Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  She rewarded the husbandman, carried away her treasure trove, and, away from all observation, opened the lid, for the lock had been broken off and the lid lifted easily. Inside the box was the putrefying head of Armstrong. She pushed the box in among some bushes, wrapped up the head in a large coloured handkerchief which she had been wearing as a turban, and walked out on to the road which led to Selçuk. She had noticed the hole of some animal – possibly a fox, she thought – as she had come along the road from the site of the temple. She unrolled the head from the handkerchief and, having examined it carefully through a powerful magnifying glass, she placed it in the mouth of the hole and pushed it in with her parasol as far as ever she could. Then she walked on to the flooded site with her handkerchief and rinsed it in the water. Whilst it was drying in the sun she took out her notebook and began to make indecipherable hieroglyphics after the name Armstrong. Her mind worked rapidly. She had come immediately to the conclusion that the death of Armstrong had better be a secret for the present. She wondered whether it could still be a secret in Athens. What had his mother done, she wondered, when he did not return to his home. She wondered whether Marie Hopkinson or Megan knew of his disappearance.

  She speculated also as to the whereabouts of the rest of the body. Her first theory had been that the whole carcass would be found in the snake-box, but now she felt sure that the body must still be in Greece. It would have been safer, from the murderer’s point of view, to have brought it to Selçuk and disposed of it in the neighbourhood of Ephesus, but the transport of a dead body is always a problem, she reflected. The head had been brought in the blood-stained sleeping-sack, of course, and another home had been found for it when the sacks were needed for the night.

  She wondered when the vipers had been killed. To go to the trouble and possible danger of killing them when it would have been easier and simpler and far less likely to lead to his own apprehension merely to set them free in the marshy, sunny country round about the ancient harbour, argued a mental attitude in their murderer which might give a strong hint of his identity, she thought. This gave rise to a further question in her mind. She wondered whether there was any connexion between the slaughter of Io, the cow, and the beheading of the serpents. Her thoughts turned from that speculation to a consideration of Alexander Currie. Would a man who had been prepared (in the phraseology of the little boys) to stick a penknife in the bum of Iacchus, kill a cow and some snakes? She did not think so. In the case of the statue, Alexander’s ill-considered action was the result of a belief that the statue was no statue but a man; he had proposed to put this belief to a simple test. The death of the cow, Io, came under a very different category of actions. To begin with, it was not a hasty action at all. It had been carefully planned and artistically executed. The killing might have been to test a belief, but, if so, the belief must have been one different in kind from the simple conclusion arrived at by Alexander Currie. It might have been a religious belief, a scientific belief, a sadistic impulse rooted in heaven-knew-what kind of belief, it might even, she thought with a shudder, have been a belief that the death and evisceration of the cow was a joke.

  The death of the snakes did not seem to her to typify a mind in the least like Alexander Currie’s, nor the mind which had conceived the death of the cow. Whoever had killed the snakes must have been conscious of his social obligations to the party. The snakes had been killed by someone who did not want the members of the party to be bitten by the snakes. Instead of merely freeing them, he had destroyed them. He must, she reflected, have been horribly nervous about snakes.

  She nodded her head, retrieved her handkerchief from the bushes, put away her notebook, and walked slowly and very thoughtfully back to the camp. She knew who had killed the snakes.

  The little boys and Gelert had rounded up the dogs, which had proved less difficult to recapture than the party had any right to expect. They had been fed again, and were now the faithful followers of the camp. In their present verminous condition, their attentions were embarrassing, however, and their friendliness not altogether an asset.

  ‘There’s no doubt,’ said Sir Rudri, regarding the dogs with a certain amount of favour, ‘that the people of Britain have a remarkable faculty for the handling and taming of animals.’

  Mrs Bradley, observing both dogs and human beings with detached amiability, said that she did not doubt it.

  ‘Except for snakes,’ she added.

  ‘Snakes! Ugh!’ said Alexander Currie.

  ‘Yes. Snakes,’ said Sir Rudri thoughtfully. ‘I’d still like to know who changed my snakes at Epidaurus.’

  Except for Gelert, the party, who had made up their minds long ago that he had changed the snakes himself, gaped at this statement, and then ignored it.

  ‘Did you find the box?’ asked Stewart. ‘If not I vote we look for it again this afternoon. It makes something quite decent to do. I’ve got another idea. I believe it must be somewhere fairly obvious.’

  He proved this with striking success immediately after lunch, and the little boys brought the empty box in triumph to Mrs Bradley, who was sitting resting in the shade.

  She accepted it with thanks, and complimented them upon finding it.

  ‘It’s pretty nifty,’ said Kenneth, taking a resolute sniff at its interior. ‘Stinks as though something pretty foul had gone pretty bad in it.’

  Mrs Bradley considered this to be so exact and acute a rendering of the actual facts of the case that she gave the little boys money to go with Ian and Cathleen next morning by train to Smyrna from Selçuk, to buy figs and Turkish delight and anything else they liked.

  ‘We have to be whipped for Artemis Orthia first,’ said Kenneth cheerfully. Noticing that the prospect did not appear to daunt them, Mrs Bradley inquired as to the nature of the proceedings.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know exactly, but I believe it’s only going to be a sort of token whipping,’ explained Kenneth. ‘Anyway, if we don’t make any row, we’re to have ten shillings each from Sir Rudri Hopkinson, and my father will give me five shillings more, I should think.’

  ‘Stewart thinks we should stick out for a pound,’ said Ivor. ‘What do you think, Aunt Adela?’

  ‘Who’s going to do the whipping, though?’ Kenneth cannily inquired. ‘We don’t want to jolly well annoy whoever it is.’

  ‘But why worship Artemis Orthia in Ephesus?’ Mrs Bradley pertinently inquired of Sir Rudri, a little later.

  ‘I know, I know.’ He looked worried. ‘It was Armstrong’s idea. It seemed quite a good idea at the time. His theory was that we should worship the goddess in all the ways in which she had ever been accustomed to be worshipped – the Spartan, the purely Attic, the Ephesian, as such – and so on.’

  ‘I wonder what you mean by the purely Attic, and by the Ephesian, as such,’ Mrs Bradley innocently inquired.

  Sir Rudri scowled at her. Alexander Currie laughed.

  ‘At any rate,’ said Mrs Bradley calmly, ‘the boys will not be whipped for Artemis Orthia or anybody else.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Because such whipping of boys was always done by a priestess of the goddess, and in Sparta. Sparta isn’t Ephesus and you haven’t a priestess.’

  ‘We were depending upon you, of course.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Alexander Currie. Mrs Bradley beamed upon him. ‘She isn’t —’

  ‘She certainly isn’t,’ she agreed wholeheartedly.

  ‘Isn’t what? A virgin? Oh, I see,’ said Sir Rudri. He seemed staggered by the thought that his careful composition of the party had now gone completely astray.

  ‘A pity that Megan isn’t here,’ he said with a sigh. ‘She would have been the person, without a doubt.’

  ‘Well, it’s your own fault that she isn’t,’ said Mrs Bradley decidedly.

  ‘No, no, Beatrice. It had nothing to do with me. Megan herself elected to stay with her mother.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘We could get a Turkish girl,’
suggested Sir Rudri suddenly. ‘She needn’t hit them too hard. And then, of course, there were the eunuch priests of Artemis here in Ephesus.’

  ‘I thought the idea was to kill them,’ argued Alexander Currie, who had a father’s rational objection to the flogging of his son by anybody – man or woman, whether eunuch or virgin.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Sir Rudri, stealing Jove’s thunder thoughtlessly. Alexander Currie glowered at him, his bald head throwing a golden gleam in the rays of the afternoon sun. Mrs Bradley put up her parasol and held it over him.

  ‘My son is not to be beaten, anyway,’ he said, concisely, savagely, and finally.

  ‘Very well! Very well! Two will be plenty, I suppose,’ Sir Rudri testily agreed.

  ‘Nor Stewart Paterson, either. I’m responsible for him to his mother,’ Alexander continued triumphantly. ‘And as for your own wee laddie, I wonder you’ll look him in the face to think of beating him all for nothing. If lads are bad,’ Alexander continued, becoming excited, ‘that is one thing. But to beat an innocent lad in the wrong portion of the empire of the Ancient Greeks, to worship a goddess, who, ten to one, is not the goddess you’re thinking she is, but another, is no more than the foolishness of a silly, cracked old gomeril.’

  ‘I’m not a silly, cracked old gomeril,’ Sir Rudri shouted, the Viking moustache rising grandly to the fray. ‘It’s you, afraid of a few, small, harmless snakes and a statue on a rock and suchlike small, childish things, that have been the trouble all along in this party. Wouldn’t I have crowned the poor dogs, isn’t it, but for you and your foolish complainings? What, indeed, are we here for, if not for experiment upon the dogs and the boys, and why have I spent all my money, that is all I am asking, indeed?’

  ‘Hold your whisht, you wee Welshman,’ said Alexander Currie composedly, eyeing the Viking moustache with a militant eye.

  Mrs Bradley planted herself between them.

  ‘My dear Rudri! My dear Alexander!’ she said, in shocked, amazed accents, whilst her black eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘Please, please! At any rate, wait until it is cooler.’

  She took Alexander’s arm, and led him into the shade. Alexander wiped his brow, sighed, and began to chuckle.

  ‘Child,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘it is time that Rudri went back to Athens, and everybody with him. There is nothing to gain by staying here any longer.’

  ‘He is wishful to conduct two or three experiments on the site of the temple,’ said Alexander Currie. ‘Poor Rudri! Maybe I should not have called him a Welshman.’

  ‘Well, not a wee Welshman,’ Mrs Bradley agreed. She half-wondered whether to take Alexander into her confidence, but decided to continue her investigations alone for a time, and see where they led. She was not afraid that the head would turn up to complicate matters again. There were jackals in the neighbourhood, and she thought that the head, if found, would be unrecognizable.

  She spent the rest of the day in a thorough exploration of the ruins, and made a plan of them for herself, having found Sir Rudri’s handy but inaccurate. It was easy enough to do this. The road from Selçuk came in by the north-east corner, and the gymnasium of Vedius lay almost due south of it. She made the gymnasium her starting-point, paced her distances southward past the stadium to the theatre, and westward up the Arcadiane to the Harbour Gateway, and then added the rest of the ruins to the plan. She was less concerned with the plotting of the ruins, however, than with the problem of Armstrong’s death. Apart from the general dislike in which he had been held by the party, she could not think of anybody who ardently desired his demise. Even Sir Rudri, so far as she knew, had nothing to fear from the young man except the publication of the photographs, and even that contingency had seemed remote after Mrs Bradley’s offer of a thousand pounds had not been repudiated by the photographer.

  He had quarrelled with Gelert, of course. He had not been friendly with anybody in the party. Ian was resolute enough to have killed him; so, in his queer, unassertive way, was Dick. Alexander Currie was quick-tempered and bold enough. Megan was stout-hearted and callous enough, Cathleen was superstitious enough, and Dish had sufficient natural dignity. Dish, of course, had hated Armstrong. She considered Dish, screwing up her eyes in the brilliant light of the sun.

  She went to the hole into which she had thrust the head, and groped for it. Flies flew off it in clouds. She unfolded the camp stool she was carrying, sat down, put the head in front of her on the dry ground, and considered it carefully from all angles. Olfactorily it was disgusting, but the most careful examination of it failed to give any clue to the way in which its owner had met his death. After a lengthy scrutiny of the decomposing, unlovely object, she concluded that her first opinion had been justified. The wound, the poison – whatever it was that had caused the death of Armstrong – was still the secret of his body. The head, once beautiful, now one of the most repulsive objects imaginable, could tell her nothing at all beyond the fact that Armstrong was dead. Whoever had hacked it off had done so, Mrs Bradley concluded, without skill, but boldly, in a couple of strokes. So much, and nothing more, was evident.

  She picked up the head and poked it back into the hole, washed her hands in the murky, stagnant water of the flooded site of the temple, dried them on a handkerchief, and walked back to the ruins to tea.

  Alexander Currie and Sir Rudri had made up their quarrel, it seemed. The little boys, however, looked disconsolate, although they ate with their usual heartiness. Mrs Bradley, watching them, concluded that the prospect of a beating and ten shillings had appealed to them very greatly, and that her and Alexander’s humanitarian interference on their behalf did not appeal to them at all. Even Ivor, the nervous and imaginative, muttered, as he walked away, kicking stones:

  ‘Fat lot of use our going to Smyrna now.’

  Alexander Currie overheard the remark, and, so pleased was he at having defeated Sir Rudri that he called the boys aside and gave them their money. Mrs Bradley could hear the joyous:

  ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ of Stewart, and the mumbling accents of Ivor. It was Kenneth, however, who came running back to her.

  ‘I say,’ he said, ‘do you like Turkish delight?’ Mrs Bradley thought this very nice of him, and said so, handsomely.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Kenneth, flushing brick-red with embarrassment, ‘after all, if it weren’t for you, we shouldn’t jolly well be going to Smyrna, should we?’

  2

  The party went to bed early, for at half past ten they were going to the flooded site of the temple of Artemis so that Sir Rudri could conduct his last series of experiments.

  Nobody went to sleep. The reeds on the edge of the sea-marshes whispered, and little winds moaned round the otherwise silent stones of the ancient, deserted city. Cathleen, who, with Ian and Ronald Dick, had been more interested in the village of Selçuk with its people, its station inn, its little café and its storks’ nests on the house-tops, was restless. After lying beside Ian for half an hour, she got up, and groped her way to Mrs Bradley.

  ‘You know what I said about somebody being killed before we finished our wanderings?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, child, I remember.’

  ‘Well, I feel – I feel it’s happened.’

  Few attributes of the human mind held any astonishment for Mrs Bradley. She said:

  ‘That’s very strange, but, if I were you, I’d think no more about it. Ian, at any rate, is well, and so are your father and your little brother.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. But something has happened. I feel it. Tell me what it is, and who it is! I know that something has happened!’

  ‘Hush, child. You’ll disturb the little boys. They ought to get some sleep. There’s this silly business to-night, and tomorrow they’re going out for the day, and that will be very tiring. Go back to Ian, now, and lie down, and don’t fret. There’s nothing to fret about. You mustn’t be foolish and imagine things.’

  ‘But I’m not! I’m not!’ said Cathleen, wildly. ‘And it may be Megan! I love her dearly.
I can’t bear to think she may be dead!’

  ‘Why should she be dead?’ asked Mrs Bradley reasonably. ‘It’s the hot weather here, and the unhealthy situation of the ruins that have made you nervous and tired. Be a good girl, now. Go along back to Ian.’

  She went with the girl, shining her small torch on to the ground to light the way. Like corpses waiting to be interred, or shapeless bundles of merchandise awaiting shipment, the pilgrims lay huddled in their sleeping-sacks, this time outside the theatre, along the Sacred Way. The white stone glimmered in the starlight. Later the moon would rise, the new moon for which Sir Rudri had waited before carrying out his latest experiments.

  Ian was sitting up, waiting for Cathleen to come back. He said, when Mrs Bradley had settled Cathleen into her sleeping-bag again:

  ‘I am wishing to go for a walk in the city before the moon is up and we have to go to the temple.’

  ‘Very well, child. I will get my sack and sit on it, and talk to Cathleen. We’re far enough away from the others here not to disturb them,’ Mrs Bradley replied. He nodded, grunted, and soon his squat, bow-legged figure was lost to sight. He had passed along towards the theatre, to take the ghost-road of the Arcadiane out towards the ancient port. He went slowly, picking his way, until he came to the Harbour Gateway. From here he crossed to his right, to the ruins of the harbour baths and the gymnasium. Ephesus, never quite silent, always exciting and lovable, was fascinating, mysterious, and full of ghosts by night. He was imaginative, and the city was one he had always longed to see. He halted, listening for the steps of the long-dead Romans, those most persistent ghosts who haunt Timgad equally with Pompeii, and march up a street where no street can be seen, and change guard on walls which are no longer there. But no ghosts seemed to haunt Ephesus; or, if they did, Ian knew nothing about them.

  So absorbed, so interested was he, however, that the moon rose and still he did not return. He went north-east to the double church of the Virgin, then slowly made his way round the fortifications and at last went back to the camp. The Sacred Way was deserted. The pilgrims had all gone on to the site of the temple of Artemis.