Spotted Hemlock

chapter nineteen

The Grey Mare’s Ghost

‘ …she would rise, lie down, turn, walk, trot or gallop at the command of her leader.’

Ibid.

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Now,’ said Dame Beatrice, when she and Laura were at the hotel in Garchester where they had taken rooms, ‘we must hire, beg, borrow, steal or even purchase, a grey horse. A draught animal would be best, as it has to carry two persons. I wonder whether we can persuade some brewers’ drayman to oblige us?’

‘They take the stuff round to the pubs by lorry nowadays, don’t they? Why don’t you let me ring up Highpepper? Somebody there is sure to know of a grey.’

‘An excellent idea! By all means do that.’

Laura returned with the news that nobody at Highpepper possessed or hired a grey horse, but that the Garchester cricket team used one to pull the heavy roller and that, out of the season, it was returned to a farmer who lived on the western outskirts of the town.

‘The same horse as Miss Good saw that night, I’ll bet,’ added Laura, at the end of her triumphant recital. ‘You said once that if we found that horse we’d find the murderer, didn’t you?’

‘I have no recollection of it. If I did say so, I was jumping to conclusions which have proved to be unwarranted. Nevertheless, we may be able to establish a connection between Mr Basil and the dead girl if it is the same horse.’

The farmer was willing to let his grey horse out on hire for a Lady Godiva item in a pageant.

‘Of course,’ said Laura, who, at her own wish, was doing the lying, ‘we’re not actually doing the pageant until the spring, but we want time to assemble the props. Will you send the horse over to Calladale College tomorrow afternoon?’

‘Too far. Her won’t go in a horse-box and it’s a waste of a lad’s time to ride her over, her being slow-moving, do you see? Why don’t you bring your good people over here?’

‘Well, they can’t spare the time, either. I suppose you don’t know of anybody nearer the college who owns a grey carthorse?’

The farmer shook his head.

‘There’s young Jem Townsend owns a dapple,’ he said, ‘and there’s old Tom Garter owns a blue roan, but for Lady Godiva you’d be better off with an old white pony such as Colonel Grant’s got for his little grand-niece.’

Laura thanked him, regretted that they could not come to terms and asked where the dapple and the blue roan could be found. The farmer, slightly surprised that even a stranger should not know where young Jem Townsend and old Tom Carter lived, supplied the required information and wished her good day, asking, with twinkling eye as he eyed Laura’s splendid proportions, whether she herself was cast for the part of Lady Godiva. Laura told him to wait and see, and drove to Jem Townsend’s farm.

Here her luck was in.

‘Want my old Flossie for Lady Godiva again? Have they found a young woman brave enough to take it on, then? Last time the gentleman said the one they’d picked lost her nerve, so he brought the horse back next day.’

‘May I see the mare?’ asked Laura. Old Flossie turned out to be a twelve-year-old Clydesdale and as strong as an elephant. ‘You say she’s been hired out for a pageant before? When would that have been?’

‘A matter of a few weeks back, but I understood they’d give up the idea of holding the pageant. Seems a funny time of year to have a Lady Godiva, anyway. Catch her death, more likely than not.’

‘Who hired the mare?’

‘Some young woman. I didn’t know her, and ten to one I wouldn’t recognise her.’

‘And did she bring the mare back?’

‘No. I’ve never seen her again. The mare was put back in my paddock, with a pound note pushed through my door.’

‘In an envelope?’

‘Yes. Nothing wrote on it except To loan of grey mare. Pageant off. Lady Godiva yellow. So I read between the lines the girl had turned it down.’

‘You didn’t keep the envelope?’

‘Why, what was wrong with it?’

Laura saw that his suspicions were aroused and that it would be best to beat a retreat. She laughed.

‘Just badinage,’ she said. ‘Well, let’s come to an agreement about the mare. We shall need her for at least a week. Send her over to Calladale College as soon as you can.’

‘Fancy a ladies’ college doing Lady Godiva! That’s a new one, that is!’

‘Oh, I don’t know. History, and all that, you know.’

‘Have you got a Peeping Tom?’

‘I hope we’ll have hundreds. We shall take up a silver collection.’

The great, docile animal arrived on the following day in charge of a lad and was stabled. Then Dame Beatrice asked to have a word with Miss Good. Young Cleeves’ Thisbe listened attentively and agreed that she might be able to tell whether the horse resembled that from which she had fled on the night of Norah Coles’ disappearance, but added that, of course, she couldn’t be sure.’

A tableau, or, rather a mime was arranged, therefore, and she received permission from Miss McKay to be a spectator. More difficult to arrange was that Basil should also be there.

‘Not being able to charge him at present,’ the inspector pointed out, ‘we haven’t what you’d call much control over him, madam. If he comes at all, it’ll mean he’ll have to come willing. We can’t press the point much.’

‘I am going to interview him. I’ll invite him to tea at my hotel in Garchester, and then it should be a simple matter to arrange. Now that he has heard what I had to say the other day, I think he will prepared to assist us by every means in his power. I have taken a weight off his mind.’

The inspector made no comment on this optimistic supposition. He said, ‘Conditions will need to be the same as before. What kind of night was it?’

‘Starry, but moonless. Calm, but not cold.’

‘It was a lot earlier in the year, madam.’

‘We must do the best we can,’ said Laura. ‘After all, what Miss Good thinks she saw isn’t evidence.’

‘We do not require evidence from Miss Good,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but merely a contributory statement.’

She contrived her talk with Basil that same afternoon over tea in the hotel lounge. Laura was ordered to absent herself from the meal, and cadged an invitation from Miss Considine to take tea with her in her private sitting-room at the hostel.

‘Dame Beatrice,’ said Laura, taking a toasted and well-buttered scone, ‘thinks she has some sort of stranglehold on Mr Basil. I can’t believe he’s a murderer, all the same.’

‘I know very little about him,’ said Miss Considine. ‘Have some honey on that. Our own beehives. Do you keep bees?’

Noting the deliberate change of subject and realising that, in Miss Considine’s view, it was not in the best of taste for a lecturer in full possession of her job to discuss a former colleague who had been deprived of his, replied that she had an aunt with a passion for heather-honey, and the conversation developed upon bee-keeping lines.

At half-past five Laura left the cosy sitting-room and its bright fire, and George drove her back into Garchester. Dame Beatrice was still in the lounge but there was no sign of Basil. Laura raised her eyebrows and her employer beckoned her to a chair.

‘All according to Cocker?’ Laura enquired. Dame Beatrice nodded slowly and rhythmically, but did not reply in words. They dined at seven, changed into warmer clothing, put on wraps and thick shoes and gloves, and drove back to the college.

Here there were preparations to be made. The mare was brought round to the kitchen garden, and Laura, who was inclined to regard the proceedings as an entertainment, not realising until afterwards what they portended, suggested that the sight of somebody attired in a sheet would scare the horse into bolting.

Dame Beatrice agreed.

‘The animal is wearing blinkers. You will mount him and then clothe yourself in the ghostly vestments.’

‘That’s another thing,’ said Laura. ‘What happened to the other ones—the ones the original ghost used?’

‘They have yet to reappear. The college laundry list is not short of the two sheets which we have found to be necessary to clothe the ghost, so, obviously, they did not come from here. May I request you to array yourself? The student who is to assist us should be here anon, but the construction of these trappings requires that the major character in the drama should be robed before the party of the second part can be inserted. You had better try it on first, to learn its intricacies, but keep behind the horse.’

Laura climbed into the tent-like and voluminous apparatus. It came to half-way between knee and ankle, and had adequate eye-holes. She gathered in the slack—there were slits for her arms—and announced that she thought she could manage. At the top of the cellar steps two students were waiting for them. Dame Beatrice greeted them, identifying them by the light of a torch, while Laura wriggled out of the trappings.

‘You do not object to taking part in our small experiment?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.

‘Well,’ said Miss Good, ‘no, I suppose not. What do you want us to do?’

‘Vastly different things, dear child. We want you to repeat, as exactly as you can, your actions and behaviour on the night you saw this horse and its rider.’

‘Oh, dear!’

‘Have no misapprehensions. My nephew, Mr Lestrange, will be with you.’

‘Darling Piggy! What a heart-throb!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. We always call the pig-lecturer Piggy.’

‘I had understood the soubriquet to be a pet-name for Mr Basil. By the way, should you happen to run into Mr Basil, take no notice at all. Do not speak to him, even to greet him. His equilibrium is not to be upset in any way until, as I hope, the ghost-horse upsets it completely. So now, Miss Good, if you will proceed, as the police might put it, to the college front gate, Mr Lestrange will get out of his car there, and the two of you will dawdle about until you see the ghost-horse coming. As soon as it comes in view, do as you did before—hide from it and let it go by. When it has passed, Mr Lestrange will drive you back here. Please be prepared to tell me of any differences you may have noticed between this apparition and the other.’

‘And what about me?’ asked the student who was with Miss Good.

‘You, child? You are wearing breeches, are you?—All right, Miss Good. Off you go.’

‘Well, I thought you said I had to ride a horse,’ the student continued.

‘No; I said that you had to ride on a horse. In this particular case the two are not synonymous. You are helpless and a dead weight. Do not assist Mrs Gavin or the policeman who has just put in an appearance. Right, Constable Starling! Up she goes. Now, student, remain inert.’

Laura, who was also wearing breeches, had already mounted the horse, or, rather, had been hoisted on to its bare back by the policeman. Then he and Laura, the one heaving up the student’s inert body and the other receiving it and hitching round it the billowing, sheet-like garment in which she herself was clad, contrived (with no little difficulty) to get the double-ghost horsed.

‘Right,’ said Laura, when she had a firm grip of the student and both were muffled in the sheet. ‘Can do all right. Miss Good should have reached the gate by now.’

The grey mare moved at a stately walk down the drive. The night was clear, but very dark, and Laura left the horse to pick the way. The gravel squeaked and spurted under the horse’s hoofs. The student, in Laura’s arms, grew very heavy. There was a faint shriek, followed by a scrabbling noise as the horse passed out of the gate. It broke into an uncomfortable trot, taking the direction for which Laura had hoped.

Piggy Basil had accompanied the inspector, but without enthusiasm. He was not told whither they were bound, and showed increasing reluctance to continue the journey as it became more and more obvious that they were on the way to Calladale.

‘Look here, what’s in the wind?’ he enquired plaintively, as the car drew up fifty yards or so from the college gates. ‘What’s behind all this?’

‘We get out here, sir,’ said the inspector, not attempting to answer these questions. ‘All we want you to do, sir, if you will be so good, is to keep your eyes and ears open.’

‘If I will be so good! And, if I don’t choose to be so good, I shall be in trouble for obstructing the police in the execution of their duty, I suppose! And they call this a free country!’

The inspector, disregarding this rhetoric, stepped out in the direction of the light which was shining down on the college gates, a light which served to emphasise the contiguous blackness. Just as they were about to enter the tiny pool of illumination which was cast around the gates and upon the ground, the inspector stopped. He caught Basil by the arm to bring him to a halt.

‘Listen, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you hear anything?’

‘No,’ Piggy replied, after a short pause. ‘I don’t. Yes… yes, I can hear a horse, I think. Sounds like a heavy carthorse!’

‘That’s what I thought, sir. Let’s get into the hedge. I don’t want us to be spotted,’ said the inspector. ‘Who the devil would be riding a horse at this time of night?’ he added. This was a disingenuous question; he knew the answer perfectly well.

‘Damn the old bitch! I’m being framed!’ muttered Piggy. He stumbled into the muddy ditch just as the grey mare and her double burden came into the lamp-light that shone down on the college gates.

‘Christ!’ he muttered. The ghosts passed on into the darkness, an amorphous glimmer in the gloom. ‘The old girl knows! She must know everything!’

‘Yes,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘I knew. There could have been other explanations of the appearance of the ghost-horse at that particular time and on that particular night, but this, as we came to gather and put together the facts of the case, seemed to me the most likely.’

‘I always thought it was Mr Basil abducting Mrs Coles,’ said Laura.

‘No. It was Mr Basil assisting Mrs Coles by removing the body of Miss Palliser from the college cellar. Last night’s little plot had a double purpose. I had to prove that it could be done that way, and I had to let Mr Basil realise by the most dramatic means in my power—since I wanted to give him a shock—that I knew the truth so far as the removal of the body to the old stage-coach was concerned.’

‘I’ll bet you gave him a shock, all right,’ said Carey. It was the weekend, and the three of them were in his house at Stanton St John. ‘I wonder the chap didn’t pass out.’

‘Oh, you Piggies are made of stern stuff,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, he was so overcome he came clean. Then he said he supposed he might as well hold out his wrists for the handcuffs.’

‘But he wasn’t arrested, you say? I should have thought moving a dead body so as to conceal it was a pretty serious offence.’

‘Yes. He was actuated by chivalry, of course.’

‘Chivalry?’

‘Certainly. He tells us that Mrs Coles found herself in possession of her sister’s dead body, hid it in the college cellar —the inner one, where it was almost certain nobody would find it—and then panicked and called upon Mr Basil to help her get it out of the building. He responded nobly.’

‘Then you mean he carried it on horseback to that coach near the back gates of Highpepper Hall?’

‘No. He carried it on horseback to his car which he had left about two hundred yards from Calladale in a side road. He did not bring it to the college for fear of attracting attention at that time of night.’

‘It was bad luck, that girl Good spotting him,’ said Laura. ‘But for that, he would never have been involved. But why did he do it?’

‘He thought that Mrs Coles had murdered her sister. When I was able to reassure him on that point, he consented to assist us. He did not know, and it would not have fitted in with our plans to have told him, of the form that assistance was to take.’

‘So where do we go from here? You know the identity of the murderer. It wasn’t Piggy and it wasn’t Norah Coles. The girl was murdered in college. Norah panicked and Piggy, that perfect, gentle knight, helped her out. Palliser was murdered in college! ... That ought to ring a bell, but it doesn’t. The murderer couldn’t have been a student, unless it was an accident, in which case it couldn’t be called murder.’

‘It was, and it was not, an accident.’

‘You mean the dope was really intended for Mrs Coles, don’t you? I’ve thought that one out ad nauseam, but it doesn’t add up. The sheer, hard fact remains that Palliser couldn’t have been killed in the college, and yet she was. How do you work it out?’

‘Impersonation, child.’

‘Eh? Good Lord!’

‘Cast your mind back a little. I believe I told you of a conversation I had with a certain Miss Bellman, a conversation which, for two particular reasons, intrigued me.’

Oh?’

‘Yes. It appeared from this conversation that the fact of Norah Coles’ marriage was fairly widely known to the students in her hostel and that they preferred to think of her as Norah Coles and not as Norah Palliser. Coupled closely with this is the fact that the first student to see the body immediately identified it as Palliser. Of course, the college authorities still knew her as Palliser, but I noticed that a warning, in the form of a kick on the ankle, was given to one student who might have become too talkative. You see, the students had had to be taken into Mrs Coles’ confidence over the matter of this daring impersonation.’

Laura stared at her employer. ‘You mean that Palliser was actually in college as Coles?’

‘I haven’t any doubt of it.’

‘But—since when?’

‘I do not think that Mrs Coles returned to college after the summer vacaton. I think her sister came back in her place then, and the students in her hostel had to be told, in order that they might help in perpetuating the fiction.’

‘What about the head of the hostel, though, apart from the lecturers?’

‘Cast your mind back to your own student days, and remember that Mrs Coles was not much of a public figure in the college. Her work was adequate, she played no games, she got into no trouble and her sister was sufficiently like her for the mother to make a mistake in identifying the body.’

‘What was Norah Coles’ idea, then?’

‘To be with Mr Basil.’

‘So that was the reason for the broken leg business! Oh, yes, of course. What’s more, I see the point now of the postmistress’ evidence that Palliser had served in an agricultural college. Well, I’m dashed! Then who administered the poison?’

‘Presumably somebody who did not know of the imposture.’

‘Old Biancini!’

Dame Beatrice shook her head.

‘Do not forget that, although the prosecution does not need to show motive in a case of murder, it is, from the layman’s point of view, a matter of enormous importance. A motiveless, or apparently motiveless, murder, unless it is committed by a homicidal maniac, is a murder unrelished by the public, who, after all, are represented by the jury. “But why should you think he did it, if he had no reason to do it?” they are apt to enquire.’

‘One can see their point,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, in this case, we do know that he disliked the girl.’

‘Not at all. It was the girl who disliked him. Besides, the strongest motive in the world (according to the available statistics) is the hope of financial gain. Now, Biancini had no such hope. Mrs Coles’ inheritance was already in her possession, and, unless she made a will, it would revert to her husband upon her death.’

‘Coles? But Coles wouldn’t hurt a fly! He’s the complete art student, absorbed in his painting and in his future, and all that sort of thing.’

‘Mr Coles has no particular reason to love his wife, you know, and he does need money very badly, I’m afraid. Besides, by that time, he must have known that he’d been cuckolded, and that is not a situation to appeal to most husbands. I think that, although his motive was the expectation of money, he salved his conscience by reminding himself of the other things. He had even found out Basil’s name.’

‘It sounds likely enough, when you put it that way. The only trouble is that I can’t connect it with the man himself. He just doesn’t seem the type for a cold-blooded killer. And another thing: how did he know about the coniine? I shouldn’t think it’s generally known that the spotted hemlock can be deadly. Again, how was it administered? He could hardly have gone to the college and poured it down the girl’s throat. Besides, if he had, he’d have known that the person he was poisoning wasn’t his wife. How do you work all that out?’

‘I don’t know how he knew about the coniine, but I suspect that Norah Coles had told him, probably just as an item of interest. There is lots of spotted hemlock about the Calladale grounds and she may have—indeed, I think she must have—told him of its properties. It would have seemed to him a sort of poetic justice to poison her with it, I dare say.’

‘I wonder how long it took him to distil the stuff?’

‘He may have experimented for months.’

‘When you said he would have shown more imagination if he hadn’t talked so much, were you thinking about the coniine?’

‘Chiefly, yes. He felt himself perfectly safe at our last interview and made the mistake all murderer’s make—he underestimated the opposition’s brains.’