Here Lies Gloria Mundy

18

Exit Gloria

« ^ »

It seemed to me that there was nothing more that I could do. My foolish impulse to attempt to whitewash a double murderess had vanished long before I received Dame Beatrice’s letter and there appeared only two minor points to be cleared up, neither of them my business. The ownership of the burnt-out car had not been established and nobody so far had suggested how the elderly cleaner’s charred and disfigured body had been conveyed to the old house.

I put these points to Dame Beatrice in another letter and she in her reply invited me to bring Imogen to stay for a weekend at the Stone House. Imogen, who was staying with her sister and finding the children charming but distracting, responded warmly to the invitation, so on a cold autumn Friday afternoon we drove to the New Forest.

I had met the children when I picked Imogen up at her sister’s house and, as we were leaving the Downs behind us and I was taking the road to Chichester and then to Romsey to avoid Southampton, she mentioned that she would have to move, in order to get enough peace in which to write her book; I suggested that her next move should be into my pad.

‘Then, as soon as the winter is over, we’ll go house-hunting in London and in the summer we’ll move into the Cotswold cottage,’ I said.

‘Marriage lines or no marriage lines?’

‘We might as well regularise the union, I suppose,’ I said, as I kissed her cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That remark might have been more happiry phrased, but it indicates honourable intentions. Make it before Christmas and then I shan’t need to join in the family festivities.’

‘I’ve never made love to you properly,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘When do I repair the omission?’

‘Well, it would be most improper to do it under Dame Beatrice’s roof,’ she answered with mocking primness.

‘She would only cackle and wish us well. Do a few lines on a bit of paper matter so much?’

‘Yes, if they mean that you have to maintain me in sickness and in health, whether you like it or not.’

‘Oh, Lord! Not a church wedding?’

‘With you complete in sponge-bag trousers and a buttonhole. Besides, just in case you thought differently, I am entitled to be married in white.’

‘I’ve never thought about it. I have to confess that I myself am a spotted and inconstant man.’

‘Just as well that one of us has had some experience.’

‘This is the most unromantic conversation I ever took part in!’

‘It is nothing to the boring dialogues we shall have when we are married.’

‘Then there’s no time like the present.’ I pulled into a lay-by which fortunately was empty.

Breathless at the end of the next ten minutes, she said, ‘Perhaps it won’t be so boring after all. Where did you learn your technique?’

‘Not from Gloria Mundy,’ I said.

‘Stop at Romsey Abbey. There’s a stone carving outside the south door,’ she said. It was a crucifix. Unbidden to my mind came the Celtic warrior at Kilpeck. I banished his image and gently took Imogen’s hand. The figure on the crucifix was not quite life-size, but, unlike most such portrayals, the eyes were open and the head was raised. It was a representation of Christus Dominans and may have been brought back from the Middle East by crusaders, or so I had read. It seemed very likely, for the figure was too anatomically correct to be of Saxon origin, as some claimed, and it was a figure of victory, not of death.

‘This place was built for a convent of nuns,’ I said, as we walked back to the car.

‘And the carving was outside the abbess’s door,’ remarked Imogen. Nothing more was said until we reached Lyndhurst and even then all I said was, ‘Not far now.’

It was growing dusk. The road between Lyndhurst and Brockenhurst is one of the most beautiful major routes through the New Forest and in the dim evening light the majestic trees gave cathedral solemnity to the scene. I drove slowly and we did not talk.

Once over the little river, the Stone House soon came into view. Dame Beatrice and Laura Gavin received us kindly, George, the chauffeur and general handyman, carried our suitcases upstairs and Laura and Imogen followed so that Laura could show Imogen our rooms. I was left downstairs with Dame Beatrice.

‘We are going to be married sooner than I thought,’ I said.

‘The sooner the better,’ she responded, ‘once minds are made up. Has Imogen parents living?’

‘No. I expect she will be married from her sister’s house. As for me, I expect old Hara-kiri will arrange to put me up the night before. He doesn’t live all that far from where she will be.’

The next two days were crisp and cold. Imogen and I walked in the forest, chaperoned by Laura’s two mighty Dobermanns, and returned to eat Lucullan meals prepared by Henri, the French cook, and served by Celestine, his wife, who regarded Imogen and me with a dewy, sentimental eye and on one occasion said, ‘Ah, the poor children! What suffering comes after les noces!’

When we had left the Stone House I went to visit Aunt Eglantine to tell her of my approaching nuptials.

‘I suppose you’ll expect a wedding present,’ she said.

‘The best one would be your good wishes, dear Madame Eglantine.’

‘Don’t talk such abysmal nonsense!’ she said. ‘Promised you millions, didn’t I?’

‘An embarrassment of riches and one with which I could not cope. Make me another of your prophesies.’

‘I am no prophetess. I speak only of the things I know.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as that I buttered the schoolmaster’s steps and I sent the letter to him pointing the finger at the witch.’

‘You? But you might have killed Mrs Coberley?’

‘She is a murderess, isn’t she?’

‘You have no right to say that. She was acquitted.’

‘Be that as it may, men always are fools when they meet beauty face to face. Look at Helen of Troy.’

‘I wish I could.’

‘There you are, you see. And you about to be married to this bluestocking of yours!’

‘She isn’t a blue-stocking.’

‘When am I going to meet her?’

‘I don’t know that you are. I don’t trust you with anything I hold precious. Did you really butter those steps?’

‘What do you think? I wanted to find out whether she was another witch. If she had not tumbled down the steps I should have known her for one. She had saved herself from life imprisonment, so I thought she could save herself from a nasty little fall.’

‘I shall never forgive you.’

‘Then I shan’t tell you how the black witch took the body to the old house.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I worked it out. She came in a car, didn’t she? She burnt the car. She borrowed another one.’

‘How could she do that?’

‘Anthony Wotton has only one double and one single garage. The other cars were left outside. People are careless. They don’t always lock their cars. They think that at the houses of friends they are safe.’

‘You may be right about that. Over that weekend there would have been — let’s see. Ah, yes. Anthony’s car and Celia’s mini in the double garage, and mine, as I was the first guest, in the car-port. That means that Roland Thornbury’s car, William Underedge’s, Dame Beatrice’s and, for the night he was there, Hardie McMaster’s, were left in the open.’

‘Not Roland Thornbury’s. It was bogged down,’ Aunt Eglantine reminded me. ‘And the white witch had gone.’

‘But, supposing that you are right and that’s the way she got the body from the burnt-out car to the old house, how did she hide it from the Saturday night until the morning the gardener found it?’

‘I worked that out, too,’ said Aunt Eglantine with great satisfaction. ‘I’ve had nothing to do here but quarrel with the nurses and think my own thoughts. She killed that woman on the way down here and put the body in the boot before she set fire to the car. All she had to do was to go to a hotel in the town — you will never know which one because she will have given a false name and it’s not a thing which matters — ’

‘It matters if it proves that she was actually in Hilcombury on that Saturday night. She didn’t show up at Beeches Lawn until the Sunday.’

‘Very well.’ Aunt Eglantine closed her eyes. ‘That’s all,’ she said. ‘She couldn’t move the body to the old house until the car had cooled down.’

‘Even so, when did she get a chance to move the body without anybody knowing?’

‘It gets dark early at this time of year. All Anthony Wotton’s people would have been indoors and his gardeners would have gone home. It would have been easy enough for her. An ordinary person might have run into trouble, but not a wicked black witch like her.’

‘Your thinking seems to have been deep, logical and constructive, clever old Eglantine. You have an answer to everything.’

‘Oh, people think I’m crazy,’ she said, opening her eyes, ‘but I can out-think most of them when I put my mind to it. Anyhow, I’ve told the police all that I’ve told you and they believe me, even if you don’t. They’ll catch up with her, you mark my words.’

‘Are you telling me that she risked staying in a local hotel all those nights after she had burnt the car with the body in it?

‘I don’t know. She was in the old house for part of the time. She was seen by others and I met her there when I had my accident.’ She chuckled. ‘She wasn’t expecting any of us, I’ll wager,’ she said, ‘neither those young people who got caught in the rain or me so early in the morning.’

I thought of the empty cans of food and drink which had led to Rouse’s enquiries about squatters. Her explanations could have covered those, too. Hotels are expensive nowadays.

‘She would have been pretty cold in the old house,’ I said. Aunt Eglantine had an answer to that.

‘Not if she chanced the staircase and made a fire in one of the bedrooms,’ she said. ‘The stairs would have borne a lightweight like her, I daresay, whereas I brought them crashing down.’

‘Smoke from a bedroom fire, or anywhere else in the old house, would have been noticed,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, it wasn’t. It took a conflagration to draw attention to the old house, didn’t it? Do stop raising silly objections. All that I’ve told you covers the known facts, so have done with your contumacious carpings, young man.’

I returned to my flat and tried to settle down to work, but it was impossible to concentrate on the new book. What with the conversation with Aunt Eglantine and my approaching marriage, I found myself incapable of serious application to creative writing. I soon gave up the attempt and wrote to Imogen instead. That is to say I was halfway through the letter when Anthony’s call distracted me. He sounded incoherent.

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Take a deep breath and begin again. Are you tight?’

Apparently he relinquished the phone to Celia, for it was her voice which came through.

‘It’s that girl again,’ she said. ‘Do come.’

‘Has she been arrested?’

‘No, and Cranford Coberley is free. Drop everything and come, please. We need you badly.’

I did as she asked. I left my letter unfinished, got my car and drove straight to Beeches Lawn, stopping only to pick up a sandwich and some coffee on the M4. When I had pulled up in the forecourt of Anthony’s garage, I locked the car, a precaution I had never taken before at his place, and as I walked by the kitchen garden I met Platt, the gardener.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but, in case you didn’t know, there’s trouble up at the house.’

‘Yes, I had a telephone call,’ I said.

‘That’s all right then, sir. You won’t be getting a shock.’

I did not ask him to explain what the nature of the shock would have been. I knew that Anthony and Celia were alive and that was all that concerned me at the moment. I hurried along to the house. Celia opened the front door.

‘The servants are having hysterics and Anthony isn’t much better,’ she said. ‘Come in and have a drink. We can all do with one.’

She took me into the enormous drawing room. Anthony was at the window staring out at the almost leafless trees. He turned round as we came in.

‘Hullo, Corin,’ he said. ‘Good of you to come. We’re in trouble again.’

Celia went out and returned from the dining-room next door with bottles and glasses.

‘I met your gardener,’ I said. ‘What’s happened now? Not Aunt Eglantine, I hope?’

‘Oh, no, it’s Gloria Mundy. She’s dead,’ said Celia. ‘The servants found her lying outside the back door. The police have been here again and so I suppose all hell will be let loose once more. Will that wretched girl never stop causing trouble? Help yourself, Corin, and don’t stint.’

I poured drinks for all of us. Anthony was almost too shaken up to hold his glass. I wondered whether he had gone on caring for Gloria after all, or even whether he had killed her.

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know. The servants came in just as we were finishing breakfast and blurted out the news, so Anthony went out there. She was quite dead. Of course the police had to be told and Detective-Inspector Rouse came again. He is becoming quite an old friend,’ said Celia bitterly. ‘He badgered us and the servants with questions and then had the body taken away. We could tell him nothing, of course, and we don’t know where we stand. It really is unutterably awful.’ Her calm demeanour suddenly crumpled. She burst into tears. This pulled Anthony together. He took the glass from her hand, laid it very precisely on the side table and collected her on to his lap. At the same moment the doorbell pealed.

‘I’ll go,’ I said; but the maid also had pulled herself together sufficiently to answer the door. She let in Rouse. I met him in the little vestibule and took him along to the drawing-room. I gave a loud knock on the door to suggest to the others that they had better unscramble themselves.

They were in separate chairs when we went in and, although Celia’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes were dry.

‘You are just in time for a drink, Detective-Inspector,’ she said.

‘No, thank you, madam. I shan’t keep you a moment. There will have to be an inquest, of course, but we found a letter on the body. It will be handed to the coroner in due course, but it is addressed to Mr Wotton, so I think he had better read it.’

Anthony took the envelope and unfolded the letter which was inside it. He perused it and then handed it to me. There was no doubt about its being a suicide note. In it Gloria said that she knew the game was up, that she had no intention of spending years in prison, that she regretted the death of the elderly cleaner, but not the murder of the American cousin — ‘she only came over here to sponge on me because she thought I was still Hardie McMaster’s mistress and he is a very rich man’ — and the letter went on to mention the photograph ‘with which I never intended any harm, but only something to hold, Tony, over your rather stupid head, but she went off with it and I did my best to buy it back so that she could do you no harm with it. Tony, my weak-kneed old darling, if your gardener must keep all that lethal stuff in his shed, he should keep it locked up. There is enough poison in there to lay out a regiment.’

She named some of the substances. All of them, I knew, contained hydrocyanic acid, more commonly known as prussic acid. There would have been pesticides such as rat poison, wasp-killer and a fumigatory for trees and fruit. Which she had used she did not say. The letter ended:

I have read somewhere that certain natives kill themselves on the doorstep of an enemy so that their ghost will haunt him. I bear you no malice, but I will haunt that bitch of a woman you married until she kills herself to get rid of me. She looked at me as though I was scum. Even that Coberley woman only laughed when the soup went over me. I can forgive her for that, but I won’t stand being treated like dirt by that wife of yours.

I handed back the letter. He gave it to Rouse without showing it to Celia.

‘I must ring up Hara-kiri,’ he said, when the inspector had gone. ‘I don’t want him to hear about this from the newspapers. I wonder, Corin, whether you would do it for me? You’ll do it better than I would, because you are in no way involved.’

‘I’ll ring him up from my flat, then,’ I said. ‘Now that you are out of trouble, I think the two of you are better on your own.’

The fact was that I was anxious to get away. There was nothing useful that I could do by staying and I was superstitious enough not to want the Wottons’ bad luck to attach itself to me.

Back in my flat, I had a dream I shall not forget. I am well aware that nothing is so boring as having to listen to an account of someone else’s dreams, but, because of Aunt Eglantine’s strange and bizarre request later, this dream of mine still seems of peculiar significance. It began when I dreamed I received a ‘Tag Map’ from Hara-kiri.