Spotted Hemlock mb-31

by Gladys Mitchell

‘Oh, I see. Yes. All right, Bellman. Rejoin the herd and then, by the time you get back here, I shall be gone.’

  Miss Bellman, with a grateful glance at Dame Beatrice, made her two journeys back to the buffet counter with her provender, and Dame Beatrice, refusing sustenance in the form of the doughnuts, sipped coffee and listened to Miss Paterson’s comments on the mentality of students past and present whilst the lecturer disposed of two doughnuts and left the others ‘for Bellman, who’ll be sure to be able to gobble them up, however much food she’s had already.’

  She had scarcely vanished through the swing doors when Miss Bellman, who, Dame Beatrice decided, must have been watching for this exit, came up to the table. Dame Beatrice presented her with the doughnuts.

  ‘You know P. G. Wodehouse,’ said Miss Bellman, seating herself and seizing one of the gifts. ‘Well, when he talks about starving pythons, it’s really nothing to what we get like in this place. Myself, I think we’re overworked and it’s nature’s way of ensuring that we don’t drop down dead. I never eat like this at home. Did you want to talk about Norah?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Miss Bellman, what sort of person was she? I know you’ve been asked this before, but is there anything you can add, I wonder?’

  ‘I’d call her the lone wolf type.’

  ‘Both lone and wolf?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I think she was a bit predatory. This boy Coles, you know. I bet, if you could find out the truth, that she married him, if you see what I mean. Otherwise, why an art student with no money? He can’t be much of a catch.’

  ‘How well did you know her?’

  ‘Well, we were at school together, and when we both planned to come here she suggested we tried to get into the same hostel. I wanted to be in the main building, but she wouldn’t hear of that. She said we’d be so much more independent in a hostel, and that she’d heard there was more chance of getting weekend passes and late leaves if you weren’t directly under the Prin.’s eye. So I gave way. You could have blown me over when she told me she was married. She never, in the ordinary way, told anybody anything. Of course, she swore me to secrecy and, as I couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t promise, I did. If I’d blabbed, it would have been all over the college grape-vine in no time, and the lecturers would have been bound to get wind of it. I don’t suppose the Prin. would have minded, in a way, but, of course, she’d have been bound to keep an eye on Coles to make sure her work wasn’t suffering, and that sort of thing’s such a bind! So I kept it to myself until, well, it sort of had to come out after we knew about the murder.’

  ‘Did her sister ever visit her in college?’

  Miss Bellman, who had a mouthful of doughnut, choked.

  ‘No. I had heard at school that she’d got an older sister, but it seemed there’d been trouble at home and she never mentioned her after we got here,’ she said, as soon as she could utter.

  ‘Come, Miss Bellman! You know better than that! Please be frank.’

  ‘I can guess what you’re going to ask me, and there’s nothing I can tell you,’ said the student, very red in the face.

  ‘I see. Very well, Miss Bellman. I respect your loyalty, although I deplore your reticence—at least, on this occasion. Thank you for the help you have so far given me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Bellman, following Dame Beatrice’s lead and rising from table. ‘I’d tell you if I felt it would be right, but I don’t feel it would.’

  ‘I quite understand. You must have had a terribly worrying time.’

  They parted at the door, Miss Bellman to attend a lecture which she stigmatised as ‘poppycock about tap-roots’ and Dame Beatrice to return to Miss McKay. She found the Principal engaged on the telephone. Miss McKay waved her to a seat and soon put down the receiver.

  ‘So sorry,’ she said. ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘So well,’ Dame Beatrice replied, ‘that I want an interview with those students who live in college.’

  ‘We have twenty of them. Do you wish to speak to them all?’

  ‘Yes, please. As you know, there is evidence that, after hostel supper, the missing girl was not seen again. I have reason to suppose that she came over here, to college.’

  ‘Really? For what reason?’

  ‘If I wished to be melodramatic, sensational and realistic, I should say that she came over to college that night to murder her sister, but — ”

  Miss McKay remained calm. She nodded.

  ‘But that is not the right answer. Please tell me all that you know,’ she said.

  ‘It is not a question of knowledge—yet. It is a question of applied logic, I think. Are there any rooms in the students’ quarters here, which contain two beds?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Good. May I speak to the men in charge of the boiler-room before I speak to the students?’

  The men in charge of the boiler-room proved to be two in number. They wore dark-brown overalls and were brothers. Their ages might have been forty-five and fifty. What they had to report, in answer to Dame Beatrice’s questions, was interesting, to the point and, to her, confidently expected. In other words, so far as they knew, nothing except for the fuel that they themselves had shovelled on, had been put to burn in the boiler furnaces since the summer holiday.

  ‘That had to be cleared up,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Well, let us hope that the rats in the inner cellar won’t have eaten every scrap of the overcoat by the time the police get here.’

  As Miss McKay was not completely in her confidence, she made no reply to this but agreed that Dame Beatrice should address the in-college students immediately before supper that evening.

  She made her appeal to them in the full confidence that if they had anything to tell her she would hear it. Her experience of young people informed her that, reserved and slightly suspicious as they were in the face of authoritative pronouncements, they were ready and willing to co-operate for the general good.

  ‘It is essential,’ she concluded, ‘that the murderer be found if another life is to be spared. I cannot promise indemnity to the student or students who are prepared to help me, but I can promise that the case or cases will be considered sympathetically. Anyone to whom my words may apply should report to me as soon as possible after the evening study period. I shall be in the secretary’s office and I shall be alone there.’

  ‘They’ll talk their heads off, you know, during supper and even during Study,’ protested Miss McKay, when she and Dame Beatrice had left the hall. Dame Beatrice nodded.

  ‘Exactly what I want,’ she declared. ‘These difficult decisions are not always best left to the individual conscience.’

  She parted from the Principal and went over to Miss Considine’s house to interview the pulchritudinous Miss Good.

  Miss Good was in high feather. Miss Considine’s house had finished supper by the time Dame Beatrice arrived, and Miss Good had received by post that morning an intimation from Mr Cleeves that his father was prepared to ‘come across with a decent little farm’ so that the marriage could be arranged and would take place immediately their college careers were over.

  ‘I want to know rather more about your ghostly horseman, Miss Good,’ said Dame Beatrice, introduced into the hostel common-room at an hour when the rest of Miss Considine’s students were busy, or not, at their books. ‘Please do not embroider your answers. If you cannot remember, pray say so in plain terms. This is important.’

  ‘I’m not likely to forget that awful night,’ said Miss Good, seated upon an upholstered stool opposite her interlocutor, who was occupying an armchair. ‘What with leaving my ring at the hotel and then being abandoned at the gates and having to trail back in shoes which hurt me, and then meeting the ghost—well, I’ve never felt quite the same since. What did you want me to tell you?’

  ‘A little more about the ghostly horseman, as I said. What shape was he?’

  ‘Tall and broad and, somehow, bulgy. Like the bear, you know.’

  Dame
Beatrice did know. She added that she was strongly tempted to ask a leading question.

  ‘You can,’ said Miss Good. ‘You might not think it, but I’m not easily influenced.’

  Dame Beatrice hesitated no longer.

  ‘I know you were taken by surprise when you saw the apparition,’ she said, ‘but could it have been possible that this rather shapeless horseman was carrying something?’

  ‘Gracious!’ exclaimed Miss Good. ‘Now you are putting ideas into my head! No, honestly, I couldn’t say. You see, I was so petrified.’ She hesitated, and then gave her lustrous hair a childish toss. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t say. It’s no good. It is a leading question and I could so easily agree. You mean a body, don’t you? I’d better leave it unsaid. I just don’t know.’

  Dame Beatrice commended her for her good sense and left her. Miss Good had not retarded the enquiry, and Dame Beatrice was grateful to her. Her next step was to telephone the police to tell them that the college cellars might bear some investigation and then she went into the secretary’s office, left vacant at her request, to await any developments which might follow her address to the in-college students.

  She had been seated at the secretary’s desk for ten minutes or so when there came a gentle tap at the door, and a dark, pale-faced, rather good-looking girl came in. Dame Beatrice invited her to close the door and sit down.

  ‘I suppose I know what you want,’ said the girl. ‘You want to know that I swapped rooms with Miss Palliser the night before she actually disappeared.’

  ‘That is what I want to know. Why did she ask you to make the exchange?’

  ‘She said she’d got some photographs to develop and she wanted to use the college cellar as a dark-room.’

  ‘Was that an unusual reason to give?’

  ‘No, not at all. Heaps of people did it. You see, we’ve got a photography club in college. The staff encourage it. The animals and plants, you know, and students doing the jobs—it makes a nice exhibition when we have Open Day. Only you’re supposed to get permission to use the cellar, because staff baggage and stuff is kept down there, and Palliser (she was in my group, so I knew her, in a way, the way you do know people in your group) hadn’t got permission and wasn’t going to ask for it.’

  ‘Did she say why?’

  ‘Yes, of course she did. She’d got some negatives of herself and her boy, taken on holiday. Nothing to do with college at all. She was rather a cagey, secretive sort of person, so I wasn’t surprised she wanted to develop them in secret. I mean, with the best will in the world, no doubt, the lecturers do take such a kindly interest in us and our men. Even those ghastly boys at Highpepper seem to give them a heart-throb if they think we’re interested. So I swopped with Palliser for the night, she to occupy my S.B. and me to occupy hers. It’s easy enough, as long as you sport your oak and nobody sees you. It’s often been done for one reason and another. Why, last year a girl named Désirée Something or other smuggled a boy in, and they occupied one of the double-bedded rooms in Paterson’s on a swap basis, and Paterson hadn’t a clue.’

  Dame Beatrice, who had visualised something of this situation and who, privately, congratulated the young on their enterprise, thanked the student warmly. The case was taking shape at last. She returned to Miss McKay to take her leave and indicated that the police would require to have access to the cellars, probably on the following day.

  chapter seventeen

  The Gentlemen Raise Their Voices

  ‘Fritz, who was never taken by surprise by events of this kind, had time to fire before the birds were out of reach.’

  Ibid.

  « ^ »

  There was one last port of call and Dame Beatrice, having telephoned the local police, made it before she returned to the village of Wandles Parva. She went to Highpepper Hall.

  ‘I want,’ she said to Mr Sellaclough, whom she found sipping his mid-morning glass of Madeira, ‘if I may, to interview those of your students who were responsible for introducing dead rats and rhubarb into the Calladale soil. Let me hasten to add that this is no punitive expedition. It is from the highest motives that I desire to possess this information.’

  ‘Take a glass of Madeira with me, and tell me more, Dame Beatrice. I have no doubt that the students responsible will give you every assistance in their power if the matter is one of importance.’

  Dame Beatrice accepted the glass of Madeira and recounted as much of the story as was necessary for the object she had in view.

  ‘So, you see,’ she concluded, ‘it would help a good deal if I could establish, once and for all, that the Calladale horseman was not one of your students dressed up to alarm the young women. If it was not, then there is only one thing for me to think, and I have thought it already.’ She told the Principal what she thought had happened.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Mr Sellaclough. ‘But what a bizarre notion! Why not a car?’

  ‘I have no doubt that a car was waiting, if what I suspect is true. The reasons for choosing to leave Calladale on horseback may have been to avoid making the noise a car would be bound to make and also because the ghostly hood and voluminous attire made an effective disguise. It would be too much to expect that you know of a heavy grey horse in the neighbourhood of Calladale? It had not occurred to me until very recently that the horse must be traced, but my latest researches have revealed that it is essential to find it.’

  ‘I’ll put it to the college at lunch about the rats and rhubarb, unless you’d care to address the gathering yourself. It might be quite a good idea if you did. I don’t suppose young men in the mass hold any terrors for you, do they?’

  So the midday meal at Highpepper was enlivened by the presence at the staff table of a small, black-haired, very sharp-eyed old lady who was introduced by Mr Sellaclough as ‘that very distinguished psychiatrist and investigator of crime, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley,’ and who rose to the sound of slightly ironical cheering.

  ‘I will not detain you for more than a moment, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I am here to invite two of those who interred the rats and the rhubarb to dine with me in the private room of the hotel which I am led to believe you are accustomed to patronise in Garchester. Perhaps I might be permitted to have a word with my guests at the conclusion of the meal.’

  ‘In my study,’ said Mr Sellaclough. ‘And I am asked by Dame Beatrice to say that nothing in the nature of disciplinary action is contemplated. The matter under review is an exceptionally serious one, but has nothing to do (so far as we know) with the college.’

  He took his guest straight to his sanctum and in a few minutes there came a tap at the door. Mr Sellaclough pressed his buzzer and Soames and Preddle came in.

  ‘I’ll leave you,’ he said. ‘Sit down, Mr Soames and Mr Preddle. Gentlemen, you may smoke.’

  ‘I know that your time is very fully occupied,’ said Dame Beatrice to the students, as soon as the door had closed behind their Principal, ‘so I will come straight to the point. Where did the rats come from?’

  The two young men looked at one another. Then Soames replied that they had come from ‘an old rat-catcher chap named Benson.’ He added that he hoped the girls at Calladale had not been annoyed.

  ‘Where can I get hold of Benson?’

  Preddle told her that, far from his time being fully occupied, he had little or nothing to do that afternoon and would escort her to Benson’s cottage if she would give him time to change. Beautifully dressed and carrying an impeccable hat, he returned in short order. Dame Beatrice found Mr Sellaclough, with Preddle’s help, thanked him for his co-operation and his hospitality and was introduced to Soames’ new car, a dashing sports affair in silver and bright blue.

  Old Benson’s cottage proved to be about a mile from the front gates of Highpepper and to be picturesquely situated in front of a small wood. The old man was chopping some kindling, but looked up when the car braked opposite his garden gate.

  ‘Good-day, sir,’ he said to Preddle. ‘Job for the co
llege again?’

  ‘No, not this time, Benson. Dame Beatrice wants a word with you.’

  ‘It’s the drains,’ said Benson. ‘If there wasn’t drains, there wouldn’t be varmint. You wants your drains clearin’ out.’

  ‘She doesn’t want you to go ratting for her, you old chump! I said she wants a word with you.’

  ‘Not about rats?’

  ‘Yes, about rats, but not my own personal rats,’ Dame Beatrice explained. ‘What I want to know, Mr Benson, is where the rats came from that you sold to Mr Soames and Mr Preddle at the beginning of this term.’

  ‘It was a bit before the beginning of term, actually,’ said Preddle. ‘You remember, Benson? You got us a splendid collection. We told you we were experimenting with them as manure.’

  Benson received this reminder with wheezy mirth.

  ‘Tell you anything, the young,gentlemen will,’ he confided to Dame Beatrice. ‘Course, I never believed it. Up to one of their larks, I reckoned. Why, I could tell you…’

  ‘Yes, another time, you old liar,’ said Preddle. ‘Dame Beatrice hasn’t got all the afternoon to waste listening to your tall stories. Fire away, Dame Beatrice, or he’ll talk you into a coma.’

  Dame Beatrice accepted this advice.

  ‘All I want to know,’ she said, ‘is where those rats came from.’

  ‘Where they come from? Why, all over the place. The farms round ’ere is fair drippin’ wi’ rats. Drop from the thatch, they do.’

  ‘Do you know Calladale, the agricultural college for women, twenty-five miles from here?’

  ‘Ah, that I do. Why, I remember, one time, they ’ad to fetch me in to put down their varmint. Somebody ’adn’t ’ad no more sense than to store ’op-manure in the cellars. They was knee-deep—ah, waist-deep—in rats. My word! I never seed so many o’ the varmint in my life, and when Mr Soames and Mr Preddle came along orderin’ me to find ’em an ’underd rats, I says to ’em, I says, “Why don’t you gennelmen go to Calladale College?” I says. You’ll mind me makin’ the remark, Mr Preddle, sir? “Why don’t you go over to Calladale College?” I says. “That’s where they grows rats on their gooseberry bushes.” Them was my words, wasn’t they, Mr Preddle, sir?’