The Crozier Pharaohs

14

Full Marks For Artistic Impression

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Signor Tussordiano,’ said Laura, looking up from her crossword puzzle that evening after they had spoken with Susan.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘That waxworks man who used to travel the fairs with all those heads of murderers. The police arrested him because they thought he had killed his wife, but you proved it was a drunken lion-tamer with whom she was having an affair.’

‘Dear me, yes, but how do you know? You were not with me then.’

‘No, I was teaching a class of forty wary-skulled young ladies who were only killing time until they were old enough to leave school, poor perishers. I wonder why headmistresses always give the rottenest class to the newest recruit? Anyway, old Tusso would model that head for you and be glad to do it. I’ll put matters in train to track him down, shall I? Gavin will know who keeps the tabs on these people. What’s the good of having a husband at Scotland Yard if one can’t make use of him? Anyway, to answer your question, after you left Cartaret College, which was alleged to train teachers and failed signally, so far as I was concerned, to carry out its function, I followed your career with avid interest. If it isn’t a rude answer, why did you pick me for your dogsbody when the other one left to get married?’

Dame Beatrice considered the question and then said that she did not know. She returned to the point at issue. ‘Signor Tussordiano?’ she said. ‘But what an excellent idea!’

‘We like to earn our salary. OK, then, I’ll get busy. One thing about Tusso, he won’t ask any questions you don’t want to answer.’

The exhibitor of waxwork heads was a white-haired old gentleman with the innocent eyes which Dame Beatrice associated with jewel thieves and the sellers of shares in bogus oil wells and copper mines. However, Signor Tussordiano was almost as innocent as he looked. His real name was Pugh and he was apt to talk nostalgically of what he referred to as ‘the valley’, although actually he had been born in Deptford and had never been further west than St Giles’s Fair in Oxford, and that was in his early boyhood when his uncle had first taken him on the road.

Laura had been right, on the whole, when she had stated that he would ask no awkward questions. He did put one query to Dame Beatrice when she told him what she hoped he could do for her.

‘Murderer?’ he asked eagerly, when she showed him the photographs. ‘One for my collection?’

‘Murdered, we think, not a murderer,’ she replied. ‘I hope, with your expert help, to get him identified, and that, perhaps, will lead us to the killer.’

‘Nice big pictures,’ he said, spreading out the newspaper. ‘You can make out the underlying bone structure and that’s what matters. These photos would be about a quarter natural size, I reckon. Call back in a week and I’ll have summat for you. I’ll have to charge you for the materials, but, seeing what you done for me in the past, I’ll do the work free. I s’pose I couldn’t ’ave the ’ead when you’ve done with it? Then when you’ve cotched the murderer I can model his head as well and set ’em up side by side.’

‘Certainly you may have it.’ So the bargain was struck. Dame Beatrice advanced the money the old man said he would need and she and Laura returned to the Stone House. It had been agreed that the modeller would telephone when the head was ready. Dame Beatrice had been to Crozier Lodge to obtain details of the dead man’s colouring with regard to hair and eyes, and she had checked with the police to make certain that Susan’s memory was not at fault. Inspector Burfield, who had been the officer responsible for having the body removed from the river, had confirmed Susan’s description, but added that, as the man’s head had been more or less submerged when he was found, his hair was probably not so dark as Susan had described it. ‘More mid-brown than nearly black’ was the inspector’s emendation of her description.

‘So you’ve given the old chap an idea, ’ said Laura. ‘I like the thought of setting a murderer’s head side by side with that of his victim. His collection doesn’t go further back than Crippen and his dissected wife with the operation scar, but he can do Emily Kaye to pair up with Patrick Mahon and one of those unfortunate females to team with Neill Cream.’

‘You show a regrettable and ghoulish relish for your theme. I shall be interested to see what Signor Tussordiano produces for us.’

When she was shown the modelled head, Dame Beatrice was doubtful whether her plan would work. She was presented with the bust of a young man which appeared to have no connection whatever with the photographs she had supplied to Tussordiano. The dead man’s eyes had been staring and wide open. Those of the model were open in the normal way and one had a slight cast in it. The mouth in the photograph was also open, as though the man had been in the act of saying something — to the bitch Sekhmet, most likely — when he was struck down. The side of his face that had been shattered had been completely reconstructed in the model; the lips were slightly parted and the modeller had given the immature face a leering expression which, together with the cast in the left eye, gave the viewer anything but a pleasing impression of the subject’s character.

‘In fact,’ said Laura, ‘if you were told that this was the murderer instead of the murderee, you could well believe it.’

‘Yes, hardly a prepossessing countenance,’ agreed Dame Beatrice. However disappointing the first result of her experiment seemed to be, she decided to carry out her plan. She had the painted waxwork photographed in colour and from various angles before she returned it, as promised, to Tussordiano and then began her quest for information about the somewhat repulsive-looking youth which the photographs portrayed. Laura had supposed that George, the reliable chauffeur and general handyman, would be handed copies of the pictures to take to the Crozier Arms and the public houses in Axehead, and she was surprised when Dame Beatrice did not avail herself of George’s services, but told Laura to drive her to Castercombe.

It was a handsome town founded by the Romans on four crossroads much after the pattern of Cirencester. It went one better than the Cotswold town in that it had acquired under the Normans a cathedral in place of Cirencester’s memorable parish church of St John the Baptist with its gloriously over-ornate south porch and magnificent fifteenth-century tower; and Castercombe had a covered market in place of the open square in the town centre at Cirencester.

Laura asked no questions. She possessed the Highlander’s courteous but almost instinctive dislike of enquiring into other people’s business or motives. When her college friend, Kitty Trevelyan, had enquired the reason for this reticence, Laura had replied that what you did not know, you did not have to do anything about. This reply, Laura remembered with a non-Presbyterian grin, had shocked the High Anglican Kitty, who had demanded, ‘But, Dog, don’t you have any sort of a conscience?’

‘Can’t afford one,’ Laura had responded. ‘Your lot may be the Conservative Party at prayer, but our lot were brought up to quote Dr Johnson.’

‘As how? All he said was that the lady smelt and he stank. I shouldn’t have thought that was the sort of remark you made in Early Victorian drawing-rooms.’

‘In eighteenth-century drawing-rooms, ducky.’

‘Well, what about what he said about your lot?’

‘You ought to be made to analyse and parse that observation. Anyway, he asked where else would you find such horses and such men. He was talking about oats.’

‘Wild ones?’

‘No, fathead, the kind you eat.’

‘Well, even those you have to sow, I suppose,’ Kitty had said, ‘so it comes to the same thing in the end.’

‘Dear old Kitty,’ thought Laura nostalgically, as she took the one-in-four gradient down the Axehead hill into Abbots Bay and then followed the coast road to Castercombe. ‘Made a fortune in the hairdressing and the fashion businesses, and married a rich man into the bargain. He adored her and her idiocy and maintains that she was his inspiration. Who says fools don’t prosper?’

Having parked the car in one of the marked spaces in what had been the old marketplace in Castercombe, she waited for further instructions.

‘Half-past one,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Lunch, I think. You must be famished, as we breakfasted so early. Did I not perceive a likely-looking hostelry as we turned into this square? Would you care to walk over to it and find out whether they can put a table at our disposal?’

Lunch over, she produced her photographs and displayed them to the receptionist. The girl said she had only lived in the town for a year, so Dame Beatrice asked if there was anyone on the staff of the hotel who had been living or working there at least three years previously. She added that the subject of the pictures was unlikely to have been a guest staying at the hotel, but that somebody on the staff might have known him if that person had been resident in the town.

‘Try Fred in the cocktail lounge,’ said the girl. ‘He’s been here longest.’ She looked appraisingly at Dame Beatrice’s eccentric but obviously expensive clothes and at Laura’s well-cut summer suit and asked, ‘Come into a fortune, has he, this young fellow?’

Dame Beatrice cackled, thanked the girl and made for the cocktail lounge with her photographs. Here she ordered two brandies and asked the elderly barman what he would have. His was a small port in which he pledged the ladies’ health. Dame Beatrice asked him if he had ever known the young man in the pictures which she handed to him. He looked at them carefully, but shook his head.

‘Not without he worked for Parrish’s the chemist,’ he said. ‘I might have seen him in there, if I recollect. I’ll tell you who would likely know for sure, and that’s my brother Bert, as keeps a do-it-yourself shop in Paternoster Way, along by the cathedral. Always in and out of the chemist’s in his younger days owing to suffering with his stomach. Then he got Christian Science and give up the physic. About four or five year ago, you say. Ah, well, now, if anybody would recognise them pictures, Bert would. Ask for Mr Smallwood if his assistant’s minding the counter. They close for dinner-time, but he’ll be open again by now and most likely having his after-dinner snooze while the assistant runs the shop. There ain’t much doing in his line in the early afternoons. His trade is mostly on Saturdays and in the evenings when chaps come by on their way home from work.’

The cathedral was so much of a landmark that Dame Beatrice and Laura found Paternoster Way without difficulty. Laura opened the door of the do-it-yourself shop and saw that it was in the charge of a young man wearing a brown overall. She came out and reported that brother Bert was not visible, so was probably sleeping off his lunch.

‘Then we will not disturb him for a while,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I want him to be in sunny mood when I show him the photographs. We will visit the cathedral. I admire large, gloomy buildings erected to the glory of God and as a passport to heaven for those who built, paid for and maintain them.’

The interior was certainly grand enough and gloomy enough to satisfy her. She spent most of the time seated in one of the pews near the end of the nave and studied the architecture, the transition from Norman to Early English, the fourteenth-century east window, the fan vaulting of the chancel and the carved stone screen which separated the nave from the choir.

Laura wandered around, identified piscinas and aumbrys, the ornate fifteenth-century tomb surmounted by the effigy of the bishop who had been responsible for the later alterations to the building, found a little locked door which had led to the rood stair and examined the stone screen in greater detail than Dame Beatrice was able to do from her seat in the nave.

She came back to her employer and announced that she wanted a postcard or two from the stand by the south door. After this, they went into the cloister and the chapter house and then Dame Beatrice looked at her watch and decided that it was time they returned to Bert Smallwood’s shop. Laura opened the door of it again; this time two men, one of them elderly, were there.

Laura, already briefed, spent some time in selecting an assortment of screws and a plastic arm for opening and closing a casement window, bought some emery paper and a pair of nail scissors, while Dame Beatrice wandered around inspecting the stock and then bought some metal clips for which she had no use whatever and a set of curtain hooks.

Having thus prepared the ground for negotiations of a different kind, she produced the photographs. The result was gratifying, particularly when she mentioned that Bert’s brother Fred had sent her. The elderly man hardly did more than glance at the pictures.

‘Why, that looks like young Todhunter,’ he said. ‘Used to work at Parrish’s the chemist till he got the sack for putting his hand in the till. Went abroad, so I heard. I used to go regular to Parrish’s before I saw the light and my stomach stopped playing me up.’ The old man looked at her with curiosity and asked, ‘Is he back here, then? Had trouble with him, have you?’

‘Personally, no. I have never even met him.’ She took another picture from the briefcase she was carrying. ‘Could you recognise this as the same man photographed recently by the Axehead police?’

He went white when he saw the disfigured face of the dead man, but gave the picture far more attention than he had given to the photographs of the head which Tussordiano had modelled and then he shook his own.

‘Could be,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t like to swear to it. This one is dead, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Dame Beatrice. She produced her Home Office credentials. ‘The police are interested in him, so I hope that you will be prepared to co-operate if they ask you to substantiate your recognition of the youth you knew as Todhunter. There is more than a suspicion that his death was no accident. That is why the police are so anxious to get him identified.’

‘I’ve never had dealings with the police and I don’t want to begin at my age.’

‘You could sell your story to the papers, Mr Smallwood,’ said his assistant. ‘They pay big money for stories about murder.’

Before they left Castercombe, Dame Beatrice and Laura, having asked to be directed to the chemist’s at which Todhunter had been an assistant, obtained no confirmation of Smallwood’s identification of the model in the coloured photographs, for the shop had changed hands. Nevertheless, as Laura said, there was now something to report to the Axehead police. The detective-inspector was interested but cautious. He did not see, he said, that the identification of young Todhunter got him very much further in identifying the body of the man found in the river, since nobody had yet come forward to put a firm name to this man. They could not be certain he and Todhunter were the same.

‘If the young fellow went abroad,’ he said, ‘we should have the devil of a job proving that he ever came back, especially as we don’t know to what part of the world he went. Then, again, if this shopkeeper in Castercombe recognised the youngster in your photograph, but can’t swear to the man in ours, well, there you are. In any case, we haven’t a clue as to why anybody should murder him, any more than we know why Goodfellow was murdered. What’s your theory, ma’am?’

‘I believe the man in the river knew of something in the murderer’s past and that the man found dead in the valley had been a witness of the river murder.’

‘Ingenious, ma’am, but where is the proof?’

‘Still to be sought.’

‘Do you know who the murderer is?’

‘Not, as you point out, without proof. I was told that young Todhunter was dismissed from his job for petty pilfering. Did the shopkeeper give him in charge as well, I wonder? If so, the police at Castercombe might also be able to identify my photograph and (a remote possibility, no doubt) recognise the man in yours.’

‘Well, I’ll get in touch with them, of course, since you suggest it, but, in my opinion, it’s a very long shot, ma’am.’

It turned out that there had been no charge laid against Todhunter, but the Castercombe police agreed to find out what they could and whether the youth had indeed left the town. If he had, they would do their best to discover where he had gone and whether he had got into any trouble or made any enemies there, but they indicated that it was a forlorn hope.

‘And, if he changed his name as, being in disgrace, he most likely did,’ they said, ‘we shall be left without a clue and and it might seem a waste of time and trouble to start looking into things now that he’s dead.’ The detective-inspector transmitted this opinion to Dame Beatrice when he received it and added that, great though he knew her reputation to be, even she would find this particular nut too hard to crack. Meekly she agreed.

‘Are you really giving up?’ asked Laura. Dame Beatrice cackled, but made no other reply. Meanwhile the police continued with their enquiries into the antecedents of the so-far mysterious Goodfellow and with some, although limited, success. To Bryony’s annoyance, Susan’s curiosity and Morpeth’s alarm, they began at Crozier Lodge just as lunch was being cleared away, so that all three women were in the house. Detective-Inspector Harrow began with Susan, but the interview produced nothing. She denied, quietly but firmly, ever having met Goodfellow.

‘I’ve been told about him, of course,’ she said, ‘but the only time he came here I was out with a couple of the hounds and when I got back I was told about his visit and what a screwball he seemed to be. Scared both the girls, I guess, so Bryony wished him on to Dame Beatrice, she being trained to deal with such cases and, so far as my knowledge goes, he never came here again.’