Nest of Vipers mb-55

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘I wouldn’t have called Billie Kennett a motherly type,’ said Laura, when they were in the car. ‘Do you really think that she is?’

  ‘I think that, in partnerships such as theirs, one finds a dominant and a submissive; a protector and a protected.’

  ‘In this case, the submissive seems to have cut a pretty wide swathe. Act of rebellion or act of despair?’

  ‘It hardly matters now. Our interests lie elsewhere. I am extremely grateful to Miss Barnes.’

  ‘For returning to that two down, two up, nest of theirs?’

  ‘No. For telling Miss Kennett, in front of witnesses, that she had to get married.’

  ‘And trick that obnoxious Hempseed into bigamy?’

  ‘Bigamy, in my opinion, does not enter into the matter. Mr Hempseed (to use his pseudonym) has far too much common sense for that, I am perfectly sure. I have no doubt that, to satisfy Miss Barnes, some kind of ritual was carried out which she assumed to be a marriage ceremony. She appears to be a singularly guileless young person, and a very bad liar. As I say, I am convinced that Mr Hempseed is far too wary a practitioner to have contracted a bigamous marriage which Miss McHaig could have exposed for what it was at any moment she chose. Also, Miss Barnes saw far more of Miss Minnie than she admits.’

  ‘So what’s this “had to get married” argument all about?’

  ‘The loss of her virginity, no doubt, had some importance for her. One assumes she desired to lose it.’

  ‘Oh, well, it isn’t fashionable to be a virgin nowadays. How are we going to spend Sunday?’

  ‘In meditation and prayer, as is seemly and right.’

  ‘You’re not going to church?’

  ‘Why not? In the business we are about to undertake, the more of the odour of sanctity we have about us, the more sure are we of successfully resisting the powers of evil. Besides, I always go to church when we are at home.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought you looked on that as a social gesture, something the village kind of expected of you as the owner of the biggest house in the place.’

  ‘There is that aspect, of course.’

  ‘Look, what is all this? And what has Barnes’s virginity got to do with it?’

  ‘That remains to be seen. We shall know more, I hope, when we have visited that sleazy little antique shop again.’

  ‘I say!’ said Laura, on a note of enlightenment. ‘Does it all add up? I mean, Miss Minnie being connected with that peculiar sect and being seen by that dim-wit Barnes to go into the junk shop and disappear, and Barnes teaming up with this Hempseed simply for the purpose you mentioned, and Miss Minnie getting drowned and disfigured? Could it make some sort of sense? I suppose it could. But where does Niobe Nutley fit in? Didn’t she murder the old lady, after all?’

  ‘Monday’s child is fair of face,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘so let us see what its pulchritude can do for us the morn’s morn, as I believe your countrymen express it. Meanwhile, we are in a seaside town at an unattractive time of year. How shall we disport ourselves on a somewhat cheerless Saturday evening?’

  ‘Go to the pictures,’ said Laura.

  The cinema, the only one in the little town, looked drab and unprepossessing from the outside, but, in deference, no doubt, to the summer visitors from whom it derived a good deal of its revenue, the interior was warm and tastefully decorated.

  The young woman at the receipt of custom looked them over with a casual glance which hardly travelled beyond the treasury note which Laura was holding out, and said briefly, ‘One senior cit., one full price – where d’ya wanna be?’

  Laura opted for the front of the circle and was picking up her change when from a curtain which screened the back of the box-office, a bland, expressionless face peered out and a finger poked the girl in the back.

  ‘OK,’ said the box-office girl, without turning round. ‘You’ve got time for a quick one, if you hurry, Dadda. Dirty old man!’ she observed in an indulgent tone, when the face had disappeared behind the curtain.

  ‘Who is he?’ Laura enquired.

  ‘Name of Bosey. Deputises for me every other Sat’ night and Wednesdays, when I go off.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen his shop.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  At this moment a considerable section of the audience came streaming out and several patrons came in from outside. Dame Beatrice and Laura mounted one long flight of steps and were conducted down another to their seats at the front of the circle. The main feature was entitled: The Ghouls of Dead Man’s Creek.

  ‘Very suitable,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘At the interval I shall require a choc-ice and a bottle of some obnoxious liquid which I shall imbibe through a straw.’

  ‘When in Rome, and all that, I suppose,’ said Laura. ‘Sure you wouldn’t like me to dash out for some fish and chips?’

  There was a message for Dame Beatrice when they got back to their hotel.

  ‘Would you please ring your son at his home address, Dame Beatrice?’

  Dame Beatrice did so and was told by Ferdinand Lestrange that, at his last remand before the magistrates, Chelion Piper had been released and the police had withdrawn the charges.

  ‘I don’t know whether you or Cox, Cox, Rufford and Cox have pulled it off,’ said Ferdinand, ‘Congratulations, anyway.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Discoveries

  « ^ »

  (1)

  MONDAY morning proved to be as frustrating as Saturday had been. The junk shop was still closed. In spite of the card which hung inside the glass-topped door and announced this, Laura hammered on the wooden panels and then tapped with the edge of a coin on the glass, while Dame Beatrice waited in the car.

  Laura returned to it to announce that that appeared to be that and to add that the proprietor either had overslept or else took Mondays off as well as Saturdays and, if the girl in the cash desk at the cinema had spoken the truth, some part of Wednesdays also.

  ‘Anyway, we know he’s about here somewhere,’ Laura went on, ‘because I saw him in the cinema when he popped his head out behind the receptionist. He can’t be far away.’

  ‘Monday may be his day for prospecting for more items to display in his shop,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It is not considered by most shopkeepers to be a very good day for trade, I believe. Let us disport ourselves until after lunch as best we may, and return here this afternoon.’

  But the afternoon proved equally frustrating. They tried the shop again at two-thirty, at four o’clock and at ten minutes to five, but the notice inside the door was unchanged and Laura’s peering in through the glass produced no information, except that the shop was empty.

  ‘We will try again tomorrow,’ said Dame Beatrice. Tuesday, however, proved to be another abortive day, so on Wednesday afternoon Laura went back to the cinema on her own to find that the same girl was behind the grille. She seemed disgruntled. She took Laura’s money, pushed over the ticket and the change and then hunched herself on her stool and picked up the magazine she had been reading when Laura had come in. The time was half-past three and Laura and Dame Beatrice had been to the junk shop at ten in the morning and again after lunch. It was still closed.

  Laura sat through an hour of the programme and then went down to the vestibule. This time the ticket-office stool was occupied by a large man in evening dress.

  ‘Oh,’ said Laura, hastily improvising, ‘I believe, when I took my glove off to pay for my ticket, I might have left it on the ledge. Would your cashier have seen it and put it away somewhere? It’s a brown one, like this—’ she produced one of a pair which was in her handbag ‘—and I’ve only just missed it.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it, madam,’ the man – obviously the manager, from his costume and unctuous deportment – replied after he had leaned over sideways to glance at the floor, ‘but the young lady has only gone off to have a cup of tea. She’ll be back directly, if you’d care to take a seat.’

  Laura took one of the gold-painted, uncomfortable little chairs
which formed part of the décor of the vestibule and was not kept waiting long. The girl appeared from behind the curtain at the back of the box-office, she and the manager exchanged a word or two – indignant on the one side, mild and soothing on the other – the manager disappeared behind the curtain and the girl slid on to the stool. Laura came forward with her story of the missing glove.

  ‘You wasn’t wearing gloves when you took your ticket,’ said the girl. ‘You must have dropped it some place else. Perhaps it’s on the floor upstairs where you were sitting.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Laura, ‘I didn’t take anything out of my handbag up there. I asked the man who was taking your place here—’

  ‘The man who was taking my place here, yes, I don’t think! The man what ought to of been, only he never!’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Never turned up, the old bugger! And me with a date! I ask you! Wednesday afternoon and evening is my time off and I’d got today planned special. Sours on you, don’t it, when you got something all planned out and it don’t come off.’

  ‘Oh, dear! I’m sorry. Rotten for you. Does this chap often let you down?’

  ‘No, and better he hadn’t, unless he wants my boyfriend waiting for him one night. He doesn’t like being stood up, my boyfriend doesn’t.’

  ‘None of them do, but perhaps your relief will still turn up. I hope so, anyway.’

  She went back to the hotel and explained the situation to Dame Beatrice, adding that, in her opinion, the junk shop proprietor was either out on the toot of the century or that he had scarpered.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘our conversation with Miss Barnes had its own peculiar interest, don’t you think? A pity that, from the doorway of the shop the picture in which I took so much interest is not visible.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that unless we find some means of entering the shop, we cannot tell whether the picture is still in place.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I expect there’s a back entrance somewhere. Shall I go along and have a look round? There’s probably an alleyway from the street and then another one at right angles to it which runs along the back of the shop.’

  ‘I hardly think further investigation is called for.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know so much. It’s a bit peculiar, to say the least, that the shop should still be closed.’

  ‘Possibly the proprietor is taking his annual holiday.’

  ‘At this time of year?’

  ‘He would hardly close his shop during the months the summer visitors are flocking into the town.’

  ‘If there was another shop next door, perhaps we could ask about him. It’s strange he didn’t let the cinema people know he would be absent.’

  ‘What makes you so persistent?’ asked Dame Beatrice, gazing at her secretary in some perplexity. Laura shook her head.

  ‘Those fire-irons, perhaps,’ she said, ‘and the murder and Elysée Barnes and one thing and another.’

  ‘Then, if it will ease your mind, you had better find this back entrance, if it exists, but please stay on the right side of the law.’

  ‘I don’t intend breaking and entering, if that’s what you mean.’ Laura waited for no comment upon this declaration. They took the car, and when they reached the junk shop she got out and strode rapidly away down the narrow street. As she disappeared at the right-angled turn, the milkman’s van pulled up outside the shop, the man got down, took a pint bottle from his cargo and was about to place it on the step when he changed his mind and returned it to the van.

  ‘I was wondering at what time the shop opens,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Ent he open, then?’

  ‘It appears not. Neither was the shop open on Saturday or Monday or yesterday.’

  ‘Must-a-bin. He took the three bottles in all right, else they ud still be here, like, wouldn’t ’em? Nobody don’t pinch milk bottles in this town, you know.‘ He climbed back on to his van and resumed his round. Dame Beatrice went up to the shop door and hammered on it. Then she walked up the little cobbled street in Laura’s wake and met her secretary coming back.

  ‘We’d better let somebody know,’ said Laura. ‘I looked in through a back window and I think the chap’s dead.’

  ‘Did you try the back door?’

  ‘Yes. It’s open, but I’d said I wouldn’t go in, so—’

  ‘We had better both go in. There may be something I can do. In any case, the shop will be on the telephone.’ She was hurrying Laura along as she spoke. They reached the head of the narrower alley which led to the back of the shop past derelict patches which had been the gardens of houses long since pulled down, and got to the shop itself. There was no garden gate and the garden itself had been turned into a dumping ground for unsaleable merchandise or for pieces too cumbersome or too large to be taken inside the house.

  The two investigators picked their way amongst this rubbish and, reaching the back door, Laura, who was in the lead, turned the handle and went in. Dame Beatrice followed. Laura led the way through a neat, clean scullery and kitchen. On the kitchen table stood three bottles of milk. Dame Beatrice noted them, but made no remark, although she saw that the kitchen, in addition to its store-cupboards, also housed a refrigerator.

  Laura led the way up four linoleum-covered stairs to the room behind the shop, for the building was on the slope which led up from the sea-front. She opened a door and stood aside to let Dame Beatrice in.

  The little room was furnished as an office. There was a roll-top desk, a filing cabinet, a swivel chair and, on a small table, a typewriter and a telephone. Everything was spick and span except for an almost imperceptible layer of dust on the desk and table and the untidily spread-eagled body which lay in a pool of blood on the carpet not far from the desk.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Dame Beatrice. She herself went forward and looked at the body. There was no need to touch it. The post-mortem signs of death were all too obvious. ‘I shall not telephone from here. Nothing must be touched. Go back to the hotel and telephone from your room.’

  “The call will go out through the hotel switchboard.’

  ‘That cannot be helped and the hotel desk will only put your call through. Tell the Superintendent that I am here. He is an intelligent man and will guess that something serious has happened.’

  ‘Do I tell him nothing more?’

  ‘Nothing. And stay at the hotel until I come.’

  ‘Suppose he asks questions?’

  ‘Tell him I think we have something which bears on the Minnie case.’

  Laura departed. Dame Beatrice looked out of the window, which was some way from the ground owning to the slope of the hill, and saw a broken step-ladder lying among the other rubbish in the yard. She assumed that it had formed the means by which Laura had managed to reach the window to peer into the room. Leaving the door open, she went down into the room which formed the shop. The picture was gone. In its place hung a tattered rag doll with a piece of paper pinned to its soiled and torn clothing. On the paper was a carefully executed drawing in red ink. It depicted the head of a goat, formalised and with three stars, one on either side of, and one between, its horns. Below it was a five-pointed star from which splashes of red ink appeared to denote drops of blood.

  ‘So?’ said Dame Beatrice to the doll. She left the shop and mounted the main staircase, being careful not to touch the banisters. The landing disclosed an open doorway. She looked in. It seemed that the chamber was a bedroom and nothing more. The bed was made, the furniture was simple and the room was clean and tidy.

  Next door to it was a bathroom and then a short flight of stairs led to two more rooms, one over the shop and the other, the nearer, over the office. The door of the nearer room was open, that which was over the shop and looked out on to the street, was closed.

  Dame Beatrice looked in at the open doorway and discovered that, by the removal of the party
wall, the two rooms had been knocked into one. Thick black velvet curtains hung at the front and back windows, but were drawn back so that there was plenty of light in the room, despite a somewhat overcast wintry sky.

  Around the two long walls and on either side of the window a frieze of life-size nude figures had been drawn in black paint. They were alternatively male and female, but there was nothing lewd or in any way remarkable about them. In fact, Dame Beatrice thought, they were the work of a quite considerable artist and although the first effect was somewhat startling, it was not repugnant.

  The floor of the room presented another and a more sinister appearance. It was covered from wall to wall in black carpeting on which had been drawn a white circle contained within a square. At each corner of the square were cabbalistic designs which could be interpreted by any student of the occult. The circle itself was bare, but between it and the window was a long, heavy table, painted black and having at one end what appeared to be a headrest padded with white velvet and having embroidered on it in red a facsimile of the goat’s head which Dame Beatrice had seen downstairs on the piece of paper pinned to the doll.

  Also on the table, laid out in what appeared to be ritual fashion, were a long knife, a sword, a large silver cup, a nine-thronged scourge, a glass jar containing a white substance which Dame Beatrice identified as salt (although she did not attempt to taste it), a carafe of colourless liquid which, from her knowledge of witchcraft, she diagnosed as water, and a V-shaped metal object up the arms of which two serpents, joined at the tail, were climbing. There was also a tall, curiously-ornamented metal cabinet, but it was locked.

  Experimentally Dame Beatrice walked behind the table and pulled the cord which operated the black velvet window curtains. Immediately the curtains in the other half of the room also came together and the dim red light from a chandelier, which switched itself on as the curtains closed, balefully illuminated the scene.

  ‘Very pretty,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Black, rather than white magic, I fancy, with overtones of Satanism and, for good measure, a splash of voodoo.’ She pulled the cord again to draw the curtains apart. The light extinguished itself and, after a last look around, she went downstairs and into the shop.