Dead for a Ducat, Chapter Seventeen

Dead for a Ducat

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Carolus, with Lance and Phoebe Thomas, was the first to arrive, and found Lady Pipford wearing an oyster-coloured dress and a good many diamonds.

“I’ve just been out to the kitchen,” she told Carolus.  “What treasures your Sticks are!  You must never lose them.”

“Yes, Mrs. Stick is a good cook,” admitted Carolus.

“Jason and his wife came into the room, Jason wearing a dinner-jacket as though it were a uniform and Felicity looking awkward in plum-colour.  There had been, apparently, some slight misunderstanding with Lanie and her fiancé which Felicity seemed unable to forget.

“It isn’t as though we asked them to drive us down,” she was soon saying to Lady Pipford while Carolus at a nod from his hostess poured out the Amontillado.  “I mean, they offered quite of the own accord.  I said to Lanie when she asked me, on the telephone, “If you’d rather we went down by train we can just as well . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” said her mother-in-law pacifically.

“Oh, I don’t worry about it,” said Felicity.  “It’s not worth worrying about.  But it seems so extraordinary to make a remark like that when we only kept them waiting five minutes.  ‘Would you rather we hired a car?’ I asked her, but she wouldn’t hear of that.  So I offered not to come at all.  ‘I shouldn’t mind,’ I said, ‘going home in a taxi while you go to Mincott.’  It really might have been better.”

“Oh no, dear,” said Lady Pipford.

“I do dislike being where I’m not wanted.  It made the journey down so difficult.  I offered to get out of the car and come on as best I could, but she said that wouldn’t do.”

Carolus, observing, saw Jason come across and whisper savagely to his wife, “Let it drop, can’t you?”  His expression was murderous, and though he had some of Carroll’s sympathy for it, it was a revelation in the precise and chilly Jason.”

“I don’t want to go on talking about it,” said Felicity.  “I’d much rather forget all about it.  But a thing like that comes as such a shock from one’s sister-in-law.  I said, ‘Anyhow we can get back on our own tomorrow and shan’t have to trouble you again.’  I mean, no one likes to feel they’re a trouble to people . . .”

She was interrupted by the entrance of Lanie with Roger Settle.  They looked as though they were going to an expensive nightclub.  Lanie introduced Roger Settle to Lance and Phoebe.

“Do you play golf?” asked Dr. Tom to break the silence.

“Not actuallah,” said Roger Settle.

“That’s a pity.  We’ve got rather a good club here.  You live in London, I suppose?”

“Knightsbridge.”

“Very nice,” said Phoebe.  “I’ve always liked Knightsbridge.”

“Rallah?” said Roger Settle.

“Have you any theory about these two deaths?”

“Definitelah.  Sex maniac.”

“Sex maniac?” repeated Phoebe incredulously.

“Certainlah.  Quite common.  Read about them.”

“But really,” began Phoebe.  At that moment, however, she was interrupted by greetings from Mr. and Mrs. Gorringer, who had bid a ceremonious good evening to Lady Pipford and, knowing everyone present, were making a circuit of the guests.

“Did my ears deceive me?” asked Mr. Gorringer.  “Or did I catch the word maniac?  If so, we are treading on forbidden ground.  No talk of murder tonight, but allégresse, gaieté de cœur !”

Beside him his wife gave expression to his words.  She was a tall woman, and at forty-five would have been almost handsome if it were not for the watchful, over-alert expression on her face as she waited for a chance to be funny.

“No talk of murders?” she said now.  “What a shame!  I do like a nice cosy chat over bloodstains.  A bit of gossip about gore.”

The headmaster laughed heartily, and the two passed on.

Then Missed Crick entered.  She wore . . . but could it be true? Carolus asked.  She wore what could only be described as a costume for the first production of an Ibsen play.  Out of it her brown and scrawny neck and muscular old arms protruded in a rather unfeminine way.

“I’ve left it in the hall,” she was heard to say to Lady Pipford.  “A bottle of my rose-hip syrup.  What a gathering! Where’s the Vicar?”

“He hasn’t come yet, said Lady Pipford.  “He and Mr. Boater are our only absentees.  But it’s early yet.  Do make Carolus give you a glass of Sherry.”

“Do you think I ought?” asked Miss Crick inevitably.  She was soon sipping as she looked round for a victim.  She wanted to talk.

“Mr. and Mrs. Fleece arrived.  The Vicar looked as though he had to clamp his arm firmly to his side to prevent him slapping everyone on the back as he made his greetings.  His wife followed him with fussy qualifications of his more outrageous sallies.

“My dear Lady Pipford!  This is indeed a joy!” he cried at the pulled at the hand of his hostess.  “Splendid to see you your good hospitable self again, after all our troubles.  We’re to forget them, eh?  Let joy be unconfined, what?”

“He doesn’t forget your Loss,” said Mrs. Fleece.

The Vicar was passing on.

“Our Æsulapius!” he yelled to Dr. Tom.  “Glad you can spare time from packing ’em and dosing ’em to come out to a simple village gathering.  You kill ’em off and I’ll bury them!”

“He really hates conducting funerals,” confided Mrs. Fleece.

“The headmaster himself!” bellowed the Vicar, continuing his round.  “And his good lady!  We’re all agog, you know.  We rustics love scholarship and wit in our midst.  We await the bon mots, Mrs. Gorringer.  We expect to be enlightened, headmaster!  We’re country yokels here, remember.”

“We still keep in touch,” avowed Mrs. Fleece.

“Miss Crick!  What a pleasure to meet where no parochial business claims our attention.  Jason, my dear fellow, and Mrs. Jason.  How well you both look!  How is the sun and heir?  Lanie!  What a joy!  And this is the Mr. Settle we’ve heard so much about.  I trust I’m going to have the pleasure of pronouncing?”

“Selwyn dear, it’s not official yet,” warned Mrs. Fleece.

“And our Deene!” shouted the Vicar.  “Still looking for clues, eh?  Still using the microscope?  What a game!  What a game!  Got your eye on all of us, I’ll be bound.  Suspects to a man!  I can almost feel the gyves upon my wrists!”

“He doesn’t mean a word of it,” said Mrs. Fleece, almost apoplectic with worry.

Chuckling at his own jocularity, the Vicar subsided for the moment as he accepted a glass of Sherry.

Mrs. gorringer appeared to be restive.  While Mr. Fleece had taken the floor she made no contribution to the general conversation, though her husband from close at hand was loyally ready to laugh.  It began to look as though she would be reduced to waiting till dinner was nearly over and she could place her serviette corner-wise on her head, seize a knife to serve as sceptre, pucker her face and say “Queen Victoria!” to her admiring spectators, a little piece of mimicry which never failed in its effect.

However, rival humorists were stilled for a moment as, in an old and fraying dinner-jacket, his face scarlet but his stiff shirt scrupulously starched, Monty Boater entered.  He swayed politely towards Lady Pipford, said good evening to her, and waved a general greeting to the room.  He could not have been described as drunk except by a police doctor examining a motorist, but he was very, very happy.

“I remember a night like this in Mysore,” he told Miss Crick.

“Yes?” Miss Crick encouraged him.

“Well, a night like this,” said Mr. Boater, quickly deflated.

The conversation was now vigourous.  Mrs. Gorringer was telling that story of her daily help with always sent everyone into fits, but the Vicar, remembering the last choir outing, achieved, by the sheer force of his lungs, a bigger audience.

“Mr. Gorringer called Carolus aside.  He’s great red ears looked like gross hybiscus blossoms over the shining white of his shirt-front.

“Ah, Deene,” he said quickly.  “You are quite easy in your mind, I make no doubt?  You have no apprehensions for this evening?  We may address ourselves to enjoyment without arrière pensée ?”

“Personally I can’t feel easy about this till it has been entirely cleared up.”

“No?  Tut!  Dear me!  A pity.  You have not, I take it, suspicions of anyone present?”

“Suspicions?”

“You do not take my meaning?  I ask, but not for my own sake, whether we should be wary?  Whether one of our fellow guests may have been wholly or partially responsible for one of the two deaths?”

“I’ve done what I can to guard against any possible danger.”

“Ah!  Elusive, I note.  Cautious.  And who shall blame you?  Your methods are of course your own.  But forewarned is forearmed.  In view of the presence here of my wife I felt . . . I ventured to enquire . . .”

“I simply can’t answer you, headmaster.  I have no notion as to what, if anything, may come about.”

“No.  No.  I quite see.  Ever cautious.  Ah, I see our hostess is preparing to move.  With what verve she does these things.  I would give my ears for her gifts.  I shall see you anon, my dear Deene.”

The headmaster had been placed at his hostess’s right hand, and beside him is sat Mrs. Fleece.  Mr. Boater came next, then Lanie, Carolus and Phoebe Thomas with Jason at the lower end of the table.  On Lady Pipford’s left-hand was Dr. Tom, then Miss Crick, Roger Settle, Felicity Pipford, Mr. Fleece and Mrs. Gorringer.

Stick was soon heading round the Potageà Creme de Céleri, as Mr. Gorringer was quick to name it, and there was a lowering of conversational enthusiasm while this was attacked.  But Mrs. Fleece was startled by Mr. Boater beside her saying loudly, “They used to make this dam’ well in Helsinki.”

“Really?” she whispered in agonised embarrassment.

“Dam’ well,” reiterated Mr. Boater loudly.  “The Finns are no fools.  I remember one night when a couple of girls were sitting with me in a cabaret . . .”

Mrs. Fleece looked as though she might jump up and, clapping her hands to her ears, run screaming from the room.  No one else seemed to be talking at the moment, and although Mr. Baker spoke loudly, it was exclusively for her.  Mr. Gorringer on her other side was talking heavily to Lady Pipford.

“I’m hoping to persuade the Board of Governors . . . I feel that no stone should be left unturned . . . The good name of the Queen’s School, Newminster, depends . . .” he boomed.

There seemed to be no escape for Mrs. Fleece.

“These two floozies, continued Mr. Boater, spoke little English.  You know ‘we would like champagne’, ‘my friend knows a good hotel’.  That sort of thing . . .”

Desperately Mrs. Fleece looked across at Dr. Tom, but he seemed interested in an account Miss Crick was giving him of how she raised bulbs indoors without using fibre.  She looked towards Roger Settle, but he was now concentrating on his Sole Colbert in a most forbidding manner and she could not catch his eye.  Her husband was too far away.  Flustered, the lines making new contours in her face, she had no remedy but to listen.

“So when it was time to go I said to one of them, ‘It’s a nice night,’ I said, though of course I had no idea what the weather was like outside.  She didn’t seem to understand but sat there smiling away . . .”

Mrs Fleece scarcely touched her sole.  Then, just as Monty Boater’s story seemed to be ending, she was alarmed to hear her husband’s voice raised above those of his fellow guests.

“Never could stand at the fellow”, he was saying.  A flabby, deceitful type.  I know they say de mortuis, and all that, but upon my word that fellow Montaccord deserved to be an exception.  I don’t want to sound uncharitable . . .”

If only she were near him to point out that her husband could not be uncharitable if he tried, but she was held fast by Mister Boater’s revealing story.”

“I guessed at once what she was up to,” he was saying.  “But fortunately I hadn’t anything in my pocket-case worth mentioning.  So I just waited without turning the light on. . . .” ”

Oh dear, thought Mrs. Fleece.  This is like Dante’s Inferno.  How shall I ever escape?

Stick was bringing round the tornedos, but, delicious though it looked, Mrs. Fleece had no appetite for hers.  She nibbled and cut nervously while Mr. Boater’s interminable tale went on.

Carolus congratulated himself, meanwhile, on being between Phoebe Thomas and Lanie Pipford.  He could keep up an exchange of small talk and at the same time watch the Vicar between Felicity Pipford and Mrs. Gorringer, neither of whom seemed very pleased with the situation.  Felicity made dark hints about not being welcome, while Mrs. Gorringer found herself stricken into silence by the Vicar’s bonhomie.  She had thought of quite a little witticism about the sole, but Jason Pipford did not promise much as an audience and she had petulantly kept it to herself.

Stick brought in the partridges.  Lady Pipford tackled hers serenely, allowing Mr. Gorringer to talk as she did so.

“I feel I have a right to expect the support of the Board of Governors . . .” he was blooming.  “Were it simply a matter of personal dignity, there would be no urgency. . . .”

Lady Pipford nodded cheerfully she cut away the other side of her partridge’s breast and popped it in her busy mouth.

Felicity was talking to Roger Settle.

“I shall quite understand if you don’t want to ask me to the wedding,” she said.  “I never like to be asked to something when I’m not really wanted.  It isn’t as though I am one of the family in more than name. . . .”

“Not?” said Roger Settle politely but shortly.

“I told my husband this evening I was quite willing to stay at home.  He didn’t need to feel he had to bring me.”

“Suppose not,” said Roger Settle absently as he dissected his package.”

Mrs. Gorringer had emerged from her sulks to tell her little story about the waiter in the Ostend hotel which, recounted at her own dinner-table, had reduced the entire school staff to long and hearty laughter.  Jason Pipford on the left was rather gloomily busy with his partridge, and the Vicar on her right clearly impatient to begin talking again, but Mrs. Gorringer went on steadily to her climax.  When she finished, Mr. Fleece gave a hurried staccato laugh and at once recalled a seaside landlady who was given to crystal-gazing.  Mrs. Gorringer accepted defeat, and like King Henry I (at least for the evening) never smiled again.

“Oh, but pickled nasturtium seeds are far better than capers!” Miss Crick could be heard saying to Dr. Tom, who nodded as he shovelled into his mouth a fork-load of game chips.

It really seemed to Mrs. Fleece that Monte Boater’s story had finished at last, only just short of a hotel bedroom.  She was feeling so relieved that she actually consumed a little of the partridge and sipped the Burgundy.  She was just going to smile encouragement to her husband down the table when she heard that terrible voice beside her again.

“But mind you,” Monty Boater was saying, now that he had wholly consumed his partridge, “but mind you, not all like that.  I remember a girl in Trieste who actually pawned her bits and pieces to help me get home when I was stranded.  Big, flashy type she was with the great swaying hips and a figure with too many curves in it, if you know what I mean.  She came up to me in the street as a matter of fact . . .”

Mrs. Fleece’s brief respite which had allowed her to eat a little partridge was clearly over.  Like Gray’s cat, “she mew’d to every watery God, Some speedy aid to send”, but “nor cruel Tom nor Susan heard”.  She was almost paralysed with embarrassment and terror.

The chocolate soufflé appeared and was popular at least with Lady Pipford and Lanie.  Then, with the coffee, Lady Pipford made the little announcement which had come to be expected of her.

“We’re not going to withdraw,” she said.  “It’s a silly old custom which I’ve no use for.  We’ll smoke with you.”  And she lit a cigarette.

Stick was bringing round a bottle, and Carolus recognized the very dark colour of his Spanish brandy.  Lady Pipford did not help herself to it, but poured out of glass of Noyau from a bottle beside her.

“Ah yes,” said Mr. Gorringer.  “I remember now.  You indulge in a sweet liqueur.  One taste, I fear me, I can never share with you.”

“Love it,” said Lady Pipford loudly, as she raised her glass.  “Buy it by the dozen bottles.”  Her words were audible down the table.  “No one else likes it, so I’ve given up trying to offer it.”

Then things happened with appalling rapidity.

Carolus was on his feet, upsetting his chair behind him.

“Don’t drink that, Margaret!” he shouted.

But it was too late.  Lady Pipford had swallowed her liqueur at a gulp, given an almost simultaneous gasp and crumpled.  Her head lay on the table in front of her and one hand splayed out beside it.

Dr. Tom was bending over her in a moment.

“She’s quite dead,” he said at once.  “Cyanide of potassium.  You can smell it.”

There was a scream from Mrs. Fleece, then for about ten seconds a very terrible silence.  Lanie Montaccord rushed to the little figure of the dead woman crying, “Mother!  Mother!” and Jason followed her silently.  For what seemed a very long time no one else moved or spoke.

❦

Dead for a Ducat, Chapter Sixteen

Dead for a Ducat

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Carolus was surprised, next day, by a telephone call from Lady Pipford.

“Would you,” she asked almost cooingly, “lend me the Sticks for an evening?  I want to give a little dinner-party here.”

“But my dear Margaret . . .”

“I know what you’re going to say.  People will be scared.  That’s exactly why I want to do it.  To re-establish confidence, as it were.  And if your Sticks have sole charge of everything and buy all they need for the occasion themselves and do not allow anyone near the food, it will be impossible for the most timorous guest to feel he is bidden to eat in the Chamber of Horrors.”

“I see.”

“Really, I’m rather sick of this nonsense.  Darryl shot himself, and then poor May Swillow committed suicide or was poisoned—two deaths that might happen anywhere.  Now I see people passing the house almost afraid to look up at it, as though it were the Red Barn.  It’s my home Carolus, and I’ve every intention of living here for the rest of my life, long after these wretched deaths are forgotten.  So I want to fumigate these rumours by asking a number of people to dinner.”

“I don’t think it’s a very good plan, Margaret.  But I’ll certainly ask Mrs. Stick, and if she is willing to do it, I have no objection.”

“How stuffy you sound!  It will clear the air, don’t you see?  And it will amuse me to watch them sitting and tasting to see if they can detect anything strange.”

“Now you’re exaggerating.  No one will give it a thought.”

“When Mrs. Stick was clearing away the luncheon plates Carolus tackled her.  He tried to make the invitation sound flattering to Mrs. Stick, but it seemed to put her in a fluster of doubt.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.  “Where those murders happened?  I am sure Stick and me don’t want to get mixed up in anything of that sort.  Of course I should like to oblige Lady Pipford, but then there’s this poor woman being poisoned to be thought of.  Fourteen, you say?  Oh, I could do it all right, or Stick and me could easy enough.  When we were with Mr. Justice Sheers we often had to cook for twenty, but I can’t help feeling I should be stepping into a dead woman’s shoes.”

“Nonsense, Mrs. Stick.  It’s just for one night.”

“Oh, I know, and we should be glad to, I’m sure, if it wasn’t for This Other.  You say Lady Pipford wants to give this dinner-party to put all that behind her, as it were, and I can well understand that.  But what would my sister say if she got to hear I’d cooked the dinner in a house of death like that?  I don’t know what to say, I’m sure.  I’ll have to see what Stick thinks about it, and let you know.”

“Very well, Mrs. Stick.”

“I’m not saying I shouldn’t like to do a big dinner again, because you never have more than the four or five, do you?  But it’s the thought of all that’s happened.  I’d use nothing from there—not even the salt and pepper.  Still, we shall have to see.  It’s not something you can say right off.  I’ll talk it over with Stick.  If we can See Our Way we will.”

It was not until that evening that Mrs. Stick decided.

“Stick and me will be willing, Sir,” she told Carolus.  “Only there mustn’t be anyone else to help, that’s all.  Stick can wait at table—he’s done it before.  I don’t want anyone running round my feet when I’m trying to cook, and then we can be sure there’s Nothing in the food.”

“What about your married sister, Mrs. Stick?” asked Carolus mischievously.  “Suppose she hears about it?”

“Well, Sir, things have gone So Far, with you hobnobbing with murderers and policeman half the time, that once more won’t make any difference.  I’m sure Stick and me never meant to have anything to do with such things, and the times we’ve talk it over and thought we should have to leave.  But there you are.  Will you tell Lady Pipford, then?”

A few days later Carolus was jubilantly hailed by Mr. Gorringer as they came out of chapel.

“I hear we are to be fellow-guests on Thursday,” he said.  “A little dinner-party to mark the end of your mysteries, my dear Deene.  A splendid idea, as I told Lady Pipford.  We shall be shewing a solid front, I feel.  Let us lay the ghost of all this trouble once and for all.”

“Unfortunately the ghost, if there is one, is not likely to be laid so easily until the murderer is discovered.”

“Now, now, now, Deene.  Let’s give no more thought to murderers.  A morbid subject at the best of times.  Let us rather look forward to a convivial evening at Mincott House.  Though I must say,” he added more soberly, “you bachelors are to be envied.  My wife has already insisted on a visit to her couturière. . . .”

“Her what ?” Carolus could not resist asking.

“Ah, I forget you’re not a modern-language man.  In plain words, her dressmaker.  I fear me some sartorial innovation.  It seems that for occasion of this kind we must appear en grande tenue.  I was wondering whether, perhaps, your excellent motor-car would accommodate us, my dear Deene?  It would certainly add to the amenities of the evening.”

“I’ve promised to take Lance and Phoebe Thomas, but I daresay we can all get in if your wife doesn’t mind her grande tenue being a bit squeezed,” said Carolus.

“You like your joke at the expense of modern languages I see,” returned Mr. Gorringer sourly.  “My ears burn when you history and classics men get together.  But perhaps I should be well advised to hire a taxi-cab.  I did not know our doctor and his wife had been invited.  Now I wanted a word with you about the last period on Mondays. . . .”

Mr. Gorringer became immersed in school details.

When Carolus went out to Mincott that afternoon he found Lady Pipford chuckling over the promise of success of her scheme.

“They are all coming,” she said.  “Not a backslider amongst them.  Dr. Tom and Phoebe.  The Gorringers.  Micc Scick, the Fleeces and you.  Lanie and Roger are bringing Jason and Felicity down.”

“That leaves you with an odd number.  You need another man.”

“I know.  I’ve asked Mr. Boater.”

“You have ?”

“Well, he is a sort of gentlemen, Carolus, and he’ll behave himself all right on an occasion like this.”

“You may be right.”

“What is so extraordinary is that none of them held back and account of what has happened.  It was almost as though they all knew the truth about it and had no more fears.”

“The Sticks will come to you on Thursday morning.  Mrs. Stick says she wants all day to prepare.  She won’t have anyone to help her.”

“Just as they like.  I can get Mrs. Nockings if they want someone to wash up and be useful.”

“No, no, my dear Margaret.  You don’t know on what dangerous ground you’re treading.  It appears that long ago, in the incredibly far past of Mrs. Stick’s youth, she walked out with Nockings.”

“Really?  A romance?”

“She speaks very bitterly of him now.  I think he had better be told to keep out of the way that day.”

“He won’t like it.  If there’s one thing that Nockings hates, it’s being out of the way.  Still, I’ll tell him.  And his wife.  And Swillow.  The Sticks can have the place to themselves.”

Carolus left her to drive into the village.  He wanted to ask a few questions of Monty Boater.  Hs knock at the cottage door was answered by Boater himself, who looked red-eyed and bad-tempered, as though he just been woken from a heavy afternoon’s sleep after a good deal of mid-day drinking.

“Come in,” he said grimly, “I was just brewing a cup of tea.”

They sat in uncomfortable chairs facing one another, and Boater gave a long, liverish yawn.  Carolus guessed that he would remain fuddled and sleepy till he had swallowed a few cups of hot tea, so waited for the kettle to boil before saying anything.  When Boater had noisily drunk, he himself became more communicative.

“Believe it or not, the old girl’s asked me out to dinner,” he said.  “I was never so surprised in my life.  It reminded me of an occasion in Rangoon.”

Carolus decided to seize on this.

“What was that?”

Monty Boater look at him viciously with his red-rimmed eyes.

“Oh, just an occasion in Rangoon, he said.”

“So you’re going on Thursday?”

“Yes.  I’ll get my dinner jacket out of moth-balls.  It will amuse me to see you all on your best behaviour.”

“Won’t you be?”

“You never know what I’ll be.  The Bishop of London, old Winnington Ingram, used to say to me, ‘Monty,’ he used to say, ‘you’re unpredictable.’  And he was right.”

“Yes.  Now I have to ask you about something which may be hard to explain.”

Boater laughed.

“You thought I’d find it hard to explain myself when you met me in the drive of Mincott House the other night didn’t you?  But it wasn’t”

“No.  This is a little less simple.  On the Monday after May Swillow’s death you were seen to go up to Mincott House at about half-past ten and make your way to the boiler-room.  You went in and closed the door and remained there for a while, after which you left the grounds presumably to go home.  Is that just as easy to explain?”

Monty Boater look angry.  His puffy cheeks flushed and his voice was raised as he answered.”

“It dam’ well would be,” he said.  “Just as easy, if I meant to explain it.  But I don’t see why the hell I should, Deene.  Who are you to cross-examine me about my movements?”

“I am a dabbler.  An amateur.  And I’m the first to admit it.  There’s not the slightest reason why you should tell me anything, if you don’t want to.  I thought you rather prided yourself, though, on being able to explain incidents.”

“Being able to is another matter.  How can it possibly help you to clear up the mystery round these murders to know why I went to the boiler-room?  Answer me that.”

“I don’t know.  It’s just that one simply cannot afford to have unexplained occurrences and a case like this.  If you had put your hat at the top of a telegraph post I should still have wanted to know why you had done it.”

“I see.  Well, as it happens, there’s no very great mystery about this.  If it will satisfy your curiosity and stop you asking questions I don’t mind telling you.  Only when you’re satisfied that it has no bearing on the case you must keep it to yourself.  Is that agreed?”

“Yes.”

“It was like this.  Old Darryl and I used to use that boiler-room pretty often during his last few months.  Bit of a gamble.  Drop of Scotch.  We both liked a game of cards, but couldn’t play when the old girl was around.  As you know, she’s a night bird.  Never in bed before twelve, and sometimes the small hours.  We tried playing up in his room, but it’s a bore to have to keep your voice down all the time.  So old Darryl thought of the boiler-room.  Nice and warm.  Cosy.  Good light.  We took to playing there.”

“Did Nockings know?”

“I daresay.  He never actually came in while we were playing, but once or twice we caught glimpses of him snooping around.  He didn’t say anything—to us, at any rate.”

“Still, I don’t quite see why this should bring you back to the place.”

“No.  To tell you the truth, Deene, old Darryl had three or four bottles of whisky cached in that boiler-room.  There was a cavity under one of the flagstones.”

“Three or four bottles?  How did he get hold of them?”

“I told you old Darryl was no fool.  He wasn’t.  He knew his onions.  There were no flies on old Darryl.  He was up to snuff, all right.  He could tell you a thing or two.  He wasn’t to be caught with chaff.  He didn’t let the grass grow under his feet.  He knew a hawk from a handsaw.  He . . .”

“Yes, yes.  Well?”

“He had a key of the wine-cellar,” said Boater finally.

“Had he indeed?  So that’s where he got his whisky.”

“That’s right.  Lady P. would never give it to him.  So old Darryl kept his own little cellar under the floor of the boiler-room.”

“Where did he keep that key?”

“In his pocket.  Treasured it.  Used to say it was the most valuable thing he possessed.”

Carolus watched Boater narrowly.  “It was not among the contents of this pocket when he died,” he said.

“Wasn’t it, by Jove?  But I wonder what dirty dog has got hold of it.”

“I wonder, too.”

“Don’t look at me, Deene.  I’ve never had it for a moment.  Even when old Darryl was alive.  I wouldn’t raid Lady P.’s cellar.”

“No, but you were prepared to raid Darryl’s, weren’t you?”

“That’s different.  He put that whisky there for him and me, you might say.  Anyway, when I got there the cupboard was there.  Not a sausage.  Every bottle gone.  I don’t know whether old Darryl had packed them. . . .”

“Yes, he had.  They were found among his things.”

“I thought as much.  Old Darryl knew what was what.  He could tell you which side his bread was buttered.  He didn’t need to ask which way the wind blew.  He put the saddle on the right horse.  He had an eye to the main chance. . . .”

“Quite,” said Carolus firmly.

“So now you see why I went to the boiler-room that night and came away empty-handed.”

“I also know, if your details are correct, that somewhere, in someone’s possession now, is a spare key to the wine-cellar.”

“Yes.  I suppose so.  Awkward, but.  I remember once . . .”

But Carolus had said good-bye and left the cottage before that memory could be recalled.

He decided to take his own security measures, though, with respect to the dinner-party on the following Thursday, and that evening he is interviewed Mrs. Stick.

“Have you seen Lady Pipford about the menu?” he asked.

“Yes.  It’s all arranged, Sir.  I’m going to do a nice cream-of-celery soup to start with cruttons . . .”

“Cruttons, Mrs. Stick?” asked Carolus, honestly puzzled.

“Squares of fried bread,” said Mrs. Stick, a little surprised by such ignorance.  “Then fillets of sole Colbert.  That’s with a pat of parsley butter on each.  Tournedos.  Then roast partridge with game potatoes and salad.  A nice chocolate soufflé to finish.  It isn’t what I call a very satisfying dinner, but there’ll be plenty of everything.  I’ll see to that.”

“It sounds excellent.  Simple and seasonable.  What I want to do is to supply the wines.”

“Mrs. Stick did not at first welcome this idea.”

“There’ll be the Expense . . .” she said.”

“We can manage it out of stock, I think.  I want to make a little present to Lady Pipford, and I’m sure I can persuade her to agree.  We’ll take up a dozen each of the Amontillado, the Montrachet for the sole, Saint Émilion for the tournedos and Chambertin for the partridges.  I’m not going to take Champagne.  If you think they’ll want a Sauterne with the sweet, we can give them the Château Rieussec.  Then, with the coffee, some of the old Spanish brandy my uncle sent me.”

“I don’t suppose there’s one of them would appreciate any of them, Sir,” said Mrs. Stick severely.

“Oh yes, Dr. Tom and Phoebe will.  So will Lady Pipford and her daughter, and perhaps her daughter’s fiancé.  The headmaster will say he does, and Mr. Boater will enjoy them, even if he can’t distinguish much.  At any rate we shall know the wines are all right.”

“Mrs. Stick nodded.”

“Indeed yes, Sir.  I hadn’t thought of that.  Of course it will be best.  I’ll tell Stick to see about it.”

“I shall have lunch out on Thursday, so that you can have the whole day up there.”

“Very well, Sir.  I hope I don’t run into that Nockings.  The nasty cunning thing.”

“I don’t think you will.  Lady Pipford has given orders that no one is to go to the kitchen except you and Stick.”

“That’s Something,” Mrs. Stick agreed, and left Carolus to his mixed and apprehensive thoughts.

❦

Dead for a Ducat, Chapter Fifteen

Dead for a Ducat

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When Carolus told Mrs. Stick he would not be in for his usual cold Sunday evening supper, she seemed rather put out. 

“There, and I’ve made a nice game-pie for you.  I suppose it will keep, but still . . .”

“I assure you I shall miss it,” said Carolus.  “I’m taking what he calls pot luck with the Vicar of Mincott.”

Mrs. Stick stared.

“You’re not going to eat anything out there, are you, Sir?  Not with a poisoner loose in the place.”

“Really, Mrs. Stick.  That’s a very wild assumption.”

“I only know that Stick’s brother’s a bailiff on a farm at Mincott and says it’s something awful the talk is going round.  There’s been two deaths up at the house, and no one knows who will Go next.  It’s bad enough your having people here who are mixed up in anything like that, without your going out there eating things that may have arsenic in them.”

“At the Vicarage, Mrs. Stick?”

Carolus thought this was rather a neat piece of parrying, because Mrs. Stick was a staunch churchwoman.  But she was equal to it.

“Well, you never know, do you, when it Starts?” she said.  “You can’t tell who’s been in the house or where anything comes from.  You much better stay at home and have your game-pie.”

“I can’t do that, I’m afraid.  The call of duty, as Nockings would say, takes me even to Vicarage pot luck.”

Mrs. Stick turned round sharply.

“Did you say Nockings?” she asked.  “That wouldn’t be Sam Nockings, would it?”

“I think that’s his name.  Why?”

“I thought he’d left the district years ago.”

“You know him?”

“I ought to.  We were Walking Out together once, till I found him out.  Is he anything to do with these murders?”

“There is no certainty that there has been a murder, Mrs. Stick.  Nockings is the gardener at Mincott House, and a very good gardener, I understand.”

“Oh yes, he’s a good gardener all right,” said Mrs. Stick bitterly.  “But I’d like to know what else there is good about him.  Mind you, it must be twenty years now, since I’ve so much as set eyes on Nockings, but if he’s anything like what he was then, he’s a nasty, sneaking, underhand brute that would deceive his own mother.  I wouldn’t put him past murder, if it’s a murderer you want.”

“You seem to feel very strongly about it, Mrs. Stick.”

“Well, I do.  Out all times of the night . . .”

“Really?  Even as a young man?”

“True as I’m standing here.  I used to say to him, ‘Whenever do you find time to sleep?’ I used to say.  But there you are.  He was made the creepy sort.  Now, if he was to have poisoned that poor woman, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“I daresay he is one of the suspects.”

“It only shews the kind of person you get mixed up with when you start larking about with one of your crimes, Sir.  Now you be careful what you put in your mouth at that Vicarage, and if anything doesn’t taste just write you leave it.  I shan’t feel comfortable to your safe back again, upon my word I shan’t.”

Carolus, as a matter of fact, be anyone that the evening whether he would get an opportunity of putting anything into his mouth at all, so long did he sit with the Vicar waiting, presumably, for Mrs. Fleece to prepare the ‘pot luck’.  At last he decided that he would not, as he had intended, wait until the Vicar was fortified by food before broaching the matter of his inquiries, but tackle him now.

He opened with a single shot fired with the deadly effect of a trained rifleman.

“Vicar,” he said, “I happen to know that you went up to Mincott House on the night Darryl died.”

Mr. Fleece laughed heartily.

“Oh, excellent!” he said.  “First-rate!  Where were you on the night of the crime, eh?  You do like to bring a little comedy into your investigations, Deene.”

“I’m quite serious.”

“Me?  At the house?  Oh, come now.  I am a quiet old village parson with no time for mysteries.  Whatever makes you think that?”

Thus, reflected Carolus, had Miss Alicia Crick at first evaded the issue.

“Mr. Fleece, I am not a policeman.  I have no authority to interrogate you.  You are entirely at liberty, of course, to refuse an answer, even to turn me out of your house for suggesting this.  But with the responsibility of a man desperately looking for the truth in this tangle, I ask you—were you or were you not at Mincott House that night?”

“I was not!” proclaimed the Vicar.

Carolus rose to his feet.

“I am very sorry you should not wish to tell me the truth,” he said.  “You were seen there.”

“Seen? ”

“The lights of a taxi leaving the drive shewed you plainly.”

Mr. Fleece laughed again.

“Ah!  Shewed me plainly!  But where, my good Deene?  Where?”

“Entering the gates.”

“Did they shew me after I’d entered them, may I ask?”

“No.  I can’t say they did.  The taxi had passed on.”

“I never did enter them!” roared the Vicar, with boisterous triumph.  “I was not at Mincott House because I never passed through those gates!  You see how easily you can be mistaken?  You see how chary you should be of inferring that a man is not telling the truth?”

“You were in the gateway, though?”

“That’s another matter.  I was in the gateway.  I did not penetrate to the drive.”

“Why not?”

“It is a long story,” said the Vicar rather loftily.

“Too long to tell?”

“Better say, too intimate to tell.  Private affairs.  Not connected with anyone’s death.  I don’t propose to enlarge on that.”

“Just as you please, of course.”

Mr. Fleece grew breezy again.

“But you were caught out there, my dear Deene.  You were a bit too clever that time.  You disbelieved me when I said I had not been to Mincott House, and you see now it was true!”

Carolus said nothing, and Mr. Fleece stopped chuckling and began to move about uncomfortably in his chair.

“As a matter of fact,” he said at last, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t know what I was doing up there that evening.”  He made an effort to lower his voice.  “Only I don’t want my wife to know.  She’s apt to worry about these things.”

“I will certainly not tell her,” said Carolus at once.

“It’s a very simple matter, Deene.  £ s. d.  The living here is worth just three hundred pounds a year, and the Easter offerings, which total about forty pounds.  No more.  You can imagine the difficulties.  Bella has twenty-five pounds a year from an aunt.  But it means we live not merely in penury, but in perpetual anxiety.  You find it difficult to imagine, I daresay.  People suppose that parsons are comfortably provided for.  Nice old houses and so on.  Try keeping up appearances on my stipend!  It’s a long battle.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Carolus.

“Just at that time things had reached a climax.  Tradesmen’s bills!  Water!  Electricity!  Coal!  I did not know where to turn.  And as I lay in bed that night, it suddenly came to me—I must see Lady Pipford.  She had been kindness itself in the past.  I could not go on a day longer worrying myself and seeing Bella worry, when the whole thing could be relieved by a cheque from our Lady of the Manor.  We had been to tea with her that very afternoon, and she had hinted to me that she guessed there with difficulties and half suggested that I should call on her.  All very tactful and indirect, of course, but enough for me together that she was approachable.

“Then, once I had the idea I thought:  Why not put it into execution now, immediately?  Bella was fast asleep beside me, for although she appears to worry more than I do, she has the faculty of falling asleep very easily.  Lady Pipford, I knew, was a late bird, rarely going to bed before twelve, and it was now less than half-past ten.  I slipped quietly out of bed and, picking up my clothes, went into the bathroom to dress.  When I had done so I listened at the door for a moment, but Bella was still breathing heavily in deep sleep.  I was soon on my way up to the house.

“It was a dark, noisy night, and the wind seemed to carry me along.  I don’t know how long it took me to walk from the Vicarage, but I seemed to make very good time.  Then, when I was only a few hundred guards from the gates, a car passed me, driving towards the house.

“I continued, at first.  I thought it might be Swillow bringing the car back or Lady Pipford herself.  It did not occur to me that anyone would be calling at the house at this hour.  But as I drew nearer I saw that the car had dropped a passenger and was coming out again.

“I was now in a quandary.  Whoever it was at the house made my visit impossible.  It crossed my mind that it might be the son or daughter coming down unexpectedly late.  Even so, I could not speak to Lady Pipford in front of Jason or Elaine.  There was only one thing for it:  to abandon my approach for tonight and come up in the morning.  I turned away, and, as I told you, never entered the gates at all.  That is really the whole story”

Carolus seemed to be thinking deeply.

“I should add, I think, that when I saw Lady Pipford later, though sorely vexed and worried by events herself, she was most generous.  Most generous.  My problems, for the moment at least, are shelved.”

“Then you heard no shot that night?” asked Carolus, ignoring this.

“No.  The wind was behind me, of course.”

“Tell me, before you reached the Vicarage on your return, did another car pass you?”

“I can’t remember that.”

“Did you notice that there was a dance going on?”

“I knew there was to be one, but I don’t remember hearing or seeing anything of it.”

Mrs. Fleece appeared just then.

“Shall I bring it in here to the fire?” she asked.  “Or light the oil-stove in the dining room?”

“In here, I think,” said the Vicar, to the great relief of Carolus.  “We can put the cloth on the card table.”

Carolus could not help wondering what had taken so long to prepare.  Those large, nude, greyish boiled potatoes, perhaps.  Not surely the beetroot, which was plainly soaked in reddened vinegar, or the round slices of a substance described as luncheon meat, or the cold rice pudding which completed the meal.

Mrs. Fleece called her husband’s attention.

“Selwyn.  The cider,” she said in a hushed voice, and the Vicar left the room to return with a china jug from which he half filled their glasses with a cloudy liquid.

“Fall to, my dear fellow,” he shouted to Carolus.  “You must be hungry, after all that detection.  Let me see you demolish some of this.”

Carolus tried to obey.

“I meant to get corned beef,” said Mrs. Fleece desolately.  “But Bunt was out of it.”

“A good thing,” the Vicar pronounced.  “Deene had enough of that in his army years, I’m sure.  What do you think of our local cider, Deene?  A man’s tipple, what?”

It might be, thought Carolus, but only for a man not subject to acidity.  However, he managed to swallow half a glassful.

A few moments later he was on his feet.

“I’m most terribly sorry,” he said.  “I’ve just remembered I have to see Gorringer at nine o’clock.  You and I have been talking too long, Vicar.  You will excuse me, won’t you?”

He almost ran from the room and out to his car.  How he managed to drive home he never afterwards knew.  The road seemed to undulate like a shaken tape in front of him, the hedges to rise to the sky or bow to the ground.  He wanted to vomit, but knew that he could not.  He was dizzy, and his eyes would not remain in focus.

“Oh God,” he thought.  “I’ve been poisoned.”

He managed to pull up outside his front door and reel to the bell.  His last thought, before collapsing at the feet of Mrs. Stick, was that at least it wasn’t cyanide of potassium.  That was instantaneous.

He came round to the laughing face of Dr. Tom and the very solemn one of Mrs. Stick.  “Swallow this,” said Dr. Tom, and Carolus found himself painfully obeying.  Thereafter he vomited long, and at last felt a certain relief.

“You silly ass,” said the doctor.  “Putting yourself out like that!”

“He was poisoned, that’s what he was,” said Mrs. Stick.  “With all respect, Doctor, you could see he was poisoned, and might have died if you hadn’t of given him that Semitic.”

“Was I?” asked Carolus.

“No.  You simply ate something that didn’t agree with you.  You probably psyched yourself into believing there was poison in it.  Poison on the mind, that was your trouble.”

Mrs. Stick was not to be appeased.

“He will go messing about with these nasty cases, doctor, though I’ve begged him a hundred times to let them alone.  What else does expect but to be poisoned?  I’d like to know.  Shall I give him a drop of brandy, Doctor?”

“Can do.  And you can give me a whisky-and-soda.  Hauling me round here on Sunday evening for this.  Where had you been to dinner?”

“At Mincott Vicarage.”

“I see.”

“I think it must have been the cider.”

“Cider and auto-suggestion.  You’re all right now, anyway.”  Mrs. Stick had left the room.  “What is all this at Mincott, Carolus? ”

“Don’t ask me tonight.  I’m still pretty much at sea.  I’ll come and tell you both when it’s a little clearer.”

“You’re working towards a solution?”

“I think so.”

“And the police?”

“They haven’t a clue.  I mean, they haven’t one very important clue which I have.  So they are at a disadvantage.”

“They anticipate more murders?”

“I believe so.”

“You don’t?”

“There’s always a certain danger.  I’ve tried to get Margaret Pipford to close the house and go away, but she won’t.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Try to persuade her.”

“I will, though it’s probably hopeless.  She’s the most obstinate woman I know.”

When Dr. Tom had gone, Carolus, still feeling rather shaky, went up to bed.  He slept badly that night.  It may have been the effects of food-poisoning and the emetic, but he felt heavy with a sense of some ugly impending doom.  The case as he saw it grew increasingly twisted and inhuman.  Other murders he had investigated seemed to have clear, direct motives—these were full of obscurity and deep purpose which made them seem more cruel and cunning.  What motive could anyone have for killing May Swillow?  Carolus believed he had the answer to that.

He twisted in his bed that night with a slight fever.  He saw the people he had been interviewing not as the commonplace inhabitants of an English village or relatives of these, but as creatures with potentialities for evil which made them, in his hot mind, almost satanic.  Not one of them, he began to feel, was incapable of the dark sin of murder.

In the distorting fog of insomnia he saw them one by one, as though they were devil-faced sheep he was counting in order to tire his brain.  The suspects, he supposed they were, or at all events police suspects.  Margaret Pipford herself, for instance, at first so nonchalant and ready for him to investigate, later so secretive and withdrawn, was not she capable of murder?  He saw the old face, full of character and courage, which he had known and liked for so long, as that of a Medusa.  Then her son, that scientific, cold-mannered man, who had opportunities to obtain poison, who had been in Mincott at the time of Darryl’s death, if not of May Swillow’s, wasn’t he capable of both murders?  Carolus had always distrusted that humourless type, whose life was ordered to a rigid system and whose passions, it seemed, were controlled for approved purposes.  He distrusted Jason as much as he disliked him.

The breezy Elaine seemed no longer, in these fantastic night thoughts, a downright and ordinary Englishwoman who had made one unfortunate marriage and was now going towards another.  She was a woman of purpose, a woman who would stop at nothing to achieve her ends.  That strong profile, that sharp, resolute way of speaking—she, if anyone, was capable of killing those who stood in her way.  She had been motoring aimlessly up the Great North Road, she said, on the night of her husband’s death, and quite apart from the difficulty of imagining her doing anything aimlessly, this seemed an improbable story.

Then Nockings.  When first Carolus had seen him he spoke of usually going to bed at half-past ten, “which is late enough when you’ve got to be up in the morning.”  Now it appeared, both from Nockings himself and from all accounts of him, that he was an inveterate somnambule, a creeper and watcher in the small hours.  He had been near the house at the time of Darryl’s death, and in it when May Swillow was poisoned.  His long, lugubrious face could easily be that of a murderer, and of him alone it was possible to imagine that he had some deep distorted motive for killing May Swillow.  In the feverish mind of Carolus, Nockings seemed, in appearance at least, like murderers of the past—Eugene Aram or the Demon Barber.

Or Swillow.  What did Carolus, or anyone else, know of the taciturn Swillow?  That trap of a mouth, that surliness might conceal motives scarcely credible to a balanced mind.  Swillow was a primitive with the dangerous inconsistencies of a primitive.  The title of a joseph Conrad short story came unbidden to his mind we thought of Swillow—‘Heart of Darkness’.  He could see Swillow as a savage survival, someone perhaps unconsciously but by nature at war with civilized life.

Carolus went on to Poppy Munn.  How remote she seemed in this phantasmagoria from the innocent country girl.  He thought of the young metropolitan criminals, the Teddy Boys and knife-carrying thugs of the London suburbs, and remembered Poppy saying that the day was past when a girl was a country miss until she had lived in London.  There was a hardness in her manner which had at first surprised him and now gave her in his recollection something inhuman.  Poppy Munn, he thought on this midnight, Poppy Munn could be a murderess, and a cold and competent one.

Or Boater, for that matter.  Boater’s bibulous self-aggrandizement could not be mistaken for bonhomie.  Boater was not a ‘good fellow’, and probably never had been.  He was a sot, but a determined sot.  He could come secretly up to the house—according to Nockings—and went on some errand which he had yet to explain, shut himself in the boiler-room and emerged to reel away between the trees.  An unpleasant man, Boater.  Whether or not he had been at the house on the night of Darryl’s death, he had certainly intended to go there.

Nor by any means was Miss Crick excluded from the nightmare category of those sleepless hours.  With her energy, her sinewy strength, her passion for strange concoctions, she seemed, as Carolus pictured her weatherbeaten face and ungainly vigorous body, as much a potential killer as any of them.  He knew that with the light of day and the return to school routine Alicia Crick might seem no more than an ordinary parochial spinster, but tonight the very plants seemed mandrakes which emitted human screams as they were pulled.

And the Fleeces, driven into a corner by the cruel whip of perpetual poverty, were not either of these capable of some desperate act?  The noisy Vicar hallooing his triumph over Carolus because, he said, he had not actually passed through the gates of Mincott House that night seemed suddenly an unamiable, a highly unreliable figure.  What pains he had taken, when the matter first arose, to account for his absence from the conjugal bedroom?  And his wife’s features, contorted by endless anxieties, seemed gnomish now, almost diabolical.

That left Carolus with two men who at least qualified as suspects to one or another of the murders—if murders these had been—Eddie Bretton and Bunt.  Bretton at first seemed a commonplace youth, and Poppy had taken pains to present him as a ‘simple rustic type’.  But the description did not altogether fit.  He had lied readily enough at first about his activities on the night Darryl died and had had a voluble explanation for his lying.  As for Bunt, “the evil-hearted grocer,” Carolus remembered, “he crams with cans of poisoned meat The subjects of the King”.  Mr. Bunt with his aggrieved manner, Mr. Bunt who had given Nockings chocolates for May Swillow, Mr. Bunt was with the rest of them in that infernal rout.

It was not until the small powers that Carolus slept, and then uneasily.

❦

Dead for a Ducat, Chapter Fourteen

Dead for a Ducat

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When he went out to Mincott again on Sunday morning he found Miss Crick back at Rosemary Cottage.  It appeared that Mrs. Nockings was ‘obliging’ Lady Pipford, aided by her sixteen-year-old daughter.  He guessed that Miss Crick’s enthusiasm for domestic economy had been too much for the old lady.

“But I filled the breach,” said Alicia Crick.  “I held the fort.  It’s nice to know one can still be useful at times.  Sit down.  I’ve just got to run down the garden for a cabbage and a sprig of pennyroyal, and I’ll be with you.  Shan’t be a mo.”

Carolus found himself depressed this time by his surroundings.  Miss Crick no longer seemed to him a quaint, over-rusticated old party, but a woman with something deep and not readily perceptible in her make-up.  Yet he could not tell why.  So far as he had observed, her actions were harmless enough.

She came in breezily, set down her trug, and turned to give Carolus her full attention.

“Well now,” she said, “what crime have I committed this time?”

Carolus tried to give his voice and manner all the solemnity of which they were capable.

“Miss Crick, you remember the night of Darryl Montaccord’s death?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go out that night?”

“Out?  Do you mean out-of-doors?”

“Yes, Miss Crick.  Out-of-doors.”

“I may have just popped out somewhere.  I can’t really remember.”

“Did you hear the shot which killed Montaccord?”

“Really, Mr. Deene, what a silly question!  How should I know?  There are so many shots.”

“Were there?  That night?  Did you hear more than one?”

“I haven’t said I heard any.”

“But did you?”

“May have done.  Why?”

“Where were you when it was fired?”

“Oh, I can’t remember that.  I’m here, there and everywhere, you know.”

“Very well, then, miss Crick, let me be a little more specific.  What were you doing in the garden of Mincott House that night?”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Must we go through all this?  I know you were there, and you know you were there, so why do we waste time?”

“You’re a very strange man, Mr. Deene, to come and make such an extraordinary accusation.  I wonder what on earth makes you think you have grounds for it?”

“Miss Crick, you were seen, distinctly and indubitably.  You were coming round from the back of the house when the driver of a car in front of the doorway switched on his headlights.  You tried to dodge away, but you were quite clearly seen.”

Miss Crick managed to smile.

“Oh dear!  It does sound incriminating, doesn’t it?  Yet it wasn’t, you know.  Not really.”

“You were in the garden that night?”

“I was.”

“When the shot was fired?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t you like to tell me the whole story?”

“Well, just a jiffy while I nip out to the kitchen and get something On, or I shall have no lunch.  I’ll give you a glass of primrose wine to sip while I’m gone.  Then I’ll tell you the whole dreadful story.”

Miss Crick pranced out, and Carolus sat with a white liquor untouched beside him, examining the ceiling.  It will be lies, he supposed, but they might be revealing lies.  He thought grimly that in this work he probably discovered more truth from lies than from the truth itself.

When she came back, Miss Crick seemed particularly cool and cheerful, as though she had had time to compose herself.  She smiled brightly to Carolus and talk a hard chair.

“I wanted a root of lovage, she said archly.

“What on earth is that?”

“Lovage.  Levisticum officinale.  It’s a culinary herb which grows almost wild in Lady Pipford’s garden.”

“You mean you went up there on that particular night to take a root of this herb?”

“Yes.  Funny, wasn’t it, that I should have chosen the very night of Darryl’s death?”

Funny again, reflected Carolus.

“But if you wanted a root of this herb, why didn’t you ask Lady Pipford for it?”

“I did.  But you know what she is.  She said, ‘You must ask Nockings’.”

“And did you?”

“Yes, but he refused.  He said there was none to spare, or something of the sort.  He resents my interest in the garden.  He thinks that no one knows anything about plants but himself.  I don’t know how Lady Pipford puts up with it.  I told her while staying there helping that there was scarcely a herb in the place.  Sage, mint, thyme—but what are those?  ‘You must have summer savoury,’ I told Lady Pipford, ‘purslane, orach, tarragon and basil.  You’ve no cumin or marjoram—not even a root of fennel.  How could May Swillow cook for you without coriander seeds and dill, rampion and tansy?  It’s a mystery to me.’  And Nockings, of course, resented the suggestion.”

“But that was after you had asked him for the plant you wanted?”

“Yes, but it was just as bad before.  If I brought a few seeds or a jar of potpourri up to Lady Pipford, he took it as a personal offence, and when I asked him for the lovage, he refused.”

“Didn’t you go to Margaret Pipford again?”

“I did.  ‘My dear Alicia,’ she said, ‘I never interfere in these matters.  I am sorry, but if Nockings says no, there it is.  He is a good gardener, and I believe in giving him his own way.’  I asked how he could be a good gardener when he had never grown asparagus peas—most delicious vegetables—or Welsh onions, or sweet cecily or rue or caraway or balm?  But Margaret Pipford has no imagination really, and is quite content to go on with the same old foods.  So there I was.  All that lovely lovage going to waste, and not able to get a root of it.”

“Is lovage lovely?” asked Carolus with some amusement.

“It’s exquisite.  It has a sort of smoky taste, like more aromatic celery.  It’s such a striking planet, too, with polished leaves and fine long stalks.  Its leaves a delicious in soups and stews, or can be snipped up with a pair of scissors and popped in a salad.  Then the stalks!”

“What?” asked Carolus.

“Candied, my dear man.  Candied.  Better than angelica.  Oh, it’s a wonderful plant, but I just couldn’t get hold of it.  So I decided that night to nip up to the House and pinch a root.  Was it very naughty?”

“I have no opinion, Miss Crick.  What time did you leave?”

“I left home about twenty to eleven.  I reached the house about ten to, I suppose.  But an awful thing happened.  Just as I was getting near the bed where the lovage is growing, I heard someone singing.”

“Singing?”

“Yes.  A bass voice.  Singing a hymn.”

“What hymn?”

“For Those in Peril on the Sea,” said Alicia Crick sharply.  Then her old voice quavered into music.  “You know, Eternal father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave. . . .  It’s one of William Whiting’s.”

“And someone was singing it in a bass voice in Lady Pipford’s garden a little before eleven on the night Darryl died?”

“Yes.  I was petrified.  I hopped behind a bush and waited.  It was Nockings.  He was coming from the boiler-house.  I watched him go past and make off in the direction of his cottage.  But I could not move for quite a time.  Just as I was collecting myself and making again for the lovage, the second awful thing happened.  There was a shot from upstairs.  Just one.  But it seemed to shake the whole night.  And after it silence.  I waited, thinking someone would come tearing out of the house or something.  But not a movement.  Not a sound.  Until—it must have been five minutes later—I heard the sound of a car approaching.”

Miss Crick paused.

“You must excuse me a moment,” she said.  “I want to see how my vegetable goulash is doing.  Have some more primrose wine?  Oh, you haven’t drunk that yet.  Shan’t be a jiff.”

She rose to her feet with the energy of a schoolgirl and strode from the room.  She was back in three minutes.

“It seems to have been quite a night,” said Carolus.

“It was dreadful.  I’d long ago abandoned all idea of lovage.  All I wanted was to get away.  I watched this car come in and stop by the front door.  I could hear Jason’s voice asking the taxi-driver how much he owed him, then saying, ‘Rather a lot from the station, isn’t it?’  I couldn’t hear what the taxi-man said, but it turned round quickly and drove off, while Jason went up to the front door and disappeared inside. 

Miss Crick now seemed to be in some confusion.

“There’s something else . . .” she said.  “Really, I don’t know whether I ought . . . I suppose it’s all right, but I do hate sneaking . . .”

“You saw someone?”

“Yes.  As the taxi was leaving, the lights shewed the entrance.  And just coming through the gates as it got near, I saw Mr. Fleece.”

“Are you quite sure, Miss Crick?  Couldn’t you have imagined that?”

“I’ve tried to think so a dozen times, but no, I’m quite sure.  The headlights lit him up.  After the taxi had gone I couldn’t see more of him, and waited for him to come into the light thrown by the lamp over the front door.  But he never came.  I waited at least ten minutes, but there was no more sign of him.”

“You say he was entering as the taxi left.  He could have been leaving, I suppose, and have turned round in the light of a taxi.”

“I don’t think so.  I had the impression he was striding forward.”

“Then what?”

“I waited at least ten minutes for him to appear.  Perhaps longer.  I couldn’t get through the front gates if he was about.  Then, just as I really thought it was safe to go, another car came in, and I recognised it as Eddy Bretton’s.  He pulled up by the front door and switched off his lights.  It was when he switched them on again that he saw me, I suppose?”

Carolus nodded.

“At last, when he had gone, I was able to make my way home.  Dear, I was so thankful.  It was a lesson to me, of course.  Thou shalt not steal.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s lovage, for that matter.  I drank a whole glass of strawberry and beetroot cordial when I got in, and thankfully went up to bed.”

“At no time that night did you enter the house?”

“Certainly not”

“Or hear anything from the house except the shot?”

“No.”

“Or see anything you have not described?”

“No.  I’ve told you the whole sorry story.”

“Did you go up to the house on the day of May Swillow’s death?”

“No.  Thank goodness.  But you know that when you came to see me the afternoon.”

“Yes.  But not until about half-past-four.”

“I hadn’t been out, except in the garden.”

“I see.  You’ve given me some valuable information, Miss Crick, if it is all quite accurate.”

“Have a glass of mead before you go?  And a savoury hotcake?”

“Thank you.  I’m in rather a hurry.”

As he left Rosemary Cottage, Carolus heard the chimes from Mincott church tower turned to a single bell, and knew that Matins was about to begin.  He decided to attend, not knowing quite what expected to learn from the occasion, but guessing that several the people connected with the case would be present.

He was not disappointed.  He was shewn into his seat by Mr. Bunt, who wore a peculiar black gown with velvet facings.

“I don’t know where I’m going to put you,” he whispered to Carolus in a disgruntled tone.  “There’s so many of them reserve their pews, and then don’t come.”

He led Carolus to a corner seat against the wall in a row towards the back from which he could see most of the congregation, though from over their right shoulders, as it were.

The vestry was at the west end of the church, and when the choir and merged blithely singing a hymn and walking sedately in pairs, he saw that Nockings was one of the last pair before the Vicar brought up the rear.  But what surprised him was the identity of the gardener’s partner, for it was Swillow, and Swillow had never seemed to Carolus to be of a church-going disposition.  However—“Oft in danger, oft in woe!” intoned Swillow cheerfully as they started up the aisle, and Carolus realized that he had a lot to learn about some of the people associated with Mincott House.”

“Lady Pipford was alone in her pew.  She looked rather severe this morning, Carolus thought, as though the strain were telling on her.  Just behind her sat Mrs. Fleece, fidgeting and scared-looking, watching her husband as though she thought he would make some ghastly blunder, as doubtless she had watched him through every service since their marriage.

But Mr. Fleece was loud and confident, racing cheerfully towards the Te Deum which was sung to the quadruple chant.  Everybody seemed impatient to reach the joys of community singing when the four remaining hymns, indicated on an oak-framed board near the pulpit, could be shouted in unison, interrupted only by a brief and snappy sermon from the Vicar.

Just as Carolus recognised Eddy Bretton and Poppy Munn sitting together on the far side of the church, he realized that their Banns were being called.  It was for the First Time of Asking, and seemed to send a thrill through the congregation.

But the greatest surprise for Carolus was the sight of Monty Boater in a neat grey suit, looking very much a country gentlemen, and joining discreetly in the singing.  Of course, Carolus reflected, English law forbade competition between church and inn, agreeing that licensed premises should not open until Sunday services were almost finished; still he had not, somehow, expected to see Boater here.

Miss Crick had followed Carolus and, arriving late, had been put in a pew behind him.

They were now well into the hymns, those waltz-like sacred songs with which congregations hail the greatest mysteries of religion.  The village of Mincott gathered together its vocal abilities to trill gaily.  “Three in One and One in three, Ruler of the Earth and Sea!” and everyone looked very pleased about it.  It was hard to realize that among the singers was in all probability at least one very cruel, all very mad, or very desperate murderer.

Mr. Fleece preached on good neighbourliness.  It was, Carolus heard later, a favourite theme of his.

“Just now, in our little community,” he said when he had warmed to his subject, “we are passing through a crisis which tests us to the full.”

Carolus saw that Mrs. Fleece was positively grimacing with anxiety.

“At such a time,” continued the Vicar, “we must try not to harbour ugly suspicions, not to carry harmful rumours, not to damage faultless reputations and not to think unkind thoughts.  It may be there is an agent of evil among us; If so, in due course he or she will be exposed.  In the meantime it is not for us to judge, but to think the best of one another and remember the beams in our own eyes before we look for the motes in our brothers’.”

Laudable sentiments, thought Carolus, but not calculated to help him much in the search for the truth.

When it was over and the hosts of Midian had prowled and prowled around to the evident enjoyment of everybody, Carolus sought out Mr. Fleece and asked him whether he could spare him half an hour some time, as there were a few more facts he wanted to clear up.

“Rather!” shouted the Vicar.  “Come and take pot luck tonight!  After evensong.  We shall be delighted.”

“Thank you.”

Carolus felt his heart sink at the prospect of a cold meal in that gloomy vicarage, but could not offend Mr. Fleece by a refusal.

At the Bull he found several of the congregation, including Monty Boater, already getting the church dust out of their throats.  He had some questions he wanted to put to Boater, but decided that this was not the moment he needed.  He drove home to lunch feeling he had achieved very little.

❦