by T E Kinsey
I remembered our conversation with Mrs Carmichael. ‘But Audrey Carmichael told us they’d had an argument,’ I said.
‘She did, pet. Scarcely conclusive – we’re not always proud of our public arguments – but odd that he should lie when he’d been so open about how difficult it was to get on with Carmichael. It was as if he didn’t want to have to answer questions about the specifics of the row. He didn’t want us to ask him what it was about.’
‘And what was it about?’ asked Lady Farley-Stroud.
‘Land,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘More particularly, the selling of the land. Dougal hates the farm and wants to get away, but he can’t find a buyer. Or so he told us. But when we spoke to Morris Carmichael he seemed to indicate that he already had a buyer on the hook and was ready to sell up and move to London while his mother married Noah Lock and moved next door. So if Dougal hadn’t been able to sell for months, but suddenly Morris was already packing to leave, something didn’t quite add up. And that was why we visited my solicitors yesterday, and why I was so pleased to get this telegram this morning.’ She produced a lengthy telegram from her bag and passed it to the inspector.
Inspector Sunderland read the message. ‘Well, that’s a pretty good motive,’ he said eventually.
‘I think so,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Some while ago,’ she said, addressing the rest of us, ‘Laurence Dougal was approached by Messrs Ferwinkle and Papworth in Gloucester who were acting on behalf of a local property developer, with a view to acquiring his land to build new houses. His prayers had very nearly been answered, but there was a snag. The developers’ plans were entirely dependent upon also acquiring the land next door, owned by Spencer Carmichael. And Carmichael, being Carmichael, refused to sell. It would have set him up in a comfortable retirement, but it gave him much more satisfaction to deny Dougal his chance to escape. Dougal knew that if Carmichael were suddenly to die, Audrey would give the farm to her son and marry Lock, and he knew that Morris would sell to the first person that offered him anything like the asking price so that he could move away. That in turn would mean that his own sale could go through. And the only person standing in the way was Spencer Carmichael.’
‘How very mundane,’ I said, somewhat disappointed.
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘But murder can be quite mundane sometimes. I did warn you.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘We’d better go and collar Dougal,’ said the inspector. ‘And see what he has to say for himself. I don’t suppose you have any actual evidence, my lady?’
‘Oh no, dear, nothing like that. You asked me to solve the mystery; I shall leave the bothersome details to you.’
Inspector Sunderland smiled ruefully. ‘Very well, my lady, I’ll get some lads onto it. He’s bound to have slipped up somewhere.’
‘I could beat a confession out of him if you like,’ I said.
He chuckled. ‘I’m very sure you could, miss. But for some reason, judges are frowning on that sort of thing more and more these days.’
‘Pity,’ I said. ‘But if you ever need anyone roughed-up, I’m your girl. I can do it without leaving any marks.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind, miss.’
Throughout all this, the landlord and his sister had just stood there, dumbstruck, but now I noticed Ronnie bobbing about, trying to see past us into the bar.
‘Reckon you’ve missed your chance there, sir,’ he said to the inspector. ‘Larry Dougal i’n’t there no more.’
The inspector turned. ‘No? Did you see him leave?’
‘No, sir, but he were sittin’ over there by the door.’
‘Thank you, Mr Townsley. Come on, then, ladies, we’d better go and see.’
We filed quickly out after the inspector and made for the door.
Laurence Dougal was sitting on the pavement outside the pub sporting a split lip. He looked somewhat dejected.
A uniformed constable was standing over him while another carried on watching the door. ‘Caught this one trying to leg it, Inspector,’ said the first. ‘He… er… he resisted my attempts to reason with him. A bit. So I… er…’
‘I can see what you, “er”,’ said Inspector Sunderland. ‘Laurence Dougal, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Spencer Carmichael. Constables, help him up and get him to the wagon.’
The two uniformed policemen lifted the portly farmer to his feet and started to lead him away. Some of The Hayrick’s regulars were already out on the pavement and were parting to allow the constables through, while the rest looked out through the windows. Dougal turned his head and noticed that there was no one blocking the street behind him except two well-dressed ladies and a slightly-build maid. I saw the decision flicker behind his eyes an instant before he broke free from the two constables and charged towards us, aiming directly for me. He barrelled towards me like a rugby prop forward heading for the line, head down and thinking only of barging me aside and breaking for freedom. The boys back home in the valleys had taught me plenty of rugby skills as a girl, and I was briefly tempted simply to tackle him, but a Shaolin monk had taught me some infinitely more interesting tricks as we fled through China all those years ago and I confess to a childish desire to have a little fun.
I let him get close enough to think he was going to get away with it before stepping lightly to one side and following through with a move that would have made Chen Ping Bo beam proudly as I spun the overweight farmer and threw him, leaving him sprawling on the cobbles.
The assembled farmers cheered and were still laughing as the chagrined constables caught up with him, lifted him to his feet once more and led him away. I bowed to the crowd.
The inspector sighed. ‘Perhaps you might try handcuffs, lads?’
The inspector began to lead us away to Bert and the waiting car, but the farmers were still milling around and began to bombard us with questions. He deftly deflected their entreaties for more information, telling them that there would be a full report in due course.
‘Thank you for all your help,’ he said as we finally reached the car and climbed in. ‘Of course you’ll be called upon for statements and the like, but for now I advise you to get yourselves home and leave the rest to us. If any newspaper reporters buttonhole you, say nothing and refer them to me.’
‘Thank you, Inspector,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘That was fun.’
‘I’ll be in touch, my lady,’ he said, and banged on the roof of the car to signal Bert to leave.
We went straight back to The Grange where Lady Farley-Stroud exuberantly recounted the day’s events to Sir Hector and proclaimed that having Lady Hardcastle as a neighbour and friend was quite the most exciting thing to have happened to her for years. Sir Hector listened with affectionate patience and asked a few clarifying questions when his wife’s commentary lapsed into hyperbole.
They invited us to stay for tea (which Sir Hector still endearingly referred to as “tiffin”) and we gratefully accepted, pleased to be able to enjoy Mrs Brown’s celebrated sandwiches and cakes. It was early evening by the time we once again declined their kind offer of a lift home with Bert at the wheel.
‘It’s fine, darling,’ said Lady Hardcastle, kissing our hosts goodbye. ‘It’s a pleasant evening and the walk will do us good. We really do need to get a motorcar of our own, you know. It’s been an absolute boon this past week.’
We walked down the hill and back to the house.
‘We ought to write to Jasper Laxton and ask him to name his house, you know,’ said Lady Hardcastle as we removed our outerwear in the hall. ‘We can’t really go on calling it “the house” but since we’re only renting the place it doesn’t seem right to name it ourselves.’
‘What would you call it, my lady?’ I said, hanging up her coat.
‘Oh, I don’t know. “Dunspyin”?’
I laughed. ‘I’m not sure Mr Laxton would approve.’
‘No, pet, I don’t suppose he would. Then again, he’s in India so it would be simply ages
before he found out.’
‘I think “The House” will have to do for now, then, my lady. Will you be wanting any supper?’
‘Oh, I hadn’t thought. Perhaps some more sandwiches? And cards. We haven’t played cards for simply ever.’
‘Right you are, my lady.’
‘And brandy. We can’t possibly play cards without brandy.’
I laughed. ‘Is there anything we can do without brandy?’
‘Very little, I find, pet, very little.’
The evening passed in a pleasing blur of cognac-fuelled cheating and giggling.
We were called upon several times over the ensuing weeks to attend police interviews, coroner’s courts and magistrate’s courts, but other than that, our lives were comparatively carefree once more. Lady Hardcastle had returned to full health and found much to occupy us both, most of it entertaining, including a small celebration in honour of my birthday.
Her two pet projects were the installation of a telephone and the purchase of a motorcar. The first was going to take some time, but matters had finally been set in motion. The approval of various bodies had been sought and obtained, and the installation of a marching line of telegraph poles to extend the line from the heart of the village along the lane to The House had been planned. There had been some grumbling from people who complained that we were marring the beauty of the countryside, and I couldn’t help but agree with them to a certain extent, but the promise of being able to call The Grange, or to talk to Lady Hardcastle’s brother Harry in London soon overcame my own objections, and the village grumblers found something else to grumble about long before work was due to commence. It would be weeks, possibly months, before we had our telephone, but at least things were moving.
The second project, the purchase of a motorcar, proved to be equally problematic in its own way. The motor dealer we approached in Bristol was reluctant at first even to deal with Lady Hardcastle, insisting that he would only talk to her husband. When she offered to engage the services of a medium to conduct a séance so that he could, he relented slightly, but still refused to take her driving ambitions entirely seriously. But her persistence slowly wore him down and eventually he agreed to sell her the pillar-box red Rover 6 in the showroom on the strict understanding that she should return the car as soon as she found that it was unsuitable and that he would happily agree favourable terms.
Within a week the car was delivered and a local builder was engaged to construct a garage for it beside the house. We were mobile, and soon to be telephonically connected; the twentieth century had arrived in Littleton Cotterell.
TWO
The Ghost of the Dog & Duck
“April showers”, that’s what the rhyme calls them. “Nightmarish April storms such as might herald the imminent apocalypse” would have been more apt for the weather we were having, but it would neither scan nor rhyme, so I suppose we have to stick with the official version.
Just when Lady Hardcastle had rediscovered her taste for the outdoors and for life among the living, we were more or less trapped indoors for days at a time as vicious storms swept in from… from… actually, I have no proper recollection where the storms swept in from. The west would be normal for wet weather, but there’d been thunder so it was more likely that they’d come from the south. Or from Hades itself.
Wherever they were from, they were dampening our fun and our spirits as well as our garden. The brand new motorcar had been sitting under its tarpaulin in the front garden for days; the weather was too vile for the drives Lady Hardcastle had planned, and the builders she had hired to build its little house suddenly found themselves engaged on other work as soon as the rain began to fall.
The fires were still lit, as were the lamps for most of the day as we struggled to banish the gloom. And it was all but impossible to get into the little laundry room for all the wet linen hanging in there.
There was little to do but cook, eat, and read.
We had settled down in the drawing room together with our books one evening after supper. I had already scoured the newspaper for something interesting, but beyond an explosion at the electricity substation which supplied power to the tramway, there was nothing of any interest there and instead turned to a local history that Dr Fitzsimmons had lent me when a passage caught my imagination. I looked up from the book and saw that Lady Hardcastle had also stopped reading and was staring into the fire.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, my lady?’ I asked.
‘Do I what?’ she asked, distractedly.
‘Ghosts,’ I said. ‘Do you believe in them?’
‘Believe, pet?’ she said, looking over at me. ‘No, I don’t “believe”. My mind is open to the possibility that there’s something going on that we don’t understand, but I do try awfully hard not to believe in things. I’m an empirical girl, you know me. Show me some evidence and I’ll be excited as a puppy, but a few credulous folk hearing bumps in the night isn’t enough for me.’
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling strangely disappointed.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just something I was reading,’ I said.
‘I thought you were reading that local history the doctor gave you.’
‘I am. Chipping Bevington has a ghost.’
‘Does it, by crikey?’ she said, sitting up. ‘Why don’t we have one?’
‘That’s not recorded, my lady,’ I said. ‘There’s just a story about the Chipping Bevington ghost.’
‘Well go on then, you’re dying to tell me.’
‘Really, my lady? You won’t think it’s silly?’
‘Of course not.’
‘There’s a long, dreary section about the town and its history, about the market and the pubs. Did you know there were six pubs, my lady?’
‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said with a smile, warming to my own enthusiasm.
‘And then there’s this bit about the ghost of Sir Samuel Lagthorpe,’ I said as I picked up the book and began to read.
The Chipping Bevington Ghost
Sir Samuel Lagthorpe spent many years abroad managing various Colonial enterprises, and by the time he returned to England at the beginning of 1873 he had amassed a fortune large enough that he need never work again. He bought a modest, but nonetheless comfortable, cottage just outside the town in the village of Littleton Cotterell and settled into country life, enjoying his new role as the exotic village squire “from overseas”.
Always interested in the comings and goings of his new neighbours, he accompanied his friend John Stebbings, a local farmer, to the cattle market in Chipping Bevington to experience for himself the commercial realities of the men among whom he now lived. It was there that he met a beguiling and beautiful young woman named Charlotte Dunnett. Her father owned land near the town and she, similarly, attended the cattle market to learn more about her father’s tenants so that she might one day take over the management of his estate. So popular was she that few ever questioned her ambitions and she was a welcome and regular sight at the cattle market.
Sir Samuel soon managed to get himself introduced to the young woman. By and by their shy meetings at the cattle market grew to courtship and before summer’s end they were engaged to be married.
His forthcoming marriage sealed Sir Samuel’s resolve to make his home in England after all his years of wandering the Empire and he made arrangements to spend several days in London settling all his affairs. He knew that life with a woman as sparkling and wilful as Charlotte would never be predictable but he was determined that, whatever other adventures they might have, their financial future would be as secure as he could make it.
He travelled to London by train on Monday the 27th of October, intending to return two weeks later when everything was settled. He took rooms at Claridge’s and spent an enjoyable few days going through papers with his solicitor by day and dining with old friends and companions by night.
He returned to his hotel on the Thursday evening, the 30th, to find a telegram waitin
g for him that had been delivered earlier that day. It told him that Charlotte had gone for her morning ride as usual but had fallen from her horse and now lay gravely ill at her father’s house. Sir Samuel, said the telegram, was to come at once. He left hurried instructions for his belongings to be packed and sent on, settled his bill and took a hansom to Paddington. He managed to catch the last train to Bristol but by the time he arrived there was no connecting train north to Chipping Bevington and so he roused a local cabman and hired a brougham to take him the 20 miles to Charlotte.
The journey seemed interminably long and Sir Samuel fidgeted and fretted as the carriage made its way along the Gloucester Road. At length he arrived at the Dunnetts’ house but even as he hurried inside he knew he was too late. He was met in the hallway by Charlotte’s father who managed to tell him in a broken voice that Charlotte had died from her injuries less than half an hour before.
Following the funeral Sir Samuel returned to his Gloucestershire home and was seldom seen. His many friends paid visits but his door remained bolted and their concerned letters of friendship and comfort went unanswered. By the end of November the local police were persuaded that something was amiss and broke into his home where they discovered his body, the service revolver with which he had ended his life still clutched in his hand.
One year later, on the anniversary of Charlotte’s death, shopkeepers on Chipping Bevington High Street reported being awoken in the early hours of the morning by loud noises as though a carriage had clattered through the streets at enormous speed. One witness reported seeing “a jet black brougham” drawn by “a fiery horse” heading in the direction of the Dunnetts’ farm and local legend claims to this day that on the night before Halloween, the ghost of Sir Samuel Lagthorpe races through Chipping Bevington, desperately trying to reach his beloved Charlotte.