Here Lies Gloria Mundy

15

Little Progress

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Of course,’ said Dame Beatrice when we met next day, ‘one thing stands out clearly. Miss Mundy must have needed to have it supposed that she was dead. She took some risks to achieve this and at first it seemed that she had succeeded. The first thing which drew my attention to the facts was Miss Brockworth’s assertion that the red and black scorched (but not burnt-up) hair was a wig. This could have been merely a spiteful remark from somebody who, quite obviously, disliked Miss Mundy, but when I challenged the police, the detective-inspector was compelled to admit that Miss Eglantine’s possibly irresponsible statement was correct. The striking coiffure was indeed a wig and was the only means, so far as you and Mr Wotton were concerned, of identifying the body.’

‘But of whom should Gloria have been so scared as to go to such lengths to fake a corpse to look like her own?’ I asked.

‘That has yet to be discovered. There could be two inferences, both of which will have to be examined. She may have feared that the police were on her trail for some crime she had committed earlier, or else she may have a personal enemy of whom she was desperately afraid.’

‘Could be some relative of that Italian who committed suicide on Gloria’s account,’ I said, not really meaning my words to be taken seriously. Dame Beatrice, however, seized upon them.

‘An Italian who committed suicide on Miss Mundy’s account?’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘I can’t. I had the story at second hand and was given no details. I don’t know how he killed himself or where or even when.’

‘But there was some connection with Miss Mundy. From whom did you get the story?’

‘I don’t remember. I expect Wotton mentioned it. It would have come either from Wotton or McMaster. Nobody else I know would have spoken to me about Gloria. She must have been living with the Italian — he was an artist, it seems — and so got dragged into giving evidence.’

‘There was no suggestion that it was anything but suicide, I suppose? But how should you know, since you had such a brief, undetailed account of it?’

‘Are you wondering whether Gloria murdered the bloke?’ I asked flatly.

‘Well,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘I do not rule out the possibility, since there seems a strong likelihood that she murdered that woman found in the old house at Beeches Lawn.’

‘Well, if the police are of that opinion, it won’t be long before they catch up with her.’

‘London is a good place in which to hide.’

‘She skipped from Trends pretty quickly when she realised that McMaster had recognised her.’

‘That is dependent upon whether she did realise it, but let the inference stand. Do you know whether Mr McMaster has informed the police that he recognised her?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure not. He’s the kind of bloke who would always let the hen partridges fly.’

‘Shades of Peachum, Mr Stratford?’

‘I’ve just thought of something,’ I went on. ‘I’ve got myself a fiancée through this business and that fiancée may have been for a time on the staff of Trends while Gloria was there. Would you care to have a word with her? She herself was called Gloria, strangely enough, and the real Gloria would have been called by anything but her real name, it seems, but I have no idea what her shop name was. It could have been Violetta.’

‘Is there any chance that your fiancée would have known Miss Mundy’s address?’

‘I should hardly think so. She was only at Trends to gather material for a book. I don’t think she would have been in the least interested in the other assistants’ private lives. I’ll tell you who might be able to help, though. There is a silver-haired, pleasant young miss on the staff who knew more or less where my Imogen hung out during her stay at Trends, so she might be the best chance of our locating Gloria.’

‘Well, we must not ignore any opening. Are you persona grata with this silver-haired young woman?’

‘I don’t know. I told her I was a policeman.’

‘Enterprising of you, but perhaps, under the circumstances, not too helpful. People dislike what they call “getting mixed up with the police”. I think perhaps it would be best if I myself made the next enquiries at the shop, but let us consider a few points before I do so. It is certain that Miss Mundy presented herself at Beeches Lawn on a Sunday, a day on which Trends would have been closed, but the evidence at our disposal suggests that she was also in the neighbourhood of Mr Wotton’s residence on the Tuesday.’

‘If McMaster is right in thinking that he saw her still working at Trends some time after that, she probably sent in a doctor’s certificate to cover her absence, don’t you think?’

‘It seems a reasonable theory. On the other hand, if she had a car it would be quite possible for her to drive to Beeches Lawn directly she had finished work, do whatever she had decided to do there, and still get back to London and to the shop on the following morning.’

‘A car? I don’t know why, but I never thought of her having a car.’

‘It is an ubiquitous possession nowadays.’

‘Yes, of course. You don’t mean she stole that car the police found outside the convent building, do you? — and burnt a body in it? Oh, no, that’s far too fantastic’

‘That was a stolen car, according to the police theory, but, even if it had been her own, she still had to get back to London. Of course, there is always the train, but there is something more important than the fact that Miss Mundy does not appear to have given up her position at Trends until after Mr McMaster’s visit.’

‘I still think there is just a chance he may have been mistaken. He saw a girl with black hair and a dead-white make-up. I believed I was convinced that he saw Gloria in this girl, but I find a lingering doubt,’ I said. ‘Would she have dared to go back to Trends, where she might be recognised?’

‘We will shelve the point and go to another matter. Has it struck you that somebody, Miss Mundy or another, must have had that red and black wig in readiness and that the murder was premeditated and carefully planned?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it along those lines. That means all the murderer had to do was to find the right time to commit the crime.’

‘And to select the right victim, of course.’

‘The right victim? How do you mean?’

‘She had to find a woman sufficiently of her own build, (although not necessarily of her own age), somebody who would be unsuspecting, and somebody who would not be missed for some time. Is there a picture forming in your mind?’

‘Going on the assumption that Gloria Mundy knifed this so-far-unknown woman, burnt the body in that car and somehow — heaven knows how! — got the body back to the old house — well, if I can swallow all that, I can see various possibilities,’ I said. This was not strictly true. What came into my mind were not possibilities, but wild flights of imagination into which, fortunately, perhaps, Dame Beatrice did not enquire.

She said, ‘Let us pick up the threads again. Now then, we know that Miss Mundy was at Beeches Lawn on the Sunday. The host, the hostess and all the guests (yourself included) say so. Now what evidence have we that she did not leave the neighbourhood as soon as she had left Beeches Lawn after the soup incident?’

‘Are you serious in asking that?’

‘Please answer me.’

‘Well, there is the evidence of Roland and Kay, who saw her standing at the window of the old house.’

‘In pouring rain and gathering darkness, remember, and themselves, I imagine, intent only on reaching the shelter of Mr Wotton’s hospitable home.’

‘But it wasn’t raining, nor was the girl inside the old house, when McMaster saw her among the bushes as he crossed the kitchen garden. Of course he only saw the top of her head, I believe.’

‘But it was, as you say, her head he saw, and her hair was, to him, unmistakable.’

‘He didn’t have the help of it at Trends.’

‘Nevertheless, I believe him and I believe Mr Thornbury and Miss Shortwood. It was Miss Mundy they saw.’

‘I thought you were doubtful about Kay and Roland.’

‘Not if my interpretation of the known events is correct. I think the murder was committed on the Saturday night, the night before Miss Mundy presented herself at Beeches Lawn.’

‘She would never have dared leave a stabbed and burnt body in that car. The police would have found it when the man who rented the old convent building reported the obstruction.’

‘The car, I believe, was not drawn to their attention until the Monday or Tuesday.’

‘That’s true. They hadn’t got rid of it even when Celia Wotton came back from the hospital after Miss Brockworth’s accident. I suppose they were still trying to trace the owner, so wanted to have the car all in one piece, which it wouldn’t have been, perhaps, if they’d moved it. Did Gloria steal the car as well as burn it.’

‘No, I think it was her own car and an old one which she was prepared to sacrifice in order to further her own ends. The number plates, I am told — I have been in conference with Detective-Inspector Rouse, as you know — had been removed. My reading is that this was done to prevent the car’s being traced to Miss Mundy, not that the vehicle had been stolen.’

‘There are other ways of identifying cars, apart from their number plates,’ I pointed out.

‘No doubt she trusted that the fire would eliminate other clues. I will let you know how I get on at Trends. Where will you be during the next few days?’

‘At Beeches Lawn, if I am not in my flat. The Wottons have invited me for another visit.’

The shell of the old house was a grim reminder of the days of my first visit to Beeches Lawn. What remained of the roof had been removed for reasons of safety, I supposed, so that, apart from the ravages which it had suffered from the fire, the house was now completely open to the weather. I wondered what Anthony proposed to do with it. I supposed that it was not impossible to renovate it, but in his place I would have pulled it down.

Celia opened the subject at lunchtime. She said that the house now gave her the horrors, but that Anthony wanted to preserve it. The contractor was coming that afternoon to make another survey.

‘Now that the roof has gone, something must be done soon if I am to save the rest of the structure,’ said Anthony, ‘but Celia is too emphatic. The trouble is that, before I came into the property, a preservation order was slapped on the old place, so I’ve got to find out where I stand now with regard to that.’

‘While Anthony and the man are confabulating, will you take me out in your car, Corin?’ asked Celia. ‘It’s either that, or both of us staying indoors all the afternoon. I don’t suppose the survey will be over until teatime at the earliest.’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Oh, anywhere. Just out and around. Anywhere you would care to take me.’

‘Don’t keep her out after dark. I don’t trust bachelors,’ said Anthony. I laughed as I thought of Imogen.

‘I’ve got myself a girl of my own,’ I said. Celia was all speculation and curiosity, but I said that, as the evenings were shortening and I had received my orders not to keep her out after dark, I would unburden myself to her uttermost satisfaction when we were in the car.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, as I took the Cheltenham road.

‘Can you climb a hill?’

‘I hope so.’

‘And visit a church?’

‘If have to.’

‘Right. We’ll climb up to Belas Knap and then go and look at Elkstone.’

I was surprised that she had never seen either, but then I remembered some American friends of mine who had been astonished to find how little I knew of historical London, a city in which I had spent the best part of my adult life.

I locked the car and we left the road and made the steep climb by way of a route marked out by the National Trust. A thousand feet up the shoulder of the beautifully named Cleeve Cloud was the long barrow, a grass-covered mound with an impressive forecourt, a false entrance and, round at the sides, the burial chambers in which, four thousand years ago, Neolithic men had buried the dead. I crept inside one of the short passages, but Celia remained outside.

‘How did they make such a place?’ she asked, when I emerged.

‘Drystone walls made of limestone blocks,’ I answered. ‘The Cotswolds haven’t changed.’

‘You’ve changed,’ she said, as we stood together in the wind which was driving ragged autumn clouds across the sky. ‘Are you very happy, Corin?’

‘As happy as a man contemplating matrimony can expect to be,’ I replied. She laughed.

‘A two-edged answer,’ she said. ‘Race you down the hill.’

‘No, you won’t. You’d find the slope too steep for safety. You’d tumble over and get covered in cowpats. I’m not going to have my car stinking like a midden.’

‘Are you practising being a stern and bossy husband?’

I had a vision of Imogen with the gold lights in her dark hair and her answer to my proposal of marriage. ‘I’ll have you, but I’m going to write my book first.’

‘Stern and bossy? I’d never get away with it,’ I told Celia.

‘It’s old-fashioned, anyway,’ she said. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Imogen Parkstone.’

‘Not the novelist?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I’ve read her! She’s really good.’

‘Is she? I don’t read other people’s novels for fear they are better than my own.’

‘Does she earn a lot of money?’

‘I’ve never thought about it. Maybe she does.’

‘More money than you do?’

‘Quite likely.’

‘Will you mind if you find that she does?’

‘No, it wouldn’t make any difference. We should have an agreement to pay a certain amount into the housekeeping and keep the rest for ourselves, I suppose, to spend as we liked.’

‘And take separate holidays?’

‘That might come later.’

‘I wish Anthony had never gone on that cruise. The knowledge that that awful girl is still alive haunts me.’

‘Forget it. She is not likely to show up at Beeches Lawn again. Besides, Anthony got over that brief interlude of idiocy years ago.’

We found some blackberries in the lane, great luscious whoppers on bushes fertilised, I suppose, by the cows.

‘Don’t touch them,’ said Celia, as I stretched out my hand for the fruit.

‘Why not?’

‘There’s a country superstition that by this time in the year “the Devil’s drawed ’is tail over ’em”,’ she told me, with a fair shot at the local intonation.

‘Oh, ah?’ I said, imitating it. ‘So ’ow do ’ee come to know that there, then?’ But I did not touch the blackberries. I thought of Aunt Eglantine and laughed as I unlocked the car. On the way to Elkstone I asked how Marigold Coberley was getting on.

‘She is feeling much more hopeful,’ said Celia. ‘Mr McMaster wrote to her to tell her that he had seen Gloria Mundy alive and working at Trends.’

‘Not her ghost?’

‘No. He is convinced now that she is still in the flesh. The police are after her.’

We bypassed Cheltenham at Prestbury and followed the by-roads almost to Andoversford. Then I headed the car south-west to Seven Springs and after that it was due south to Elkstone.

The village was high up above the valley of the Churn and as harsh and uncompromising as the church itself. The edifice had been built roughly at the same time as Kilpeck, but, except for the chevron moulding around the broad chancel arch and an inner archway to the sanctuary, no two interiors could have been more different, neither were the south doorways comparable.

For one thing, both Celtic and Viking ornament were missing here. Elkstone was as brutal and as stern as the Normans who built it. There was Norman ruthlessness and cruelty in the hideous, warning sculptured faces at the crossing of the vault ribs of the chancel, and Norman thrift in the provision of a large dovecot under the roof, a dovecot which, when we had squeezed our way up a narrow stair, proved to be as large as the chancel below it.

When we were back in the car it occurred to me that we were so near Will Smith’s cottage (as I still thought of it) that I might as well show it to Celia.

I guessed that my beloved lane would be knee-deep in wet vegetation and probably very muddy, but there was a made road up from the stables. These had been converted into classrooms and changing-rooms by the school, and some boys were just emerging as I left the car in the road. A young master was with them.

‘Is it all right if we take this road to the gamekeeper’s cottage? I used to know him,’ I said.

‘Oh, go ahead,’ he responded; so we took the straight road to where the cottage stood at the top of the low hill. The slope was grassy and in front of the building Will had contrived a little unfenced garden, but this had run riot now and was covered in weeds. At the back were the woods where he and I had so often walked and talked.

Celia was enchanted with the cottage. I told her I wanted it for my own.

‘Would you live here all the year round?’ she asked. ‘If so, you would need electric light and you would have to build a bathroom, wouldn’t you? I would love to go inside.’

I began to demur, but then it occurred to me to try the back door, for country people seldom lock up. It did not yield, however, so we went round to the front, but that was fastened, too. I suppose the authorities did not want the property invaded by boys who wanted a quiet smoke.

‘I expect we shall have to spend a lot of our time in London to keep in the literary fishpond,’ I said in answer to Celia’s question, ‘but that will depend on Imogen.’ I looked about me. On the sloping ground below, a drystone wall marked off a stretch of pasture and I remembered I had once seen a couple of bottle-fed lambs come bounding up to the farmer like pet dogs and there was still a grey mare in the paddock, although hardly the one on whose back I had been given a ride. ‘For myself, I wouldn’t care if I never saw London again,’ I added.

‘It’s better for children to be brought up in the country. Are you planning to have a family, Corin?’

‘Good heavens, we haven’t got that far! Give us a chance,’ I said. ‘Anyway, at present, Imogen, I am sure, is far keener on producing books than children.’