Authors: Gladys Mitchell
‘Well, she seems to think rather well of this mighty hunter, anyhow. You’ll see when we arrive. Then there is Mrs Bradley. Know her? Little, old, shrivelled, clever, sarcastic sort of dame. Would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age. I believe she
is
one. Good little old sport, though. You’ll like her, I expect. Then there’s a chap named Carstairs, very decent. Scientific sort of bloke, I believe—beetles or something. And that’s the lot.’
‘And here we are,’ added Dorothy, as Garde shaved paint off the gate-post at the lodge. ‘What a rotten driver my young man is!’
The occasion was Alastair Bing’s birthday. The place, Chayning Court, was a pleasant Queen Anne house which had been bought by Alastair, its present owner, upon his succeeding to a respectable fortune made by his maternal uncle.
Alastair Bing called himself an archaeologist, thought of himself as a scholar and a gentleman, and was, as a matter of fact, a hot-tempered, muddle-headed, self-opinionated, domineering man, quite likeable if you did not see too much of him, extraordinarily insufferable if you did. He had been a widower for seventeen years, during which time his daughter Eleanor had acted as his housekeeper and secretary. Garde, his son, junior to Eleanor by some years, favoured his mother’s side of the family, and was tall, strong, virile, and moody. He had elected to take up the study
of medicine—this to his father’s disgust. Alastair had imagined his son a Cambridge don. It was significant that no one of their acquaintance had doubted which would win the day—the spitfire, vindictive, explosive older man or the gloomy, moody, saturnine younger one. Garde always got his own way, usually by holding stolidly to the course he had set himself, and declining to be drawn into argument. His proposal of marriage to the beautiful and popular Dorothy Clark had been characteristic.
‘Look here, Dorothy, what’s a decent month for a wedding?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. June?’
‘Right you are. Next June it is! When can you come and choose an engagement ring?’
‘But Garde——’
But Garde had gone.
Dinner, on this rather formal occasion, was in the grand manner, but conversation was dull.
The host concluded a not very scholarly exposition of the results of the Egyptian delvings which had lately been concluded.
His son’s voice, apparently finishing a more or less disparaging remark about the food, boomed across a great and embarrassing silence.
Eleanor Bing—plump, placid, drab, self-possessed, and much too freezingly well bred to achieve popularity, her unshingled hair rolled into a mid-Victorian modest bun, her evening dress uninspired but expensive, her small, neat feet
well and attractively shod—spoke quietly and very clearly in reply.
Her brother glowered at her in his boorish way, and went on with his dinner.
Between his sister and Dorothy Clark sat a quiet-faced, grey-haired, whimsically smiling man with a pleasant voice and engagingly diffident manner. This was Carstairs the naturalist, a friend of Alastair Bing’s early manhood. His easy, quiet conversation, his well-modulated tones, and his flashes of mild humour brought him instant attention from the rest of the table whenever he made a remark.
On the further side of Dorothy Clark there was an empty chair.
The most out-of-place member of the house-party was the woman seated on Alastair Bing’s right. Her name was Bradley —Mrs Lestrange Bradley. Nobody quite knew who knew her or why she had been invited. There was a rumour that she had worked Garde out of a foolish scrape on boat-race night, but why the boy should have ‘dug her up again,’ as Alastair disgustedly expressed it, and brought her down to Chaynings, no one could make out. Perhaps, Dorothy unkindly suggested, it was an inherited taste for fossils!
Mrs Bradley was dry without being shrivelled, and birdlike without being pretty. She reminded Alastair Bing, who was afraid of her, of the reconstruction of a pterodactyl he had once seen in a German museum. There was the same inhuman malignity in her expression as in that of the defunct bird, and, like it, she had a cynical smirk about her mouth
even when her face was in repose. She possessed nasty, dry, claw-like hands, and her arms, yellow and curiously repulsive, suggested the plucked wings of a fowl.
‘Mountjoy is very late for dinner,’ said Carstairs. ‘It’s a quarter past eight. I wonder what is keeping him? Got an idea for his new book, and has forgotten about food, I expect,’ he added, chuckling.
Alastair Bing, his fierce moustaches bristling, his blue eyes gleaming with intense hatred, and his stiff, tufted little white imperial wagging with passionate denunciation, launched a savage attack upon his absent guest. That same afternoon, it appeared, Everard Mountjoy had offered, as his considered and expert opinion, the statement that the mound on Belldon Down was not an ancient British earthwork, but merely the remains of a bunker on what had been the local golf course seven or eight years ago, before its removal nearer the sea.
‘The ridiculous fellow!’ cried Alastair Bing, trembling with fury. ‘The utter clown!’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said the butler at his elbow.
Alastair stopped short.
‘Well?’ he snapped, glaring at the meek manservant as though he were the offending scientist. ‘What is it?’
‘If you please, sir,’ the butler said, ‘Parsons informs me that Mr Mountjoy went to take his bath upwards of an hour ago, and has not re-appeared.’
Alastair glowered at him.
‘Re-appeared? What do you mean? Re-appeared?’ he inquired sourly. ‘The fellow isn’t a disembodied spirit, is he! Don’t be idiotic.’
‘He went to take his bath, sir,’ the butler repeated, unmoved, ‘upwards of an hour ago.’
‘Well, it’s nothing to do with me,’ yelled his employer irascibly. ‘Go and tell Parsons to knock at the door and inquire whether Mr Mountjoy requires any assistance.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said the man.
‘I hope he has not been taken ill,’ remarked Eleanor solicitously. ‘You don’t think, Father, that you had better go and see if all is well, do you?’
‘No, I do not,’ returned Alastair Bing shortly. ‘I certainly do not. A man who has the audacity—the effrontery—the sheer, downright buffoonery to tell me to my face that I don’t know an ancient British earthwork when I see one——’
‘But, sir,’ began Bertie Philipson mildly. ‘I mean,’ he continued innocently—but nobody ever knew what he meant, for at that moment the butler again approached his master.
‘Sir,’ he said, in as urgent a tone as is compatible with perfect butlership.
‘Well?’ said Alastair Bing, with the dignified coldness of an irritated man who thinks that a vast fuss is being made over nothing. ‘What is it now, Mander?’
‘Parsons has hammered and hammered at the bathroom door, sir, and has obtained no answer. We, that is, Parsons and myself, sir, fear that the gentleman must have been taken ill.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ grumbled Alastair, getting up from the table. ‘Rubbish, rubbish!’
Followed by the butler, and muttering some remark about clownishness and earthworks, the irritated archaeologist departed.
The guests and family looked at one another, and Mrs Lestrange Bradley spoke. Strange to say, her voice belied her appearance, for, instead of the birdlike twitter one might have expected to hear issuing from those beaked lips, her utterance was slow, mellifluous, and slightly drawled; unctuous, rich, and reminiscent of dark, smooth treacle.
‘I remember that a friend of my own fainted in the bath some four years ago,’ she said graciously and with quiet relish. ‘She was drowned.’
‘Oh!’ cried Dorothy. ‘How terrible!’
‘I think I will go and see if there is anything wrong,’ said Garde, rising abruptly from the table. ‘Might need some help,’ he added ungraciously.
The guests shifted uncomfortably in their chairs and looked along the table to where the mistress of the house was seated. She seemed quite composed, however, and, reassured, they resumed their interrupted meal. The conversation became general, and gained in animation and interest.
Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes passed by. The quiet, efficient servants performed their appointed tasks. The meal drew towards its close. Still the master of the house and his heir did not return.
Carstairs shifted in his seat, and his eyes turned frequently towards the door. Once he seemed to
be intently listening. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.
‘Do you find the room oppressive, Mr Carstairs?’ asked Eleanor, signing for a window to be opened wider.
‘No, I thank you,’ returned the scientist, ‘but I confess to an extraordinarily strong feeling of apprehension. I wonder if you will be so kind as to excuse me? I feel I must go and see whether our friend Mountjoy is ill or well.’
He rose abruptly from the table and passed out of the room.
‘He is Scottish on one side of the family—I forget which,’ said Eleanor carelessly. ‘They do get such curious ideas at times.’
‘Some of the Scottish people have the gift of second sight,’ remarked Dorothy. ‘I remember a friend of my father had it. He knew when people were going to die. It was rather horrible.’
Mrs Bradley smiled to herself in a sinister manner, but offered no contribution to the conversation. Apparently the natural gifts of the Scots people had no particular interest for her.
The talk languished, and presently died. The atmosphere became charged with tension. It was as though all the persons, not only in that room, but in the whole house, were holding their breaths, waiting for something to happen. The silence weighed upon all their spirits, and they sat, an uncomfortably silent group, straining their ears to catch any sound which might indicate what was going on upstairs.
‘Sounds quiet enough. I do hope he isn’t ill,’ said young Philipson, breaking the silence at last, and shifting uneasily in his chair.
Dorothy moved her slim shoulders as though they chafed beneath an unaccustomed burden.
‘I expect it is all a false alarm, but I think Father might send to tell us so,’ observed Eleanor in her precise voice. ‘Oh, dear, what is that banging noise?’
Above stairs, a vigorous hammering on the panels of the bathroom door was eliciting no reply from the occupant.
‘May have fainted,’ suggested Garde. ‘Vote we break in. Heard of people being drowned through fainting in the bath. Silly blighters have weak hearts, and the hot water does them in. I’ll get a chair and smash the panels of the door.’
It was as he returned with a stout chair that Carstairs appeared from below. Garde stepped forward and rammed the heavy wooden chair with violence against the bathroom door.
‘Half a moment!’ cried the scientist. ‘We might as well try the lock first.’
He turned the handle, and, to their surprise, the door opened.
‘Well, I’m damned!’ shouted Garde, who, in his capacity as a student of medicine, had bounded in before the older men. ‘It’s a woman. I say! She’s dead!’
‘A doctor! A doctor!’ cried his father. ‘I’ll telephone. Get the poor creature out of there. Put
her in Mountjoy’s room for now. Oh—and where the devil is Mountjoy then?’
Without staying for an answer, he bounded with considerable swiftness and agility down the stairs to the hall telephone to call up the doctor, whose skill, in this case, would be unavailing, for, to Garde Bing’s already practised eye, there was no doubt that the thin, wet body they lifted out of the bath was a dead body.
He and Carstairs made prolonged and gallant attempts at artificial respiration, but their efforts were vain.
‘Hopeless,’ said Carstairs, straightening himself.
Garde, seated on the edge of the bed in the room where they had taken the dead woman, shook his head gloomily.
‘No doubt about it,’ he agreed. ‘Better go down again, I suppose.’
As the young man turned to follow his father down the staircase, Carstairs laid ahand on his arm.
‘Just one moment, my boy,’ he said, and paused.
‘Feeling seedy?’ asked the young man sympathetically. ‘Beastly things, corpses. We get used to them, though, up at the hospitals, you know. Let’s have a brandy, shall we? Soon put you right. Weird business, though, isn’t it? What the devil was she doing, having a bath in our house? And who is she? And how did she get in? And, oh, a devil of a lot of other things.’
‘Such as?’ prompted Carstairs quickly.
‘Oh, such as the bathroom window being wide
open top and bottom, and the door being unlocked. And that chap Mountjoy—couldn’t stick that mealy-mouthed blighter, somehow—but where is he?’
‘Dead,’ replied Carstairs calmly. He pointed to the bedroom in which the dead woman lay.
‘In there,’ he concluded.
Garde turned white. His knees felt as though they had turned to water. He held on to the banisters for support.
‘In—in—what do you say?’ he stammered weakly.
Carstairs gripped his arm.
‘Hold up, old chap,’ he said peremptorily. ‘You are too hefty for my strength to support you. I know it’s a shock, but there it is, and we have to face it. That’s Mountjoy all right, and I shouldn’t tell your sister.’
‘Tell—my—sister?’ said Garde, like a man in a dream. ‘But she’ll have to know.’
‘About the death of Mountjoy, yes,’ said Carstairs, puzzled at the sudden collapse of the young man. ‘The fact that Mountjoy was a woman, no!’
‘I—yes, I get you. Rather bad luck to find out that the chap you are engaged to is a woman, what?’
He began to giggle helplessly.
‘Go and pull the plug out of the bath, and stop being a fool,’ said Carstairs sharply.
The little group downstairs, mute and becoming more and more uneasy as the time slipped by, were still waiting and waiting as though for something to happen.
It happened. The door swung suddenly and, as
usual in that well-run house, noiselessly open, and Garde walked in. His face was pale. It was damp with cold perspiration.
‘He’s dead,’ he said, in a queer, staccato voice.
‘Who?’
It was Mrs Bradley speaking.
‘Why, Mountjoy, of course. That’s why he didn’t come down to dinner. He couldn’t. He was—well, he was dead, you see. Drowned. Drowned in the bath.’