Nest of Vipers

Chapter Fifteen

The Witches and Mr Shard

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(1)

BILLIE KENNETT was alone. So was Dame Beatrice, for she had left Laura behind, divining rightly that Billie (and Elysée, if she happened to be at home) would talk more freely if an observer and shorthand writer were not present. Laura concurred whole-heartedly with this view and was only too thankful to remain at the hotel, feeling (although she did not express the thought) ill-at-ease in the company of two women who were emotionally involved with one another. To Dame Beatrice, Billie was not only willing but anxious to talk.

‘I first noticed a difference in Ellie about four months ago,’ she said. ‘She seemed just as keen on our friendship, but somehow I felt that something had gone wrong with the relationship. She had strange moods and there were occasions when I suspected she might be taking drugs. Once I asked her outright if this was so. She denied it, of course, but I wasn’t really satisfied. Then she began wanting the use of the car more often than she had ever needed it before, but she said she had made a new contact who wanted her to model ski-clothes for him and she was anxious to do it, so I said no more, but let her have the car whenever she asked for it. I never suspected the Minnie angle, or what she was really up to, of course, or I would have stepped in.’

‘And what was that?’ Dame Beatrice enquired. ‘What was she up to?’

‘You know enough to be able to guess that. She had got herself mixed up with these black magic people and I think she had gone too far to be able to extricate herself safely. I really do draw the line at black magic. It’s horrible. Ordinary white witchcraft cults, well, they’re all over the place these days.’

‘I think they always were, but I suppose they were kept underground until the laws were repealed,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘All comes of this breakdown of orthodox religion, I suppose. Anyway, between true witches and the Satanists there’s the same distinction as there is between black and white.’

‘Between white and black, surely?’

‘Same thing.’

‘By no means, but let it pass. So when did you suspect that Miss Barnes had involved herself in undesirable activities? You spoke of four months ago. What happened then?’

‘I saw the Satan-marks on her body. When people live cheek-by-jowl in a couple of rooms, as we did at Vipers, and both had a living to earn, you share the accommodation as best you can because time is precious, especially in the mornings, when you’ve got to get off to work, so if Ellie happened to be in the bath and I wanted to brush my teeth, well, of course, I just went into the bathroom and got on with the teeth-cleaning. One morning I happened to notice some angry-looking marks on her body, one on each breast and one near her navel, so I asked her what on earth she’d been doing to herself.’

‘The Devil’s signs, of course. In the old days the witches were thought to come by the marks through his agency. What did she say?’

‘Passed the marks off as mosquito bites. I was sure they were nothing of the sort, but I had no idea at the time that they were initiation marks. I thought perhaps she had a lover and that they were instances—’ her face twisted in a grimace of angry disgust – ‘of the divine passion. I was jealous and afraid. I’d felt for some time that she was no longer satisfied with our relationship. I loved her and wanted the best for her, so I accepted what I thought was the situation and tried all ways to find out who the man was.

‘I knew she flirted a bit with one or two of the men at Vipers, but I soon dismissed them from my calculations because those of them who could have had any attraction for anybody as beautiful as Ellie were well and truly tied up already, so I wasn’t really afraid I was going to lose her to any of them there.’

‘Mr Piper himself?’

‘Oh, I expect he made a pass or two before they jugged him, but there was nothing in it. I think Chelion is a bit of a monk where women are concerned and I expect he was too thankful to have escaped Niobe’s clutches to tie himself up seriously with anybody else. Anyway, I tried my hardest to find out what was going on.’

‘And then?’

‘Nothing else for a long time, except that Ellie wouldn’t allow me ever to see her in the bath any more. I accepted that, the same as I had accepted her explanation about the mosquito bites. Everybody has the option of privacy, and once, as I thought, she’d got a lover, well, I decided to bow myself out.’

‘You seem to have behaved with great sympathy and self-restraint.’

‘I’m fond of the little so-and-so, and if she wants a man, so be it. Well, the next thing, and much the most important, was this pseudo-marriage with that heel Polly Hempseed. After she had come back here and you had gone, I shook the truth out of Ellie – literally, I mean. I threatened to kill her if she didn’t come absolutely clean.’

Dame Beatrice sized up the short, square, sturdy figure and the resolute bull-dog face, and could picture the scene, but she said: ‘Wrestling-match or whatever it was, I would have thought Miss Barnes, with her height and the degree of physical fitness which, I imagine, goes with her secondary profession as a model, would have had the advantage in a trial of bodily strength.’

‘Not when I’m hopping mad, which I was,’ said Billie. ‘Besides, Ellie has the usual feminine dislike of going to the mat and settling matters by seeing which can bite pieces out of whom. I think, too, that she was scared stiff of the Satan lot. Anyway, she gave in easily and came clean.’

‘How clean, I wonder?’

‘Oh, I’m sure I heard it all. I said I should go to the police. She broke down completely and begged me not to involve her. That brought me up all standing, but I got the address of that junk shop out of her and I went along to put the fear of God into that bloke.’

‘Interesting. Did you threaten him with the police?’

‘No. He wasn’t there, so I pushed a letter through the shop’s letter-box. I couldn’t keep on going there. After all, I have my job to think about. Besides, I guessed they had lost interest in Ellie once she had become – once she had lost – after she and Hempseed – I mean, she was no use as a sacrificial victim any more.’

‘Yes, yes, I quite understand. And now?’

‘Well, that’s about it. Ellie and I still share this house, but, of course, things will never be the same again. I suppose she’ll marry some day. I wish she would, and get to hell out of my life.’

‘How does the death of Miss Minnie fit into all this?’

‘I have no idea, except that, from what I made Ellie tell me, it was Minnie, blast her! – who introduced Ellie to these Satanists.’

(2)

Niobe herself opened the door to Dame Beatrice.

‘Oh, no!’ she said, stepping back a pace when she recognised the visitor.

‘I fear so,’ said Dame Beatrice, stepping inside. ‘I wonder whether Mr Shard is at home? It is he with whom I would speak.’

‘Mandrake? I expect he’s busy.’

‘Perhaps you will be good enough to ring through on the intercommunication apparatus and let him know that I am here.’

‘Will you state your business? He won’t be pleased to have his writing interrupted unless you have business of importance to discuss with him.’

‘My business concerns the death of the man who kept an antique-dealer’s shop in the town and from whom Mrs Gavin brought a yataghan.’

‘A what?’

‘And to whom you either sold or gave a set of steel fire-irons, although you have denied doing so.’

‘You had better come into my office.’ Dame Beatrice followed her and Niobe made contact with Mandrake Shard.

‘Will you go up?’ she said. ‘He is at the end of the landing on the first floor. There is a nameplate on the sitting-room door.’

Shard, who seemed to have been working at an enormous desk which was covered with reference books, papers and a typewriter which had a half-finished sheet of quarto still sticking up in it, greeted her twitteringly.

‘Well, well, well! Hullo, hullo!’ he said. ‘How nice! How very, very nice! Sherry, I think, don’t you? Or shall we go out to tea again? No. Sherry, sherry! Oh, but do come in! Come in!’

Dame Beatrice came in and closed the door. The room, she noted, was beautifully and expensively furnished and, except for the littered desk, exquisitely neat and clean. There was only one picture on the walls, but it was a Picasso of the artist’s 1941 period. Dame Beatrice wondered whether its fantastic disorientations, exaggerations and unkind if humorous comments upon a woman’s features and bodily attitude were a kind of compensation to Shard for his own tiny but well-formed frame and his loss of the girl he had once hoped to marry.

Dame Beatrice took the armchair to which he waved her and he bustled about in the cupboards of a satinwood cabinet and produced glasses and a couple of early nineteenth-century decanters – all of them collectors’ pieces – and cried gaily:

‘Which shall it be? Which shall it be? And do you take a biscuit with your sherry? Speak now, or for ever after hold your peace!’

‘No biscuit. The sherry is at your choice,’ she said. She sat and sipped while she studied the room and Shard, she surmised, studied her. He did not drink.

‘More?’ he enquired. ‘Ah, well, later on, perhaps. One is disposed to enquire, if one does not give offence, why you have come to see me.’

‘I want to know more about the Satanists.’

‘Oh, my dear Mrs Farintosh!’

‘Since last we met, their leader has met his end. By the way, as there should be few secrets between friends, I ought to tell you that Mrs Farintosh, as such, does not exist.’

‘You don’t need to tell me, dear and excellent lady. I snooped around, you know, and placed you quite easily since you are well-known (and famous, too), but it seemed only good manners to respect your alias – or should I say your nom-de-plume?’

‘No, I write, when I write, under my own name.’

‘Then welcome to my abode, Dame Beatrice. What do you want to know about the Satanists? I am hardly a mine of information, I’m afraid. I attended only two of their meetings and those were not for the initiated. Targe came to the first of them with me, but I think he found the proceedings childish and disappointingly dull. After all, to a man who has the horrid details of Jack the Ripper’s activities propped up beside his breakfast bacon and egg, the sight of a virgin lying on a strip of black velvet and having gibberish said over her can hardly rank as a sexual extravaganza or orgy.’

‘But you yourself went a second time?’

‘By personal invitation of the Grand Master, or whatever he called himself. The initiates, when they addressed him (which they did only after prostrating themselves) moaned at him, “You, You!” So I never learned his name.’

‘Did you ever go to his shop in the town?’

‘Well, of course, but not to his shop as such. It was where the meetings were held, you know.’

‘Ah, yes, of course it was. I asked a foolish question. I shall now ask another. Was the girl on the table someone you knew?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did you also recognise any of the circle of members?’

‘I thought I did, but we were all masked.’

Dame Beatrice waited, but no more information was forthcoming. Shard held up the decanter but she shook her head. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and held it up to the light (not so much, she thought, to admire the beautiful colour of the golden liquid as to make sure that she would admire the beautiful opaque spiral on the stem of the glass and its bowl engraved with flowers).

Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw. ‘The better the colour the more worthy of the priceless glass?’ she asked. ‘Or does the priceless glass make a most innocuous and healthful beverage taste better?’

‘The second, I think. You are hoping that I will disclose the names of those members of Satan’s Circle whom I thought I recognised, but that I cannot do. We were all placed under an oath of secrecy and I am sufficiently superstitious to feel that I cannot break it.’

‘It matters little. Your evidence would only be confirmation of what I already know. One thing I believe you can tell me without forswearing yourself. Was the girl on the table the same girl each time?’

‘No, she was not, neither was there any masking of her features.’

‘And you recognised both girls?’

‘No, but I did recognise one of them.’

‘Was she unusually tall, as women go?’

‘So you know who she was! Dear me! But I have said nothing, mind!’

‘No, you have kept your oath. Why did you never go to a third meeting?’

‘We were given a date, but Miss Minnie’s death caused it to be postponed, so I have never been to the place again.’

‘Was any mention ever made of a threatening letter written to the instigator of the proceedings?’

‘Not in my hearing. The writer would have been Miss Billie Kennett, no doubt.’

‘Ah, so one of the virgins was Miss Elysée Barnes. Thank you for confirming that piece of information, which I already possessed.’

‘I have told you nothing,’ said Shard. ‘Please remember that.’ He had been sipping appreciatively. He now drained his glass and set it gently down on the Hepplewhite table at his elbow.

‘Quite,’ said Dame Beatrice thoughtfully. ‘I understand that before Miss Minnie was murdered you believe she sometimes entertained a man in her bungalow.’

‘As I told you, I am a dedicated spy.’

‘Who was it?’

‘As I also told you, I don’t know.’

‘When you attended the gatherings, did anything in the nature of a Satanic romp occur?’

‘Oh, no, nothing of an orgiastic nature at all. The Grand Master gave us some promises, but I understand that we had to wait for the full moon before he could carry them out. The two young women were merely on show to whet our appetites.’

‘And Miss Minnie was murdered before he could keep his word. She, I imagine, was his procuress of virgins. If one was sacrificed at each full moon, I should think she was kept busy.’ said Dame Beatrice, with an eldritch cackle which made Shard glance at her in alarm. ‘I appreciate that you are under oath not to reveal names,’ she went on. ‘I have seen the room in which the Satanist meetings took place. Apart from the girl herself, was anything else on the table? I may add that I have made some small study of witchcraft, both black and white, so nothing you say will surprise me.’

‘Well,’ said Shard, ‘it didn’t surprise me either. One has read the recognised authorities, of course – Ahmed’s The Black Art, Cavendish’s The Black Arts, Rhodes’ The Satanic Mass, Peter Haining’s Witchcraft and Black Magic and so on – so one knew pretty much what to expect. The meetings were held specifically to get converts, so everything was pitched in a low key not to frighten the neophytes away, but with veiled promises of all kinds of excitement to come. Anyway, in answer to your question, to which I see no harm in giving a truthful reply, there was a gold cup surmounted by a strange device also in gold and terminating in a crescent moon. The cup and this object were placed on the girl’s lower abdomen and the Grand Master, bare to the waist and wearing goat-skin trousers reminiscent—’ he gave a falsetto giggle – ‘of Robinson Crusoe, sat enthroned behind the so-called altar. There were candles on either side of him and he wore a gold headdress embodying horns with the full moon caught between them.’

‘So that, and the cup on the girl’s body, were what the metal casket contained,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Did you get what you wanted?’ asked Laura, when Dame Beatrice returned to the hotel.

‘Yes, and a little more than I expected. Both Miss Kennett and Mr Shard were most enlightening.’

‘As how?’

‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that reminds me! There is one more question which I ought to put to Mr Shard,’ She rang through to the hotel reception desk and gave the telephone number of Weston Pipers.

‘Bradley speaking,’ she said. ‘Can you connect me with Mr Mandrake Shard, please?’

A man’s voice replied: ‘Ah, good afternoon, Dame Beatrice! Piper speaking. How are you? Yes, I’ll call him to the phone at once.’

‘There is something I have just thought of,’ she said, as soon as she and Shard were connected.

‘Oh, yes, dear lady?’ His high little voice sounded apprehensive, she thought.

‘It is merely this: at the meetings which you attended, was there an admission fee?’

‘I must admit that there was. Visitors were asked to hand over a fiver each time and we were told that, if we became members, a monthly subscription would be called for. I gathered that the society was anything but prosperous.’

‘Thank you for telling me so. I am so sorry to have interrupted your work again.’

‘Think nothing of it, dear lady.’ The little falsetto voice sounded relieved and cheerful this time.

‘Oh, and – shall we say to settle a bet?’ – I suppose it was you who wrote some of those anonymous letters?’

‘Not all, dear lady, not all. Those I did write were great fun, though.’

‘I believe,’ said Dame Beatrice, when she had put down the receiver, ‘that our tiny friend’s gift of insatiable curiosity is going to prove a most useful feature of our enquiry. He goes from strength to strength.’

‘Dirty little snooper,’ said Laura.

‘Well, after all, what are we but dirty little snoopers, if it comes to that?’ said Dame Beatrice equably.

‘At least we only snoop so that justice may be done.’

‘Justice? She has the two faces of Janus, one moral, the other legal. We may need to subvert her course in one or other of these respects.’

‘Here, what are you up to?’ asked Laura suspiciously.

‘Even I myself hardly know. Our first consideration is to establish an alibi for Mr Piper concerning the murder of the antique-dealer.’

‘I thought you were doubtful whether he had an alibi.’

‘My doubts are now resolved. The police no longer suspect him of murdering Miss Minnie and they do not suspect him of so much as knowing the dead shopkeeper, but I have a fancy for the truth and should like to know what it is. Now you would wish to know what passed between Mr Shard and myself. I will give you a full account of it and then we shall see whether your ideas march with mine.’

‘They usually follow well behind yours, and limpingly at that,’ said Laura, grinning. ‘In the old Scots word, unknown to me until I read Huntingtower (I think it was), they go hirpling. But I’m absolutely agog. Tell me all, omitting no detail, however slight.’

‘After I have had a last talk with the Superintendent, you shall know as much as I do.’