St. Peter's Finger mb-9

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I didn’t realise she walked out early. Ah, that accounts for it, then. She wasn’t feeling well, and came out in rather a hurry.”

  “I should say, too and all, she did. Didn’t look ill, neither. Fair raced to the bottom of the road, and took Bill Gander the taxi. Does for us and the station. Walked out of here to see her go, I did. Well, no gloves haven’t been found, so far as I know.”

  “Thank you so much. She must have dropped them on her way, then. They were rather expensive gloves —she’d like to find them. I wonder—I’d better ask at the police station, perhaps. Do you know when she left the cinema? I should have to tell them that, I expect, should I not?”

  “Two o’clock, as near as I can remember. She hadn’t been in long, I can swear to that.”

  “Oh, thank you so much. That’s helpful.” Armed with this unexpected bit of evidence that Mrs. Maslin had, as matters stood, no alibi for the time of the child’s death, she got back to the guest-house to discover that Mrs. Maslin herself had arrived the day before she was expected, and was at that moment walking histrionically up and down the guest-house dining-room, to which she had laid claim for the purpose of a private interview, waiting to see Mrs. Bradley.

  Mrs. Bradley found a small, ferrety-looking woman, sharp-featured and pale, with hard grey eyes, foxy-red hair and a thickish coat of inartistic make-up, and Mrs. Maslin saw a small, black-eyed, elderly woman with a fiendish smile and an air of being able to see through to the back of Mrs. Maslin’s head.

  “I hear that nothing has been done to clear up the mystery of my niece’s death,” Mrs. Maslin announced belligerently, instinct warning her that with an adversary of this calibre it would be as well to get her word in first.

  “Let us sit down,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking the most comfortable chair she could see, and fishing out a mangled length of knitting from an untidy, brightly coloured bag.

  Mrs. Maslin complied with this suggestion, and, as she had had no reply to her question and did not propose to repeat it, sat in what was intended for haughty silence whilst the newcomer knitted a couple of rows and carefully counted her stitches.

  “And purl two,” said Mrs. Bradley, nodding slowly and agreeably. She looked up suddenly and said:

  “Why didn’t you stay in the cinema all the time?” The question took Mrs. Maslin entirely by surprise.

  “What cinema?” she said, hedging rather too obviously. Mrs. Bradley took up her knitting again, bent her gaze upon its intricacies, and said:

  “On the afternoon when your niece was found dead, you went to the cinema with the other guests here and the younger children from the orphanage.”

  “Yes, I did. And—oh, yes, I remember now. But who told you that I left early?”

  “How early?” asked Mrs. Bradley, again not answering the question.

  “I don’t know. It was hot. I was bored. I wanted some air. I expect, now I look back, that some instinct warned me.”

  “Warned you of what?”

  “Why, naturally, that something had happened to Ursula.”

  “Why should it do such a thing?”

  “Well, I am, I suppose, the relative—I mean, I was—most nearly in touch with her, poor child.”

  “Only by marriage, though, aren’t you?”

  “What I want to know is—what has been done about the death? The sisters promised me that the death should be fully investigated,” said Mrs. Maslin, leaping away from the question with very suspicious celerity.

  “Why do you want it investigated?”

  “Well, surely, my own niece—and such a terrible verdict!”

  “You mean you think the child’s death was accidental?”

  “I do not believe it was suicide.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bradley, “neither do I.”

  “M-murder?” said Mrs. Maslin, a gleam—was it of hope?—in her calculating grey eyes.

  “There is no evidence that one could give to the police.”

  “Oh, isn’t there?” said Mrs. Maslin, becoming volcanic. “You tell me what you’ve found out, and I’ll soon get something for the police, with that and what I know!”

  “I have discovered,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that with Ursula Doyle and her cousin Ulrica dead, your stepdaughter Mary would inherit the grandfather’s fortune.”

  “Yes, but that’s no good,” said Mrs. Maslin vigorously, refusing to admit the implication. “It’s Ulrica we must look at. Have you examined her movements? She’s a most peculiar child. Her father was a most dreadful man—an atheist—believed in nothing.”

  “And Ulrica proposes to enter a convent.”

  “Yes, don’t you see?— It’s abnormal.”

  “What is? To enter a convent?”

  “Well, in my opinion, it is. But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m sure you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, yes,” replied Mrs. Bradley, taking up her knitting again and doing some rapid decreasing which she felt she would regret later on. “You want me to trump up a case against your niece Ulrica to show that she murdered her cousin. As the law stands, no murderer may stand to gain by the results of his murder—in this case the family fortune—so the money, you hope, would automatically come to Mary.”

  “I don’t think you’re being serious! You are not being serious!” said Mrs. Maslin, flushing in sudden fury. “It’s intolerable! It’s just making fun! No one would think that a dreadful tragedy had occurred— or that you were being paid to investigate it,” she added spitefully.

  “On the second count he would be quite right,” said Mrs. Bradley, unperturbed, and counting stitches again. Mrs. Maslin bristled. Had she had hackles on her neck they would certainly have stood upright. Mrs. Bradley let her simmer, and then said:

  “So you refuse to account for your movements on the afternoon of the crime?”

  “Of course I don’t! It’s ridiculous! I walked back here to have a look at the school?”

  “You walked? How long did it take you?”

  “I don’t know, but all this is silly.”

  “Did you speak to anybody here when you arrived?”

  “No. I walked round the grounds.”

  “Who opened the gate?”

  “It was open.”

  Mrs. Bradley reflected sadly that this was true. The gate was always left open during the day.

  “Didn’t anybody see you?” she said. Mrs. Maslin suddenly looked frightened.

  “It can’t possibly make any difference whether anybody did or not!” she blustered feebly, her foxy little face quite sharp with anxiety and fear. Mrs. Bradley wagged her head.

  “A difficult position, most,” she observed without compunction.

  chapter 14

  hobbies

  “The ever-flourishing and fruitful soil

  Unpurchased food produced: all creatures were

  His subjects, serving more for love than fear.”

  george sandys: Deo Opt. Max.

  « ^ »

  Mother patrick was grafting fruit-trees. It was the Saturday half-holiday for the private-school children, and the day, although dull, was calm and not cold. She descended the ladder when she saw Mrs. Bradley, and waved her grafting knife.

  “Go and find me two sensible children, dear,” she said. Feeling rather like a sensible child herself, Mrs. Bradley grinned amiably and walked towards the school. But no children, sensible or otherwise (and, in any case, how she was to pick out the one kind from the other, since she could neither see with Mother Patrick’s eyes nor think with her mind, she did not know), were anywhere to be seen. At last, in a corner of the vestibule, she found a child, who, challenged, said that her name was Mary Maslin. Mary Maslin was crying.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Bradley formally, “but I have been asked by Mother Patrick to find her two sensible children. Can it be that you are a sensible child? For, if so, half my task is accomplished.”

  “But I don’t want to help Mother Patrick. I don’t want to help anybody,” said Ma
ry Maslin, through sobs. Mrs. Bradley sat down beside her on a bench which covered school boot-holes, and observed that it was not a very nice day for anybody to be out of doors.

  “It isn’t that,” said Mary, obviously in need of a confidante. “It’s because my mother’s come back here to take me away.”

  “To take you away from school?”

  “Yes. She’s going to let me have a private governess, and perhaps I’m to go to New York. But I don’t want a private governess. I want to stay here with the girls.”

  “It certainly seems rather trying,” Mrs. Bradley agreed, “to be obliged to leave school in the middle of term like this.”

  “All because of what happened to Ursula,” Mary observed without reticence. “It’s so stupid. As if I should do a dreadful thing like that! They know quite well I shouldn’t!”

  “Of course not. But I can understand your mother’s feelings.”

  “She wants Ulrica to come away, too. She wants to have her stay with me, and for us to share the governess. And I don’t want that! I don’t like Ulrica much. She’s clever and I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not. I’d hate to be clever and horrible, and I don’t want her anywhere near me! I suppose I can’t say so to mother, but Ulrica scares me. I don’t feel comfortable with her.”

  “But you don’t feel comfortable at all,” Mrs. Bradley pointed out. “Look here, Mary, I think I can make you a promise. I will speak to your mother, and although I shall not be able to prevent her from taking you away from the school—in fact, it’s just as well that you should go—a change will do you good— I certainly will see to it that Ulrica doesn’t go with you.”

  “Will you?” said Mary Maslin, cheering up a little. “Well, that’ll be something, anyway. Thanks a lot. Well, all right, then, I’ll go and hold bits of stick for Mother Patrick. Doesn’t she look lovely on a ladder?”

  Off she went, and Mrs. Bradley, left with a new idea, walked out of the building in quest of one more child. Failing to find one, she went back herself, and meekly assisted in the work. Some of the orchard trees were large and old, and had been cut back by the gardener some weeks earlier in preparation for Mother Patrick’s talents. She first cut them back a little more, and then made a slit between the bark and the wood. Mrs. Bradley and Mary Maslin held delicately-prepared grafts and handed them up on demand, to be inserted in the slit like rather spiky trimming on a hat.

  Mother Patrick on a ladder certainly was a fearful and wonderful sight. She had a man’s trick of balance whilst using both her hands, and yet it seemed all the time that her large, ungainly body, its bulk apparently added to by her habit, must at any moment descend, among splintered wreckage, on to the snowdrop-sprinkled orchard ground below.

  When the grafts were properly inserted, Mrs. Bradley and Mary handed clay which Mother Patrick clapped upon and moulded round the tree to keep the air, Mrs. Bradley supposed, or curious insects, or, possibly, prying eyes, from the delicate grafts. There was need for something to speculate on, for, as is the way with those who merely stand at the foot of a ladder and hand things up to the master-builder above, the assistants grew tired a long time before Mother Patrick was ready to give up.

  “That’s all,” she said at last. “You are a good child, Mary. You must try to do as well in my subjects as your cousin Ulrica can do. Still, to-day you have done well. I shall pray for our work to be blessed. I cannot give you a merit now, because it is holiday time, but remind me to give you one in the next mathematics lesson—however badly you behave!”

  “She always calls it ‘behaving.’ She really means ‘answering’ or ‘working,’ ” Mary explained, as she and Mrs. Bradley went to wash. “She really believes that everybody can do her sickening old algebra and geometry if they like. Just like Mother Saint Simon and her science. And they’re for ever throwing Ulrica up at me. Did you have a clever cousin when you were at school?”

  “Never. There were no clever members of our family,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “Now I remember, though, I did not go to school.”

  “Did you have a governess, then?”

  “Alas, no. My father taught us. We merely learned to read, and not to lose our tempers when we argued.”

  “What did you read?”

  “Oh, Lewis Carroll, and the Bible, and the Swiss Family Robinson,” Mrs. Bradley replied.

  “I have never read any of those. Perhaps that is why we are different.”

  “It is quite likely. And now, is it time for tea?”

  “You don’t fast, do you, during Lent?”

  “No. But I never eat much, except when I come upon my chauffeur eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

  “Ulrica is trying to fast, but Mother Saint Francis won’t let her. She says we are growing children, and need our food.”

  “Most sensible.”

  “Yes, it is, really. That’s what I think.”

  “Mary,” said Mrs. Bradley, with some suddenness, “was Ulrica in class, do you know, on the afternoon that Ursula died?”

  Mary stared at her.

  “I really don’t know,” she said. “We’re not in the same form, you see.”

  “The third and the fourth forms did have a lesson together that afternoon, though, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, but I’m only in the second form,” Mary replied, “and Ulrica thinks I’m much too stupid to be helped with my work the way she’d begun to help Ursula.”

  Mrs. Bradley nodded, and asked, again with some suddenness, whether Mary would like to go to tea with her in the guest-house.

  “I’d love to,” the child replied with considerable eagerness. “Mother asks us once a week, while she’s staying here, one of us at a time because we’re not supposed to go to the guest-house in pairs. But mother’s gone to Kelsorrow. If you asked permission, I could come. They’d let me. They always let us if anyone asks. Oh—but—” She paused, and looked slightly embarrassed. “You’ll have to write me down on the slate, you know.”

  Mrs. Bradley nodded.

  “You mean that the cost of your tea will be added to my bill. Of course. Come along. Do we have cake in Lent?”

  They walked over to the school refectory and Mrs. Bradley obtained the required permission. Tea in the guest-house was over by half-past five, and as Mary had to get back in her classroom by six to do her preparation, they parted immediately, and Mrs. Bradley strolled over to the nuns’ Common Room, to which she had been bidden, earlier in the day, by Mother Simon-Zelotes, who wanted to discuss Mendel’s theory of heredity.

  Mrs. Bradley had not forgotten that from five o’clock until half-past six the nuns sang Compline and went on to Matins and Lauds, and the Common Room, she thought at first, was deserted. In the corner by the fire, however, was the old lay-sister Catherine, her gnarled hands, brown as the fruit trees which Mother Patrick had re-vitalised that afternoon, lying folded together in her lap, her lips moving easily in prayer, the facile, comforting prayers of habit, her rheumed eyes focused vacantly on heaven—or purgatory, perhaps—Mrs, Bradley could not guess. Her broad feet—not essentially nun-like, just the broad and easy-shod feet of any very old woman—were planted upon the fender for warmth, and to help support in an upright position the soldierly, hard, old body.

  Mrs. Bradley seated herself without a word, and watched how the rosary passed through the brown old hands. So they sat for a long time, until the old woman looked up from her beads, nodded and mumbled a bit, and then said, in the abrupt manner of the aged, who always speak the middle and not the beginning of their thoughts, “I told them it would not do. I always said so.”

  “The hot water system?” Mrs. Bradley intelligently enquired. The lay-sister nodded.

  “When I was a girl, we boiled every drop in the copper, and carried it up in pails. There was none of the danger then.”

  “I suppose not, sister. Didn’t the people scald themselves sometimes, though?”

  “I never heard of it. Things ought to be done in God’s way, and if water is going to be heated
it ought to be boiled on a fire. Brother Fire. Good Brother Fire.” Her voice mumbled on. She had forgotten Mrs. Bradley, and her thoughts were lost in the wide and echoing halls of dim-lit memory. Content to be left to her own thoughts, Mrs. Bradley sat motionless. The darkness gathered. Soon the old lay-sister slept.

  The first of the Community to join them was Mother Cyprian, who, under special dispensation, was to get on with some embroidered bookbindings. She lit the lamp —there was no gas laid on in the buildings which abutted on the cloister—exchanged smiles and bows with Mrs. Bradley, seated herself beneath the light and began to mount the embroidery she had done on a square of fine, strong linen. Mrs. Bradley asked permission to look at the work. It was exquisitely done on satin, and Mother Cyprian explained that after the backing had been put on she would be able to do the heavier work in braid, which the satin, without its backing, could not support.

  “Then, too,” she said, delighted to show her work, “the paste which I shall use to connect the embroidery with the book which I wish to bind would damage the delicate satin if I applied it directly. The backing is useful. It comes between. It is like—” She paused for a simile which should be at once intelligible to her hearer and satisfying to herself—“it is like—”

  Invention failed her, but old Sister Catherine, awakened by the light and the sound of talking, piped out, in a voice like a badly-played viola:

  “It is like the blessed saints who intercede for us. Holy Saint Joseph, protector of the Blessed Virgin Mary…” Her mumbling voice droned on.

  “She is Irish,” Mother Cyprian observed, as though this was both an explanation and an excuse, but of what oddity the explanation, and for what impropriety the excuse, Mrs. Bradley did not understand. Sister Catherine went to sleep again, and made small moaning noises in the corner. Mrs. Bradley woke her very gently, and led her to the door and down the steps. Docile, the old woman said good night to her and went away to her bed. When Mrs. Bradley came back to the Common Room, Mother Cyprian had finished her work, and was pressing it out to lie smooth.

  “Did you teach Ursula Doyle?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.