Wraiths and changelings, p.20
Wraiths and Changelings, page 20
part #53 of Mrs Bradley Series
‘Who murdered your wife, Mr Crieff-Tweedle?’
‘Really, Chief Inspector, I have no idea. If anybody is to be caught and punished, I would like it to be Melrose. I couldn’t stand the fellow,’ said Dum, trying to smile.
‘But we have no more evidence against him than against yourself so far.’
‘Then there are David and Arcati.’
‘A complete alibi in both cases, as proved.’
‘Then what about the Bylands? They’d had a terrific row with Dee before she went off alone to that dinner.’
‘Ah, yes, she went alone to the dinner. I suppose she took the car?’
‘Of course she did. I mean, she must have done. The car wasn’t there when the Bylands were ready to leave. That’s why they had to call up a taxi.’
‘Oh, you knew they called a taxi, did you?’
‘Of course. The driver came to the front door of the bungalow and said there was a taxi for them. Besides, I know Byland went out to the annexe to phone.’
‘And found it empty?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Melrose wasn’t there? He had not returned from wherever it was he went?’
‘I think Byland would have mentioned that.’
‘It wasn’t locked up, then? The annexe, I mean.’
‘I have no idea. I didn’t go over there with him.’
‘But you saw the Bylands off?’
‘Only from the front door. The taxi, of course, was in the service road round at the back. I saw them off, then I took my aspirins and went to bed, and that really is all I can tell you.’
‘I expect your wife was disappointed that you did not attend the dinner.’
‘I really was far too unwell to go. Besides, it would have been very anti-social to spread my germs.’
‘There’s a nice thought, then. Well, thank you for your help. I’ll see myself out.’
A few minutes later a servant showed the Chief Inspector in again.
‘I do beg your pardon for intruding upon you again, but there is just one thing.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Rees, emphasising the inflection with which South Wales stresses those two words. ‘Just one more question if I may, then.’
‘Oh, go on, go on, and then perhaps you’ll leave me in peace.’
‘We have a plan of the bungalow named Kojak. It looks as though the bedroom which you and your wife occupied—and the Bylands’ bedroom, for that matter— had windows which overlooked the back garden. The back garden was very small. Agreed?’
‘Yes, of course. Only a few yards separated the back windows of the bungalow from the service road.’
‘That being so, after you had taken your aspirins and gone to bed, did anything disturb you at all?’
‘Well—this is going to sound ridiculous.’
‘Not if it accords with a theory which Dame Beatrice has propounded to me and which, so far, she has not repeated to anybody else.’
‘Oh, well, this won’t be the same thing, I’m sure. You see, I had just settled down in bed when I could have sworn I heard my wife’s voice in the back garden. What is more, I thought I had heard a car pull up.’
‘Your own car?’
‘Oh, as to that, I had no idea. Most of the people who rent those bungalows have cars. I thought nothing of hearing one pull up until, as I say, I thought I heard my wife’s voice.’
‘Oh, yes? Surprised, were you, to hear it?’
‘Yes. Your own voice suggests that you want to know what I did. Well, all I wanted was a bit of peace, so I pulled the bedclothes well up round my ears and made up my mind that if she came in to see how my cold was getting on, I was going to pretend to be fast asleep.’
‘And did she come into the bedroom, then?’
‘No, she did not. Nobody came into the bungalow at all. Soon after that, the aspirins got to work, I suppose, and I did fall asleep. It was not until the morning, when I found she hadn’t breakfasted, that I began to wonder what had happened.’
‘At what point did it occur to you that your wife had never come home that night?’
‘I wasn’t convinced—not really convinced—until I knew her body had been found.’
‘You thought you heard a car pull up at or near the bungalow, and you thought you heard your wife’s voice. Did anybody seem to be with her? Did you hear another voice and did you hear the car start up again a bit later on?’
They were leading questions. Dum took time to consider them before he replied:
‘No, to both your suggestions. I’d had some whisky, you know, and then the aspirins and, as I told you, I bundled myself up in the bedclothes so that my ears were covered. I didn’t want to hear my wife’s voice. I rather disliked her voice, you know. So I muffled myself up and she did not come into the room after all, so I soon went to sleep. As to the person she could have had with her, if, indeed, she had anybody at all, it might have been any of the others or even somebody talking across from the next bungalow. I am convinced now that she did not come home at all.’
‘I suppose you have no idea of the approximate time that you thought you heard your wife’s voice in the garden?’
‘Approximate time? Well, not really. The Bylands took some half hour or so to finish their packing after Dee had gone off to dine, and then we had some whisky for our colds and there were the farewells and I apologised as best I could for Dee’s behaviour to them, and then there was Byland’s phone call and a fairly long wait for the taxi and then I had another whisky and got ready for bed—say about another twenty minutes to half an hour—and, of course, I’d only just got into bed when I thought I heard the car then her voice.’
‘Adding all that up, then, can you give an estimate of the time?’
‘Only roughly, of course. I suppose it would have been in the region of ten o’clock or a little later.’
‘And at what time did the party begin their dinner at the hotel?’
‘Oh, it got later as the days went on. Dee grew impatient of the time we had to spend waiting until it was dark enough, in her opinion, for the ghosts to put in an appearance, so, in the end, we were beginning our dinner at about eight-thirty and not exactly hurrying over it, you know.’
‘Of course not. Who would hurry over a good dinner? Well, now, you know that Dame Beatrice, who is psychiatrist to the Home Office, has been taking a great interest in the case on behalf of Miss Eiladh Gavin. Eiladh! Isn’t that a pretty name, now?’
‘Oh, get on, Chief Inspector!’
‘Well, strange this, but neither of them believes that you were attacked at Burgh Castle on that Tuesday night. You will remember that Tuesday night, won’t you?’
‘I’ve already admitted that I may not have been attacked, but I certainly fell off a broken part of the wall.’
‘But your wife was attacked and her body was thrown over the wall.’
‘Well, of course, or so it appears.’
‘Yet you say you heard her voice outside the bungalow on the night of her death.’
‘It was only my fancy.’
‘Oh, no, it was not your fancy. She was there, and she was there not so very long before she was murdered. You were not the only one to hear her voice, no, indeed. Your neighbours heard it, too. A big, strong, carrying voice she had, I believe.’
‘We had nothing to do with our neighbours.’
‘Indeed you had not. That wouldn’t stop their ears, though, would it? Not like the deaf adder of Scripture, are they?’
‘I know nothing about them, but if my wife did return to the bungalow before she went to Burgh Castle, there is only one person she would have been talking to, and that’s the priest, Melrose. And if it was Melrose, well, then, priest or no priest, there’s your murderer, Chief Inspector.’
‘Oh, no, that won’t do. That won’t do at all, look you. We had a tail on Melrose that night, and the name of the tail was Detective Inspector Tom Carpenter of the C.I.D.’
‘What!’
‘Yes, indeed. Tailing Melrose he was, most of the time he was in Norfolk, and he had a tip-off that evening, see? So after dinner he went out, pretending to buy bottles of wines and spirits—oh, such wickedness, to be sure!—but really he went to Norwich and found Melrose, but could prove nothing. So he pulled him into Norwich police station, see, and Melrose was there all night to answer questions about the murder of the play-actor Pavy. We have got nothing on him yet, but we hold two of his gang for the Crieff-Tweedle robbery, and hard luck if we can’t round up the rest of them on a charge of conspiracy and murder. All in it, you see, all the lot of them, and all bloody liars.’
‘Well, I hope you do round them up, of course, but, if it wasn’t Melrose with my wife, who was it?’
‘Well, not to surprise you, of course, but the neighbours say it was you yourself. You opened the front door to her. You had not gone to bed. You were having a bit of a soak, see, and she found you alone and began to upbraid you for being —well, a great pity that whisky has such a strong smell, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I had a bad cold.’
‘Yes, indeed. Was it the bad cold that made you become heated in argument, or was it the whisky? Something made you take her by the throat and strangle her. It was you who took her dead body to Burgh Castle in the car she came back in, wasn’t it?’
‘So there it is, then,’ said Rees to Dame Beatrice. ‘We have arrested and charged him and sorry I am to do it, for driven to it he was, you might say, and, of course, diminished responsibilitity because of the whisky. Dr Carpenter diagnosed the hangover, if you remember. How he ever got his wife’s body into the car and remembered to tie the handkerchief round her neck and then get the car to Burgh Castle and back to Wroxham, where we found it abandoned near the railway station as though she had gone off by train, we shall never know. He must have walked back to the bungalow from there. You were quite right, ma’am. When she found she was left alone at the hotel after dinner that night, she decided to abandon all thought of Burgh Castle and drove straight back to the bungalow in the rain.’
‘And there, you think,’ said Eiladh, ‘she found him alone and soaking up the whisky and began lambasting him and he suddenly saw red and strangled her. Serve her jolly well right! Poor old Dum!’
‘You need not feel so very sorry for him,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I have no doubt at all that murder had been in his mind for some time. The real climax came when she sent him alone to Burgh Castle that night to spy upon you and the Carpenter brother and sister. He pretended that he himself had been attacked so as to prepare the ground if ever he had an opportunity to kill his wife under, so to speak, protection of the ghosts. Up to that point, of course, it was wishful thinking. He could not have known how neatly matters were going to fall into his hands on the night he killed her.’
‘Well, I’m still sorry for him,’ said Eiladh. ‘She was perfectly beastly to him and in public, too, which really is unforgivable.’
‘And of course, he must have known he was her heir,’ said Dame Beatrice dispassionately. ‘Crippen was also a victim of his wife’s unkind tongue and that in public, too, but it was his infatuation with Ethel le Neve which led to murder. There is always a last straw and I think that, in Edward Crieff-Tweedle’s case, the straw was made of gold and was correspondingly heavy.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Eiladh stoutly. ‘If Dee hadn’t been so beastly to the Bylands, the bungalow wouldn’t have been empty except for Dum that night, and if she hadn’t been so beastly about Tom and me, we three would have gone with her to Burgh Castle, rain or no rain. It was all her own fault that she was murdered.”
‘Oh, domestic victims of murder always contribute towards their own deaths,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘That they asked for it is a truism. The same applies (although his was not a domestic murder) in the case of Salathiel Pavy. There were at least two of the Melrose gang assisting in the ghost business and Pavy, who had been co-opted, had learned enough of their activities to be in a position, or so he thought, to blackmail them. He escaped from them at Horning, but, while Melrose took Mrs Crieff-Tweedle’s party on that round trip so that she did not get to St Benet’s Abbey that night, his two henchmen strangled Salathiel when he left the hotel to obey their telephone call and strung him up in imitation of the murdered monk.’
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
Brother Pacificus
‘No Will o’ the Wisp mislight thee
Or snake or slow-worm bite thee,
But on, on thy way,
Not making a stay,
Since ghost there’s none to affright thee.’
Robert Herrick —‘The Night-Piece to Julia ’
« ^
It was late autumn and cold on the Broads. The sedges were withered, the reeds rustled uneasily in a sharp east wind and strings of wild duck took echelon flight across a pale, unfriendly sky. The cruiser, motor-driven, turned into the dyke which led to Ranworth Broad.
‘I can’t think why you wanted to come back to these haunted waters,’ said Hamish to his sister. Eiladh, at the controls, did not reply. The boat moved slowly down the narrow channel and reached the open water before she answered.
‘Tom didn’t want me to come,’ she said, ‘but we’re not married yet and I wanted to see Ranworth church.’
They moored and went ashore. The church was open. They climbed the tower and came out on to the leads. Eiladh walked to the battlemented parapet and looked down and around. Below her, Broads, rivers and marshes were as small as a picture map of the surrounding countryside.
They descended into the body of the church. Before the beautiful fifteenth-century painted screen, with the Archangel Michael, in all his glory of wings and halo, predominant among the decorative saints, a man was kneeling. He was not quite bareheaded, for he seemed to be wearing on the back of his head a small, round, white cap, such as prelates of the Catholic church affect.
He must have heard the brother and sister come in, for he rose from his kneeling position and stood aside to give them room to look at the screen. By the time they had examined it—and they took their time—he had disappeared, but after they had come down from the little room where the Ranworth Missal or Sarum Antiphoner, the second great treasure of the church, was housed, he was back on his knees again in front of the screen and, delicately, appeared to be touching it.
‘I suppose it’s all right?’ Hamish murmured to his sister. ‘I mean, he isn’t doing any harm?’
Eiladh did not reply. They dropped their offerings into the box provided and she led the way out of the south porch and back to their boat. Near it was another boat, an unwieldly, flat-bottomed craft on which a small white dog was keeping guard.
‘Well, that wasn’t here when we came,’ said Hamish. ‘Queer-looking old tub. The dog isn’t taking any notice of us. He’s waiting for his owner to turn up. Some native of the place, obviously.’
‘The man who was kneeling in the church,’ said Eiladh.
‘Can’t be. The man was in the church before we got there, and this boat wasn’t here when we went ashore.’
A sound, not of footsteps, but of quiet whistling, caused them to turn round.
Approaching them was a man in a long, sack-like garment with a dark hood, rather like that of an anorak, covering his head.
‘Good evening,’ said Eiladh. ‘Didn’t we see you in the church just now?’
‘I fare to touch up that old screen now and again,’ said the man. ‘My little Caesar wait for me. Come you along then, bor,’ he broke off, addressing the dog. He spoke with the ascending, seemingly questioning accent of the countryside. Then he splashed through the shallow ripples to his boat, stepped aboard, seated himself beside the dog and began to pull across the Broad towards the dyke. The brother and sister watched his slow but steady progress. They found they were holding hands.
‘So the little white cap was really a tonsure,’ said Eiladh, very quietly, ‘and I knew his dog would be white, not black like the other one.’
‘Eh?’ Hamish released her hand.
‘Well, look!’
The clumsy boat had reached the middle of the Broad. As they watched, it melted into air and was gone.
‘You have to speak to them first,’ she said. ‘That’s why he was able to tell us what he was doing in the church.’
‘What the devil are you talking about?’
‘Not the devil; the ghost of Brother Pacificus,’ said Eiladh.
—«»—«»—«»—
[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[April 08, 2007]
Gladys Mitchell, Wraiths and Changelings
