Death of a Burrowing Mole mb-62

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘From what I know of Miss Broadmayne – not very much, I admit – I find it a little strange that she should have laid herself open to being called harsh names by Miss Yateley.’

  ‘I fancy Miss Broadmayne is anxious to be on the right side of the law as represented by me, ma’am. After we’d left that gamekeeper Goole, I gave the young lady a solemn warning that, if Goole had not blotted his copybook by what amounted to kidnapping her and locking her up, she could have found herself in court on a charge of poaching. She was cavorting about all among his pheasants, and at night, too.’

  ‘Had she blacked her face? I believe that aggravates the offence, does it not?’

  Mowbray laughed.

  ‘What she blacked was Goole’s eye,’ he said. ‘I’m having another word with him later on.’

  Laura and Fiona swam; Dame Beatrice and Priscilla sat in deckchairs on the beach at Holdy Bay.

  ‘Are you really Bonamy’s godmother?’ asked Priscilla.

  ‘Well, I was present at his baptism,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Later on, I was able to delegate my responsibilities to his schoolmasters. Those long-suffering men made certain that he could get through the Catechism and recite the Ten Commandments and, in due course, they brought him before the bishop for Confirmation.’

  ‘People accept an awful responsibility when they take it upon themselves to promise for the baby that he will renounce the devil and all his works. I suppose somebody promised it in my name when I was christened, but I don’t think it has worked out very well,’ said Priscilla.

  ‘You mean you have murdered, stolen, lied in court and committed adultery?’

  Priscilla said, ‘You ought to have been a priest. They always make sin sound so silly. No, I haven’t done those things – I haven’t enough courage – but I haven’t escaped the sin of covetousness.’

  ‘The sin which is apt to lead to all the others. I wonder why it is relegated to tenth place? It almost comes as an afterthought, one feels.’

  ‘Did you get what you expected?’ asked Laura when, having given the two girls tea, she and Dame Beatrice had watched them drive away from Holdy Bay to return to the cottage.

  ‘Priscilla began with one confession and ended with another. Neither helps to advance the enquiry into Professor Veryan’s death, so far as I can see. She confesses that she did not spend that weekend in London, but with her farmhouse friends, as she had arranged to do. Mr Mowbray, I fancy, will have no difficulty in confirming this.’

  ‘It’s the story she told at the beginning and then she changed it to this trip to London and all the balderdash she invented to bolster up the story. I suppose she, like the rest of them, got scared when the inquest was adjourned. What was the confession at the end, and what came between the two?’

  ‘She repeated an account she had given previously to young Fiona—’

  ‘A bit of a grampus when swimming, that one. Powerful, but untidy, and puffs and blows. Best on the butterfly, she informs me, and that, of course, is not the most effective stroke when one is breasting the waves. Sorry! I interrupted you.’

  ‘It was worthwhile. Your summing-up was admirable. Fiona has puffed and blown upon poor Priscilla until she has blown her house down and then Mowbray sent her to me. I was about to tell you that Priscilla gave Fiona (and now me) a graphic account of how simple a matter it must have been to tumble Professor Veryan off the tower of the keep. Fiona urged her to confess that she had actually seen the murder committed.’

  ‘Good gracious me! And had she?’

  ‘She says not. One thing is as certain as anything can be, though: she may have seen murder committed, but she herself could not have committed it in the way she describes; she is far too light and frail to collect even an unsuspecting man’s legs from under him and heave him over into an abyss. Fiona might have done it, but not Priscilla.’

  ‘Do you think she saw it done?’

  ‘I shall not answer that. People have now lost any of the faith in psychologists they may ever have had. I think I shall take up stamp-collecting.’

  ‘But what about young Priscilla?’

  ‘Fiona insisted that she should open her heart. Priscilla, having given one version of the way in which she spent the weekend of Professor Veryan’s death, then changed it for a much less credible one and this, it appears, has lain heavily upon her conscience. She has had nightmares and has woken Fiona up more than once.’

  ‘But we know that poor little rabbit couldn’t have killed a six-foot man, not even a string-bean like Veryan.’

  ‘True, but we have to make allowance for nerves, imagination and a guilty conscience.’

  ‘A guilty conscience?’

  ‘Because she had told lies to the police.’

  ‘Oh, I see, but surely she realised that she was only in the same boat as everybody else? The whole boiling of them chopped and changed their alibis as soon as they knew the police suspected murder. They’ve all told lies.’

  ‘True, but perhaps their consciences are not so tender as hers or their dread of the police not so great.’

  ‘Do you really think she knows anything about Veryan’s death? Her reconstruction of it can’t be all imagination, can it?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. She has chosen an explanation of how murder could have been committed, but by a method which, as I think we are agreed, she herself could not have used.’

  ‘So what method did she use?’

  ‘You are leaping to conclusions. However, I myself will leap to one. I think Priscilla spent a domestic and blameless weekend and was no nearer Holdy Castle than her friends’ farm on the night of Veryan’s death, and that Mowbray knows it.’

  This conclusion was justified. On the Sunday night Priscilla had been driven to Fiona’s house by one of her friends, on the pretext of getting a lift back to the castle with Fiona. But, as there seemed to be no lights on in the house, Priscilla had returned to the car, and on the Monday morning her friends had found a note to say that she would not wait for breakfast and had borrowed the wife’s bicycle to get back to Castle Holdy and rendezvous with Fiona.

  ‘But she didn’t leave the farm until six on the Monday morning, ma’am,’ said Mowbray. ‘The cowman saw her go. I reckon we can leave her out of our calculations.’

  15

  A Body in the Woods

  « ^ »

  But why on earth didn’t the little silly stick to the truth she told in the first place? Why go to the lengths of inventing a weekend in London and getting drunk and joining a political march and all that rubbish?’ asked Laura, reverting to the subject some time later.

  ‘Oh, as it states in the hymn, because of “the very wounds that shame would hide”. She has a great admiration for Dr Susannah and was beside herself to think of Fiona and the beloved object alone together for the weekend.’

  ‘So you got her to tell you why she went to the house – which is, after all, further from Castle Holdy than her friends’ farm – on that Sunday night?’

  ‘Oh, no. I told her and then gave her the best advice I could.’

  ‘Which was? – not that I’m trying to break the bond of secrecy between doctor and patient.’

  ‘There is nothing secret about it. I told her that she should continue to write the obsession out of her system. She had shown me some poems. I commended them and suggested that the remedy is in her own hands. She replied that she saw herself as a most ineffective person, so I pointed out that, whereas a grand passion seldom lasts a lifetime, poetry can be immortal.’

  ‘Is hers really any good?’

  ‘She thinks it is and, at present, that is all that matters. The real wish of Priscilla’s heart is not to captivate Dr Susannah, but to see herself as the author of a slim volume. I encouraged her and promised to put her in touch with some helpful people when she has assembled an appropriate array of stanzas.’

  ‘Does she really stand any chance of publication?’

  ‘Oh, I have seen worse verses than hers in print. She is not afra
id to experiment and, although at present it is not difficult to see whence she derives her images and ideas, she will find her own voice in time and I think she will have something pertinent to say. She has a poem which she calls ‘Castle Holdy’. It shows a mature grasp of her own present state of mind. It goes:

  ‘When all our defences were down, the bastions abandoned and broken;

  When from shattered portcullis the word – the word of surrender – was spoken,

  Then, throwing away his long sword, the emblem of battle and danger,

  There stepped from the ranks of the foe a courteous and soft-spoken stranger.

  He asked neither captives nor gold; he set no proud carillons pealing;

  He gave us the choice of two gifts and cunningly offered them, kneeling.

  One was for peace, one for love, and easy it was to confuse them.

  His gifts were two-edged as his sword – but we chose, for we dared not refuse them.

  ‘Anybody capable at Priscilla’s age of analysing her own emotions as successfully as that is not entirely negligible.’

  ‘You sat down and memorised the thing?’

  ‘I read it twice. A combination of rhyme and rhythm, when both are conceived on simple lines, is readily assimilated. But to our more immediate concerns.’

  ‘That phone call just now from Mowbray? He wouldn’t say anything when I took it. He just asked me to put you on if you were available. Is there something he wants us to do?’

  ‘Not at present. There is no reason why I should not tell you what was said. It was only that he wanted me to receive the news direct from him. It will all be public property by this evening.’

  ‘That must mean he has taken a step forward in the enquiry, I suppose.’

  ‘He does not appear to think so.’

  ‘Oh? Not a setback, I hope?’

  ‘He has received a report of a body found in the woods on the Holdy Castle estate.’

  ‘Any connection with that motorbike and sidecar?’

  ‘He has yet to get the body identified. He would not say more over the telephone.’

  ‘Bonamy and Tom did start something when they opted to dig for buried treasure, didn’t they? What’s the betting that this woodland corpse is that of one of the missing workmen?’

  ‘That is a certainty, I fear.’

  This proved to be the case. At the inquest the body was identified formally as that of Stickle. Humus had been heaped over the corpse, but there had been no attempt at a more permanent burial. According to the forensic experts, the man had been dead since the time which coincided, more or less, with the vandalism at the castle.

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ said Mowbray, when he met Dame Beatrice after the inquest, ‘I would say that this man and his mate Stour had a bust-up, probably after getting drunk together, and that Stour did for Stickle. Wherever he was killed, the medico has no doubt about the method used. He died from a blow on the head from a pickaxe, probably while he was stooping down or kneeling. Well, my next job is to find Stour. They disappeared, so far as anybody can tell, at the same time or near enough. They did their morning’s work, pushed off and haven’t been seen since, but I reckon they were responsible for wrecking the dig.’

  ‘Has Mr Tynant found two workmen to take the place of these two?’

  ‘Mr Tynant says he is packing up. The damage to his careful work has discouraged him. That, and Veryan’s death, and now the murder of this workman, have convinced him that there’s a jinx on the castle.’

  ‘I can well understand his feelings. I doubt, though, that the death of Stickle was the result of a drunken quarrel,’

  ‘I can’t see much doubt about it,’ said Laura. ‘Couldn’t it have been just that? – both of them in their cups and what began, most probably, as a mere argument developing into a bloody battle?’

  ‘That does not correspond with the theory that the deceased was stooping down or kneeling when he was attacked,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘There is no evidence to show where the murder was committed, I take it?’ she said to Mowbray.

  ‘Some dirt found in the wound – a very nasty one – is being analysed, but, of course, there’s difficulty because of the woodland humus with which the body was covered. Some of that is bound to be mixed up with any other. I’m hoping the science boys will come up with something, because, if we can find out where, it could give us a clue to finding out who. On the face of it, it looks as though Stour and Stickle were almost certainly the vandals, but then there’s this third man of yours, ma’am, though I don’t know how you come to deduce him.’

  ‘I will go further. I will suggest that there were at least four men, and possibly five, who wrecked Mr Tynant’s work, and that they included Stickle and Stour. You remember, perhaps, a report from Tynant that the trench (not the ditch) had been deepened overnight and then the earth replaced in an attempt to hide what had been done? I think that was the work of Stickle and Stour. They had heard the stories about buried treasure and were looking for it, but were not prepared to do any damage until the real vandals came along. As to who actually murdered Stickle, I keep an open mind. It is as likely as not to have been Stour, I suppose, and it need not have been at the castle, although there is plenty of dust and rubble there to hide any bloodstains.’

  ‘Exactly, ma’am. As you probably know, Mr Tynant’s pick and shovels have been kept in the keep and that’s where we found them. There are no fingerprints on the pick and no bloodstains that anybody can see, but none of that was gone into at the inquest. We’ve asked for an adjournment, as everybody expected.’

  ‘No fingerprints and no bloodstains once again hardly indicates that the murder was the result of a drunken quarrel,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but, of course, another pick may have been used.’

  ‘Exactly, ma’am. You will recollect, though, that there were no fingerprints on Professor Veryan’s telescope either.’

  ‘Anyway, the presence of the motorcycle combination in Goole’s woods may be accounted for,’ said Laura. ‘The sidecar could have been used to transport the body, and that doesn’t sound much like a drunk, either. It’s too calculated and opportunist, I would think. Anyway, where was the bike that it came to be so handy for the murderer’s purpose if he wasn’t Stour? He must have been Stour.’

  ‘I know, Mrs Gavin. I wish I’d had some acquaintance with the two fellows beyond just the routine questions everybody was asked following Professor Veryan’s death.’

  ‘I would still like to know why two men living at a distance were preferred to two men who live actually in Holdy village,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I think I will make it my business to find out. Probably it was a question of thews and sinews, or superior skill in using the tools provided. The point is probably of no importance unless the village men took umbrage and seized an opportunity of liquidating Stickle, but it seems most unlikely.’

  ‘I hope it didn’t happen like that, I’m sure, ma’am, because, if it did, the next body to turn up could be that of Stour. As it is, I shall have to do a house-to-house enquiry in the village and then round up all the chaps who were staying at the hostel the last few weeks. There may have been trouble there. The bike and sidecar turning up in those woods is very mysterious unless Stickle was murdered either on the vandalised site or at the hostel and then brought to the woods by night.’

  ‘But why bring the body to the woods when it would have been far less dangerous to have dumped it somewhere on the heath or even on one of the beaches?’ said Laura. ‘Besides, would men coming from the hostel have thought of woods on the estate? I doubt whether itinerants like these hostellers would have known about the woods, or even of the existence of the estate itself, come to that. Those grounds and the house are a good way out of the village.’

  ‘You may have something there, Mrs Gavin. Well, thanks to Dame Beatrice’s handling of little Miss Yateley, I can leave that young lady out of my calculations with respect to Veryan’s death, not that she was ever seriously in my mind. Miss Broadmayne, too, than
ks to that cloth-head Goole, is also out of it, but I can’t eliminate the two young chaps Monkswood and Hassocks, I’m afraid, and there is nothing, so far, to exonerate the Saltergates and Tynant. Even Dr Lochlure will have to remain on the list, although I really can’t visualise her tipping a man off a tower. So far as motive is concerned, my mind hasn’t changed. Saltergate had had some pretty hot exchanges with Veryan, and Tynant was his partner and may have been his rival. As for the young men, I don’t think malice would have entered into it, but I still think of horseplay, or else that Veryan made some commotion on top of the tower which disturbed them. I can see them going aloft to see what was happening, grappling with Veryan before they realised who he was, and then, with the broken coping and all the rest of it, sending him over the edge without the slightest intention of doing so.’

  ‘Well, I certainly do not think they had any previous knowledge that he was interested in astronomy,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I wish they could produce an alibi for the Sunday night, although I do not believe for an instant that they were in the keep when Professor Veryan was killed.’

  ‘Of course, there remain the two workmen,’ said Laura. ‘Who is to say that, instead of two men, Veryan and another, on the tower that night, there were not three? Suppose Stickle and Stour had a grievance against the boss of the outfit over pay or conditions or all the other things the so-called workforce is always beefing about? One or both of them fling Veryan off the tower and then find out that they’ve killed him and, later on, fall out between themselves and Stour does for Stickle in case he should grass?’

  ‘It’s plausible, Mrs Gavin.’

  ‘Besides, they had got wind of the Castle Holdy treasure and thought Veryan’s dig was being carried out to find it. I’m certain about that. It would account for everything.’

  ‘The treasure is only an old wives’ tale, ma’am. It’s about as credible as the belief that the bones dug up at Glastonbury were those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. I’m a Somerset man myself and was told the story at school, but who’s to tell one skeleton from another, except to distinguish a male from a female?’