, you see.” They arrived at the foot of the tower. “Used to keep me kit and tools in ’ere. That’s ’ow I come to find ’im,” the gardener added. “Well, now, about this sack of yourn. I ain’t got one on the premises, as you might say, but I can get you one, like what I promised. ’Ow big a one did you want?”

  “The biggest sack possible, and tightly stuffed with straw,” said Laura. She returned to Dame Beatrice.

  “News!” she announced. “I’ve just had a bit of the low-down from the gardener.” She recounted what she had heard.

  “Interesting,” remarked Dame Beatrice. “So the servants are birds of passage.”

  “Mrs. Dysey can’t be very well off, if she can only afford a halfwitted char and a gardener. What do you make of the gardener’s remark that his wages are right?”

  “But little. Naturally the place would have to be kept in order, in view of the summer lettings.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so, but, of course, he was the one who found the body, and he did say that he knew too much.”

  “You are suggesting?”

  “I wondered whether a spot of blackmail might not be indicated—on his part, I mean.”

  “There is that aspect of the matter. On the other hand, if he really is blackmailing Mrs. Dysey, it was rather a dangerous remark to make, was it not? I should suppose that he made it merely to impress you. Naturally, as the one who found the body, he would consider himself to be a person of importance. Having gone so far this morning, he may be inclined to tell us a little more. Upon the propriety or otherwise of gossiping with servants I make, at this juncture, no comment, because I shall be more than interested in anything which Bellairs may see fit to disclose.”

  “Yes, we could bear to be better informed about the history and general ramifications of the Dysey family,” said Laura, “so, if he decides to natter, I shall give him his head. My permutations and combinations with a straw-stuffed sack should encourage him, I feel. I only wish it could be stuffed with something heavier, but, short of climbing into it myself, I don’t know what else to use that wouldn’t simply bust the sacking. Of course, Gavin’s right. You couldn’t fall from top to bottom of a spiral staircase, but we may as well put it to the proof.”