Noonday and Night mb-51

by Gladys Mitchell

  Noonday and Night

  ( Mrs Bradley - 51 )

  Gladys Mitchell

  Noonday And Night

  Gladys Mitchell

  Beatrice Adela LeStrange Bradley 51

  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1: Pottery and Porcelain

  CHAPTER 2: The Missing Coach-Drivers

  CHAPTER 3: Hulliwell Hall

  CHAPTER 4: Dantwylch, Below the Knoll

  CHAPTER 5: The Bishop’s Palace

  CHAPTER 6: Devil-Porter It No Further

  CHAPTER 7: The Watchman Waketh But In Vain

  CHAPTER 8: The Hotel on Loch Linnhe

  CHAPTER 9: Saighdearan, Place of Soldiers

  CHAPTER 10: The Bungalow

  CHAPTER 11: Pistol and Dagger

  CHAPTER 12: No Coaches on the Roads

  CHAPTER 13: The Story of a Disappearance

  CHAPTER 14: Conradda Mendel Speaks

  CHAPTER 15: So Does Basil Honfleur

  CHAPTER 16: Confession of an Avenger

  CHAPTER 17: Sunset and Evening Star

  NOONDAY and NIGHT

  Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley is called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of two touring motor-coach drivers and uncovers a racket in stolen antiques, smuggling – and murder.

  MAGNA PRINT BOOKS

  Bolton-by-Bowland Lancashire . England

  First Published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1977

  Large Print Edition by Magna Print Books 1978

  by arrangement with Michael Joseph Ltd, London

  © 1977 Gladys Mitchell

  ISBN 0 86009 100 7

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Printed and Bound by Redwood Burn Ltd. Trowbridge and Esher

  Noonday and Night

  CHAPTER 1

  Pottery and Porcelain

  ^ »

  The invitation to dinner was accompanied by two slightly unusual requests. One was that Dame Beatrice would bring another woman with her, preferably one who was interested in ceramics; the other was that she would also bring her two blue-dash English delftware dishes, chargers which had been made round about AD 1640, although whether in London or Bristol was uncertain.

  One sentence in Basil Honfleur’s letter appeared to explain this otherwise curious request. ‘I’ve recently become possessed of a particularly fine early nineteenth century Welsh dresser, and I would love to see how your two pieces look on it compared with some which my crockery scout Vittorio has managed to pick up for me.’

  This, Dame Beatrice thought, was an elliptical way of indicating that, if her pieces looked well on his shelves, there would be an offer to purchase them. After the dinner, she supposed, the company would adjourn to the kitchen and the dishes would be put on display. Then would follow a bargaining battle between the knowledgeable woman Dame Beatrice would have brought with her if she could think of anybody suitable, and Vittorio (whoever he was), to fix upon the price to be offered.

  Dame Beatrice was not particularly attached to her delftware, which had been left her by a distant relative for whom she had had little affection. It was neither uncommon nor, she supposed, very valuable. She considered it, in fact, to be rather ugly and, compared with her collection of Sèvres porcelain (actually made in the factory at Vincennes before that was transferred to Sèvres itself), extremely crude. One charger was decorated with a figure on horseback which might or might not represent Prince Rupert; the other showed Adam, Eve and the serpent, Adam chastely upholstered in an apron of fig leaves which appeared to depend upon faith alone for its support, Eve content apparently with her Godiva-like mantle of hair. The serpent, writhing down from a loaded fruit-tree, was focusing its attention upon the apple (or whatever) which was being passed from hand to hand by the other two.

  ‘Take Conradda Mendel,’ said Laura Gavin, the secretary, when Dame Beatrice showed her Basil Honfleur’s letter. ‘They’ve got another thing in common besides an interest in antiques.’

  Laura meant by this that both Honfleur and Miss Mendel had once upon a time attended Dame Beatrice’s clinic for psychiatric treatment. It had happened, Dame Beatrice remembered, that she had arranged for the decorators to take over her Kensington house where, at that time, her clinic was held, and so she had fitted up a room on the first floor of her Hampshire residence, the Stone House on the edge of the New Forest, and for a few weeks she had carried on her work there. Those whose commitments did not permit them to attend had been referred to another psychiatrist in London and their case histories handed over to him.

  Both Honfleur and Conradda had found the change of venue acceptable and, in Honfleur’s case, convenient, since it saved him the longer journey to London. He and Conradda had met at the Stone House on one or two occasions, owing either to unavoidable delays on the road or to the vagaries of the train services, and had taken tea together at the Stone House.

  Honfleur had been in a Commando unit during the war; Conradda had suffered persecution under the Nazis. He was now well settled in an occupation which suited him. Conradda was a dealer in antiques who did a little very high-class pawnbroking on the side, although her clientèle was not subjected to the sight of three golden balls above her extremely exclusive Mayfair premises. It was she who had found the Sèvres for Dame Beatrice and it was her proud contention that the only collection which could match it was that at Waddesdon, the former home of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild.

  Dame Beatrice knew that this statement on Conradda’s part was a wild distortion of the truth, but she treasured her pieces and no servant was ever allowed to put a finger on them. She had seen Miss Alice de Rothschild’s collection in the enormous French-Renaissance-style mansion administered nowadays by the National Trust and had admired but did not covet it, and she had treated Conradda’s contention with mirth.

  ‘Conradda Mendel?’ she said, in answer to Laura’s suggestion. ‘I thought perhaps you yourself would like to come. It may be a dinner well worth eating, and you would do better justice to it than I shall.’

  ‘No,’ said Laura. ‘Reading between the lines, this Honfleur wants to get his hooks on to your dishes. You take Conradda and watch the fur fly when she and this Italian really go into a clinch over the price. If it isn’t an impertinent question, shall you consider selling?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I expect so, if Mr Honfleur wants them; I don’t at all care for the chargers.’

  ‘Me neither, as Fowler would hardly permit us to say. Shall I ring up Conradda, then? They do actually know one another, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they met here at the Stone House when I had that room next to mine converted into a consulting room for a while.’

  Conradda, apprised over the telephone by Laura of the probable reason for the invitation, accepted it with alacrity, but warned her that if Vittorio was also ‘in the business, although I do not know anyone of that name,’ he would know her by repute if not by sight.

  ‘I might call myself Leah Cohen, don’t you think?’ she suggested. Laura said firmly that Dame Beatrice would not like that.

  ‘Besides, Honfleur knows you, even if this Italian does not. Anyway, we mustn’t go in for subterfuge,’ she said. ‘Not ethical.’

  ‘Business precautions, that is all,’ said the Jewess. ‘Will it be a good dinner? I do not insist upon kosher food.’

  Vittorio was a tiny, monkey-like little man, sinuous and very thin. When the introduction was made, it seemed, s
urprisingly, that Conradda’s name meant nothing at all to the olive-skinned, shifty-eyed Italian: if he was the expert he seemed to be – there was no doubt, from the conversation over cocktails and again at the table, that he certainly knew a great deal about antiques of all kinds – it was odd, to say the least, that he had not heard of Conradda, who was a well-known figure at all the important auctions, besides being a collector in her own right. There was no obvious reason for him to dissemble. Although Conradda could drive a hard bargain, she was known to be scrupulously fair in her trade dealings, even refusing to take advantage of the ignorant beyond what she called ‘my pickings, because I have had to pay for my knowledge on my way up, so only right I should expect just a small profit, don’t you think?’

  Dame Beatrice, who could always keep several streams of thought, unconnected with one another, in her mind at one and the same time, covertly studied Vittorio while conversing amiably with her host on the subject of his business. Honfleur was in charge of the main booking office of a motor-coach company which ran extended tours, as they were called in the official brochure, to the various scenic or historic parts of England, Wales, Scotland and Eire, and also to France, Germany, Austria and northern Italy. Part of his job (and the pleasantest part, he explained to Dame Beatrice), was to leave his office on occasion in order to follow up the various tours and report upon the hotels which the coaches used for overnight stops en route.

  He was a short, powerfully-built man of about fifty-five and gave the impression of being vigorous and capable. Dame Beatrice, however, having once had him as a patient, knew a good deal about him. He always sent her a Christmas card, but beyond that their acquaintanceship had not made any progress until she had received the unexpected invitation to dinner. This, however, explained itself because it was clear, she thought, that it was her delftware and not her company which was important to him.

  While she was listening to his description of a trip he had made that summer to two Continental hotels on which his firm desired a confidential report since there had been adverse criticism of them from some of the passengers, she heard the tiny, olive-skinned Vittorio say to Conradda Mendel,

  ‘You have a personal interest in ceramics?’

  ‘Oh, I run a general little junk-shop,’ she replied. ‘All is grist to my mill, not only ceramics.’

  ‘You work in London?’

  ‘I also have a place in Oxford, but the students, they have no money for nice pictures and china nowadays. I think I shall sell up and perhaps go to Bath.’

  ‘I wonder whether there is much money in Bath, either? There might be some nice things to pick up there, though, which you could sell in London. Do you have good connections?’

  ‘I welcome any customers who come in, that is all.’

  ‘I suppose one has to do that if one keeps a shop. I myself am a free-lance, following my nose and picking up here a little something, there a little something else. I have clients, people who tell me what they want and who trust my judgement. You are not interested particularly in ceramics, you say?’

  ‘That takes specialised knowledge.’

  Dame Beatrice could have explained that a knowledge of ceramics was Conradda’s particular line of country. However, she did not avail herself of the opportunity, but left such a confession to Conradda herself, if she chose to make it, which apparently she did not. Dame Beatrice concluded that such a claim in Conradda’s opinion, since there might be a chance of selling the delftware dishes to Honfleur, might be bad for business. She was secretly amused by this thought and looked forward to being an observer of the various ploys which would be involved when Greek met Greek, or, in this case, when clever Jewess skirmished with wily Italian.

  ‘I rather wish you were more interested in pottery, because, as a matter of fact,’ said Honfleur, who had finished his description of a new coach he had just put on the road, ‘I wouldn’t be averse to parting with one or two of my own pieces, if you would care to look them over, Miss Mendel.’

  ‘Oh, but, now, now!’ cried Vittorio. ‘After I go to all that trouble to collect them for you? You break my heart when you say you are willing to part with them.’

  ‘Well, it’s that Welsh dresser I bought,’ explained his client. ‘It will only hold just so much, if the dishes are to be displayed to advantage. We have some duplicates…’

  ‘No, never! I do not buy duplicates for you. Those which are something alike are of different years. Look at the marks on the back! You speak of your Bristol delft, no doubt, but consider and do not be so hasty to part with your treasures.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Honfleur pacifically, ‘after dinner we’ll take the pieces down and have a look at the date-marks. I had no idea you’d be so upset at the thought of selling. I might even give one or two of the dishes to you for your own collection. How about that?’

  ‘Very kind. We shall see when the time comes.’ Vittorio did not sound at all enthusiastic, Dame Beatrice thought. She changed the subject to that of the ex-Emperor Charles V and his Swiss palace full of clocks and this topic lasted the company for the rest of the meal.

  After coffee had been served amid conversation which did not include the subject of ceramics, an adjournment was made to the kitchen. Honfleur’s was not a large house, but all the rooms were spacious, the kitchen not less so than the rest.

  ‘I call it the kitchen, but, of course, no cooking is done in it,’ said the host. ‘Most of my food comes in ready cooked from outside, except for my breakfast. I go to the Regal for that, and quite often, if I’m not entertaining at home, I go there for dinner too. Well, what do you think of the set-up?’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Dame Beatrice, gazing around at the furnishings. ‘Most interesting.’

  There were two immediately impressive objects in the room. One was a tremendous kitchen table, but even more noticeable, because of its loaded shelves, was the magnificent Welsh dresser. On its three shelves, the lowest of which was formed of a dozen very small drawers, each with its rounded wooden knob, were arranged Honfleur’s collection of plates and dishes.

  ‘The dresser is large, but not large enough. That’s my trouble. There isn’t room enough on the dresser itself to display the whole collection,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you show the best pieces in your dining-room?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘Surely that would be a suitable setting?’

  ‘Oh, no, not in my view. If I had gone in for figures and vases and that sort of thing, I would have had them displayed elsewhere, but plates and dishes belong in the kitchen and nowhere else.’

  ‘You could spread the extra pieces out on this table, couldn’t you?’ asked Conradda. ‘It would take a dozen large plates or dishes at least.’

  ‘People might handle them. I wouldn’t want that. They are hardly likely to reach up and take a dish off the dresser shelves, but it’s asking too much of human nature not to pick up a plate which is lying out on a table and take a look at it. You simply cannot keep people’s fingers off things if it’s possible to handle them.’

  ‘So you will not take your dishes down for us?’

  ‘Oh, I had intended to do that. Vittorio, the step-ladder.’

  He mounted it when it was brought in from the adjoining scullery and took down in turn three dishes from the top shelf.

  ‘Leeds creamware, about…’ he turned the first one over.

  ‘1780,’ said Vittorio. ‘The strange bird in black overglaze is quite typical of the period. A good piece, not especially notable. Now this I like better, perhaps because it is of earlier date.’ He handed the second dish to Dame Beatrice.

  ‘1760, or thereabouts,’ said Honfleur, ‘Derby Heart-Shaped. No other factory used this particular underglaze of blue. Chinese motifs, as you see – a pagoda, some rather strange trees, a spray of flowers and, of course, a fenced bridge.’

  ‘Reminiscent of the willow-pattern china of my childhood,’ said Dame Beatrice, handing back the dish.

  ‘The third dish,’ said Vittorio, ‘
I find very pleasing. Worcester, as you see, and dating between 1770 and five years later. Very rich style of painting round the border in dark blue and gold, the scene in the middle done by somebody else, probably by Jefferyes Hamett O’Neale. Almost as good as a signature is this style of his. A charming scene, do you not think? Observe the house with its twin towers, the lake, the heavy trees, the hills in the background and the suggestion of a rocky island where the central painting meets the fruit and birds at the bottorn of the border. Nice, wouldn’t you say?’

  Next the visitors were shown the plates which occupied the two lower shelves. Once or twice Conradda, as though instinctively, stretched out a hand to take one of the plates either from Honfleur or from Vittorio, but each time neither man appeared to be conscious of the appealing gesture; both handed the piece to Dame Beatrice.

  When all the plates had been admired and descriptions and details of them provided, Conradda said:

  ‘And now what about the pieces you say you have not room to display? The dresser is nice and I am curious to know what is hidden away in those cupboards and drawers.’

  The Welsh dresser was well furnished with the receptacles she mentioned. There were three deep drawers side by side below the succession of small ones which formed the bottom shelf, and below the middle one of the three deep drawers were three more, the lowest of which, except for the skirting planks, reached the floor. On either side of these middle drawers were cupboards of considerable size.

  ‘Oh, there’s nothing more to see,’ said Honfleur, ‘except the less important china and the cutlery I keep for everyday use.’ He pulled open the drawers and the cupboard doors and proved the truth of his words. Conradda turned to other items of interest. On one of the walls was a fine collection of carved wooden love-spoons, the traditional gifts which young Welshmen in former times had presented to young women whom they expected to marry.