Your Secret Friend (Timothy Herring)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “It wouldn’t be the same thing at all,” said Sandra. “Besides, what’s widdershins, anyway? It’s for churches, I thought.” She looked round. Only one of her band was left, the others, suborned by Gillian, were slinking to the gate and, as she watched, they reached it and began running down the lane towards the highroad. Even Veronica had joined in the panic flight. Sandra’s only staunch supporter was Connie Moosedeer, who now came strolling up with silent Red Indian tread.

  “They got cold feet,” she said. “Gillian worked on them. She said we’d all be expelled. What’s happening now?”

  “Nothing,” said the leader morosely. It was Waterloo. She turned to Timothy. “Shall I tell Miss Pallis you’re coming?”

  “It would be a favour I scarcely deserve,” he responded gallantly. “I’m truly sorry to upset your plans, but, as a sensible woman, surely you can see it wouldn’t do. It’s more than possible that the police still have an eye on this place, you know. Suppose you had got in—which I suppose you would have done if I had not been here, and probably by burglarious methods at that—and the police had found you and had frogmarched you back to Miss Pomfret-Brown handcuffed to the gendarmes? I bet you never thought of that, did you?”

  “No,” said Sandra faintly. “No, we never did.”

  “All right. Perhaps you and this other young woman would like to hop into the car. We’ll give you a lift back to school. That’ll show the others, won’t it?”

  “Yes, it certainly will,” said Sandra, brightening up. Diana got out of the car.

  “I’ll sit at the back with Tom,” she said, “then you two can cram in beside Tim. What happens,” she added, when, this manoeuvre accomplished, Timothy let in the clutch, “if we run across any member of the staff?”

  “It will be all right,” said Sandra confidently, “if we’re with you. They won’t know you’re not parents.”

  “Good Lord!” said Tom Parsons, making his only contribution to the proceedings, and that in a tone of horror.

  “Tell me about the curse,” said Timothy.

  “Oh, there they are!” cried Sandra, as the deserters came in sight. “Oh, do sound your horn as we go past! Sucks to Gillian, the nasty, horrible, yellow, cowardly creep! Come to think of it,” she added, as the car, having given the devil’s tattoo—out of place, possibly, considering the whole nature of the circumstances—sailed past the foot—slogging traitors, “it was just a bit further on from here that I first saw the ghost of Miss Vere Pallis that night.”

  His recent visit to Constance Vere Pallis made Timothy react promptly to this mention of her name.

  “Oh, yes?” he said. “When would that have been?”

  “On the night of Hallowe’en. I was out of school. I was going to the churchyard.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Well, to see if it was true about the ghosts. I saw Miss Vere’s. It was walking along this road.”

  “Oh, I see.” He saw, or thought he might be seeing, a very great deal. “And what happened?”

  “It went into the churchyard and disappeared. I thought at first it was really her herself, and then, of course, I didn’t see how it could be, because Miss Vere was in Northumberland.”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Have you told anybody else?”

  “Only the others. They didn’t believe me. They thought I made it up.”

  “You didn’t, by any chance, address the ghost? Speak to it? Call it by name, or anything?”

  “Oh, no, of course I didn’t. You see, when I thought it was real, well, I forgot Miss Vere wasn’t on our staff any longer, so I thought about being expelled for being out of the school grounds at night. Then, when I realised it was a ghost, well, you don’t speak to ghosts unless they want to be spoken to, do you? So I just hoped I wouldn’t be noticed, and I didn’t go into the churchyard after all.”

  “Was anybody with you?”

  “No. None of the others would risk it.”

  “I can’t say I blame them.”

  “I wondered afterwards why I should have seen Miss Vere’s ghost when she wasn’t dead.”

  “Oh, that can happen. On Hallowe’en anything can happen. There’s that business about looking into a mirror in the dark, and seeing the ghost of your future husband. Haven’t you ever done that?”

  “Oh, no. I shouldn’t be interested. I’m not going to get married. One doesn’t have to, nowadays,” said Sandra. “That’s what the pill is about.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Phisbe Meets Again

  “A little learning may be a dangerous thing,” said Timothy to Coningsby at Phisbe’s headquarters on the following day, “but a little knowledge may not only be dangerous but damned embarrassing.”

  The young, earnest, incredibly efficient dogsbody, without whom the Society could not have accomplished a tenth of its work, had not the faintest idea of the honorary secretary’s meaning. He took off his spectacles and repeated politely, but in the form of a question:

  “A little knowledge, Mr. Herring?”

  “Yes. I’ve come by a little knowledge in a most unexpected way. It’s practically dynamite and I haven’t the ghost of a notion what to do with it. Ghosts, in fact, are of the essence.”

  “The poltergeist which came here has gone, by the way.”

  “Probably haunting Nanradoc Castle by now. How are things going there?”

  “We are opening the castle even earlier than we did last season. This summer’s takings exceeded the treasurer’s hopes. He is thinking of asking the committee to agree to three shillings instead of two and sixpence for admission to the castle and grounds, and to increase the price of the medieval banquets. The guesthouse for members of the Society is also flourishing and, in accordance with many requests, it is remaining open from March until the end of October, with a special three days at Christmas.”

  “That’s fine. Tell me, Coningsby, what would you do if your suspicions that a certain person had committed a very serious crime seemed to be confirmed?”

  “I suppose I should think it my duty to inform the police.”

  “Yes, but the confirmation came in a way that I—in fact, that nobody could possibly have expected, and the trouble is that, if I go to the police with this little bit of knowledge—and I must emphasise that it is only a little bit—I may be landing the party (whom I suspect) in very serious trouble. It’s a case of murder, you see.”

  “Oh, dear me, yes. I see what you mean. Apart from this bit of knowledge to which you refer, are your suspicions based on any kind of evidence?”

  “That’s the point. They’re not—not really. It’s just a hunch I have. The affair is complicated by a very important fact, though. There was an inquest, followed by a hearing before the magistrates, and the whole thing has been buried, along with the dead man. I’m not at all sure I want to dig it up again.”

  “Was it this suspect of yours who was brought before the magistrates, may I ask?”

  “No, and the hearing was not to decide whether a murderer should stand trial. Murder didn’t enter into it. The accused was brought before the court for a decision as to whether or not she was guilty of complicity.”

  “Not as an accessory to murder, then?”

  “No. As the remaining partner in a suicide pact.”

  “Oh, I see. I am afraid my knowledge of the law, such as it is, is confined to the law of libel, the law of Trusts and the laws concerning property.”

  “Good Lord! I thought we kept a tame solicitor!”

  “Oh, yes, of course we do, Mr. Herring, and I should not dream of encroaching. I have an interest—purely academic—in these matters.”

  “Well, you see my difficulty, don’t you? So far as is known, the thing began as a suicide pact. One partner succumbed to poisoning, the other lived, but has been cleared of complicity.”

  “Which means that the justices took the view that she also intended to die, but did not actually succumb.”

  “That’s it.”

  “
What made you think of murder, Mr. Herring?”

  “I happen to be pretty sure that the person I am thinking of could have got hold of poison. Poison cupboards in school laboratories contain some surprising compounds. Another thing is that I know the parties involved—all three of them to some extent, and particularly the woman who was taken to court. I can believe that the man who died was a suicide type, but I’m certain the woman was not. What it seems to boil down to is either that the man intended to kill himself and to take the woman with him without her knowledge, or that somebody else intended to murder the pair of them. I suspect that it was this last, and, as I say, this new bit of knowledge confirms my suspicions, but it doesn’t really produce any fresh evidence, except that this ‘somebody else’ could have got hold of poison.”

  “You are referring, of course, to the death which took place at Little Monkshood fairly recently.”

  “That’s it. I thought you’d pick up the trail.”

  “I subscribe to a press-cutting agency which supplies me with anything the papers have to say about the Society’s properties. The Little Monkshood inquest and the subsequent proceedings were reported only locally, but, of course, I received the full account. By the way, Mr. Herring, I myself was sent a small item of news in connection with Castle Nanradoc.”

  “Oh, really? What was that?”

  “Miss Marion Jones, whom, you may remember, we put in charge of the country club and the medieval banquets, is engaged to be married.”

  “No, really? That’s good. Who’s the fellow? Anybody I know?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Herring. It is our member, Mr. Aloysius Rafferty.”

  “What, the handsome Irishman? Well, I’m very glad. He’s a decent chap. I must send them a wedding present. I think the Society will want to weigh in with something, too. Remind me to bring up the subject at the committee meeting this afternoon. And there’s another item on the agenda. Did you send out those addendum slips concerning Croole church?”

  “Certainly I did.”

  “I need not have asked. Now back to my troubles.”

  “I go beagling in my spare time, Mr. Herring.”

  Timothy stared at him.

  “You’ll never cease to surprise me or to compel my admiration. A fatiguing form of sport, I should have imagined, but what are you getting at in the present instance?” he asked. “That non sequitur is intriguing.”

  “It has occasionally been my experience, sir, that the hare which has been started up first is not always the hare which is caught in the end.”

  “Oh, Lord!” said Timothy. “Yes, I see what you mean. I hadn’t thought of that! Better not start up anything in the present instance. I think perhaps you’re right.”

  “All the same, Mr. Herring, if you believe a murder has been committed . . .”

  “Yes, I feel the same way. The only real evidence for my belief, though—if you can call it evidence—is my knowledge of the parties concerned, particularly my knowledge of one of them, as I said before, but now comes this little something which, while it doesn’t amount to much in the way of police-court evidence, does confirm my suspicions. It’s like this: it seemed at first that it was highly unlikely, although not absolutely impossible, that my suspect should have been in the neighbourhood of Little Monkshood and so able to put the poison into the drinks there. Everybody concerned thought she was where she ought to have been, which was in the north of England—in Newcastle, to be precise, but she had a long week-end free at the end of October, and now, according to information which I received in this accidental way, she was in the neighbourhood of Little Monkshood at a time when the stuff could have been put into the bottles.”

  “And the poisoned wine, or whatever it was, was drunk by the victims some time later, of course.”

  “Yes. Five or six weeks later.”

  “Forgive me for saying so, Mr. Herring, but your case seems a little thin.”

  “I know. Against that, my suspect had a motive for causing the deaths of those two. She was insanely jealous of their relationship to one another. My view, you see, is that she found out that they had gone to Little Monkshood together, knew that, on Hallowe’en night, they had had a drink there, and knew that the bottles were left partly empty.”

  “And poisoned them after the—er—lovers had gone?”

  “That’s my theory, but the only evidence, so far, that she was anywhere near Little Monkshood that night rests on the unsupported word (spoken in all innocence, at that) of a small girl. It confirms my suspicions, but it’s not much to go on, is it?”

  “As you say, Mr. Herring. Of course, if this woman was in the neighbourhood and had come from the north of England, she must have stayed the night somewhere.”

  “A few discreet enquiries seem to be called for, you think. I see it’s a quarter past one. Have you had lunch?”

  “Not yet. I was about to go to my usual place when you called in.”

  “Well, come to my club and let’s fortify ourselves against this afternoon’s meeting. You’ve been a great help, I may tell you. Talking to you has cleared my mind. I don’t want to start an unwarrantable stink, but I can’t just sit tight and do nothing. I’ll get the small kid’s word confirmed if I can, and then I shall have to think again.”

  The committee meeting lasted longer than usual. It had been called for three o’clock, and by twenty minutes past the hour the chairman, who was also the president of the Society, remarked to Timothy, who sat on his right, that he supposed all who were coming had turned up, so he might as well begin the proceedings. These followed their usual course, but a great deal of time was taken up by the debate which followed the treasurer’s plea that the admission charge for entrance to Nanradoc Castle in Snowdonia should be raised from half-a-crown to three shillings. Most committee members had something to say on this, either for or against, and after a great deal of discussion and some relevant and (as is so often the case) some remarkably irrelevant arguments, a decision was taken to submit the matter to the annual general meeting.

  “Bloody waste of time,” muttered Parsons, who was seated next to Timothy. “Why can’t it be left to the treasurer? He’s got the facts and figures.”

  “People on committees do love the sound of their own voices,” said Timothy. “That’s why most of ‘em put themselves up for election.”

  Following the abortive discussion, the next item concerned the remuneration of the curator. This was settled satisfactorily, and without consideration for the prejudices of the Prices and Incomes Board. Other Business began briskly and concerned nothing but minor points, one of which, the design of a new heading for the Society’s notepaper, gave rise to acrimonious dispute which called for the authoritative intervention of the chairman. Then came the expected and always eagerly-awaited question:

  “Anything for us this time, Tim?”

  “Yes,” Timothy replied, “there are several matters we might like to think about before the next meeting. Got the letters there, Coningsby? Thanks. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there’s the question of the fourteenth-century bridge over the Haven river at Kingshaven. It’s not wide enough for modern road conditions and the local council want to widen it. It’s a good bridge and they’ll ruin it if they do. I think we might try to persuade them to build another bridge further up-river. That would be a lot cheaper for them than building a bridge at the east end of the town, because the river widens considerably as it goes. Moreover, they could easily divert the traffic west of the town, more easily than at the east.

  “Then there are those almshouses in Catleigh Abbots. They’re scheduled for demolition. It would be a great pity if we allowed that to happen. A grant from us would probably save them. The site isn’t wanted for anything in particular. It’s simply that Catleigh Abbots doesn’t want the expense of repairing them.

  “Then there’s Croole church, of which you’ve been notified. There is another matter coming up in connection with some documents, but I have so few details at present that I won’t tr
ouble you with what I’ve got, and, when I do, you may think it is not our concern, and it may not be. Lastly, members will remember that we made ourselves responsible for repairing and restoring Little Monkshood in the County of Dorset. Ownership, however, does not rest with us. It is highly desirable, I think, that it should. If members agree, I should like us to suggest to the owner that she should sell. At present, members may remember, the agreement is to open the house to the public on one day a week for four months of the year. This seems to me insufficient. The house, although not unique, is of early date and a very good example of its period.”

  “Have you made any approach to the owner?” asked Lady Grace Norton. “Have you any reason to think that she might agree to sell? I, for one, would be glad if she did. It is insufficient, as Timothy—as Mr. Herring—says, to open it to the public (which includes ourselves, of course) only some—what would it be?—some dozen and a half times a year.”

  “No, I have not formally approached the owner, but there is reason to suppose that she would not be averse to parting with the house. An unfortunate death, apparently a suicide, took place there recently, as members may recall, and the owner herself was involved.”

  “If someone will propose a motion, I will put it to the meeting,” said the president. Lady Grace proposed, Parsons seconded, that an approach be made to Miss Marchmont Pallis to find out whether she would be willing to sell Little Monkshood to the Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest, and the motion was carried with one abstention.

  “I’m not voting against it,” said Timothy’s thorn-in-the-flesh, “but I’m certainly not voting for it. We seem to specialise in properties where somebody has died an unnatural death. I don’t like it. It’s ghoulish.”

  “Do you suggest we should demolish the Tower of London, Berkeley Castle, the New Forest, Kenilworth, Holyroodhouse, and so forth?” asked young Rafferty. “Not to mention the towns of Drogheda and Wexford.”

  “Ah, that reminds me,” said Timothy, “of a matter which requires your absence from the committee room for a few minutes, Aloysius me boyo. Hop it, laddie. We’ll call you back when we want you.”