Here Lies Gloria Mundy

14

Unexpected Developments

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This time, of course, I took the car. It was an easy and pleasant run from London. I decided to have lunch in the town and then find the house I wanted.

There were two hotels, the White Hart, built on the foundations of an abbey guest-house, and a quiet Georgian building — quiet, that is to say, because it was in a side street and not on the main road through the town — called Bartlemy’s. I suppose I could have gone a little way out and got myself a free, and possibly a better, lunch at McMaster’s hotel, but this seemed rather like scrounging, so I resisted what, I will admit, was a temptation and settled for the White Hart.

The hotel was in the high street opposite the old court house where, as I had stated in the brochure, the assizes used to be held, so at one time the White Hart had been much patronised by lawyers. Inside the place one stepped straight into a story by Charles Dickens. There was a heavy, homely, slightly musty atmosphere, the bar was in the charge of a dragon who could have been Mrs Squeers in person, and the dining-room, into which I peeped before ordering a drink, was dim, dark-wainscoted and furnished with large mahogany tables and with chairs of the kind our great-grandfathers probably had in the dining-rooms of their gloomy Victorian homes. On the walls were heavily framed portraits of whiskered gentlemen in Dickensian collars and cravats, and over the mantelpiece, below which a coal fire was burning, hung a vast picture portraying a heavy-featured gentleman in the wig and robes of a judge.

I ordered a drink from the dragon. I would have liked a cocktail, but I met an eye which apparently dared me to ask for such a thing, so I ordered a dry sherry. It turned out to be about double the size served in other bars and no dearer.

‘You’ll be staying for lunch, I suppose,’ she said. Nervously I replied that I would like to have lunch. ‘Then make that drink last,’ she said. ‘One o’clock’s the time we serve. You’d better see the head waiter. He’ll book you if there’s room. It’s market day. He’ll be in the garden. Put your drink down. I’ll keep an eye on it.’

‘Which way is the garden?’

‘Through there.’ She pointed to an archway on my left. I abandoned the sherry to her guardianship, went through the archway and traversed a vast, panelled room hung with pictures of hunting scenes and decorated with post-horns, whips, deers’ heads, stuffed pheasants and a giant pike, the last two items in glass cases.

Passing through this mausoleum, I found another door, which opened on to a wooden balcony. From the balcony a long flight of wooden steps with a handrail led down into a long, narrow garden. This was given over mostly to fruit trees now denuded of their produce, but in a border on the right-hand side of a narrow path were some tatty, dreary-looking, bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, about the most uninspiring inflorescences I have ever seen, I think.

Near the end of the garden two elderly men were standing. The taller, whom I took to be one of the hotel guests, was wearing a smoking-jacket and black and grey plaid trousers; the other had on a winged collar and a black frock coat. The old gentleman in the smoking-jacket addressed me.

‘Too late for the plums, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘I didn’t come for plums,’ I said. ‘I wanted to book a table for lunch.’

‘Ah,’ said the other old man, ‘certainly, sir. Come along while I look at my list. I can’t promise you a table to yourself. Our tables are for six or eight persons, and our lunches are popular, sir, very popular.’

‘That’s all right. I’m a writer. I like company,’ I told him. ‘One listens and learns.’

‘We used to get the lawyers,’ he said, preceding me along the narrow path, ‘but not now. They’ve moved the assizes to Bigsey. A pity, sir. Oh, dear! The stories those lawyers could tell! Quite hair-raising, some of them. Other times it was as much as I could do to keep a straight face as a young waiter. Very hilarious, sir, lawyers, and very improper at times. Worse than doctors, I’d say. Will you mount the steps first, sir? I shall be slower than you. The gentleman you saw me with is the owner of this hotel. He misses the lawyers sadly.’

As we walked through the long lounge with its trophies, he went on, ‘A writer, did you say, sir? We have a lady of your calling lunching here for the next fortnight. Dinner, too, so I have managed to squeeze in a little table for her, as our regulars are mostly gentlemen, but there would be room for two if she gave permission.’

He accepted a large book from the formidable barmaid, scanned the day’s entries and asked me my name. He inscribed it and said, ‘One o’clock, sir, please, and your place reserved only until one-fifteen. We are popular, you see.’ I picked up my sherry, which the barmaid had covered with a clean beermat and turned to see a young woman standing behind me. ‘This is the lady writer. Mr Stratford, miss. Miss Parkstone, sir,’ said the waiter.

‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘Imogen!’

‘Good gracious me!’ said the girl. ‘William, put Mr Stratford at my table if he is staying for lunch.’

‘What will you drink?’ I asked.

‘My usual, please, Mabel.’

‘If you like to upset your liver, it’s no business of mine,’ said the barmaid. ‘This gentleman had more sense.’ She juggled with bottles and a shaker. We took our drinks into the lounge and seated ourselves in armchairs beneath a particularly fine set of antlers.

‘So it was you,’ I said. ‘How came you to be serving in a dress shop — viz., to wit, Trends?’

‘To get material for a book, of course. I got the idea from P.G. Wodehouse. Do you remember Rosie M. Banks?’

‘Oh, the female novelist who worked as a waitress in a gentlemen’s club to get material for Mervyn Keene, Clubman?’

‘Exactly. Well, it struck me as such a good idea that I thought I would try it.’

‘Monica Dickens tried it, and with signal success. This place rather brings Dickens to mind, don’t you think? Of course, Monica’s accounts of her experiences were autobiographical.’

‘Don’t deviate. What’s all this about Trends? What were you doing among the ladies’ dresses? I didn’t know you were married.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oho!’

‘And not “Oho” either. I am now an amateur detective. I was merely sleuthing at Trends. I was looking for traces of Gloria Mundy.’

‘That woman whose body was found in the ashes of a bonfire? How on earth did you get mixed up in that awful business?’

‘Never mind that for the moment. It’s a long story and it will keep. Let’s talk about you. I nearly dropped dead when the woman at the post-office at Culvert Green had a forwarding address for Parkstone. I thought coincidence was playing even more of a joke than usual.’

‘I called myself Domremy at Trends, but I thought I had better come clean in the hotel register and at the post-office.’

‘Just as well to avoid unnecessary complications.’ I looked at her as the autumn sun brightened that otherwise depressing room and made gold lights in her fine-spun, dark-brown hair.

‘Why aren’t you pale and interesting?’ I demanded. ‘I was told that you had a whiter-than-white face, black hair, and cats’ eyes like green glass when you were at Trends.’

‘They were thinking of somebody else. Anyway, Trends wasn’t the only stint I did in subservience to my art. I’ve worked in old-clothes shops in the East End, in men’s outfitters in the suburbs, in so-called salons in the provinces where they put one silk scarf and one Italian sweater in the window and sell trousers nobody would be seen dead in. I have even worked at an Irish draper’s where the bar behind the shop was a lot bigger than the shop itself and far better patronised. That was over in the Republic. Besides all that, I’ve worked in Kensington High Street, in Oxford Street and (by virtue of knowing the management) in the clothing section of a Marks and Sparks. You name it, I’ve done it, so far as the sales side of the rag trade is concerned.’

‘God bless my soul!’

‘Keep on asking and perhaps He will.’

‘It seems a lot of trouble to have gone to for a single book. That’s what I meant,’ I said.

‘Ah, but what a book it’s going to be! This is not a Rosie M. Banks, I’ll tell you. I’ve had a hell of a time, sometimes hilarious, sometimes very unpleasant — occasionally, when walking home alone after dark in some parts of London, even quite dangerous — but I’m sure it will be worth it. I plan a monumental opus after the style of Dostoievsky. I ended up at Trends, packed the job in — couldn’t stand the boss-lady for one thing — left my hotel and came to stay in this town with my sister and write the book. If you’d paid your sub to the lit. soc. as a gentleman should, and kept in with the rest of the crowd, you would have known I’d moved out of London.’

The gong went and we adjourned for lunch. The dining-room was full and, except for one mixed party at a central table which seated eight, all the guests except Imogen were men.

‘I always try to pick a place which caters mostly for men,’ she said, when we were seated, ‘then I know I’m going to get enough to eat.’

‘I always used to think you were on a perpetual diet. That’s one reason why old Hara-kiri mistook you for Gloria when he took his wife to buy a dress at Trends.’

‘I was called Gloria at Trends. Not my choice, needless to say. I inherited the name from my predecessor. As to my physique, I suppose I’m a fausse maigre like that girl in a novel by (I think) W.J. Locke. She looked like a starved cat in her clothes, but peeled to a goddess when she put on her swimsuit.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Splendid! When do I — ?’

‘No lechery, please. I am convent bred,’ she said, laughing. ‘Now tell me your story.’

‘Not here and not now. I intend to do full justice to this meal. Game soup and Southdown lamb — the local produce, I trust — don’t go with murder and arson, so let me have my lunch and then you shall walk me round the town and I’ll tell you all. Remind me, though, to send a telegram before we begin our peregrinations. I’ve got to scrub the false information I enclosed in a letter to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.’

‘Goodness me, you are flying high! Do you really write informative letters to Dame Beatrice? I met her once when she lectured to the lit. soc. on Macbeth.’

‘I missed that. Yes, we are fellow sleuths. Get on with your soup or it will be cold. Everything shall be revealed when we are up on the Downs this afternoon.’

But I decided that it would be sacrilege to talk about burnt corpses while we were walking on the Downs so, as soon as I had sent off my telegram to the Stone House, I told Imogen all that I knew about Gloria Mundy as we explored the town.

We walked up the slope to the castle gatehouse and, as we were looking at what had been the outer bailey I said, ‘I knew old Hara-kiri was mistaken.’

‘About what?’

‘He thought you were the ghost of Gloria Mundy.’

‘Who is Hara-kiri?’

‘Do you remember a vast man with a lot of yellow hair? I brought him to one of the lit. soc. dinners when my first book was published.’

‘The man I called the Viking?’

‘That’s the chap.’

‘But how could he have thought I was Gloria Mundy’s ghost? That’s the one and only time I ever saw him.’

‘No. You saw him a few days ago in the Trends shop. He came with his wife to look at evening dresses.’

‘But, Corin, I wasn’t at Trends a few days ago. I left there weeks ago. That’s why you didn’t find me at that rather awful little guest-house. I was at Trends on a month’s approbation and I left at the end of that month. I had got what I wanted and they had had enough of me. Don’t look so moonstruck. Does it matter?’

‘No. I suppose not. Strange, though, that the light-haired girl I spoke to thought I meant you and not Gloria Mundy.’

‘I expect you asked for Gloria. We all had special names in that department. The light-haired girl you mentioned, and anybody who succeeded her in the job, was called Dorella. My number was five and all the fives would be known as Gloria and all the fours as Dorella and the third is always called Violetta and so on and so forth. Just an old Spanish custom at that particular shop.’

‘But what an odd coincidence that you, of all people, should have been called Gloria.’

‘Life drips with coincidences.’

‘God bless them,’ I said. ‘Do you know something? An elderly disciple of Sprenger and Kramer told me I should meet you again.’

‘You could have done that at the lit. soc.’ There was a silence after this. I broke it.

‘I ought to have tumbled to it, I suppose,’ I said thoughtfully.

‘Tumbled to what?’

I glanced at the fine dark-brown hair which a breeze was ruffling and replied, ‘Brown hair, not really black. And you left Culvert Green almost a fortnight before the real Gloria would have done. That has rather upset my theories.’

‘Oh, it was a bit of a dump, you know, and if you wanted a drink you had to go to the local. There wasn’t even a table licence at the hotel. I used to get bottles from the off-licence and drink secretly in my bedroom. How on earth did you come to get mixed up in this murder business? How did it start?’

So I began at the beginning which, in a sense, was my meeting with McMaster outside Kilpeck church, for it was there I received my first report of Gloria Mundy, and told her the story.

‘So there was really no connection between that and your meeting the actual girl at Beeches Lawn,’ said Imogen. ‘How strangely things work together!’

‘Things don’t always work together for good,’ I said. ‘In this case, they worked together for ill. I wish to heaven I had never gone to Beeches Lawn, especially now that I’ve mucked up my end of the enquiry.’

‘But nobody asked you to make the enquiry, did they? Anyway, if you hadn’t gone to Culvert Green we shouldn’t now be heading for the ruins of a Cluniac priory.’

‘I thought it was a Cistercian abbey.’

‘Have it your way. Have you now told me all?’

‘I think so. What do you make of it?’

‘I’ll answer that next time we meet, although goodness knows when that will be. Let’s skip the ruins and go up on to the Downs. There are the remains of a hill fort and a couple of disc barrows up there. We can look at them and brood on the irrevocable past,’

‘Is it so irrevocable?’ I asked. She did not answer, so I went on, ‘You can tell me nothing I don’t know already about what is up on those hills. I’ve sub-edited a holiday booklet on this neighbourhood, don’t forget.’

The Downs, as ever, were exhilarating, if that word can be used to describe anything so sublimely peaceful as ‘here, where the blue air fills the great cup of the hills’, and as we climbed towards the top of Firle Beacon there was one prospect which made me stop in my tracks. Away to the left the softly swelling contours took the shape of a woman’s breasts. I said, looking at the hills and not at the girl beside me, something I had been longing to say to her years ago, but had been too poor, at that time, to offer her marriage.

‘Will you have me, Imogen?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll have you, but I’m going to write my book first. You ought to have asked me ages ago. I always hoped you would. Am I the reason you stopped coming to the lit. soc. meetings?’

‘Yes. I didn’t have any money for marriage in those days.’

I booked dinner at the White Hart for the two of us and a room for myself for the night. I spent all next day with Imogen, lunched and dined with her again and then drove back to my flat under a hunter’s moon. There was a heap of correspondence awaiting me. It included a letter from Dame Beatrice in answer to my telegram. She had written:

No, no, my dear Corin Stratford, I have a feeling that neither you nor Mr McMaster was wrong. I will attempt to supply chapter and verse in support of this theory and shall be very glad to know why you sent a telegram repudiating all your previous statements. Do telephone me when you have received this. As your telegram was not sent from London, I deduce that you are still on the trail, so I do not expect to hear from you immediately, but, please, when you have telephoned to say that you are at liberty, do come and see me as soon as you can and let me have all the latest news by word of mouth and face to face — so much more enjoyable and stimulating than a talk over the telephone or barren words couched in the restrained vocabulary of littera scripta.

Here there have been developments of a most satisfactory kind. I asked for and have obtained a full copy of the pathologist’s report. It is most interesting and is one of two reasons for my thinking that the news you gave me in your letter bears the stamp of authenticity. The first reason is that, if Mr McMaster was ever in a state of such intimacy with Miss Mundy as he postulates, it is in the highest degree unlikely that he mistook another young woman for her at Trends. Ghost or no ghost, I am sure he saw Gloria Mundy days after she was thought to be dead.

As for the pathologist’s report, as you will appreciate, forensic science has now reached such a stage of meticulous accuracy, due in large part to the work of Professor Keith Simpson and others, that the reconstruction of even the most maltreated corpse is not only possible but may be accepted without question.

In the case under review, the evidence is positive. Up to a point (which is to say it cannot tell us who the deceased was), it disposes of the myth that the body in the burnt-out house was that of Gloria Mundy.

You saw Gloria at Beeches Lawn and I am sure that you will endorse the views not only of Mr Wotton and his wife (asked separately for their opinion), but of William Underedge, Miss Brockworth, Miss Kay Shortwood and Mrs Coberley, with all of whom I have been in contact, that Miss Mundy was not more than about five feet five inches tall. The corpse, however, was well above that height before the fire charred off her feet. Moreover, the report gives an estimated age for the deceased of not fewer than sixty years. Is not science wonderful?

There was also a letter from Anthony Wotton. He wrote that he had telephoned my flat but had no answer. He supposed I was taking a holiday on the strength of the money I had received for the brochures and hoped I had not been spending all my time out on the tiles. When I got back, he and Celia would welcome it if I felt inclined to pay them another visit. There was a postscript:

Dame B has been here again and insisted on seeing Celia and me separately. When we compared notes afterwards, it seemed that she asked both of us to estimate the height of Gloria. Celia said that Gloria was at least two inches shorter than herself. I chanced naming an actual figure and put it at five five, which really comes to about the same thing, as Celia is five six and three-quarters.

I read this and then telephoned Dame Beatrice to say that I was back in London. She responded by saying that Coberley was up on remand in a day or two and that, in view of the evidence which was now available, there was much less chance of his ever being brought to trial unless the police could establish some connection between him and the so-far-unknown deceased.

‘Of course,’ she said in conclusion, ‘the most telling evidence against him now is the fact that he knew where he had placed that impounded dagger, but I doubt whether it will amount to much. The broken window, which nobody disputes, means that some unauthorised person forced an entry, whereas Coberley had a key. Moreover, the dagger was in a wooden box which Coberley had made no attempt to hide — I believe you yourself saw the wooden box when he let you into the old house — and there is every probability that the intruder investigated the contents of the box. Whether the long dagger which Mr Coberley had placed in it was the weapon used to kill Miss Mundy’s deputy I now have strong reason to doubt, as it appears to be beyond dispute that the murder was not committed at the old house or the body burnt there. When can you come to see me?’

‘Is tomorrow too soon?’ I asked. She answered that that would be splendid and that I was to get to the Stone House in time for lunch.