The Crozier Pharaohs mb-66

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘She isn’t our only trouble. We think we’ve got a prowler.’

  ‘That isn’t a pleasant thought. What about going to the police?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve enough to go on.’

  ‘I don’t know so much. Those hounds of yours must be pretty valuable. You don’t want somebody poaching one of them and going off with it.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that. We think it’s us he’s spying on and that, when he gets the opportunity, he will do us some harm.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘He comes and taps on windows and then runs away. We’ve never seen him face to face, only as a shadow in the garden.’

  ‘What makes you afraid he means mischief?’

  ‘We think he may be from the unlucky family of those patients who died when our father was still alive. It’s left some nasty feeling in the village and there was a bit of a demonstration at father’s funeral.’

  ‘I certainly think that for you to go to the police is the answer.’

  ‘And have my father’s bad luck — because that is all it was — discussed all over again in open court? We’d rather die. Then, as though that wasn’t enough, this madman comes along and insists that we are doctors and must treat him. I’ll say again how terribly sorry we are to have burdened you with him, but he frightened us so much that Bryony said he must be mad and that Dame Beatrice was our only hope. I know we ought to have rung up and asked before Bryony brought him over to you, but — is she willing to treat him? He seemed very ready to go to her.’

  ‘I should have thought there was somebody nearer to you. Anyway, he didn’t stay long. I saw that Bryony had one of the hounds in the back of the car. Was that a precautionary measure?’

  ‘Yes, of course. We didn’t trust the man, but nobody would touch either of us while we were under the protection of Osiris.’

  Laura rightly took it that Osiris was the guardian hound and not the god in person, although, as she said to Dame Beatrice later, with Morpeth you never knew.

  ‘Very wise to take him along, ’ she said over the telephone, ‘I suppose this man couldn’t also be your prowler?’

  ‘Oh, good gracious, no! At least, I do hope not. I’m sure the prowler is a villager who bears us a grudge because of father.’

  ‘Doctors make mistakes at times, but nobody thinks they intend to harm a patient.’

  ‘We’re not liked by the villagers. They don’t like the hounds, either.’

  ‘Well, if your prowler does any more window-tapping, you take my advice and call the police.’

  ‘What news from the hills?’ asked Dame Beatrice when Laura went back to her. Laura reported the conversation and it turned on to the subject of doctors as murderers. The names of Crippen, Buck Ruxton, Palmer, Pritchard and Lamson came up. Laura also spoke of a French physician born in Lyons, who, later, practised in Paris and was suspected of murdering wealthy women patients for their money or to cash in on life assurances he had taken out in their names.

  The evergreen mystery of Charles Bravo’s death in 1877 at The Priory, a house in Balham, came into the conversation, although, as Dame Beatrice pointed out, if Charles Bravo was murdered by the administering of poison — tartar emetic among other things was mentioned — it was unlikely, on the evidence provided, to have been Dr Gully who was the criminal.

  ‘And, of course, Thomas Neill Cream studied medicine,’ said Laura, ‘and gave unfortunate girls drinks with “white stuff” in them. Then there was the Polish barber-surgeon Klosowski, who called himself George Chapman after he had parted from a young woman of that name. You don’t suppose somebody in the village got a bit fanciful and imaginative and spread it about that the Rants’ father knocked off a patient or two for gain, do you?’

  ‘I do not think much gain could accrue to him from cottagers. These morbid speculations do not become you and are extremely far-fetched.’

  ‘Their father seems to have been anything but a poor man when he died, and that doesn’t sound much like a village GP,’ argued Laura.

  ‘Perhaps the mother left money.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘We never hear anything about the mother, do we?’

  ‘She may have died when the girls were very young.’

  Laura agreed and the conversation drifted into other channels, but, after supper, as they were settling down to the business of working on Dame Beatrice’s memoirs — a project masterminded in a sense by Laura, since she had suggested it and had insisted that it would be an interesting and valuable addition to the already published volumes of Dame Beatrice’s case notes — Laura asked whether Dame Beatrice had come to any further conclusions with regard to Goodfellow’s visit.

  ‘Morpeth said on the phone that he made no bones about coming all this way. However, you don’t think he is a case in need of psychiatry, do you? He is playing some game, you think.’

  ‘Most people are in need of psychiatry of one sort or another. Some people find what they need by attending church, others by confiding in sympathetic friends. Some find it in their work, others in strenuous sport. These things all minister to minds diseased and that means most minds.’

  ‘Good heavens! Is that why I’ve always been hooked on swimming?’

  ‘To return to a subject from which we appear to have deviated, I think the reason Mr Goodfellow called is that he was anxious to have a good look at us,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and possibly, as you would say, to size us up.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That is the question.’

  ‘It’s one to which you think you know the answer, isn’t it, though?’

  ‘No, I do not know the answer. I do know, however, that he is not mentally disturbed in the sense that he would have us believe. What he really has on his mind I cannot say.’

  ‘You don’t think — I know it’s a very long shot — that the Rants had any reason of their own, except that he scared them, for bringing him here? Bryony, in particular, could be a bit cagey, I think.’

  ‘What makes you suggest that?’

  ‘Morpeth admitted that they know you don’t see people — patients, I mean — without an appointment. If he had come on his own and if we had not recognised the car and Bryony in it, you wouldn’t have given him an interview, would you?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Emphatically not, because I should have sent him to the right-about as soon as I heard him talking all that rubbish to Polly at the front door.’

  ‘Dear me! How high-handed you have become!’

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ said Laura. ‘This business of a prowler at Crozier Lodge. Do you think he can be in league with that Susan woman who, apparently, works for the Rants for nothing? It was very odd, the way she suddenly walked herself into their lives.’

  ‘During their father’s lifetime she would have had no place at Crozier Lodge. There were no Pharaohs there then. Bryony told me that, when Dr Rant died, the sisters spent a long time deciding whether or not to stay on at the Lodge. The house and its grounds seemed too large for the two of them. The Pharaohs were a way of justifying their staying on. Whatever they say about her, Susan’s advent must have been a godsend. Your own acquaintance with the Rants began under far more unusual circumstances than did Susan’s, if you remember.’

  ‘I was a witness to the result of a car accident, that’s all. You know the story. A lorry had pushed the Rants’ car off the road and into a ditch. It happened sufficiently near here for me to give them a chance to telephone a garage from here and give them a cuppa. They were pretty badly shaken up, you know. Returning to this question of a prowler, I’ve told Morpeth that the thing to do is to tell the police.’

  ‘Or set the hounds on him. He would scarcely be prepared to race half a dozen of them. I wonder that two otherwise unprotected women have not thought of one or other of these alternatives for themselves.’

  ‘If the prowler is in league with that Susan woman, the hounds wouldn’t be much go
od. She has probably got them where she wants them by now. After all, she’s the kennel-maid.’

  I see no reason why you should suspect her.’

  ‘I always suspect people who do something for nothing.’

  ‘But that does not apply to Susan. She is provided with food, with a task which, no doubt, she finds agreeable and, more than all, with the companionship of other women. She may feel a real need for that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps. Anyway, I don’t trust her.’

  ‘But you have never even met her,’ said Dame Beatrice reasonably.

  ‘I know, but something about that set-up stinks.’

  ‘The foul odour may not emanate from Susan.’

  ‘I’d like a chance to size her up, but, as we are never asked to visit Crozier Lodge, I don’t suppose I shall get one.’

  3

  A Thief in the Dog- Watches

  « ^ »

  Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier were sometimes referred to as twin villages, but it would be more nearly true to say that they were mother and daughter.

  When seaside holidays became fashionable, people were not slow to discover the charms of Abbots Bay, but it was situated between two headlands. As it could not expand east or west, the village of Abbots Crozier came into being on the clifftop and a cliff railway was built for the convenience of visitors. Hotels sprang up, the cottagers and other householders took in holidaymakers and both villages flourished.

  The coast was rock-bound and the sea treacherous, so at Abbots Bay a large sea-water pool was constructed so that bathing was safe at any state of the tide, the rise and fall of which kept the pool clean.

  Abbots Crozier had its own attractions. Its hotel windows commanded wide views of the sea and the moors and there were pleasant walks to be had in the upland air and along the banks of the little river which, when it reached the top of the cliffs, foamed, churned and rushed downhill to meet the sea. It bypassed most of the residential part of Abbots Crozier, but cut its way through the middle of the village of Abbots Bay, which it had been known on one occasion to devastate with severe floods.

  Susan’s cottage was almost at sea level. The house occupied by Bryony and Morpeth Rant was on the hilltop hard by the rest of the village on the cliffs. Justifiably had Goodfellow complained of the thoughtlessness of parents who saddled their off-spring with baptismal names likely to embarrass them when they grew older. Morpeth’s name was a case in point. Between the births of the two girls their mother had become an addict of folk songs (of the Cecil Sharp kind) and the old country dance tunes. The Morpeth Rant had been one of her favourites and the unfortunate Morpeth suffered in consequence.

  Whenever possible she would sign herself as M. Rant, and she envied her sister the name Bryony, although Bryony herself had no liking for it. It had been her father’s choice. She had been born with black hair and he had exclaimed, ‘Black bryony! I saw some in the woods alongside the river yesterday.’

  ‘The berries are red,’ said her mother.

  ‘No matter. The plant is called black bryony. I like the name, so Bryony let the child be called.’

  When their mother died, the girls were nineteen and twenty-two respectively. Morpeth became her father’s receptionist. Bryony, with the aid of a charwoman, ran the house and drove the car when Dr Rant made his round of afternoon visits to patients who were too infirm or too self-important to attend his surgery. Both girls disliked their father and, to compensate for this, had never taken down his brass plate or disposed of his effects except for his clothes.

  They kept the brass plate brightly polished and although they banished to the garage lumber room his case of surgical instruments, together with the black bag and its contents which he had carried with him on his rounds, they had not parted with them.

  From the time when Laura had rescued them after their car accident, they had been occasional but welcome visitors to the Stone House, although neither Dame Beatrice nor Laura had ever been invited to brave the Pharaoh hounds at Crozier Lodge. This was largely because the sisters had not regarded their hospitality as coming up to Stone House standards. Laura guessed that this was the reason, but there was nothing she could do about it.

  ‘It stands to reason,’ said Bryony, when the matter had came up for discussion once again recently, ‘that, living in that lovely old house and having maids and a French chef, Dame Beatrice would think that our accommodation and cookery were derived from the backwoods and ourselves smelling strongly of dog.’

  ‘They keep dogs themselves,’ Morpeth had pointed out.

  ‘Only two.’

  ‘I don’t see anything wrong with our house.’

  ‘Not for us, perhaps, but those two are used to better things, and, anyway, our cookery would not be up to their standard. Again, we spend so much time with the hounds that there is little left to spend in entertaining visitors.’

  ‘We’ve got Susan now. With her help with the hounds, it seems strange and uncouth not to return hospitality.’

  ‘I am sure Dame Beatrice will like it better the way things are. We do not have to go to the Stone House every time we are invited. In any case, there is a limit to the number of times we can leave Susan to cope with seven dogs. We don’t want to lose her, do we?’

  ‘I don’t believe she would leave us. She asked to come here. Where else would she go to find something she really wanted to do? There are no other kennels near here where seven beautiful dogs are kept.’

  ‘Seven? You can hardly count Sekhmet. Anyway, as for Susan, it would be awful if she elected to leave us. We must see to it that she has no reason to do so. She knows the hounds and they know her, and that is what really matters.’

  ‘I should like to know Laura Gavin better,’ said Morpeth.

  ‘Let us hope she feels the same about you, but I doubt it. She has Dame Beatrice, a husband, a son and a daughter. Why should she want more? Come along. It’s feeding time.’

  All the hounds in residence at Crozier Lodge were named after the gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt. There were six of them. The dogs were called Osiris, Horus, Amon and Anubis. The two bitches were Isis and Nephthys. Then there was Sekhmet, the liver-coloured Labrador whom the tender-hearted Morpeth had bought from a pet shop in Axehead, the nearest town and the place where the sisters did some of their shopping.

  The male hounds took little or no interest in Sekhmet. It was as though they were as conscious of class distinctions as are many human beings. They never rounded on her or ganged up against her, but this was partly because she was never allowed to run with them. The other two bitches tolerated her, for all three were allowed a run in the grounds together, but her heart was set upon fraternising with the dogs and her nose was always against the heavy, high, wire-netting fence which surrounded the spacious stable yard in which the dogs exercised themselves when they were not being taken for their daily run on the moor.

  ‘I believe she thinks she is a dog,’ said Morpeth.

  ‘Poor cow,’ said Bryony. ‘Don’t you remember how we always wished we were boys when we were young? If we had been, father would have sent us to college and we would have made a place for ourselves in the world.’

  ‘We shall do that with the Pharaoh hounds,’ said Morpeth.

  The stables had been converted into cubicles, so that each of the six Pharaohs had his or her own domain. Each of the three handlers had her own couple to take on to the moor for exercise. Bryony took Osiris and Horus, Morpeth had Amon and Anubis, and Susan was responsible for Isis and Nephthys. If anybody had enough energy, Sekhmet was taken for a run. Otherwise the three women took it in turn to throw sticks and a ball for her in the garden. She was not housed in the stables, but had a large kennel constructed out of an ancient garden shed which was in the grounds when Dr Rant bought the property.

  As for Crozier Lodge itself, it had always been too large for the family’s requirements, even while Dr Rant and his wife were alive, but his young partner had ‘lived in’ and occupied two of the
rooms. Now that the sisters owned the house it was more or less of a white elephant to them, even though a bedroom was always available for Susan if she were ever to elect to stay overnight to assist with a whelping or to cope with any other emergency.

  Known locally merely as the Lodge, the house had eight bedrooms, two bathrooms, drawing-room, dining-room, a former library which had been converted into two consulting-rooms, a morning-room which the two doctors had used as a waiting-room for patients who attended morning and evening surgery, and a large kitchen, a scullery and a butler’s pantry. Where the money came from to purchase such a property formed a topic for discussion in the village, for Dr Rant was not loved and had moved to Abbots Crozier from the Midlands, so that he was received (and distrusted) as a foreigner. There was even some dark speculation as to why he had ever left the Midlands and a theory was bruited abroad that he had diddled an elderly patient out of her money and had fled to escape some embarrassing enquiries.

  Apart from the garden shed which Sekhmet occupied, and the stables which were now devoted to the six Pharaoh hounds, there was one other outbuilding on the estate. The ground floor of this was used as a garage, but there was an outside stair to a room in which Dr Rant had stored junk and to which the sisters, after their father’s death, had added his effects. The garage was kept locked when the car was inside, but there was no lock on the door of the room above, although it was at the top of an outside stair. In Bryony’s opinion, there was nothing in it worth stealing, and if a tramp chose to doss down in it, well, it was a long way from the house.

  Dr Rant’s unpopularity had been added to by the deaths of two patients through what the village regarded as gross carelessness if nothing worse. One of the deaths had been followed by an inquest, for Dr Rant had refused to sign a death certificate when certain rumours had come to his notice.

  To add to the discontent, any medicines which might be required had to be obtained from the chemist in Abbots Bay, for there was no chemist’s shop at that time in Abbots Crozier. The villagers resented the long trudge downhill and up again by the zigzag cliff path and still more the expenditure on the cliff railway by those who were too infirm to do the stiff climbs back.