Say It With Flowers

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Bit of luck if he can. Good thing it’s a private hire service and not a taxi rank.”

  “It is a very small business, so the porter tells me—just a man and his son. Which one we get hardly matters, as he is certain to know the route the other took.”

  “Yes, and Phlox and Marigold are not people you would forget or get mixed up with anybody else. When do we start?”

  “As soon as the man can get here. Of course, both cars may be out.”

  The porter came up at that moment to inform Dame Beatrice that the car would be outside the hotel in a quarter of an hour’s time. If he wondered why the owner of a chauffeur-driven Jaguar should choose to hire a car for her excursions, he did not betray the fact. He merely stated that Dame Beatrice would find Game a reliable man and a safe driver.

  Game drove up at the appointed time and said he understood that the ladies wanted to see the Roman Wall.

  “Some people we met had you to drive them. This would have been some weeks ago. We should wish to follow the same route.”

  “I always take the same route, madam. Percy Street, Newgate Street, Clayton Street, Westgate Street, and we’re on the road to Shield, which is the best starting place to see the Wall. I drop people at Shield if they like walking, and they can take the footpath to Greenhead and see pretty nearly all there is to see of the Wall itself. But if people don’t want a twelve-mile walk—and there’s plenty that don’t—well, you can walk out and back and I pick you up again where I set you down.”

  “What did Mr. and Mrs. Carmichael do?”

  “Oh, they paid me off at Shield and said they should very likely put up somewhere for the night.”

  Dame Beatrice did not comment on this statement, but she heard a suppressed groan from Laura. If the car had been paid off at Shield and the Carmichaels had gone on by foot, there seemed little chance of tracing their subsequent movements. The twenty-seven-mile journey to Shield was accomplished in just under an hour, for Game was convinced, apparently, that his passengers were interested in seeing as much of the countryside as they could. He pointed out, with enthusiasm, the fragments of the Wall to be seen at Denton Burn and Hedden-on-the-Wall, the site of Vindobala and Hunnum, and gave their later names of Rutchester and Halton Chesters. At Stagshawbank he insisted upon stopping the car and handing his passengers out to admire the extensive views. At Chesters he turned them out again to see the excavated site of Cilurnum and the collection of Roman antiquities in the lodge. After this, Laura struck. She resolutely declined to get out of the car at Carrawburgh to see the site of Procolitia, so Game rather sadly covered the succeeding two miles and pulled up at Shield-on-the-Wall.

  From here the Wall strode over basaltic cliffs and the views were of great extent and sombre beauty. Laura, who was fond of walking, decided to tackle the twelve-mile stretch of footpath to Greenhead station, where the car would pick her up. Dame Beatrice, desiring the car to wait for an hour, accompanied her as far as the National Trust property of Barcovicus, near Housesteads, then she returned and Laura went on alone.

  Laura did not stop to visit the small museum, but, having taken leave of her employer, she set off for the near-by mile-castle, which she did stop to admire, and then she turned aside to visit the Northumbrian Lakes, bleakly set in a landscape of desolate beauty. It was here that she encountered a shepherd. Such, at any rate, she judged him to be (although there were no sheep to be seen) from the appearance and slinking gait of his dog.

  Laura passed the time of day cheerily and was striding on when she realised that the man was addressing her. She stopped and turned, but even an ear attuned to the cadences and peculiarities of the many and various Scottish dialects could make nothing of his strange Northumbrian vowels.

  “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head and smiling, “I don’t get it.”

  The shepherd raised his notched blackthorn and pointed.

  “Comprenez-vous le français?” he demanded.

  “Oui, parfaitement, monsieur.”

  “Puis, on dit qu’il faut avoir un témoin.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  “Venez.”

  “Non. Les heures courent. Je me dépêche.”

  She turned from the shepherd and hurried away. When she glanced back she saw that he had waylaid two young men who also, it seemed, had planned to walk the Wall.

  Laura had more than her share of curiosity. It was one thing to walk off by herself into the wilds of Northumbria with a middle-aged man whose English was unintelligible but whose French was readily comprehensible; it was quite another, to her mind, when safety through numbers presented itself. She turned and ran back to where she had left the shepherd.

  “What does he say?” she asked, when she came level with the trio.

  “He wants a witness.”

  “Yes, so he told me. What for?”

  “He says there’s a dead body about a couple of miles from here.”

  “Why does he want a witness?”

  “He seems to think somebody else ought to see it. We’d better go along with him, I suppose. Are you walking over to Greenhead?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “So are we. If you care to wait . . .”

  “Oh, I’m coming with you to see the body.”

  “Hardly that. Not very nice for a woman.”

  “It’s no nicer for men, and I’m quite accustomed to bodies.” She turned to the shepherd.

  “Allons, monsieur,” she said. He led the party by a track which they could scarcely make out, but which seemed as clear to him as the open road, beside a lake and across the wild moor to a riven copse of stunted silver birches and gorse bushes.

  “We arrive, it seems,” said one of the young men. Laura, guided by who knows what premonition vouchsafed her by her Highland ancestry, parted the thorny shrubs of gorse and peered in as though she knew exactly the position in which the corpse was lying.

  “Here she is,” she said. The young men crammed forward.

  “Don’t touch it!” said one, looking with horror and disgust at the lifeless, pathetic body.

  “Not on your life!” said the other. Laura said:

  “I think I recognise her. Look here, this is more serious than I can very well explain. I must get back to Newcastle at once.” She broke into a run and did not relax until she was certain that the others were not following her. Scarcely knowing how she did it, she found her way back to the footpath which led to the highest land on which the Wall was built. She paused to look neither at mile-castles nor turrets, but made the best time she could to Great Chesters and then tackled the broken cliffs of basaltic rock, the Nine Nicks of Thirlwall, and forced the pace past Magna, the modern Carvoran, to the station at Greenhead.

  “I don’t know what we’d better do,” she said, seating herself beside Dame Beatrice and accepting a heartening drink of rum and coffee poured from a thermos flask, “but the sooner we’re back in Newcastle and at the police station, the better.”

  “Drink, and then the man can start the car. You have come far and, it appears to me, much too fast. Relax for five minutes. Even the news of another murder will keep for as long as that.”

  Laura finished the drink and handed back the cup.

  “How on earth did you guess?” she asked. Dame Beatrice shrugged.

  “Your feverish manner told its own tale,” she said. She pulled open the communicating window between the back seat and the driver. “Back to the hotel, and at the roundest pace you can achieve,” she said. “To save time is now important.” She closed the aperture. “And now?” she said to Laura. Laura described her experiences.

  “What makes you think it was murder?” Dame Beatrice asked.

  “It seems to me that it stands to reason. Why should a woman who’s stayed more than once in our vicarage at Wandles be found dead on a Northumbrian moor when, according to Veronica Pierce, she left to go to America?”

  “Miss Beads?”

  “Hilary Beads. Or so I think. She’s a bit decayed. And don’
t let’s forget that she was only the second—no, the third—person to be shown Dickon’s Roman finds.”

  “Well, well! It will be a good thing when we are back in Newcastle, although, by then, the police may have received the news over the telephone.”

  This did not prove to be the case. Laura’s story was the first report the police had received. They wrote down her statement and read it over to her. She agreed that it was correct, but was not asked to sign it. The officer pointed out, very kindly, but with north-country bluntness, that they had yet to prove that matters were as she had given them to understand. Not that they disbelieved her, he explained, but they had to satisfy themselves that her story was true. She gave him her address in the city and, to her amusement, before he let her go, he solemnly rang up the Grand and confirmed that she was indeed staying there.

  Laura returned to the hotel and to Dame Beatrice, and said that she supposed she would have to prolong her stay until after the inquest. This being so, Dame Beatrice returned alone to the Stone House to receive a piece of information which appeared to confirm Laura’s view that the body in Northumberland was indeed that of Hilary Beads. There was a short note awaiting her. It came from Veronica Pierce, who said that she and the vicar were perturbed to learn that the aunt whom Hilary Beads had promised to visit before her departure for America had not set eyes on her niece at all. Further, the aunt had received a cable from the American friends with whom Hilary had been going to stay, enquiring whether Hilary had changed her plans, as she had not turned up there, either.

  Dame Beatrice, who had broken her long journey and stayed the night with friends in Salisbury whom she had long promised to visit, arrived home in plenty of time to go round to the vicarage as soon as she had read Veronica’s note. She was shown the aunt’s letter.

  “Of course, we’ve written off to say that Hilary cut short her stay with us by three days in order to visit her aunt,” said Veronica, “and that she left us after tea on the Wednesday and that Gascony drove her to the station with the light luggage she had brought with her. Her heavy baggage, of course, had gone straight to Southampton.”

  “I wonder whether it was put on board the liner she should have travelled on?” said the vicar, who was also present.

  “If events followed their normal course, it should have been,” said Dame Beatrice. “Presumably the light luggage you mention would have been sufficient for the few days’ trip across the Atlantic and the heavy baggage would have been stowed away in the baggage-room in the hold of the vessel. Nobody checks whether the passenger is actually on board when the crane picks up its net.”

  “What about the New York end?” asked Veronica.

  “Presumably the heavy baggage would be unloaded from the hold in the same way and transferred to the Customs sheds,” said her husband. “I suppose we had better get on to the shipping people to find out which cabin she was to have occupied and whether her light luggage was delivered to it.”

  “That task might be better left in official hands,” said Dame Beatrice. “If you like, I will take the necessary steps through Laura’s husband. He will know exactly what to do and whom to contact.”

  The Pierces thankfully left the matter to her and she returned to the Stone House to ring up Gavin. She told him of Laura’s gruesome find in Newcastle and then gave him the news about Hilary Beads’ aunt. He promised to obtain the information she wanted, and added that Laura was a pest.

  “There’s one thing,” he said. “If this aunt is the nearest relative, she’ll have to buzz up to Newcastle and identify the body formally. It can’t be left to Laura.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Riddle of the Beads

  “. . . whose effects we may foretel without an Oracle: to foreshew these, is not Prophecie, but Prognostication.”

  Ibid (Section 17)

  * * *

  THE body had been brought in by the police, whom Laura accompanied to the spot where she had seen it. It had been photographed, examined by the police medical officer, its pockets turned out and a search instituted for other tangible clues. Laura saw nothing of these interesting but abortive exertions, for, the moment she had shown the police the body, she was hurried back to a car by the police matron and driven straight to the police station, where the kindly woman insisted upon giving her a cup of strong tea. Thus, until the inquest, which was held two days later, Laura remained unaware of a salient fact.

  From the investigation which was made on the spot, one interesting and irritating fact emerged. There was nothing on or about the corpse itself to betray the identity of the dead woman. Apart from a Newcastle bus ticket, which had worked its way into the slightly torn lining of a jacket pocket, and two sixpences and a half-penny which had done the same thing, there was nothing to be found. There were no laundry marks on the underclothing, and the jacket and waterproof were of the “off the peg” variety. There was no hat anywhere to be found, and the woman either carried no handbag, or had had it stolen. The body was not mutilated in any way except for the heavy blow on the back of the head which had caused death. There was nothing in the immediate vicinity to suggest that the death had not been natural—the result of an accident—and, apart from the fact that it would scarcely have been possible for even the most determined person to have struck herself such a blow on the back of the skull, there was no trace of a weapon. The police quartered the ground and, a considerable distance from the body, found a small boulder which they took to test for bloodstains.

  Meanwhile, at the vicarage, Dame Beatrice made the disclosure that a body, believed by Laura to be that of Hilary Beads, had been found in Northumberland. She also mentioned the French-speaking shepherd who had discovered the body, and the two young men who had also seen it.

  “A French-speaking Northumbrian shepherd? Oh, well, I suppose it would have made a nine-days’ wonder at one time,” said the vicar, “but now that every schoolchild seems to join a school party and go to France and has been taught French, there seems nothing very unusual about it.”

  “Dame Beatrice says he was a middle-aged man, though,” objected Veronica.

  “An ex-soldier with a French wife, my dear.”

  “Most probably,” said Dame Beatrice. “At any rate, he shouldn’t be difficult to trace. They will need him at the inquest, and those two young men as well. It will be adjourned, of course, after the purely formal evidence has been taken, but I should hardly think that they will want Laura now that she has given them a statement.”

  “You did not, yourself, want to take a look at the body?”

  “No,” said Dame Beatrice, “I did not. I had a reason.”

  “Which you are not prepared to disclose, I guess,” said Veronica. “Well, we won’t press you.”

  “In any case, it seemed best to inform the police as soon as possible, I am sure,” said the vicar. “But, you know, I am at a complete loss. There is something so very odd about it all. Why on earth should Hilary have left us to travel to America when, all the time, she meant to go to Northumberland?”

  “The only people who have any connection with Northumberland, so far as we know,” said Veronica Pierce, “are the Carmichaels.”

  “Really, my dear, that is not a proper sort of remark,” remonstrated her husband. “Not at all a proper thing to say.”

  “What are you going to do next?” asked Veronica, ignoring the vicar’s strictures and addressing Dame Beatrice.

  “I should like to know all that you can tell me about Miss Beads.”

  “You know as much as we do.”

  “She did not begin by being a family friend, so to speak?”

  “No. She came here first to recuperate after an illness. We did not charge her much because she seemed a nice person and we did not think it right to charge an invalid a lot of money,” said Veronica. “After that, she turned up about every eighteen months or two years. In fact, we’ve seen quite a lot of her, I suppose. She must have stayed here half a dozen times at lea
st.”

  “Do you know of any previous connection she had had with any other of your visitors?”

  “None at all. If you are particularising, as I feel sure you are, she and the Carmichaels have never met, so far as I know.”

  “Not even on this last visit?”

  “I don’t see how they can have done. We wrote to put off Phlox and Marigold. They always expect separate bedrooms, and we could not manage that while Hilary was staying here. Our accommodation is limited. We must keep a separate room for a study and, apart from that, we’ve only three bedrooms and a dressing-room.”

  “They might have met in the village. Their stay in the village overlapped, no doubt?”

  “Overlapped?”

  “My informant was Laura. She mentioned that one of the small boys from Pelican House described Phlox Carmichael to the life and said that he mended a shoe for him the day the boys went digging at Dickon’s.”

  “Neither the Carmichaels nor Hilary mentioned a meeting in the village. I suppose it didn’t occur to them. But it’s very peculiar that the Carmichaels have never told us where stayed from that Wednesday until the Saturday.”

  “It seems more than ever important to discover the identity of the skeleton which was found on Dickon’s smallholding!”

  “Yes,” said Veronica Pierce, frowning, but avoiding the implication, “I know. Gascony is most anxious that that should be found out. After all, he was the person who first uncovered it.”

  “So you think that I should suspect him, equally with the Carmichaels, of having guilty knowledge of how it came to be there?”

  Veronica laughed. Dame Beatrice, leering in an amiable fashion, nodded.

  “Seriously, though,” said Veronica, “although I don’t like Phlox at all and can only just about tolerate Marigold, it doesn’t seem reasonable to suspect them of murder. I mean, there really isn’t anything to go on, is there? Anyway, I do hope the police will be able to find out what Hilary did instead of going to Southampton, as we thought she’d done.”

  “Let us go into that. She came to stay with you—when, exactly?”