The Crozier Pharaohs

3

A Thief in the Dog- Watches

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Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier were sometimes referred to as twin villages, but it would be more nearly true to say that they were mother and daughter.

When seaside holidays became fashionable, people were not slow to discover the charms of Abbots Bay, but it was situated between two headlands. As it could not expand east or west, the village of Abbots Crozier came into being on the clifftop and a cliff railway was built for the convenience of visitors. Hotels sprang up, the cottagers and other householders took in holidaymakers and both villages flourished.

The coast was rock-bound and the sea treacherous, so at Abbots Bay a large sea-water pool was constructed so that bathing was safe at any state of the tide, the rise and fall of which kept the pool clean.

Abbots Crozier had its own attractions. Its hotel windows commanded wide views of the sea and the moors and there were pleasant walks to be had in the upland air and along the banks of the little river which, when it reached the top of the cliffs, foamed, churned and rushed downhill to meet the sea. It bypassed most of the residential part of Abbots Crozier, but cut its way through the middle of the village of Abbots Bay, which it had been known on one occasion to devastate with severe floods.

Susan’s cottage was almost at sea level. The house occupied by Bryony and Morpeth Rant was on the hilltop hard by the rest of the village on the cliffs. Justifiably had Goodfellow complained of the thoughtlessness of parents who saddled their off-spring with baptismal names likely to embarrass them when they grew older. Morpeth’s name was a case in point. Between the births of the two girls their mother had become an addict of folk songs (of the Cecil Sharp kind) and the old country dance tunes. The Morpeth Rant had been one of her favourites and the unfortunate Morpeth suffered in consequence.

Whenever possible she would sign herself as M. Rant, and she envied her sister the name Bryony, although Bryony herself had no liking for it. It had been her father’s choice. She had been born with black hair and he had exclaimed, ‘Black bryony! I saw some in the woods alongside the river yesterday.’

‘The berries are red,’ said her mother.

‘No matter. The plant is called black bryony. I like the name, so Bryony let the child be called.’

When their mother died, the girls were nineteen and twenty-two respectively. Morpeth became her father’s receptionist. Bryony, with the aid of a charwoman, ran the house and drove the car when Dr Rant made his round of afternoon visits to patients who were too infirm or too self-important to attend his surgery. Both girls disliked their father and, to compensate for this, had never taken down his brass plate or disposed of his effects except for his clothes.

They kept the brass plate brightly polished and although they banished to the garage lumber room his case of surgical instruments, together with the black bag and its contents which he had carried with him on his rounds, they had not parted with them.

From the time when Laura had rescued them after their car accident, they had been occasional but welcome visitors to the Stone House, although neither Dame Beatrice nor Laura had ever been invited to brave the Pharaoh hounds at Crozier Lodge. This was largely because the sisters had not regarded their hospitality as coming up to Stone House standards. Laura guessed that this was the reason, but there was nothing she could do about it.

‘It stands to reason,’ said Bryony, when the matter had came up for discussion once again recently, ‘that, living in that lovely old house and having maids and a French chef, Dame Beatrice would think that our accommodation and cookery were derived from the backwoods and ourselves smelling strongly of dog.’

‘They keep dogs themselves,’ Morpeth had pointed out.

‘Only two.’

‘I don’t see anything wrong with our house.’

‘Not for us, perhaps, but those two are used to better things, and, anyway, our cookery would not be up to their standard. Again, we spend so much time with the hounds that there is little left to spend in entertaining visitors.’

‘We’ve got Susan now. With her help with the hounds, it seems strange and uncouth not to return hospitality.’

‘I am sure Dame Beatrice will like it better the way things are. We do not have to go to the Stone House every time we are invited. In any case, there is a limit to the number of times we can leave Susan to cope with seven dogs. We don’t want to lose her, do we?’

‘I don’t believe she would leave us. She asked to come here. Where else would she go to find something she really wanted to do? There are no other kennels near here where seven beautiful dogs are kept.’

‘Seven? You can hardly count Sekhmet. Anyway, as for Susan, it would be awful if she elected to leave us. We must see to it that she has no reason to do so. She knows the hounds and they know her, and that is what really matters.’

‘I should like to know Laura Gavin better,’ said Morpeth.

‘Let us hope she feels the same about you, but I doubt it. She has Dame Beatrice, a husband, a son and a daughter. Why should she want more? Come along. It’s feeding time.’

All the hounds in residence at Crozier Lodge were named after the gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt. There were six of them. The dogs were called Osiris, Horus, Amon and Anubis. The two bitches were Isis and Nephthys. Then there was Sekhmet, the liver-coloured Labrador whom the tender-hearted Morpeth had bought from a pet shop in Axehead, the nearest town and the place where the sisters did some of their shopping.

The male hounds took little or no interest in Sekhmet. It was as though they were as conscious of class distinctions as are many human beings. They never rounded on her or ganged up against her, but this was partly because she was never allowed to run with them. The other two bitches tolerated her, for all three were allowed a run in the grounds together, but her heart was set upon fraternising with the dogs and her nose was always against the heavy, high, wire-netting fence which surrounded the spacious stable yard in which the dogs exercised themselves when they were not being taken for their daily run on the moor.

‘I believe she thinks she is a dog,’ said Morpeth.

‘Poor cow,’ said Bryony. ‘Don’t you remember how we always wished we were boys when we were young? If we had been, father would have sent us to college and we would have made a place for ourselves in the world.’

‘We shall do that with the Pharaoh hounds,’ said Morpeth.

The stables had been converted into cubicles, so that each of the six Pharaohs had his or her own domain. Each of the three handlers had her own couple to take on to the moor for exercise. Bryony took Osiris and Horus, Morpeth had Amon and Anubis, and Susan was responsible for Isis and Nephthys. If anybody had enough energy, Sekhmet was taken for a run. Otherwise the three women took it in turn to throw sticks and a ball for her in the garden. She was not housed in the stables, but had a large kennel constructed out of an ancient garden shed which was in the grounds when Dr Rant bought the property.

As for Crozier Lodge itself, it had always been too large for the family’s requirements, even while Dr Rant and his wife were alive, but his young partner had ‘lived in’ and occupied two of the rooms. Now that the sisters owned the house it was more or less of a white elephant to them, even though a bedroom was always available for Susan if she were ever to elect to stay overnight to assist with a whelping or to cope with any other emergency.

Known locally merely as the Lodge, the house had eight bedrooms, two bathrooms, drawing-room, dining-room, a former library which had been converted into two consulting-rooms, a morning-room which the two doctors had used as a waiting-room for patients who attended morning and evening surgery, and a large kitchen, a scullery and a butler’s pantry. Where the money came from to purchase such a property formed a topic for discussion in the village, for Dr Rant was not loved and had moved to Abbots Crozier from the Midlands, so that he was received (and distrusted) as a foreigner. There was even some dark speculation as to why he had ever left the Midlands and a theory was bruited abroad that he had diddled an elderly patient out of her money and had fled to escape some embarrassing enquiries.

Apart from the garden shed which Sekhmet occupied, and the stables which were now devoted to the six Pharaoh hounds, there was one other outbuilding on the estate. The ground floor of this was used as a garage, but there was an outside stair to a room in which Dr Rant had stored junk and to which the sisters, after their father’s death, had added his effects. The garage was kept locked when the car was inside, but there was no lock on the door of the room above, although it was at the top of an outside stair. In Bryony’s opinion, there was nothing in it worth stealing, and if a tramp chose to doss down in it, well, it was a long way from the house.

Dr Rant’s unpopularity had been added to by the deaths of two patients through what the village regarded as gross carelessness if nothing worse. One of the deaths had been followed by an inquest, for Dr Rant had refused to sign a death certificate when certain rumours had come to his notice.

To add to the discontent, any medicines which might be required had to be obtained from the chemist in Abbots Bay, for there was no chemist’s shop at that time in Abbots Crozier. The villagers resented the long trudge downhill and up again by the zigzag cliff path and still more the expenditure on the cliff railway by those who were too infirm to do the stiff climbs back.

As one old man recollected, Dr Rant’s predecessor had done his own dispensing. When you went to the surgery you expected to come away with a large bottle of pink medicine guaranteed to cure all the ills that the flesh is heir to. Dr Rant, therefore, started off on the wrong foot by requiring patients to present an indecipherable prescription to a sea-board chemist whom they believed could not read it any better than they could.

When Dr Rant died, his partner moved out and took house at Abbots Bay, so Abbots Crozier then had no doctor.

At nine on the evening of Goodfellow’s visit, Bryony rang the Stone House and apologised for bringing him over without warning.

‘I hope we shall never see him again,’ she said to Dame Beatrice. ‘I am inclined to go to the Headlands hotel and find out how long he is staying there. We don’t want him badgering us again.’

‘I think it would be inadvisable to go to his hotel. Your motives would be misunderstood. You have done what you could for him. I would leave it at that, if I were you. You can always appeal to the police against a nuisance. There is just one thing I would like to know. Did he give any indication of knowing, before you brought him along, that you and your sister were acquainted with me?’

‘None at all. He said he needed a doctor to examine his knee and then he went off into incoherent talk and a lot of silly posturing. He alarmed us very much. We were desperate to know what to do with him.’

‘Did he make any mention of your Pharaoh hounds?’

‘Yes, that was when he said he was Ozymandias, king of kings. I suppose the word Pharaoh made some connection in his mind. It was then that we decided he was mad. Morpeth went so far as to bring Osiris into the house, although not into the room where I was talking with Mr Goodfellow. She wanted to assure herself and him, Goodfellow, that we had some protection at hand.’

‘I see. Well, I should dismiss him from your mind unless he pesters you. If he does, tell the police.’

‘What worries me is that he had only to ask at the hotel if he really thought he needed a doctor. They would have referred him to Dr Mortlake down at Abbots Bay. Everybody goes to him now that my father is no more. As for the knee — well, there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. The Headlands is nearly halfway down the cliff and it’s a very rough walk and all steeply uphill to get to us from there. Then, when he got here, he pirouetted about like a dancer. I’m sure he hadn’t injured his knee. Well, I rang up only to apologise to you and to thank you for seeing him.’

‘I don’t think either thanks or an apology is due from you. We were interested to meet him, although I do not think we shall see him again.’

‘Did he pay for the consultation?’

‘No, but the interview hardly amounted to a consultation. He gave us an interesting interlude in our trivial round and I am grateful for that.’

About three-quarters of an hour later the telephone rang again at the Stone House and Laura answered it.

‘That was Morpeth,’ she said, when she returned to the room in which she had left Dame Beatrice.

‘Don’t tell me that she or her sister has disregarded my advice and gone to the Headlands hotel to check up on the length of Mr Goodfellow’s stay there.’

‘Not gone to it, but Bryony has rung it up. There is not, and never has been, a Mr Robin or any other Goodfellow staying there.’

‘Interesting, but not surprising. He refused to name the hotel to us.’

The next bit of news also came from Crozier Lodge by telephone. Immediately after breakfast on the following day, Bryony rang up to say, ‘We have lost Sekhmet. We think she has been stolen by a man who had put aniseed on his clothing. Her kennel stinks of it. Susan went a while ago to look at Sekhmet and found her gone. We’ve been all over the grounds, but there’s no sign of her. The strange thing is that none of the hounds gave any warning that a thief was about. Of course, Sekhmet’s shed is a good way from the stables where the hounds were, so, if he was very quiet and Sekhmet herself didn’t make any fuss, they may not have bothered, but it seems strange. Their hearing is acute and, although they are amenable creatures, I don’t think they would tolerate an intruder about the place, particularly at night or before we were up and about.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Susan is out now, with a couple of the hounds, looking for her.’

‘Is Sekhmet a valuable dog?’

‘Well, not compared with the Pharaohs, so far as we are concerned. That is our real worry. We wonder whether this was a try-on to find out how easy it was to get into the grounds and walk off with a dog. Of course, Sekhmet herself is an amiable lunatic. She probably went off like a lamb and kept her nose glued to the man’s knee to drink in the lovely stink of the aniseed.’

‘Would it be as simple to steal a hound?’

‘Gracious, no. The stable yard is locked when the hounds are in at night and there is a high perimeter fence to enclose it which nobody could climb and, anyway, the hounds would gang up on him if anybody did get in.’

‘Could not the dog have roamed off on her own?’

‘We don’t see how. There is no padlock on the front gates, but Susan always shuts them after herself when she goes home at night. For once, she went to look at Sekhmet even before she came up to the house for breakfast, so we had early warning that the dog was gone.’

‘Is there a record of any other dogs having been stolen in your neighbourhood recently?’

‘Not so far as we know, but not much of the local news comes our way. In any case, I shouldn’t think the village dogs would be worth stealing. There is an Alsatian at the pub and the village poacher owns a lurcher, but I can’t imagine either of them being much of a temptation to anybody, still less that they would go off with a stranger. Sekhmet, of course, is such a trusting fool that she would go off with anybody who spoke kindly to her.’

‘So it was Susan, not one of yourselves, who discovered that Sekhmet had disappeared, was it?’

‘Yes. At this time of year she comes along not later than half-past six. She went to the shed, found it empty, looked all about and then reported to us and we all searched and called, but when Susan mentioned the smell of aniseed we thought we knew what had happened, although we couldn’t smell it in the shed.’

When the telephone call was over, Laura said to Dame Beatrice that it was strange that Susan had gone straight to Sekhmet’s shed before breakfast. Dame Beatrice agreed, but added a rider to the effect that people did do strange things and that there was nobody more unpredictable than a more-or-less educated middle-aged spinster.

‘We don’t know that Susan is middle-aged,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, a former theory comes back to me. Couldn’t there be a connection between this dog-stealer, if there is one, and the mysterious prowler we’ve heard about? He taps on windows, apparently, and the Rants are too scared to go out and challenge him. Couldn’t he have been making sure that the coast would be clear for dog-stealing because the Rants would never venture out of the house at night? It seems like that to me. Anyway, I’ll give the Rants a ring after tea and ask whether Susan found Sekhmet.’