Winking at the Brim (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “You won’t go until the thing about Angela is all cleared up, though, will you?”

  “Can’t see what difference that makes. It’s nothing to do with us. If anybody has to stick around and make arrangements, it will be the Calshotts.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Sally uncomfortably. “All the same…”

  “Oh, you mean we ought to show proper respect. Well, I didn’t respect Angela when she was alive, and I don’t see any reason to respect her now she’s dead. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I never would have thought she’d do for herself. Nigel being a vet, we meet some queer types—you know, fanatical animal lovers, barmy old maids, hysterical middle-class not-enough-to-do types, and people who believe animals have souls or have been reincarnated or something—the lot! You can’t imagine! Why, some of them think more of their pets than they do of their children.”

  “It must be very interesting,” said Sally weakly.

  “Interesting? It takes the patience of Job to cope with it all at times! What I mean is that there wasn’t anything exactly potty about Angela Barton. She was mean and sneaky, a busybody and a mischief-maker, but I’m positive she wasn’t the type to kill herself.”

  “She’d had a letter, you know.”

  “Blackmail? Poison pen?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. It was just—I don’t suppose it matters if I tell you, because it will all come out later. It was from the vicar to tell her he didn’t need her as housekeeper any more.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I found her. The letter was on the floor. I read it.”

  “You found her? Oh, Sally, how awful for you! You come right inside and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

  “No, really, thanks.”

  “With a shot of brandy?”

  “No, honestly. I must be getting along.”

  “Who the devil are you nattering to, Margie?” shouted an irritated voice. “Bring whoever it is inside and shut that damned door. Oh, it’s you again, Sally. Do you ever go to bed?”

  “It’s nearly nine o’clock, Nigel,” said Marjorie. “And Sally has news. You know poor old Angela Barton? Well, she’s done herself in. Poisoned herself. Sally found the body.”

  Nigel, sweaty, tousled and wearing nothing but a pair of pyjama trousers, scratched his chest, blinked and said, “When?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” replied Sally.

  “Where?”

  “In that broken-down cottage up above the hunting-lodge. I was caught in the storm and went there for shelter, and there she was, lying on the floor.”

  “Poor old you!” said Nigel. “Was it all bluggy?”

  “Oh, Nigel, don’t!” cried Marjorie.

  “She’d taken poison, it’s thought,” said Sally, “and she’d got a wound in her throat, but I don’t think it had bled—well, anyway, not very much.”

  “Poison? Who says so?”

  “Well, the police have been called.”

  “What kind of poison?”

  “Oh, what does that matter!” cried his wife. “The poor thing is dead. What difference does any particular poison make?”

  “It might matter if it was something I’ve got,” said Nigel. “They might think I’d supplied her with it.”

  “You?” exclaimed Sally, astonished by the line the conversation was taking.

  “Vet,” said Nigel laconically. “I always have a supply of poison—strychnine, for example—same as doctors and some experimental scientists. Need it for our work. So do mole-catchers, incidentally. All others would have quite a job getting hold of it, I can tell you. Not that it takes much to put a body to sleep. Half a grain will do the trick. Of course we’re only allowed to use it as an ingredient in medicine. The 1962 Act put an end to its use as a lethal dose for your pet—or your pet aversion. Even my supply is limited. Cruelty to animals, you see. It’s a frightful death, if it’s what I think it is. You go into convulsions, arch yourself nearly into a hoop, froth at the mouth, and turn blue. If Angela chose that way out, she has my sympathy.”

  “I’d better be going,” said Sally, who was feeling sick. “Will you tell the other two? Everybody had better know what’s happened, and I’ve still got to see the Tamworths and the Bensons.”

  “Angela Barton dead? Poisoned herself? Good God!” exclaimed Major Tamworth predictably. “Heaven bless my soul, whatever next?”

  “Some sort of enquiry, I suppose,” said Sally.

  “Wretched woman must have been off her head!”

  “Suicides always are. I mean, they must be, or they wouldn’t do it,” said Winfrith Benson, with a glance at her more formidable sister.

  “Unless their honour is involved,” said Godiva prudishly. “In that case, to put an end to things is the only decent way out.”

  “But that would only apply to men,” said Catherine Tamworth. “Women do not have that kind of honour, only the other kind, and even that is very unfashionable nowadays.”

  “Really, Kitty!” exclaimed her husband. “We don’t want the Permissive Society brought to the breakfast table! Had yours, I suppose?” he added to Sally, in his usual hospitable manner.

  “Oh, yes, of course, thank you,” she replied. “Would you mind telling me when was the last time you saw Angela?”

  “Why, when you left here yesterday. There was some idea that these Benson girls would take her across the loch, wasn’t there?” demanded the major.

  “She changed her mind,” said Godiva, “and we didn’t go across until after lunch because the major commandeered the boat to go fishing.”

  “Oh, ah, yes, so I did,” the major agreed. “I’d forgotten all about it. Didn’t get a bite, that’s why.”

  “And you saw nothing of her later?” asked Sally, turning to Godiva.

  “Nothing at all. She walked towards the head of the loch and said she would wade across the river. Why?”

  “Because, as you know, I found her in that ruined cottage above the hunting-lodge. You were in the lodge yesterday, so I just wondered whether you might have seen something more of her after she left you the first time.”

  “We were down on the shores of the loch until the storm broke,” said Godiva. “Then we took shelter in the lodge and came back here as soon as we could. We saw nothing more of Angela. I’m sorry we wouldn’t go with you to the cottage, but really the storm, and getting back in the boat, took all our energy.”

  “Horrid,” said Winfrith. “It was misty and the boat was half full of water. We had to bail out before we could launch it.”

  “Nothing else to report, I take it? No sightings, or anything unusual?” asked Sally.

  “I should have thought Angela Barton’s death was sufficiently unusual for one day,” said the major. “Calshott want any help of any sort, do you know?”

  “He didn’t say so, but I think perhaps another man, a contemporary, might be useful to him.”

  The major blew out his moustache.

  “How do you mean—contemporary?” he demanded belligerently. “I can give him twenty years!”

  “Fourteen, to be exact, dear,” said Catherine Tamworth. “Have you told the others, Sally?”

  “About Angela? Well, Marjorie and Nigel know, so I suppose they’ll tell the other two.”

  “Jeremy’s a fool,” said his father, with a sudden explosion of anger. “Begins these ridiculous affairs and doesn’t consider the consequences.”

  “People never do,” said Godiva. “That’s where freewill comes in. If we ever considered the consequences, we should never embark upon anything at all. Ah, me! It’s a very good thing that we can’t see into the future.”

  “What has freewill to do with that?” demanded the major.

  “Oh, that we haven’t any, of course,” said Winfrith. “I agree with Godiva. The future is settled for us before we actually come to it.”

  “What did you mean about Jeremy and his affairs?” asked Godiva. The major cleared his throat protestingly.

  “Oh, nothing,
nothing,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking about Jeremy at all. Well, if you’ll give me a lift in that contraption of yours,” he added to Sally, “I’ll get along to Calshott and find out what he intends to do. Be a good idea to call this holiday off, I should think, but I’ll see what he has to say.”

  Sally dropped the major at Sir Humphrey’s caravan and, she supposed, left them in conclave. Lady Calshott came out to her van as she was about to drive off and said authoritatively, “I suppose you won’t go jaunting off by yourself again today, Sally?”

  “I shall be in for lunch, if that is what you mean,” Sally replied. “I want to write some letters.”

  “About what has happened?”

  “Well, I don’t want to stay on here much longer, so I shall write to my grandmother to say I am on my way back.”

  “The police may want to question you. I suppose you realise that?”

  “Of course. With a father and a grandmother such as mine, I can hardly be ignorant of police procedure, Lady Calshott.”

  “Oh, well, yes, I suppose that is true. Unfortunately it is all so different up here. One might as well be abroad and have done with it. Phyllis and I will not be going to the tent today. My husband will not expect it, nor would it be desirable in case the police should wish to question us. You won’t go far away, will you?”

  “Only to the usual spot where I park for the night.”

  “Very well, so long as we know where to find you.”

  Sally drove towards the head of the loch, stopped her van and, fishing out a deck-chair, sat in the open air with her writing-pad on her knee and composed a letter to her grandmother.

  (2)

  “Two letters, written envelopes, not typed,” said Laura, indicating the missives she had placed beside her employer’s plate, “and both, if my eyes can be trusted, postmarked from north of the Border.”

  “One from Sally,” said Dame Beatrice, picking up a paper-knife. “I recognise her deplorable handwriting.”

  “Hark who’s talking!” said Laura, sotto voce. Dame Beatrice, whose hearing had not deteriorated with her years, caught the muttered comment and cackled harshly.

  “My handwriting is indecipherable, not deplorable,” she observed.

  “I used to find it indecipherable,” admitted Laura, “but one can interpret anything, given time and the necessary amount of practice.”

  “Granted. Well, this seems to be a very long epistle. I will put off reading it until after breakfast. The other is very much slimmer.” She slit it open and glanced at the signature. “Sir Humphrey Calshott,” she said. “Lady Calshott’s hand I would have recognised from a previous short correspondence.” She read the letter and passed it over to Laura.

  “Golly!” said the secretary. “Suicide, no less! Well, well! I take it that Sally’s letter contains details. So Sir H. is calling off the expedition as soon as the police have finished making their enquiries. I suppose he could do nothing else, as the woman was some sort of relative.”

  “She was Lady Calshott’s cousin,” said Dame Beatrice. “Eat your breakfast and then we will see what Sally has to say.”

  What Sally had to say was, as Laura put it when she and Dame Beatrice had read the letter, plenty. She began by emphasising Sir Humphrey’s statement that the Loch na Tannasg expedition was to be called off and asked to be allowed to return to the Stone House from which she would get in touch with her friends in the hope that there was some prospect of their having found a flat.

  “I shall be thankful to get away from this neighbourhood, anyway,” Sally had written. “Apart from the death itself, which has been a shock to all of us, I was the unlucky person who found the body.

  “I had been given a day off and I went for a drive. As a matter of fact, I had been wondering, ever since I first came here, whether there was any access to an empty house and a crofter’s cottage other than by crossing the loch. It seemed to me that there must be a road leading round to both, and I set out to find it.

  “Both buildings had been deserted for a long time, so the road I found was overgrown and too narrow, anyway, for my van, so I did the last bit on foot. It began to rain, so I raced for the cottage, which was much nearer than the house, and there was Angela’s body.”

  Laura looked up at this point in her reading.

  “Rotten luck that Sally had to be the one to find the body. Tell you what strikes me, though. Seems an odd sort of spot for a suicide to choose. You’d almost think she didn’t want her body to be found.”

  “Read on,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Oh? The plot thickens, does it?” Laura returned her attention to the letter and did as her employer had advised.

  “Sir Humphrey,” the script went on, “says he has no doubt what the police report will be, but, of course, we all expect to be obliged to hang on for a bit, as nobody has any idea how long these sort of enquiries take. But I’m in an awful spot, Grandmamma darling, because I can’t believe in the suicide theory. I think the poor woman was murdered.”

  “Murdered!” said Laura, looking up again.

  “What is more, Sally provides what you, no doubt, would call chapter and verse,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Does she, indeed?”

  “You see,” the letter went on, “if I hadn’t, quite by chance, discovered the body, it could have lain where it was for years. That doesn’t much seem to indicate suicide. They always leave a note, I thought, saying why they did it, partly—well, mostly, I suppose—to justify themselves and, if they’ve any decent feelings, to make sure that nobody else is blamed for their death. I found no note, and am sure none was left in the caravan for the Calshotts to find. That’s the first thing. Secondly, there’s the business of the thermos flask.”

  “Oho!” said Laura. “I suppose the thermos flask contained the evidence.”

  “The faked evidence, if Sally is right,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Good Lord! The plot does thicken, and with a vengeance!”

  “You see,” Sally had written, “I happen to know that Angela never lumbered herself with sandwiches and a thermos flask when she went on these jaunts. Right from the beginning—no, not quite that, because Phyllis Calshott didn’t join us for the first two or three days and until she turned up Angela and I had the tent—anyway, as soon as Phyllis arrived, Angela packed up her share in the watching—watching for the monster to surface, you know—and said that, as she had only a fortnight to spend in Scotland, she was going to regard it as a holiday and use her time in seeing as much of the neighbourhood as she could.

  “We were quite used, then, to having her go out immediately after breakfast—never any question of her doing the washing-up, needless to say—but she always found somewhere or somebody to give her a cup of tea and a bit of lunch—bread and cheese, most likely—for, I must emphasise this, she never took food or drink with her. That means somebody else provided the thermos flask. Incidentally, there was no sign of any food, but that, perhaps, has no significance. I’m sure there will be traces of poison in the flask, but whether Angela drank any of the coffee, or whether she could have been poisoned elsewhere and the body, with the faked evidence, dumped in the ruined cottage, I don’t think it will be at all easy to find out, although I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.”

  “I can’t see that Sally is on very firm ground there,” objected Laura.

  “I think she justifies herself, at any rate to her own satisfaction, if you read on,” said Dame Beatrice. “How far have you gone?”

  “To the bit where Sally thinks A.B. wasn’t poisoned at the cottage, but elsewhere.”

  “Ah, yes. Try the next paragraph.”

  “The thing is,” Sally had written, “that, unless someone put her there, I can’t see what Angela was doing in the cottage at all. She was quite cold when I found her, so, as the rain had only just come on, she wouldn’t have been taking shelter from the storm. That was my reason for entering the cottage, worse luck!—but it couldn’t have been hers. Anyw
ay, it was the last place where you’d choose to have lunch. It was not only almost in ruins, but there were cobwebs, bird-lime, rabbit and fox droppings and everything like that to put you off unless you really needed a bit of roof over your head, as I did. Moreover, her clothes were saturated, yet she couldn’t have been caught in the storm because it had only just come on when I raced to the cottage. She also had a throat wound which is thought to have been an unsuccessful attempt at suicide before she took the poison, but I think it happened after her death, because I don’t think it had bled.

  “Anyway, Grandmamma, I can’t make up my mind whether or not to mention these suspicions of mine to the police. If we were in England I suppose I’d feel bound to, but up here, where I don’t really understand the procedure or how long the enquiry, if I do start a hare, is likely to take, I feel much more doubtful. It’s not as though I’ve got any real proof and—the thing which appears to support the suicide theory—Angela had a letter that morning from her vicar to say he wouldn’t require her to keep house for him any longer, as he was making other arrangements. I’m told she was hoping to step from being his housekeeper into marriage with him and if that hope was destroyed I suppose it might have driven her over the edge. I just don’t know. But I would like your advice. Could you write straight away? We’re sure to be here for another few days. Apart from the police, Sir Humphrey has to make arrangements for the removal and return to the hirers of the caravans and tents, which means a journey to Glasgow and perhaps a bit of a hold-up over the terms of hiring, as, of course, he expected to rent some of the gear—his own caravan and tent, if nothing more—for a couple of months instead of the rather short time we’ve been up here.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Laura. “Sally’s a level-headed, unflappable sort of modern young woman, but this letter strikes me as a cry from the heart and an S.O.S. of some magnitude.”

  “A telegram, suitably worded, is the immediate answer. After that, you had better arrange to have my car put on the train for Glasgow, and for ourselves to accompany it.”