Death of a Burrowing Mole mb-62

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘To you I hardly needed to put it into words.’

  ‘You flatter me, indeed you do. If what you tell me is true (and I am certain it is), I suppose I must be the chief suspect.’

  ‘Why should you suppose that? Good gracious me! If every time two eminent scholars fell out, the result was the murder of one of them by the other, we should soon be very short of first-class brains. Co-operate with me, please, and let us have a true picture of how you spent that Sunday evening and night.’

  ‘Very well. So far as the night itself is concerned, my previous story needs no alteration. From midnight onwards I was in bed. What I did not disclose and what I had suggested to my wife that she did not mention, was how we spent the later part of the evening.’

  ‘Why did you want to conceal what you did?’ ‘Because I was ashamed of it and ashamed of having involved Lilian. I acted the despicable part of a spy and persuaded my wife to assist me.’

  ‘Did you find out anything to your advantage?’

  ‘I confirmed my impression that the completion of Veryan’s trench must inevitably ruin the foundations of one of my flanking-towers. I also satisfied myself that, if one of his secondary burials had been under the land on which my wall and flanking-towers were built, all trace of it would have been lost when the castle’s outer defences were erected.’

  ‘So what becomes of his insistence to complete his trench?’

  ‘Were he – had he been a mean-minded man, I would put it down to sheer cussedness and a determination to make a thorough nuisance of himself, but Malpas, although cussed, was not mean or small-minded. I think he had some reason for completing the circle of his trench which he did not disclose to me.’

  ‘Can you guess what it was?’

  ‘No, I can think of nothing. I have approached Tynant on the matter, but he can offer no explanation. As perhaps you know, he has agreed to extend the trench away from my wall and towers and to give up his excavation short of the tower which is in jeopardy.’

  ‘At what time did you and your wife return to your hotel?’

  ‘Oh, between eleven-thirty and midnight. The porter can tell you. I had asked him to stay up and let us in.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Saltergate. Will you ask for Mr Tynant?’

  ‘Well!’ said Laura, when Edward had gone.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dame Beatrice, ‘it begins to look as though Mr Saltergate can be eliminated.’

  ‘I thought the opposite. With Veryan out of the way, Tynant is prepared to play ball. It was very much to Saltergate’s advantage to get rid of Veryan.’

  ‘Time will show what happened. When Mr Tynant comes in, I want you to disappear. Do not return unless I send for you.’

  ‘You think he may have some deep, dark secrets to disclose?’

  ‘I think that he and possibly Dr Lochlure will speak more freely in your absence than in your (or anybody else’s) presence. There, I think, he comes.’ Laura slid out as Tynant entered. ‘Ah, Mr Tynant, I believe you would like to amend the story you told to the police,’ said Dame Beatrice urbanely.

  Nicholas hitched up the knees of his impeccable trousers and seated himself.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I must. What do you want – a love story?’

  ‘That would be most agreeable and would pass the time at our disposal very pleasantly.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be what you’re here for.’

  ‘Who can tell? Commence. I am all agog.’

  ‘You will have to tell me where to begin.’

  ‘How long have you known Dr Lochlure?’

  ‘On and off, for about two years.’

  ‘Why haven’t you married her?’

  ‘Lack of filthy lucre. You can’t expect a girl like her to settle for a cottage and live on home-grown potatoes.’

  ‘And your own tastes,’ said Dame Beatrice, with an eye on his beautiful clothes, ‘do not run that way, either.’

  ‘Look, I know better than to fence with you, Dame Beatrice. You want me to confess that, with Veryan out of the way, I stand a good chance of being offered the chair of archaeology at my university. Very well, I admit it. They can hardly pass me over. All the same, I didn’t kill him and I can’t tell you who did.’

  ‘Ignoring the fact that I have had your story already from the police, will you tell me, in as much relevant detail as you think fit, exactly how you spent the weekend of Professor Veryan’s death?’

  ‘I can’t, without involving Susannah.’

  ‘Then by all means involve her. When I release you, I shall talk to her. She will have every chance of refuting your statements, should she think it well to do so. Remember, too, that only those indiscretions which lead to crime are of any interest to the police and, in this case, to me. They and I pool all our information, you know.’

  ‘I know I am high on the list of suspects. At least, I shall be if the police can ever prove that Malpas Veryan was murdered. But, if I caused his death, should I confess so freely that, because of it, I have every prospect of stepping into his shoes?’

  ‘And, I understand, of having half his fortune for a research project. There was no need for you to confess to something which is bound to be common knowledge very soon. Do tell me what was behind the story of the mouse.’

  ‘What story of what mouse?’

  ‘The mouse which provided you with an excuse to remove Dr Lochlure from Miss Broadmayne’s home.’

  ‘Sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. Is this another version of the Isle of Man’s talking mongoose?’

  ‘I still hope that you will give me an account of how you spent the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, especially the Sunday night on which Professor Veryan died.’

  ‘I have already given a full account to the police.’

  ‘I am still wondering whether you would care to alter that statement in any way?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. Whether it is exactly accurate or not is beside the point. It’s a good story and I don’t propose to depart from it. It doesn’t matter what young Fiona has told you. I am not risking Susannah’s reputation by admitting that I slept with her.’

  ‘Although you did. Very well, Mr Tynant. Please ask for Dr Lochlure to come in.’

  ‘I insist upon hearing the questions you put to her.’

  ‘If she has no objection, neither have I.’

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Please ask the policeman on duty to send her in.’

  Nicholas walked to the door. There was a short colloquy at the end of which Susannah, raising her voice a little, said, ‘Certainly not. Listeners hear no good of themselves. I shall see Dame Beatrice alone, as everybody else has done. Do you want tongues to wag even more than they’re wagging already? Don’t be tiresome.’ With that, she entered the room and shut the door.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘I am glad to know that you can manage your men.’

  ‘Men? In the plural? You flatter me, Dame Beatrice.’

  ‘I think not, unless all but one of the male sex are blind. Would you prefer to have my secretary sit in on our conference?’

  ‘You are such an intimidating inquisitor that I rather think I would like to have someone else present. May I ask her to come in? She is in the corridor.’

  ‘Please. Well, now, do I understand that there are certain aspects of your story which you wish to amend?’

  ‘You know, Dame Beatrice, I do think this is rather unfair. You hear everybody else’s account and then you ask me for mine. Suppose mine does not tally with what you have been told already? What are you going to think?’

  ‘That someone is lying, but that the someone need not be yourself.’

  ‘I suppose Fiona Broadmayne has been making mischief.’

  ‘She certainly gave a somewhat different picture of her weekend from the one she gave to the police. I shall be glad to have your version.’

  ‘Oh, well, if I must! Fiona invited me to spend the weekend at her home. I had met her parent
s and naturally I expected them to be there when we arrived. I was surprised and, I must confess, very much annoyed when I discovered that she and I were to spend the weekend alone together, particularly as I had already had to decline an invitation from a friend because I had promised Fiona. Under the circumstances I saw no reason why I should let myself in for an intolerably boring weekend, so, when I discovered that I had been taken to a house which had not even a servant in it to prepare the meals, I telephoned the Barbican hotel.’

  ‘And the ever-attentive Mr Tynant rescued Childe Rolanda from the dark tower. What is the story of the mouse? Surely you will tell me.’

  ‘Oh, that! I helped Fiona get tea ready – she had brought with her various stores to last the weekend – and then I was in a quandary. I wanted a reason for insisting upon taking my departure before nightfall without giving her the crude explanation which would have been the true one, so, in desperation, I invented the mouse and insisted that I am so allergic to rodents that I could not possibly stay in a house which harboured them.’

  ‘She did not believe your story.’

  ‘No, I don’t think she did. There was a stormy scene and at the end of it I rang Nicholas Tynant, knowing that I could catch him before he went fishing on the Saturday, and asked him to come in his car and collect me.’

  ‘His, I take it, was the invitation you had had to refuse.’

  ‘Yes, it was. When I had to turn it down, he said he was going to spend the Saturday fishing.’

  ‘But the two of you spent the weekend in the other hotel here in Holdy Bay.’

  ‘In separate rooms, as the chambermaid can certify.’

  ‘Of course, and you booked separately and in your own names.’

  ‘Certainly. There was no reason to do otherwise.’

  ‘We now come to the heart of the matter. Will you give me an account of how you spent the night on which Professor Veryan died?’

  ‘It will not differ in any particular from the one I have given to the police.’

  ‘Are you sure you will not change your mind?’

  Susannah got up from the table.

  ‘Have you finished with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Not quite. Please sit down again. Tell me exactly what you did after dinner on that Sunday evening.’

  ‘You are trying to find discrepancies in my story. There may be some slight alterations, but absolutely nothing of any significance.’

  ‘Did you know that your caravan was occupied during your absence?’

  ‘Fiona told me that the two boys, Bonamy and Tom, wanted to borrow the key, so I assumed they slept there.’

  ‘Did you raise any objection?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. They promised to leave everything perfectly tidy. Besides, I was – oh, well, never mind that.’

  ‘Besides, you were not so invulnerable yourself that you could afford to question the behaviour of your juniors.’

  ‘Oh, they had girls with them, had they?’

  ‘And you had Nicholas Tynant with you.’

  ‘I did not! I did not! – in the sense you mean.’

  ‘You may be asked to swear to that in a court of law, and that might come very hard on Mr Tynant. He does not appear to have much of an alibi for the Sunday night. You had better give him any help you can, for your own sake, as well as his.’

  ‘How dare you threaten me!’

  ‘That is not a threat; it is a friendly warning. I cannot disclose matters which, so far, are known only to myself and the police, but there is no longer any doubt in their minds that Professor Veryan was murdered.’

  Susannah’s face registered no emotion. All she said was that she had not realised that there had been so much bad feeling among the party.

  ‘For, of course,’ she added, ‘it must have been one of us. Nobody else would have known he was up on top of the tower.’

  ‘I would still like to have an account of your own Sunday evening.’

  ‘Well, I had no idea, and neither had Nicholas, that we would need an alibi. We agreed that it might be better if we did not arrive together on the Monday morning, so we arranged that he would take me to the caravan after dinner on Sunday night but that he would leave me to turn the boys out, if they were there, while he sneaked off and spent the rest of the night at the Barbican. He had told Malpas he was going to spend Saturday and Sunday fishing and this would have been true if I had not telephoned him to take me away from Fiona’s home on the Friday while he was still at the Barbican. Malpas would have suspected nothing when Nicholas came down to breakfast on the Monday morning, you see. He would have concluded that Nicholas had returned from his fishing-trip while he was still on the tower on Sunday night. Of course, everything went wrong when the car broke down at Holdy Bay.’

  ‘I think I must see Mr Tynant again. Will you ask the policeman to recall him?’

  Nicholas came in jauntily.

  ‘This is an unexpected honour,’ he said. ‘I concluded that you had finished with me. Has Susannah been ruining my reputation?’

  ‘Far from it. She has dismissed you without a stain on your character.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t believe her. If she had been right, you would see me in a very poor light. I have already indicated that I slept with her. I hope you are not expecting details.’

  ‘Of another kind and on another matter. In your first statement you said that, soon after leaving Holdy Bay after dinner on the Sunday night, your car broke down and you were obliged to escort Dr Lochlure back to the hotel. If the breakdown was of such a nature that you could not cope with it yourself, how were the repairs done so quickly? Your car, I understand, was back at the Barbican on the Monday when Professor Veryan’s body was found.’

  ‘Oh, after I left Susannah at the hotel I went to the all-night garage in Holdy Bay and told them where to pick up the car and where to deliver it when they had put right whatever was wrong. They knew me because I’ve had dealings with them before, and I made a special point that I needed the car urgently.’

  ‘I see. And the rest of your story, the long walk back to the Barbican, the waiting for the outdoor domestic staff to turn up—’

  ‘Perfectly true.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Tynant. Is it also true that you have come to an agreement with Mr Saltergate and that the argument about the trench is settled?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Malpas was very stiff-necked about the completion of our trench, but, as Saltergate points out, any secondary burial under his walls would most likely have been destroyed when the walls and towers were built. All the bad blood has now been drained away.’

  ‘Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, considering all the circumstances.’

  ‘Well, Beatrice, can you give Mowbray a lead?’ asked the Chief Constable.

  ‘I can advise him to find the two girl students who shared bed and board in the caravan with my godson and young Tom Hassocks.’

  ‘Aha. Who are they and how can they help?’

  ‘I don’t know that they can, but there is just the chance that they may be able to confirm the approximate time of Professor Veryan’s death. The medical evidence was not conclusive on that point. They can also give the young men an alibi if they were with them in the caravan when Malpas Veryan was killed. Personally I am not at all sure that they were – not so far as the Sunday night was concerned, at any rate.’

  11

  Private and Other Conversations

  « ^ »

  What makes you think the girls whom the two men students picked up can help with establishing the time of death, ma’am?’ asked Mowbray.

  ‘Well, most of the adults have taken it for granted that the caravan was empty at the time of Professor Veryan’s death. It now appears that the young people may have slept in it on all three nights of that weekend. The young men heard nothing, so I think they were in my paddock, as they claimed, but there is just the chance that one of the girls may have heard Veryan cry out as he fell, particularly if the fall was involuntary.’


  ‘Even if one of the girls did hear something, ma’am, it won’t help unless she looked at her watch at the time, but it’s worth a try.’

  ‘You said you had finished that sonnet of yours,’ remarked Fiona.

  ‘Oh, yes. I don’t think it will do for my collected works, but I still think it’s too good for the college magazine. Do you want to read it?’

  ‘No. You read it aloud to me.’

  ‘Very few poets do justice to their own work when they read it aloud.’

  ‘Betjeman does.’

  ‘My father says de la Mare didn’t. He once heard him and Edith Evans read his work alternately.’

  ‘Never mind that. Have a bash.’ Fiona stretched herself on the sands. The poet gave a preliminary cough. ‘Here goes, then,’ she said. ‘No rude comments.’

  ‘Of course not; nothing but admiration. Has it got a title?’

  ‘No. I simply call it Sonnet. It goes:

  ‘Put out the light and be my body’s balm.

  I have more need of you than you of me;

  But at the hearts of maelstroms there is calm -

  The endless patience of Eternity;

  And so, though fine the line ’twixt love and lust,

  Fear you no ill nor any purpose dire,

  For in the end, dear heart, we are but dust,

  The residue of Love’s consuming fire.

  Too soon the all-impatient dawn will break,

  And, with it, Night’s sweet symphony be mute,

  So, while we have the time, let Orpheus make

  A music with his lyre and Pan his flute.

  Put out the light. Let Eros have his way.

  Minds invent lies, but bodies never may.’

  ‘Hm!’ said Fiona, raising herself on one elbow. ‘A bit derivative, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t see how that can be avoided. One reads so many things that, in the end, it becomes very difficult to sort out what is original from what one has unconsciously absorbed.’

  ‘That last line isn’t true, anyway. Look at prostitutes and gigolos and those sort of seedy adventurers who make love to silly rich women for their money and marry them.’