“Well, let us hope that the tumbrils won’t begin rolling,” said Dame Beatrice. “So Mrs. Wilks has left us again, has she?”
“She like better food than she get here,” said Mrs. Polkinghorne, beginning to pour out tea. “All the same, I think she is not so very glad to go.”
“The last I heard, she was begging Sister to keep her here,” declared Marcellus. “I suppose Sister told her she did not want her back, and small blame if she did say so. What right had Mrs. Wilks to go flouncing off with a stranger after all we had done for her over the last seven years? Ingratitude is no name for it.”
“I think she like the big car,” said Mrs. Polkinghorne. “Miss Lipscombe,” she added when Sister Marcellus had taken herself off, “write too many letters. I tell her so. And Sister Marcellus talk too many words.”
“And did you tell her that?”
“Not so. She is religiosa, so I respect her. She is also muy tonta.”
“She cannot help being very ignorant. She has not had your advantages.”
“That is true. I am without charity, like San Pablo.”
“You fail to do him justice.”
“I go to good school in Madrid. There the religiosas are of two kinds. Some sing in choir; others sing in kitchen. You understand? But here not so. Sister Marcellus, she do both. Not good, that, do you think?”
“I am not capable of expressing an opinion. I agree with you, though, that Miss Lipscombe, as I think you once told me, wrote at least one very dangerous letter
“So I think. She let cats out of bags and get scratched and die.”
“Can you name the particular cat that caused her death?”
“No,” replied Mrs. Polkinghorne sadly, “I cannot name that animal.”
“I had not realised that Sister Marcellus was Irish until her indignation caused her to betray the fact. How many of the nuns are Irishwomen?”
“Who can say? Inglés, escoces, irlandés—to me all the same.”
“No doubt to most English, Scots and Irish, all Catalans, Castilians, Galicians, Asturians, and Estramadurans are the same!”
“All español and no difference of religion. All good Catholics except a few who are Communist No troubles, no bombs, no strikes in the Spain I come from.”
“Really? It sounds an ideal country. Did you ever talk to Miss Lipscombe about it?”
“That one? No. She go nowhere and she know nothing. To be a daughter to el alcalde, what is that? She come not of good people. All is pretending. She find out everybody’s business and although she is frightened at night she do not lock her door for fear of fire and the lock stick when she want to get out. Also she has weakness in her riñones. You understand?”
“Her kidneys, yes?”
“So. And she visit el escusado in the middle of the night, pull chain, and wake everybody. Do you call that nice?”
“It is difficult to choose between waking people up and neglecting to flush the toilet, perhaps.”
“Selfish,” said Mrs. Polkinghorne flatly. “Egoisto. Besides, she do it to annoy Mrs. Wilks, who do not sleep so good if she wake up in the night with the chain pulled.”
Dame Beatrice, who had had various not very-well-defined pictures in her mind of how Miss Lipscombe had come to her end, found her ideas suddenly clarified. There would have been the exit from the ground floor bedroom, the walk along the cloister to the lavatory, the meeting (totally unexpected by both of them) with an intruder, the subsequent anonymous letter—anonymous in the sense that it was unsigned, but bearing the full imprint of Miss Lipscombe’s name because of its threatening contents, the payments as the price of Miss Lipscombe’s silence, and the ultimate turning of the worm . . . “One letter too many? Yes, indeed,” thought Dame Beatrice.
“Publish and be damned, for my motto,” she said aloud. Mrs. Polkinghorne moved away from the tea table and took up her everlasting crochet work without attempting to question Wellington’s famous dictum.
“What I don’t understand, ma’am,” said Inspector Cramond, “and what I wish you’d explain (supposing you have any theories about it, which something tells me you have) is how the murderer can have done what he did, supposing we’re right about it being murder. That is, how on earth he managed to kill her without having to leave a mark of violence on her, ma’am. Even an old girl like that would have put up some sort of a struggle and some of these elderly ladies who’ve led abstemious lives and gone to church regular are surprisingly tough.”
“That is very true, if they are awake and alert, but what if they are unconscious and therefore inert when they are put into the water? Once immersed, the victim could be held face downwards without any mark of violence being apparent.”
“You mean they drugged her before they drowned her?”
“The Princes in the Tower need not have been drugged before they were done to death, Inspector.”
“You mean he smothered her and then dumped her in the pond?”
“Believing that she was already dead, I fancy, but I suppose she began to revive. She would have been in the water by then, I think, and all he had to do was to hold her face down until she actually did die. She could not have stood the slightest chance. Yet neither assault—the original partial suffocation, possibly effected soundlessly with a pillow, and then the eventual drowning—need have resulted in marks of violence on the body.”
“And where would he get a pillow? One of her own, do you think?”
“More likely it came from Mrs. Wilks’s old room and he crept in, armed with it. I am told that she never locked her door for fear of fire. Suffocation with a pillow need not produce evidence of injury, or so the forensic journals inform us.”
“She was in bed, then, and not down at the pond when she was murdered?”
“It is a tenable hypothesis, don’t you think? In spite of Mrs. Wilks’s evidence at the inquest, there has never been any proof that Miss Lipscombe went into the village to play bingo. That means she would have had no reason to pass by the pond at night.”
“So that’s how you figure it all out, ma’am? And what about the murderer?”
“She ran into him, I think, when he was on his way to the cellar. Access can be gained to the house, as we know, by way of Mrs. Wilks’s old room, and the murderer knew all about that. On the occasion of their meeting, Miss Lipscombe must have left her room, as seems to have been her habit during the night, for a certain necessary purpose. She must have recognised the intruder by the light of the lantern he was carrying. Possibly she shrank back against the shadowed wall of the cloister without challenging him, but later on I think she wrote him a letter and, although it was in print and unsigned, he soon knew from whom it came because Miss Lipscombe began extracting sums of money from him.”
“So that’s how she got it, not from bingo, but from blackmail, you think? And she knew the man. Sounds to me like this nephew of Mrs. Wilks, but we’ve no proof, have we?”
“No, not yet.”
“Never mind. If he’s mixed up in this cellar business, Special Branch will get him for that, all right. He and his mates, whoever they are, are bound to try and shift the stuff out while the convent is empty next Sunday evening, because they’ll smell an almighty big rat when Mrs. Wilks doesn’t return to this chap’s house. The way I see it, they’ve brought the stuff to the cellar a bit at a time and probably the only chaps who’ve acted as porters are the two men the children spotted. Well, I reckon one of them is our man. On the other hand, they can’t take the stuff out a bit at a time because, as I see it, they’ve nowhere safe to store it until it gets on board ship or in some other way to its destination. So they’ll choose Sunday, put their whole gang on to the job, and clear the cellar while they think the coast is clear.”
“I agree about that, Inspector, but I do not think our murderer will come on Sunday.”
“Don’t you, ma’am? Why don’t you think he’ll come?”
“Because he will be in church.”
“In church? Aski
ng a blessing on their enterprise?”
“You jest, Inspector, but I mean what I say. The murderer will be in church because there would be an uncomfortable amount of speculation about his whereabouts if he neglected to attend.”
“His wife would wonder where he was, you mean?”
“I do not think he is married. He could feign illness, I suppose, but I do not think he will, neither do I think his companions would wish it. I do not think they trust him very far, but we shall see.”
“Then you don’t think he’s Mrs. Wilks’s nephew, as he calls himself?”
“I will tell you who he is and we shall apprehend him on his own confession.”
On the following day Dame Beatrice moved in with the Fennells.
“The inspector wants the coast left entirely clear on Sunday,” she explained, “and he thinks it will lead to less speculation if I move out of the convent in good time.”
“Have you thought any more about that vile letter which was sent to me?” Fennell asked when his wife had gone off to superintend the preparation of the evening meal. “You indicated that you did not believe it came from Miss Lipscombe.”
“Neither did it. I am certain that it came from her murderer.”
“But why should he write in such offensive terms to me?”
“It was a long shot, of course, but I think he hoped that if, for any reason, suspicion of having caused Miss Lipscombe’s death ever chanced to alight on him, the letter might divert that suspicion from him to you.”
“Good Lord! Is he crazy?”
“No, but he is a weakling and a coward. Such people are very dangerous because they have no scruples when it is a case of saving their own skins at the expense of someone else’s. He realised the feeling you had for your wife and thought that he might turn it to his advantage.”
“Well, who is the fellow, anyway? It must be somebody I know.”
“It was somebody who did not cut his vile words out of Miss Lipscombe’s Family Bible, anyway. The print is quite different, as I noticed.”
“A very nice clean-up, ma’am,” said the inspector, when he called at the Fennells’ house on the following Monday morning after Mrs. Fennell had left to go to the school. “We had plenty of reinforcements, but there were only four of them, two to work the cellar and two more to load up the van. We took them red-handed, just the way we wanted it, so you can go back to the convent as soon as you like. Chummy-boy, which is to say the man whose name you gave me, wasn’t with them, as you told me he wouldn’t be. So now, ma’am, how do we get this confession out of him?”
“I return to the attack, Mr. Chassett,” said Dame Beatrice to an obviously nervous and unhappy young man. “Are you still maintaining that you have never received one of those anonymous letters?”
Ronald Chassett moistened his lips.
“What does it matter now?” he asked feebly. “The old woman who wrote them is dead.”
“I feel that she is like Esther Reid, of whom I read in the far-off days of my childhood. She yet speaketh. Come, Mr. Chassett! If you did not receive one of those letters, perhaps you wrote one.”
“I don’t know what you mean. And I’d be glad if you would vacate this shed. I’m expecting a class in ten minutes’ time and I have to get things ready for them.”
“Ah, yes, this shed. The very first of the letters—not the one you wrote, of course, but an earlier one—referred to it, did it not?”
“I’ve no idea, but if that nosey old parker sent some filthy accusation about me to the Sisters, I can pretty well guess what it was.”
“Can you, indeed? I should be interested to hear what your conjectures are.”
“Well, if she snooped around here often enough, she probably saw a meeting or two between me and my fiancée.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I couldn’t always meet Marilyn at my home or hers, so occasionally we met here.”
“But you no longer do so?”
“No. Sister Hilary told me about the letter and I got the impression that we were being spied on, so we dropped the shed as a meeting-place. Does that satisfy you?”
“I seek information, not satisfaction.” She glanced round the shed and took in its benches, cupboards, and tool-racks. “As a place of assignation it must have had its disadvantages.”
“We met only to talk over our plans for the future.”
“Then why did you object to being spied on?”
Ronald Chassett kicked the leg of one of the benches.
“People have such dirty minds,” he said. “I didn’t mind for myself, but I didn’t like somebody tipping off Sister Hilary that Marilyn and I met here. Marilyn is sensitive. She might have heard criticism if somebody in the town began some ill natured gossip about us.”
“After you gave this place up for that particular reason, did you ever meet anybody else here?”
“Oh, well”—he hesitated—“oh, well, now and again a few of us used to meet here for a quiet game of cards. There was no harm in it. We never played high. Now, look here, I don’t want to be rude and turn you out of this hut, but my class will be on their way.”
“I think not, Mr. Chassett. I understand that Sister Hilary is keeping them over at the school so that you and I should not be interrupted. Did you know that the convent cellars were raided by the police last night and that four of your card-playing acquaintances were taken into custody? It seems that they were in the act of removing a fairly large quantity of detonators and explosive material from the cellar, which you had shown them and which you had declared to be safe.”
Ronald Chassett moistened his lips.
“And how am I supposed to have known about the cellar?” he demanded, in frightened, belligerent tones.
“Your mother was on the school staff when all the teachers lived in the convent.”
Ronald Chassett opened his mouth, made an incoherent attempt at speech, gave it up, and glared at her. She resumed, “Miss Lipscombe saw you, didn’t she? You offered her money—not a great deal, it is true—and she took it and promised not to give you away to Sister St. Elmo. She did not blackmail you to begin with except to make you get rid of a certain large and heavy book . . .”
“It’s a lie! It’s all lies!”
“It is not a lie that when you knew she was continuing to send out those anonymous letters, one of which came to you, you distrusted her sufficiently to kill her. You need not have done that, you know. She knew nothing about the explosives in the cellar, although she had begun asking you for more money.”
“She snooped around,” said Chassett, finding his voice. “We couldn’t trust her.”
“Good gracious!” said Dame Beatrice, with a leer that caused him to flinch. “You surprise me so much that I think I should like to sit down.” She picked up a chair from behind one of the benches and calmly seated herself in front of him. Then she went on. “You don’t think a nervous old lady like that would have stayed in the convent another moment if she knew there was sufficient ammunition in the cellar to blow the whole house to pieces, do you?”
“I suppose you’ve told the police all this?”
“I thought you might like to confirm it. I should hate to do you an injustice.”
“You can go to hell, then. I can only be punished for one murder, so yours won’t make any difference.”
“You forget that I am not a nervous old woman lying helpless in bed while a cowardly and vicious young thug stifles her with a pillow.”
“Your death will be even more unpleasant than hers was,” snarled Chassett. “You weren’t very clever to come here alone when I’ve got this”—he snatched from its bracket on the wall a large, extremely ugly-looking chisel—“to help me out.” He lunged towards her. More quickly than seemed possible in such an old and apparently frail woman, Dame Beatrice skipped from her chair and overturned it in front of his legs just as the inspector and his sergeant burst in at the door.
“So it is goodbye,” said Sister St. Elmo, giving Dam
e Beatrice her hand. It was the school dinner hour and the whole Community was there to wish the traveller Godspeed. Dame Beatrice made her farewells. She had already said goodbye to the secular staff and the two old ladies, for Mrs. Wilks was back in the convent once more. It fell to the oldest Sister to say the last word. Two pairs of brilliant black eyes in two lined and ancient faces summed each other up with sympathetic understanding.
“We shall meet in heaven,” asserted old Sister Ignatius with finality. Dame Beatrice said gently that she would look forward to the reunion.
About the Author
Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, Oxford, in April 1901. She was educated at the Rothschild School in Brentford, the Green School in Isleworth, and at Goldsmiths and University Colleges in London. For many years Miss Mitchell taught history and English, swimming, and games. She retired from this work in 1950 but became so bored without the constant stimulus and irritation of teaching that she accepted a post at the Matthew Arnold School in Staines, where she taught English and history, wrote the annual school play, and coached hurdling. She was a member of the Detection Club, the PEN, the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. Her father’s family are Scots, and a Scottish influence has appeared in some of her books.
Convent on Styx (Mrs. Bradley) Page 20