The Crozier Pharaohs mb-66

by Gladys Mitchell

  Her complete independence, however, she did not abandon, for she felt, wisely, no doubt, that some of Dr Rant’s imperiousness had been bred into Bryony and that to maintain a certain amount of apartheid from the sisters was the policy to be followed. The arrangement suited all three. The sisters were happy to have Crozier Lodge to themselves each evening and Susan’s help was invaluable when they first took on the Pharaoh hounds. Susan retained her own little home and steadfastly refused any money payment for her services, though the sisters insisted on feeding her.

  All this came out in Susan’s story and so did the explanation of her suspect activities on the morning of the Watersmeet death and her subsequent refusal to disclose to the police where she had been before she showed up at Crozier Lodge and found that Sekhmet was missing.

  ‘What made you go to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house?’ Dame Beatrice had asked. ‘Such was not your custom, was it?’

  ‘I have a keener sense of smell than either of the Rants,’ Susan had replied, ‘and I detected the smell of aniseed the moment I got inside the gates. I went straight to the stable yard, but the hounds were all right, although, of course, very restless and excited because they could smell the aniseed, too, so then I thought I had better check on Sekhmet. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to steal her, but Morpeth valued her and it was no secret that the Rants had money, so Morpeth might have offered quite a sizeable reward to get the dog back. That was the way I reasoned.’

  ‘That won’t quite do,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You have nothing to lose by being frank with me. Let us forget the aniseed and come to what you were doing before you reached Crozier Lodge.’

  The rest of Susan’s story had followed. It was some weeks after she had joined Bryony and Morpeth that she encountered the poacher Adams, and it was not until Bryony mentioned his name and remarked how useful it was when he brought along rabbits for the hounds that she realised the poacher’s name was the same as that which she had been made to abandon when the vicar and his wife adopted her.

  ‘They wanted me to feel that I was their very own daughter,’ Susan said, ‘and that I would be proud to take their name. I don’t know about being proud,’ she added, addressing Laura rather than Dame Beatrice, ‘but it gave me a feeling of safety which was heaven after feeling so lost. They treated us quite well at the Home, but it was impersonal, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel as though you belonged anywhere and my brother and I were separated, I thought for ever, once I was adopted and went to live at the vicarage, and we never met after that until the day I first opened the back door to him at Abbots Crozier. He didn’t know who I was then, and he doesn’t now. I have never told him I am his sister. Snobbishness, I suppose, but not everybody wants to claim relationship with the village poacher. But every now and then, when my bit of interest comes in, I buy him a shirt or a jacket or trousers from a jumble sale. That’s where I was that morning, taking him a lovely wool shirt that I had picked up the previous week. He may be a poacher and perhaps a bit of a thief, but he’s a decent man and I like to think I’ve got somebody belonging to me, even if they themselves don’t know it.’

  ‘Well, I am deeply affected by this artless tale,’ said Dame Beatrice briskly and without irony, ‘but it does not explain, so far as I am concerned, a point of some importance. What did you do when you found that Adams was not at home when you called?’

  ‘I guessed he was out rabbiting. I had plenty of time before I needed to show up at Crozier Lodge and I wanted to give him my present personally, so I hung about on the moor until he came back. It wasn’t all that long to wait. I gave him the shirt but asked him to say nothing about it to anybody — ’

  ‘Did he never wonder why you offered him these kindnesses?’

  ‘He thought they were because I had been brought up in a vicarage and was accustomed to doing acts of charity. We never wrote to one another after we were separated, as I told you, so, although I suppose he had heard I was not the vicar’s own child, he had no idea that I was his sister because of the change of name.’

  ‘So, when you met him that morning, he told you that he had left the rabbits in the postbox and that somebody had walked off with Sekhmet,’ said Laura. ‘Simple, when you know the answer. So that’s why you went straight to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell the police what you had done and where you had been, instead of letting them suspect you and search your cottage?’

  ‘She has answered that,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She did not want a connection made between her and Adams.’

  ‘I should have told them if things had got worse for me,’ said Susan. ‘I was pretty badly scared when they did search the cottage and found that ridiculous hat. I knew then what I had suspected all along.’

  ‘That the man in the river had been murdered?’

  ‘Oh, I had had my suspicions before that. Nobody could have got that deep gash in his head from slipping and hitting his head on one of those rounded boulders. It wasn’t so much the police I was scared of. It was the murderer. Nobody else could have palmed off that silly hat on me. He must have spied on me at Watersmeet, I think, and that’s a horrible thought.’

  ‘How much of her story is true, do you suppose?’ asked Laura later. Dame Beatrice shook her head.

  ‘We can check a good deal of it with Adams without giving away his relationship to Susan, since she is sensitive about that.’

  ‘Don’t you think he has put two and two together by now?’

  ‘That is more than likely. Several points in her story are inconsistent. Susan is not very good at deceit. What I do think is that a shop in Axehead has found a fine woollen shirt missing from its stock. Such items are expensive and I think would be beyond the reach of Susan’s purse.’

  ‘You don’t mean she nicked it!’

  ‘She felt that the end justified the means, no doubt. I have heard that the Jesuits hold similar views, although they do not express them by stealing woollen shirts from haberdashers.’

  ‘Anyway, if the rest of the story is true, we know where she went that morning and why she went to Sekhmet’s kennel before going to the house, so those are two niggling little points cleared up, not that they matter, but I do hate unsolved mysteries and one can’t do with them in a case of murder, ’ said Laura. ‘Shall you go and see Adams?’

  ‘Not at present and perhaps not at all. And now, to play havoc with the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, where shall I find a skeely sculptor to model this head of mine?’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘No. The head of the man found in the river. The police photographed it full-face and in profile. It will be hard if we cannot find somebody to model him, taking, we’ll say, three years off his age and restoring his appearance to what it was before he was attacked so brutally.’

  ‘So you do know who the Watersmeet man was?’

  ‘Dear me, no, but from a bow drawn at a venture the arrow sometimes finds a rare and valuable quarry.’

  14

  Full Marks For Artistic Impression

  « ^ »

  Signor Tussordiano,’ said Laura, looking up from her crossword puzzle that evening after they had spoken with Susan.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘That waxworks man who used to travel the fairs with all those heads of murderers. The police arrested him because they thought he had killed his wife, but you proved it was a drunken lion-tamer with whom she was having an affair.’

  ‘Dear me, yes, but how do you know? You were not with me then.’

  ‘No, I was teaching a class of forty wary-skulled young ladies who were only killing time until they were old enough to leave school, poor perishers. I wonder why headmistresses always give the rottenest class to the newest recruit? Anyway, old Tusso would model that head for you and be glad to do it. I’ll put matters in train to track him down, shall I? Gavin will kno
w who keeps the tabs on these people. What’s the good of having a husband at Scotland Yard if one can’t make use of him? Anyway, to answer your question, after you left Cartaret College, which was alleged to train teachers and failed signally, so far as I was concerned, to carry out its function, I followed your career with avid interest. If it isn’t a rude answer, why did you pick me for your dogsbody when the other one left to get married?’

  Dame Beatrice considered the question and then said that she did not know. She returned to the point at issue. ‘Signor Tussordiano?’ she said. ‘But what an excellent idea!’

  ‘We like to earn our salary. OK, then, I’ll get busy. One thing about Tusso, he won’t ask any questions you don’t want to answer.’

  The exhibitor of waxwork heads was a white-haired old gentleman with the innocent eyes which Dame Beatrice associated with jewel thieves and the sellers of shares in bogus oil wells and copper mines. However, Signor Tussordiano was almost as innocent as he looked. His real name was Pugh and he was apt to talk nostalgically of what he referred to as ‘the valley’, although actually he had been born in Deptford and had never been further west than St Giles’s Fair in Oxford, and that was in his early boyhood when his uncle had first taken him on the road.

  Laura had been right, on the whole, when she had stated that he would ask no awkward questions. He did put one query to Dame Beatrice when she told him what she hoped he could do for her.

  ‘Murderer?’ he asked eagerly, when she showed him the photographs. ‘One for my collection?’

  ‘Murdered, we think, not a murderer,’ she replied. ‘I hope, with your expert help, to get him identified, and that, perhaps, will lead us to the killer.’

  ‘Nice big pictures,’ he said, spreading out the newspaper. ‘You can make out the underlying bone structure and that’s what matters. These photos would be about a quarter natural size, I reckon. Call back in a week and I’ll have summat for you. I’ll have to charge you for the materials, but, seeing what you done for me in the past, I’ll do the work free. I s’pose I couldn’t ’ave the ’ead when you’ve done with it? Then when you’ve cotched the murderer I can model his head as well and set ’em up side by side.’

  ‘Certainly you may have it.’ So the bargain was struck. Dame Beatrice advanced the money the old man said he would need and she and Laura returned to the Stone House. It had been agreed that the modeller would telephone when the head was ready. Dame Beatrice had been to Crozier Lodge to obtain details of the dead man’s colouring with regard to hair and eyes, and she had checked with the police to make certain that Susan’s memory was not at fault. Inspector Burfield, who had been the officer responsible for having the body removed from the river, had confirmed Susan’s description, but added that, as the man’s head had been more or less submerged when he was found, his hair was probably not so dark as Susan had described it. ‘More mid-brown than nearly black’ was the inspector’s emendation of her description.

  ‘So you’ve given the old chap an idea, ’ said Laura. ‘I like the thought of setting a murderer’s head side by side with that of his victim. His collection doesn’t go further back than Crippen and his dissected wife with the operation scar, but he can do Emily Kaye to pair up with Patrick Mahon and one of those unfortunate females to team with Neill Cream.’

  ‘You show a regrettable and ghoulish relish for your theme. I shall be interested to see what Signor Tussordiano produces for us.’

  When she was shown the modelled head, Dame Beatrice was doubtful whether her plan would work. She was presented with the bust of a young man which appeared to have no connection whatever with the photographs she had supplied to Tussordiano. The dead man’s eyes had been staring and wide open. Those of the model were open in the normal way and one had a slight cast in it. The mouth in the photograph was also open, as though the man had been in the act of saying something — to the bitch Sekhmet, most likely — when he was struck down. The side of his face that had been shattered had been completely reconstructed in the model; the lips were slightly parted and the modeller had given the immature face a leering expression which, together with the cast in the left eye, gave the viewer anything but a pleasing impression of the subject’s character.

  ‘In fact,’ said Laura, ‘if you were told that this was the murderer instead of the murderee, you could well believe it.’

  ‘Yes, hardly a prepossessing countenance,’ agreed Dame Beatrice. However disappointing the first result of her experiment seemed to be, she decided to carry out her plan. She had the painted waxwork photographed in colour and from various angles before she returned it, as promised, to Tussordiano and then began her quest for information about the somewhat repulsive-looking youth which the photographs portrayed. Laura had supposed that George, the reliable chauffeur and general handyman, would be handed copies of the pictures to take to the Crozier Arms and the public houses in Axehead, and she was surprised when Dame Beatrice did not avail herself of George’s services, but told Laura to drive her to Castercombe.

  It was a handsome town founded by the Romans on four crossroads much after the pattern of Cirencester. It went one better than the Cotswold town in that it had acquired under the Normans a cathedral in place of Cirencester’s memorable parish church of St John the Baptist with its gloriously over-ornate south porch and magnificent fifteenth-century tower; and Castercombe had a covered market in place of the open square in the town centre at Cirencester.

  Laura asked no questions. She possessed the Highlander’s courteous but almost instinctive dislike of enquiring into other people’s business or motives. When her college friend, Kitty Trevelyan, had enquired the reason for this reticence, Laura had replied that what you did not know, you did not have to do anything about. This reply, Laura remembered with a non-Presbyterian grin, had shocked the High Anglican Kitty, who had demanded, ‘But, Dog, don’t you have any sort of a conscience?’

  ‘Can’t afford one,’ Laura had responded. ‘Your lot may be the Conservative Party at prayer, but our lot were brought up to quote Dr Johnson.’

  ‘As how? All he said was that the lady smelt and he stank. I shouldn’t have thought that was the sort of remark you made in Early Victorian drawing-rooms.’

  ‘In eighteenth-century drawing-rooms, ducky.’

  ‘Well, what about what he said about your lot?’

  ‘You ought to be made to analyse and parse that observation. Anyway, he asked where else would you find such horses and such men. He was talking about oats.’

  ‘Wild ones?’

  ‘No, fathead, the kind you eat.’

  ‘Well, even those you have to sow, I suppose,’ Kitty had said, ‘so it comes to the same thing in the end.’

  ‘Dear old Kitty,’ thought Laura nostalgically, as she took the one-in-four gradient down the Axehead hill into Abbots Bay and then followed the coast road to Castercombe. ‘Made a fortune in the hairdressing and the fashion businesses, and married a rich man into the bargain. He adored her and her idiocy and maintains that she was his inspiration. Who says fools don’t prosper?’

  Having parked the car in one of the marked spaces in what had been the old marketplace in Castercombe, she waited for further instructions.

  ‘Half-past one,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Lunch, I think. You must be famished, as we breakfasted so early. Did I not perceive a likely-looking hostelry as we turned into this square? Would you care to walk over to it and find out whether they can put a table at our disposal?’

  Lunch over, she produced her photographs and displayed them to the receptionist. The girl said she had only lived in the town for a year, so Dame Beatrice asked if there was anyone on the staff of the hotel who had been living or working there at least three years previously. She added that the subject of the pictures was unlikely to have been a guest staying at the hotel, but that somebody on the staff might have known him if that person had been resident in the town.

  ‘Try Fred in the cocktail lounge,’ said the girl. ‘He’s been here longes
t.’ She looked appraisingly at Dame Beatrice’s eccentric but obviously expensive clothes and at Laura’s well-cut summer suit and asked, ‘Come into a fortune, has he, this young fellow?’

  Dame Beatrice cackled, thanked the girl and made for the cocktail lounge with her photographs. Here she ordered two brandies and asked the elderly barman what he would have. His was a small port in which he pledged the ladies’ health. Dame Beatrice asked him if he had ever known the young man in the pictures which she handed to him. He looked at them carefully, but shook his head.

  ‘Not without he worked for Parrish’s the chemist,’ he said. ‘I might have seen him in there, if I recollect. I’ll tell you who would likely know for sure, and that’s my brother Bert, as keeps a do-it-yourself shop in Paternoster Way, along by the cathedral. Always in and out of the chemist’s in his younger days owing to suffering with his stomach. Then he got Christian Science and give up the physic. About four or five year ago, you say. Ah, well, now, if anybody would recognise them pictures, Bert would. Ask for Mr Smallwood if his assistant’s minding the counter. They close for dinner-time, but he’ll be open again by now and most likely having his after-dinner snooze while the assistant runs the shop. There ain’t much doing in his line in the early afternoons. His trade is mostly on Saturdays and in the evenings when chaps come by on their way home from work.’

  The cathedral was so much of a landmark that Dame Beatrice and Laura found Paternoster Way without difficulty. Laura opened the door of the do-it-yourself shop and saw that it was in the charge of a young man wearing a brown overall. She came out and reported that brother Bert was not visible, so was probably sleeping off his lunch.

  ‘Then we will not disturb him for a while,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I want him to be in sunny mood when I show him the photographs. We will visit the cathedral. I admire large, gloomy buildings erected to the glory of God and as a passport to heaven for those who built, paid for and maintain them.’