The Crozier Pharaohs mb-66

by Gladys Mitchell

  As one old man recollected, Dr Rant’s predecessor had done his own dispensing. When you went to the surgery you expected to come away with a large bottle of pink medicine guaranteed to cure all the ills that the flesh is heir to. Dr Rant, therefore, started off on the wrong foot by requiring patients to present an indecipherable prescription to a sea-board chemist whom they believed could not read it any better than they could.

  When Dr Rant died, his partner moved out and took house at Abbots Bay, so Abbots Crozier then had no doctor.

  At nine on the evening of Goodfellow’s visit, Bryony rang the Stone House and apologised for bringing him over without warning.

  ‘I hope we shall never see him again,’ she said to Dame Beatrice. ‘I am inclined to go to the Headlands hotel and find out how long he is staying there. We don’t want him badgering us again.’

  ‘I think it would be inadvisable to go to his hotel. Your motives would be misunderstood. You have done what you could for him. I would leave it at that, if I were you. You can always appeal to the police against a nuisance. There is just one thing I would like to know. Did he give any indication of knowing, before you brought him along, that you and your sister were acquainted with me?’

  ‘None at all. He said he needed a doctor to examine his knee and then he went off into incoherent talk and a lot of silly posturing. He alarmed us very much. We were desperate to know what to do with him.’

  ‘Did he make any mention of your Pharaoh hounds?’

  ‘Yes, that was when he said he was Ozymandias, king of kings. I suppose the word Pharaoh made some connection in his mind. It was then that we decided he was mad. Morpeth went so far as to bring Osiris into the house, although not into the room where I was talking with Mr Goodfellow. She wanted to assure herself and him, Goodfellow, that we had some protection at hand.’

  ‘I see. Well, I should dismiss him from your mind unless he pesters you. If he does, tell the police.’

  ‘What worries me is that he had only to ask at the hotel if he really thought he needed a doctor. They would have referred him to Dr Mortlake down at Abbots Bay. Everybody goes to him now that my father is no more. As for the knee — well, there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. The Headlands is nearly halfway down the cliff and it’s a very rough walk and all steeply uphill to get to us from there. Then, when he got here, he pirouetted about like a dancer. I’m sure he hadn’t injured his knee. Well, I rang up only to apologise to you and to thank you for seeing him.’

  ‘I don’t think either thanks or an apology is due from you. We were interested to meet him, although I do not think we shall see him again.’

  ‘Did he pay for the consultation?’

  ‘No, but the interview hardly amounted to a consultation. He gave us an interesting interlude in our trivial round and I am grateful for that.’

  About three-quarters of an hour later the telephone rang again at the Stone House and Laura answered it.

  ‘That was Morpeth,’ she said, when she returned to the room in which she had left Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Don’t tell me that she or her sister has disregarded my advice and gone to the Headlands hotel to check up on the length of Mr Goodfellow’s stay there.’

  ‘Not gone to it, but Bryony has rung it up. There is not, and never has been, a Mr Robin or any other Goodfellow staying there.’

  ‘Interesting, but not surprising. He refused to name the hotel to us.’

  The next bit of news also came from Crozier Lodge by telephone. Immediately after breakfast on the following day, Bryony rang up to say, ‘We have lost Sekhmet. We think she has been stolen by a man who had put aniseed on his clothing. Her kennel stinks of it. Susan went a while ago to look at Sekhmet and found her gone. We’ve been all over the grounds, but there’s no sign of her. The strange thing is that none of the hounds gave any warning that a thief was about. Of course, Sekhmet’s shed is a good way from the stables where the hounds were, so, if he was very quiet and Sekhmet herself didn’t make any fuss, they may not have bothered, but it seems strange. Their hearing is acute and, although they are amenable creatures, I don’t think they would tolerate an intruder about the place, particularly at night or before we were up and about.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Susan is out now, with a couple of the hounds, looking for her.’

  ‘Is Sekhmet a valuable dog?’

  ‘Well, not compared with the Pharaohs, so far as we are concerned. That is our real worry. We wonder whether this was a try-on to find out how easy it was to get into the grounds and walk off with a dog. Of course, Sekhmet herself is an amiable lunatic. She probably went off like a lamb and kept her nose glued to the man’s knee to drink in the lovely stink of the aniseed.’

  ‘Would it be as simple to steal a hound?’

  ‘Gracious, no. The stable yard is locked when the hounds are in at night and there is a high perimeter fence to enclose it which nobody could climb and, anyway, the hounds would gang up on him if anybody did get in.’

  ‘Could not the dog have roamed off on her own?’

  ‘We don’t see how. There is no padlock on the front gates, but Susan always shuts them after herself when she goes home at night. For once, she went to look at Sekhmet even before she came up to the house for breakfast, so we had early warning that the dog was gone.’

  ‘Is there a record of any other dogs having been stolen in your neighbourhood recently?’

  ‘Not so far as we know, but not much of the local news comes our way. In any case, I shouldn’t think the village dogs would be worth stealing. There is an Alsatian at the pub and the village poacher owns a lurcher, but I can’t imagine either of them being much of a temptation to anybody, still less that they would go off with a stranger. Sekhmet, of course, is such a trusting fool that she would go off with anybody who spoke kindly to her.’

  ‘So it was Susan, not one of yourselves, who discovered that Sekhmet had disappeared, was it?’

  ‘Yes. At this time of year she comes along not later than half-past six. She went to the shed, found it empty, looked all about and then reported to us and we all searched and called, but when Susan mentioned the smell of aniseed we thought we knew what had happened, although we couldn’t smell it in the shed.’

  When the telephone call was over, Laura said to Dame Beatrice that it was strange that Susan had gone straight to Sekhmet’s shed before breakfast. Dame Beatrice agreed, but added a rider to the effect that people did do strange things and that there was nobody more unpredictable than a more-or-less educated middle-aged spinster.

  ‘We don’t know that Susan is middle-aged,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, a former theory comes back to me. Couldn’t there be a connection between this dog-stealer, if there is one, and the mysterious prowler we’ve heard about? He taps on windows, apparently, and the Rants are too scared to go out and challenge him. Couldn’t he have been making sure that the coast would be clear for dog-stealing because the Rants would never venture out of the house at night? It seems like that to me. Anyway, I’ll give the Rants a ring after tea and ask whether Susan found Sekhmet.’

  4

  Dead in the River

  « ^ »

  When Laura made her telephone call, she was told an interesting story which was likely to last the village gossips and the frequenters of the only public house in Abbots Crozier for some time to come.

  Susan’s narrative had begun, as narratives should, at the beginning and it lost nothing in the telling or in Morpeth’s version of it which came over the telephone.

  That morning, Susan had tramped uphill by the zigzag path from Abbots Bay as usual and had found the hounds very restless. She had inspected each one and Nephthys, in particular, had seemed very unhappy. Susan let her and Isis out and although Isis only sniffed around as though she had detected some unusual aroma in the air, Nephthys made a bee-line for the garden shed.

  Susan followed, for she had never known the bitch to do such a thing before. It was im
mediately clear that Sekhmet had gone. Susan called her by her ‘calling’ name — each dog had one, since their official names were not altogether suitable by which to summon them in public. Sekhmet was called Fret. Usually she came at once and made wild demonstrations of affection even to Susan, who had no use for them, but on this occasion she did not respond to her name.

  Susan had been told about the prowler. She jumped to the conclusion that he had taken Sekhmet in mistake for a hound bitch — ‘although he can’t know much about dogs,’ she said ‘if he couldn’t tell a Labrador from a Pharaoh, even at night, when the job must have been done.’

  She took Isis and Nephthys back to the stables, shut them away and let the other hounds out into the stable yard, then she went to the front gates. They had been shut, but, as usual, not locked when she arrived. When she had heard about the prowler she had suggested a chain and padlock, but, so far, this had not materialised, for the sisters were dilatory even though they were scared.

  Susan reported up at the house, had a quick breakfast, leaving the sisters to finish theirs, and volunteered to go in search of the missing animal. She took Anubis and Amon with her, remarking before she left that if one of the dogs had to be enticed away ‘poor old Sekhmet was most easily to be spared’. She loosed her two hounds into Sekhmet’s shed, then put them in leash and sallied forth, hoping that they would be able to follow the aniseed scent.

  She had had a hunch (she told the sisters on her return) that the thief would make for Abbots Bay. From there the main road led to Axehead, where there was a railway station, but if the man had a car, he could have taken the hill road to Abbots Crozier or left the car below on the sea front. The options were open.

  Amon and Anubis ignored the entrance to the zigzag path and at first Susan thought that the smell of aniseed must have vanished in the keen morning air, and that the hounds, having nothing to guide them, were now intent on their accustomed run on the moor and were heading for their usual playground.

  This did not prove to be the case. They rejected the right-hand turning with which they were familiar and proved that they had their minds on the job after all — for, when they had led her across a bridge and had reached a wicket gate which, to Susan’s certain knowledge, they had never seen opened, they stopped, looked up at her and whined impatiently.

  ‘Good boys,’ she said. She opened the little gate and went with them on to a path beside the river. It led to one of the beauty spots of the neighbourhood and was a favourite walk for summer visitors.

  As it happened — perhaps because it was still early morning — she met nobody. She released the hounds and they took her through a wooded glade on an uphill track, which, in spite of the summer weather, was still miry underfoot in places. She followed the river, less boisterous here than it would be when it reached the top of the cliffs and cascaded noisily down to Abbots Bay, and followed the hounds, who were obviously eager in pursuit of their quarry.

  The rough path mounted and dipped and then mounted again until it reached the confluence of two streams at a very picturesque viewpoint known as Watersmeet. It looked no less beautiful, presumably, than usual, but more interesting.

  Wedged in a cleft of the rocks over which the foaming waters were pouring lay the body of a man. His head was face-down under water and he was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and briefs. On the bank was a badly ripped pair of grey flannel trousers — and Sekhmet, sitting on them.

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Susan to the hound. ‘What the bloody hell have you been up to?’ She did not touch Sekhmet, but waded into the swirling water. There was no doubt, however, that the man was dead, so she scrambled back again, gave Sekhmet a kick on the hind-quarters and said, ‘Up!’

  Sekhmet responded dutifully, but picked up the trousers in her powerful jaws and backed away with them.

  ‘Oh, suit yourself,’ said Susan. ‘Home!’ The two hounds cast around for a bit, but soon followed the woman and the Labrador. Sekhmet stumbled over the dragging trousers, but would not abandon them. Arrived back at Crozier Lodge, Susan returned the three dogs to their quarters and the last she saw of Sekhmet was a seemingly smiling and gratified animal once again seated on the trousers.

  ‘So you found her, ’ said Bryony, when Susan went up to the house.

  ‘Sure I found her. Mind if I use the phone? I found a drowned man, too. I think she took a chunk out of his trousers. He must have pulled them off and thrown them to her and then rushed into the river to get away from her. If he were still alive, I think it would be the last time he went in for dog-stealing. She brought the trousers home with her as battle honours, and if any policeman thinks he can take them away from her at present, he is welcome to try, but it would be as a memento mori, I fancy.’

  ‘If she savaged this man,’ said Morpeth, ‘I suppose she will have to be put down.’

  ‘Hold your horses!’ said Susan. ‘Let’s find out first what the police have to say. I don’t believe that silly old Fret would savage anybody. She wanted the trousers, that’s all. I think that, when the man dashed into the river to get away from her, he missed his footing — those boulders must be as slippery as hell — fell over and bashed his head.’ She went to the telephone and rang up the police at Axehead.

  An inspector and a sergeant, both in uniform, appeared in due course and Susan conducted them to the confluence of waters where the dead man lay. They had come prepared and were wearing fishermen’s waders. They slithered on the wet boulders, but retained their footing and soon had the dead man on the bank. There was a nasty disfiguring gash down one side of his face and the inspector was inclined to accept Susan’s theory that the man had dashed into the river to escape the attentions of the dog and had slipped and fallen.

  The sergeant had made an attempt to take the trousers away from Sekhmet, but she had turned so menacing and had guarded them so jealously that the inspector said, ‘Leave her be. No sense in getting our fingers bitten off. Perhaps, miss,’ (turning to Susan, who had been watching the manoeuvres with an indulgent and satirical smile) ‘you could help.’

  ‘Me?’ said the kennel-maid. ‘I can’t spare my fingers, either. She can still smell the aniseed on the trousers, I expect. Once that wears off, I can get them for you easily enough if you really want them.’

  ‘They will need to be inspected before the inquest, miss.’

  ‘All right. I’ll let you have them as soon as I can. It’s suicide to try to take them away from her while she’s in this mood.’ So the police took away the body, having ascertained that the dead man was a complete stranger to the Rant sisters — though the sisters told them about the prowler. Later in the day, Morpeth had found Sekhmet lying out in the sunshine and had taken the opportunity to remove the trousers from the shed and take them indoors.

  Here what turned out to be a significant discovery was made. A neat operation on the band of the trousers had completely removed the maker’s name.

  ‘Well, Sekhmet can’t have done that,’ said Morpeth. ‘That has been done with a sharp pair of scissors, not torn out by an enthusiastic dog.’

  ‘But why?’ asked her sister.

  ‘To disguise ownership, of course. I think he was our prowler.’

  ‘But he had no reason to think that we should ever have seen inside the waistband of his trousers. Where is Susan?’

  ‘Out with Isis and Nephthys, as usual.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Well, Amon and Anubis had their run this morning and all the excitement of tracking Sekhmet and finding the body, so that lets you out for today if you like, although I must take out my two. You might let the police know that we’ve got the trousers, although I can’t see why they should be needed at the inquest. Give Susan her tea directly she comes in and a meat pasty to take home for her supper. I’m surprised she was willing to go out again. She must have had a nasty shock when she found the dead man, so she may be very glad to get home early and turn in. Give her a bottle of the elderberry wine. She deserves it.’

  M
orpeth showed Susan the trousers when the kennel-maid came in. Susan examined the hole in the waistband and said, ‘I don’t want to put ideas into your head, but what do you think of the hole?’

  ‘What do you mean, Susan?’ asked Morpeth anxiously.

  ‘I think, for Sekhmet’s sake, the police will have to look at these trousers,’ replied Susan. ‘No dog made that hole. A piece has been cut clean out of the garment with a pair of sharp scissors.’

  ‘Well,’ said Morpeth, ‘I can tell you this: there were no scissors in the pockets when I picked the trousers up and took them from the kennel after Sekhmet lost interest in them. There was nothing in the pockets at all. As for Sekhmet, she’s probably got her nose against the wires of the stable-yard enclosure by now and is trying to attract the attention of Osiris or one of the others. She was lying asleep in the garden when I took the trousers. There was nothing else near her or in her den. That man seems to have been determined to hide his identity, but, then, if he was our prowler — ’

  ‘I don’t like the look of it,’ said Bryony, when she came home after Susan had gone off with the wine and her supper. ‘If he had no scissors or sharp knife, somebody else could have cut his trousers, although for what purpose I can’t begin to think, unless the death was not accidental. It’s a pity there was nothing in the pockets. The police love fingerprints and diaries and old letters with indecipherable postmarks.’

  ‘Well,’ said Laura to Dame Beatrice, after finishing her telephone conversation with Morpeth, ‘do we brave the same fate as Jezebel?’

  ‘Oh, what did the Rant sisters have to say?’

  ‘It appears that the ill-advised dog-thief who drenched his trousers in aniseed has now lost not only the trousers but his life. He got a nasty knock on the head and Susan, the gifted kennel-maid, tracked down him and the bitch he had walked off with and found the body.’