When Last I Died

by Gladys Mitchell

  "That is very interesting indeed," said Mrs. Bradley. "You dreamt that your husband was trying to explain something to you about that haunted house, and you always woke up just as you were on the point of understanding what he meant."

  "Why do you look at me like that!" cried Muriel. Mrs. Bradley's bright black eyes began to sparkle.

  "I beg your pardon," she said. "I don't think you understand the importance of those dreams, but that doesn't matter now. Tell me this, Mrs. Turney. Would you want people to be convinced, even all these years afterwards, that Bella Foxley was a murderess—if she was one? Or are you willing to leave things as they are?"

  "I don't believe Tom fell out of that window, either the first or the second time, and I don't believe the haunted house had anything to do with his death," replied the widow. "But as for Bella Foxley—if I could blacken her name even now that she's dead, I'd do it. It was something she knew, and something Tom knew, too! That's why she killed him. It was the grated carrot, you know. That's what it was. Tom knew. Oh, how I wish we'd never gone! It was the telegram that decided us, although Tom knew better than to expect anything under the will. Poor Aunt Flora! She hadn't very many relations to go and see her! But we weren't well off, you know, and Tom said she might think we thought we'd got expectations, and he wouldn't go anywhere near. We had no expectations of any sort, and didn't want to have any, and he knew what people would think—especially Bella—if they got to hear.

  "Well, Bella was there already. She had arrived the day before. She was quite nice, and she and I went up to see Aunt Flora, who looked very, very frail and very much older than when I had seen her last, for all she had dyed her poor old hair since we were there before, although I didn't like to tell Tom that, and he wouldn't go in to see her. He couldn't bear illness, poor man."

  "When had he seen her last?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  "When Tom and I were married. I was Tom's second wife, you see, and we had only been married four years. Aunt Flora did not come to the wedding, but we sent her a piece of the cake —Tom would have a cake and orange blossom and everything, for my sake, because he said I was only a girl, and that, after all, it was my first marriage, even if it was his second. He was full of little jokes like that about it. I never felt his first wife came between us at all, although I believe he had been quite fond of her. But, after all, she had been dead for nearly twenty years when he married me. He was nearly sixty, you see, and although people made some remarks about December and May, it really wasn't like that at all. Tom was really very young for his age—more like a man of forty-five, I always thought—and I've always been rather reserved and sort of old for mine, so it was a more suitable marriage than you would think, considering I was only twenty at the time. I am only thirty now, although people have taken me for thirty-five or six."

  She did look that age, thought Mrs. Bradley, but the fact had no importance. It might be important to know that Tom was so much older than she had imagined, though, she decided. A man of sixty-four or five might tumble out of first-floor windows and hurt or even kill himself where a man much younger might sustain no lasting injury. Curious he had not hurt himself the first time, all the same, at any rate, not seriously."

  "Had you met your husband's cousin before?" she enquired, as Muriel paused. The widow nodded.

  "Oh, yes, several times. She and Tom got on quite well together. She put him in the way of renting these haunted houses from time to time. She had even come away with us for part of her summer holiday, I remember. We were very hard up that year, and she said that if we would let her join us she would pay half the expenses and we could pay the other half between us. It was quite a generous offer, because, although we had two bedrooms, the one sitting-room did just as well for three as it would for two, so we actually saved a little more than you would think, especially as the rooms came a little cheaper, taking the two bedrooms with one sitting-room, you know. It was then she gave us the first news about this last haunted house. Tom was pleased. We had a happy time. I liked Bella then, and Tom liked her right to the end."

  "Even after he knew ...?"

  "That she choked poor aunt? Well, perhaps not quite so much then, but, of course, he couldn't be sure."

  "But I thought he was sure?"

  "Well, you see, what really happened was this:"

  "We are coming to it at last," thought Mrs. Bradley.

  "You see, Aunt Flora was so much better that we thought we might all venture to go out for a little while in the afternoon. A sickroom can be very monotonous, and poor Aunt Flora's (I don't mean it was her fault, of course !) was really rather stuffy and smelly. Well, Tom said he wouldn't be a minute, and Bella seemed to be hanging about, almost as though she wanted me out of the way...."

  "You thought of that later," thought Mrs. Bradley. She grinned, and the narrator looked disconcerted." Wanted you out of the way, yes?" said Mrs. Bradley, nodding.

  "So I decided I wouldn't be in a hurry, and, anyhow, I was waiting for Tom. Tom came out—I was waiting by the front door—and said that Bella seemed to have found herself a job in the kitchen. I couldn't understand that, because, Bella spending all her life in kitchens at that time, being housekeeper at that dreadful Home, you know, I didn't think she would want to go into one when she need not, so I went and looked through the window and tapped on the glass. She looked up, and I could see that she had a carrot in her hand...."

  "I don't think she denied that she grated the carrot," said Mrs. Bradley, gently interrupting the narrative.

  "Oh, I see. No, she didn't deny it. But I always say that Aunt thought she was getting pease-pudding. She would never have taken raw carrot; of that I'm very sure. Anyhow, Bella didn't come, so Tom and I walked on for a bit, and then Tom remembered that he'd left a letter for the house-agent up in our bedroom, and he badly wanted it to catch the post. He decided to go back, but told me not to come, but to wait for him at the bottom of the hill if I liked.

  "Well, I did wait for him, but he was so long that I began to get chilly, and I walked back towards the house. There was no sign of him until I got right up to the porch, and then I saw him. He looked terrible. He said, 'Oh, there you are, Muriel! A dreadful thing has happened. Poor Aunt is choked to death. You had better go for the doctor.'

  "I didn't know where the doctor lived, but he gave me quite a sharp push—he was always so gentle as a rule—and told me to hurry up.

  "'I'm not going to leave that hell-cat alone with her,' he said. I couldn't think what he meant, but now I know."

  "What did he mean?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

  "Why, Bella, of course. He meant he knew Bella had done it, don't you see? And he wasn't going to give her a chance to remove anything which might give her away."

  "But you couldn't have thought that at the time, you know, Mrs. Turney," said Mrs. Bradley, even more gently than she had yet spoken. Muriel looked at her, and then agreed.

  "No, perhaps not; but I think it now," she said. "Well, I fetched the doctor. Poor aunt was choked with the carrot. The doctor confirmed it at once."

  "But you can't prove, and your husband couldn't have proved, that Miss Foxley did the choking," said Mrs. Bradley. "He didn't see her do it, and, even if he had, I doubt whether her word would be considered less valid than his if she declared that he was lying. Why did you hate Miss Foxley at that time, Mrs. Turney? She had never done you any harm."

  "I know she hadn't," agreed Muriel, "but, looking back, I can see it all."

  Mrs. Bradley thought she herself could, too, but she did not say this. Believing, however, that no logical answer would be forthcoming to her question, she asked another :

  "How long had you been in the new house when Bella Foxley came to stay with you?"

  "Well, she came almost at once; that is, once the funeral was over. Tom and I did not stay for that. Then we heard about the will, and when we knew that poor Aunt Flora had left the house and furniture to Eliza, it was difficult, I thought, for Bella to remain. She ought to have gon
e back to the Home, of course, to work out her notice...."

  "Ah, yes," said Mrs. Bradley. "She gave in her notice before Aunt Flora's death, I believe."

  "Yes, I suppose she must have done, to get in the complete month." She paused. Then she exclaimed, "But that's a proof, surely, of what I've been saying! She did kill poor Aunt! She must have had it all planned before she went down there! Wicked, wicked thing! Didn't I tell you!"

  Mrs. Bradley did not take up the challenge. She merely remarked that Bella hated the work she had been doing, and to this Muriel agreed.

  "I suppose another post of the kind she had held would be comparatively easy to find," Mrs. Bradley added; but Muriel could offer no opinion on this.

  "At any rate," she said, "she had no home to go to, and she said she felt bad, after Aunt's death and the funeral and everything, so we agreed to put her up, although we didn't really want to; but she kept hinting and hinting, in the way relations do, and in the end we felt we had to invite her, especially as she had found the house for us, and had visited us before.

  "She was very good about everything, I must say. She paid well for her board and lodging, and I shouldn't have minded keeping her on for a month or two if it hadn't been for the way the house behaved."

  "The way it behaved?" said Mrs. Bradley, intrigued.

  "Oh, yes. It was dreadful. Not only frightening but dangerous. Things thrown about and furniture upset, and people creeping about in slippers after dark. It terrified me so much that I had to leave, and Bella was frightened, too, and she came with me. But Tom wouldn't leave—he said it was the most interesting house he had ever known. He researched, you know, in such things, and wrote books and articles. It didn't pay very well. We were always rather hard up. Still, the rents for those sort of houses are always very low, so we hadn't the usual expenses, and my poor Tom was very, very happy."

  She paused again, looking sadly back at the difficult but, seen in retrospect, desirable, happy past.

  Revenge, thought Mrs. Bradley, might appease whatever strife was hidden behind that weak, anxious and, if one had to admit it, rather peevish little face.

  "I thought," she said aloud, "that Bella did return to the Institution for a time?"

  "Only to get her things. She stayed one night, that's all— or was it the week-end? It's so long ago now, and what happened later was so awful, that I really don't remember every little thing."

  "I think it must have been the week-end," said Mrs. Bradley, thinking of the diary—although, as she immediately admitted to herself, it would have been easy enough for Bella to have transferred the episode of the boy Jones and the foreign bodies in the food from the time when it had really happened to the date on which it was chronicled in the diary. She was greatly intrigued by the diary. Its frankness, lies, evasions, and inventions made up such a curiously unintelligible whole.

  "Did you see the two boys whom the police interviewed in your village?" she inquired.

  "Boys?" said Muriel. "I don't remember any boys." Yet her colour rose as she spoke.

  "Two boys had escaped from the Home at which Bella Foxley was employed, and at one point it was thought that the police had found them in that village."

  "Oh?" Muriel looked thoroughly alarmed. "Oh, really? I never heard anything about it. How funny—how curious, I mean. No, I had no idea——"

  "Naturally," said Mrs. Bradley, as one dismissing the subject. "I suppose there is no complete and exact record of the happenings in the haunted house, by the way?"

  "Record? ... Oh, yes, of course there is! But ... oh, well, you could see it, I suppose. There is a typed copy somewhere, but I don't know where it went. The psychic people—the Society, you know—had one copy, and then there was a carbon. The copy I've got is in Tom's own handwriting, and I don't know whether I ought to lend it. Besides—forgive me; I don't mean to be rude, and I can see you take a real interest—I mean, not just curiosity and all that—but what are you trying to do? Even if it could be proved that Bella did push Tom out of the window, it wouldn't help. She's dead. She committed suicide, and, as I say to people (when I mention the subject at all) if that wasn't a confession, what could be?"

  "I see," said Mrs. Bradley, "and I know I'm tiresome. But if I could just see the entries about the hauntings I should feel so very grateful."

  "Well—all right, then," said Muriel, "but I can't let you take it away."

  "It is very kind of you to let me see it at all," said Mrs. Bradley. "Is it a complete record?"

  "You'll see that it goes right up to about—well, when Tom fell the first time."

  She went over to the writing desk in the corner, rummaged, and brought out a stiff-covered exercise book containing perhaps a hundred pages of thick, blue-ruled paper. She looked at it, turned the pages; then thrust it back into the drawer.

  "I've remembered where the typed copy is," she said. She took the cushions off an armchair and removed a brown-paper package.

  "Here you are," she said. About forty sheets had been used, and Mrs. Bradley read them carefully. Then she turned to the last page. Upon this a summary of the hauntings had been worked out, dated and timed.

  "I should be glad to be allowed to make a copy of this summary," she said. "It may be extremely important."

  "Important for what?" inquired Muriel. Mrs. Bradley, making rapid hieroglyphics in her notebook, did not reply. When she had finished she read through all the entries once more before she put the typescript together and handed it over. It tallied pretty well with the diary.

  Muriel put it into the desk, and came back to the hearth.

  "He was murdered," she said. "Blackmail."

  "I know," said Mrs. Bradley. "Just one more point. You knew of this haunted house, how long before your husband's aunt died?"

  " About a month."

  "As long as that? By the end of December?"

  "Yes. It must have been as long as that, because we had to give a month's notice where we were. That was in the haunted flat in Plasmon Street."

  "Yes, I see. That seems quite clear. It's been very good indeed of you, Mrs. Turney, to talk to me like this, and I am interested—more than I can tell you—in your story."

  "Well," said Muriel, rising with the guest, "won't you stay and have a cup of tea or something? I'm sure it's been really nice to have a chat with somebody about it. But nothing can bring Tom back. Still, it's very kind of you to take an interest. I am ever so glad you called."

  Mrs. Bradley was glad, too. Dimly she was beginning to see quite a number of things, all of them interesting; some astonishingly so.

  Chapter Five

  THE HAUNTED HOUSE

  "Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust; And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie."

  RALEIGH.

  MRS. BRADLEY'S application for permission to hold séances in the house at which Cousin Tom had met his death was granted by Miss Foxley, and the séances were duly held. They were not conducted by Mrs. Bradley, although she was an interested participant.

  She went twice to the house before the first séance, and contrived to dispense with the services of the caretaker as guide.

  "Just as you like, mum," he said, when she pointed out that his voice and familiar tread did not give the spirits, if there were any, a chance, "although I didn't think, when I first had the pleasure of showing you round, as you was one of them fakers."

  "One of those what?" said Mrs. Bradley.

  "Well, you've heard of poodle-fakers, haven't you? I calls these here ghost-hunters spirit-fakers."

  "Oh, no," said Mrs. Bradley. "A spirit-faker, in the full technical sense of the term, is a person who fakes, or manufactures, spirits for the purpose of deceiving the earnest seeker after psychical phenomena."