Watson's Choice

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Not for a long time yet, dear,’ Alice replied, ‘and the dog will be gone by then. They can’t keep him there very long. I expect they’ve nowhere to put him until his kennel arrives, or perhaps the people live in a flat and are leaving him at the station until they move into a house.’

  ‘I only hope your suggestions are not the truth,’ said Laura, when the boys had gone to bed. ‘That dog is my pet mystery at the moment, and I don’t want it to make sense of that sort.’

  ‘You’re an incurable romantic, Dog,’ said Alice serenely. ‘You’d make a mystery out of a steak and kidney pudding!’

  ‘Probably should, at that,’ agreed Laura gloomily. ‘Never made or cooked one in my life!’

  Alice laughed. Laura said soberly:

  ‘Keep the kids busy while I slip away after lunch. I’m going to see that dog again. I shall probably give him a run.’

  ‘Oh, dear! But isn’t he savage? The boys said he wasn’t, but with John what he doesn’t want doesn’t exist. You’ll be careful, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but he isn’t at all dangerous. I’d love to know how Celia Godley comes into it, though.’

  ‘There’s a piece of liver you can have, and I’ll mix him up some vegetables and gravy.’

  ‘Shouldn’t bother. He seems to be fed and watered. I’ll have the liver, though. Let’s hope he fancies it.’

  When she was ready, she borrowed a strong leather lead, and, the boys having been taken to help the pigman with a boiling of small potatoes, she escaped on to the highroad without difficulty.

  The procedure was as it had been the first time. Laura gained the station and took cover. The train went past as before, and at a reasonable distance in its wake (presumably so that she could not be seen from the guard’s van) came Celia on her bicycle with food and water for the dog. Laura gave her plenty of time to get away, and then went into the waiting-room. The dog made two gulps of the liver, wagged his tail, and allowed himself to be stroked. Laura released him from his chain, hooked the lead on to his collar, and said encouragingly, ‘Come on, then.’

  The dog gave a yawn and then a slight snort, and followed her meekly on to the platform. At the sound of an approaching train she dragged him into the waiting-room again, but after the train had passed they resumed their exercise. After a bit she took the lead off. The dog came to heel, and she took him out of the station and on to a rough field for exercise.

  ‘There!’ she said, at the end of half an hour. ‘That’s all for to-day. I’ll come and see you again to-morrow. Come on.’ He followed her with the greatest docility to the waiting-room.

  She kept up this errand of mercy for nearly a fortnight, and usually took the boys with her, for it was clear that the dog was harmless. Her conscience troubled her for leaving Mrs Bradley so long, but every time she telephoned to suggest coming home, her employer emphatically forbade her to do any such thing, adding untruthfully that there was nothing to do in London but go to the pantomime. The weather remained mild and fairly dry, and Laura was only too glad to receive Mrs Bradley’s reassurances and remain with Alice and the boys in the country.

  At the end of the fortnight she received a disappointment. The boys had driven in to the town with Alice’s husband, and so Laura went alone to feed and exercise the dog. She was considerably later than usual because she had waited to get the boys out of the way, so she decided that it would be as well to let the train and Celia come and go before she went into the waiting-room.

  The train duly appeared and disappeared, but there was no sign of the girl. The evening, which promised to be misty, began to creep closer. The air was chilly and damp. Laura decided to risk matters, and went towards the waiting-room, speaking to the dog as she went. But the dog was gone and so was the chain. Only the staple to which the animal had been fastened remained to show that he had been there. The waiting-room had been cleaned out and someone had opened the window.

  ‘Well, I’m dashed!’ thought Laura. Then an obvious explanation came to her. ‘Celia must have got there earlier than usual and taken him out for a walk,’ she said to Alice when she got back. ‘I’ll pop over again to-morrow and make sure.’

  The next day she went very much earlier and stood by the waiting-room window. It was still open. There was still no sign of the dog. Laura was considerably disappointed and turned away.

  ‘Was my journey really necessary?’ she said aloud. In the utter stillness of the silvery pale of the afternoon whose sunshine seemed to make the station more dingy than usual, her own voice startled her. The station suddenly seemed not only grimy but evil. She glanced about her, shrugged off the unaccountable feeling and walked back along the platform to climb the fence and go home. Suddenly she stopped short, staring at some ominous-looking blotches.

  ‘Good heavens, the brute has savaged someone!’ she said. ‘Wonder whether it was Celia he went for? Shouldn’t have thought he’d go for anybody. By the look of this blood he must have turned pretty grim.’ Feeling decidedly grim herself, she searched the platform and looked into a decrepit office where porters had once had their mysterious lair. Then she crossed the line in contravention of the bye-laws and searched the opposite side of the station. There were some stairs which led to the booking office above. She went half-way up, listened, heard nothing, and so returned to the farm.

  ‘Hallo, Dog,’ said Alice when Laura appeared. ‘Anything interesting happened? You look het up.’

  ‘The dog’s gone,’ said Laura, ‘and before he went he bit someone fairly badly. There’s blood about on that platform.’

  ‘Good gracious! Suppose it had turned on you or the boys! I wonder who it went for?’

  ‘There is no evidence to show, duck. Let’s hope it was its owner. Anybody who tied a dog up in that disgraceful hole deserves to be bitten, I should say. One thing I can establish – ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can ride over to Sir Bohun’s place to-morrow and find out whether the dog bit Celia Godley.’

  ‘Even supposing he did, I don’t see what good it will do to find it out.’

  ‘Knowledge is power,’ said Laura owlishly. Directly after the midday meal next day she resisted all the blandishments of the boys, who wanted her to play football with them in an exceedingly miry paddock (for the frost had gone by that time) and rode off to Sir Bohun’s house on the excuse of giving him news of Philip’s well-being. She found Sir Bohun in an excited state compounded of anxiety and testiness.

  ‘She still isn’t back!’ he said. Laura was interested to note that Celia Godley, unscathed, was still staying at the house.

  ‘Miss Campbell?’ Laura enquired. She thought Celia looked particularly blooming. (‘Might be in love,’ decided Laura, who fancied herself as a psychologist.)

  ‘Confound her, yes! Well, this is the last time I put up with it! Her explanation was pretty thin before. This time I shall tell her I’m through,’ declared Sir Bohun in violent tones. ‘Damn it, it’s not respectable, all this staying out at night, and I’m determined not to stand for it. Hang it all, it makes me a laughing-stock! No, she’s cut her stick once too often. I’ve had enough of it.’

  ‘I don’t blame you, uncle,’ said Celia demurely.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Laura, ‘she couldn’t have been bitten by a dog?’ Out of the corner of her eye she saw Celia start. There was an audible gasp, too, from that corner of the hearth.

  ‘Bitten by a dog? Why the devil should she be bitten by a dog?’ Sir Bohun demanded.

  ‘There was such a thing as the Hound of the Baskervilles here on the night of the Sherlock Holmes party, if you remember.’

  ‘Hound of the – Look here, young woman, this is no time for nonsense!’

  Laura looked at him, and then at Celia. The latter had recovered and was smiling. Laura said no more upon the subject. Instead, she gave such news as there was of young Philip, and took her leave, refusing Sir Bohun’s invitation to stay for tea. She went to the nearest call box and telephoned Mrs Bradley.
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br />   ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles has savaged somebody at that derelict railway station. Linda Campbell is missing again. Could there be any connexion?’ she suggested.

  ‘Why should there be?’ Mrs Bradley mildly enquired.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just a thought. The dog isn’t at the station any more. He must have been released. He didn’t slip his collar, or anything. I wish you’d come down and look into it. There’s blood half-way down that platform. The dog may be a killer, for all we know. In fact, I feel in my bones that he is.’

  ‘Very well, dear child, I will come, but I think that your Highland gift of second sight may be myopic for once!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ cried Laura, horrified. ‘I haven’t the Gift! It’s just a hunch I’ve got that all is not well with L. Campbell.’

  ‘Mr Grimston had the same hunch when he told us his dream, child, yet nothing appeared to be wrong.’

  ‘I can’t help Grimston’s troubles. He’s a queer fish, anyway. When shall I tell Alice to expect you?’

  ‘Not at all. I shall go straight to Sir Bohun.’

  ‘You do take it seriously, then? Do you mean about the dog, or Linda C.’s disappearance, or both?’

  ‘There is no need to jump to conclusions. Obviously there is more in Miss Campbell’s life than her duties as nursery governess or fiancée, but that is as far as we can go. When I have seen Sir Bohun I will contact you again.’

  ‘What do you make of it, Alice?’ asked Laura, after the boys had gone to bed.

  ‘Nothing. Why should I make anything of it?’ Alice enquired serenely. ‘I don’t know Miss Campbell. I don’t even know the dog. Can you take onion soup for your supper?’

  Laura went to bed that night full of onion soup and, as she herself expressed it afterwards, very strange forebodings. Such strange forebodings did she have that she got up as soon as it was light, made tea, took some up to Alice, and announced her intention of taking a stout stick and returning to the ghost station.

  ‘Not without me,’ said Alice. ‘Wait a bit, and I’ll get us both some breakfast.’

  ‘What’s up?’ asked her farmer husband sleepily; and when he was told he said, ‘We’ll all three go. If the dog has turned savage and happens to be anywhere around – ’

  ‘He can’t be,’ said Laura; but, for once in her life, she let the other two have the last word.

  CHAPTER 9

  DESDEMONA?

  ‘And I have done a hellish thing,

  And it would work ’em woe:

  For all averred I had killed the bird

  That made the breeze to blow.’

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE – The Ancient Mariner

  *

  IT WAS A strange little procession that went to the ghost station that next time. There was mist everywhere, for the landscape was a patchwork of sand, gravel, and water. A river wound, between banks clothed with nondescript, uninteresting bushes, near to Alice’s farm and the railway, its natural sluggishness quickened into some sort of life by a lasher beside a mill. In the gravel pits the wastes of water stretched like lakes of the dead beneath a canopy of ghostly miasma. The only natural pond in the neighbourhood, bordered by short winter grass (startlingly emerald even at that hour of the morning), could have been the mere to which Sir Bedivere consigned Excalibur. A cow or two loitered near its border, and sedge and a clump of bulrushes gave an unreal, picture-postcard effect. This, and the mist, reminded Laura of angel-choirs in American films.

  ‘That’s where the local mosquitoes breed,’ said Alice, turning her head. ‘Come on, Dog. Don’t loiter. I want to get back and cook the breakfast.’

  They reached the station and slid down the bank on to the platform. Laura found herself glad to have the other two with her. She had a sixth-sense impression that, even apart from themselves, the station was not deserted.

  ‘What exactly do you expect to find here, Dog?’ enquired her matter-of-fact and agile friend, joining her on the platform and looking round for her heavier, more slowly-moving husband.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Laura replied. She still felt thoroughly uneasy. ‘I don’t like the thought of that dog. If the person he savaged was alone – ’

  She led the way towards the covered part of the platform and pointed out the blotches of blood. Alice’s husband bent to examine them.

  ‘Wish I’d brought Bruce,’ he said. ‘He’d probably trail the chap so that we could find out what happened to him. But, you know, Laura, I shouldn’t think a dog of the sort you described – a Great Dane, wasn’t he? – would maul anybody to this extent. There’s a lot of blood here, and it looks as if it spurted from a wound. It isn’t just drops of blood, such as you’d get if a dog bit you. Let’s look about us. I shouldn’t think anybody who lost that amount of blood could have got very far without help. What’s up these stairs?’

  ‘Don’t you go,’ said Alice, darting ahead. ‘Your two tons might bring the woodwork down!’ She leapt up the stairs at top speed, Laura after her, and the heavy young farmer, slower off the mark but willing to risk his neck, followed in the rear.

  The stairs proved perfectly sound, and the farmer’s hunch was justified. Lying close up against the locked doors of the disused booking-office was the body of Linda Campbell. Alice, in the van, gave a groan. Laura knelt down and picked up a limp hand.

  ‘Rigor over and done with, I suppose,’ she said, gently replacing the icy hand beside the pathetic body.

  ‘The telephone from here is bound to be disconnected,’ commented the taciturn farmer. ‘Laura and I had better stay, Alice, love, while you go off and phone a doctor and the police.’

  There was no necessity for argument, so Alice went down the stairs at once, ran along the platform, climbed the bank and, remembering that there was a public telephone very near the ghost station, she made for that instead of taking the longer route to the farm.

  It was not the first time that Laura had seen unnatural death. She and the farmer turned their backs, as by tacit agreement, on the dead girl, and gazed out of a dirty window on to the railway line below. Neither spoke.

  After a short interval Alice reappeared.

  ‘I’ve telephoned Mrs Bradley as well,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know whether I ought to tell Sir Bohun Chantrey, but I thought it better not. It would be the business of the police to tell him, no doubt. Besides, from what you’ve said from time to time, Dog, it seems possible that someone at the house is responsible for – this.’

  Unlike the others, she had been gazing at the body, but with compassion, not with curiosity. Death had given Linda Campbell a softer, more youthful appearance than had been hers in life, although Alice, who had never encountered her then, did not realize this, but only wondered that Laura, who was tolerant, should have disliked the dead girl so much.

  Laura, staring out through the grime and the cobwebs, was thinking her own thoughts. There was not much doubt as to the cause of death. As soon as she had knelt down beside the body, she had seen the tear in the transparent mackintosh and the tear immediately below in the cloth of the light-grey suit. She had marked, too, how the blood had stained both garments. Stabbed to the heart – a phrase with an olde-tyme flavour which, in less dreadful circumstances, would have made Laura smile – was the obvious description of the manner in which Linda Campbell had come by her death.

  But if the means by which the death had been accomplished were obvious, the identity of the murderer was not obvious at all. (That Linda had been murdered Laura had no doubt whatever. The absence of the weapon indicated murder quite clearly, for accident seemed out of the question.) There was only one crumb of satisfaction to be got from the whole shocking business – at any rate the dog was not to blame! At least – Laura swung round and stood gazing intently at the body – it did not look as though the dog was to blame. The nylon stockings – Laura gingerly raised first one of the legs and then the other – were very slightly mud-splashed but there were no rents or tears. The same, so far as Laura could see withou
t turning the body over, was true of the clothing. Except for one thing, the bloodstained slits in the waterproof and the suit were the only evidence of violence.

  What the one thing was Laura did not discover until Mrs Bradley arrived at the farm. The police took statements from the three who had discovered the body, and heard the tale of the dog on the station. They appeared to attach no importance to it.

  ‘That wasn’t done by a dog, Miss,’ said the inspector who took Laura’s statement. ‘Not even the broken breast-bone.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’ asked Laura, when Mrs Bradley came to the farm later on in the morning.

  ‘Whoever stabbed Linda Campbell must have had to press on the breast-bone to detach the weapon, I imagine,’ Mrs Bradley replied. ‘I am surprised that the police made mention of it to you.’

  ‘I bask in the reflected light of Gavin’s glory. That’s why they unleash their tongues. Seriously, I think the man was probing for information. I don’t mean that they suspect me, but they can’t see why I ever went to the ghost station at all.’ She paused and looked troubled. ‘I suppose I’d better stop calling it a ghost station now. I take it she was killed where I saw the blood on the platform?’

  ‘There does not seem any doubt of that. The police would not suspect you of guilty knowledge. The broken breast-bone is a matter of interest. The weapon, which would have had a very sharp point, must have passed completely through the body. It must have taken tremendous force to run the girl through like that. No wonder the murderer broke the breast-bone to get the blade out again.’

  ‘You mean he had to put his foot on her as she lay there?’ asked Alice, horrified by this picture.

  ‘Undoubtedly so.’

  Laura spent the remainder of the day racking her brains as to the significance of this observation. Mrs Bradley, after the midday meal, went off to see how Sir Bohun Chantrey had received the news of the death. She found the baronet in a state of great agitation, but not on Linda Campbell’s account.