Titles by Gladys Mitchell
Speedy Death (1929)
The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929)
The Longer Bodies (1930)
The Saltmarsh Murders (1932)
Death at the Opera (1934)
The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935)
Dead Men’s Morris (1936)
Come Away, Death (1937)
St. Peter’s Finger (1938)
Printer’s Error (1939)
Brazen Tongue (1940)
Hangman’s Curfew (1941)
When Last I Died (1941)
Laurels Are Poison (1942)
Sunset Over Soho (1943)
The Worsted Viper (1943)
My Father Sleeps (1944)
The Rising of the Moon (1945)
Here Comes a Chopper (1946)
Death and the Maiden (1947)
The Dancing Druids (1948)
Tom Brown’s Body (1949)
Groaning Spinney (1950)
The Devil’s Elbow (1951)
The Echoing Strangers (1952)
Merlin’s Furlong (1953)
Faintley Speaking (1954)
On Your Marks (1954)
Watson’s Choice (1955)
Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956)
The Twenty-Third Man (1957)
Spotted Hemlock (1958)
The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)
Say It with Flowers (1960)
The Nodding Canaries (1961)
My Bones Will Keep (1962)
Adders on the Heath (1963)
Death of a Delft Blue (1964)
Pageant of Murder (1965)
The Croaking Raven (1966)
Skeleton Island (1967)
Three Quick and Five Dead (1968)
Dance to Your Daddy (1969)
Gory Dew (1970)
Lament for Leto (1971)
A Hearse on May-Day (1972)
The Murder of Busy Lizzie (1973)
A Javelin for Jonah (1974)
Winking at the Brim (1974)
Convent on Styx (1975)
Late, Late in the Evening (1976)
Noonday and Night (1977)
Fault in the Structure (1977)
Wraiths and Changelings (1978)
Mingled with Venom (1978)
Nest of Vipers (1979)
The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)
Uncoffin’d Clay (1980)
The Whispering Knights (1980)
The Death-Cap Dancers (1981)
Lovers, Make Moan (1981)
Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982)
Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982)
The Greenstone Griffins (1983)
Cold, Lone and Still (1983)
No Winding Sheet (1984)
The Crozier Pharaohs (1984)
Gladys Mitchell writing as Malcolm Torrie
Heavy as Lead (1966)
Late and Cold (1967)
Your Secret Friend (1968)
Shades of Darkness (1970)
Bismarck Herrings (1971)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1970
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle, 2014.
www.apub.com
First published Great Britain in 1970 by Michael Joseph.
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
E-ISBN: 9781477869130
A Note about This E-Book
The text of this book has been preserved from the original British edition and includes British vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation, some of which may differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, with only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.
To my Brothers
R.J.
who boxed for London University and was awarded his Purple,
and C.S.
who, by using “the old one-two,” once knocked out his opponent in the first moments of the first round.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE Impresario
CHAPTER TWO Training Quarters
CHAPTER THREE Retort Discourteous
CHAPTER FOUR Lunch With a Crocodile
CHAPTER FIVE A Confusion of Cars
CHAPTER SIX The Hunt Is Up
CHAPTER SEVEN In and Out the Windows
CHAPTER EIGHT Further Proceedings
CHAPTER NINE Remanded In Custody
CHAPTER TEN Stymied
CHAPTER ELEVEN Georgics
CHAPTER TWELVE Not Golf But Croquet
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Innocents Day
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Tobias and the Angels
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Prisoner’s Release
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Various Bastards
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Deductions and Conclusions
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Moonrocket Kid
Acknowledgment
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Impresario
“Now don’t you mind old Satan,
With all his tempting charms.
He wants to steal your soul away
And fold you in his arms.”
Anon.—Negro Spiritual
A few yards to the south of the level-crossing a patch was being put on the narrow country road and a grizzled man was waving a red or a green flag at intervals to control the passing of infrequent cars. That there were any cars at all along this outlandish stretch was owing mostly to the fact that a poet of some repute was buried two miles away in the village churchyard and that his grave had become a place of pilgrimage, particularly for Americans on holiday.
At the eastern side of the level-crossing stood a railway signal-box and, to the north of that, there was a large public house called the Swan Revived. Its somewhat insensitive sign depicted the prone figure of a ballerina (presumably Anna Pavlova) supported on the arm of a kneeling young man wearing white tights and a coronet who, with the hand which was not employed in propping up the lady, was holding a vast tankard of foaming ale to her apparently eager lips.
Opposite the signal-box and separated from it by the width of the road was a small, disused railway station. On what had been the “up” platform were the ticket office, the stationmaster’s house, a waiting-room and, somewhat apart from this block, a large shed. On the “down” platform there was nothing but a solitary bench. From the end of each platform a white-painted wicket-gate opened on to the road (for there was no bridge by which passengers could cross the line), and behind the stationmaster’s house and its adjuncts were a goods yard of considerable extent and what had been the station entrance for the purchase and collection of tickets.
The branch line had been intended originally for the convenience of passengers who wished to visit the poet’s grave, but, since the automobile had become ubiquitous, the station had fallen (like the royal palaces of Troy and the courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep), into ruinous decay, a victim not so much of the fell hand of Time as of the sweeping, iconoclastic reforms of Doctor Beeching. It had then been offered for sale and, after repairs and re-decoration, had been purchased on borrowed money by a young man named Tobias Sparowe and converted by him int
o a draughty, inconvenient home.
Sparowe, at this time twenty-six years of age, was that complete anachronism a true and dedicated amateur. His hobbies were botany, geology, and amateur dramatics; he was a very fair horseman (although he did not own a mount), he could box, fence, and swim, played cricket when he could get a game and was a keen dry-fly fisherman, although only as the guest of wealthier friends. He preferred Aristophanes to Euripides and liked smoked salmon better than caviar. His favourite modern authors were P. G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton Burnett, and Cyril Hare and, in spite of the fact that he was domiciled in Dorset, he found Thomas Hardy unreadable.
By trade and inclination he was a biographer, and turned a poor but comparatively honest penny by delving into the private lives of the distinguished departed and committing the results to paper. He also contributed a weekly column to a woman’s magazine, and his articles might well have ended up in the editorial waste-paper basket but for the fortunate fact that the editor was his maternal aunt. She took the prudent view, warmly supported by her husband, that to send the young man a weekly cheque drawn from profits made by the magazine was infinitely preferable to sending him money which would have to come out of her own or her husband’s pocket, since the painstaking biographies he wrote did not bring in enough to support their nephew. It is only fair to report, however, that, rather than sponge on his relatives’ private purse, he would have taken a job.
Apart from the fact that he would have preferred to write his column for men, in which case it may be assumed that he would have made a better job of it, it would be untrue and unfair to state that Toby took no interest in women, although it would be reasonably correct to say that the thought of marriage rarely crossed his mind. When it did, it came, not of its own volition, but was suggested to him by his aunt.
“It’s an insult to womanhood,” she stated on one occasion, “that a decent-looking, steady boy like you should go on being a bachelor. What’s the matter with girls? Aren’t any of them good enough for you?”
“Far too good, for I am sinful man, dear aunt,” Toby had blithely replied, but, in order to escape the pressure she was able to put upon him while he lived in London, he had given up his Baker Street flat and purchased the derelict station. It was about twelve miles from Morchester and two and a bit from the village of Heathcote Fitzprior, where Heathcote the poet lay buried. It was also inconvenient and draughty, and he let it as often as possible, so that he could afford to take a holiday away from it.
One morning in the middle of February the flag-waving navvy at the level-crossing held up a small, battered-looking car so that a farm lorry laden with horse-dung could make the passage between the hedge and a row of white and orange-coloured municipal skittles which marked off the roadworks from the rest of the lane. When he allowed the car to pass, it turned into what had been the station yard and pulled up between the back of the sizable shed and what had been the waiting-room. Two men got out and came round to Toby’s front door. One, as a mild concession to current trends, had modelled his hair-style on that of Mr. Simon Dee, although, sadly, he lacked that distinguished and lively artist’s good looks; the other favoured the more flowing coiffure affected by pop groups. Morever, this second man wore a beard, velvet trousers, and a near-mink overcoat, whereas his companion, except that he wore no hat on his shining hair, was as irreproachably dressed as a paid mute at a funeral, and in much the same style.
This man, extending a slender, neatly-gloved hand, gave a modest rat-tat on the door and, when it was not answered immediately, his companion beat upon it with both fists, demanding loudly, “Anybody home?”
Toby was not expecting visitors and did not recognize the voice. He flung open the door and was immediately embraced by the near-mink, who exclaimed rapturously.
“Sparowe, isn’t it? Not busy, are you? Not interrupting your literary labours, are we?”
“Oh, hullo,” said Toby, extricating himself. “What can I do for you? I—er—I don’t think 1 know you, do I?”
“Theatrical agents. May we come in?” asked the soberly-clad, kid-gloved man. “We’d like to proposition you, if we may.”
Toby took them into his sitting-room and seated them in armchairs. When he had taken over the railway station he had found that the stationmaster’s house, except for repairs and complete re-decoration, both inside and out, had needed no alteration, consisting, as it did, of a living-room-cum-office and a kitchen and a scullery downstairs, and a large, a small, and a cubbyhole bedroom upstairs. The waiting-room, which adjoined the house on the east side, he had made into a study, as it had a fireplace. The booking-ofiice, which formed a similar adjunct to the west, he had converted, when he had closed permanently the booking-clerk’s unsightly little grill, into a large, luxurious bathroom. Lack of funds had prevented further expenditure on plumbing, so the other essential retiring-room which had been for the station staff was still in the station yard, no provision of this kind for passengers having been deemed necessary by the railway authorities.
Toby looked enquiringly at his uninvited but not unwelcome guests, and these, with commendable promptitude, got down to business.
“You remember that Tale of Two Cities of yours?” said the near-mink. Toby, who had once turned the novel into a play for the dramatic society of which he had been a member, assented warily, surprised that the other should have heard of it. He said so, and added,
“But I don’t lay any claim to be a dramatist, of course. I just rustle up something for the mob when we can’t afford to pay author’s royalties for a modern play, that’s all, and, even then, the producer always knocks spots off the thing in rehearsal, and the cast complain about their lines and alter them to suit themselves, and all that sort of thing. I mean, by the time the ticket-holders get to see the play, it’s not a bit like what I wrote in the first place, although the producer is decent enough to put my name on the programme, so, if you thought I was a dramatist—”
“But you are a professional writer, are you not, Mr. Sparowe?” asked the other man.
“Oh, well, yes, I suppose so. I bring out a book—a biography, you know—about once in eighteen months, but that means I’ve only written three in all; otherwise, well, I do a weekly column for a magazine called Eve’s Arbour, and that’s my lot. By the way, you seem to know me, but . . .”
“Oh, I’m Maverick,” said the near-mink, “and this is Gracechurchstreet. Now, if it isn’t an embarrassing question, dear fellow, do biographies make money?”
“Well, mine don’t. I’m lucky if I sell two thousand copies. All the really important people have been done time and again, you see, so one is reduced to the smaller fry, and nobody is especially interested in most of those, so books about them don’t sell very well. I write biography to interest myself rather than my readers. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure the book I’ve just published will sell at all. It’s the life-story of our local poet, a man called William Heathcote. He was shipped off to Virginia as a convict in the reign of Charles the Second, won his freedom and came back to Dorset, his native shire, to die in his own village, which was named after his family. They were the local big-wigs. Americans visit his grave because most of his poetry is about Virginia where, after a sticky start, he seems to have settled down happily for a time as tutor to the young sons of one of the tobacco planters.”
“A convict?” said Gracechurchstreet. “I’ve had a look at your book, and he is the man we’ve come to talk about. Why was he transported? Have your studies established that?”
“Yes. He was a frequenter of taverns in his youth, often got into brawls, and in one of his drunken moments he killed an inoffensive bystander. For this he was sentenced to seven years’ transportation.”
“Wasn’t murder a hanging matter in those days?” demanded Maverick.
“I suppose so, but Heathcote came of a good family, as I said. They were the squires of Heathcote Fitzprior, the village here, and had powerful friends, so I suppose, as Peachum would say, they soften
ed the evidence.”
“A tavern brawl and a sentence of transportation, eh?” said Maverick. “Well, that sounds just the kind of thing that my friend is looking for. What do you say, Gracechurchie?”
“The story needs pep,” said Gracechurchstreet, in his prim voice. “Charles the Second you say, Mr. Sparowe? Well, the way I see it is this: the young fellow Heathcote, gay, good-looking, debonair and in his cups, as you just said, notes a tall, dark, handsome guy come into this bar with a smashing redhead. What he doesn’t realize is that he is seeing Charles Two (acting incognito) with Nell Gwynn. Well, I seem to hear Heathcote pass the redhead a few well-intentioned compliments and Charles resents this and they frame for a punch-up. Well, the royal Mr. Stuart gets the worst of it, because Heathcote floors him, and the result is he is hauled off by the gendarmes and given his seven-year stretch, Nell Gwynn pleading with the king that the noose and the hot seat are out of it. Well, in the States, Heathcote is starving, but—”
“Historically,” said Toby, with emphasis, “Heathcote was taken on as tutor to the two sons of a tobacco planter in Virginia, where he was sent to serve his sentence. This sort of post was usually given to men who were not convicts. They were called Redemptioners, men of good character and some education who had been too poor to pay their passage out and had agreed with the captain of the convict ship to give them a free trip in exchange for several years’ wages paid in a lump sum by one of the planters. They were usually taken on by the planters as tutors or clerks or something of that nature—work for which the convicts were usually unfitted.”
“So these poor fellows—these Redemptioners—were in the position of slaves, you might say?” asked Gracechurchstreet. “Bully for them! Brave fellows! Sons of guns, Mr. Sparowe!”
“Well, they couldn’t leave their employment and they took no wages until their time was up, but they were supposed to be decently treated and properly fed, and, if they were lucky, they lived more or less as members of the family. They could be trusted, you see, in a way that the convicts could not. It paid them to behave themselves and they usually stayed on in the colony for a bit when their time was up. Some of them made a lot of money.”
Gory Dew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 1