The Crozier Pharaohs

11

Scalpels

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The valley indeed had a sinister reputation. Robin Goodfellow was not the first to have met with a violent death there. At one time the distance between Castercombe and Axehead, then a flourishing port, could be covered only on foot or on horseback, since no coach could cope with the descent or ascent from what became the village of Abbots Crozier after Abbots Bay needed to expand.

There was a coast road between Castercombe and Axehead, but the journey was a long one, and during the old coaching days before the sea wall was heightened and improved the thoroughfare was often under water. The valley was sheltered and the road through it was always passable, although the surface was very rough and travellers carried weapons. But, even in those times, nobody risked the valley after dark for there were stories of attacks, some of them fatal, by highway bands who emerged suddenly from behind the jagged and fantastically shaped outcroppings of rock. It was commonly held that there were ghostly as well as human agencies to be feared.

One exception had been a party of amateur ghost-hunters, but, although they were reticent about their experiences, most of them declared that they would not care to brave the valley again after nightfall.

At Hallowe’en and at other times which were kept secret, the local witches held a meeting in the valley and fearful happenings ensued.

However, it was far from dark when, on the morning following the visit of the police and the sisters Rant to the Stone House, Dame Beatrice and Laura, having booked lunch at the Headlands hotel, drove westwards towards Cowlass Hill and Castercombe.

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘from what little we were told, it doesn’t seem that Goodfellow was killed all that far from the village. Hullo! We are not the only seekers after truth, it seems.’

Three police cars were parked off the road and not far from them were a couple of caravans and some tents. Uniformed policemen and what appeared to be a troop of Guides were searching the heather and beating down the bracken. Directing operations was a police inspector, also in uniform. The police were in shirt-sleeves, for the day was already warming up.

Laura parked the car just off the road and she and Dame Beatrice got out. A little knot of idlers, probably holiday-makers, was watching the scene from the roadside. Laura and Dame Beatrice joined them. The inspector came up.

‘Nobody to leave the roadside,’ he said.

‘Then what are the Guides doing among the local vegetation?’ asked Laura.

Before the inspector could reply, Dame Beatrice presented her official card. His authoritative attitude changed. Having been introduced to Laura, he led them away from the sightseers and said, ‘My apologies, madam. Only trying to keep the general public off our pitch, although what they think they’re going to see, goodness knows.’ He turned to Laura. ‘The Girl Guides are helping us, ’ he said. ‘They stick at a dull job better than boys do, and don’t go skylarking about. They had permission to camp here, so we thought we’d make them useful.’

‘They were not camping here at the time of the incident, of course?’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Came from Bristol about an hour ago. They’re helping us look for the murder weapon, although we don’t call it that. I don’t think anything will turn up. If the murderer has any sense, he’ll have taken the weapon away with him and disposed of it elsewhere.’

‘Were the caravans here when it happened?’ asked Laura.

‘No, Mrs Gavin, they are ours. We’re keeping a round-the-clock watch on this part of the valley in case anything emerges.’

‘Including the murderer?’

‘Well, you never know.’

‘I wonder the Guide leader likes the idea of having a camp so near the scene of a pretty horrible crime.’

‘The young lady didn’t know about it until I took her aside and told her. Anyway, we are moving them on this afternoon. Found them a much better site in a farmer’s field at the foot of Cowlass Hill. When they turned up here, I thought it better to let them into the area and make themselves useful, especially as we no longer needed to cordon off the area once the body had been photographed and removed.’

‘Well,’ said Laura to Dame Beatrice, as they walked back to the car, ‘at least we know where it happened.’

‘And, thanks to the courtesy of the police force, we know when. Susan, according to what the Rant sisters told us yesterday, appeared to think that the death had occurred on the morning when she had the news from the shepherd, but Goodfellow had been dead for at least twelve hours when the police doctor examined him.’

‘You know, it’s the wrong way about.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, if a crackpot like Ozymandias had slit somebody’s throat, I wouldn’t be surprised, but that Mr Oz himself should be the victim does surprise me.’

‘To begin with, Goodfellow was not what you call a crackpot. To continue, he was carrying out a masquerade which may have threatened danger to someone. I think he must have had an assignation here with his murderer.’

‘But why choose a place like this valley?’

‘Nobody in this neighbourhood recognised the picture in the newspaper until Morpeth saw it. That indicates that Goodfellow was not resident in these parts unless he was in hiding hereabouts. He must have bought food for himself, but he could not have shopped in either of the villages or in Axehead; or someone besides Morpeth would probably have come forward with what they knew of him.’

Dame Beatrice had booked rooms for herself and Laura at the Headlands hotel. As they drove back to it for lunch, Laura asked the reason for their stay. It appeared that Dame Beatrice wished to keep in close touch with Bryony and Morpeth, that she was interested in Susan, and that she felt a personal interest in Goodfellow.

‘And now,’ said Laura, ‘what’s the real reason?’ Dame Beatrice cackled, but did not reply directly. Her only response was to remark, as they turned into the hotel carpark, that lunch was served from one o’clock onwards and that Laura might like a walk in order to work up an appetite for it.

Laura was pleased with this suggestion. She saw her employer established in the small garden overlooking the sea four hundred feet below, brought her a glass of sherry and promised to be back in about an hour. The hotel was not far from the top of the cliff railway and her first thought was to go down into Abbots Bay and explore the village. When she reached the little terminus, however, she changed her mind. There was a narrow lane leading away from the cliffs to her left. She calculated that it would take her to the valley again, with its fascinating rock formations and its brooding air of mystery and evil.

She chose this route, therefore, and, where the short, steeply sloping lane turned westwards, she found herself on a cliff path with the high bank of the hill on one side and a long drop to the sea on the other. The path was about four feet wide and it followed the shape of the hill. It was obviously man-made and fairly recent; it had been constructed, Laura supposed, for the benefit of the summer visitors.

Unlike the valley, in which the rocks made deep pools of shadow, the path, all along, was in full sunshine. There were gulls, the sea was glittering with silver, and on the landward bank there were the slender-flowered thistle, the rest-harrow, low-growing gorse and even, Laura discovered, the upright clover, an exile from Cornwall or Jersey. There was also a wood vetch, no stranger to rocky cliffs, which had attached its tendrils to a small bush of hawthorn.

She did not hurry. Now and again she met holidaymakers or was overtaken by them, but they were few. At a bend in the path there was a bit of flat rock which offered a seat. She accepted the invitation and gazed out to sea, then let her eyes rest on a big patch of thrift which was growing a few feet down the cliff. Near it was a tangle of brambles and caught up in the brambles was a brown object which was certainly not a paper bag tossed away by some litter-lout.

Laura looked at this object until curiosity got the better of her. The cliff was not precipitous at this point, and she was tall, with long arms. There was nobody else about, so she spreadeagled herself on the short, dry grass and stretched downwards. She could not reach the object, so she hoisted herself forward and tried again, this time with success.

Wriggling her way backwards from the edge of the cliff, she returned to the stone seat to examine her find. It was a roll of soft leather fastened by a narrow strap of the same material. Laura unfastened the strap and unrolled the little hold-all. Its contents were three scalpels — all, so far as she could see, clean and polished. The blades were less than two inches long and their shapes differed from one another according to the function each was designed to perform.

Conscious that her find might be of importance to the police, she looked with some excitement at the scalpels, but did not touch them. She rolled up the little bundle, fastened the strap, dropped the prize into the case from which she had removed her binoculars, slung the binoculars, separately from their case, by their own safety strap, around her neck, got up and decided to return at once to the hotel. She was hardly on her feet, however, when round the bend came two sand-coloured hounds followed by Morpeth Rant. They were heading towards the village, apparently on their way home.

Laura walked towards them, greetings were exchanged and Morpeth asked what Laura was doing in the neighbourhood. ‘Have you heard any more about Ozymandias?’ she enquired. ‘It was I who recognised the picture in the paper, you know.’

‘Dame Beatrice is interested in the police search for the murder weapon. We’re staying tonight at the Headlands.’

‘You would think his friends would have come forward by this time, wouldn’t you? Oh, well, I had better be getting back. There are the runner beans to do for lunch. Bryony is so wasteful when she strings them that I don’t like leaving them to her.’

‘Where does this path bring me out?’ asked Laura, who had changed her mind about going straight back to the hotel with what she had retrieved from the cliff.

‘Oh, into the valley, and about halfway along it. You may meet Susan. She is walking Isis and Nephthys, but I expect they are out on the open moor, so you may not see them if you are going back to the hotel when you reach the valley.’

They parted, and Morpeth appeared to have taken it for granted that Laura would be continuing her walk; for she made no suggestion that they should go together as far as the cliff railway. In any case, Laura was not in the mood for Morpeth’s or anybody else’s company. She wondered, but only idly, why Morpeth had chosen to take the cliff path. It was not the ideal location in which to exercise fairly large and extremely active dogs, for it was a favourite walk for visitors. Laura glanced at her watch and began to stride out. The binoculars’ case now contained the leather bundle and the binoculars bounced against her chest on their short strap, so she unhitched the longer strap, that which was attached to the leather case, and swung it from her hand.

The cliff path ended with a view of the most spectacular outcrop in the valley. It was the Witch’s Cauldron, and from where she stood, Laura thought she could see why it had been given that name. Between two crags, cut as clear as stencils against the morning sky, the blue gap looked like a hag with a sharply pointed profile wearing voluminous skirts.

As Laura walked on, the figure vanished and the rock presented the appearance of battlements. Below her, there was an area of grass, an oasis in a wilderness of rocks, bracken and heather which, from the evidence of a carefully mown patch in the middle of it, appeared to be the local cricket pitch.

Laura descended into the valley by a steep, rough path and found, on her right, a slope of grass which formed a kind of amphitheatre for cricket spectators. Whether the grass was natural or had been lovingly provided by the devotees of a game once played in gentlemanly and sporting fashion without the aid of bouncers, facemasks and illogical appeals for l.b.w., Laura did not know. The cricket ground was a small one, all that could be conjured out of that otherwise inhospitable and arid valley, but it was a tiny miracle in such a setting.

Above it, opposite Laura, was a fortress of rock pinnacles, and below her was the stony road traversing the valley.

Descending to it, she set a brisk pace towards the village, but when she came to the place where the hiker had found the murdered body, she slowed down. The caravans and the Guides’ tents had gone, but the signs of police-trampled grass and bracken still marked the spot.

Laura did not come to a halt. There was a knot of sightseers who had heard the news of the murder and she had no intention of joining them. She swung the strap which held the camera case and its contents and got into her stride again.

There was time for a drink before lunch. She had it in the hotel bar, went to her room to change her shoes and then joined Dame Beatrice in the garden.

The afternoon was a busy one. Having been shown the scalpels in their leather case — this in the privacy of Laura’s bedroom — Dame Beatrice decided to take the bundle immediately to the police station and hand it over.

‘The things all look clean enough,’ said Laura.

‘A stream runs through the valley, I noticed,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and I have no doubt the crime was premeditated and that the murderer had come with materials to clean the-weapon. However, present-day methods of testing for bloodstains are well advanced and if there is the slightest trace of them the forensic experts will find it.’

The detective-inspector accompanied them up to Abbots Crozier and, while Dame Beatrice remained in the hotel, Laura guided him to the spot at which she had seen the little leather case. He asked whether she could be certain, so she indicated the flat outcrop upon which she had seated herself and directed his attention to the clump of beautiful pink thrift and the tangle of bramble runners.

‘Careless of the chap,’ he said. ‘Anybody could have spotted it if they had happened to take a seat on that ledge, as you did. Why on earth didn’t he chuck it further down the cliff where nobody could have seen it either from above or below?’

‘I think he thought he had,’ said Laura. ‘If he and the murdered man had arranged to meet in the valley when no holidaymakers were about, it must have been almost dark. I imagine the murderer was in a great hurry to get back to wherever he had come from and chose this cliff path so as not to go into Abbots Crozier past any of the cottages. From the top of the cliff railway it’s no distance to the zigzag path down to Abbots Bay. Goodness knows where he went from there.’

‘So you think that the murder was committed in the semi-darkness, so it might have been quite dark before he had cleaned up and taken to the cliff path?’

‘Yes, and thought he had thrown the leather case safely away.’

‘Of course,’ said the detective-inspector, ‘there’s no proof yet that a scalpel was the murder weapon, you know. There is no doubt the case was stolen from that loft, but the thief may have decided that what he had stolen might identify him if he tried to sell it. He may not have known what the scalpels were, but I suppose he realised they were no ordinary implements. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he chucked away all the contents of the doctor’s bag and simply sold the bag itself. I must find out from the Rant daughters whether their father’s initials were on the bag.’

‘The bag won’t matter all that much if one of the scalpels was not the murder weapon,’ said Laura.

‘Ah, well, we shall know more about that when Forensic have had their go, Mrs Gavin.’ His sergeant, who had remained in the police car which had brought him to Abbots Crozier, departed with him and Laura rejoined Dame Beatrice and asked what came next on the agenda. Dame Beatrice replied that a visit to the Rants, the real reason for their stay in Abbots Crozier, was the next item.

‘There are some questions I want to put to them and to Susan,’ she said. ‘Now that we have had this second death, a pattern begins to emerge.’

‘As how? One took place soon after dawn at Watersmeet and was a drowning following severe concussion; the other must have happened at dusk in Rocky Valley and was caused by a throat-slitting. There is still a doubt, even, as to whether the first death was a murder at all, but there is certainly no doubt about the second one. I don’t see much of a pattern emerging. The only thing common to both is that Susan seems to have been involved in some way. She found the first body and was told about the second one.’

‘Your comments are very just. Do you think it rather more than coincidence that two unnatural deaths have occurred within such a short period of time so near a village as small as Abbots Crozier?’

‘Well, there are all these holiday visitors around and about. Apparently, one of them found the second body. Who is to say that he himself wasn’t the murderer of Ozymandias? Do you think I might ring up Axehead and ask what they know about the chap? After all, they owe me something for finding the scalpels for them.’

‘True, but if you had not found them, I think somebody else would have done so and might have thought it necessary to hand them over to the police.’

‘Somebody who knew what they were and that a doctor had lost them? Yes, I suppose that’s more than likely. The case has already had a fair amount of coverage in the press, so anybody who found anything unusual would feel bound to report it, just as I did. Besides, by now those Guides will be having a whale of a time telling all and sundry how they helped the police at the place where the murder was committed, and hunting for a knife must have given them a thrill which it would be ridiculous to expect them to keep to themselves.’

‘Knives may not have been specified definitely, but I agree with your conclusions.’

‘The murderer may have been among that knot of gawpers who were at the roadside watching operations when we arrived. I say, do you think there was something a bit fishy about my meeting Morpeth this morning?’

‘In what way? She had two of the hounds with her and we know that the dogs were exercised daily by the sisters and Susan.’

‘Exercising the hounds on that cliff path instead of on the open moor sounds a very unusual proceeding, especially as the path is narrow and so many holidaymakers use it.’

‘I expect the hounds had already taken exercise on the open moor and that Morpeth had decided to walk into the near part of the valley and go home by the pleasantest route.’

‘Well, do I ring up and ask about the hiker?’

‘I think not. Let’s talk first to the Rant Sisters. After that — ’

‘Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today,’ said Laura. ‘I was looking forward to getting a bit of exclusive information, but you know best.’