The Crozier Pharaohs

13

Brother and Sister

« ^ »

So now for Susan,’ said Dame Beatrice, when they were in the car. ‘Drive down to the Axehead road, as usual, and then turn left and pull up where the zigzag footpath from Abbots Crozier ends in the middle of Abbots Bay village. There, I fear, we may have some time to wait.’

‘We are to waylay her?’

‘I do not want to visit her in her cottage, but I must see her alone. Before we can get any further in this business, she will have to explain why she left home so early on the day of the first man’s death and what she was doing up to the time that Sekhmet was missing. The police are not satisfied, I am sure, with her continued assertion that she was bathing in the Abbots Bay sea-pool.’

‘If she wasn’t, and refuses to come clean, she’s asking for trouble, but why are you bothering? We didn’t know the first man and we certainly didn’t take to that charlatan Ozymandias. You don’t think Susan is likely to be pinched for the first death, do you?’

‘She could also be apprehended for the second one now that those scalpels have been found, and so could Bryony or Morpeth.’

‘I thought it was pretty clear the scalpels had been taken by that tramp, or whatever he was, who slept in the garage loft.’

‘Or by the poacher, perhaps. As for the man in the loft, he may or may not have stolen the doctor’s bag, but the poacher has identified him as the man Susan found dead at Watersmeet, so he could not have been the murderer of Goodfellow.’

‘The poacher only recognised him on the strength of what could have been a very poor and misleading artist’s impression.’

‘That reminds me. Now that the local police and I are mutually acquainted, I must ask to see the far from poor and misleading pictures their official photographer took of the dead man which were thought to be too gruesome to print in the newspapers.’

‘You don’t think you know who he was, do you?’

‘No. I am hoping that I can find someone to tell me.’

They sat on for half an hour and expected to wait longer, but Susan, it seemed, had left Crozier Lodge earlier than usual. Laura got out of the driver’s seat and greeted her.

‘Hullo, there!’ she said. ‘We’ve been waiting until we could get you on your own, away from Bryony and Morpeth. Hop into the car and have a word with Dame Beatrice.’

Dame Beatrice had taken her seat at the back. A bewildered but unexpectedly obedient Susan got in beside her. Her obedience was soon explained.

‘I think I’m in for a spot of bother,’ she said. ‘The police don’t believe that first death was an accident, do they?’

‘The more one knows of Sekhmet, the less one can conceive of a man’s being so much alarmed by her attentions as to yield up his trousers to her and dash into a river to escape from her. Have the police made her acquaintance?’

‘Yes. They’ve been once or twice, a different man each time, and I was asked to go into the house so that her reactions wouldn’t be conditioned by my presence.’

‘In other words, to find out how she would behave herself with strangers when you were not there,’ said Laura. ‘What did the Rants think about these visits?’

‘They don’t know anything about them. That’s what worries me. They must have kept watch and seen Bryony and Morpeth go out with four of the hounds, so that they knew I was alone at the Lodge with nobody to back me up. Of course, all that damn bitch did was to abase herself before them, pile on the charm, roll over, wag her stinking tail and more or less jump through hoops for their benefit. If ever a dog landed its handler and feeder in jug, that dog is blasted Sekhmet and that handler and feeder is me. Besides, now this second death — this obvious murder — has come about, the police are more on their toes than ever.’

‘But you couldn’t have any connection with the murder in the valley,’ said Laura. ‘It took place in the late evening. You would have been back in your cottage, not roaming the moor seeking whom you might devour.’

‘That’s all you know,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t always go straight home from the Lodge. I’m not liked in the village but I do go quite often to the Crozier Arms. I’ve got my bit of money, and I like my pint and I don’t see why unfriendliness should do me out of it.’

‘I wonder you don’t patronise a pub down here in Abbots Bay,’ said Laura.

‘Chance would be a fine thing. The chairman of the licensing justices owns both the big hotels here, and he sees to it that there’s no pub, as such, in the place. Well, I’m not the type to feel at home in a hotel bar. I stink of dog, I suppose, and my clothes aren’t exactly haute couture. At the Crozier Arms, they’re not particular what you look or smell like, so long as you can pay your shot. I might be more popular there if I could stand my round, but, for one thing, I can’t afford it and, for another, one pint is my limit. Sorry! I’m talking too much.’

‘Far from that, ’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘In fact, I hope that you will be prepared to tell us a great deal more.’

‘Such as what?’ Susan’s mood, which had been expansive although slightly melancholy, changed. She became wary and suspicious.

Dame Beatrice sensed the change. She said gently, ‘You need help. You have admitted that, but I cannot and I will not work in the dark. Where were you on the evening of Goodfellow’s death?’

‘I told you. I was in the Crozier Arms.’

‘And after that?’

‘Oh, well, I visited a friend.’

‘The same friend as you visited on the morning of the Watersmeet death?’

Susan’s expression turned to one of mulish obstinacy.

‘How much do you know? — not that you’ll tell me,’ she said.

‘Certainly I will tell you. All that I know is that you did not go for a bathe that morning. The rest is surmise.’

‘Oh, yes? Well, that isn’t much help to you because you wouldn’t be right and I’m still not saying anything.’

‘Not even if I mention a poacher named Adams?’

‘The Rants pay for the rabbits and he’s never been convicted for poaching or stealing or anything else.’

‘And, so far, he has not been identified as your brother.’

‘How did you find that out?’ Susan blurted out the words in alarmed surprise.

‘I mentioned that it was surmise, but my guesses are always based upon deduction, which is another way of saying that I am trained and experienced in putting two and two together. You may trust me. I know you have killed nobody.’

‘Why?’

‘Call it instinct.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ said Susan, rousing herself as though she had been heartened, as indeed she had. ‘I know your reputation for catching criminals. You know who the Crozier murderer is, don’t you?’

‘Do you?’ asked Laura, when Susan, having told them a story which was an appendix to what they already knew, had got out of the car and gone home.

‘Do I what?’

‘Know who the murderer is.’

‘So would you if you thought over all that we have been told, but, as usual, it is a question of proof, as Nicholas Blake has put it. However, I hope to learn from a little experiment I am going to make with the assistance of those Watersmeet photographs which were not published in the newspapers. Meanwhile, think of what we have been told.’

‘Does Susan’s story, the one she has just told us, come into it?’

‘I think not, except that Dr Rant died and that some time after his death, when the Rant sisters decided to breed Pharaohs, Susan became kennel-maid to Sekhmet and the cherished hounds.’

‘You said she was not the murderer, but you mention Dr Rant. You don’t mean that Dr Rant was also murdered, do you?’

‘If he was not, my whole theory falls to the ground.’

Laura did not voice the astonishment she felt, but, as she drove homewards, she turned the conversation on to the story they had heard from Susan. They had known that she had been adopted by the vicar of Axehead and the twin villages of Abbots Crozier and Abbots Bay, and that her tiny income came from interest on the money he had left her in his will. They also knew that she remembered a brother. In the account she had just given them, she said that she had lost track of him after she became a member of the vicar’s household, for, as a child, she was not allowed to write to him and when she was old enough to decide such matters for herself, she found that the home where they had been fostered together had been vacated and she could find nobody who could tell her where the inmates had gone. She did not pursue her enquiries very far, for she reasoned that her brother would be old enough to be at work and could be anywhere in the British Isles or even in Canada or Australia or some other part of the globe. In any case, they had never, as children, been very close friends, so, having made some attempt to trace him and failed, she soon gave up the quest and, after the deaths of her adoptive parents, whose surname she had taken, she occupied herself by taking seasonal jobs in the hotels of Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier and in such occupations as baby-sitting to families in Axehead, where there was a repertory theatre and a dance hall, or as an auxiliary worker in the Axehead hospital. She had also worked in the kennels of the moorland hunt and, later, for a veterinary surgeon in Castercombe, so when she discovered that the Rant sisters were keeping and occasionally breeding Pharaoh hounds, she had found, in her own words, ‘my life’s work and a couple of good friends, if only they would have me’.

Her complete independence, however, she did not abandon, for she felt, wisely, no doubt, that some of Dr Rant’s imperiousness had been bred into Bryony and that to maintain a certain amount of apartheid from the sisters was the policy to be followed. The arrangement suited all three. The sisters were happy to have Crozier Lodge to themselves each evening and Susan’s help was invaluable when they first took on the Pharaoh hounds. Susan retained her own little home and steadfastly refused any money payment for her services, though the sisters insisted on feeding her.

All this came out in Susan’s story and so did the explanation of her suspect activities on the morning of the Watersmeet death and her subsequent refusal to disclose to the police where she had been before she showed up at Crozier Lodge and found that Sekhmet was missing.

‘What made you go to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house?’ Dame Beatrice had asked. ‘Such was not your custom, was it?’

‘I have a keener sense of smell than either of the Rants,’ Susan had replied, ‘and I detected the smell of aniseed the moment I got inside the gates. I went straight to the stable yard, but the hounds were all right, although, of course, very restless and excited because they could smell the aniseed, too, so then I thought I had better check on Sekhmet. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to steal her, but Morpeth valued her and it was no secret that the Rants had money, so Morpeth might have offered quite a sizeable reward to get the dog back. That was the way I reasoned.’

‘That won’t quite do,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You have nothing to lose by being frank with me. Let us forget the aniseed and come to what you were doing before you reached Crozier Lodge.’

The rest of Susan’s story had followed. It was some weeks after she had joined Bryony and Morpeth that she encountered the poacher Adams, and it was not until Bryony mentioned his name and remarked how useful it was when he brought along rabbits for the hounds that she realised the poacher’s name was the same as that which she had been made to abandon when the vicar and his wife adopted her.

‘They wanted me to feel that I was their very own daughter,’ Susan said, ‘and that I would be proud to take their name. I don’t know about being proud,’ she added, addressing Laura rather than Dame Beatrice, ‘but it gave me a feeling of safety which was heaven after feeling so lost. They treated us quite well at the Home, but it was impersonal, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel as though you belonged anywhere and my brother and I were separated, I thought for ever, once I was adopted and went to live at the vicarage, and we never met after that until the day I first opened the back door to him at Abbots Crozier. He didn’t know who I was then, and he doesn’t now. I have never told him I am his sister. Snobbishness, I suppose, but not everybody wants to claim relationship with the village poacher. But every now and then, when my bit of interest comes in, I buy him a shirt or a jacket or trousers from a jumble sale. That’s where I was that morning, taking him a lovely wool shirt that I had picked up the previous week. He may be a poacher and perhaps a bit of a thief, but he’s a decent man and I like to think I’ve got somebody belonging to me, even if they themselves don’t know it.’

‘Well, I am deeply affected by this artless tale,’ said Dame Beatrice briskly and without irony, ‘but it does not explain, so far as I am concerned, a point of some importance. What did you do when you found that Adams was not at home when you called?’

‘I guessed he was out rabbiting. I had plenty of time before I needed to show up at Crozier Lodge and I wanted to give him my present personally, so I hung about on the moor until he came back. It wasn’t all that long to wait. I gave him the shirt but asked him to say nothing about it to anybody — ’

‘Did he never wonder why you offered him these kindnesses?’

‘He thought they were because I had been brought up in a vicarage and was accustomed to doing acts of charity. We never wrote to one another after we were separated, as I told you, so, although I suppose he had heard I was not the vicar’s own child, he had no idea that I was his sister because of the change of name.’

‘So, when you met him that morning, he told you that he had left the rabbits in the postbox and that somebody had walked off with Sekhmet,’ said Laura. ‘Simple, when you know the answer. So that’s why you went straight to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell the police what you had done and where you had been, instead of letting them suspect you and search your cottage?’

‘She has answered that,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She did not want a connection made between her and Adams.’

‘I should have told them if things had got worse for me,’ said Susan. ‘I was pretty badly scared when they did search the cottage and found that ridiculous hat. I knew then what I had suspected all along.’

‘That the man in the river had been murdered?’

‘Oh, I had had my suspicions before that. Nobody could have got that deep gash in his head from slipping and hitting his head on one of those rounded boulders. It wasn’t so much the police I was scared of. It was the murderer. Nobody else could have palmed off that silly hat on me. He must have spied on me at Watersmeet, I think, and that’s a horrible thought.’

‘How much of her story is true, do you suppose?’ asked Laura later. Dame Beatrice shook her head.

‘We can check a good deal of it with Adams without giving away his relationship to Susan, since she is sensitive about that.’

‘Don’t you think he has put two and two together by now?’

‘That is more than likely. Several points in her story are inconsistent. Susan is not very good at deceit. What I do think is that a shop in Axehead has found a fine woollen shirt missing from its stock. Such items are expensive and I think would be beyond the reach of Susan’s purse.’

‘You don’t mean she nicked it!’

‘She felt that the end justified the means, no doubt. I have heard that the Jesuits hold similar views, although they do not express them by stealing woollen shirts from haberdashers.’

‘Anyway, if the rest of the story is true, we know where she went that morning and why she went to Sekhmet’s kennel before going to the house, so those are two niggling little points cleared up, not that they matter, but I do hate unsolved mysteries and one can’t do with them in a case of murder, ’ said Laura. ‘Shall you go and see Adams?’

‘Not at present and perhaps not at all. And now, to play havoc with the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, where shall I find a skeely sculptor to model this head of mine?’

‘Yours?’

‘No. The head of the man found in the river. The police photographed it full-face and in profile. It will be hard if we cannot find somebody to model him, taking, we’ll say, three years off his age and restoring his appearance to what it was before he was attacked so brutally.’

‘So you do know who the Watersmeet man was?’

‘Dear me, no, but from a bow drawn at a venture the arrow sometimes finds a rare and valuable quarry.’