Say It With Flowers

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I imagined that it might.”

  “This skeleton may not have been there when my boys did their digging under the supervision of Mr. Colson, the history master. I know my boys and I cannot help thinking that, if there was a skeleton to be found, they would have found it. I should wish to visit this man Dickon forthwith and question him closely. Would you care—have you time—to accompany me?”

  “I should like it above all things. My car is just outside and my chauffeur knows the way.”

  Dickon, Dame Beatrice noted, was not overjoyed to see them. He greeted with a surly grunt the headmaster’s request to be allowed to inspect the site where the boys had done their digging, but he led the way to it. Arrived on the site he stood scowling thoughtfully at it and then said abruptly:

  “You better take the other things off my hands. I don’t fancy having things in the house as have laid beside a dead man.”

  “What things?” the headmaster enquired. “You don’t mean your finds?”

  “Ah. Some bits of money and a pot and a rare ugly old mask. When you’ve done here you might care to walk up to the ‘ouse and take a look at ‘em.”

  “Why, that’s very good of you,” said Mr. Brooker. “I should like them above all things for the school library and museum if you feel like parting with them—that is, if they are genuine, as I feel sure they are.”

  “I reckon they’re genuine all right.”

  “What do you mean, Dickon?” The headmaster exchanged glances with Dame Beatrice. “Why the emphasis?”

  “I bin turning over that there skelington in my yead, sir, and I dunno as I likes the look of it.”

  “In what sense, man?”

  Dickon sketched a gesture towards the disturbed ground which he had tidied over but which still showed signs of archæological research.

  “When I thinks,” he said impressively, adding weight to his words by making a dramatic pause in order to spit at a slug, “when I recollects of how them boys of yours—yes, and their master, too—goed to all that strenerous work and then how the young ladies as the nuns brought along done their digging as well, and then when they other two young shavers comed ‘ere, I don’t see—that I do not—how that there skelington could of laid there without bein’ found. And if it weren’t found, I says to myself, figuring of it out, if it weren’t found, it were for a very good reason.”

  “The boys and girls did not dig in the right place,” said Mr. Brooker hastily. Dickon fixed him with a ruminative eye.

  “It weren’t found because it weren’t there to be found, Mr. Brooker, sir. And if it weren’t there to be found when your boys and the young convent ladies done that there digging, then somebody—what the perlice calls person or persons onknowed—must of put it there to be found.”

  “Relentless logic, Dickon,” Dame Beatrice observed, leering at the thinker. “Strangely enough, Mr. Brooker and I came to the same conclusion and that is why we are here. Will you point out the exact place in which the skeleton lay?”

  The man indicated the spot and then asked:

  “Will I be liable to the police for having a skelington on my land?”

  “If it is a modern skeleton, as we are beginning to think that it is,” Dame Beatrice replied, “they will be here to question you, but, unless you dumped it here yourself, there is nothing for you to fear except the temporary inconvenience of their presence.”

  “I dunno, mam. Interfering sort of old nosey parkers, some of ‘em be. Tain’t likely to be Tom Parkin, down the village, you see. I reckon it’ll be some of that lot as come here from Culminster in the war to see what I was a-doin’ wi’ my pig-meat. Ah, and I reckon as how a dead man mought raise a domn sight more questions than a killed pig.”

  “Possibly,” agreed Mr. Brooker, to whom the last remark seemed to be addressed. He appeared to be preoccupied.

  “It happens to be the skeleton of a woman,” remarked Dame Beatrice. “So much was evident to me when I examined it.”

  “A woman? Be you certain sure, mam?” demanded the smallholder.

  “Dame Beatrice, among other honours, holds the degree of Doctor of Medicine,” Mr. Brooker pointed out, adding immediately, “A woman! Well, of all things!”—a disingenuous observation which did not escape the notice of Dame Beatrice.

  “Whose skull was split by a heavy implement or tool, possibly of agricultural origin, such as a slasher,” she added.

  “You don’t accuse me of using a slasher on some poor woman, mam?”

  “Do you possess a slasher?”

  “You must keep your ‘edges trimmed up.”

  “Let me see it, please.”

  Her tone of authority was such that Dickon did not show the slightest resentment. He went off, without a word, and returned in less than ten minutes with the heavy, sharp implement. Dame Beatrice fished out a pocket magnifying glass and then, with a gloved hand, took the slasher from him. After a silence, during which Dickon seemed not to breathe, she handed it back with the remark:

  “Has anyone borrowed it within the past four or five years?”

  “Not onless mother lended it out without my knowledge, mam, and that’s a most onlikely thing. I’ve never knowed her lend out my tools. Have something to say if I ketch her at it.”

  Dame Beatrice and Mr. Brooker returned to the school.

  “A slasher?” said the headmaster. “Good heavens! Did you notice,” he added, “that, by implication, two of my boys dug up the site on their own initiative?”

  “They are hardly likely to have planted a corpse there, you know,” Dame Beatrice observed, with the leer which often served her instead of a smile. “And the slasher appears to be guiltless of human gore.”

  “Quite. A bit of investigation is indicated, though, I fancy. Let me see . . . if my memory serves me, it was Mr. Colson’s form who went to Dickon’s place to dig. Mr. Colson’s form . . . yes. Let us see what light he can throw on matters, shall we?”

  Mr. Colson could throw no light on matters at all, for Mr. Peters was staunch and, having put himself in a position where he could be blackmailed, had kept faith with Simon and Andrew and had allowed their sin to revert to the limbo which had sponsored it.

  The headmaster, however, was experienced and tenacious. He sent for the form, boy by boy, to the consternation of the young and the annoyance of their form-master, who, although he occasionally bullied them for their good and for the sake of preserving law and order, had that other attribute of the trained sheep-dog, a real sense of the dignity and righteousness of his work. More humanly speaking, he did not hesitate to revile and castigate his boys in the privacy of the form-room, but he had the strongest objection to anyone else criticising or punishing them.

  The headmaster, he reflected gloomily, surveying the uneasy expressions on the unfurrowed faces before him, as boy after boy was sent for and came back to sit in deathly silence, was within his rights, he supposed, in tracking some miscreant down, but he could not help hoping that the enquiry, whatever it was concerned with, would come to a dead end.

  As it happened, only about half of the form had been sent for when the headmaster came into the form-room. He inspected the serious faces.

  “Stand up, any boy who missed the last film show.”

  Neither Andrew nor Simon, so far, had been sent for. Both, after an agonised glance at the other, stood up.

  “There seems to be a conspiracy of silence on a matter of some importance,” went on the headmaster. “Come to my room, you two.” He swept out, in all the dignity of his gown and hood, but the wretched children following him caught the heartening whisper of the young Charles as they passed the end desk in the front row:

  “Stick it out! Nobody ratted,”

  “What was that, Charles?” asked Mr. Colson, as soon as the form-room door was shut.

  “Please, sir, nothing, sir.”

  “Who ratted?”

  “Please, sir, nobody, sir.”

  “What was there to rat about? I suppose Andrew and Simo
n went off on a toot instead of attending the film show?”

  “Well, sir,” said Raymond, “Mr. Peters knows about it, sir, so I don’t think there can be trouble, sir.”

  “Mr. Peters?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said several voices, simultaneously. “Mr. Peters knows all about it, sir, so it’s bound to be quite all right, sir.”

  “Hm!” said Mr. Colson, who knew that Mr. Peters’ lack of experience was apt to make him as clay in the hands of the inevitably unscrupulous young. “Oh, does he, indeed! Well, open your books and read the third chapter. Expect questions—everybody!”

  “Written answers, sir?”

  “Written answers and no hornswoggling.”

  In Mr. Brooker’s room, Sysko and Saintso found an old friend, Dame Beatrice of the Stone House. She leered lovingly at them.

  “So these are the arch-detectives,” she said.

  “Attend to Dame Beatrice, and be sure to answer her fully,” Mr. Brooker commanded them. “There may be no reason to punish you, but you must satisfy her completely—completely, mind!”

  Having said this, he nodded sternly at them, went out, and closed the door.

  “So there was no skeleton at the feast,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “It wasn’t so much a feast—seed cake, in fact. Jolly good, though,” said Simon.

  “But no skeleton, no,” said Andrew. Dame Beatrice took them through the whole of the exploit.

  “So you had formed your plan, and decided to take Andrew with you, before the last lesson, but you did not disclose the plan or issue the invitation until tea-time?” she said to Simon, at the end.

  “That’s quite right, yes.”

  “And you yourself went nowhere near Mr. Dickon’s land, once you had come away from it with Mr. Colson and the rest of your form, until you returned to it with Andrew on the afternoon of which we have been speaking?”

  “Cross my heart I didn’t—no.”

  “You have been of considerable assistance to my researches. Off you go. Here!” She produced a pound note. “Is that sufficient to provide extra calories for yourselves and your form-mates?”

  Meanwhile Mr. Colson had buttonholed Mr. Peters as soon as both were relieved of their duties by the sound of the bell.

  “Peters, you young ass,” said Mr. Colson, beginning genially as was his wont when he thought that perhaps he would be obliged to end on a rather different note, “what the devil d’you mean by suborning my form? The Man sent for them one by one just now, and they tell me that you know all about it. Come clean.”

  “Why, yes, that’s about right, I suppose. What’s been found out? Am I to be matted?”

  “I’ve no idea. Dish out the gen and I might be able to tell you.”

  Mr. Peters dished out the gen.

  “Golly!” said Mr. Colson, who could see as far through a plateglass window as the next man. “That blasted skeleton! Planted! And after the place had already been dug over! What do you know! Peters, my lad, this is big stuff. The village will be front-page news tomorrow!”

  * * *

  *Taken from the interim report of September, 1957. G.M.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1950 plus—and All That

  “. . .to confirm and establish our opinions, “tis best to argue with judgments below our own.”

  Ibid (Section 6)

  * * *

  CONFIDENT that Dame Beatrice could extract from Simon and Andrew any information which they had in their possession, Mr. Brooker got out his car and again drove to Dickon’s smallholding.

  Dickon was “down the pigs,” he was told by Mrs. Dickon who, at the moment, had no company but that of the baby and the dog. Alfie, in deadly terror (owing to his mother’s lurid descriptions of the life which awaited him at school), had fled to the outside privy as soon as he spotted the car, and had bolted himself inside it, thus failing to form one of Mr. Brooker’s audience.

  The headmaster nodded, tickled the baby under the chin, received from her a bleak stare, thanked Mrs. Dickon, and strode down the narrow ribbon of trampled earth which the Dickons called a garden path and found his quarry smoking a ruminative pipe and leaning on the sty of his favourite sow.

  Dickon removed the pipe, pushed back his hat—a gesture which could have conveyed either respect or embarrassment and which was, as it happened, a slightly uneasy mixture of the two—and nodded a greeting. He was at no loss to guess the nature of the errand which had brought Mr. Brooker to the smallholding.

  “More trouble about them there bones as Mr. Colson took away, I reckon, sir,” he said.

  Mr. Brooker shook his head.

  “Not more trouble; just the same trouble, Dickon,” he said. “But I’m afraid I have come to ask you a few questions.”

  “Well, Mr. Brooker, sir, as I says before, what I looks at is this: was that there skelington a ancient monument, or was it honest ‘uman bones and of scientific interest, as you might say, to the police? That’s what I still wants to know, with all respect to Dame Beatrice and yourself.”

  “An interesting point, Dickon. It is most interesting that you should have doubted from the first whether the skeleton was that of—shall we say?—a Roman Briton.”

  “Stands to reason I should doubt it, Mr. Brooker, sir. As I says before, if they little lads of yourn and the young ladies from the convent and then they two boys what Mr. Colson sent along on their own—if they didn’t find yon skelington where vicar and ‘is London friends dug it up, well, what I says, again and again, is that that there skelington weren’t there to be found.”

  “I quite agreed with you the first time, if you remember. But what follows?”

  “What follows is that the skelington were planted ‘ere, and I wants to know for why. Vicar and them friends of his turns up when nobody could of expected them, I knows, but lookin’ for a road, ‘em was, not skelingtons. If your little lads were older, I’d feel inclined to think they done it for a joke.”

  “I wonder,” said the headmaster, “whether it was the vicar or whether it was his guests who chose to dig here?”

  “It were vicar. I be certain sure o’ that.”

  “That is interesting. Have you any enemies, Dickon? Is there anybody who might wish to embarrass you, or even harm you in any way?”

  “Not as fur as I knows on. Keep meself pretty much to meself, I reckon, and the missus don’t give no offence nowhere.”

  “You see, there doesn’t seem the slightest reason to have buried the skeleton on your land if it was to be dug up and discovered so soon.”

  “I reckon whoever planted it on me never reckoned on vicar and his friends digging here again. That’s why I said as how, if your boys had been older, and them knowing how much digging had been done a’ready . . .”

  “Yes, yes, but, as you quite rightly point out, my boys are mere children.”

  “Of course, some of ’em is all of thirteen years, sir. One on ‘em might ‘ave a brother a medical stoodent or such . . .”

  “I shall institute the most stringent enquiries, of course, but I am convinced in my own mind that no such thing has happened. I do take your point, though, that whoever buried the thing—the—er—the cadaver—could not have expected that the same piece of ground would be excavated again so soon. That was why I asked whether you had ill-wishers. It looks like somebody from the immediate locality, doesn’t it?”

  “Put like that, sir, it most certainly do.”

  “One more question, Dickon. The two boys who came here after tea that evening. Did you supervise them while they were here?”

  “Can’t say I did, sir. I understood they come with permission from the school, and I didn’t see as they could do any ‘arm, so I leaves my boy Alfie with ‘em for part of the time, being as I were busy and the wife were out, and, when I come back ‘ere, I took young Alfie orf to feed the pigs and left your two boys to get on as long as they wanted.”

  “May I speak to Alfred?”

  “He’s gone a
nd locked himself in the closet, but I’ll get him out if you warnt to speak to ‘im.”

  Lurid threats brought a fearful and tearful Alfie to talk to Mr. Brooker, but there was nothing to be learned from him of anything having been dug up on the site by Simon and Andrew. Mr. Brooker returned to the house with Dickon to receive the mask and the pot which had been promised him. Having been given them, he gazed benevolently at the smallholder.

  “I am delighted to have them for the school museum,” he said. “At least, they’re not bones, even if they’re not genuine, you know.”

  “Bones!” said Dickon, in a sepulchral tone, “It’s our framework, sir, is bones. ‘The bare bones of an argyment,’ they says. ‘The bone of contention,’ they says. ‘Why make so many bones about it?’ they says. ‘Boney,’ they calls Napoleon, although, so far as I am aweer, Napoleon was a well-covered man. ‘Bone in my leg,’ they says, when they don’t want to stir their stumps to play with their kids. ‘Bone to pick,’ they says, when they intends to differ with ee and bring ee to book. Ah, there be no end—no end—to bones, sir.”

  “And you have ‘boned’ most of your sayings from common English usage, Dickon,” said the headmaster, with a smile. “Your examples are most apt.”

  “ ‘Let’s ‘ave the tongs and the bones,’ ” quoted Dickon, surprisingly. “I done William Shakespeare at school, sir. Bones! ‘Of thy bones are corals made.’ ”

  “Shall we go to my car and install my treasure trove?” asked Mr. Brooker, cutting short this flood of erudition. Dickon assented and the pottery was soon safely installed in the headmaster’s car.

  “And glad Mother ‘ull be to be rid of the things, sir,” said Dickon. “Soon as her heered o’ that skelington, so soon her assured me as ‘ow no good luck ‘ud ever come of it. ‘Mark my words,’ ‘er says, ‘us can bid good-bye to all comfort and cheerfulness,’ ‘er says, ‘for months, and maybe years,’ ‘er says.”

  “Dear, dear,” said Mr. Brooker. “Well, I must be on my way. My very good wishes to your wife and—er—thank you very much for the treasures.”