Nest of Vipers mb-55

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘You seem to have behaved with great sympathy and self-restraint.’

  ‘I’m fond of the little so-and-so, and if she wants a man, so be it. Well, the next thing, and much the most important, was this pseudo-marriage with that heel Polly Hempseed. After she had come back here and you had gone, I shook the truth out of Ellie – literally, I mean. I threatened to kill her if she didn’t come absolutely clean.’

  Dame Beatrice sized up the short, square, sturdy figure and the resolute bull-dog face, and could picture the scene, but she said: ‘Wrestling-match or whatever it was, I would have thought Miss Barnes, with her height and the degree of physical fitness which, I imagine, goes with her secondary profession as a model, would have had the advantage in a trial of bodily strength.’

  ‘Not when I’m hopping mad, which I was,’ said Billie. ‘Besides, Ellie has the usual feminine dislike of going to the mat and settling matters by seeing which can bite pieces out of whom. I think, too, that she was scared stiff of the Satan lot. Anyway, she gave in easily and came clean.’

  ‘How clean, I wonder?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure I heard it all. I said I should go to the police. She broke down completely and begged me not to involve her. That brought me up all standing, but I got the address of that junk shop out of her and I went along to put the fear of God into that bloke.’

  ‘Interesting. Did you threaten him with the police?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t there, so I pushed a letter through the shop’s letter-box. I couldn’t keep on going there. After all, I have my job to think about. Besides, I guessed they had lost interest in Ellie once she had become – once she had lost – after she and Hempseed – I mean, she was no use as a sacrificial victim any more.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I quite understand. And now?’

  ‘Well, that’s about it. Ellie and I still share this house, but, of course, things will never be the same again. I suppose she’ll marry some day. I wish she would, and get to hell out of my life.’

  ‘How does the death of Miss Minnie fit into all this?’

  ‘I have no idea, except that, from what I made Ellie tell me, it was Minnie, blast her! – who introduced Ellie to these Satanists.’

  (2)

  Niobe herself opened the door to Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she said, stepping back a pace when she recognised the visitor.

  ‘I fear so,’ said Dame Beatrice, stepping inside. ‘I wonder whether Mr Shard is at home? It is he with whom I would speak.’

  ‘Mandrake? I expect he’s busy.’

  ‘Perhaps you will be good enough to ring through on the intercommunication apparatus and let him know that I am here.’

  ‘Will you state your business? He won’t be pleased to have his writing interrupted unless you have business of importance to discuss with him.’

  ‘My business concerns the death of the man who kept an antique-dealer’s shop in the town and from whom Mrs Gavin brought a yataghan.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘And to whom you either sold or gave a set of steel fire-irons, although you have denied doing so.’

  ‘You had better come into my office.’ Dame Beatrice followed her and Niobe made contact with Mandrake Shard.

  ‘Will you go up?’ she said. ‘He is at the end of the landing on the first floor. There is a nameplate on the sitting-room door.’

  Shard, who seemed to have been working at an enormous desk which was covered with reference books, papers and a typewriter which had a half-finished sheet of quarto still sticking up in it, greeted her twitteringly.

  ‘Well, well, well! Hullo, hullo!’ he said. ‘How nice! How very, very nice! Sherry, I think, don’t you? Or shall we go out to tea again? No. Sherry, sherry! Oh, but do come in! Come in!’

  Dame Beatrice came in and closed the door. The room, she noted, was beautifully and expensively furnished and, except for the littered desk, exquisitely neat and clean. There was only one picture on the walls, but it was a Picasso of the artist’s 1941 period. Dame Beatrice wondered whether its fantastic disorientations, exaggerations and unkind if humorous comments upon a woman’s features and bodily attitude were a kind of compensation to Shard for his own tiny but well-formed frame and his loss of the girl he had once hoped to marry.

  Dame Beatrice took the armchair to which he waved her and he bustled about in the cupboards of a satinwood cabinet and produced glasses and a couple of early nineteenth-century decanters – all of them collectors’ pieces – and cried gaily:

  ‘Which shall it be? Which shall it be? And do you take a biscuit with your sherry? Speak now, or for ever after hold your peace!’

  ‘No biscuit. The sherry is at your choice,’ she said. She sat and sipped while she studied the room and Shard, she surmised, studied her. He did not drink.

  ‘More?’ he enquired. ‘Ah, well, later on, perhaps. One is disposed to enquire, if one does not give offence, why you have come to see me.’

  ‘I want to know more about the Satanists.’

  ‘Oh, my dear Mrs Farintosh!’

  ‘Since last we met, their leader has met his end. By the way, as there should be few secrets between friends, I ought to tell you that Mrs Farintosh, as such, does not exist.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me, dear and excellent lady. I snooped around, you know, and placed you quite easily since you are well-known (and famous, too), but it seemed only good manners to respect your alias – or should I say your nom-de-plume?’

  ‘No, I write, when I write, under my own name.’

  ‘Then welcome to my abode, Dame Beatrice. What do you want to know about the Satanists? I am hardly a mine of information, I’m afraid. I attended only two of their meetings and those were not for the initiated. Targe came to the first of them with me, but I think he found the proceedings childish and disappointingly dull. After all, to a man who has the horrid details of Jack the Ripper’s activities propped up beside his breakfast bacon and egg, the sight of a virgin lying on a strip of black velvet and having gibberish said over her can hardly rank as a sexual extravaganza or orgy.’

  ‘But you yourself went a second time?’

  ‘By personal invitation of the Grand Master, or whatever he called himself. The initiates, when they addressed him (which they did only after prostrating themselves) moaned at him, “You, You!” So I never learned his name.’

  ‘Did you ever go to his shop in the town?’

  ‘Well, of course, but not to his shop as such. It was where the meetings were held, you know.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course it was. I asked a foolish question. I shall now ask another. Was the girl on the table someone you knew?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you also recognise any of the circle of members?’

  ‘I thought I did, but we were all masked.’

  Dame Beatrice waited, but no more information was forthcoming. Shard held up the decanter but she shook her head. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and held it up to the light (not so much, she thought, to admire the beautiful colour of the golden liquid as to make sure that she would admire the beautiful opaque spiral on the stem of the glass and its bowl engraved with flowers).

  Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw. ‘The better the colour the more worthy of the priceless glass?’ she asked. ‘Or does the priceless glass make a most innocuous and healthful beverage taste better?’

  ‘The second, I think. You are hoping that I will disclose the names of those members of Satan’s Circle whom I thought I recognised, but that I cannot do. We were all placed under an oath of secrecy and I am sufficiently superstitious to feel that I cannot break it.’

  ‘It matters little. Your evidence would only be confirmation of what I already know. One thing I believe you can tell me without forswearing yourself. Was the girl on the table the same girl each time?’

  ‘No, she was not, neither was there any masking of her features.’

  ‘And you recognised both girls?’

  ‘No, but I did recogni
se one of them.’

  ‘Was she unusually tall, as women go?’

  ‘So you know who she was! Dear me! But I have said nothing, mind!’

  ‘No, you have kept your oath. Why did you never go to a third meeting?’

  ‘We were given a date, but Miss Minnie’s death caused it to be postponed, so I have never been to the place again.’

  ‘Was any mention ever made of a threatening letter written to the instigator of the proceedings?’

  ‘Not in my hearing. The writer would have been Miss Billie Kennett, no doubt.’

  ‘Ah, so one of the virgins was Miss Elysée Barnes. Thank you for confirming that piece of information, which I already possessed.’

  ‘I have told you nothing,’ said Shard. ‘Please remember that.’ He had been sipping appreciatively. He now drained his glass and set it gently down on the Hepplewhite table at his elbow.

  ‘Quite,’ said Dame Beatrice thoughtfully. ‘I understand that before Miss Minnie was murdered you believe she sometimes entertained a man in her bungalow.’

  ‘As I told you, I am a dedicated spy.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘As I also told you, I don’t know.’

  ‘When you attended the gatherings, did anything in the nature of a Satanic romp occur?’

  ‘Oh, no, nothing of an orgiastic nature at all. The Grand Master gave us some promises, but I understand that we had to wait for the full moon before he could carry them out. The two young women were merely on show to whet our appetites.’

  ‘And Miss Minnie was murdered before he could keep his word. She, I imagine, was his procuress of virgins. If one was sacrificed at each full moon, I should think she was kept busy.’ said Dame Beatrice, with an eldritch cackle which made Shard glance at her in alarm. ‘I appreciate that you are under oath not to reveal names,’ she went on. ‘I have seen the room in which the Satanist meetings took place. Apart from the girl herself, was anything else on the table? I may add that I have made some small study of witchcraft, both black and white, so nothing you say will surprise me.’

  ‘Well,’ said Shard, ‘it didn’t surprise me either. One has read the recognised authorities, of course – Ahmed’s The Black Art, Cavendish’s The Black Arts, Rhodes’ The Satanic Mass, Peter Haining’s Witchcraft and Black Magic and so on – so one knew pretty much what to expect. The meetings were held specifically to get converts, so everything was pitched in a low key not to frighten the neophytes away, but with veiled promises of all kinds of excitement to come. Anyway, in answer to your question, to which I see no harm in giving a truthful reply, there was a gold cup surmounted by a strange device also in gold and terminating in a crescent moon. The cup and this object were placed on the girl’s lower abdomen and the Grand Master, bare to the waist and wearing goat-skin trousers reminiscent—’ he gave a falsetto giggle – ‘of Robinson Crusoe, sat enthroned behind the so-called altar. There were candles on either side of him and he wore a gold headdress embodying horns with the full moon caught between them.’

  ‘So that, and the cup on the girl’s body, were what the metal casket contained,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Did you get what you wanted?’ asked Laura, when Dame Beatrice returned to the hotel.

  ‘Yes, and a little more than I expected. Both Miss Kennett and Mr Shard were most enlightening.’

  ‘As how?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that reminds me! There is one more question which I ought to put to Mr Shard,’ She rang through to the hotel reception desk and gave the telephone number of Weston Pipers.

  ‘Bradley speaking,’ she said. ‘Can you connect me with Mr Mandrake Shard, please?’

  A man’s voice replied: ‘Ah, good afternoon, Dame Beatrice! Piper speaking. How are you? Yes, I’ll call him to the phone at once.’

  ‘There is something I have just thought of,’ she said, as soon as she and Shard were connected.

  ‘Oh, yes, dear lady?’ His high little voice sounded apprehensive, she thought.

  ‘It is merely this: at the meetings which you attended, was there an admission fee?’

  ‘I must admit that there was. Visitors were asked to hand over a fiver each time and we were told that, if we became members, a monthly subscription would be called for. I gathered that the society was anything but prosperous.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me so. I am so sorry to have interrupted your work again.’

  ‘Think nothing of it, dear lady.’ The little falsetto voice sounded relieved and cheerful this time.

  ‘Oh, and – shall we say to settle a bet?’ – I suppose it was you who wrote some of those anonymous letters?’

  ‘Not all, dear lady, not all. Those I did write were great fun, though.’

  ‘I believe,’ said Dame Beatrice, when she had put down the receiver, ‘that our tiny friend’s gift of insatiable curiosity is going to prove a most useful feature of our enquiry. He goes from strength to strength.’

  ‘Dirty little snooper,’ said Laura.

  ‘Well, after all, what are we but dirty little snoopers, if it comes to that?’ said Dame Beatrice equably.

  ‘At least we only snoop so that justice may be done.’

  ‘Justice? She has the two faces of Janus, one moral, the other legal. We may need to subvert her course in one or other of these respects.’

  ‘Here, what are you up to?’ asked Laura suspiciously.

  ‘Even I myself hardly know. Our first consideration is to establish an alibi for Mr Piper concerning the murder of the antique-dealer.’

  ‘I thought you were doubtful whether he had an alibi.’

  ‘My doubts are now resolved. The police no longer suspect him of murdering Miss Minnie and they do not suspect him of so much as knowing the dead shopkeeper, but I have a fancy for the truth and should like to know what it is. Now you would wish to know what passed between Mr Shard and myself. I will give you a full account of it and then we shall see whether your ideas march with mine.’

  ‘They usually follow well behind yours, and limpingly at that,’ said Laura, grinning. ‘In the old Scots word, unknown to me until I read Huntingtower (I think it was), they go hirpling. But I’m absolutely agog. Tell me all, omitting no detail, however slight.’

  ‘After I have had a last talk with the Superintendent, you shall know as much as I do.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Assessments and Conclusions

  « ^

  (1)

  ‘OH,’ said the Superintendent almost airily, ‘we soon gave up our suspicions of Piper and the same – although I can’t say we’d ever considered her seriously – any suspicions we might have had of Miss Nutley, the only other person, so far as we could discover, who had ever had a key to the bungalow apart from Miss Minnie herself.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘you discovered, as I did, that those particular keys, Piper’s and Miss Nutley’s, would not open the bungalow door. But I thought Piper had lost his key.’

  ‘Gave us a bit of a facer when we tried Piper’s key which we found in Miss Nutley’s desk and she swore was his, and then the duplicate Miss Nutley showed us. Miss Minnie, as she called herself, had had the lock altered unknown to Miss Nutley and Piper. Once we realised that there was no way Piper could have got into the bungalow except the way he did get in, unless Miss Minnie herself opened the door to him – and all the available evidence was that, of all unlikely things for her to do, that was the unlikeliest – we virtually wiped Piper off our slate.’

  ‘But did not immediately release him from custody.’

  ‘An old and perhaps somewhat discreditable ploy, ma’am. We thought that while we held on to Piper the real murderer might get careless and do something to betray himself, but he (or she) didn’t, so in the end we had to give the beaks the tip, the last time he was remanded, that we felt he had no case to answer.’

  ‘And you still have no idea of the murderer’s identity?’

  ‘No. Anyway, we’re now only faced with finding one mur
derer, not two.’

  ‘Oh, really? You have come to the definite conclusion that the shopkeeper’s death was suicide?’

  ‘Yes, we’re forced to that conclusion and would have arrived at it independent of your hints except for the little mystery of those milk bottles, but what we reckon is that somebody who hasn’t come forward – a charwoman, most likely, because the whole house was better kept and looked after than an elderly man living on his own would have kept it – picked up the bottles automatically, as it were, and put them in the kitchen.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she have raised the alarm when she found the body?’

  ‘Judging by the nature of some of that stuff I told you about in his desk and filing cabinet, ma’am, I don’t suppose she was ever allowed in the office, and that, of course, is where the body was.’

  ‘So what made you decide upon your verdict?’

  ‘The coroner’s verdict it will be when the inquest is resumed. You’ll remember (as Mrs Gavin was called upon as the finder of the body) that the inquest was adjourned at our request and will now be resumed.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The body was identified by the manager of the local cinema, was it not?’

  ‘That’s right. Well, the medical evidence showed that there was nothing to rule out the probability of suicide, and although the pathologist thought the wound was too deep to have been self-inflicted, the coroner told the jury to disregard that and the inquest will be resumed on those lines, especially as the pathologist himself could find no rational significance in the depth of the wound and was forced to agree that if Bosey had fallen on the knife, that would explain matters. This, coupled with your own hints, has settled the thing so far as we’re concerned, so now we shall concentrate on the Minnie case, for there is no doubt whatever about that being murder.’

  ‘I shall be interested in pursuing my own enquiries, subject to your permission, of course.’

  ‘Please go ahead, ma’am. I trust our former agreement stands and that you’ll keep in touch with us and give us the benefit of your findings?’