The Whispering Knights (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Yes, indeed. It seems to take matters out of the hands of blind Fate and place them in a human or, if you prefer it, an inhuman context.”

  “You mean that somebody intended that Capella should be present when the bodies were found?”

  “I cannot be as explicit as that at this juncture, but I cannot ignore her strange obsession with dead bodies in rectangles, cist graves, and so forth, and we are not the only people who would have heard about them. Anybody in our party could have done so. The point has been made before.”

  CHAPTER 14

  LIONEL AND CLARISSA

  “In crooked banks a spring so flows

  O’er stone, mud, weeds: yet still clear goes.”

  Owen Feltham

  Owen had been able to give Dame Beatrice a telephone number as well as the address, so Laura was able to ring up and arrange a meeting with Lionel and Clarissa at their home, but before this took place the police, in the form of Inspector Marsh accompanied by a sergeant, turned up at the Stone House.

  “The Southampton chaps have been on to that couple,” said Marsh. “As you know, Dame Beatrice, the various Forces are much better co-ordinated than they used to be. In these days of motorways and fast cars a criminal can get from here to yon in a matter of hours, so we have to have an arranged liaison between the various Forces, let alone all the fun and games connected with Interpol and the drugs and the arms rackets.”

  “I am interested in the couple for the same reason as yours, of course,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Yes. After all, they are the last people known to have seen Miss Owen alive. We got very little help from them. Their story is that she was most certainly alive and well when she left them, but we’re a bit dubious about dates. The medical evidence suggests that she had been dead for at least three days when you drew attention to that sack at Little Rollright. It was investigated the same day and provided a very nasty experience for those who opened it. Can you tell us any more about your own visit to the Rollright Stones? As we understand it, you went there more or less on impluse. The visit had not previously been planned.”

  “That is quite true and is easily explained. Finding that our journey to Oxford would take us within a reasonable distance of Little Rollright, Miss Babbacombe-Starr, our young companion, asked whether we might visit the stones. She had visited them as a child and had been greatly impressed by the legend of the disappointed king, his circle of men, and the treachery of his five knights. We had been visiting various stone circles and prehistoric graves, and it seemed to me a very suitable climax to our tour.”

  “Miss Catherine Owen had been a member of your touring party. How did she get on with the other members?”

  “Ah,” said Dame Beatrice, “that is what Mrs. Gavin here would call the sixty-four-thousand dollar question, is it not? My answer will not help you. I really have no idea. She was cool and detached in her attitude to the other members, although she appeared to have found Mr. Stewart, our youngest member except for Miss Starr and Sister Veronica, a knowledgeable and stimulating companion. But when she left the tour with the couple we knew as Lionel and Clarissa, he remained at Ardrossan and went with the rest of us to Inverness. From there, Mrs. Gavin, Miss Starr, and I went over to the Isle of Lewis.”

  “Where all three of you saw another woman who had been murdered in the same way as Miss Owen.”

  “That is so. The rest of the story—I refer to the disappearance of the corpse and its subsequent reappearance on the shores of Loch Roag, you already know.”

  “Upon taking further thought, as you must have done, Dame Beatrice, have you any idea at all who the woman was? All we can get from Miss Starr is a very garbled and fanciful story of a person who flitted from tall stone to tall stone at some of the places your party visited on the tour.”

  “I perceive the direction in which you are heading, Inspector, but I can assure you that Miss Starr’s flights of fancy can have no bearing on the deaths of either of the two women. She was so completely under our eye from the moment the three of us left Inverness that she could not possibly have committed even one murder, let alone two.”

  “May I ask what your movements were after you left Stornoway? We have Miss Starr’s version, of course.”

  “We stayed on Skye, at Glasgow, in Chester, and, after we had deposited Miss Starr at her home, Mrs. Gavin and I spent a night in Oxford.”

  “Thank you, madam. If anything useful should come to light . . .”

  “I shall, of course, inform you.”

  “Thank you, madam. We shall welcome your co-operation.”

  “It looks pretty bad for Lionel and Clarissa,” said Laura, when Marsh and his sergeant had gone.

  “I think you are right. I shall present the couple—and in uncompromising terms—with what I see as their possible motive. It will be interesting to find out how they react. What the police are doing, I imagine, is checking the details of their journey south from Ardrossan, and I shall pursue the same line of enquiry.”

  Lionel and Clarissa had a ground-floor flat at Lee-on-the-Solent, with nothing but a broad grassy strip between their front garden gate and the sea. They received Dame Beatrice and Laura with a delight which was more simulated than real, and once the greetings were over Lionel launched into the attack.

  “We’ve been absolutely badgered by the police since Catherine’s body was found,” he said. “It’s really most unfair. Why should we be expected to know any more about it than anybody else? She didn’t die while she was in our company, and we’ve never even been to the Rollright Stones, let alone leaving a friend’s body in a sack there. The whole business is absolutely preposterous.”

  “No doubt it is,” said Dame Beatrice soothingly. “Unfortunately for yourselves, you appear to have been the last people (except for the murderer, of course) to have seen Catherine Owen alive.”

  “That has still to be proved,” said Clarissa. “We are not alarmed, of course. Nobody who knows us would dream of connecting us with such a dreadful business, but the whole thing is dangerous from another point of view. The publicity may jeopardise our new job.”

  “Another thing connected with that aspect,” said Lionel, “is that we are impatient to move house, for the new job will provide us with rent-free accommodation, but while all this fuss is going on we don’t want to carry the dirty linen into a new environment, even if the police would let us leave, and I am not at all sure that, at the present juncture, they would.”

  “Oh, I think you exaggerate,” said Dame Beatrice. “When you returned from the tour, did you bring Catherine here?”

  “Bring her here? Certainly not. As I have said, when we returned from the tour our concern was to arrange to move house. We would have had no time for casual visitors.”

  “You say you did not bring her here; so where, en route, did you leave her?”

  “We dropped her off at Heathrow. She said she could get a taxi there.”

  “You must all have spent a night or two somewhere between Ardrossan and Heathrow, I think.”

  “Yes, we did, but only one night. I am accustomed to long-distance driving, so we made the journey in two hops, the first from Ardrossan to Carlisle and then on the motor roads to London’s Heathrow. Any more questions?”

  Lionel spoke smilingly, but Laura sensed that there was disquietude behind the smile and perhaps a touch of menace. This was enhanced when Clarissa asked hotly,

  “Look, what is all this?”

  “Well, ‘all this’ culminated in murder,” replied Dame Beatrice calmly, “and, as you probably know, murder is part of my business, particularly so in this case, as I travelled in Catherine’s company so, to that extent, have a personal reason for trying to find out who killed her. You must be patient with me. Surely you, of all people, have an interest in her death and a willingness to help find out who caused it. I will not deceive you. I am, as usual, working with the police.”

  There was silence. Then Lionel spoke.

  “We
are rebuked,” he said, “and rightly. I am sure, Dame Beatrice, you will understand that we have been in a state of shock since the news broke and are not yet quite ourselves. Ask what questions you will and we shall answer as best we can, shall we not, Clarissa?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry, Dame Beatrice. What do you want to know?”

  “Perhaps you would give me, tedious although it may be for you to repeat the account you will have given the police, a résumé of your journey to London from Ardrossan.”

  They had little to tell her. The journey had been completely uneventful. They had spent only one night at a hotel. There had been some talk of crossing from Carlisle eastwards to look at the cup and ring marks at Roughting Linn, and the couple, left to themselves, might have done this, but Catherine was so anxious to get back to London that they had abandoned the idea, sped down the motorways, and got her to the London area in two days.

  “Why, having decided to join the tour, did you leave it uncompleted?” Dame Beatrice asked. They had talked matters over, it appeared, and when it was suggested that there was to be a longer stay in Inverness, they had decided that if the scheduled visit to Stornoway was still under contemplation, they had neither the time nor the money for such an extension of the itinerary.

  “Laura, Miss Starr, and I spent only one night in Inverness,” said Dame Beatrice, “before we crossed to Lewis, and, of course, you could have done the same. May I ask, though, why, if you were so anxious to cut short the tour, you contemplated crossing over from Carlisle to visit other stone circles in Northumbria?”

  “Oh, it would have meant only one more night on the road and would have taken less time than the couple of nights we expected to stay in Stornoway,” said Lionel.

  “Ah, yes, of course. Did you gather from Catherine her reason for abandoning the tour at Ardrossan?”

  “I thought you understood her reason. She was anxious to get home and complete her preparations for going to America.”

  “You never suspected that she might have had at least one other reason for abandoning the tour?”

  “I think,” said Lionel, “that you are putting a leading question, Dame Beatrice, but, as this is not a court of law, I will accept it. The answer will disappoint you. We suspected no other reason for her action.”

  “Not even if I remind you that her paper of answers to the Truth Game was stolen from my room at Penrith and another set of answers substituted?”

  “Remind us?” said Clarissa. “But we had no idea that such a thing had happened. Was it a joke of some kind?”

  “I hardly think so. The inference is that Catherine’s own answers may have given away somebody else’s secret.” Dame Beatrice watched the two faces, but neither gave anything away. She deduced that Lionel and Clarissa were facing a well-rehearsed situation and were prepared for it. “It has been suggested to me,” she went on, “that Catherine had a reason for discontinuing the tour apart from the one she gave you. I wonder whether she made any mention of it after the three of you had left the rest of us?”

  They looked at one another and then shook their heads. They had always found Catherine extremely reticent and self-contained, they said.

  “Not a woman who would give much of herself away,” added Lionel. “Rather a forbidding personality, on the whole. Won’t you enlighten us?”

  “Yes, certainly I will. It has been suggested to me that she was beginning to find Mr. Stewart’s amorous approaches unwelcome.”

  “What rubbish!” exclaimed Clarissa. Lionel, more mildly, said that not only had Catherine never given them any inkling of any such matter on the journey home, but he thought she would have been extremely gratified if she had received any such advances. Catherine was frozen, he said, and would have welcomed any chance of thawing out.

  “Besides, his sights were so obviously set on Capella Starr,” said Clarissa. “I should think he was taken by surprise, wasn’t he, when you carted her off to Stornoway? I suppose he had already committed himself to Clava.”

  “He may have decided to see both Clava and Callanish,” said Dame Beatrice. Lionel said excitedly that perhaps that was what Stewart had done.

  “I don’t intend to suggest that he murdered that unknown woman on Lewis,” he added, “but it would be typical of his sense of humour to have found the body and placed it in that passage grave. The police referred to it when they were questioning us, and really Capella was very tiresome about her ghost and its flittings and her always seeing dead bodies in rectangles, and so forth.”

  “It certainly would be interesting to know what he did after he left Inverness,” said Clarissa.

  “He could not have known that the three of us would visit the Rollright Stones,” said Laura. “It was a last-minute decision and was suggested by Capella herself. You heard that Catherine’s body was in the sack we discovered, I suppose?”

  “We could hardly help doing so when you consider the way the police have harassed us,” said Clarissa resentfully. “It’s so utterly stupid of them. Lots of people must have known she was alive and well when we left her at Heathrow. The trouble is that, so far, the police don’t seem to have found anybody who will come forward and swear to that. She told us she lived in a house let in the form of three self-contained flats, but the other tenants were on holiday or, at any rate, not at home, I suppose, or they would have told of her safe arrival. It seems to me that our luck has been completely out.”

  “Once again,” said Dame Beatrice, “I must say I am slightly puzzled. Were you not very anxious to get home here to begin your preparations for moving house? Could she not have taken the train from Carlisle or somewhere else and let you come straight back here instead of dropping her at Heathrow?”

  “Oh, she was lumbered with a suitcase and things,” said Lionel. “One didn’t like to discard her, and, as things have turned out, it wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway.”

  “When do you expect to take up your new appointment?”

  “If we ever do. That is to say, if the publicity over this wretched murder does not cause the university to change its mind and appoint another candidate.”

  “Two other candidates,” said Clarissa. “The post calls for a married couple, each on a separate salary.”

  “It sounds more like a couple of domestic servants, put like that,” said Lionel, “but actually it is to run a university hostel in Lancashire and would suit us ideally. The money is more than I have been getting as a prep-school master and Clarissa as a school secretary. We shan’t need to keep on this flat, you see, because the quarters at the hostel are rent-free and I shall also be doing some lecturing in modern languages, which will be far more interesting than trying to teach the rudiments of French to small boys.”

  “Well, there wasn’t much to be gained from all that,” said Laura, when they had taken their departure. “We are no further forward. They told us nothing that we did not know before we talked to them.”

  “You mean nothing that we did not guess. It is still only theory that they are brother and sister, but are passing themselves off as a married couple in order to obtain this post which seems to mean so much to them. If they thought that Catherine had any suspicion as to their real relationship, they may well have thought that she might prove dangerous and would be better out of their way.”

  “But how could she have found out?”

  “I said ‘any suspicion.’ Everybody must have noticed that they always occupied separate bedrooms at the hotels.”

  “Are you going to tell the police that you think they have a motive for killing her?”

  “Not at present, and perhaps not at all. I shall not be satisfied that they are guilty until or unless I can prove, or the police can prove to me, that they murdered the woman on Lewis. I am convinced that the two deaths are connected and were brought about by the same person or persons.”

  “What makes you think so? The other woman was nothing to do with our party.”

  “I have a suspicion that sh
e might have had a connection with some member of our party. As Lionel pointed out, Capella’s dreams and visions, whether they were inspired by Sister Veronica’s suggestions or not, had become known to all of us.”

  “Well, that seems to let Lionel and Clarissa out.”

  “Not until their homeward journey has been very thoroughly checked, and that is a task for the police, not for us.”

  “If they prove to be in the clear—that is to say, if you are right, and you always are right—it boils down to Stewart or Owen.”

  “Or both of them.”

  “You’re talking about the business of heaving that sack over the railings, but they are both tall, strong men. I should think one of them on his own could have tumbled it over. I shouldn’t think Catherine was all that heavy. I could have done the job myself, I think, if I’d been pushed to it. Of the two of them, I’d plump for Stewart. I think Lionel was right about his sense of humour.”

  “I repeat that nobody could have known that we had decided to visit the Rollright Stones.”

  “Capella herself could have told somebody. It was at her suggestion that we went there.”

  “But we are joint witnesses to the fact that she could not have committed either of the murders.”

  “Yes, of course, there’s that,” said Laura in a doubtful tone. They were met on their return by an unexpected but welcome visitor. This was Laura’s husband.

  “I thought I’d like to look you up,” he said to Dame Beatrice. “We haven’t been called in officially—the local chaps naturally prefer to solve their own crimes if they can—but my Deputy told me he had heard you had mixed yourself up with murder again, so I thought I would run down and hear all about it from your personal standpoint.”

  “There is plenty to hear,” said Laura. “How long can you stay?”

  “Only for tonight, but I need not leave until after lunch tomorrow. I must go then. We’ve got another top security lark on.”

  He was given the story after dinner that night and, when he had heard it, he said that the set-up must be bizarre enough even to satisfy his wife.