The Mudflats of the Dead

CHAPTER 14

THE FLAT-MATES

‘Thoughts, like old vultures, prey upon their heart-strings.’

Isaac Watts

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Meanwhile, as Laura had surmised, Dame Beatrice had by no means lost interest in the case. She was still curious about Camilla’s death by drowning, was challenged by the doubts and difficulties concerning it and decided that the most obvious approach to a solution of the problem was to find out more about the girl herself and the kind of life she had led before her disastrous visit to Saltacres.

Her first move was to contact Adrian and Miranda again in the early autumn and make an attempt to get them to tell her more about Camilla than she had gained from them so far. She rang them up and invited them to come and stay at the Stone House for a few days. Having received a surprised and pleased acceptance of this offer, she sent her car and her chauffeur to transport them from their London flat to the Stone House.

They brought their paraphernalia with them. She had suggested this.

‘Life is quiet here. You will be glad of something to do during your stay.’

So Adrian wandered happily in the woods and over the open stretches of the Forest picking up leaves and fungi and making a collection of beetles. He made what, to him, were delightful discoveries – the brilliant orange colour of the phlebia which he found on dead boughs of birch, oak and alder. He came upon a great spotted slug with snail-like horns and obese, mottled body, climbing the cap of amanita rubescens (known to country people as the Blusher because of its pink stain), and made a beautiful and delicate sketch which he gave to Laura. He found the elegant but poisonous wood blewit and liked the colour of the blue cap which gave it its name the Amethyst, and made another colour sketch for Dame Beatrice. The Verdigris toadstool, named for the violet laccaria, and the charming little marismius rotula, the Fairy Umbrella, he sketched for his own use. Wild flowers were hard to find at that time of year, for it was September, but he found ling and some sweetly scented dodder on the open heathland, and the common gorse was here and there in flower.

‘Adrian is so happy,’ said Miranda. ‘I’m glad the weather is fine. I wonder whether you will accept my picture of your garden? It has made a change from my usual work.’

It was after dinner each evening that they talked about Camilla. Dame Beatrice listened attentively to the small anecdotes, mostly connected with the art school which was the venue where Miranda had usually encountered Camilla before they had taken her to Saltacres.

‘She was too casual in her attitude to her work ever to become first class. She had talent, but she dissipated it. She frivolled away her time and then, of course, this everlasting chasing after men when, poor girl, she was not even attractive to them, did her work nothing but harm. Work must come first, and a long way first, if it is to win recognition,’ said Miranda.

Dame Beatrice enquired about fees at the art school. ‘Oh, the fees are reasonable enough,’ said Miranda.

‘It is the materials which cost the money,’ said Adrian. ‘Somebody once said that the best poetry is written on good paper with a good pen – or words to that effect – and the same theory applies even more closely to painting. If the materials are not up to standard, the results cannot be anything but disappointing.’

‘Could Miss St John afford good materials?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.

‘Oh, yes, those she used were quite adequate,’ Miranda responded. ‘She worked in an art dealer’s and picture-frame maker’s shop before she became a full-time art student, so she may have been able to get a discount.’

‘I should doubt that, once she had stopped working for them,’ said Adrian.

‘I believe I have been told that she had a private income,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Do you know whether she ever made a Will?’

‘I should think it extremely unlikely,’ said Miranda. ‘Are you suggesting that somebody murdered her for her money? I don’t believe she had all that much, you know. She dressed sloppily and cheaply—’

‘I don’t believe that is anything to go by in these days,’ said Adrian. ‘They all buy cheaply and then throw away. Mending is a dirty word with teenagers.’

‘Well, it’s hardly a romantic occupation,’ said his wife, ‘as you would know if you had to do it.’

‘When did Miss St John come into her inheritance and give up her employment, I wonder?’ said Dame Beatrice. Neither of the couple could remember the date on which she had enrolled at the art school, but Adrian promised to call at the place where Camilla had worked – he knew the shop and patronised it occasionally – and Miranda volunteered to produce the other information.

This was all the help they could offer, but when they got home they kept their word and did more than they had promised. Camilla had given in her notice at the shop some year and a half before she had accompanied the Kirbys to Saltacres, and she had registered as an art student at the beginning of the autumn term after her notice at the shop had expired. She received a discount on her own purchases whenever she brought another customer along, but the discount was very small.

‘One other thing I did,’ wrote Adrian in his small, neat, masculine hand, ‘was to ask about her Will. It does not appear to exist. I tried under Hoveton and all the other Johns and St Johns, and I also tried, of course, under her real name of Thomasina Smith.’

‘I don’t think I have heard that name before,’ said Dame Beatrice over the telephone when she thanked him for his letter and all the trouble he had taken.

‘She wasn’t proud of it. That’s why she changed it, but they knew her by it at the shop,’ said Adrian. ‘I’m sorry we’ve been of so little help.’

‘That is not true. I shall now go and see whether her flat-mates can add anything to what you have told me. You gave me the address – or, rather, your wife did. I will write straight away to Miss Minehart.’

Gerda Minehart’s answer came promptly, proving that artists can be businesslike. It was a lengthy letter. The writer had always been in touch with the Kirbys, since she and they had much in common, and, having heard Miranda’s account of Camilla’s death, she was completely mystified by it (she wrote) and would welcome a visit from Dame Beatrice, and so would the others with whom she shared the flat.

The flat turned out to be misnamed. It was not literally a flat at all, as it was on two floors. The lower one of these had been turned into a large studio which was shared by all four women. Above it were the four bed-sitting-rooms, one of which had already been let to another artist in place of Camilla. As she also had been acquainted with the dead girl, she was anxious to take part in the conference.

This took place on a Saturday, when the school was closed so far as the art classes were concerned, but open for students who wanted to put in some extra time there – chiefly, Gerda Minehart explained, the potters and sculptors, as the building offered facilities which many of the students did not possess in their homes or lodgings.

Dame Beatrice expected little to come of the visit so far as any explanation of Camilla’s death was concerned, but she found the flat-mates interesting. From Miranda’s description, she had no difficulty in identifying the three who had actually shared the premises with Camilla, even before the introductions were made.

Gerda Minehart was not only the oldest but the undoubted leader of the little group, and it was in her bed-sitter that the meeting was held. She was Jewish and while she was dispensing hospitality in the form of tea and cake she mentioned the name of Conradda Mendel. ‘She has often spoken of you,’ she said.

‘Yes, she was once connected with a case I was called upon to look into,’ said Dame Beatrice. She gazed at the one picture in the room, a spirited study of a horse being shod. ‘She also assists me to choose what to buy in the sale rooms from time to time when I am moved to acquire a modest item or two of antique silverware.’

‘She acts as my agent, too,’ said Gerda, ‘but on the other side of the fence. She negotiates the sale of my pictures – on a commission basis, of course. This ensures that she does her best for me.’ She followed the direction of Dame Beatrice’s eyes. ‘That’s one of my things.’

‘It is splendid.’

‘Yes, it is,’ the artist agreed without boastfulness but with the solid satisfaction of a master craftsman acknowledging quite impersonally the feeling for a job well done. The other three made appropriate murmurs of agreement. The socialite Mevagissey, whose first name, it appeared, was Claire and whose signature to her pictures was ‘in honour,’ she informed Dame Beatrice, ‘of the most ravishing little fishing port on earth, for Mevagissey, of course, is not my surname,’ fingered a necklace of jade as she listened and talked.

‘Ah, you paint fishing-boats and seascapes,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘So did Camilla, when she went to the seaside with Miranda and Adrian,’ said the beautiful, voluptuous Fenella, leaning back in her chair and yawning. ‘It doesn’t seem the healthiest of subjects to choose, does it, if one gets drowned in the end?’

‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it,’ said the newly joined member of the group. ‘But what I think—’

‘Has no significance, Val, darling,’ said Gerda. ‘Fenella, in her elephantine way – all right, Fen! Don’t bother to aim your bosom at me! You’ve done us a favour by bringing up the subject Dame Beatrice wants to talk about. What do you want us to tell you about Camilla, Dame Beatrice?’

‘How many people knew that she was going to Saltacres with Mr and Mrs Kirby?’

‘I should think anybody at the art school could have known,’ said Mevagissey. ‘There was nothing secret about it. Miranda usually took one or even two of the students with her and Adrian when they went away in the summer.’

‘Do you know of anybody who would wish to harm her?’

‘Again, there could be any number,’ said Gerda, ‘but they wouldn’t murder her, you know. Nobody took her seriously enough for that.’

‘She swiped their boyfriends, though,’ said the youthful Valerie.

‘Not mine,’ said Fenella complacently, ‘and the men didn’t stay swiped very long. They soon began looking for something a bit more beddable.’

‘She really was her own worst enemy, I expect,’ said Mevagissey, ‘and, as you say, she never managed to keep the boyfriends after she’d stolen them. They soon tired of her. She was a bit of a laughing stock actually.’

‘She was a little rat. I wonder anybody was ever tempted to sample her,’ said Fenella.

‘Anyway, nobody would have bothered to murder her,’ said Gerda again.

‘Would she ever have contemplated suicide, I wonder?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Oh, no!’ said Valerie and Mevagissey together.

‘No,’ said Fenella. ‘She enjoyed life in her own way, poor little sod.’

‘I don’t think she minded losing her men after she’d collected them,’ said Gerda. ‘It was the chase she liked.’

‘But what of the deprived young women?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.

‘Oh, Camilla wasn’t the only predator,’ said Fenella. ‘People are always changing their sleeping partners. Nobody we know would murder anybody because of a swap-over of bodies, otherwise we’d all be in Kensal Green by now.’

‘Do you know anything of her background – her parentage, education, that sort of thing? Her real name appears to have been Smith. There seems to be no evidence that she herself ever made a Will, but presumably her father or another relative left her something, or she would not have been in a position to give up her paid employment and live on a private income.’

Fenella and Claire Mevagissey exchanged glances and Gerda, Dame Beatrice thought, looked troubled. Nobody spoke until Valerie said, ‘We’ve wondered about that ourselves.’

‘Better not talk,’ said Gerda. ‘We don’t know anything.’

‘You can’t libel the dead,’ said Fenella.

‘You can blacken their memory.’

‘Her reputation wasn’t all that shiny.’

‘This,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘is an enquiry into what I am convinced was a case of murder. Anything you may tell me or the police will be held to be entirely confidential unless it is needed as evidence in a court of law.’ She looked at each one of them in turn. It was Fenella who spoke.

‘We always thought she had managed to get somebody on a piece of string,’ she said. ‘We – Gerda and Claire and I – were at a party with her. She got pretty high and she, well, let a rather big cat out of the bag when we got her home. I don’t suppose she remembered afterwards what she’d said. She had been too much under the influence to remember anything much at all, I guess.’

‘She was just full of wild babble,’ said Gerda. ‘She didn’t know what she was talking about.’

‘They do, you know,’ retorted Fenella. ‘They know perfectly well what they’re talking about until they actually go under the ether, and by the time they wake up, complete with hangover, they haven’t the blindest conception of what they’ve let out and nobody is more surprised than themselves if someone repeats it to them.’

‘But you did not repeat it to her, I imagine,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Heavens, no! It was none of our business if she was putting the screw on somebody.’

‘Man or woman, I wonder?’

‘She didn’t say, but we thought, knowing Camilla and her ways, that it was a man and probably not one of our gang at all, but somebody who couldn’t afford not to pay up. The inference was that she’d collected a little bundle, and that this evidence was still available to earnest enquirers, and that it would be pretty serious for the man if somebody talked.’

‘This would have happened while she was still employed at the shop, I take it, otherwise you would not need to infer, because you would know, if she had been living here at the time.’

‘Well— ’ Fenella and Mevagissey exchanged glances again. ‘Well— only sort of while she was still at the shop, if you know what I mean,’ said Fenella.

‘She had to go to hospital,’ said Claire.

‘I am accustomed to reading between the lines.’ Dame Beatrice rose to go. ‘Thank you all for your help. You have clarified my own ideas to a most gratifying extent. Blackmail is a particularly nasty business.’

Gerda accompanied her downstairs.

‘I don’t believe Camilla had a baby,’ she said. ‘She was far too fly to go so far as that.’

‘She was not fly enough to avoid being murdered,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘People shouldn’t write or do things for which they can be blackmailed. It’s their own fault if somebody takes advantage of them and cashes in.’

‘What did you really think of Miss St John?’

‘I was sorry for her. She was all the time chasing the bluebird and every time she caught it it died on her.’

‘But the dog it was that died,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘The little bitch, you mean. Oh, she was that, all right,’ said Gerda, ‘and we’re pretty sure about the blackmail, although we don’t know any names.’