The Crozier Pharaohs

10

Dead in the Valley

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I think you ought to have a lock put on that door,’ said Susan one day to Bryony. ‘Now that you’ve heard one tramp has used the loft as a doss-house, others may follow and some may be very rough types. Besides, it’s known all over the place that you two are alone here at night. You ought to make the front gates secure as well. You can always let me have a key.’

‘Something in what Susan says, don’t you think?’ said Morpeth to her sister when the kennel-maid had gone out with two of the hounds. ‘I don’t at all care for the thought of a tramp getting into the grounds and sleeping in the loft. After all, if people know we are alone I expect they also know that, except for harmless, goofy old Sekhmet, the hounds are shut away at night and can’t protect us.’

‘I agree. We’ll have a padlock put on the front gates and another on the outside of the loft door. Well, shopping day, so I’ll get the padlocks in Axehead while I’m doing the rest of it.’

‘Why don’t you teach me to drive the car? We could then take it in turn to do the shopping.’

‘You’re too nervous to make a good driver. Besides, I don’t think you would ever pass the test.’

‘We don’t know that until I’ve tried.’

‘This is no part of the country for a learner-driver. It takes me all my time to negotiate the road down to Abbots Bay and the hill to Axehead. I’ll teach you the rudiments out on the moor, if you like. It’s quiet and safe up there, but it wouldn’t help you at all when you face sharp bends and traffic and a hill of one in four when you wanted to get into Axehead.’

Morpeth said no more. She was not at all anxious to have the responsibility of driving the car, and the realisation that a driving test would have to be taken daunted her. When her sister had gone shopping, she prepared the vegetables for lunch and played for a time with Sekhmet and a rubber ball. It then occurred to her that a tramp, even though Adams had described him to her as ‘summat a cut above the usual’, might have left the loft very untidy and possibly in an offensive condition which ought to be dealt with before the door was padlocked against further intruders.

Morpeth armed herself with dustpan, soft-haired brush and a duster and walked over to the garage. She mounted the outside stair and opened the door of the loft. The room had a window, but she left the door wide open in order to obtain more light as she looked around her.

The room appeared to be in order. She saw her father’s old but favourite armchair, a table with some books on it, his desk with its drawers and a wardrobe from which she and Bryony had taken his clothes. They had disposed of them to a church jumble sale in Axehead except for his raincoat and a tweed hat he put on when he went fishing. Both garments were too grubby to be offered in such a state and Bryony had decided that it was not worth the money to have them cleaned.

There seemed nothing much which needed to be done in tidying the room except to dust it. Morpeth did this thoroughly, shaking the duster out at the open doorway every now and then. She opened the drawers, but they were empty, as she expected. It occurred to her that she ought to inspect the interior of the wardrobe in case the intruder had used it as a convenience. Dreading that such might be the case, she hesitated for a bit and then nerved herself to make the inspection.

The wardrobe was empty. The bag which the doctor had carried with him on his afternoon calls on his patients, the ancient raincoat and the hat which Morpeth knew had been left in the wardrobe had gone. Morpeth, although fearing it was useless, searched the room again. Then she left the loft and went back to the house. On Bryony’s return from shopping, they unpacked the baskets, put away the food and the other household necessities, and made coffee. When they had settled down, Morpeth broke the news of the disappearance of the hat, bag and raincoat.

‘Father’s bag gone, and that old raincoat and hat?’ said Bryony. ‘Must have been taken by the tramp Adams talked about. I suppose the man thought he could sell them, especially the leather bag. Is anything else missing?’

‘Not so far as I know. Perhaps you would go and have a look round. You see, if the bag is missing, father’s scalpels and perhaps other dangerous things have gone. The bag was fitted up just as he left it.’

‘After lunch, then. There’s no hurry. Have you done the vegetables? Susan will enjoy the cutlets I’ve brought in. What’s she doing this morning?’

‘She is still out. She must be taking Anubis and Amon for a longer walk than usual.’

Susan came back with startling and disturbing news.

‘Police all over the moor,’ she said. ‘A hiker has found a body in that rocky valley which runs out to Castercombe.’

‘Not another dead body?’ exclaimed Bryony.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I met the shepherd whose flock graze the pastures below Cowlass Hill and he says the man’s throat was cut.’

‘How horrible! Worse than the other death! At least that one was brought in as accident. This one must have been murder or suicide,’ said Bryony.

‘Yes, I suppose so. What’s for lunch?’

‘You feel like having lunch after hearing a thing like that?’ asked Morpeth.

‘I didn’t see the body and I’m hungry.’

‘Did the police stop you?’

‘No. I was right over near the Witch’s Cauldron rock and they were mostly on the road. I thought they might be looking for somebody who had escaped from Castercombe gaol. Then, when I got to Cowlass Hill and met the shepherd, he told me what had happened. He got the low-down from his son, who happens to be a policeman. It seems to be a suicide so I suppose it was all right for the policeman to blab.’

‘Did you see the police on your way back?’

‘No. I kept well in the shelter of the rocks and then I took the cliff path, which is quite hidden from the road. Anyway, I think they were too busy to notice me.’

‘You were determined to dodge them, I suppose,’ said Bryony. ‘Well, I don’t blame you.’

‘I should think not indeed!’ said Susan, her sun-and-wind-roughed face flushing angrily. ‘If you had been given the going-over they gave me when they were in my cottage and found that silly hat and the piece of trouser-band, you would have dodged them, too. It was my rotten luck to find that dead man at Watersmeet and I don’t want any more to do with dead bodies for a long time to come, thank you!’

The news was all over the village by the early evening. The three women had supper at seven and Susan, presumably on her way home, called at the Crozier Arms for a beer and then, to the surprise of the sisters, she came back to Crozier Lodge with as much of the matter as she had been able to gather at the pub.

‘Didn’t like to ask any questions,’ she said, ‘me not being exactly what you might call popular in the village, but the barmaid was getting a pretty lurid account from a man who had a cousin in the telephone exchange in Axehead, so I gathered an earful, but whether it was fact or romance I wouldn’t care to guess. Apparently the police plan to telephone the hotels to find out whether any guest is missing, as nobody in the village seems to know anything.’

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a convict, does it? Where was the body found?’ asked Bryony.

‘I told you, near enough. I don’t know the exact spot.’

‘Perhaps the poor man had a sudden fit of depression. That valley can be very lonely at times and it’s a nasty spooky place, anyway,’ said Morpeth. ‘Some people think it’s haunted.’

‘Talking of lonely and spooky,’ said Susan, ‘would you mind if I kipped here for the night? That’s what I came back to ask.’

‘It’s not like you to be nervous,’ said Bryony, ‘but stay by all means, if you want to. I wonder how soon the police will know who the dead man was?’

‘Goodness knows. I suppose they’ll put out photographs, as they did of the man I found. This village will be getting itself a bad name if any more people die on holiday here.’

Nobody came forward to identify the dead man, so the police did as Susan had predicted. A day or two after Susan had returned to Crozier Lodge to make her report, Morpeth recognised a picture in the local paper. The sisters had gone into Axehead to take Nephthys to the vet for a check-up, as the hound had begun to scratch an ear and seemed slightly off her food. Morpeth had to pass a newsagent’s after she had left Bryony sitting in the car in the carpark, so she went into the shop to buy a couple of women’s magazines which the sisters favoured and which they passed on to Susan when they had finished with them.

A small pile of the papers was lying on the counter, so that Morpeth could not help seeing them. Feeling a sense of shock, since the caption above the picture on the front page was eye-catching and in large print, she picked up a paper, bought it and the magazines, and went on to the veterinary surgery with a sense of foreboding and deep unease, for she had no doubt whatever that the newspaper picture was that of Goodfellow. It was not the photograph of a dead man. It was that of an artist’s impression of what Goodfellow would have looked like before his throat was severed, but Morpeth had no difficulty in recognising the face.

In the vet’s waiting-room she realised this with a sick feeling of horror mixed with resentment at the tricks Fate seemed to be playing. The half-dozen other pet-owners, having looked up, but without curiosity, when she entered, returned to their magazines or to stroking their cats, and paid her no further attention. Her excitement made her impatient of delay. She felt that she could not return quickly enough to the carpark to show Bryony the newspaper.

Half an hour’s waiting-time before Nephthys could receive attention caused her to calm down and reflect upon what her next move should be. Obviously it was her duty to report to the police that she knew something important about the dead man and, for what it was worth, could give his name. In her naive, almost childish way, she thought the police would be sufficiently grateful for the information to give up pestering Susan and themselves about the body found in the river. Instead, therefore, of taking the hound straight back to the car park, she called at the Axehead police station. An enlarged copy of the newspaper picture was conspicuously displayed at the side of the front door. Morpeth looked at it, hitched the hound’s lead to the railings and said, ‘Good girl, stay!’

‘You’d better see the Chief, miss,’ said the desk sergeant resignedly, when she had stated the purpose of her visit. ‘Yours is the sixth story, up to date. They range from telling us the man was an oil baron to suggesting he was the victim of a secret society, so I hope your account will seem a bit more sensible. You say you knew the man?’

‘Well, I had met him. He called on us, thinking one of us was a doctor. He was quite insane, you know. I’m not a bit surprised he committed suicide.’

‘Come this way, miss.’ Morpeth and the detective-inspector had met at Crozier Lodge over the former enquiry. Harrow greeted her in avuncular fashion as soon as the sergeant showed her in.

‘Well, well, well!’ he said. ‘Sit down, won’t you, Miss Rant? So you’ve come along to help us.’

‘I don’t know how much help it will be,’ said Morpeth, ‘because I’m not at all sure that the name he gave us was his real name. He was quite mad, you see.’

‘So what name did he give you?’

‘He called himself Robin Goodfellow, but he also told us that he was Ozymandias, king of kings. When we heard that, Bryony thought he was a case for a psychiatrist and the only one we knew was Dame Beatrice, so Bryony took him to the Stone House.’

‘That would be Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, of course. I’ll have a word with her. Now, to another point, Miss Rant: the woman who acts as your kennel-maid found the body of that man in the river, didn’t she? We understand that on the morning of this Goodfellow’s death — if you are right and the dead man is the man you knew — she was out on the moor with a couple of your dogs. She met a shepherd over Cowlass Hill way, didn’t she?’

‘We always take the hounds on to the moor for a run. There’s nothing in that. Susan would naturally go there.’

‘Did she often go as far as the lower slopes of Cowlass Hill?’

‘I don’t know. We please ourselves how long we stay out and how far we go. It mostly depends on the weather.’

‘She did meet this shepherd out there, though, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she said so. She made no bones about telling us,’ said Morpeth, beginning to panic. ‘How do you know it was Susan? She wouldn’t have given the shepherd her name, meeting him casually like that.’

‘We have our methods.’ He was careful not to add that the police had not known for certain, until that moment, which woman the shepherd had spoken with. The shepherd had proved very inept at describing a female whom he had never previously met, but he had described the Pharaoh hounds this woman was exercising, so it was merely a case of finding out which of the three from Crozier Lodge had been out on the moor that morning. Harrow felt a sense of triumph now that he knew Susan had been the one. Almost too good to be true, he thought, but it was true. She had found the first body, incriminating evidence had been discovered at her cottage, and now it was clear that she had been in the vicinity of a second man on the morning of his death.

Harrow was still in the dark as to the reason for Susan’s having left her cottage so early on the morning of the Watersmeet death. He had made attempts to get her to change her story, but she adhered to her assertion that she had been for a swim, although he had made it very clear that he did not believe her.

‘Look,’ said Morpeth desperately, ‘if the man was found in Rocky Valley and Susan met the shepherd near the foot of Cowlass Hill, she wouldn’t have known anything about what had happened until the shepherd told her. There is more than one way of getting to that hill.’

‘The valley opens out on to those hill pastures, and most people go that way, Miss Rant.’

‘But you can take the cliff path to Castercombe and bypass the valley altogether.’

‘You did what?’ said Bryony, when Morpeth got back to the carpark and showed her sister the newspaper picture. ‘Well, you have put your foot in it! Poor old Susan!’

‘Susan wouldn’t have known who the dead man was, even if she had passed beside the corpse. She was out with Isis and Nephthys when Goodfellow called on us and he never came near us again after you had taken him to see Dame Beatrice. We can both swear that Susan had never set eyes on him and wouldn’t have a clue to who he was.’

‘I’m going to ask whether we can call at the Stone House this afternoon. I think Dame Beatrice ought to know about this.’

‘I expect she does know. It’s in the papers.’

The detective-inspector had got there first. Polly, the maid who answered the door, informed the sisters that Dame Beatrice and Mrs Gavin had two policemen with them. ‘But come in, miss, do,’ she said to Bryony. ‘The ladies won’t be long, if you’d care to wait. They’re in the library.’ She showed Bryony and Morpeth into the drawing-room. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll be all that long,’ she repeated comfortingly. ‘The police hasn’t much time to waste, nor have our two ladies. You can play the piano if you want. They’ll not hear it from here.’

Bryony had preserved a long silence which had lasted for the whole of the journey. When the door had closed behind Polly, she broke into speech.

‘So the police have beaten us to it,’ she said. ‘I can’t think what made you go to the police station before you had spoken to me about that wretched newspaper picture.’

‘I did what I thought was the best.’

‘The way to hell — ! Oh, well, it’s done now. I wish, all the same, that we’d got our story to Dame Beatrice before the police arrived.’

‘I don’t see what difference it makes.’

‘Of course it makes a difference.’ She lapsed into a brooding silence again. Morpeth stood it for the next ten minutes and then she went over to the piano and began very softly to strum. This did nothing to relieve the tension. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Bryony exclaimed. Fortunately, soon after this Laura came into the room.

‘Sorry we had to park you, ’ she said. ‘The rozzers have gone, so I’ll ring for tea and then you can tell us why you’ve come.’

‘I suppose,’ said Bryony bluntly, when tea had been brought and Dame Beatrice had joined them, ‘it’s no good asking what was said between you and the detectives?’

Dame Beatrice cackled and replied that she saw no need for absolute secrecy. She proceeded to give an account of the interview. It had begun when she was asked whether it was true that she had been called upon to treat a patient named Robin Goodfellow.

‘Well,’ said Morpeth, as she and her sister drove home, ‘I hope you are not going to continue the great silence. You know how I hate it when you don’t speak to me.’

‘I’m sorry I was angry with you. Perhaps, after all, you did the right thing in going straight to the police when you saw that madman’s picture in the newspaper.’

‘Dame Beatrice told them that in her opinion — and she made it in her professional capacity — he was not a madman.’

‘I don’t have to agree. Only a madman would cut his own throat.’

‘People do that sort of thing in a fit of depression, not because they’re mad.’

‘I didn’t notice that Goodfellow gave us any impression of feeling depressed when we met him, nor in the car when I took him to the Stone House.’

Back in that Georgian domicile, Dame Beatrice and Laura were conducting their own conversation.

‘You told them you saw no need for secrecy, ’ said Laura, ‘but you withheld the most important point, didn’t you?’

‘I thought I qualified it by saying “absolute” secrecy. Are you thinking of anything in particular?’

‘You didn’t mention that the police think the throat-slitting was not suicide but murder.’

‘My dear Laura, that word was never mentioned. I am aware of what the police think, but they were careful not to say it.’

‘And you were careful not to put the word into their mouths.’

‘All they said was that they had not found the implement with which the deed was done.’

‘Well, wasn’t that tantamount to saying the man had been murdered? You can’t cut your throat and then get rid of the knife or whatever it was.’

‘The part of the valley where the hiker found the body is no longer cordoned off, we were told. I think that tomorrow we will drive over there and look at — ’

‘The spot marked with a cross?’

‘The police were not sufficiently informative to make certain that we can do that, but I would like to obtain a general view of the setting.’

‘Fancy Morpeth’s having the guts to take action without first consulting Bryony!’

‘You mean that, on her own initiative, she went to the police? It was an impulse she may live to regret.’

‘Why?’

‘I do not like this disappearance of the coat, hat and bag from that loft.’

‘There doesn’t seem much doubt about who had those. The poacher Adams knew of that room, so did the tramp he found asleep there, so, possibly, did the prowler they talked about and, if one tramp, why not others? It would get around that the Rants are on their own at night and that there is no lock on the front gates — and none, so far, on the door to the loft. All these points have come out in conversation at various times and, I thought, were emphasised today.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Dame Beatrice, ‘but there is one point which you appear to have overlooked. There are three other people, in addition to those you have listed, who knew what the loft contained.’

‘Four,’ said Laura. ‘I suppose Dr Mortlake would have known. He lived in the house long enough and didn’t move out until after Dr Rant’s death. He doesn’t seem to have left until the will was proved and he knew he could go into practice on his own. He may even have helped the Rants to clear up their father’s things and get rid of his clothes. The doctor’s bag is missing, Morpeth told us. Who would want it except another doctor? Mortlake, beware! “There’s a porpoise close behind you and he’s treading on your tail!” Oh, I’m not serious,’ Laura added hastily as she caught Dame Beatrice’s eye.

‘“Dare to be a Daniel,” ’ responded Dame Beatrice. ‘ “Dare to stand alone, dare to have a porpoise firm and dare to make it known!” Your powers of imagination have rendered me, as usual, faint but pursuing. Dr Mortlake? You open up strange and terrifying vistas.’

Laura spread out shapely hands and opened up another vista, or thought she did.

‘If they would let you see the body, ’ she said, ‘could you tell whether the throat had been cut with a doctor’s scalpel?’

‘I am not a forensic expert and I have no intention of asking to see the body,’ Dame Beatrice replied.

‘Throat-cutting must be a very messy business. Wouldn’t the murderer have got smothered in blood?’

‘Perhaps not if, as the police seem to think, the victim was seized by the hair from behind, his head pulled back and one swift and deadly slash made across his throat.’

‘With a scalpel?’ persisted Laura.

‘The police did not offer a suggestion as to the nature of the weapon, as you know. They merely said that they had not found anything with which the lethal wound could have been inflicted.’

‘Perhaps the hiker who found the body spotted a knife and pocketed it. Seems unlikely. Oh, well, they say all murderers make at least one mistake. What interests me is the fate of the doctor’s bag. Bryony told us that the three scalpels Dr Rant possessed were rolled up in a soft leather hold-all rather like some manicure sets people take when they’re travelling. Where do you think the doctor’s old waterproof and his tweed hat have gone? Morpeth says she found them missing when she went to clear up that loft. Did they go at the same time as the bag, I wonder?’

‘I am going on the assumption that the person the poacher saw talking to the tramp outside Sekhmet’s kennel that morning was wearing them, but no mention was made of a bag, so I may be mistaken. However, Adams’ somewhat inadequate description of the clothes the person was wearing coincides quite interestingly with Morpeth’s account of the missing raincoat and hat.’

‘You say “person”. I notice that you don’t commit yourself as to sex.’

‘The poacher himself admitted that he was unable to guess whether the stranger was a man or a woman,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I wonder what light the inquest will throw on this second unnatural death?’

‘Yes, Abbots Crozier is fast becoming a hissing and a byword for a danger spot. As for the inquest, perhaps it will tell us whether Robin Goodfellow was the man’s real name. My own view is that it was as much of an alias as Ozymandias. Still, parents have the weirdest flights of fancy when it comes to naming their children, as poor Morpeth Rant knows to her cost. Fancy naming a baby after a folk dance!’

‘Morpeth is as pleasant a name as Elspeth,’ remarked Dame Beatrice, ‘if it is taken on its own. As for the inquest, well, I have no wish to seem ghoulish, but I am looking forward to it.’

The death at Watersmeet had attracted very little attention outside the immediate neighbourhood of Axehead, Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier and would hardly have merited more than a few lines in the local paper had it not been for the bizarre incident of Sekhmet and the dead man’s trousers. Unless or until they could prove their theory that the man had been murdered and his trousers stripped off him and given to the dog before the body had been put into the river, the police were keeping very quiet about the whole Watersmeet affair.

The valley murder, as it came to be called, was a very different matter. The big dailies ran it as front-page news and the London Postmark devoted its double centre page to a set of photographs of the area. Broadcasts and television coverage followed, and Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier, together with Axehead, where the inquest was opened, swarmed with reporters and cameramen. Accommodation in both the villages and the town was stretched to its limits and there was even an overflow into Castercombe.

The medical evidence indicated that the victim had been attacked from behind and his head pulled back. One slash had severed the jugular vein. The identification of the body posed a problem for the police because it threw more open the vexing business of discovering who the murderer was.

The corpse was identified by a smart London policeman neither as Ozymandias nor Robin Goodfellow, although the man had been known for some time under the latter name. He turned out to be a very shady private eye known also to the Metropolitan Police as Hillingdon. The media had done their work and the pictures of the dead man had been compared with those in police files, for Ozymandias had done time for larceny. The inquest was then adjourned pending further police enquiries and the search for the weapon responsible for Hillingdon’s death.

‘I think, ’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that this murder ties up with the death at Watersmeet.’

This opinion was endorsed by Detective-Inspector Harrow to his sergeant.

‘Ten to one,’ he said, ‘this Hillingdon, as we’ve now got to call him, knew something about that Watersmeet business, and died because of what he knew.’

‘So if we knew who the Watersmeet killer was — and we’re still convinced that was murder, not accident — we could spot the valley murderer, sir.’

‘All sorts of trouble about that, the way I see it. As there’s a London end to this business, we could be looking for a needle in a haystack unless the Metropolitan Police come in and help. If only we could get a clear identification of that Watersmeet corpse it might help.’

‘The two deaths were, of course, quite unlike. Murderers usually repeat their effects.’

‘Oh, well, we must just soldier on with this Rocky Valley business. That place has got itself a bad name locally. It’s a queer sort of landscape and not a bit like anywhere else in that neighbourhood.’

‘According to what I’ve heard, sir, nobody goes that way after sunset if they’re cycling or on foot, and motorists prefer the coast road, although it’s the longer way to Castercombe from Axehead.’

‘Nobody goes that way after sunset? Makes it an ideal place for a murder, doesn’t it? According to the doctors, death had occurred the night before the body was found. The two men must have met by arrangement and both wanted the transaction kept secret, I reckon.’

‘Brings us back to the Watersmeet business. According to Adams, two men or a man and a woman met in the Rants’ garden before the household was stirring. It is more than possible that the man found dead in the river later in the day was one of them.’

‘Sounds like people who knew the Rants’ garden and the valley, doesn’t it? — or, anyway, one of them did.’

‘And knew that Watersmeet would most likely be deserted so early in the morning. It sounds like three assignations: one in the Rants’ garden, one at Watersmeet, and this one in Rocky Valley — and the last two with unsuspecting victims. What do you think about one of the Rant sisters? We are already keeping an eye on that dog-woman of theirs. All three women are out every day with those hounds and must know the countryside like the backs of their hands.’