St. Peter's Finger mb-9

by Gladys Mitchell

  The evening was cool, and the climb up out of the village fairly steep, but she took the slope briskly and soon was warm. It was easy to find the way. A bright half-moon lit the path, and against its light the convent church stood bold and black and solid, a landmark to pedestrians on the moor. As she drew nearer she could see, between her and the church, a huddle of lower roofs. Some part of these, she surmised, must belong to the convent guest-house, and the rest to buildings abutting on to the cloister.

  Whilst she was standing still at the top of the slope before exploring further, she was aware of the approach of an elderly man with a bicycle. She noticed him first when he was still some distance away because of the headlamp of the bicycle, which appeared to bob up and down owing to the uneven surface of the stony moorland track. She did not move, and in a minute or two he came up beside her, and both of them stood gazing at the buildings.

  “Death-traps,” said the man.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yes, and death-traps is what I mean. Lures little children to their doom.”

  “What does?”

  “Nuns.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I call it ’orrible. Soon as I ’eard, I said to my old girl, ‘I’ll be off and hold an inspection of that there lazar-’ouse,’ I said. Come be road in seven hours and a quarter, less two hours’ rest and refreshment. Always give yourself a chance when you’re on your old jigger, and you’ll still be cycling at ninety.”

  “You follow up sinister happenings, Mr.—?”

  “Gossage. Ah, I do. ’Obby of mine this twenty-four year and seven months, ever since me and the old girl found ourselves next-door neighbours to a man what cut seven throats in the one ’ouse between ten-thirty-seven, when the other next-door was speaking to one of the corpses, engaged in putting out the cat, and six-fifteen, when the early-round milkman see the blood on the front-door step, it having run that far in the interval between the ’orrid deaths and their dramatic discovery.”

  “And you suspect that a horrid death—?”

  “Took place with that little girl in that sinister bathroom? Ah, that I do. And I’ll tell you for why. That inquest was in our paper. Perhaps you never see it—ah, you did, though, or else you wouldn’t be ’ere. Kept very small, at first, to the bottom bit of the page, but even then what I call suggestive, and look how it’s ’otted up now. The whole place was wrecked last night by ’furiated villagers. And the coroner’s remarks, if you noticed, were what I calls—what’s the word— muffled? No, that ain’t quite it. Now, what do you call it—?

  “Vague?”

  “Vague, that’s the word. Ah, vague. And the coroner’s name was ’Iggins.”

  “Higgins?”

  “That’s right. The only other ’Iggins I ever knowed was a absconding slate-club treasurer. Now what do you make of that?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Not a bit. It was like an ’and pointing. I swallowed me breakfast, pumped up me tyres, tested me brake-blocks, told the old girl to expect me when she see me —retired last year, I did, so free to indulge me fancies —and then, to prove ’ow right I was, I find you ’ere a-gazing your fill by moonlight. I meant to ’ave a read of the Sunday paper, but mother lit the fire with it by mistake.”

  “And what do you think really happened in that bathroom?”

  “ ’Ad ’er ’ead ’eld under.”

  “Really?”

  “Not a doubt of it. Easy enough to do, and leaves no trace. That little girl was a heiress, near enough. Only one life between ’er and ’er grandfather’s money, and that was the grand-dad ’imself.”

  “Are you sure of your facts?”

  “They says so, down at the pub.”

  “Who say so?”

  “A couple of chaps I run into. Nobody round these parts is talking of anything else. Irish, that little girl was, and her grandfather went to America and made his pile in the Prohibition trade. Champagne was ’is lay, and whiskey. Done well, and cleared out. Never copped. Not even suspicioned, so far as he knew. And now collects art treasures, like any other millionaire. Very tidy placed, ’e is. It’s common talk in the village. There’s another girl at the convent, so far un’armed. Two other girls, I believe. But what will the ’arvest be?”

  Mrs. Bradley could not tell him. He remained in earnest contemplation of the buildings for a minute or two and then looked at his watch, and asked her what she made the time.

  “A quarter to ten,” she said, as she held out her arm to throw the light of his head-lamp on to her watch.

  “Crikey! They’ll be shut,” he remarked, as he turned the bicycle about and headed in the direction of the village. “So long! And you take the advice of one what knows, and keep well away from them gates. You never know who might be lurking.”

  He swung his leg over the bicycle with an ease remarkable in an elderly man, and wobbled unsteadily over the stony path. As he carried no rear lamp, but only a red reflector, she soon lost sight of him. With a little cackle, for the chance encounter had amused her, she approached the convent buildings more closely. They seemed to be surrounded on every side by a very high brick wall which rose behind the guest-house garden and the gardens of two private houses which adjoined the guest-house on the west, and completely enclosed the other buildings. The gatehouse was set some yards farther back than the gates to the houses, and was in the ancient form of a small room over an archway closed by a massive door. The window looked over the hill. A building to the left of the gatehouse, larger than any of the private houses, but again in a line with them, Mrs. Bradley later discovered to be the convent Orphanage. There were lights in several of the buildings—sure sign of untoward happenings, for the convent hour of lights-out was nine-thirty. Even the gatehouse window showed a glimmer, like that of a candle, to wayfarers coming from the village.

  Doors to the convent were few. The Orphanage had its separate entrance, but evidence, supplied later on, proved what appeared, even at first glance, and at night, to be the case, that the entrance was barred up and never used. There was no entrance to the convent grounds, in fact, except by way of the gatehouse. Even the convalescents, if they wished to walk in the gardens of the convent, were obliged to come out by one of the guest-house doors and go in through the gatehouse entrance.

  Seawards the breeze freshened. The church, with its high boundary wall running parallel, almost, with the coast, had its north side fronting a cliff along which ran a little path. The moon showed the path up clearly, and Mrs. Bradley followed it westwards for about a quarter of a mile, and discovered that it branched off from a coast-road which swung south of the convent and which had crossed the track by which she had mounted the hill.

  The sea beneath the moon looked calm, as though the waters themselves, in meditation, induced the long thoughts which she found herself thinking as she watched them. The tide was in and came to the foot of the cliffs. Below, she supposed, there were caves. The landscape was a perfect setting for smugglers, and the hill-track by which she had come was their mule-road, she thought, across the moor.

  She looked back at the convent buildings. High in the church tower burned a steady light. Saint Peter’s Finger they called it in the village. It was the warning to ships which the convent still made it a duty to show every night, although a new lighthouse, half a mile farther along the coast, had released it, in effect, from its ancient obligation to mariners. But as Saint Peter’s Finger its glow was still noted on charts, and the nuns kept watch, two by two, in the lamp-room at night. The light itself, Mrs. Bradley thought, looked friendly. The high walls and the gaunt, stark church threatened those without, yet gave an impression of guarding those within. But all dark deeds seemed possible—she had noticed it before—in tall buildings seen by moonlight. One view of the convent made it look as though it had been gutted by fire. There seemed no glass in the windows and the buildings had an empty, neglected look. She turned back and continued her tour.

  Along the east wall she dete
cted the presence of pigs, but, apart from the fact that all lights, except the beacon-lantern in the tower and the glimmer over the gate, were now put out, there was nothing else to be discovered, and she turned to walk back to the village.

  She found herself thinking about her chance acquaintance, the elderly man with the bicycle. She wondered how long he was going to remain in the neighbourhood adding to his collection of horrors. She remembered that some of his information had been picked up in the bar of the pub at which she and George were staying. George, too, was adept at acquiring information in pubs. She resolved to compare the results of his researches with what the cyclist had told her. If the child were an heiress, no wonder the village was full of sinister rumours.

  The way back seemed short, with the slope of the hill in her favour, but the path was rough, broken and rutted, and several times she stumbled on outcropped stones.

  chapter 2

  inmates

  “Hopeless immortals, how they scream and shiver,

  While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning

  Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong

  Down to the centre!”

  isaac watts: The Day of Judgment.

  « ^ »

  The convent, behind its defences, slept uneasily, and some of the inmates, nuns and lay-sisters, orphans and private-school boarders, did not sleep at all. The disturbances to which they had been subjected (beginning with the dreadful fact of the death of Ursula Doyle on the Monday, and ending with the hooligan attack on the building which had made the following Saturday night a time of anxiety and fear) were all too recent to make peaceful sleep a possibility.

  There were twenty boarders, among them two cousins of the dead girl. The dormitories, presided over by the nuns in turn, were divided into cubicles, and, each in her narrow bed, Ulrica Doyle and Mary Maslin lay still, and feared and brooded.

  The course of events had been bewildering, strange and terrible. On the Monday evening had come the news, broken to them separately by the Mother Superior, of their cousin’s dreadful death. They were not supposed to know—Reverend Mother had not told them, and neither did she tell them at any time subsequently—that Ursula was believed to have killed herself, but of course it had come out, for although newspapers were forbidden to the boarders, the nuns could hardly keep the day-girls from them, and the tidings were all round the school on the Wednesday morning.

  The two girls had not seen their cousin before she was taken away. Ghoulish accounts of bodies eviscerated by doctors doing a post-mortem examination had been passed in thrilled whispers round the school, and although they had not come directly to Ulrica’s ears her nights had been waking nightmares ever since she had gathered, from overhearing them, the purport of all the rumours. Mary suffered less in this particular way. For one thing she was younger, for another less imaginative. Then, too, she was accustomed, and her mind acclimatised, to horrors, for her form was entertained by Mother Bartholomew once a week to the more revolting stories of the martyrdom of saints. These ancient contes et légendes were given by the old ex-actress with a lack of reticence which amounted to the Rabelaisian, and had stiffened the hair of many generations of girls, who, with the sadistic tendency of extreme youth, on the whole enjoyed them very much, but were not always edified by them in exactly the way that their mentors and preceptors might have wished.

  Still, even Mary, when night fell and the buildings were hushed and dark; when the restless sea on the grim shore broke in a far-off thunder, cuddled her knees to her chin, and lay and watched the curtains of her cubicle to see when horror entered; to be ready to fight for her life and, if necessary (so, in anti-climax, do the thoughts of children run), to scream and scream with fear.

  It was all particularly upsetting; to young Mother Mary-Joseph, whose week on duty it was in the senior dormitory, as much as to anybody except, perhaps, the cousins. Four times since Wednesday she had guided Ulrica back to bed, for, like a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth, Ulrica, nervous and clever, strode and muttered, waking the lighter sleepers and causing Mother Mary-Joseph the most acute uneasiness, for the dormitory was right at the top of the stairs, and to the stairhead Ulrica’s steps each time had been directed, except once, when she went to an open window instead.

  In the junior dormitory Mother Patrick, blessed, in spite of an apparently domineering personality, with the kindly spirit of laisser-faire which is one of the glories of the Irish, made silent rounds every night and paused beside Mary Maslin and did not rebuke her for her unorthodox, pre-natal, curled-up attitude in bed. Instead, she bent over her, murmured a benediction, and tucked in the warm, protective bedclothes to a reassuring tightness.

  She knew nothing of Mother Mary-Joseph’s anxious vigils, for the young nun did not mention them except in confession to the Reverend Mother Superior, for on the Friday she had fallen asleep and had only just wakened in time to get to the girl at the stair-head before she pitched headlong down.

  Mother Patrick herself did not sleep. There was evil abroad, and all the Community, not only the Irish, knew it. The horror of the child’s death, the dismay at the verdict of suicide, the realisation that things went on in the convent of which, with all their perspicacity and careful supervision of the children placed in their charge, the nuns knew, it seemed, less than nothing, darkened the solemn season, gave dreadful, intimate meaning to the customary Lenten fast, and made voluntary penance this time acutely personal.

  In her lodging over the Sacristy the seventy-five-year-old Reverend Mother Superior watched and prayed with her daughters. The blow had fallen sharply in its suddenness, inevitability and weight, and it had brought with it lesser shocks—newspaper comments, notoriety for the convent, serious allegations brought against the Community by an hysterically overwrought woman, Mary Maslin’s stepmother, the dead child’s aunt by marriage. Then there had been the local ill-will and rumours, and the terrifying attack, on the previous night, by a gang of village hooligans.

  Worse than all, to the Mother Superior’s mind, was a nagging feeling of doubt. She was an intelligent and widely experienced woman; had lived a brilliant, worldly life before her acceptance of the veil; and had prayed, when Father Thomas first told her of Mrs. Bradley, for Mrs. Bradley to come and solve their problem. But what if Mrs. Bradley’s researches could not alter the coroner’s verdict? Or what if things were made worse instead of better? For, although she had mentioned it to no one, and although she prayed daily that it might not be the truth, the horrid thought of murder lay in her breast like lead.

  There was everything to suggest it, and the Mother Superior, daughter of a royal house, was not the woman to shirk an unpalatable situation. The character of the dead child, the fact that she was heiress to a fortune, some peculiar features of time, place, opportunity, all put together, made a formidable array. She had thought and she had prayed, and, in the end, she had decided that, whatever the result of it, a further investigation must be made. But it had been a difficult decision, and she had made it heavily.

  chapter 3

  relatives

  “For Dissections

  For Sculptures in Brass,

  For Draughts in Anatomy,

  For the contemplation of the Sages.”

  thomas traherne: A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation of the Mercies of God.

  « ^ »

  The funeral was over. Had been over, done with, and, from its ceremonial aspect, almost forgotten, and Mrs. Maslin, who had brought the child’s body from the convent, and looked, a fox-faced, quick-eyed, wiry little woman, her very worst in black, sat behind the tray and handed tea to her husband.

  “But I don’t see why you want to go back there,” he said. “You can send for Mary if you want her. Personally I can’t see why she shouldn’t stay.”

  “It must be morbid for her,” his wife, Mary’s stepmother, replied. “It makes an unhealthy atmosphere, a thing like that happening at a school. Mary was fond of Ursula.”

  “It won’t make he
r any happier to bring her away from school, and so insist on what happened. Much better to let her stay there. The sisters are perfectly sensible women. The excitement will soon die down.”

  “I see no reason for referring to the sudden death of your own relation as something exciting, Percival.”

  “Isn’t it exciting? Don’t be a humbug, Nessa.”

  At this plain speaking Mrs. Maslin cast a sharp glance behind her, and, lowering her voice, hissed at her husband to silence him. Mr. Maslin, however, refused to be advised, and continued, in his ordinary tone of voice.

  “Well, face the facts, Nessa. Isn’t it?”

  “Will you be quiet! It’s—well, it’s scarcely decent to take that attitude now.”

  “But, Nessa, face the facts. We’ve always said that with Ursula out of the way—she was never a very good life, poor child—delicate, and with the family tendency, as we know—and Ulrica (according to Mary) bent on taking her vows as soon as she’s old enough —it would—it would be a very fine thing for us! Why try to pretend that you’re thinking of anything else?”

  “Because I am thinking of something else.”

  “Oh? What?”

  Mrs. Maslin lowered her voice still further and replied, while her harsh-skinned, brown little hands picked restlessly at a fringe on the cushion beside her:

  “I told you, didn’t I, that the Reverend Mother Superior had been trying to get hold of some private investigator or other, to try to prove that the death was not suicide, but simply an accident?”

  “Well? What’s the matter with that?”

  “Nothing… except that I don’t want Mary mixed up in it all, and questioned. It isn’t good for her. It’s morbid.”

  “Well, I don’t see what you can do.”

  “I want Mary home, that’s all. I don’t want her there, being got at.”