Winking at the Brim (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Not? Oh, well, I can’t see it’s all that important, what? I mean, poison’s poison, whatever she chose to take it in.”

  “Not to beat about the bush, Major, the latest theory is that Miss Barton was not responsible for her own death.”

  “What! You don’t mean…?”

  “It is only a theory, of course, but it will be investigated, if only in the interests of the people who went with Sir Humphrey to Tannasgan.”

  “But what gave rise to such an idea? I thought it was certain…”

  “So did the Scottish police, but since her death it has come to one’s notice that Miss Barton had made enemies. She seems to have ferreted out various secrets which might have damaged various people had she chosen to broadcast them.”

  “Hm!” said the major, blowing out his moustache. “Yes, indeed. See what you mean. But why come to me? I can’t tell you anything. Anyway, it isn’t your business, exactly, is it?”

  “Oh, yes, it is. I am accredited to the Home Office and it is thought, at this juncture, that some discreet enquiries made by a psychiatrist may be better than sending police to ask questions of innocent people.”

  “Sounds a bit peculiar to me.”

  “Yes,” said Dame Beatrice, who had been afraid that it would. “All the same, I am sure that you yourself would prefer to have a casual caller like myself rather than a poker-faced detective in a trench coat and a battered Homburg hat.”

  “Oh, well, yes, I’ll certainly agree with you there. See what you’re getting at. Yes.”

  “Especially as suicide still cannot be ruled out,” said Dame Beatrice. “Well, the only vehicle which could have served to mask, to some extent, the bitter flavour of the poison, was, of course, coffee. On the other hand, to one unaccustomed to wine, a glass of burgundy might have been taken without suspicion. My present task, therefore, is to go the rounds of the Tannasgan party to find out, if I can, where and on what occasion Miss Barton would have been offered the wine.”

  “But she’d have had it with Calshott and his gang. She roosted in his caravan, damn it!”

  “I understand that, once Miss Phyllis Calshott arrived on the scene, Miss Barton became a wanderer and, anxious as she seems to have been to learn all she could about her companions, may have called, on various pretexts, at the other caravans and may have been offered hospitality at one of them.”

  “Includin’ a pot of poison, eh?”

  “As I explained, it is only a theory that she may have been murdered. In any case, we want to trace where the poison came from and whether it could have been offered in a glass of wine.”

  “Ah, then I may as well give myself a clean bill of health, so to speak.” He got up and went over to a sideboard cupboard. “Here’s my alibi,” he said briskly. “None of us touched the stuff.” He produced two full bottles whose labels Dame Beatrice immediately recognised, and he had just returned them to the cupboard when his wife preceded a maid who was bringing in the tea.

  “Oh, well,” said Sally, “it was only to be expected that the major would be out of it. He and his wife were about the only two people except, I suppose, for the Calshotts, who had nothing to hide.”

  “So far as you know,” Laura pointed out. “How about the others? We know about the Bensons, of course, but what had the other caravan party to be afraid of? I mean, that hint she gave you about Nigel’s peculiarities is so foul that she’d have done her own reputation more harm than his if she’d dared to make it public. As for an affair between Marjorie Parris and Jeremy Tamworth, well, from what you’ve told us, it seems that Nigel knew, or, at any rate, had suspected that something was going on there, and, anyway, is it, in these promiscuous days, really a motive for murder?”

  “Well, it could be,” said Sally, “but, if it was, you’d think Nigel would murder Jeremy or Marjorie or both, not Angela, who was merely spreading the rumour.”

  “I can’t help wondering about the Calshotts,” said Laura. “Couldn’t they do with a long, hard look? Didn’t you say that Angela Barton had money to leave? How well off is Sir Humphrey and what expectations had Phyllis Calshott got?”

  “Yes, the Calshotts are in the forefront of my mind,” Dame Beatrice agreed, “and they will not be left out of our calculations. But now for the vicarage.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To obtain the Bensons’ address.”

  “You could have asked the maid at the Calshotts’ or the major himself, couldn’t you?”

  “I do not want to stir up too much curiosity.”

  Laura grinned.

  “A dirty great limousine which calls first on the Calshotts, then on the Tamworths, then at the vicarage and then on the Bensons is quite unlikely to cause speculation in the village, of course,” she said. Dame Beatrice cackled.

  “I have an idea that the Bensons may be at the vicarage, you know. It is quite likely,” she said.

  George pulled up outside the church, for the vicarage was next to the churchyard, and the door was opened by Godiva Benson. “Ah, how convenient!” Dame Beatrice exclaimed. “Two, or is it three, birds with one stone.”

  “If you wanted to see the vicar, he is out,” said Godiva, “but I’m sure he would wish me to ask you in, Dame Beatrice. Winfrith and I are acting as temporary housekeepers and maids-of-all-work, except for a charwoman, until a suitable replacement can be found for Angela Barton.”

  “A most tragic and unfortunate woman,” said Dame Beatrice, following Godiva to the room in which the vicar had received her on her previous visit.

  “Unfortunate, perhaps,” said Godiva. “I do not see her as a tragic figure, though. She was far too much of a mischief-maker to be granted the dignity of such a term. Winfrith, here is Dame Beatrice. I expect she would like a cup of tea. We can make fresh for Esmond when he comes in. His hours are always erratic. You must try to persuade him to be more punctual and meticulous when you are married.”

  Winfrith, a somewhat wraith-like figure compared with her more vigorous and determined sister, rose from her basket-chair and came forward.

  “Nice to see you,” she said. “I’m sorry Esmond is out.”

  “I came only to ask him for your address,” said Dame Beatrice, “and to tell him—perhaps you would be kind enough to give him the message if I leave before he returns—that the matter of the forged letter is quite cleared up.”

  “The forged letter? What forged letter?” said Godiva sharply. Her sister returned to the basket-chair, sat down, and put a hand theatrically to her heart.

  “I think there is only one forged letter which is known to both of us,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Yes, but we did not give it to her,” said Godiva. “How did you know we wrote it?”

  “I found out that it did not come from the vicar, as it purported to do, and I could think of nobody except yourselves who had both a motive and the technical skill to write such a letter.”

  “Technical skill?”

  “Forgery is a form of art, is it not?”

  Godiva laughed.

  “I had never thought of it as such,” she said, “but I suppose you are perfectly right. However, as I say, we did not give Angela Barton the letter.”

  “Then why did you write it?”

  “For fun,” said Godiva, eyeing her steadily. “We never had the slightest idea that she would ever peruse it.”

  “Then how did it come to be found on the floor of that cottage beside her dead body?”

  “I can only assume that she found it when she visited our caravan, read it, and purloined it.”

  “Why should she do that?”

  “To make trouble between us and Esmond,” said Winfrith, who seemed to have regained her composure by reason of her sister’s bold and uncompromising attitude. “She had only to show him the letter. He would have been very angry with us, very angry indeed.”

  “Would he have believed that you were the authors?”

  “He would have challenged us, I suppose, and we should not have
attempted to deny that we wrote it. It is not in our nature to resort to lies or to any form of subterfuge to save ourselves from embarrassment or distress.”

  “Did you provide an envelope with the letter?”

  “Certainly not. We never intended to send it, did we, Godiva?”

  “What did you mean by saying that you wrote the letter for fun?” Dame Beatrice enquired, looking at Godiva.

  “Perhaps ‘fun’ is not the mot juste. Perhaps I should have said ‘wishful thinking.’ Would that please you better?”

  “It might be nearer the truth, for which your sister claims that you have complete regard.”

  “Was an envelope found with the letter?” asked Winfrith suddenly.

  “I have no idea. If you will excuse me for a moment, though, I can soon tell you.” She went out to the car, to find Laura and Sally in conversation with the vicar. “Ah,” she said, “well met. I have been calling on you.”

  “I am sorry I was not at home to receive you.”

  “I am in the middle of an intriguing conversation with Miss Godiva and Miss Winfrith Benson and it has reached the stage of reference to the letter about which, if you remember, I spoke to you some time ago.”

  “I remember perfectly. I have been thinking over our little talk and I have come to the conclusion that poor Miss Barton must have written the letter herself in order to account for her suicide. At some time she must have borrowed a sheet of my headed notepaper—she was often good enough to undertake secretarial work for me…”

  “I do not think she wrote the letter. Sally, you were the first person to see it. Was it in an envelope?”

  “No, but there was an envelope on the floor near it.”

  “Stamped?”

  “Oh, yes, and postmarked, but naturally it was the letter itself which interested me.”

  “You did not notice the postmark?”

  “Except to realise that it had one.”

  “And you are quite certain that there was an envelope and that it was postmarked?”

  “I’m certain of both. You know what I think, Grandmamma? I think somebody found the letter which I saw Angela pick up at the post-office that morning, destroyed it, and kept the envelope to make it look as though the forged letter had come by post.”

  “That means the murder was premeditated,” said Laura. “Ugly stuff, whatever way you look at it.”

  “Well,” said the vicar, “won’t you all come in and have some tea?”

  “Well!” said Sally, when, having eaten nothing at the major’s and refused the vicar’s hospitable offer, the three were enjoying a cream tea in the mill-house just outside the village. “Do we ask how you got on at the vicarage, Grandmamma?”

  “I hardly know,” Dame Beatrice replied. “There is no doubt that the twin sisters wrote the letter you found. They admit as much. They deny, however, that they provided an envelope, or ever intended to give the letter to Miss Barton. The evidence that they wrote it lies in their own admission and is merely evidence, so far, of their own sentiments in that they would have liked the vicar to have written such a letter.”

  “But do you believe them?”

  “That they did not give the letter to Miss Barton? Yes, I do, and on two counts. I don’t believe they would have played such a cruel trick on her, not because it was cruel, but because it could be proved so easily that the vicar did not write the letter. Apart from that, there is still the extraordinary fact that the body had been in the water and the letter had not.”

  “I thought that had been discussed.”

  “But not satisfactorily explained.”

  “If the twins wrote the letter and are telling the truth when they say they didn’t give it to Angela, then they must have shown it to somebody else,” said Laura.

  “That is the explanation, I have no doubt.”

  “So the murderer got hold of the letter and planted it beside the body to indicate that Angela Barton had committed suicide,” said Sally. “If so, though, why on earth didn’t he, she or (as I think) they, at least dip the letter in water?”

  “Because the words might have become indecipherable and the purpose of the letter lost, I imagine.”

  “But if the Bensons are in the clear, who could have got hold of the letter? I really can’t believe they would have shown it, or given it away.”

  “We will ask for their address at the village post-office and I will call on them this evening after they return home. They will hardly be spending the night at the vicarage until one of them marries the incumbent.”

  “You know,” said Sally, “I’m not so sure I like all this stuff about their innocence. They admit they wrote the letter and I know they were up at the hunting-lodge on the day that Angela Barton died. Why shouldn’t they be guilty? They had motive and opportunity enough, goodness knows!”

  “You are right, but we have still to establish that they had the means, by which I mean the strychnine.”

  “Perhaps they’ve got moles in their garden,” said Laura. “Didn’t I read somewhere or other that mole-catchers are allowed strychnine, or some compound of it, for their job?”

  “Then we had better carry out a survey of the Benson sisters’ garden in quest of mole-hills,” said Dame Beatrice solemnly.

  “All very well for you to laugh! All right, then, let’s buzz back to the post-office, hoping it won’t have closed for the night, and get the address and go and take a butchers before you talk to them again.”

  This procedure was carried out. Dame Beatrice remained in the car while Laura and Sally, in the full light of a fine late afternoon which was still sunny and warm, inspected a blameless lawn and, at the back of the cottage, a small kitchen garden.

  “Clean as a whistle,” said Laura, when they returned to the car. “What now? Do we hang about until they choose to come home? Could be that they’re staying to supper at the vicarage, you know.”

  “Then we will drive back to the vicarage.”

  It proved unnecessary to trouble the vicar a second time, for they met the sisters coming away from the vicarage. Laura pulled up and Dame Beatrice got out.

  “There is one thing I forgot to ask you. You denied that you gave the letter to Angela Barton, but did you show or give the letter to anybody else?”

  “We did show it to Marjorie Parris,” said Godiva. “She walked over one morning to borrow some butter and began to express an opinion about Angela which was caustic but very amusing, so (foolishly and perhaps wrongly, I admit) we showed her our letter and she said how much she wished we would drop it where Angela would find it.”

  “But you did not do so?”

  “Oh, no, of course we didn’t. We all laughed and Marjorie said she’d like it as a souvenir of the holiday, but as we’d forged Esmond’s signature we thought it would hardly do to give the letter away.”

  “So what did you do with it after she had read it?”

  “I put it back into my little writing-case,” said Winfrith.

  “And Marjorie Parris saw you do that?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. We were outside the caravan by that time, Marjorie and I,” said Godiva, a little too quickly.

  “But you must have heard later that the letter had been found beside Angela Barton’s body.”

  “It never occurred to us that it was our letter. Not until we got back from Scotland and Winfrith had occasion to write another letter, did we realise that our letter had gone. Even then it never occurred to us that it had been used as a suicide note. It was never quoted in the newspapers, you see. We simply thought Winfrith must have dropped our letter somewhere when we packed up to return home, and Angela was dead long before that, so we did not trouble our heads.”

  “I believe they’re a couple of twisters,” said Laura, on the homeward drive. “I never believe people who swear they tell the truth at all times, as you say these claim to do.”

  “I bet they did give the letter to Marjorie, if only as a joke,” said Sally. “And,” she added, with emphasis,
“Nigel Parris is a vet and is allowed to possess strychnine. And Angela Barton had made a very nasty crack about him. And Angela knew about Marjorie’s affair with Jeremy Tamworth and guessed that they spent a week together in Tannasgan while Nigel was at a veterinary conference.”

  “So two and two do make five,” said Dame Beatrice. “I always suspected that it might be so. Dear me! What a turn-up for the book, as Laura would say.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Hubert Pring

  “Unmovèd, cold and to temptation slow.”

  William Shakespeare.

  “I know little about women,” said Hubert Pring, “and have no desire to know more. I know a great deal, however, about vampires, and, to my mind, Angela Barton was a vampire.”

  “And what, Mr. Pring, is your definition of a vampire?” Dame Beatrice enquired. Hubert assumed his most pontifical air, (“he really is impossible,” thought Sally) put the tips of his fingers together, and replied, “I cannot do better than quote you a short passage from the works of the late Sheridan le Fanu. His remarkable novelette Carmilla contains the following passage, and I think you will agree…”

  “I am familiar with Carmilla,” said Dame Beatrice; but Hubert was not to be deterred by pusillanimities of that kind. He waved his hand and proceeded with his recitation.

  “Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, 1814 to 1871,” he began, “was the nephew of the great Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but, unlike his famous uncle, instead of specialising in the comedy of manners—you will readily call to mind his delightful plays, The Rivals and The School for Scandal…”

  “Likewise The Duenna, his delightful comic opera,” put in Sally, in naughty imitation of Pring’s lecture-room tones.

  “Quite,” said Hubert repressively. “Joseph, instead, had an urge to write about the dreadful and the macabre. You may remember his Green Tea. Well, in Carmilla, one of the characters—the narrator, if I remember correctly—has this to say, referring to vampires: ‘The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons.’ ”

  “The vicar,” muttered Sally, “in Vampire Angela’s case.”