Death of a Burrowing Mole

14

Interim Reports

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The moon is up, the stars are bright, the wind is fresh and free”,’ said Tom.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning, as Alfred Noyes went on to say, “we’re out to seek for gold tonight”, although not across the silver sea, but in the devastated area which used to be the outer bailey of Holdy Castle. Now that there is no star-gazer on top of the keep and no caravan at the gatehouse, the coast is most beautifully clear and we ought to take advantage of the fact.’

‘I thought you had given up all thought of the treasure. It seems impossible for us to clear the wells.’

‘I’m beginning to wonder whether other people besides ourselves have got wind that there may be something worthwhile among those ruins. I’ve been thinking about the mess somebody has made of Tynant’s trenches and trying to work out who was responsible for it.’

‘Village louts.’

‘There don’t seem to be any. Most of the residents are retired people with sufficient means to buy up the old cottages, convert them and pass a blameless old age adding various amenities to their dwellings, messing about with gardening and, when they want a bit of excitement, walking the dog and cleaning the car or having cream teas at the restaurant.’

‘Then who did vandalise Tynant’s trenches?’

‘Either Stickle and Stour or the two chaps who lost the chance of a job on the site when you and I volunteered to help out. You mark my words. A rumour has gone around. Chaps like Stickle and Stour would never believe that Tynant is doing all that digging just to find an old grave with a few mouldy bones and some bits of broken pottery or whatever. I bet there are plenty of folk-tales about buried treasure at the castle. There must be, or somebody wouldn’t have written that piece in the county magazine. What’s more, they think the stuff is buried in the outer bailey, otherwise Tynant, in their opinion, would be excavating wells, not methodically digging trenches. The point is, you know, they could be right.’

‘Then why hasn’t somebody had a go before this?’

‘Be yourself, man! The castle is on private property. Nobody would have dared to organise a dig for gold without permission, but now our lot have come along and begun the work, so the whole situation, so far as the natives are concerned, has changed.’

‘They’ve still no right to come and ruin Tynant’s work.’

‘Never mind about their rights. Of course they haven’t got any, but the fact that digging is being done, and quite deep digging at that, means that all the old stories will have come back to people’s minds. When I was getting the drinks at lunchtime today, the barman asked me whether we’d had any luck yet. “Luck about what?” I said. At that, he winked and laid a finger resembling a large pork sausage against his bulbous proboscis and then shook his head at me. Something has gone around and, if the next village has got wind of a treasure hunt, goodness knows what is seething underground in Holdy itself. I think we ought to take advantage of the moonlight to have a good look at the whole site while nobody else is about.’

‘I’m not too enthusiastic about being seen loitering about on the site at present. I think Tynant may suspect Saltergate is at the bottom of this destruction business. He doesn’t accept that it was done by louts or by Stickle and Stour. You remember that young Priscilla told us that Tynant and Saltergate had a bust-up last week. She heard Saltergate talking to Mrs Saltergate about it. I wonder whether my godmother has got the letter I posted this afternoon and what she will make of what I told her?’

‘Don’t change the subject. Are we going gold-digging or aren’t we?’

‘I thought I had made my position clear,’ said Bonamy. ‘However, reluctant as I am to underline such remarks as I may deign to toss at you as fancy dictates and my blood-pressure allows, I will make myself clearer. I don’t go anywhere near those ruddy ruins at night, treasure or no treasure. I don’t intend to be mistaken for one of the blighters who messed up those trenches. Tynant is nearly crazy with fury about them.’

‘Who’s to see us?’

‘Probably half the village would see us. There must have been a couple of dozen gawpers there when we got to the site this morning, so the word will have gone round to everybody by now and, for all I know, there may be a couple of hundred at the site at this very moment, rooting around like pigs after truffles. Tynant will have to pay nightwatchmen with guns and dogs if he wants to keep people off treasure-hunting now. It will be worse than the Klondyke gold-rush.’

‘Tynant is as sick as mud, I agree, but, whatever Priscilla says, I don’t believe Tynant really thinks Saltergate is responsible for the damage. Nobody who has even the slightest knowledge of him would think for an instant that he would be capable of ruining another man’s work. If the boot was on the other foot I wouldn’t be so sure. Tynant is not my favourite man and I think him quite capable of playing nasty tricks.’

‘You’re biased because of his interest in Susannah.’

‘Maybe. Anyway, Fiona thinks that he has put his luck to the test and that Susannah has turned him down. That was a strange business about her and the gamekeeper and the motorbike thing. I wonder what the idea was?’

‘The idea of leaving the bike in those woods? It makes no sense at all, unless Stickle and Stour were Veryan’s killers and ditched the bike so that they couldn’t be traced through its being recognised.’

‘I might accept that if they had cleared out directly they knew that the police were not going to accept that Veryan’s death was accidental, but they stayed on through all the police questioning. It’s only over the last few days that we haven’t seen anything of them.’

Mowbray had leant heavily on Goole when the police found the vehicle in the woods.

‘How did it come there?’

‘How should I know? It ain’t a part of the woods which concerns me and my work. Them trees and bushes isn’t nobody’s concern but the woodman’s, and he don’t have no call to go there till he’s told, and he won’t be told, not till the master gets back.’

‘The men who own that bike and sidecar have gone missing. What do you know about that?’

‘What men? I don’t know nobody what own a bike and side-car. Nobody don’t use them things nowadays. If I’d of found it, I daresay I’d have thought it belonged to the young lady.’

‘And if it had been hers, what were you going to do when she or a friend of hers came to claim it?’

‘I dunno. Just ’and it over, like, I reckon, so long as she could make good as it were hern.’

‘No doubt you would have expected to get something for your trouble.’

‘I don’t never think of no such thing. I’m honest, I am.’

‘All right, Goole, but you watch your step, that’s all. You’d be in dead trouble if the young lady had pressed charges of wrongful arrest, unlawful incarceration and improper intention to assault her.’

‘Garn!’ said Goole. ‘I on’y wanted to fritten her a bit.’

‘You threatened her with a lethal weapon.’

‘It’s my right if I cotches a poacher.’

‘Next time you catch a young lady in your woods, I’ll have you for behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace if you dare to threaten her.’

‘She blacked my eye. It was her as breached the peace.’

‘All right, we’ll leave it at that. I suppose you can’t give me any idea what time of the day or night the motorbike (which you now know did not belong to the young lady) might have been left in the woods?’

‘It wouldn’t have been by night. I would be patrollin’ or if so be as I was a-bed, well, I sleeps very light and it would a-woke me. I reckon it must have been in daylight. Motors and tradesmen’s vans, and all that, comes up through the gates frequent, so I shouldn’t have tooken no heed to a motorbike, not in daylight hours I shouldn’t.’

‘All right, I’ll talk to you again later on.’

Mowbray returned to the Holdy Bay police station puzzled and dissatisfied. He could think of no reason why Stickle and Stour should have abandoned their means of transport, or why, having done so, they had chosen to disappear. The logical procedure, if they had intended to give up working for Tynant, was to have asked for any wages due to them after they had worked out their week’s notice, and gone off on the motorcycle combination as usual, this time with no intention of returning. A possible explanation, which, although it persisted in his mind, he was unwilling to accept, was that one of them had killed the other and ditched the recognisable motorcycle combination before making a getaway. Like the two young men, he connected the vandalism with treasure-hunting, and what more likely, he was beginning to think, than that Stickle and Stour had been the vandals and had fallen out with one another to the point of a fight to the death? He realised though, that, but for Veryan’s death, this explanation would not have occurred to him.

Dame Beatrice and Laura arrived in Holdy village soon after three and parked the car where the caravan had stood.

‘Well!’ said Laura, surveying the scene of devastation. ‘You’d think the place had been blitzed!’

‘Whoever the busy vandals were, they were in a very great hurry,’ said Dame Beatrice.

There was nobody about except a massive policeman who walked down from the gatehouse to the car.

‘Dame Beatrice, ma’am?’ he asked politely. ‘We got word that you might be expected.’

‘Yes, I telephoned Detective-Superintendent Mowbray from the hotel where Mrs Gavin and I had lunch.’

‘I have instructions to give you access to the ruins, ma’am. We are keeping them clear otherwise, except for Mr Tynant and Mr Saltergate. We don’t even want the other members of their party tramping about until the two gentlemen can assess the amount of the damage and decide what’s to be done.’

‘I am no expert in these matters,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘so a closer inspection probably will tell me no more than I can learn from where we are standing. However’ – she walked up through the gatehouse and surveyed the scene at closer quarters – ‘it looks as though earth has been shovelled into what was the great ditch which formed a segment of Mr Tynant’s outer circle.’

‘That’s right, ma’am. The sides of the main trench have been kind of stove in and the soil dumped in the ditch.’

‘So I can see. Do you know where I can find Mr Tynant?’

‘Detective-Superintent Mowbray asked me to tell you he would be in the lounge of the Barbican along with Mr Tynant and would wait there till you came, ma’am.’

‘Splendid. Thank you, officer.’

‘Sounds as though Mowbray is keeping tabs on Tynant,’ said Laura, when they were in the car and heading for the Barbican. ‘Surely he can’t suspect him of making away with the two workmen?’

‘Did you notice that Mr Saltergate’s towers, two of them, had also been vandalised?’

‘Yes, I saw that, but only in a general sort of way. I mean, I wasn’t bothering whose work had suffered what damage, but merely getting a general impression.’

‘That rather destroys the theory that Saltergate was responsible for the damage, doesn’t it? I think it was the work of three men. One would have used a pick, and he could have worked quickly enough, I think, to keep two others busy with their shovels. Now for the Barbican.’

Laura drove in under the archway entrance to the hotel car park and she and Dame Beatrice went into the reception hall. Mowbray rose from an armchair near the door and greeted them.

‘We have just come from the castle,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘The damage can hardly have been done by mice.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘I beg your pardon. The famous Bruce Bairnsfather cartoons of the 1914 war would have been long before your time. So you are looking for three men.’

‘Two, we thought, ma’am, those being Stickle and Stour.’

‘Three is more likely, but I do not insist upon that number. You told me, when I telephoned you at lunchtime, that you thought I might be of help. In what way? I intended to come merely because Bonamy Monkswood wrote to me.’

‘So I understand, ma’am, but there is a matter over which you can be a lot of help to us, if you will. The two youngest ladies, Miss Broadmayne and Miss Yateley, have been to me with a half-told story which I should like to check, but Miss Yateley turned very timid and, indeed, got herself into what I can only describe as ‘a state’. I think she was almost dragged along to me by the other young lady and the interview turned into a horse-to-water episode which frustrated me and got the young lady herself into such a tizzy that I gave up questioning her. In the end she was repeating over and over again that she knew nothing, it was all her imagination, she had never meant any harm, Fiona was a traitor and a bully and a telltale, and so on and so forth, all very high-pitched and hysterical, until I told the other young lady to take her back to the cottage where they are now staying and put her to bed with a couple of aspirins.’

‘Did Miss Broadmayne offer an explanation of Miss Yateley’s outburst?’

‘No. All she said was that Priscilla had something to tell me about Professor Veryan’s death.’

‘Oh, not about the wreckage of Mr Tynant’s trenches?’

‘No, ma’am, nor of the damage to the foundations of two of Mr Saltergate’s bits of walling, that’s to say two of what he calls his flanking-towers. Somebody has pickaxed their foundations.’

‘So I could see. What is the present relationship between the two gentlemen?’

‘Much improved, according to Mrs Saltergate and Dr Lochlure. Each has absolved the other of what Mr Hassocks – a lively young gentleman that, ma’am – referred to as “dirty work at the crossroads”.’

‘That must be very gratifying to Mrs Saltergate and Dr Lochlure. Well, where shall I find Miss Yateley? Where is this cottage which I understand the two girls share with the two young men?’

‘I’ll take you along, ma’am. If Mr Monkswood is hoping to see you, he’ll be there.’

‘Where did you meet the two girls and when?’

‘At the police headquarters in Holdy Bay this morning. I heard about the damage to the trenches and walls from them. Mr Tynant phoned through while they were still with me, but I had had the news already, although I did not tell him that.’

‘From what I know of Miss Broadmayne – not very much, I admit – I find it a little strange that she should have laid herself open to being called harsh names by Miss Yateley.’

‘I fancy Miss Broadmayne is anxious to be on the right side of the law as represented by me, ma’am. After we’d left that gamekeeper Goole, I gave the young lady a solemn warning that, if Goole had not blotted his copybook by what amounted to kidnapping her and locking her up, she could have found herself in court on a charge of poaching. She was cavorting about all among his pheasants, and at night, too.’

‘Had she blacked her face? I believe that aggravates the offence, does it not?’

Mowbray laughed.

‘What she blacked was Goole’s eye,’ he said. ‘I’m having another word with him later on.’

Laura and Fiona swam; Dame Beatrice and Priscilla sat in deckchairs on the beach at Holdy Bay.

‘Are you really Bonamy’s godmother?’ asked Priscilla.

‘Well, I was present at his baptism,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Later on, I was able to delegate my responsibilities to his schoolmasters. Those long-suffering men made certain that he could get through the Catechism and recite the Ten Commandments and, in due course, they brought him before the bishop for Confirmation.’

‘People accept an awful responsibility when they take it upon themselves to promise for the baby that he will renounce the devil and all his works. I suppose somebody promised it in my name when I was christened, but I don’t think it has worked out very well,’ said Priscilla.

‘You mean you have murdered, stolen, lied in court and committed adultery?’

Priscilla said, ‘You ought to have been a priest. They always make sin sound so silly. No, I haven’t done those things – I haven’t enough courage – but I haven’t escaped the sin of covetousness.’

‘The sin which is apt to lead to all the others. I wonder why it is relegated to tenth place? It almost comes as an afterthought, one feels.’

‘Did you get what you expected?’ asked Laura when, having given the two girls tea, she and Dame Beatrice had watched them drive away from Holdy Bay to return to the cottage.

‘Priscilla began with one confession and ended with another. Neither helps to advance the enquiry into Professor Veryan’s death, so far as I can see. She confesses that she did not spend that weekend in London, but with her farmhouse friends, as she had arranged to do. Mr Mowbray, I fancy, will have no difficulty in confirming this.’

‘It’s the story she told at the beginning and then she changed it to this trip to London and all the balderdash she invented to bolster up the story. I suppose she, like the rest of them, got scared when the inquest was adjourned. What was the confession at the end, and what came between the two?’

‘She repeated an account she had given previously to young Fiona—’

‘A bit of a grampus when swimming, that one. Powerful, but untidy, and puffs and blows. Best on the butterfly, she informs me, and that, of course, is not the most effective stroke when one is breasting the waves. Sorry! I interrupted you.’

‘It was worthwhile. Your summing-up was admirable. Fiona has puffed and blown upon poor Priscilla until she has blown her house down and then Mowbray sent her to me. I was about to tell you that Priscilla gave Fiona (and now me) a graphic account of how simple a matter it must have been to tumble Professor Veryan off the tower of the keep. Fiona urged her to confess that she had actually seen the murder committed.’

‘Good gracious me! And had she?’

‘She says not. One thing is as certain as anything can be, though: she may have seen murder committed, but she herself could not have committed it in the way she describes; she is far too light and frail to collect even an unsuspecting man’s legs from under him and heave him over into an abyss. Fiona might have done it, but not Priscilla.’

‘Do you think she saw it done?’

‘I shall not answer that. People have now lost any of the faith in psychologists they may ever have had. I think I shall take up stamp-collecting.’

‘But what about young Priscilla?’

‘Fiona insisted that she should open her heart. Priscilla, having given one version of the way in which she spent the weekend of Professor Veryan’s death, then changed it for a much less credible one and this, it appears, has lain heavily upon her conscience. She has had nightmares and has woken Fiona up more than once.’

‘But we know that poor little rabbit couldn’t have killed a six-foot man, not even a string-bean like Veryan.’

‘True, but we have to make allowance for nerves, imagination and a guilty conscience.’

‘A guilty conscience?’

‘Because she had told lies to the police.’

‘Oh, I see, but surely she realised that she was only in the same boat as everybody else? The whole boiling of them chopped and changed their alibis as soon as they knew the police suspected murder. They’ve all told lies.’

‘True, but perhaps their consciences are not so tender as hers or their dread of the police not so great.’

‘Do you really think she knows anything about Veryan’s death? Her reconstruction of it can’t be all imagination, can it?’

‘Oh, I think so. She has chosen an explanation of how murder could have been committed, but by a method which, as I think we are agreed, she herself could not have used.’

‘So what method did she use?’

‘You are leaping to conclusions. However, I myself will leap to one. I think Priscilla spent a domestic and blameless weekend and was no nearer Holdy Castle than her friends’ farm on the night of Veryan’s death, and that Mowbray knows it.’

This conclusion was justified. On the Sunday night Priscilla had been driven to Fiona’s house by one of her friends, on the pretext of getting a lift back to the castle with Fiona. But, as there seemed to be no lights on in the house, Priscilla had returned to the car, and on the Monday morning her friends had found a note to say that she would not wait for breakfast and had borrowed the wife’s bicycle to get back to Castle Holdy and rendezvous with Fiona.

‘But she didn’t leave the farm until six on the Monday morning, ma’am,’ said Mowbray. ‘The cowman saw her go. I reckon we can leave her out of our calculations.’