The car arrived at the Stone House while she was still pondering. George came round to the rear door of the car but as he held it open she shook her head and told him to take her to the vicarage. Some of the points she had raised in her own mind could be cleared up there, she hoped.
The vicar and his wife were both at home and seemed very pleased to see her. The police, it appeared, had been visiting them again and had only just gone. They had asked a great many questions about the finding of the skeleton and the visits of Hilary Beads to the vicarage.
“I believe they think we are involved in the murder and in her disappearance,” said Veronica, in a troubled tone. “If it weren’t so wildly ridiculous, it would be a bit frightening. Do stay to dinner and let us have some amusing conversation.”
“Unfortunately,” said Dame Beatrice, “I have come upon the same errand as the police. I have come to ask questions. What is worse, they will probably be the same questions.”
“Oh, well, you’ll ask them in a beautiful voice, and without a Hampshire accent, anyway,” said Veronica in a resigned tone. “Sit down, please, and have some sherry. Get it out, Gascony, will you?”
They settled themselves in the comfortable and (thanks to the paying guests) far from shabby dining-room and, sherry having been supplied by the vicar, Dame Beatrice was invited to begin her catechism.
“There are several things I’d like to know,” she said, “but I’m not at all sure that I’m going to learn very much from you.”
“Close as oysters,” said Veronica. “A good thing you know it. Fire away.”
“There is one thing in particular—a question to which there is a definite answer.”
“Let your yea be yea, and your nay be nay.”
“Don’t be flippant, dear,” said the vicar.
“Which of you wrote the letter to the Carmichaels to postpone their visit here?”
“I did,” said Veronica. “Guilty.”
“Did you mention the finds on Dickon’s smallholding?”
“Yes, of course. I knew they’d be interested.”
“Did you suggest a specific date for their arrival here?”
“Yes—Saturday, May 25th. I always take bookings from Saturday to Saturday, if I can, and it seems to suit most people.”
“Then—but this is a question I do not expect you can answer—why did they choose to come to Wandles on Wednesday, May 22nd?”
“I haven’t a clue,” said Veronica. “What do you think, Gascony?”
“I have no notion at all, my dear. It does seem a trifle odd, when one comes to think of it.”
“It certainly is. They’ve a home, after all. Of course, they did know about the Roman finds. I suppose that’s what brought them down here.”
“Did they go to Dickon to see the finds, though?”
“No. There was no suggestion that they should go. It was an accidental meeting with Mr. Colson and his boys which took them to the smallholding.”
“You know, the more you think about it, my dear, the more inexplicable it becomes,” said the vicar.
“What I should like to know,” said Dame Beatrice, “is where Mr. Carmichael spent the nights of that Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday while his sister was staying at the convent.”
“At the convent? His sister?” exclaimed Veronica, gazing in fascination at Dame Beatrice.
“Well, there’s nowhere else in the village for a person like Marigold to stay, except here,” said Mr. Pierce, looking perplexed. “Are you sure, though, that she stayed there?”
“Mother Anacletus is my source of information. What I am certain about is that there was some good reason for the separation of the brother and sister on those particular nights.”
“Oh, there must have been. They go everywhere together.”
“I don’t see any good reason,” said Veronica, “except the obvious one, Gascony. You said yourself, just now, that the convent is the only other place near here where anybody could stay. As it was not possible for Phlox to put up there, he did the best he could; he got a room there for Marigold. He himself probably slept in Farmer Meggs’s barn, or stable loft, or somewhere.”
“I return to my former point. The mystery still remains. Why did they come here at all for those three days?” demanded Dame Beatrice.
“Yes, it does seem perplexing,” the vicar agreed, “but, of course, they’re rather odd sort of people. It was probably just a whim.”
“At any rate, it has given me something to go on,” said Dame Beatrice. “I can visit Mr. Meggs and ask him whether Mr. Carmichael stayed there.”
This plan she carried out at once; it had the result which she had anticipated. Phlox Carmichael had never stayed at the farm.
“So now to find out where he did stay,” said Veronica, when Dame Beatrice called back to give the negative news. “Gascony, you could do something about that, with your contacts in the village.”
The vicar looked horrified.
“My dear girl, it is no business of mine,” he said. His wife shrugged and then she winked at Dame Beatrice to indicate that one person in the vicarage could be relied upon to secure any information which the village might be able to give. Dame Beatrice, however, stated baldly that she preferred to question the villagers herself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Help from the Village
“What a strange vision will it be to see their Poetical fictions converted into Verities, and their imagined and fancied Furies into real Devils!”
Ibid (Section 55)
* * *
VERONICA PIERCE, although not an acute psychologist, was sufficiently knowledgeable about the villagers to have realised that anything as exotic as Phlox Carmichael would hardly have escaped their notice. Her theory, therefore, that some of them might be aware of his actions during the time that Marigold was staying at the convent, was a likely one. Dame Beatrice thought, however, that the police enquiry might have been effective in causing the villagers to retreat into their shells in the face of questioning and probing.
She decided to begin with the village school and to ask to have a check made on absentees. As she had given away the prizes and attended the school concert at the end of the Christmas term, her advent and her request were equally well received by the headmistress, who was in charge of the top class of the primary school, the second grade being taken by an uncertificated teacher and the infants having their own teachers of the five-to-six- and seven-to-eight-year-olds. There were no longer any secondary school children in the building. These were conveyed daily to town by motor-coach.
Dame Beatrice leered kindly at the top class and then turned her back on them to talk to the headmistress.
“You keep registers, of course,” she said. “It is important that I should find a child—preferably a boy, as I find them, on the whole, to be more enterprising and to have a wider range than girls—who played truant (to put it bluntly) on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday on the twenty-second, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth of May.”
“I’ve had no note from Eustace Trumble’s parents, and he was absent, rather suspiciously—weren’t you, Eustace?—on that Thursday.”
“Come here, Eustace,” said Dame Beatrice, turning to the class and fixing a tubby little boy in a green jersey and brown corduroy shorts with a basilisk eye. Eustace blushed, and crossed glances with his teacher. She jerked her head, so, with an expression of sullen gloom, he left his desk.
The interrogation was carried out in the playground and resulted in an interesting and, possibly, an important picture. At the end of morning school Eustace had gone home, had been given cottage pie and green peas, followed by bacon pudding and a saucerful of strawberries, and had told his mother that dinner had been smashing and had volunteered to help with the washing-up.
Reading between the lines, Dame Beatrice saw this item of self-sacrifice as a libation poured to the gods to quieten Eustace’s conscience.
“So, when you offered to help your moth
er,” she said, “you had already made arrangements to miss afternoon school.”
Eustace gulped, but, as this was made as a firm statement and not presented as a question, he appeared to think that denial would be useless.
“I’ll get the cane,” he muttered.
“Not unless you tell me lies,” said Dame Beatrice (who, in point of fact, would as soon have thought of pushing a child into the fire as of caning it), “and, if you did tell me lies, I should know. Now, speak out, Eustace, and fear nothing, for I will stand between you and retribution. Let us sit down on this form while you tell me exactly where you went, what you did, and whom you saw,”
“The lot?”
“Every single thing. Leave nothing out and put nothing in. On this occasion, necessity is not the mother of invention. Now, then: you left home and, realising that your mother was watching you, went off in the direction of school until you knew you were out of her sight. What did you do then?”
“Went over the Stone,”
“By yourself?”
“I met my mate over there.”
“Oh, yes? Well, go on. Is your mate in school today?”
“Naw. He’s left. He’s seventeen.”
“Harvey Load? Isn’t that his name? I’ve heard of him.”
“He said he’d take me fishing.”
“Where?”
“He said he’d never tooken me again if I told anybody.”
“He said he’d take you fishing. Did you actually go?”
“Us went, but us come away again.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
It appeared that the Stone—by tradition a place where human sacrifices had once been offered—had been appointed as the meeting-place because it was, at the same time, a landmark in a well-wooded countryside where obvious and unmistakable landmarks were few, a secluded and sheltered spot and, what was of equal importance, one which lay in the opposite direction to school.
“So you had to double back after you were out of sight of your home? How did you manage that?”
“Through Johnson’s spinney.”
“Ah, yes, of course, the bridle path among the trees. And when you met Harvey at the Stone, what then?”
Then they had spat on the Stone for luck and had left the woods for the river, some mile and a half away, a clear chalk stream preserved for most of its length and strictly privately owned.
“You reached the river, then, and began to fish.”
At this statement the boy burked. They had had no chance to fish, he insisted, because they had seen a man.
“Someone you knew? Someone who would realise that you had no right to be there?”
“It was that man as stays sometimes with the Reverend.”
“Describe him.”
But this was beyond the child’s power, so Dame Beatrice asked whether the man had been wearing sandals.
“Naw, not sandals. He was barefoot.”
“Was he wearing a hat?”
“Yes, a gennelman’s ‘aat.”
Further enquiry led to the supposition that the gentleman in question had been wearing a panama, and this fact, coupled with his choice of lodging, made it probable that he was Phlox Carmichael, but this was not certain.
“What was the gentleman doing? Was he fishing?”
He was not fishing; he was trying to push something under the water. It looked like a lady’s handbag. Just then the boys had spotted the river keeper and had lost no time in making themselves scarce, as, although there was a public footpath at no great distance from the river bank, Harvey was carrying a rod and Eustace the fish-basket he had woven during the winter, so that things, for them, looked suspicious.
“Do you know whether the man managed to push the handbag under the water?”
Eustace did not know. He and Harvey had made themselves scarce before they had had time to see what had happened to the handbag. Dame Beatrice returned him to the schoolroom and suggested that his absence on the afternoon of May twenty-third should continue to be ignored. “And,” she added, turning again to the small boy, “you may tell your friends everything that has passed between us. I want no secret made of it.”
She left the school and went to the cottage of the river keeper. It was five miles outside the village, on the bank of the river to which, if Eustace was to be believed, a lady’s handbag had been consigned by a man who might have been Phlox Carmichael.
The cottage was not far from where the river made a wide bend. Trees grew thickly on the opposite bank, but around the cottage and as far downstream as Dame Beatrice could see, there were tall reeds and occasional willows. The cottage itself had a large, well-stocked garden in which the owner had a henhouse and a pig-sty. She walked up a long path bordered by flowers and had no need to knock on the door, for it was wide open and the keeper’s wife was within, busy with ironing.
“He’s out cutting weed, mam, if it’s John you’re wanting,” she said, “but he shouldn’t be that long, if you’d care to come in and wait.”
Dame Beatrice accepted this invitation and her hostess disposed of another couple of garments, replaced the iron on the hob, observed that the fire could die down for a bit, as there was always the oil stove nowadays, and spread a cloth on the table.
“I am wondering,” said Dame Beatrice, “whether your husband ever retrieved a handbag from the river a mile or two higher up.”
“Handbag? Oh, ah, he did get a handbag out. Was it yours, then? I can show it to you, mam, but I reckon it ent much good no more.”
“It is not mine, but I think I may know the owner. I should be very glad to see it,” said Dame Beatrice.
“It’s out the back, in the woodshed, where John puts any old junk he finds,” said the woman. “I reckon I can lay hands on it right away. It was a pity as anyone should lose it, because it must have been a very good bag before it fell into the water. Was you fishing, I wonder, when you lost it?”
She did not wait for a reply, but went into the garden and round the side of the cottage. Dame Beatrice also stepped into the fresh air, as the little room, in spite of the fact that the door had been kept open and that the fire was being allowed to die down, was uncomfortably hot and close. She was in time to see the river keeper tie up his punt, so she walked down the path towards him.
She and the keeper had never met, although Laura knew him well. He greeted his visitor respectfully, but with reserve. She lost no time in telling him why she was there.
“A lady’s handbag? And Mother’s finding it for you? Ah, that was a fair knock-out, that was. I caught a glimpse of the feller that was a-drownding of it, but he was off before I could catch up with him. When I fishes the bag out, there weren’t nothing in it, excepting a bit of sodden pasteboard which I found tucked in a tear in the lining, so what he was a-doing. with it is more than I can say. But here’s Mother with it, so ee can examine it for yourself, mam. Take it, if it’s any good to ee, but I reckon the water has done for it.”
Dame Beatrice took the dilapidated object which the wife handed to her, and asked for the bit of pasteboard, but the keeper had thrown it away, so, having thanked the pair warmly, she walked back to where she had left George and the car. She got in and was driven to the village.
“Stop at the vicarage,” she ordered. During the short journey she opened and examined the bag. It told her nothing at all, but when she was admitted by the Pierces’ parlourmaid and showed the bag to Veronica, it was recognised immediately.
“Why, you’ve got Hilary Beads’ handbag! She had it with her when she visited us this last time. Oh, dear! Wherever did you find it?”
“Would you be prepared to swear that this bag belonged to Miss Beads?” asked Dame Beatrice.
“It’s hand-made and I know who made it. She’d swear to it all right—and that’s Iona Piatt at the other end of the village. I persuaded Hilary to patronise her a couple of years ago.”
Dame Beatrice knew Iona Piatt. She was an ardent Church worker, less for orthodox
religious reasons than because it gave her a certain status in the village and a social life. She was a spinster said to have been crossed in love. She was not of uncertain age, having been in receipt of the Government Retirement Pension for the past year. She was hale, hearty, and a semi-vegetarian. That is, she ate butter, cheese, fish, and eggs but had long since discarded meat from her diet because it was expensive. She had a small bungalow with a very large garden from which she sold produce in the form of vegetables, fruit, and flowers to motorists passing her door, and she used the largest room in her dwelling as what she preferred to call her studio. It was knee-deep in sea-shells, raffia and cane, skivers, and tubes of adhesive. If she received an order for leatherwork, she obtained payment in advance.
To her repaired Dame Beatrice and had no difficulty in getting the handbag identified. She explained how she had obtained possession of it, knowing that if she did not release this information, Miss Piatt would suffer from insomnia.
“But how could she have been so careless as to drop it in the water?” the craftswoman exclaimed, holding the bag with both hands and smoothing over the ill-used leather with her long, strong thumbs.
“The supposition is that she must have been robbed of it, the contents extracted and the empty bag thrown away.”
“But it was such a beautiful bag! Quite my best work!”
“It was because it was hand-made and so delightfully decorated and finished that the thief was certain it would be recognised if he kept it,” Dame Beatrice explained.
“Oh, I see. But it does seem a pity, doesn’t it?”
Dame Beatrice agreed that it seemed a very great pity, and added:
“It must have been stolen by someone living in or near the village. I suppose you do not recollect having seen anybody behaving in a suspicious way recently? Mrs. Pierce informs me that Miss Beads had the handbag with her when she stayed at the vicarage this last time.”
“That means—why, Dame Beatrice, that means that she may have—have met her death in or near this very village!”
“That is the conclusion I have reached, but we are far from being able to prove it—or that she is dead.”
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