When Last I Died

"So I understand," said Mrs. Bradley. But, wishing to settle first the very vexed question of the poltergeist, she added, "I have read that cases have been known of poltergeist phenomena commencing in a place where they have been unknown up to that time, on the occasion of an adolescent coining to live in the house. There is that strange but authentic case of the Rumanian girl Eleonore Zugun, in 1926, for instance. You remember that she came to live with the Countess Wassilko-Serecki, who had heard of her extraordinary powers, and that whilst she was with the Countess the most astonishing amount of poltergeist activity took place, ornaments and toys flying over partitions and from room to room, pins and needles burying themselves in the girl's flesh, hairbrushes and stilettos dropping, apparently from nowhere, and all that kind of thing."

"Ah," said Miss Biddle, "yes. I grant you anything you like about Eleonore Zugun. A most fascinating case. But there was no question of any adolescent being present in our haunted house. There was nobody but the tenant, Mr. Turney, his wife, and that unfortunate Miss Foxley. They were the only people living there while the poltergeist was active. It was all most unaccountable. But it all ceased soon after Mr. Turney's death."

"Do you happen to know for certain when the manifestations began?"

"Yes, I do. At least, let me try to be quite accurate, because I can see that there is something behind all this, dear Mrs. Bradley. You are more interested in Bella Foxley than in psychical research, I am sure."

With this shrewd comment, she went to a small éscritoire, opened it, and produced a leather-bound notebook.

"I call it my common-place book," she remarked. "I put down in it all the really interesting things that happen, with the dates. I am hoping I shall have something to publish one day. Now, let me see...."

She turned over the pages. Mrs. Bradley watched anxiously.

"Here we are," said Miss Biddle. "I knew I had noted it down. Six years ago, wasn't it? And the first date I have for the poltergeist is January 12th. I put: So the haunted house really is haunted! Samuel Kindred was passing the house at sunset yesterday, and heard the noise of loud quarrelling. As the voices were speaking 'like Londoners' he stopped to investigate. There was nothing to be seen, but he could hear loud thumpings and bumpings which seemed to come from the back of the house. He knew the house was supposed to be empty, so he went round to the window and peered in. The glass was dusty, however, and he could see nothing. Nevertheless, he did not think there was anybody there. It being none of his business, as he afterwards said, he went on his way.

"Next day, being Saturday, two or three of the school-children came into the garden of the haunted house to play hide-and-seek among the shrubs and trees. They became frightened, however, by loud, heavy noises inside the house, and one child declared that she had seen a ghost at one of the upstairs windows.

"As Samuel Kindred's story was public-house gossip by this time, four or five men armed with sticks, accompanied by Farmer Stokes with a shot-gun, went to the house on Saturday evening, having had a drink at the public-house first, to see what they could find. There was nothing to be seen, but the heavy noises were heard, and a half-brick, which came sailing through the air, struck one of the men on the shoulder and bruised him badly. What they described as 'mad bellows and screeches' of laughter followed, and in the end they broke a downstairs window and entered the house. As soon as they were in the hall, some furniture near them began to move about in an unaccountable manner, and they retreated, telling each other lurid tales of traditional hauntings. Farmer Stokes loosed off his gun, and the result was a perfect cascade of small articles down the stairs. He proposed to mount the stairs, but finding that the others had all deserted him, he gave up the idea and followed them back to the road.

"There the whole group waited for about twenty minutes, but he could not persuade the others to return with him to the house. Next day, after Evensong, my dear father, with Farmer Stokes, Mr. Morant from the Hall, Mr. Carter and old Everett, the shoemaker, went to the haunted house, but found it perfectly quiet. They climbed in, but the furniture was all in place, and everything seemed to be in order.

"The moment they turned their backs on the house, however, and were walking down the weed-grown drive towards the road, the most unearthly pandemonium broke out behind them. They hastened back, but all was quiet again, and nothing found out of its place."

"Amazing," said Mrs. Bradley.

"Was it not?" said Miss Biddle, very much pleased by this reception of her account of the hauntings.

"And how long after that was it that the news of the poltergeist became general? In other words, what made Mr. Turney decide to rent the house in order to study the hauntings?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

"Now it is very interesting and curious that you should ask that," replied Miss Biddle. "He must have had hearsay of it, for nothing had appeared in the papers then. All the same, it was not more than three or four days after that Sunday that we heard the house had the To Let board taken down, and that the owner, who was living at Torquay, had told old Joe to go in and cut the grass and tidy up the borders. Then, funnily enough, the To Let board went up again, but only for about ten days."

"And did Joe experience anything strange whilst he was attending to the garden?"

"Nothing at all, except that he declared he kept hearing voices which seemed to come up from his feet."

"Is Joe the present caretaker?"

"Oh, no. He's an almost witless old fellow who lives in that yellow cottage by the crossroads."

"I wonder how much he remembers about it?" said Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully.

"I'm afraid he's not to be depended upon," said Miss Biddle. "He's given to inventing his information. Nobody would have believed him about the voices if it could have been proved that he'd heard about the poltergeist. But it really didn't seem as though he had heard, so some people thought there might be something in his queer tale."

"I agree with them," said Mrs. Bradley. "Voices from under his feet ... a house with foundations very much older than the present superstructure ... a house so damp that the water marks the walls ... bellows and screeches of laughter ... poltergeist activity ... very interesting. Very interesting indeed."

Muriel rented a room. This fact she referred to at once. Mrs. Bradley imagined it was her way of introducing herself. It was a large room on the first floor of the house and at the front, and its only disadvantages, from her point of view, continued Muriel, were, first, that it had a bedroom fireplace (which she intended to have replaced by a 'proper one' as soon as she had enough money, provided that she could get 'the people downstairs' to agree), and, second, that it was not two rooms.

"I tried to get them to throw in the box-room," she explained, when the visitor was seated, "but they wouldn't part with it. Of course, they are very untidy, so I dare say they feel they must have somewhere to poke all the rubbish. They didn't want any more rent—not that I could have paid it; I have all my work cut out as it is—they simply wouldn't part with the room. I have all my meals with them, that's one thing. Now, when would your daughter want to begin? I'm afraid I couldn't reduce the fees very much, because my terms are by the term, if you understand what I mean, and not by the week. And would you want her to use your piano or mine? Because I can only take just so many pupils to use my piano, not that I wouldn't take more, but I've had to promise not to have the piano played here for certain hours of the day, and as it's an Agreement, I could hardly be expected to break it."

Mrs. Bradley, who had been wondering why she had been accepted, so to speak, at her face value, escorted into the house before she had stated her business, and installed in the best armchair, now briefly explained that she had no pupil to offer, but had come about something quite different.

"Oh, dear! How silly of me," said Muriel. Then, with the nervous purposefulness of the indigent, she continued hastily, "But if you're selling anything, I really don't need it, thank you."

She rose, as she said this, with the object of showing Mrs. Bradley out, but the visitor remained seated, and replied :

"I have nothing to sell. My errand is a painful one. If, when you have heard what I have to say, you still wish me to go, I shall go at once."

Muriel, looking extremely frightened, sat down again.

"Oh, dear," she said. "No, I didn't think you'd come to sell anything, although really they employ the most respectable people, I'm sure. In fact, I did a little canvassing myself after— after my husband's death, but I didn't like it at all. Some of the people were very rude and unkind. I suppose they have to be, with people bothering them all day. Still, it wasn't very pleasant."

"It is about your husband's death that I have come," said Mrs. Bradley.

"I don't understand. He died—several years ago. There couldn't be—that dreadful woman hasn't left a confession?"

"No, nothing like that. Mrs. Turney, I am investigating matters connected with the trial of Bella Foxley. I wonder whether you would tell me one or two things I very badly want to know?"

"Well—I don't know. You see, I don't want to get into any trouble. After all, the jury did say she didn't do it, although I know she did."

"There will be no trouble, I assure you. I have already had a long conversation with one of the jurymen who acquitted Bella Foxley. And I am in touch with certain aspects of the case which seem to me significant. Mr. Conyers Eastward——"

"But he defended her!"

"Yes, I know he did. But never mind that now. The point is that he is a person of repute, and I am going to re-open the case, to some extent, with him."

"Yes, I see. I'm sure you're quite respectable. But, after all, that awful woman is dead, and, even if she weren't, she couldn't be tried again for the same crime, could she? Oh, I could have done anything to her! You should have seen her look at me when the jury brought in their verdict! She knew she'd done it, and she knew how she'd done it! And yet they let her off! And I used to dream night after night that poor Tom was calling me, trying to get me to understand something about that terrible house where it happened. But I always woke up just as I was on the point of understanding what he meant."

"That is very interesting indeed," said Mrs. Bradley. "You dreamt that your husband was trying to explain something to you about that haunted house, and you always woke up just as you were on the point of understanding what he meant."

"Why do you look at me like that!" cried Muriel. Mrs. Bradley's bright black eyes began to sparkle.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "I don't think you understand the importance of those dreams, but that doesn't matter now. Tell me this, Mrs. Turney. Would you want people to be convinced, even all these years afterwards, that Bella Foxley was a murderess—if she was one? Or are you willing to leave things as they are?"

"I don't believe Tom fell out of that window, either the first or the second time, and I don't believe the haunted house had anything to do with his death," replied the widow. "But as for Bella Foxley—if I could blacken her name even now that she's dead, I'd do it. It was something she knew, and something Tom knew, too! That's why she killed him. It was the grated carrot, you know. That's what it was. Tom knew. Oh, how I wish we'd never gone! It was the telegram that decided us, although Tom knew better than to expect anything under the will. Poor Aunt Flora! She hadn't very many relations to go and see her! But we weren't well off, you know, and Tom said she might think we thought we'd got expectations, and he wouldn't go anywhere near. We had no expectations of any sort, and didn't want to have any, and he knew what people would think—especially Bella—if they got to hear.

"Well, Bella was there already. She had arrived the day before. She was quite nice, and she and I went up to see Aunt Flora, who looked very, very frail and very much older than when I had seen her last, for all she had dyed her poor old hair since we were there before, although I didn't like to tell Tom that, and he wouldn't go in to see her. He couldn't bear illness, poor man."

"When had he seen her last?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

"When Tom and I were married. I was Tom's second wife, you see, and we had only been married four years. Aunt Flora did not come to the wedding, but we sent her a piece of the cake —Tom would have a cake and orange blossom and everything, for my sake, because he said I was only a girl, and that, after all, it was my first marriage, even if it was his second. He was full of little jokes like that about it. I never felt his first wife came between us at all, although I believe he had been quite fond of her. But, after all, she had been dead for nearly twenty years when he married me. He was nearly sixty, you see, and although people made some remarks about December and May, it really wasn't like that at all. Tom was really very young for his age—more like a man of forty-five, I always thought—and I've always been rather reserved and sort of old for mine, so it was a more suitable marriage than you would think, considering I was only twenty at the time. I am only thirty now, although people have taken me for thirty-five or six."

She did look that age, thought Mrs. Bradley, but the fact had no importance. It might be important to know that Tom was so much older than she had imagined, though, she decided. A man of sixty-four or five might tumble out of first-floor windows and hurt or even kill himself where a man much younger might sustain no lasting injury. Curious he had not hurt himself the first time, all the same, at any rate, not seriously."

"Had you met your husband's cousin before?" she enquired, as Muriel paused. The widow nodded.

"Oh, yes, several times. She and Tom got on quite well together. She put him in the way of renting these haunted houses from time to time. She had even come away with us for part of her summer holiday, I remember. We were very hard up that year, and she said that if we would let her join us she would pay half the expenses and we could pay the other half between us. It was quite a generous offer, because, although we had two bedrooms, the one sitting-room did just as well for three as it would for two, so we actually saved a little more than you would think, especially as the rooms came a little cheaper, taking the two bedrooms with one sitting-room, you know. It was then she gave us the first news about this last haunted house. Tom was pleased. We had a happy time. I liked Bella then, and Tom liked her right to the end."

"Even after he knew ...?"

"That she choked poor aunt? Well, perhaps not quite so much then, but, of course, he couldn't be sure."

"But I thought he was sure?"

"Well, you see, what really happened was this:"

"We are coming to it at last," thought Mrs. Bradley.

"You see, Aunt Flora was so much better that we thought we might all venture to go out for a little while in the afternoon. A sickroom can be very monotonous, and poor Aunt Flora's (I don't mean it was her fault, of course !) was really rather stuffy and smelly. Well, Tom said he wouldn't be a minute, and Bella seemed to be hanging about, almost as though she wanted me out of the way...."

"You thought of that later," thought Mrs. Bradley. She grinned, and the narrator looked disconcerted." Wanted you out of the way, yes?" said Mrs. Bradley, nodding.

"So I decided I wouldn't be in a hurry, and, anyhow, I was waiting for Tom. Tom came out—I was waiting by the front door—and said that Bella seemed to have found herself a job in the kitchen. I couldn't understand that, because, Bella spending all her life in kitchens at that time, being housekeeper at that dreadful Home, you know, I didn't think she would want to go into one when she need not, so I went and looked through the window and tapped on the glass. She looked up, and I could see that she had a carrot in her hand...."

"I don't think she denied that she grated the carrot," said Mrs. Bradley, gently interrupting the narrative.

"Oh, I see. No, she didn't deny it. But I always say that Aunt thought she was getting pease-pudding. She would never have taken raw carrot; of that I'm very sure. Anyhow, Bella didn't come, so Tom and I walked on for a bit, and then Tom remembered that he'd left a letter for the house-agent up in our bedroom, and he badly wanted it to catch the post. He decided to go back, but told me not to come, but to wait for him at the bottom of the hill if I liked.

"Well, I did wait for him, but he was so long that I began to get chilly, and I walked back towards the house. There was no sign of him until I got right up to the porch, and then I saw him. He looked terrible. He said, 'Oh, there you are, Muriel! A dreadful thing has happened. Poor Aunt is choked to death. You had better go for the doctor.'

"I didn't know where the doctor lived, but he gave me quite a sharp push—he was always so gentle as a rule—and told me to hurry up.

"'I'm not going to leave that hell-cat alone with her,' he said. I couldn't think what he meant, but now I know."

"What did he mean?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

"Why, Bella, of course. He meant he knew Bella had done it, don't you see? And he wasn't going to give her a chance to remove anything which might give her away."

"But you couldn't have thought that at the time, you know, Mrs. Turney," said Mrs. Bradley, even more gently than she had yet spoken. Muriel looked at her, and then agreed.

"No, perhaps not; but I think it now," she said. "Well, I fetched the doctor. Poor aunt was choked with the carrot. The doctor confirmed it at once."

"But you can't prove, and your husband couldn't have proved, that Miss Foxley did the choking," said Mrs. Bradley. "He didn't see her do it, and, even if he had, I doubt whether her word would be considered less valid than his if she declared that he was lying. Why did you hate Miss Foxley at that time, Mrs. Turney? She had never done you any harm."

"I know she hadn't," agreed Muriel, "but, looking back, I can see it all."

Mrs. Bradley thought she herself could, too, but she did not say this. Believing, however, that no logical answer would be forthcoming to her question, she asked another :

"How long had you been in the new house when Bella Foxley came to stay with you?"

"Well, she came almost at once; that is, once the funeral was over. Tom and I did not stay for that. Then we heard about the will, and when we knew that poor Aunt Flora had left the house and furniture to Eliza, it was difficult, I thought, for Bella to remain. She ought to have gone back to the Home, of course, to work out her notice...."

"Ah, yes," said Mrs. Bradley. "She gave in her notice before Aunt Flora's death, I believe."

"Yes, I suppose she must have done, to get in the complete month." She paused. Then she exclaimed, "But that's a proof, surely, of what I've been saying! She did kill poor Aunt! She must have had it all planned before she went down there! Wicked, wicked thing! Didn't I tell you!"

Mrs. Bradley did not take up the challenge. She merely remarked that Bella hated the work she had been doing, and to this Muriel agreed.

"I suppose another post of the kind she had held would be comparatively easy to find," Mrs. Bradley added; but Muriel could offer no opinion on this.

"At any rate," she said, "she had no home to go to, and she said she felt bad, after Aunt's death and the funeral and everything, so we agreed to put her up, although we didn't really want to; but she kept hinting and hinting, in the way relations do, and in the end we felt we had to invite her, especially as she had found the house for us, and had visited us before.

"She was very good about everything, I must say. She paid well for her board and lodging, and I shouldn't have minded keeping her on for a month or two if it hadn't been for the way the house behaved."

"The way it behaved?" said Mrs. Bradley, intrigued.

"Oh, yes. It was dreadful. Not only frightening but dangerous. Things thrown about and furniture upset, and people creeping about in slippers after dark. It terrified me so much that I had to leave, and Bella was frightened, too, and she came with me. But Tom wouldn't leave—he said it was the most interesting house he had ever known. He researched, you know, in such things, and wrote books and articles. It didn't pay very well. We were always rather hard up. Still, the rents for those sort of houses are always very low, so we hadn't the usual expenses, and my poor Tom was very, very happy."

She paused again, looking sadly back at the difficult but, seen in retrospect, desirable, happy past.

Revenge, thought Mrs. Bradley, might appease whatever strife was hidden behind that weak, anxious and, if one had to admit it, rather peevish little face.

"I thought," she said aloud, "that Bella did return to the Institution for a time?"

"Only to get her things. She stayed one night, that's all— or was it the week-end? It's so long ago now, and what happened later was so awful, that I really don't remember every little thing."

"I think it must have been the week-end," said Mrs. Bradley, thinking of the diary—although, as she immediately admitted to herself, it would have been easy enough for Bella to have transferred the episode of the boy Jones and the foreign bodies in the food from the time when it had really happened to the date on which it was chronicled in the diary. She was greatly intrigued by the diary. Its frankness, lies, evasions, and inventions made up such a curiously unintelligible whole.

"Did you see the two boys whom the police interviewed in your village?" she inquired.

"Boys?" said Muriel. "I don't remember any boys." Yet her colour rose as she spoke.

"Two boys had escaped from the Home at which Bella Foxley was employed, and at one point it was thought that the police had found them in that village."

"Oh?" Muriel looked thoroughly alarmed. "Oh, really? I never heard anything about it. How funny—how curious, I mean. No, I had no idea——"

"Naturally," said Mrs. Bradley, as one dismissing the subject. "I suppose there is no complete and exact record of the happenings in the haunted house, by the way?"

"Record? ... Oh, yes, of course there is! But ... oh, well, you could see it, I suppose. There is a typed copy somewhere, but I don't know where it went. The psychic people—the Society, you know—had one copy, and then there was a carbon. The copy I've got is in Tom's own handwriting, and I don't know whether I ought to lend it. Besides—forgive me; I don't mean to be rude, and I can see you take a real interest—I mean, not just curiosity and all that—but what are you trying to do? Even if it could be proved that Bella did push Tom out of the window, it wouldn't help. She's dead. She committed suicide, and, as I say to people (when I mention the subject at all) if that wasn't a confession, what could be?"

"I see," said Mrs. Bradley, "and I know I'm tiresome. But if I could just see the entries about the hauntings I should feel so very grateful."

"Well—all right, then," said Muriel, "but I can't let you take it away."

"It is very kind of you to let me see it at all," said Mrs. Bradley. "Is it a complete record?"

"You'll see that it goes right up to about—well, when Tom fell the first time."

She went over to the writing desk in the corner, rummaged, and brought out a stiff-covered exercise book containing perhaps a hundred pages of thick, blue-ruled paper. She looked at it, turned the pages; then thrust it back into the drawer.

"I've remembered where the typed copy is," she said. She took the cushions off an armchair and removed a brown-paper package.

"Here you are," she said. About forty sheets had been used, and Mrs. Bradley read them carefully. Then she turned to the last page. Upon this a summary of the hauntings had been worked out, dated and timed.

"I should be glad to be allowed to make a copy of this summary," she said. "It may be extremely important."

"Important for what?" inquired Muriel. Mrs. Bradley, making rapid hieroglyphics in her notebook, did not reply. When she had finished she read through all the entries once more before she put the typescript together and handed it over. It tallied pretty well with the diary.

Muriel put it into the desk, and came back to the hearth.

"He was murdered," she said. "Blackmail."

"I know," said Mrs. Bradley. "Just one more point. You knew of this haunted house, how long before your husband's aunt died?"

" About a month."

"As long as that? By the end of December?"

"Yes. It must have been as long as that, because we had to give a month's notice where we were. That was in the haunted flat in Plasmon Street."

"Yes, I see. That seems quite clear. It's been very good indeed of you, Mrs. Turney, to talk to me like this, and I am interested—more than I can tell you—in your story."

"Well," said Muriel, rising with the guest, "won't you stay and have a cup of tea or something? I'm sure it's been really nice to have a chat with somebody about it. But nothing can bring Tom back. Still, it's very kind of you to take an interest. I am ever so glad you called."

Mrs. Bradley was glad, too. Dimly she was beginning to see quite a number of things, all of them interesting; some astonishingly so.

Chapter Five

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

"Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust; And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie."

RALEIGH.

MRS. BRADLEY'S application for permission to hold séances in the house at which Cousin Tom had met his death was granted by Miss Foxley, and the séances were duly held. They were not conducted by Mrs. Bradley, although she was an interested participant.

She went twice to the house before the first séance, and contrived to dispense with the services of the caretaker as guide.

"Just as you like, mum," he said, when she pointed out that his voice and familiar tread did not give the spirits, if there were any, a chance, "although I didn't think, when I first had the pleasure of showing you round, as you was one of them fakers."

"One of those what?" said Mrs. Bradley.

"Well, you've heard of poodle-fakers, haven't you? I calls these here ghost-hunters spirit-fakers."

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Bradley. "A spirit-faker, in the full technical sense of the term, is a person who fakes, or manufactures, spirits for the purpose of deceiving the earnest seeker after psychical phenomena."

"Oh, ah," said the old man, deflated. He handed her the keys. "No good me telling you which is for which door. You'd never remember 'em all," he continued. Mrs. Bradley accepted the formidable bunch.

"I shall proceed according to the method of trial and error," she said. Lugubriously the old man watched her approach the drawing-room, and then he shuffled away to his dinner.

Mrs. Bradley had chosen her time carefully. She had discovered the hour at which the custodian dined, and the average amount of time he spent over his meal. She knew that she had approximately two hours at her disposal. It was her intention to make a thorough examination of the house and to repeat this examination, if she thought it necessary, once more before the first séance was held. She had arranged that this séance should be held after dark, and had rented the house for the twenty-four hours beginning at ten in the morning.

She did not go into the drawing-room until the caretaker was out of sight. Then she unlocked it and went straight across to the window. It was in front of this window that the body of Cousin Tom must have fallen. Taking a folding ruler from her skirt-pocket, she measured the height of the room. She had already formed a mental estimate of the height of the bedroom window-sill from the ground, and her measurements showed the drawing-room ceiling to be twelve feet high.

She wanted to go upstairs and measure the height of the bedroom from which Cousin Tom had fallen, and prove to her own satisfaction that, allowing for flooring, there was no secret cavity between the rooms. She was trying to account for the poltergeist.

If, as she supposed, the phenomena were not genuine, then it was necessary to discover some hiding place from which the perpetrator of what had turned out to be a very grim joke could have emerged and to which he could have returned whilst 'haunting' the house.

There was the possibility, of course, that the phenomena might be genuine, and this point she did not overlook. Nevertheless, in as much of the literature relating to poltergeist activity as she had been able to procure, there seemed no evidence of anything beyond mischief and a certain amount of childish spite behind the poltergeist manifestations. Murder, for instance, seemed quite outside the scope of poltergeist behaviourism, and she had not the slightest hesitation in accepting, as a working hypothesis, Mrs. Muriel Turney's conviction that Cousin Tom had met with foul play.

The house itself, as she had realised upon her first visit and in spite of the somewhat irritating presence of the old man, was a most extraordinary place. Stone-built in the most hideous and uncompromising style of the middle of the nineteenth century, it retained evidence of having been erected on the site of a very much older building, for in some respects it adhered to the Elizabethan ground-plan upon which an earlier house had been built.

Of all the picturesque features of its foundation, however, it retained nothing but some panelling by the side of an obviously reconstructed fireplace in the dining-room.

The windows were large and rectangular, and opened up and down by means of sashcords, some of which were in need of replacement. The staircases were narrow and Victorian, even the front one. On the servants' staircase there was not room for two people to pass.

It was a cheerless house; sinisterly cheerless, for the bright sunshine streamed in through the windows, particularly of the drawing-room, which faced south, and of the bedroom immediately above it, and yet a kind of spiritual dankness seemed to permeate every part of the building.

Mrs. Bradley was particularly free from morbid fears and nervous fancies, but she would not have been in the least surprised, she felt, as she went from room to room, tapping, pacing and measuring, to turn round and find the ghost of Cousin Tom, of Bella Foxley, or even of Aunt Flora, standing in the doorway watching her. As for the front stairs, she stood quite two minutes in the bare and chilly hall looking at them before she could bring herself to mount.

Once on the first floor, however, she shook off this irrational sensation, and explored as fully and measured as carefully as she had done down below.

In connection with the alleged activities of the poltergeist she did establish one thing. That was that the contents of the bedroom from which (or in which) Cousin Tom had met his death could be shot over the banisters into the hall without trouble, and that anybody decanting furniture, ornaments or anything else portable into the well provided by the turn of the stairs, would have ample time to escape before the investigators could catch him. As for the sound of his footsteps, that, to a convinced ghost-hunter, would not necessarily convey any doubts. Poltergeists can be heard to move about, she had read, and, in fact, their footsteps were often audible without anything being visible.

The route taken by a person playing practical jokes or hide-and-seek with a victim would most likely be along the passage to the bathroom, she deduced. This passage, unlighted for about half a dozen yards beyond the bedroom door, proceeded, under a square-topped archway and down one step, to a fairly large bathroom and to the back stairs. These stairs led down to the kitchen and up to the attics, and were lighted at the top by a large window which overlooked the almost enclosed courtyard. This window, oddly enough, could be closed by shutters on the inside of the glass.

The bathroom door opened on the right of the passage, at the end of which was another bedroom which overlooked the garden. There was a rather similar passage at the opposite end of the landing, but on this side there was no bathroom, and the bedrooms were considerably smaller.

There was one item of particular interest which she had overlooked on her previous visits. This was that a small room, apparently a dressing-room, opened off the side of what, to herself, she called Cousin Tom's room, but the communicating-door had been papered over, so that, at a casual glance, it was unlikely that the fact that it was not quite flush with the rest of the wall would be apparent.

She went over and examined it again when she had explored the bathroom passage to its end. The job of disguising the doorway had been so well done that it almost seemed as though deliberate thought had been given to the possibility of hiding it. She ran her finger round the opening, being very careful not to press hard enough to break the wall-paper, and then went into the adjoining room to study the doorway from that side. The same neat, careful job had been made, and she now noted more particularly a fact which had struck her before—that the opening from the passage leading into this smaller room was not, and never had been, a doorway in which to hang a door— it was merely an arch which had been formed by removing bricks from the passage wall.

Whether these alterations had any sinister implication still had to be discovered. She noted them, and passed on. The attics, which she thought might repay inspection, proved disappointing in that they were entirely empty. Whatever lumber the house might once have harboured was not now on this top floor. She inspected the boards closely. They were dusty, but not unduly so, and she supposed that these rooms, in common with the other parts of the house to which the public were not usually admitted, received attention at intervals from the caretaker and his daughter. There was an absence of cobwebs which suggested that the last cleaning of the attics had been of fairly recent date.

She walked over to the window in each room and looked out, but beyond an extended view of the country around the house, the windows had nothing to offer. She tested the catches. They were rusty, and it did not seem as though the windows could have been opened for some considerable time, certainly not when the rooms had last been cleaned.

The attics did not cover the whole of the floor beneath, but belonged, it seemed, to the older part of the present structure, for the rooms on the opposite side of the house had no attics built over them. The lower roofs could be seen from two of the attic windows. The courtyard could not be seen from any of the upstair windows except the shuttered window on the stairs.

She was about to descend the narrow stairs when she noticed what seemed to be ventilation holes in the partition wall at the top of the staircase. When the attic doors were shut this partition wall was in darkness. She looked back, and saw that one of the doors which she believed she had shut and locked was swinging slowly open.

With a feeling more of interest than of anything approaching alarm, she went back to find out what had happened. She had not anticipated anything in the way of a supernatural occurrence, but she was relieved, all the same, to discover that the trouble was due to a defective lock and did not emanate from the realm of the spirits.

She pushed the door wide open, and went back to examine the air-holes. It was now obvious that they ventilated a large cupboard, or small, unlighted room, on the opposite side of the passage. The door of it had been papered over to match the rest of the decorations of the attic corridor, and again, like the door into the dressing-room on the floor below, would, in the ordinary-way, pass unnoticed. She traced the outline of the door beneath the paper, closed the attic door again, and this time, fastened it securely, and then, with some part of her theory if not proved, at any rate capable of proof, she returned to the first floor and made an exhaustive search.

Nothing further was to be discovered there, however, and she spent the next three-quarters of an hour in checking the plan of the house which formed the only illustration to the little guidebook she had purchased on her previous visit, and in preparing a sketch-plan of her own on which she marked the door with the faulty lock, the position of the two attic cupboards, the blocked-up and papered-over communicating door between the largest bedroom, and the window with the inside shutters and the dressing-room at the top of the stairs.

Her next objective was the courtyard. This was a rectangular strip of garden which had been made almost into a quadrangle by the addition of the newest wing. It was overgrown with tall weeds, the willow-herb flourishing particularly. There was a well at one corner, close to the scullery door. A couple of boards formed the cover. She removed them, peered into the well and then replaced the boards.

Although it was broad daylight, the courtyard looked eerie and desolate. It was silent, too, and the surrounding buildings seemed to shut out the sun. It was curious, she thought, that none of the windows, even of the new buildings, overlooked it. It seemed chilly out there. Mrs. Bradley made a careful exploration, even parting continually the long weeds to make certain that the surface of the courtyard was everywhere the same. This examination yielded nothing.

She left the house before the caretaker returned to it. Then, later in the afternoon, she sought him out, and asked him one or two trivial questions before she put to him the important query suggested by her visit.

"What has become of the well-cover, I wonder?" she said, in the most casual tone she could command.

"Well-cover? It was covered with two planks last time I were here," he responded stupidly. "What do you mean about a well-cover?"

"I shouldn't have thought two planks would have been sufficient to cover so deep a well, and one which has the opening level with the ground," replied Mrs. Bradley. "But, of course, it's no business of mine. One thing, I see that you are able to keep the flap of the cellar staircase screwed down. That's something."

"If any of the visitors brings children, I keeps my eye on things," said the old man. "Anyway, this yere courtyard beant on the reg'lar routine. Nothing to see out here. I've give up most of the garden, too, I 'ave. Just keep the front a bit tidy. I thought maybe some of them it belonged to might pay a jobbing gardener to come in now and again. It's a mort of work for an old fellow like me, and I can't keep upsides with it nohow. Barring the little wife of that poor gentleman as was killed, and she only come the once, I don't believe anybody's took that much interest in doing a bit of spade-work. Seems a shame, like, don't it?"

Mrs. Bradley emphatically dissented from this view, but she did not say so. As soon as she left the haunted house this time she went back to Miss Biddle.

"I'm becoming a nuisance," she remarked, "but there is one thing I want to know, and I don't know of anybody else who can help me. These screamings and knockings that seem to have been heard before the death of Mr. Tom Turney ...?"

"I'never heard them myself," Miss Biddle confessed, "but I know who did, and that's my daily woman. But weren't they heard after the death?"

"What kind of witness would she make? I mean, is she the kind to exaggerate what she heard?"

"Oh, yes, certainly. On the other hand, she certainly did hear something. I put down in my commonplace book what she said at the time, and I attach importance to it because it was the first that anybody heard, it seems, of that part of the hauntings, so that it could not have been the result of hearsay, or owing anything to village gossip."

Mrs. Bradley mentally blessed the commonplace book, of which she had heard on her previous visit, and begged that it might be produced. The entry was not dated—a point not of very great importance, since Cousin Tom's death was referred to, and this fixed the time sufficiently for those circumstances which she suspected that she was investigating.

The entry read: Mrs. Gubb very excited and upset. She says she heard screams and yells from the haunted house as she came past this morning on her way here. The other day the new tenant, a Mr. Turney, fell out of a bedroom window and was killed. Mrs. Gubb says that what with one thing and another, nobody will want to go near that house, even in daylight, soon.

Mrs. Bradley asked permission to make a copy of the entry, and, having made it, autographed a copy of one of her own books at Miss Biddle's deprecating but eager request, departed, went back to the inn, carefully collated such information as she now possessed, heard half a dozen more legends of ancient hauntings from the villagers, and went off again to interview Mrs. Muriel.

"I want you to come back to that house with me, Mrs. Turney," she said. A request couched in such terms was almost bound to be refused, and Mrs. Bradley was not at all surprised to hear Cousin Muriel reply :

"Oh, no, really, really, I couldn't. You don't know what you're asking! I'll tell you anything you like about the house, but I couldn't possibly set foot in it again, and nobody ought to expect it."

As Mrs. Bradley did not expect it she inclined her head sympathetically and added :

"You came to hear of the house through Bella Foxley, and you say that she had recommended houses to you before?"

"Well, yes. She had rather a flair, Tom used to say. She found Hazy for us. You know—that house where two men of the Plague Year walk about and say, "Bring out your dead." Of course, they never did say it while we were there, and so Tom couldn't put much about it in the article he wrote. We only stayed a month, but it was a very interesting old house, and we had a good deal of success with planchette there. Although, I might tell you, I don't really like planchette. It makes me think— it almost makes me believe——"

"Did your husband ask a fee for admission to his séances?"

"Why, how else could we have lived?" asked Cousin Muriel. "He certainly did not get very much for his writing."

"Then—if you don't object to the question—did he never encounter people who were disappointed when the séance, we will say, produced no results?"

"The séances always produced results," responded Muriel. "If it wasn't one thing it would be another. That was what was so wonderful, and rather frightening, really. Tom never had what you might call a barren séance."

"Really?" said Mrs. Bradley, noting down this extraordinary fact.

"Oh, no," said Muriel eagerly. "I don't know whether you've attended many séances, but Tom could induce the spirits. He had the most wonderful powers."

"Oh? So your husband was a medium?"

"No. I was. But I could only work through him. He always said he got wonderful results with me. They used to scare me sometimes, all the same. I mean, you can go too far ... that's what people say."

"Tell me," said Mrs. Bradley after a pause, "did Miss Foxley have mediumistic powers?"

"Bella? Oh, dear no! She was terribly materialistic. She used to sit with us——"

"Always?" asked Mrs. Bradley sharply.

"Well, if she was staying in the house. Not otherwise, of course. Although Tom did say once that when I was in a trance Bella came and spoke. Oh, only her astral body or something, of course. I'm afraid I don't remember all the terms. But, at any rate, she projected herself, it seems——"

"By means of the road or the railway," was Mrs. Bradley's mental note upon this——"

"And appeared. Tom said it was very interesting, and that he telegraphed to the Institution next day to know whether Bella was very ill or even dead. Of course she wasn't either the one or the other, bur they did say, funnily enough, that she'd fallen off her bicycle in the grounds as she was making a quick dash into the village that morning for some shopping that hadn't turned up. She was in a fearful state, and complained about her ankle, although she wouldn't have the doctor to it."

"Strange that a figment of that kind could travel all that way," said Mrs. Bradley.

"Oh, it wasn't all that way," Muriel put in brightly. "It was only about twelve miles as the crow flies, which is the way such things would travel I suppose."

"I don't know" said Mrs. Bradley soberly. "Wouldn't they perhaps be earth-bound to the roads?"

"Even if they were," said Muriel, who seemed oblivious of the purport of these suggestions, "they would only have had to come about seventeen miles, I believe."

"Ah?" said Mrs. Bradley. "And now, about this particular haunted house in which we are interested."

"Oh, nobody appeared there. It was simply a poltergeist," replied her victim.

"In what way?"

"Raps, footsteps, raucous laughter, writing on the walls, bell-ringing, throwing things about, moving objects from one place to another, cold air, lights in windows—that sort of thing."

"How many of the things you have just mentioned took place in the haunted house?" asked Mrs. Bradley, who, in flying hieroglyphics, had taken down the entire list. "Raps?"

"Oh, yes, ever so many times."

"Footsteps?"

"Both light and heavy. Sometimes it sounded like somebody in great boots, sometimes more like stockinged feet. Sometimes they ran, and sometimes they walked, and once they just scuffled about over our heads as though two people were fighting."

"You said raucous laughter. Can you substantiate that?"

"I don't know what you mean, but it sounded more like costermongers.''

"Writing on the walls?"

"Oh, yes. But I cleaned it all off. It wasn't—it wasn't very nice."

"Are the spirits in the habit of being obscene?"

"No, that's the funny part. They're not.^* I mean, they usually write things you can't make any sense out of. I've never known them to be really rude."

^* Apparently a mistake on Muriel's part .... "The rappings answered back with obscenity or blasphemy." Poltergeists. Sacheverell Sitwell. Faber and Faber, June, 1940.

"Did your husband object to having this writing cleaned off the walls?"

"No, he didn't mind once it was photographed. But the photographs looked even more horrid than the actual scribble, so Bella persuaded him to throw the negatives away and destroy the proofs. She said no one would believe they were spirit writings, and anyway they were embarrassing. Which it is quite true, they were."

"Do you remember them?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

"Oh, yes, of course I do, but I wouldn't repeat them to you."

"Write them down, then," said Mrs. Bradley, offering her a notebook and pencil. As Muriel hesitated she added with a cackle, "Don't worry. I expect I've heard worse things from some of my mental patients.... Now let us continue: bell-ringing?"

"Well, no, not at this house. At least—not after Tom cut all the wires. At least, I don't believe so."

"Was there a bell in every room in the house?"

"No, only in some of the rooms. I think there had been bells, but they were all out of order when we got there, but some we had repaired, but I don't remember which."

"I see. Now I know there were things thrown about and things moved, and I know there is a cold draught at one spot in the passage, so I need not ask you about those. What about lights in windows?"

"Yes, those have been seen from the road at times when both Tom and I—and Bella, when she was with us—were all downstairs, and we knew no one else was in the house or could have got in."

"The lights were always from the bedroom windows, then? Did the lights show at the same window each time, or was a different window ever used?"

"Oh, it was always the same window, so far as I know. Of course, people may not always have told us, but we asked them to, as soon as it was known the lights had been seen, because we did not use any of the bedrooms, after that, if they fronted the road. So we knew that if lights were seen it was not any light that we ourselves were using."

"Very interesting," thought Mrs. Bradley, "considering that the hauntings were a source of income."

"When Bella came to live with us," Muriel continued, "it was arranged that we should take it in turns in the evening to go out into the garden and see whether the lights were visible. If they were, then the one outside was to throw gravel at the drawing-room window, and the other two would rush upstairs to investigate."

"Oh? You took it in turns, did you?" said Mrs. Bradley.

"Well, when it came to the point, Bella said she was far too nervous to go tearing upstairs and bursting in on a ghost. She said if she saw one she'd die. So actually she used to be the one to go out into the garden, and Tom and I were the ones who always rushed upstairs."

"I wonder she wasn't afraid of the garden in the dark if she were so very nervous," said Mrs. Bradley.

"Oh, but she was," said Muriel. "She always took a loaded stick out with her—a cosh, she called it. One of those terrible boys had made it for her in the Institution workshop. Tom used to tease her about it, and ask her what good she thought it would be against a ghost, but she said it gave her confidence and she would always take it with her."

"And did you and your husband ever see the lights independently of Miss Foxley?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

"Yes. Twice. But we weren't there so very long without Bella, you know. Of course, she only spent the one week-end there before aunt's death."

"Ah, yes," said Mrs. Bradley. She glanced at her watch. "I must go, I'm afraid, Mrs. Turney. Mý son has booked seats for a revue. Do you like that kind of thing? Some people are so ponderous nowadays. Now in my opinion, the modern revue-approximates more closely to the ancient Greek idea of comedy than serious thinkers would suppose."

Muriel nervously agreed.

The séances, one conducted by amateurs, the other by a famous member of the Society for Psychical Research, continued to have negative results. This, of course, proved nothing, although one, at least, of the sitters, would have been very much surprised at any manifestations.

Mrs. Muriel Turney, invited to the second of the séances, again declined the invitation, stating that she really did not think her nerves would stand it. The medium at the second séance said that her 'control' had been out of temper for some time, and probably would give nothing to the sitters that evening. She then fell into a trance, and the sitters waited for an hour and a half, by which time it was discovered that the medium had passed from her trance into natural sleep. She was gently awakened, and everybody went home or to the inn.

There was, however, one interesting and illuminating occurrence which followed the second séance. Mrs. Bradley made a detailed note of it. The entire house had been locked up and the doors sealed, and the windows, except the one in the séance room, had been sealed also, before the sitters took their places. This was an obvious precaution, and caused no surprise to anybody. The séance was held in the drawing-room, and during the period of silence which followed the beginning of the medium's trance, everybody in the circle was not only watching the medium, but (having been informed of the probable nature of any activity which might occur in this particular house) was alert to any noises which might come from other rooms.

No sounds were heard, but before the other visitors and the medium left the drawing-room, Mrs. Bradley made a thorough exploration of the house. On the wall of the bathroom passage was written in pencil the word Bread. The writing was either that of an illiterate, or else it had been done by a normally right-handed person using the left hand (or vice-versa). It had not been there before the séance began, for Mrs. Bradley, who had sealed up the doors and windows, except for the front door, before the other sitters arrived, had also made a careful search and inspection of all walls and passages.

She mentioned her interesting discovery to no one but her son Ferdinand, who, with Caroline, his wife, had come, at her request, for the séance.

"And what do you make of it, Mother?" he enquired, when the circle was broken up and the other guests had gone.

"What do you?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

"That the house must have a secret entrance, I suppose. But, even if it has, why should anyone bother? Or is it in the contract that people who pay to be allowed to hold séances here must get some return for their money?"

Mrs. Bradley put the question to Mrs. Muriel Turney in a letter, but did not reveal the nature of the 'return.' The teacher of music replied on a postcard:

"Lots of people get nothing. My husband and I were both sensitives."

Mrs. Bradley went to see her again, but did not tell her precisely what had happened.

"Will you allow me to borrow your husband's records of the phenomena?" she asked. Muriel agreed to lend the typescript from which Cousin Tom had worked up his reports of the poltergeist.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Bradley casually, before leaving, "Miss Foxley took no particular interest in spiritualism?"

"It frightened her," replied Cousin Muriel, in emphatic re-affirmation of what she had already said upon this subject. "She says that if she ever sees a ghost it will be someone come to fetch her, and it will mean her death. I've tried to tell her that that's a very old-fashioned idea about ghosts, but she clings to it and can't bear the subject mentioned."

"Ah, but you are speaking now of Miss Tessa, not Miss Bella. But it has to be mentioned, surely, when the house is let for these sittings?"

"No. The caretaker always writes to say that it has been 'requisitioned.' That's the word he has to use."

"Interesting," said Mrs. Bradley. She looked thoughtfully at Muriel. "I thought you said you had not visited Miss Tessa since her sister's suicide?"

"Oh, I haven't, no. I did write to say I would attend the funeral if she wished it, but also said it would probably be painful to me to pay my respects, even my last ones, to Bella. Since then I have not been invited, and, of course, as I am only a relative by marriage, I should not dream of visiting her without an invitation, not even to drop in. I think in-laws make mistakes about that kind of thing. After all, they can't expect to be treated quite like the family, can they? Especially when their husband, like poor Tom, isn't there to go with them or anything."

Mrs. Bradley said that she quite understood, and that she would take very great care of the typescript. She returned to her own house at Wandles Parva, and made diligent comparison of Cousin Tom's notes with Bella's diary, bearing in mind the various types of poltergeist activity which, according to Muriel, had existed in the house. If these had been faked, had Cousin Tom faked them? Had Bella? Tom, apparently, was a fraud, yet the haunted house had a queer sort of reputation.

Again, there was the story that Tom had rented Hazy. Had Bella Foxley nerve enough to perform in that way in a house which had (Mrs. Bradley had read) a very impressive record of supposedly psychic occurrences? For Hazy had been 'written up ' in most of the journals devoted to ghosts and ghost-hunting. True, Bella was probably a murderer, but murderers sometimes suffer from nerves, and many of them are supremely superstitious. Perhaps there had been no manufactured evidence at Hazy. Perhaps it had frightened Cousin Tom.

This part of the business seemed insoluble without more evidence. Mrs. Bradley got out the diary again, and settled down to minute comparisons of facts and dates. With the knowledge she had gained since the case had first intrigued her curiosity, she could not avoid the conclusion that the diary, although it could not be said to incriminate Bella Foxley, did make very plain certain tendencies of thought, and did hint with horrid clarity at certain courses of action which made its genuineness even more suspect than she had supposed when first she read it.

Comparison with the copy of Cousin Tom's journal which was typewritten throughout—even the infrequent and neat corrections having been made on the typewriter—revealed another curious fact. Wherever the diary and the journal covered the same points, they tallied with one another, and the odd thing about this was that the noticeable errors of fact in the diary— errors of fact over which Bella Foxley ought to have made no errors—were repeated in Tom's journal.

Mrs. Bradley returned to her own notes upon the subject, written after she had read the diary and had questioned Eliza Hodge. Of course, the old servant might have forgotten, or deliberately lied about, some of the occurrences which took place about the time of the old lady's death, but, even allowing for this, the extraordinary similarity between the diary and the journal led to an obvious conclusion.

Of course, certain facts in each might be expected to tally; the cause of death, for instance, and the doctor's doubts and fears.

As for the poltergeist phenomena, they also might be expected to reveal themselves similarly to two careful and experienced observers. The fact that they had occurred, according to Cousin Tom's journal, exactly as the diary stated, was not a reason for surprise. Tom's entry for the nineteenth of February, for instance, was :

"Bella has turned up here, and may check the run of phenomena. This would be a great pity, as we have been getting on so wonderfully well until to-day, when there has been nothing much. I talked to Muriel about it, and I am afraid we did not see eye to eye. I believe she is thoroughly alarmed, and would be glad of an end to the manifestations, but John and Elvey were delighted, especially with the music."

"Dear Muriel is sometimes a little nervous about the more noisy manifestations, and I have had to take a strong line with her. All the same, we cannot turn Bella away. The night has been better than the day. Slippered or naked feet have walked past all the doors. This is encouraging, but I have advised the women to keep the doors locked. They think it is a safety measure, but I am interested to know whether this kind can be barred out."

The entry for February 22 also bore out the diary.

"This has been a splendid day," observed the typescript for this date. "We have had various kinds of phenomena of the true poltergeist type. Objects such as a small calendar have been displaced and even projected. Before we retired to bed the entire contents of the kitchen shelves were flung out into the passage. It is most gratifying, but the two women are extremely upset by it. There has been a new outbreak of bell-ringing, too, and the women declare that they cannot stand the noise of this. I shall make the experiment of cutting the wires to-morrow, as I am anxious to know whether the entities we are housing here are dependent upon mechanical aid for producing their effects, or whether their supernormal powers can ring bells which are not connected up."

This covered the diary entry for February 23, and the journal for February 24, like the diary, commented upon the sound of slippered footsteps. For February 25, when the four members of a society for psychical research had visited the house, Tom had typed ecstatically:

"A truly marvellous experience! Mr. W., Lord X., Mr. T. and Mrs. D. were here, and professed themselves delighted with their evening. I was afraid at first that we were going to get nothing at all, but then the noises commenced overhead and, upon going up the front staircase, we saw that all the spare bedroom furniture had been overturned and the electric light flex over the dressing-table was damaged. The lamp and shade were on top of the chest of drawers, and this was on its side in the middle of the room."

Mrs. Bradley cackled, and made a note in her own notebook. It read—if anybody could have deciphered it: "Fingerprints?" She then added, "Two electric lights in the spare room. Flex could have swung in breeze from window if open. Test."

The reference to the mysterious 'something' which walked in the grounds at night was missing from the journal. It had been regarded, for serious purposes, as an old wives' tale by Cousin Tom, Mrs. Bradley surmised. The coach and horses with the headless driver were also not the subject of comment or even mention in the journal.

The flight of Muriel and Bella to the inn was mentioned, and the 'footsteps' were described, under March 4, as 'almost a nuisance now, as they have become so disturbing, and more often run than walk.' There were other references to them on later dates up to and including March 10, and then the wall-writings were mentioned but were not given in detail. Bella's night visit was mentioned, but only perfunctorily. Strangely enough, Cousin Tom made no reference whatsoever to his own fall from the bedroom window. The journal continued :

"After she had gone I found a woman's suspender, a piece of paper which appeared to have been wrapped round some fish, and a good deal of horse manure in the spare room. These manifestations seem to show that the entity is not altogether friendly towards us, but I am in hope that no mischief will ensue, as this type is usually mischievous and does not always mean to be annoying."

Mrs. Bradley returned the journal by registered post. She was deeply and sincerely obliged to Cousin Muriel, she said, for the loan of it. It had cleared up several very doubtful points.

It had, at any rate, cleared up one. The poltergeist was human.

There remained the minor problem of whether to tackle the sister, Miss Tessa, first, or whether to have what Mrs. Bradley described to Ferdinand as 'another go' at the haunted house. She found herself to be slightly in favour of the visit to Miss Foxley. It would be interesting to visit one who had had, it seemed, so great an interest in Bella's death. Mrs. Bradley also hoped (merely to satisfy her own curiosity, for she could not believe that it would affect the investigation very seriously) to deduce which of the two accounts of Tessa's unhappy affairs was the true one, the bigamous marriage or the illegitimate child.

George first drove her through part of the New Forest to the house which Bella Foxley had purchased, and even past the dirty little pond (they afterwards discovered) in which Bella's body had been found. They also passed the village hall in which the inquest had been held. But they had little time to spare, and had too few details of the suicide at their command to do more than take a slight and morbid interest in the locality. Miss Foxley had sold the cottage, however. This was no news to Mrs. Bradley, for the address she had obtained from the caretaker was in Devon.

"Not Cornwall," she thought, remembering one of the entries in the diary. She ordered George to pull up at the cottage. It was still untenanted. Mrs. Bradley amused herself by peering in at the dirty windows, both front and back, by dabbling her hand in a large rain-water butt which was just outside the back door, and by carefully pacing, checking and timing the distance between the cottage and the scum-covered pond.

Whilst she was thus engaged, she discovered that she was the focus of attention (although that was an exaggerated description of the owl-like staring which she encountered as she turned to saunter back to the cottage) of a loose-mouthed, pallid, puffy-faced idiot boy, who proceeded, in an ungainly manner, to follow her to the gate.

He grinned in a sickly, shame-faced, leering manner when she looked at him. Mrs. Bradley leered back.

"Pullen ur aid onder wartur," he said, pointing to the rainwater butt.

"Good heavens!" said Mrs. Bradley, greatly impressed. She walked round to the water-butt, to the great delight of the idiot, and peered into it again.

He repeated his assertion, grinning. Mrs. Bradley gave him a shilling, which he put into the top of his sock, and went back to George, who was waiting impassively in the car.

Still in the broad sunlight of the middle day they came through a white-washed village to the sea, and a few miles further on drove past Miss Foxley's home, and then pulled up, to have a look at it without attracting too much attention.

Chapter Six

THE DEAR DEPARTED

The world's a bubble and the life of man Less than a span; In his conception wretched, from the womb, So to the tomb; Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years With cares and fears. Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

BACON.

IT was rather an extraordinary house to have chosen, thought Mrs. Bradley. Granted that the owner's main object had been to obtain complete privacy, it would have been reasonable enough to choose this white-washed cottage, but from the point of view of one who, presumably, was in hiding from the curiosity of neighbours and possibly that of the police, there was a good deal to be said in favour of a flat in London. This cottage, remote, situated on the edge of a moor and within sound and sight of the Bristol Channel (an old turnpike house, no doubt), and its solitary tenant, would be bound to arouse local interest. Besides, it was the sort of place at which hikers and cyclists were apt to call, demanding teas, or water with which to make tea. The tenant of it could scarcely be said to have chosen the best kind of cover.

Mrs. Bradley, shaking her head, told George to drive on and find a convenient place to park the car at the side of the road, and she herself went up to the door and knocked.

Too bad, she felt, if Miss Foxley should not be at home. But Miss Foxley was at home, and came to the door. Mrs. Bradley recognized her at once from the photographs in the album which Miss Hodge had shown her.

"Yes?" said the owner of the cottage.

"Miss Foxley?" said Mrs. Bradley.

"Yes."

"My name is Bradley. I called to see you about the house which you let to me for some spiritualist ..."

"I suppose you didn't get any results. Well, I'm afraid I can't help that, you know. Come in," said Miss Foxley. She pushed back a moist-looking strand of iron-grey hair and held the door open wider. Mrs. Bradley, apologising, stepped slightly aside and then did up her shoe-lace before she went in. The cottage consisted, it seemed, of two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms. The front door opened directly into the living-room. "Sit down," added Miss Foxley. She dabbed at her chin with a handkerchief specked with tiny red spots. "Been squeezing them out, and made rather a mess," she said. "Have to excuse me, I'm afraid. Not expecting a visitor this morning."

"Mercolized wax," suggested Mrs. Bradley.

"Tried it. Not much good. Martyr to the things. Complexions are God-given," Miss Foxley responded brusquely. "Now, then, about this haunted house. I can't help it, you know. I don't guarantee anything. The spirits won't come near some people. It's just a matter of luck."

"Ah," said Mrs. Bradley, "but I don't say the spirits didn't come near. All I say is that they were the wrong kind of spirits. Not what I expected, and, really, rather alarming."

"Say on," said Miss Foxley. "Are you new to the game?"

"I have never taken much interest in spiritualism," said Mrs. Bradley, deliberately giving the science its old-fashioned name, "but somebody discovered, quite by accident, that people of my colouring almost always have mediumistic powers."

"And you have?"

"Well ..." said Mrs. Bradley deprecatingly.

"You mean you have. Well, go on. What did you see? The headless coachman the villagers talk about?"

"No. I saw two little boys."

"Materialisation of the poltergeist, I should say. I think all poltergeist phenomena must be produced by entities with the mentality of little boys."

"And then I saw a woman," Mrs. Bradley continued. "Do you believe in ghosts?" she suddenly demanded.

"No," replied Miss Foxley, "not in the way you mean. Go on about this woman. My sister, I suppose?"

"She didn't say who she was. She merely said, 'Tell Bella I'll be there.' She repeated this three times, and then we broke up the sitting."

"Well, I don't see how you can tell Bella anything," said Miss Foxley in a practical tone. "Bella—if it means my sister Bella—has been dead for years. Still, I don't discredit what you say. The house belonged to Bella once, you know. I inherited it, along with the rest of her stuff." She paused, and then said briskly, "And now, what the hell are you getting at?"

"I want to know whether you will sell me that house," said Mrs. Bradley.

"Oh?—I see." For some reason she seemed taken aback by this simple statement, and repeated it aloud. "You want to know whether I'll sell you that house."

Mrs. Bradley waited. Miss Foxley, slatternly in a blouse which refused to remain tidy at the waist, and a skirt which revealed that one of her stockings was laddered, brooded, her black brows drawn together, her large and very well-kept hands irritably pushing back her hank of greasy hair. Suddenly her brow cleared.

"How much are you offering?" she demanded.

"I hadn't thought of a price."

"You can have it for—— Look here, why don't you rent it? Then you could give it up when you were tired of experimenting with it."

"So I could," said Mrs. Bradley. "But I don't want to experiment with it. I want to pull it down."

"Pull it down?"

"Yes. I think it is a dangerous house. It is too much like Borley Rectory."

"Never heard of the place. Oh, yes, I have, too. Isn't that the place Cousin Tom used to blether about?"

"There's a book on it," said Mrs. Bradley vaguely. "I believe your sister had read it."

"Poor old Bella! What a rotten life, and what a rotten end! I was fond of her, in a way, you know. Surprised at the felo de se and all that."

"Ah, yes. You identified the body, I believe."

"Sure I identified the body. Nobody else to do it."

"Did you have to go all the way from here?"

"No. On the spot."

"Staying with her?"

"Staying with her? Living with her. She'd got the creeps, and asked me to come for good. Good thing for me I'd got a fool-proof alibi, or I might have found myself in the jug, you know. Looks bad to inherit a couple of thousand through the sudden death of a sister. Don't you think so?"

Mrs. Bradley demurred politely, but Miss Foxley was not to be put off.

"I'll say it does," she continued, with truculent emphasis. "Anyway, the vicar swore to me, so that was all right. At a Mothers' Meeting I was, addressing them on Manners and Morals, or some such tripe. Poor old Bella! She was a deep one, she was. I'd never have put it past her to have choked Aunt Flora for the money. She swore she didn't, but ... I wouldn't have a bet on it with the Recording Angel."

"Then what about Cousin Tom?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

"Tom? Oh, Tom was a goop," replied Miss Foxley roundly. "And as for that ... but there! I never knew her, except by hearsay from Bella."

'Never knew whom?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

"That redundant little wife of his—Muriel."

"Oh, I see. But the inquest went off satisfactorily, didn't it?"

"Did it? Would you say that? After all, they nabbed old Bella for slugging him, didn't they? Not that I think she did that. Aunt Flora, yes. Cousin Tom, no. No point in it, for one thing. I reckon Muriel did it."

"I meant the inquest on your sister."

"Oh, that? Yes, that went off all right. There was plenty of motive for suicide knocking about. Only wanted putting together and re-shuffling. Anonymous letters, general feeling of depression, dark hints to one or two of the villagers she might not live long, the disclosure that she had stood her trial for murder and had expressed remorse (that was my contribution, made privately). Didn't want the reporters nosing around, so that bit never came out at the inquest. Unnecessary, really."

"Were the anonymous letters genuine, do you think?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

"Well, she certainly got 'em. I saw one or two. Pretty stinking. Oh, well!—Oh, and going^* back to the ghosts, didn't you get any wall-writing?"

"Oh, I had overlooked that. Yes," replied Mrs. Bradley. "The word Beads, or something similar. I wasn't interested. It's so easy to get into a house and scribble on the walls. I had it cleaned off."

"I thought you psychists sealed the place up when you were in it? Haven't I read that somewhere? How did anyone come to get in?"

"We did seal up the obvious means of ingress," said Mrs. Bradley carelessly.

"Well, either you slipped up somewhere, or the writing was genuine," said Miss Foxley. "Well, see here. I'll let you know about the house. I'll have to write to my lawyer. Can't keep you any longer now. Got to go out and pull some vegetables and stuff for my dinner. Living the simple life here."

She showed Mrs. Bradley to the door in an uncompromising manner, nodded with grim amiability at parting, and even came on to the road to see her go. A few minutes later, still at her front door, she watched with narrowed eyes as the car drove eastwards.

"Did you get the snapshot, George?" asked Mrs. Bradley.

"Two beauties, madam, I hope. I caught her fairly each time, one full-face and one profile."

"Excellent," replied Mrs. Bradley. "And now, George, we return to the village of Pond, Hampshire, where poor Miss Foxley was drowned."

In order to reach the south shore of the Bristol Channel by the end of the morning, Mrs. Bradley had left Wandles at dawn and was now extremely hungry. She directed George to drive into Taunton for lunch, and as she very much doubted whether there would be an inn at Pond, she decided to spend the night in Bournemouth.

George enjoyed driving, and, having his private reasons for wishing to spend as many hours in Bournemouth as possible, got his employer to her favourite hotel by six, put up the car, washed himself, and went to a restaurant and thence to the entertainment at the Little Theatre.

Mrs. Bradley, who would have preferred to have come more slowly from Taunton through Ilminster, Chard, Crewkerne and Dorchester, ate an excellent dinner at a table which had been found for her by the head waiter, an acquaintance of many years' standing, and after dinner strolled along the front before she went up to her room.

George had instructions to bring the car round at half-past nine next morning, but, to his delight, the order was countermanded by half past-eight, and he received instructions to spend the day exactly as he pleased, as his employer proposed to go to Christchurch to visit the Priory, and would take the bus.

George hired a bathing suit and a towel, and went for a swim. Then he called in at a pleasant bar for a drink. After that he sat in a deck chair on the front. He wore the grey flannel suit he always carried as one of the 'spares' in the car, put on his scarlet beret (a regrettable form of headgear of which, in justice to him, it must be recorded that he wore it only at the seaside and out of sight of Mrs. Bradley), and smoked cigarettes. At half-past twelve he went to a restaurant for lunch, and by two was on the front again, this time to play on the putting course and subsequently to walk on the pier. He had another swim before tea, and listened to the band in the evening.

Mrs. Bradley took the bus along the Boscombe Road as far as Southbourne. From there she walked over Hengistbury Head, was ferried across to Mudeford with a boat-load of other people, caught another bus into Christchurch, visited the Priory, inspected an antique dealer's stock, bought a large knife which she would not permit the dealer to wrap up, and caused a certain amount of sensation by lunching with the weapon beside her plate.

After lunch she went a pleasant little trip to Mudeford and back by river launch down to the mouth of the Stour, had shrimps and watercress for tea, and returned by bus to Bournemouth at half-past six. She dined at a quarter to eight, but did not go out again, for while she was still at dinner, having just eaten her fish, a message arrived from George.

"She is here, madam, but does not know we are," George had written. Mrs. Bradley cackled. She had said nothing to him of the reason for her change of plan when she had countermanded the order for the car. She wrote on the bottom of his piece of paper, underneath his message :

"Drive the car after dark into Poole, and see that you get a lock-up garage. We shall be staying in Bournemouth another two or three days."

She herself remained in the hotel that evening and all the next day. She had no fear that Miss Foxley would recognize George. She herself was the danger. George in his uniform and leggings was like any other stocky, superhuman chauffeur. In his flannel suit and little red beret, which, unbeknown to its owner, she had seen on his head several times, he was, in her view, like nothing on on earth. But then, red was not her favourite colour, particularly that shade of it referred to by Mr. Wooster as a fairly brightish scarlet. George, in his tomato-like crown, might, and did, attract a certain amount of notice, but he was not in the least likely to be connected in the mind of anyone who had only set eyes on him for a brief space of time, and at a distance, and at the wheel of a car, with Mrs. Bradley's sedate and respectable servant.

They had left Miss Foxley at her toll-house on Tuesday morning. On Friday morning George produced for Mrs. Bradley's inspection the developed and printed snapshots.

"Excellent, George," said Mrs. Bradley. "Get some enlargements postcard size, and then I think the hunt will be up."

"It will be all up, madam," replied George, "if she gets on our track before we've got all our proofs."

"The photographs should set the ball rolling, anyhow," said Mrs. Bradley. "I wonder whether she will have the hardihood to go to Pond to look for us."

"I shouldn't be surprised, madam, if she'd been. She hired a car yesterday and was driven in the right direction."

"Pity you couldn't have followed her," his employer suggested. George looked wounded.

"I've done better, madam, I fancy. I'm in touch with the bloke—chap—garage-proprietor who drove her. What's more, he did all the asking, I shouldn't wonder. I'll get on to him this afternoon, if he hasn't got a job on, and find out where they went and what they did. If he has got a job on, it will have to be this evening."

"Excellent," said Mrs. Bradley. Miss Foxley, it transpired, had gone to Pond. She had affected to take some interest in the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, then they had come back across Beaulieu Heath to Brockenhurst, and so, by way of secondary roads, to Pond. There the driver had been asked to enquire whether a car answering to the description of Mrs. Bradley's— "pretty fair description, too, madam, according to what this chap said, but she hadn't been able to spot our number-plates" —had been seen in the neighbourhood. The occupants also had been described. "The car was referred to as 'chauffeur-driven,' madam," said George, "but she must have described you very carefully, very carefully indeed."

Mrs. Bradley cackled, but did not ask for a repetition of the description. She fancied that it might embarrass George to give it. She merely said :

"Strange that so observant a lady did not learn our number-plates by heart, George, was it not?"

George would not permit himself to wink at his employer, but his left eyelid trembled slightly.

"Perhaps not so very strange, madam," he replied.

"I see," said Mrs. Bradley. "Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon."

George assented, but did not know, either then or afterwards, whether his employer referred to himself, herself, or the painstaking and suspicious Miss Foxley, or whether the proverb was intended as a compliment or a reproach.

On the Saturday morning George was absent. At one o'clock, however, Mrs. Bradley was called away from the table to take a telephone call.

"I am in Minehead, madam, having come here by motorcycle," said George. "The lady returned home by hired car, leaving at eight-thirty this morning, and the hired car is returning to Bournemouth now. There is no possible train back to you until after four o'clock this afternoon, so if you thought of visiting Pond without fear of disturbance ..."

"Thank you very much, George. I will go at once," said Mrs. Bradley. Go she did, leaving her lunch unfinished, to the great grief of the head-waiter, who had personally supervised her choice. She took a taxi into Poole, retrieved the car—George having given up to her the key of the garage and the ignition key on the previous night—and drove to Pond by way of Christ-church and Milton, the most direct route she could find.

She arrived in the village before two, and drove straight to the church. She did not know how much time she had at her disposal, but the grave she sought was in a far corner of the churchyard, and she found it easily. Miss Foxley had done her sister proud, Mrs. Bradley considered. A headstone of Purbeck marble inscribed with large clear lettering indicated that Bella Foxley, aged forty-five years, was at rest, and added a pious expectation that she was also at peace.

"Curious," said Mrs. Bradley aloud. If the diary were correct, Bella Foxley at the time of her death must have been at least forty-eight, and her sister Tessa somewhat older. She shook her head in admonitory fashion at the tombstone, and walked along a gravel path to a small wicket gate which led to the vicarage.

There was tennis going on on the vicarage lawn. In fact, it seemed that some kind of fête or a garden party was in progress. The vicar, a handsome, florid man, with curly hair going grey, a round, cheerful face and a grey alpaca jacket with grey flannel trousers, was among what appeared to be the female nobility and gentry of the place, handing cups of coffee. The remains of a cold collation set out on trestle tables in the shade, and now being taken away and generally cleared up by what Mrs. Bradley correctly assumed to be the vicar's wife, daughters and maidservants, explained the presence of the coffee, and just as Mrs. Bradley left the path to make her way across the lawn a small band of musicians carrying those instruments usually associated with the classical kinds of jazz, made its appearance at the front gate which led from the road.

"Heavens!" thought Mrs. Bradley. "Just my luck to arrive in the middle of a jamboree."

By this time, needless to say, she had been seen. There was proceeding a swift conference between the vicar and his wife. The latter then advanced, as it were, to the fray.

"Were you looking for anybody?" she asked.

"Well, I particularly wanted to speak to the vicar, but I am afraid I've come at an inconvenient time," said Mrs. Bradley, making polite motions of backing out again.

"Oh, well, if it is very important ..." said the vicar's wife, adding gently, "I don't think we know you, do we?"

"Lor' lumme, mother. I do!" exclaimed a young man who had come leaping across a couple of flower beds. "It's Carey Lestrange's Aunt Adela, or I'm a Hottentot."

He seized Mrs. Bradley's yellow claw and pump-handled it ecstatically. Mrs. Bradley, who had met a good many of her favourite nephew's friends, very easily placed this one.

"You must be Ronald," she said. The young man enthusiastically agreed that this was so, and informed his mother that he and Aunt Adela had knocked 'em cold on Boatrace Night by performing, with a crowd of assorted Londoners, the community dance known as the Lambeth Walk, this up the Haymarket at a quarter to twelve or thereabouts.

"And but that she can run like a deer, and has admission to the brightest little speak-easy I ever expect to attend," concluded the young man, this time on a rare, lyrical note, "we should have been up before the beaks in the morning as sure as eggs. Old Squiffy was, and received a fortnight without the option for taking a policeman's boots off."

Mrs. Bradley, aware that this panegyric was not having, from her point of view, too gracious an effect on Ronald's mother, was relieved to see that the vicar was approaching. Ronald, catching her eye, hastily informed his mother that he had been talking rot, as usual, presented Mrs. Bradley formally, and, when his father had been introduced, observed that he would leave them together, as he was required to make up a four at tennis.

"A very charming, high-spirited boy," said Mrs. Bradley in obituary tones. "My nephew Carey, whom he mentioned, is very fond of him."

"Carey? Then you must be—— Good heavens, Millicent!" said the vicar, "this is Mrs. Bradley. You know, I've often talked about her. Don't you remember that Carey was telling us about some of her cases when he was here? Do come along and have some coffee, Mrs. Bradley. Have you had lunch?"

Mrs. Bradley said that she had.

"That's fine," said the Vicar, absent-mindedly. He walked beside her to the deck-chairs. "Don't tell me we have a murderer in Pond," he added, pleased at his own joke.

"Possibly," Mrs. Bradley replied.

"Ah, poor Bella Foxley, you mean? I'm afraid we can hardly say so, though, can we? She was acquitted, you know. Poor soul! Poor soul! Such a wretched end, and hounded to it, one might almost say."

"Oh, no, one might not," replied Mrs. Bradley firmly. "That's why I'm here. I need not trouble you very much," she added, "but I want to know, first, who this is."

She took out one of George's snapshots of Miss Foxley. The vicar examined it carefully, almost as though he were handling Exhibit A at a trial for murder; as, indeed, thought Mrs. Bradley, he probably was.

"This, to the best of my knowledge, recollection, and belief," he said, "is Miss Tessa Foxley."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Bradley. "Do you mind writing that opinion on the back of the snapshot and signing your name?"

"Not at all," replied the vicar. "My pen ..." Mrs. Bradley produced her own, and watched, with a grimness strange to see upon her dread yet, on the whole, good-humoured countenance, whilst he wrote, neatly, and, to her great comfort and admiration, quite legibly, the name Tessa Foxley, and signed his own name underneath.

"I should, perhaps, add the date?" he suggested.

"An excellent idea," said Mrs. Bradley cordially. She had been going to suggest this herself. The vicar added the date, and handed the snapshot back.

"Now," said Mrs. Bradley, "I wonder whether you would be kind enough to describe Miss Bella Foxley?"

"The only thing that I remember is that she had fair hair and rather a nice complexion," said the vicar. "I should not have noticed the complexion, but for the fact that it was so different from that of her sister. One could not help remarking the difference, for one scarcely ever saw one without the other. They were very lonely, poor souls. Both had had their troubles, I understand. To tell the truth, I sometimes thought Miss Bella's troubles had unhinged her."

"When did Miss Tessa Foxley come here to join her sister?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

"Oh, she didn't," the vicar answered. "The house was taken by Miss Tessa, who thereupon sent an invitation to Miss Bella to come and join her. She told me all about her sister's dreadful ordeal, said what a mercy it was no newspaper photographs were taken, and begged that we would never mention it to her sister, as it had left her very nervous and depressed. She even asked us not to disclose either of their Christian names. As a matter of fact, it was not until Miss Bella's dreadful end that anybody in the village except myself and my dear wife knew who they were, I believe."

"They kept their surname, I suppose? They did not go under a false name to the tradespeople, for instance?"

"No. And when they were together they called one another Flossie and Dossie—childhood appellations, I imagine."

"Did they seem to hit it off? No quarrels, for instance?"

"No, I am sure there were no quarrels."

"Did you ever have speech with Miss Bella when Miss Tessa wasn't there?"

"Never. But I several times spoke to Miss Tessa by herself. She told me how extremely good her sister had been to her. It seems that a wealthy aunt left all her money to Miss Bella, and that she shared everything with Miss Tessa. Then, of course, upon Miss Bella's death, it all came to Miss Tessa, and she moved away. She moved very soon after the funeral. She said she would have wished to stay on in the village, and mentioned our kindness—although I'm afraid I cannot claim that we ever did very much except to keep their little secrets—the trial, you know, and the Christian names, and so forth—and, of course, my dear wife and I used to visit them occasionally, but really a good deal of the kindness was on the other side. We never asked for a subscription in vain, for instance, at that house, and Miss Tessa was an excellent stand-by if we wanted a talk in the village hall or at a Mothers' Meeting. She was also a most excellent cook. Poor Miss Bella couldn't cook at all."

"Really?" said Mrs. Bradley. "Wasn't Miss Tessa at a Mothers' Meeting when her sister ...?"

"Very distressing," said the vicar. "Very distressing indeed. I know that she blamed herself very much. Had she been with her sister, she said, it would never have happened. The meeting was at a quarter-past two, you see, and she came back here to tea. She was here when the news was brought to her. Terribly distressing."

"Have you the same doctor now?" asked Mrs. Bradley; and when the vicar replied that they had, and that his name was Sandys, she told him that he had been more than helpful. "All the same, I'm not at all sure you haven't laid yourself open to a charge of having been accessory before the fact," she added.

"Before the fact?" said the vicar, puzzled.

"Of murder," said Mrs. Bradley. She cackled to see the expression upon his round and amiable face, accepted an invitation to return and take tea at the vicarage, and went off to find the doctor's house. Characteristically, she had not asked where it was, and, characteristically, she found it within five minutes.

"You seem to have been enjoying yourself, mother," said Ferdinand, somewhat austerely. "What the devil have you been up to?"

"Looking at Item one pond, Item one cottage, Item one toll house, Item one murderess, mark of interrogation, as our friend Stainless Stephen would say. Not to speak of interviewing a clam of a doctor, an expansive and genial vicar, and the murderess, question-mark, aforesaid," replied his mother, looking very pleased with herself. Ferdinand, who had been looming over her, sat down on the arm of a chair.

"Not there, dear child. You're too heavy for my furniture," suggested his mother. Ferdinand removed his thirteen stone to the seat of the chair without comment and looked across at her. His expression had altered considerably.

"Are you pulling my leg, Mother?"

"No, child. I've found Bella Foxley."

"Then who was it committed suicide?"

"Well, not Bella."

"The sister ...?"

"Murdered, possibly. If so, she was held head-downward in the rain-water butt outside the woodshed of their cottage in the village of Pond, transported to the pond at Pond, left there to be found by any who would, and the rest abandoned to Fate and the crass stupidity of a coroner who wouldn't believe that what the village idiot said was evidence."

"What did the village idiot say?"

"He said that it was the rain-water washed her cheeks so white."

"I seem to have heard that before."

"Yes, I have transposed his rude rustic remark into the key of the poetic."

"You couldn't take that statement as evidence, coming from such a source."

"You could investigate it, though," said Mrs. Bradley. "Instead of that, the boy was told not to waste the time of the court."

"When is all this supposed to have happened?"

"Well, the doctor put the time of death at between noon and three o'clock. She wasn't found until almost dusk. It was winter, too, which gives the idiot boy's evidence all the more importance. Whenever you would choose to wash yourself in the rain-water butt, you would hardly do so in November, I imagine. Bella must have drowned Tessa, gone straight to the Mothers' Meeting, and then had tea at the vicarage."

"But why should she kill her sister?"

"That remains to be seen. Why should she kill Cousin Tom? We know why she may have killed the old aunt."

"You'll never prove a word of it, Mother."

"Probably not," said Mrs. Bradley, in such tones of self-satisfaction that her son lifted his black brows and grinned.

"Something up your sleeve," he announced.

Mrs. Bradley by this time had the enlargements of the snapshots.

"Ask your friend Pratt to dinner," she observed. "You see this woman?"

"Who is she?"

"That," said Mrs. Bradley, "is for Mr. Pratt to say."

Mr. Pratt, confronted with both snapshot and enlargement, did not hesitate.

"If it was ten years younger—well, say, five ..."

"Say six, and you'll be about right," interposed Mrs. Bradley. Pratt looked at her out of heavily lidded eyes.

"I should say it was Bella Foxley," he concluded. Mrs. Bradley produced the snapshot which the vicar had signed and dated.

"And this?" she said, presenting it so that the ex-journalist saw the photograph.

"The same, isn't it? Looks like the same snap to me."

"It is," said Mrs. Bradley. "And the man who developed the negative can swear to the date. That is arranged. Now read what is here." She turned the snapshot over.

"But the fellow can't be right, unless the two of them were identical twins," said Mr. Pratt.

"They were not in the least alike," said Mrs. Bradley gently, "and neither were they twins."

She then explained the circumstances under which the photographs had been taken, and then produced George's profile view of Miss Foxley.

"Oh, well, that one I'd swear to. It's the view I mostly saw of her in court," declared Mr. Pratt.

"You've got something there, Mother," said Ferdinand.

"Of course she has," said Caroline, now Mrs. Bradley's firm adherent. A diversion was caused at this point by Derek, who appeared to say good night, this little formality being observed on all family and what may be referred to as "semi-guest" occasions.

"My mascot," said Mrs. Bradley, presenting him, to his great delight, with ten shillings. "This is the person who found the diary and put us all on the track, Mr. Pratt."

"Oh, Gran!" said Derek, wriggling in a pleased manner. His face became even more radiant. "What's more, I got the prize. Did you know?" he said.

There was another source of confirmatory evidence of identity in Eliza Hodge, Mrs. Bradley reflected. Then, the real work would begin.

On the Thursday following her departure from Bournemouth and Pond for Wandles Parva she received a letter, signed Tessa Foxley, refusing her offer for the house. She could not bear, Miss Foxley said, the thought of having so interesting a place pulled down. She agreed that it might be dangerous, but added that 'the psychic people would know what to do about that.'

There was nothing for it but to find her another purchaser, thought Mrs. Bradley. Nothing could be done in that house unless she had complete possession of it. She wrote back, undertaking not to pull down the house, but demanding permission to have it exorcised if it became her property. She added, and underlined the words, that she did not see that there could be any objection to that."

Miss Foxley wrote back, refusing to sell. The interesting thing was that neither of her letters bore the very slightest resemblance, either in style or handwriting, to the diary.

"Very pretty," said Mrs. Bradley, and sought another interview with Eliza Hodge. The good old woman was pleased to see her.

"I wondered what you were at, madam, spending your money renting my house like this, and never coming back to live in it," she said.

"I've had a good deal of business to attend to," Mrs. Bradley replied, "and doubt very much whether I shall be able to settle down here for any length of time, after all. Did any of the boys turn up?"

"Ah, they did, with one of the masters, a very pleasant young fellow. Got them well in hand, too. I told him they could have the run of the garden, if they liked, but he only has 'em gather the flowers and the raspberries like under his eye. Tried their hand at jam-making, I declare, they did, with me to tell 'em what to do. Made a fair hand at it, too, and pleased as Punch with it, time they got it into pots. Laugh! I thought I should have died, to see boys so solemn-like over picking the fruit and then picking it over, and stirring the pans and all that. Oh, dear! It lasted me for days!"

"I suppose it reminded you of the days when Miss Foxley was housekeeper at the Institution," said Mrs. Bradley.

"No, it didn't, as a matter of fact, madam. And, of course, they did wring the neck of one of Mr. Smart's fowls and had a picnic with it over on the common. Still, they paid up, because the master stopped it out of their pocket-money he said you said they was to have, and Smart charged ten shillings although that old hen she certainly wasn't worth a penny more than three and sixpence. The boys told Smart so, too, when they went to pay him, but he only winked at the master and said honesty was the best policy, and they could have bought the chicken for three and six if they'd a-wanted, but being they thought fit to steal it, why then, they must pay for their fun. There was some talk of them waylaying him and setting on him, I believe, but he goes about now with a dog-whip, and I don't think even the boldest fancies the look of him much. 'Young 'ounds,' he says, looking 'em in the eye the first time he met 'em, 'has to be learned their manners.' I think he's got the measure of them, madam, but I don't think he ought to have took all of ten shillings for the fowl."

Mrs. Bradley listened to this artless tale with deep attention, and then resumed her own theme along the lines laid down by Miss Hodge.

"In Miss Bella's time I doubt whether they would have had a chance to help with the cooking," she observed. "After all, you are a good enough cook, I suppose, to be able to give the right sort of help to amateurs, but a poor cook like Miss Bella ..."

"Miss Bella? She could cook something lovely, madam!"

"I thought that was Miss Tessa," said Mrs. Bradley.

"Oh, no, madam. Miss Bella had got all her diplomas and certificates. There wasn't anything she couldn't cook. Miss Tessa stopped short at toffee, and, it might be, boiling a potato, although even then you might get either potato soup or potato marbles, just according to how they happened to turn out. You'd have thought she was the cook, she was that nice, fair, clear colouring and complexion, but Miss Bella, for all her spotty face, was the one. She used to say she'd have got on better in service as a private cook than at anything, only it seemed a waste of her other education."

"But, surely," said Mrs. Bradley, "the vicar in the village where she was living after her trial couldn't have been mistaken? This is the one he declared was the cook, and this he also declared was Miss Tessa."

She produced the snapshot and also the enlargement of it. Eliza Hodge wiped her fingers upon her apron and took the photographs. Then she turned them over, but Mrs. Bradley had not given her the one which carried the vicar's signature.

"He must have got it quite wrong, madam," she said. "This is Miss Bella to the life, except she looks that much older. Did she age all that much at the trial, madam?"

"No, not at the trial," said Mrs. Bradley. "Would you be prepared to declare on oath that that is a photograph of Miss Bella?"

"On oath, madam? In court, do you mean? I should think we've had enough of courts, what with two of those dreadful inquests, and then Miss Bella's trial."

"Well, I mean, are you perfectly certain it is a photograph of Miss Bella? Are you so certain that you could not be persuaded otherwise, even by someone really very clever at persuading people? A lawyer, let us say."

"Why, of course I am," said the old servant stoutly.

"And no one could get you to declare that it was Miss Tessa?"

"It's nothing in the world like Miss Tessa. Have you forgot them photos in the album up at the house?"

"No. That's why I thought the vicar must be mistaken," said Mrs. Bradley. "Did Miss Bella and Miss Tessa have nicknames for one another, do you know?"

"Not that I know of. Short names, Bell and Tess, when they were younger, before Miss Tessa fell out with the mistress, like, and cut herself out of the money."

"They didn't call one another Flossie and Dossie?"

"Good gracious, no, madam! Sounds more like a couple of barmaids, or something not even respectable!"

Mrs. Bradley agreed, and, to her horror, dreamed about rainwater butts.

Chapter Seven

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

"Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe In remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night That the graves all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the church-way paths to glide...."

SHAKESPEARE.

THREE days later Mrs. Bradley, to her surprise, received a letter from Miss Foxley advising her that she might rent the house for a week, if she so desired, but not for longer as 'it kept other visitors away.'

Mrs. Bradley wrote off a brief acceptance, and as the amount of the rent was mentioned she enclosed it, received a formal receipt by return of post, telephoned a number of interested people including her son Ferdinand and Mr. Pratt, and took up her week's tenancy of the haunted house on the following Saturday afternoon.

Altogether she had ten people in the house, but three of them were not at first seen except by Mrs. Bradley herself and by one another.

The other seven consisted of Ferdinand and Caroline, a Roman Catholic priest named Conlan, the Warden of the Institution, Mr. Pratt, a fellow-journalist named Carris (a man particularly interested in poltergeist phenomena) and Mrs. Bradley. The unknown three were two boys from the Institution who had come to the haunted house direct from Mrs. Bradley's own care, for they had just concluded their week's summer holiday at the house rented from Eliza Hodge, and the young instructor who had come down in charge of the party. These three were already at the haunted house when the party arrived, and had 'gone to ground' as Mrs. Bradley expressed it with some accuracy. Father Conlan did not put in an appearance until the Monday morning, and he left on the Tuesday evening with Ferdinand and Caroline. The journalists left on the Thursday morning. On the Thursday evening the two boys and their instructor returned to Miss Hodge's house, and by the Friday morning no one was left except Mrs. Bradley herself, but she had in her possession ten interesting documents, duly signed and dated which she was able, later on, to hand over to the police. Ferdinand and Mr. Pratt returned to the haunted house, in mystified response to Mrs. Bradley's further invitation, on the Friday afternoon.

The first séance was held on the Monday evening, and before the guests settled down in the library, which opened on the left of the hall as one entered the house, Mrs. Bradley earnestly requested them to make a thorough exploration to convince themselves that no unauthorised person and no 'trick' apparatus was to be found.

The guests, who had assembled much in the spirit of children attending a party, gleefully explored the whole house and then, except for the tiny pantry window, which they forgot, secured with adhesive tape all the entrances. Then they assembled with their hostess in the library and it was suggested by Caroline that they might have the windows open. A vote was taken upon this proposal and it was agreed to in view of the fact that seven people in the fair-sized but not particularly large room would soon produce a stuffy atmosphere, and that they were all witnesses of one another's actions.

The séance was almost ludicrously successful. Scarcely had the circle settled down—in the most informal manner, incidentally, grouped as the sitters pleased about the room, everyone talking, reading, smoking or, in the case of Mr. Pratt's friend Mr. Carris, playing Patience—when everyone was electrified by the sudden ringing of bells.

Mrs. Bradley had had the bell wires repaired, and every separate member of the party had either tested the bells or watched and listened whilst other people tested them.

The reaction, after the first shock, was disciplined and intelligent. Those who had agreed to do so—Ferdinand, Mrs. Bradley, Mr. Carris, and Father Conlan—went out of the room and made a concerted tour of the house. They went first to the servants' quarters, where the indicator was still vibrating. Each investigator had been provided with a small notebook in which he or she was to record the phenomena, if any, and his or her own reactions to them.

A written entry was duly made by everyone, and by the side of it everyone unhesitatingly wrote Faked. Two of the company, Caroline and the priest, also wrote, "But I don't see how," and "Inexplicable, however," respectively. Ferdinand added to his verdict the rider: "I would have said Genuine if all the bells had been rung, but the poltergeist seems to have avoided coming too near to where we were, in case we heard him moving about. The bells in the hall and in the room where we had been sitting and in the bedroom over this séance room did not ring."

The party returned to the room, and nothing more happened for about an hour. Then came a crash, followed by smaller tumbling noises, and the party, all this time, running out into the hall, beheld parts of a bedstead, three chairs, a candlestick and five metal trays lying on the floor at the foot of the staircase.

The company, not as well-controlled this time, went bounding upstairs. Nothing could be seen, heard, or in any way discovered, although every bedroom and every attic was searched. Two earnest seekers after truth even discovered the attic cupboard which had the airholes, but, so far as they could tell, it was empty and, as Caroline expressed it, innocent.

Opinions in the various notebooks varied on the subject of this second phenomenon. The majority wrote to the effect that they supposed the furniture had been thrown downstairs by human and not by super-human agency, but two of these confessed that they could not see how it had been done. Ferdinand wrote that he thought he had the glimmering of an idea of the method, and Mr. Pratt wrote: "I think I know where they hid, but I cannot see why we did not get them on the back stairs." The priest wrote: "This is trickery, but it is cleverly done and I cannot determine the method. There must be a cellar."

Caroline and Mr. Carris wrote that, failing any feasible explanation, they considered the phenomenon genuine, and Caroline added with her usual naïveté: "I don't think I should like to sleep here alone."

None of the party slept there except the young instructor and his charges, but where they slept remained as secret as did the fact of their existence. The rest of the party spent the night at the inn, in accordance with a previous arrangement, although Mr. Carris demurred.

All day Tuesday the phenomena continued at irregular intervals, and in the evening, when it was dusk, and Ferdinand, Caroline, and Father Conlan were about to take their departure, Mrs. Bradley summoned everyone else to the dining-room and requested them to accompany the three to the gate.

"I will wave to you all from the window of the spare bedroom, the one from which Cousin Tom is supposed to have fallen," she said. Ferdinand, suspecting that some more trickery was toward, glanced at her and raised his eyebrows.

"It's all right," said his mother. "I shall not fall out of the window."

When the party was out on the gravel drive they turned to look up at the first floor. There was Mrs. Bradley waving from one of the windows, and behind her could be seen distinctly the outline of a shadowy man.

The priest began to run back, but Ferdinand caught his arm and reassured him. When the other three returned to the house, Mrs. Bradley was in the hall to meet them.

The two journalists made for the stairs, but, carefully though they searched, there was no one to be found in the house except the people for whom they could account.

"Illusion?" asked Mr. Pratt.

"Oh, no, there was someone with me," said Mrs. Bradley. "What's more, he and his confederates are still in the house."

At these words the journalists, assisted by the Warden, who had been an interested but uncommunicative observer of the phenomena so far witnessed in the house, made a still more thorough search. The journalists came to the conclusion, after some trouble and a considerable expenditure of electricity, that the ventilated cupboard at the top of the attic stairs had nothing to conceal, and the Warden found that there was a communicating door between the chief bedroom and the room adjoining. Mrs. Bradley sat downstairs in the dining-room placidly knitting a shapeless length of mauve wool, adding (apparently as the fancy took her, for she seemed to be following no particular pattern) touches of grey and shrimp-pink, and blandly received reports as they came in. Occasionally she went to the window and stared out. There was never anything to be seen except the weedy drive and the gloomy trees. It was a disconcerting house, in more senses than one.

The searchers did not give up until a quarter to ten, when they, with their hostess, went along to the village for their nightcaps and to their beds. Next day they resumed their labours, and Mrs. Bradley thought at One point that the mystery was about to be solved by Mr. Carris, who stood for nearly a quarter of an hour in the grass-grown courtyard, inspecting it from every angle and sometimes gazing down into the well. Although he had thus the first clue in his hands, he did not follow it up, but merely remarked that wells should be covered in, and that this one, so near the scullery door, was particularly dangerous.

Mr. Pratt found the second clue, but, lacking the first, made nothing of his discovery. He merely remarked to Mrs. Bradley that it seemed as though the foundations of the house might be older than its superstructure, an intelligent conclusion with which she gravely agreed. Not to be outdone by his companions, yet equally unable to apply his information, since neither of the others had thought it worth while to follow up their own discoveries, the Warden observed that it was odd to find no door at the top and bottom of the servants' staircase in a house of that period, especially as close inspection of the walls convinced him that such doors had originally been in position. He supposed they had been taken away for convenience by later owners, but he thought this made the house draughty.

During that afternoon, when the three, tired out by their exertions and slightly bored by the apparent fruitlessness of them, had given up exploring the house, the phenomena began again. Besides the usual destructiveness and noise, the watchers were greatly interested to discover some fresh markings on the walls. Some of these were mere random strokes and loops, but the word 'blimey' and two unprintable epithets were also among the exhibits.

The three men owned that they were puzzled by this new manifestation, but the Warden remarked that it seemed 'quite like home ' to find that kind of thing scribbled on walls. At this artless remark Mrs. Bradley grimaced, but she did not reply to it, nor indicate to the guests in any way that, among them, they now had the key to all the manifestations in their hands.

When night approached, all three (having sounded one another on the subject) asked permission to remain in the house for the night. She consented, and, having anticipated such a request, produced food and drink from the larder.

After supper it was agreed that Mrs. Bradley and Mr. Carris, who had not been known to one another before the visit, should keep the watch from midnight until half-past two, and the others, who were also strangers to one another, should take over at the end of the first watch and remain on guard until five. Collusion between the watchers would thus be extremely unlikely. Incidentally (as she learned later), Mr. Carris was told to keep as strict an eye upon Mrs. Bradley and her doings as on the ghosts and their performances.

The couples had drawn for watches, and it was agreed that no one should hunt alone. Mrs. Bradley and Carris, having drawn the first watch, saw the others go up to 'bed'—in this case into the bedroom in which Mrs. Bradley had been attended, as all could witness, by the shadowy presence—and then settled down, at Carris' request, in the dining-room. At the end of ten minutes, however, he further suggested that they should not restrict themselves to one guardroom, but should move from room to room about the house, both upstairs and down, at varying intervals, keeping together, but otherwise policing the place as carefully as they could. Mrs. Bradley grinned, and agreed. But, often though they changed their headquarters, the 'ghosts' were nippier still. Whenever they had left the dining-room or drawing-room unattended, and were upstairs, they would find, upon their return, that one or more objects in that room had been displaced during their absence. If they merely moved from one of these rooms to the other, however, Carris noted that nothing in the empty room was touched. It was clear that the whole thing was trickery and depended largely upon timing. Once or twice Garris felt, he afterwards observed, as though he were on the track, for doors slammed ahead of him, and, in following up the sounds, he thought he could hear light scurrying footsteps. They always remained ahead of him, however, except on one occasion, when he was passing along the kitchen passage, on his way back from the scullery to make sure that the door to the courtyard was still sealed. It was still sealed, yet he heard footsteps behind him as he began to walk back towards the hall.

Mrs. Bradley contented herself with remaining close beside or just behind him. Several times he leapt round on her, but there was never anything in her bearing or actions which gave indication that she was a prime mover, or even an assistant, in the trickery which his intelligence told him was being practised, and on the occasion just referred to he turned and darted back, forgot two steps which led down into the kitchen, took a toss, heard a slight laugh, but found no one.

Whilst he and Mrs. Bradley were in the spare room a frog jumped with the most startling suddenness out of one of the corners, and sat there, with pulsating throat and steady little eyes, regarding them with what appeared to be sedate amusement.

"One ought to be able to relate that frog to the well, I suppose," said Carris. "It did have steps, so I suppose the frog could get up to the courtyard ... but how upstairs to this room ... unless someone brought him?"

The other two watchers had a quiet time until just before five. But at ten minutes to the hour, when their spell of duty was supposed to end, they were aroused from their sleepy boredom by a succession of loud knocks on the wall. They were in the drawing-room, which was the most comfortably furnished of the downstair rooms, and as soon as they heard the knocking they rushed out into the hall. As nothing was to be seen, they examined the seals of the front door, found that they were still intact, and made for the back of the house.

But for their compact, Pratt said afterwards, he himself would have made for the landing above, but as the Warden ran down the hall towards the passage leading to the kitchen and the scullery, he himself was bound to follow. They went as far as the scullery door, proved that it, too, was still sealed, and, coming back slowly, examining the passage walls and the dining-room as they came, discovered more scribbles.

Sucked-in was scrawled in one place, and Silly bastards in another. They went up by the front stairs and down by the back stairs, opening every door they came to and waking Carris, who was lying on the spare-room bed. Mrs. Bradley, in an armchair, was already awake, but her wrist was secured to his by a length of string, to ensure that neither moved about the house without the knowledge of the other.

The string was then detached, and the four went down to breakfast. Experiences were compared, and after breakfast two pillows fell downstairs into the hall. No more phenomena occurred before the departure of the journalists. They went reluctantly, and declared that, with another night on the premises, they could have solved the mystery.

Mrs. Bradley picked up the pillows and replaced them on the spare-room bed, then, watched by the Warden, she erased the new scribblings on the walls, only to find that two more had been done on the wall of the bathroom passage.

"I know that writing," said the Warden, suddenly. Mrs. Bradley chuckled as she erased it.

"I've no doubt of it, Warden," she said, "but you had better forget all that. Tell me, have you enjoyed your experiences?"

The Warden confessed that he had.

"And what do you really think of the phenomena?" Mrs. Bradley continued.

"Very interesting and stimulating," said the Warden. "And now—where are my boys?"

"Returned to the fold this morning. They left the house immediately they had done this last bit of writing," Mrs. Bradley replied. "I chose Price and Watermallow for this job, and I think you must agree that they have been most intelligent."

"I hardly know whether the Board ..." began the Warden.

"Did you know the two boys called Piggy and Alec, who disappeared from the Institution just before Miss Foxley inherited her aunt's money?" Mrs. Bradley enquired, coming adroitly between the Warden and his conscience.

"No. I heard all about it, of course. In fact, if you remember, that was why I was so grateful when you captured those other little scoundrels for us. Perhaps, if they had had your help over the two who got clean away ..."

Mrs. Bradley shook her head, and assisted the Warden to come to the conclusion that he also ought to be going.

They had lunch together at the inn, and she saw him off. Then she returned to the haunted house. The time was a quarter to three, and the high, untidy grass and overgrown shrubs of the garden, a broken wicket gate on to a paddock and a neglected summer-house on a weedy gravel path gave, at that still, close time of the day, an odd and ghostly effect which the first view of the gabled house did nothing to alter or dispel.

She walked up to the front door and opened it with the key which the caretaker had provided. Sunshine danced in motes of dust in the hall. The staircase, uncarpeted—for Miss Foxley had left the house only partly furnished—turned on itself at the end of the first eight stairs with an air of reserve and chilly watchfulness. Beyond it the dim kitchen passage led direct to the realm of ghosts, and one of these ghosts—so it seemed at Mrs. Bradley's first half-glance within—was already in occupation of the premises.

Mrs. Bradley was quick and lithe as a woman one-third of her age. She flung herself flat, and the bottle flew over her prone body and crashed against the wall of the staircase. She rose and sped forward to grapple with the poltergeist. The voice of Miss Foxley, from the point of vantage of cover behind the dresser, called out deprecatingly:

"Oh, Lord! I thought you were one of the ghosts!"

"I had the same impression about you," replied Mrs. Bradley, dusting her skirt with her left hand, and keeping her right in the pocket of her skirt.

"You—you needn't shoot," said Miss Foxley, emerging. "I assure you I'm not a ghost."

"So I perceive," said Mrs. Bradley, keeping her right hand where it was. "You came to see how we were getting on, I presume? Well, I'm afraid you've missed all the fun. We did have a little, although not as much as one had hoped."

"I'm glad you don't feel you've wasted your money," said Miss Foxley, nervously. "So often people complain. After all, I can't make things happen, can I?"

As Mrs. Bradley had her doubts about this, she did not reply. She merely asked whether Miss Foxley proposed to stay long in the village.

"Oh, I'm not staying at all," Miss Foxley hastily answered. "I'm due to return on the four-thirty train."

"I'll walk as far as the station with you, shall I?" said Mrs. Bradley. Miss Foxley demurred, Mrs. Bradley insisted. Miss Foxley caught the train with ten minutes to spare, and, to Mrs. Bradley's great satisfaction, completely obscured her features with a thick veil, and the lines of her figure with a long, loose mackintosh cape, before they set out from the house.

"I am just sufficiently like poor old Bella to look at, that I don't feel I want to give people a shock," she remarked, apparently feeling that an explanation was called for, although Mrs. Bradley had asked for none.

"Very proper," said Mrs. Bradley. As soon as the train pulled out of the station she telephoned for the police, and then returned to the house. This time there was nobody in occupation. She passed from room to room, and then went to the courtyard. There she removed the wooden cover of the well and peered into the depths.

There were footholds in the brickwork, as had already been noted by one of her amateur searchers after truth. She glanced round—at the scullery door, which opened almost on to the well; at the kitchen window, which overlooked it; at the pantry window, which, with all their zeal, the seekers had not troubled to seal nor she to point out to them.

"Selah," said Mrs. Bradley, removing all traces of the poltergeists' ingress and egress by this means. She returned to the well and soliloquised it:

"In five minutes we were at the well, and for some little time we sat on the edge of the well-head to make sure that no one was stirring or spying on us ... and so we began to descend cautiously, feeling every step before we set foot on it, and scanning the walls in search of any marked stone ..."^*

^*"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas." From Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. By M. R. James.

Mrs. Bradley began to climb carefully into the well.

The police were as painstaking as usual. Led by Mrs. Bradley, who availed herself of her position as temporary tenant of the house to act as guide and showman, they also climbed warily into the well, felt their way along a narrow tunnel which opened out of its side about a dozen feet above the water-line, and, after groping forward a couple of yards, emerged, as she had already done, into the cellars of the house.

The cellars were ancient, and were interesting, not only from the point of view of their age. Frogs hopped on the floors, for dampness was everywhere, chiefly because of the proximity of the well. The chief interest, however, lay not in the frogs but in the great thick groins of stone upon which the roof of the cellars was supported.

"Good heavens!" said the inspector, straightening himself as he came out of the passage exit. "Looks like something built to hold up a bridge."

"It was built to hold up the floor, including the stone pillars of a Norman church," said Mrs. Bradley, resting one of her thin yellow hands affectionately on the stonework. "This is a Norman crypt, and, I should say, one of the most interesting in England."

"No wonder there's been funny goings-on," said the sergeant, who was inclined to be superstitious and was marked for promotion because of it, his superiors being under the impression that it betokened imagination, about which they had been hearing in staff talks.

Mrs. Bradley nodded, and suggested to them that in order to obtain the results she thought probable, they would need to dig. As they had brought nothing down with them—indeed, they could not have transported spades down the well—the inspector looked at her as respectfully as circumstances, and the crude illumination of his countenance by the beams of electric torches, would permit, but did not reply. Mrs. Bradley did not relieve his mind by picking up a very beautiful frog, caressing it gently with her forefinger, and cackling loudly, and with a horrid echo from the vault.

"This way," she said. The overhead arches of the vaulting descended to earth in the form of thick, heavy, crudely-carved, round-capitalled pillars. Mrs. Bradley suddenly disappeared behind one of these, and the inspector, thinking to follow, discovered that she was gone. Unpardonably, since the place must at one time have been consecrated, he swore nervously, and turned round to speak to the sergeant.

"Disappearing trick," he said, introducing a regrettable adjective.

"Snatched away ... and no wonder, with a physog like that," said the sergeant. Suddenly Mrs. Bradley's voice spoke right in his ear.

"Tell the inspector to mind the step," she said. The flight of stone steps was immediately visible to the sergeant. He blushed—fortunately in the darkness—and followed the inspector up to a little square trap-door.

"So if the one entrance or exit was not feasible or available, the other was," Mrs. Bradley explained, as the three of them emerged at the foot of the servants' staircase. "This passage, you see, is to the kitchen and scullery, and from the scullery the door opens almost on to the top of the well. The well is a good deal later in date than the crypt, of course, and may have existed independently of it for a hundred years or so. I know very little about such things, but I should put the date of the crypt as not much later than 1090. The well may have been sunk in the fifteenth century, and the passage connecting the two I should be inclined to associate with Tudor times, although I have nothing much to go on apart from the type of brickwork. I should think the connection was made to give protection to a Catholic priest. The Jesuits, I believe, were active towards the close of the sixteenth century.

"Anyhow, that's how the poltergeist worked. He could always be somewhere else—the essence of a good game of hide and seek. Let us return to the cellars. I have more to show you."

It was, the sergeant declared afterwards, as good as a film. They returned to the cellar by the way that they had used to ascend to the kitchen passage. A short length of linoleum had been removed to give free access to the trap-door.

"Accounts for the cold that people have noticed, I daresay," the inspector remarked, peering into the aperture which the open trap-door disclosed.

"And yet how necessary an adjunct to the presence of the supernatural," said Mrs. Bradley.^* "There is a way into this passage from the back stairs," she added. "You will have noticed that the back stairs have no doors."

^*"Such cold air currents, or psychic winds, have been experienced, we should add, with many mediums....

... the chill feeling upon wrists and forehead which is a recognized sign that contact has been made and that the mysteries have begun."—Sacheverell Sitwell.—"Poltergeists"

The inspector could not see that this had anything to do with it, and said so, but received no answer except an accidental dig in the back from the sergeant who, at Mrs. Bradley's request, had provided himself with one of the crowbars which the police had brought with them in their car.

Upon reaching the cellar (or crypt, as Mrs. Bradley preferred to call it), they examined the floor with great care, but for some time could find no indication of anything out of the ordinary except a slight depression near the well-side entrance, which was to the west. The wall on this side was extremely damp, and the sergeant twice stepped into a pool of water before it occurred to him or to the inspector to enquire why there was water on the floor in this spot.

"Must be a depression, and fills from the well," he said. He climbed up the well again as the nearest way back to the house, and procured a birch broom which he brought back by way of the inside staircase. When he had swept away the water the cause of the sinking still was not apparent, but by testing the bricks with the crowbar he discovered that they were loose and could be prised up. Whilst they were being moved, however, a rush of water filled up each hole as it was made.

"Put 'em back," said the inspector, helping in this part of the work. "I'd say you've given us enough to go on, ma'am," he added, when the three of them were in the house once more, "and I'm inclined to pass on the information so that we can get our hooks on the lady before she makes a getaway. You say she was here this afternoon, so she can't have hopped it very far. Once we've got her, we can examine that cellar more carefully, and if we don't find what we expect to find, well, we shall still have enough to go on for a bit. She'll have to explain the sister's suicide, if nothing else, and why she's been passing herself off as her. You've no doubt about getting her identified, I suppose?" "No doubt at all," replied Mrs. Bradley. As they re-entered the kitchen the sound of footsteps was heard outside, and the caretaker came in by way of the scullery door.

"Ah, so you be still here, mam?" he said. He looked at the two policemen. Mrs. Bradley took out one of the snapshots. "Is this your employer?" she asked.

"Never set eyes on her," replied the old man, "as I telled 'ee before. This ...?" His face changed. "Why, this be the lady as was tried for the murder of the gentleman what fell out the window."

"Are you sure?" enquired the inspector. "No photographs were taken at the trial," he added, turning to Mrs. Bradley.

"Ah. But her was living here in the village when the poor fellow fell," said the caretaker.

Mrs. Bradley put the snapshot away and then glanced at her watch.

"I'm staying the night here," she said. "Are you expecting visitors to-morrow afternoon?"

"Ah. A lady and gentleman named Lee-Strange wants to look over the house," replied the caretaker, "so you're bound to clear out before then; Miss Foxley's orders."

"I shall be out by twelve noon," said Mrs. Bradley. The old man pattered away, and the inspector wished her good-bye.

"You know," said Mrs. Bradley, detaining him out of earshot of the sergeant, "I think you ought to finish that business in the cellar, or you may be too late to find what we think may be there."

The inspector looked sharply at her.

"It wouldn't do not to find them if they're there, ma'am," he agreed.

"Leave the sergeant to keep an eye on me, so that you're sure there will be no monkey-business," Mrs. Bradley tactfully observed, "and get back as soon as you can with something to mop up that water and a few more men to dig."

The inspector was back in less than an hour. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bradley and the sergeant had tea just outside the summer-house and discussed old-fashioned flowers, women's fashions (of which the sergeant proved to have far-reaching and extraordinary knowledge), and the breeding of pedigree Airedales.

The inspector brought back with him a posse of six men, about a hundredweight of sacking, two more crowbars, a waterproof sheet, some spades, rubber gloves, a coil of rope, three dark lanterns, and a doctor.

He left two men on guard over Mrs. Bradley, who sat with her escorts in the drawing-room, and regaled them with stories of poltergeist activity both real and faked, asked the doctor to remain in the kitchen (upon whose table he proposed to lay the results of his researches in the cellar), and took the rest of his party and their accoutrements with him into the crypt.

They emerged an hour and a quarter later. The inspector himself summoned Mrs. Bradley. He had a triumphant and congratulatory expression, but swallowed from time to time, as though it would have done him good to be sick.

"We've found 'em all right, ma'am," he said. "As you're a doctor, and put us on the track, as you might say, perhaps you'd like to be with Dr. Ellis, who is going to give them the once-over, what there is of 'em. Seems to be two boys, according to him, though I couldn't stick it long enough, myself, to be sure of anything. Buried before death, he reckons."

The gruesome and pitiful task concluded, Mrs. Bradley again found the inspector at her elbow. Half apologetically he laid his hand upon her arm.

"And, although there's, maybe, another explanation, ma'am," he said, "it is my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down, and may be used in evidence."

Chapter Eight

THE WIDOW'S MITE

Ah! when will this long weary day have end, And lend me leave to come unto my love? How slowly do the hours their numbers spend; How slowly does sad Time his feathers move!

SPENSER.

MURIEL was hysterical in her denials. She knew nothing about poltergeist phenomena, she said, and nothing about the well in the courtyard. Her husband had earned an honest living, she declared; it was not his fault, poor man, that he had been duped and victimised by that wicked Cousin Bella.

Oh, yes, the photograph was a very clear one. She would have said it was Bella anywhere. No, she could think of no reason why Bella should pass herself as Tessa, unless it was because she had had such a bad scare over the trial for Tom's murder that she thought she ought to take advantage.

Take advantage of what, the police enquired. Why, of the fact of the death; the suicide, Muriel vaguely explained. They pressed the point, and this frightened her, as Mrs. Bradley could have told them it was bound to do. Muriel crawled back into her shell, and the utmost they could then achieve was an alarmed squeaking from her that she did not know a thing more, not a thing.

"The most valuable witness simply thrown away, Mother," said Ferdinand, after Mrs. Bradley's release and the inspector's apologies. "Couldn't you do something with the woman? They'll never prove their case without her. She must know all about it, really. She simply wants handling, and the witness-box won't be the best place to do it. She's full of venom against Bella Foxley, and these flat-footed idiots have gone and stamped it all out of her. She's out to save her own skin now; nothing more."

"I know," replied Mrs. Bradley.

"After all," pursued Ferdinand, "they can't continue to hold Bella merely for impersonating her sister. They will have to prove she killed her, and that won't be any easy matter. The evidence at the inquest on Tessa Foxley was pretty straightforward. Not a doubt in anyone's mind but that it was accidental death, except for that idiot boy, and no one is going to take any notice of him after all this time, even supposing he remembers a thing about it, which he probably doesn't. And it's tricky work, anyway, having the woman up for murder again. There's certain to be a bat-eyed, pudden-brained section of the community who'll paint the newspapers red swearing poor Bella is being victimised. You see if there isn't. The police want a cast-iron case, and they haven't any such thing, unless and until Mrs. Turney comes across with what she knows."

"The trouble is," said Mrs. Bradley mildly, "that the police have succeeded in convincing Muriel that once she owns up to having known about the cellar she might as well adjust the hangman's noose about her own neck. It is most unfortunate, but there it is."

"Well, something will have to be done," her son observed. His mother grimaced, but promised nothing. She, like Sherlock Holmes, had her methods, but they required, she felt, careful application.

She left Muriel alone for a fortnight, and concentrated all her energies upon finding out all she could about the history of the haunted house. The prosecution would have to establish that Bella could have known of the cellar. The tale of the hauntings, and the chronology of the buildings, she found in the County History. She perused the account twice, and then copied it out.

There were legends and ill-authenticated stories of the coach, a headless driver, a headless Cavalier, a hanging figure supposed to date from the time of the French Revolution, and, in short, all the usual nonsense. Of true poltergeist phenomena there was no mention in the County History nor in any other printed account of the house. That, however, scarcely mattered. Such phenomena rarely persisted long.^*

^* The longest recorded case of poltergeist activity seems to have lasted about twelve years. This was at Willington Mill, Northumberland. One of the shortest was the famous haunting of the family of Wesley, which lasted for two months.

The history of the house itself as a building next engaged her attention. The County History informed her that it had originally been built on the site of a former monastery, which had been suppressed by Henry the Eighth and reconstituted under Mary. The original dwelling-house had been built in 1541, after nearly all the monastic buildings had been destroyed, but upon the accession of Mary Tudor, the monks were brought back, the Abbey Church was returned to the community instead of being used as a Parish Church, and part of the 'new' house was used by the Abbot as his lodging.

In the next reign, however, the monks were again dispossessed. The house was enlarged by the addition of another wing, and the Church was neglected. The cloister garth became a bowling green, and it was said that the earliest hauntings of the house derived from this period in its history.

During the eighteenth century the house was purchased by members of the Hell-Fire Club, and the hauntings became more serious. One of the members, whilst engaged in his childish anti-godliness, was killed, and, later, the house was burnt down and the last ruins of the church destroyed.

In 1851 the present house had been erected on the site of the ruined building, except for the north rooms which helped to enclose the courtyard. These had been added about thirty years later. The names of previous tenants, with the varying degrees of ill-luck which had attended them, members of their families or any of their servants or friends resident in the house, were appended to the rest of the historical account, sometimes with considerable detail of the hauntings, sometimes baldly.

Of the well in the courtyard there was specific mention, and it was clear that Bella Foxley—or Cousin Tom, for that matter— could have deduced the opening of the passage from the well into the crypt.

"It is supposed," one writer had alleged, "that there must at one time have been a priest's hole in the house. This would have been constructed during the short and unlucky tenancy of the Catholic family of Merrill.... There is a strong hint in one of the family papers that access to the priest's hole could be gained by means of the ancient well in the courtyard. This, however, only seems to lead to a cellar under the house...."

That was all that Mrs. Bradley could glean of the history of the house. The tales of the hauntings were ill-authenticated, but at least there was no mention of anything which suggested the activities of a poltergeist. Not that this negative information was of much value, she reflected again, since poltergeist phenomena, besides being usually of fairly short duration, are apt to be episodic, spasmodic, and to attend upon the presence of certain living persons* rather than upon historic wrongs and infamies past and gone.

^*"Its powers, then, seem to be fixed or loaded in the person of someone in the house, preferably a child in the most impressionable months of its life."— Sacheverell Sitwell.—"Poltergeists."

On the other hand, this is not invariably true. Cf. the phenomena at Borley Rectory, during the investigations carried out there by Mr. Harry Price and his observers from 1929 to 1939.—G.M.

Mrs. Bradley gave up the records, and returned to Cousin Muriel, again without result. Cousin Muriel, in fact, expressed the opinion that she would go off her head if people did not stop worrying her about those poor little boys. As Mrs. Bradley, looking at her frightened eyes and a twitching muscle just above her mouth, considered this more than likely, she forbore to press her, remarked that it was a pity that there was no one to exact vengeance for the murdered children, and, leaving this grim phrase to do what work it would to Cousin Muriel's conscience and such superstitious fears as she knew her to possess, went off to the Institution to find out what help the Warden could give in tracing the boys to Bella Foxley's company.

There was one hope in her mind, and one only, so far as this was concerned. The diary had named a certain Larry, and from the entry in which his name appeared, Mrs. Bradley had deduced that this Larry, if he could be found, might prove to have some knowledge of the means of escape used by Piggy and Alec, and some knowledge of where they had proposed to go. The difficulty, as she saw it, would be to get in touch with Larry. He might prove to have cut his connection with the Institution so completely, once he had left it, that it would be impossible to track him down. He might be dead, in prison, in another continent—anywhere. He might be out of touch with English newspapers, so that an advertisement would never reach him. He might be unable to read, or, even more likely (and she knew how completely illiterate some members of the criminal classes could be), he might be unwilling to come forward and expose himself voluntarily to police questioning.

The sooner all this was put to the proof, the better. She telephoned the Warden as soon as she arrived in the town nearest to the Institution, which was situated about two miles away on the slope of a treeless hill, and received an invitation to come immediately to see him.

He looked less like a frog, and a good deal more animated, than usual. He seemed, in fact, pleased to see her.

"Larry? Larry who?" he enquired, when Mrs. Bradley had stated the object of her visit.

"I don't know. He was here six years ago, with Piggy and Alec."

"That's another thing," said the Warden. "Who were Piggy and Alec?"

"Alec we should be able to trace, I think, from your records. It sounds to me like a reasonable, if shortened, form of Alexander or even Alexis."

"And it may not be short for anything. He may have been christened Alec," argued the Warden. "And Larry might be traceable. Yes, indeed he might."

The records were conveniently to hand. An exploration of a stock-room, a mounting of library steps, and the records were identified and produced for inspection and research.

"Larry; Larry," said the Warden, tracing Christian names with a patient and experienced forefinger. "Harry?"

"Laurence? Lawrence?" suggested Mrs. Bradley.

"Got it in one, if that's it," replied the Warden. "And if it is it, you're in luck. Only one boy named Lawrence for the whole of that year, either Christian or surname. Here we are. Henry Nelson Lawrence. Now, I can give you the next stage in his career from this."

He opened another register. Mrs. Bradley leaned over, and followed the zealous forefinger as it passed swiftly down the page.

"Ah! We are in luck! Here it is, look," said the Warden. "Lad went into the Navy. Now, granted that he continued to be respectable, you'll have little difficulty in following him up, I imagine."

It was not quite as easy as the Warden had indicated, but, fortunately for Mrs. Bradley's plans, Henry Nelson Lawrence, A.B., proved to be one of the Institution's successes. Furthermore, he happened, by great good luck, to be on leave at Plymouth. He proved to be a large, docile young man, whose embarrassment at being brought up against the past was almost equalled by his desire to assist in tracking down the murderer of Piggy and Alec.

"Who were Piggy and Alec?" Mrs. Bradley enquired." Can you remember their names?"

"Pegwell and Kettleborough," the young seaman promptly responded.

"Thank you very much. And now, Mr. Lawrence, I wonder whether you have any idea of the means by which they escaped from the Institution? I ought to warn you that you may have to make this statement in court."

"In court?" He looked doubtful, but only for a moment. "They was good little chaps," he remarked. "I liked 'em. The cook-housekeeper—I forget her name—she got 'em the files, and she hid 'em in the kitchen while they was being looked for. But that's all 1 know, lady. I never cottoned on where they went, or aught else about it."

It was good enough, if not too good, thought Mrs. Bradley. She tested the statement carefully and with finesse. There seemed no doubt that Larry fully believed that Bella Foxley had assisted the escape and had hidden the fugitives until the first hue and cry had died down.

It was not easy to decide, after that, to what extent Larry ought to be taken into her confidence. She thought she would risk it. After all, Bella Foxley was under arrest. She was not in a position to attack the witnesses.

"I ought to tell you, Mr. Lawrence," she said, "that we suspect Miss Foxley of having used the two boys for her own ends, and that, when they were of no further use to her, she murdered them by shutting them up in a cellar and starving them to death."

The simple face of the young man hardened.

"I wouldn't put it past her, mam," he said.

"And you would be willing to give evidence?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

"Yes, I reckon so. I've gone straight since I joined the Navy. I've got my record. There's nothing again' it. I don't see why I shouldn't speak up, and tell what I know. 'Twasn't nothing to do with me they made their getaway."

"All right," said Mrs. Bradley. "Tell me all you know."

"Well, I know she got 'em the files and I know she done some of the filing through the window bars, because Piggy told me. He said she could get in the dormitories without being questioned, being, like, the housekeeper, and able to go where she wanted."

"Why did they think she was willing to help them?"

"She never said. Only spilt 'em some dope about she knew they'd go straight if they got the chance, and she was going to see they got it."

"Where were they to go when they had escaped?"

"I dunno."

"Had they any money?"

"No, I don't reckon they had, but we didn't let on to one another about that. Next thing you knowed, somebody had swiped it off of you, and you couldn't complain because we wasn't supposed to have no dough. Them that had it swiped it off of the instructors."

"How long before they went did Piggy tell you they were going?"

"About a week, I reckon."

"Do you think they had any plans?"

"No, barring getting some work. The cook-lady, she put 'em on to that, because Piggy said so."

"He didn't say what sort of work?"

"I don't reckon he knowed. All he said was she was going to hide 'em up till the police 'ad done lookin' for 'em, and then she was going to find 'em some work. Then, when they got jobs, see, they was going to look out for something to suit 'em better."

"And get them into trouble with the police?"

"I don't know. I couldn't say what ideas they got. Racing stables, more like, from what they said. I reckon they was the kind to go straight all right, give 'em a chance, so long as it wasn't too dull."

"Were they obedient boys?"

"Never got into much trouble that I remember. The beaks was a bit surprised they lit out. Didn't think they was the sort, the Warden said."

"He questioned you at the time, I believe, Mr. Lawrence?"

"Oh, he dickered me a bit, but I never let nothing come out. If ever you get in a jam, lady, stick to Don't Know. I've never found nothing to touch it."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Bradley gravely. She had had exasperating evidence from Muriel Turney of the impenetrability of this simplest of defences.

The interview with Larry, however, although very unsatisfactory from the point of view of actual information, had outlined clearly the path she had to follow. Whatever her fears and objections, however tiresomely obstinate she had made up her weak little mind to be, Cousin Tom's relict would have to be browbeaten into acknowledging that she had known of the boys' presence in the haunted house.

Before she could return to Muriel's lodgings, however, a message from Ferdinand informed her that he had precise information from the police that Muriel had 'skipped.' As it was in their own interests to find her in order to produce her as one of the chief witnesses at the trial, they were 'on her track, baying like hounds,' Ferdinand's letter continued.

Mrs. Bradley did not believe that Muriel, whatever her state of mind, would acknowledge complicity in Bella Foxley's crimes by running away, so she sought her straightway in the most likely place—the house which Aunt Flora had left to Eliza Hodge. From there she telephoned to Ferdinand.

"She's in that state," said Miss Hodge, "poor thing, that I don't know what to do, and that's a fact. She says she'll go out of her mind, and, upon my word, madam, I almost believe she will, she's that worried and upset with it all. And no wonder, either, if the half of what she's been telling me is true."

"Look here," said Mrs. Bradley. "I've got to see her. I haven't come to frighten her, but I've got to know what she knows about those boys."

Muriel, however, had locked the bedroom door and was at the window, threatening, in high, hysterical tones, to throw herself out if Mrs. Bradley did not go away at once and stop worrying her.

Mrs. Bradley, standing on the lawn, said clearly :

"Now don't be silly, Mrs. Turney. Come down at once, and tell me what you know. I have just telephoned the police that you are here. Your best chance is to tell me the truth before they arrive. Come, now. Don't waste time."

Whether this appeal or Muriel's own common-sense won the day Mrs. Bradley never knew, but scarcely had she entered the house when Muriel came down the stairs and motioned her to the drawing-room. There, on heavy chairs and surrounded by Aunt Flora's bric-à-brac, the two conversed, and gradually Muriel disclosed to Mrs. Bradley the story of the poltergeist phenomena, the part played by Piggy and Alec, Bella Foxley's contributions to the hauntings and her share of the proceeds, together with other strange and diverse matters.

Most unfortunately, although Muriel was prepared to admit that she had known that the boys had originated the poltergeist tricks, she insisted that she had not known of the terrible death which they had suffered. From this assertion she could not be moved, and Mrs. Bradley had to accept it, although she could not believe that it was the truth.

"You see, as I told you, poor Tom got his living with the séances and all that," Muriel said, "and Bella often put us on to the houses. Of course, we had the usual troubles. The Society for Psychical Research used to try to check up on Tom, but he wasn't having any, and he said he didn't mind if they called him a fraud, even in print, because the people who were any good to him were not the kind to read the Journal of the Society.

"Well, about a month before Aunt Flora died, Bella wrote to us, and said she was fed up with the Institution and if she didn't get away from it for a bit she'd die. She said she had had all the sick leave she was entitled to, so either she'd have to go sick without pay, or else she'd have to resign, but she couldn't stand the life any longer.

"Well, she said she'd find us another haunted house, and a good one, if we would agree to take it on and have her live there with us for a bit until she found something she liked better.

"It sounded queer, coming from her, and I asked Tom what he thought she'd got up her sleeve. He said he didn't know, but that it was her own business and that he didn't mind if she came, so long as she didn't stay too long. He said he had done all he could with Hazy, because you had to have more helpers to get the results any better, and, besides, we had been there so long that the landlord wanted to put up the rent, and Tom said it wasn't worth that, because the house was a bit too much off the beaten track to keep on attracting people when they could go to séances in London. And the flat, of course, had entirely petered out.

"So I wrote off to Bella and told her she could do as she liked, and she wrote back and said she had found just the house and knew just the way to work it for us.

"Now she'd never suggested helping us in that way before, and Tom didn't know what to make of it, quite, and neither did I. Tom said that what he could make would keep two of us, but certainly not three, especially as Bella's helpers would expect to be paid. He wrote off and said that he didn't want extra help, and that amateurs would only mess things up. Bella wrote back and said that the helpers she meant wouldn't mess things up, and wouldn't want anything except their food and somewhere to sleep. She didn't say who she meant, but Tom soon guessed she meant two of those dreadful boys.

"Well, he was dead against it, right from the first. He said he wouldn't be able to depend upon boys like that, and he said that, anyway, as soon as they got fed up they'd sling their hook— that was his expression—and then he would be left with a lot of disappointed clients who were not getting their money's worth.

"Well, Bella didn't argue. She just turned up with the boys. That was late in January——"

"Yes. That was on January 24th," thought Mrs. Bradley, "if the dates in the diary are to be trusted." She did not speak, however, and Muriel, after frowningly trying to recollect the date for herself, announced that she thought it was somewhere round the twentieth, and continued :

"She came along with them about supper-time, and locked them up in one of the bedrooms, and said she must get back quickly to the Institution in case she was missed. I ought to say that we were in the haunted house by this time. Tom had rented it for a month 'to test its possibilities,' he told Bella."

"So you were in the haunted house before the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of January," thought Mrs. Bradley; but, afraid of startling this shy song-bird into silence again, she made no remark.

"I didn't like it," Muriel resumed. "I knew what dreadful boys they had at the Institution, and I didn't know what they might get up to, away from all the discipline and that. Tom didn't seem to mind. He took them up some supper, and locked the door again, and I must say they behaved quite quiet and orderly, I was quite surprised and pleased; not that I ever got fond of them, mind you, and right to the end I was afraid of what they might do if they took it into their heads.

"Well, then 'came the news about Aunt Flora. That must have been the next day, I rather fancy. Anyway, Bella sent us the telegram, saying she'd already been sent for by old Eliza Hodge, as the doctor didn't think poor old Aunt was likely to last.

"Tom didn't see any point in going at first. He said we'd never had much to do with Aunt, and that she'd only think we'd gone there to see what we could get. Anyway, I persuaded him—poor Tom!—and then, of course, Aunt began to get better, and then Bella killed her."

"Bella or your husband or you," thought Mrs. Bradley. Aloud she said, "And what were the boys doing while all of you were staying at Aunt Flora's house?"

"I don't know, I'm sure."

"Oh, yes, you do, Mrs. Turney. They were in the cellar, weren't they?"

"I don't know where they were," repeated Muriel. "I didn't know anything about the cellar then. I asked Tom what had happened to them, and he said not to worry; they were quite all right where they were, and had plenty to eat."

"And had plenty to eat," thought Mrs. Bradley, nodding soberly. "And Aunt Flora had had too much to eat, and was dead." Again she said none of this aloud.

"Bella went back to the Institution for a day or two, but not for long. Then she joined us at the haunted house, and Tom began his séances," Muriel continued. "Well, of course, they were ever so successful, as you know. The boys were really wonderful, I will say that for them. They cottoned on ever so quickly to what was wanted, and thought up all sorts of extra things for themselves. Quite got the spirit of it, Tom said, and he and Bella were getting on like a house on fire, which usually they didn't really do, Bella being sharp and impatient in her manner on account of her work, and being a spinster, I always thought, but never said so, of course, being the last to want to make trouble.

"Well, the cellar was Bella's idea. It seemed she had read up about it before we took on the house, and before even we got there she had had the wooden cover off the well. Of course, she didn't usually put it back, because of the boys getting up and down that way to be able to do their stuff when the spiritualists came, and get away again safely without being seen.

"Well, the next part is all, like, about my fancies, and you needn't believe it unless you like, but, after a bit, the house got on my nerves. Of course, you can say it was really the boys I was scared of, and, in a way, I think it was. You see, when Tom kept saying to Bella at the first that this game was all very well, but where were we going to be when the boys got fed up and left us, she turned round on him one day and said the boys would leave when she was ready, and not a minute before. She said she'd got the tabs on them all right, because if they didn't do what she said she'd only got to give them up to the police and they'd be taken back to the Institution straight away, and well they knew it.

"Well, things went on all right for quite a bit after that, and then I began to get those fancies."

"What fancies?" asked Mrs. Bradley gently, to end a lengthy pause.

"Well, you'll no doubt think me very silly, just like Tom and Bella did," confessed Muriel, "but, the fact is, I began to feel that there was something really funny about the house; not just the boys and their tricks. You see, up to then, I'd always believed that Tom was an honest investigator—lucky, but honest—and that my help wasn't to help him go in for tricking people, but to help with genuine what-do-you-call it——"

"Phenomena?"

"Manifestations; that was Tom's word for them. But this poltergeist business with the boys was different. It was just simply hoodwinking the people, and I'd always felt the spirits were kind of sacred, and that I'd been kind of initiated into the great mystery of it all when I married Tom and my right hand went luminous, and I was in a trance and told people things, and all that. And it sort of came to me that if we weren't careful, playing about with all this poltergeist stuff, we might offend something queer, and be very sorry for it. It seemed to me I heard whispers and footsteps nothing to do with the boys, and once I thought I heard a kind of a horrible laugh just at my elbow when I knew the boys were up in the attic cupboard being told by Bella and Tom what the next stunt was to be.

"Well, I got thoroughly nervy and run-down, and in the end I said I should leave the house; I couldn't stand it. Rather to my surprise, Bella and Tom made no objection, except Bella said that it was a bit of a nuisance, because she'd have to come, too. She said it wouldn't look right for her to stay alone with Tom, even though they were cousins. I begged Tom to send away the boys, but he said he couldn't do that, and he wouldn't join us at the inn because he said we couldn't leave the boys alone in the house because they might escape. When he did come to see us, he locked them up in the attic cupboard, where he didn't think they could come to any harm. He didn't think they could get out of it, either, but, of course, they did...."

She paused and shivered.

"Of course they did. And they thrust your husband out of the bedroom window when he returned from a visit to the inn," said Mrs. Bradley.

"How did you know that? I've never told anybody that!"

"It was fairly obvious. Bella, of course, knowing the boys so much better than your husband did, was afraid that something of the sort would happen. She went along to see whether Mr. Turney was all right. It was when she discovered that he was going to use the incident to lay a charge against her of attempting to murder him because he had evidence against her for the murder of Aunt Flora that she realized it would be safer for her if he were out of the way. It would be easy enough, she thought, to accuse the boys of the murder. What I can't understand, and what I should like you to explain, if you can, are these points:—"

Muriel shied like a startled horse at the sight of Mrs. Bradley's little notebook.

"I don't suppose I can tell you anything at all," she said wildly. "And I don't know at all why she wanted to kill poor Tom and those poor boys. All I know is ..."

"Now, listen, Mrs. Turney," said Mrs. Bradley. "First, I can't understand why, with the death certificate duly signed by the doctor, she was afraid of anything which your husband might have to say about the cause of Aunt Flora's death. After all, even an exhumation of the body couldn't have proved the doctor wrong. It was Bella Foxley's word against that of your husband."

"Ah, but there was the motive, wasn't there? All Aunt's money, except for the little bit left to Eliza Hodge."

"Ah, yes, the money. But, don't you see, Mrs. Turney, that, even granted a motive, there would be little to gain by accusing Bella of a murder which could not possibly be proved? If your husband had gone to the police with his story he would have been thought a malicious man who was jealous because the woman he was accusing had inherited a fortune to which he may have thought he had some claim. If he had been able to produce other witnesses, or some sort of circumstantial evidence ... but even you yourself could not have supported his statement, could you?"

"Don't you believe, then, that Bella did murder Aunt Flora?" Muriel demanded, without attempting to answer the last question.

"That is not the point. At the moment I am pointing out that belief isn't proof, and that the unsupported testimony of one man could not be accepted in a court of law. Now, come along, Mrs. Turney! Why did Bella Foxley murder your husband?"

"I don't know anything more than I've told you already," said Muriel tearfully. "I don't see why you won't have it. 1 don't suppose Bella knew any more about the law than 1 do. I still think she believed Tom would give her away."

"And I still believe that that is nonsense," said Mrs. Bradley crisply. "Oh, well, if you won't tell me, I must seek other means of finding out."

"I'm sure I wish you success," said Muriel, perking up a little. "As long as she's punished for it, I don't mind what means you take."

"It is the death of the boys I am investigating," Mrs. Bradley reminded her. "Bella Foxley has already been acquitted of murdering your husband."

"Well, the boys were killed because they knew she was going to kill Tom," said Muriel. Mrs. Bradley looked at her for a little time in silence. This apparently caused her some alarm and discomfort, for she added, dropping her eyes, "Oh, no, it couldn't be that! How silly of me to say that! Unless, of course ..."

"Unless what?"

"Unless, as you thought at first, I believe, it was Bella who pushed Tom out of the' window the first time, and not the boys at all."

"It was not Bella," Mrs. Bradley responded. "If it had been, Tom—your husband—would not have exposed himself a second time to be attacked."

Chapter Nine

COUNSEL'S OPINION

Love forbid that through dissembling I should thrive, Or in praising you myself of truth deprive! Let not your high thoughts debase A simple truth in me: Great is Beauty's grace, Truth is yet as fair as she.

CAMPION.

THE trial of Bella Foxley for the murders of Frederick Pegwell and Richard Kettleborough began on Tuesday, November 5th, and was concluded on Friday, November 8th. It was not a sensational trial, as trials go; it had none of the historic horror of the trial of Burke and Hare for the murder of the Widow Dogherty; it did not enhance the reputation of the Counsel for the Defence as did the trial of Mrs. Maybrick for the murder of James Maybrick, her husband; neither did. it achieve that almost sublime position in the annals of the Sunday press which was granted to the trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen for the murder of his wife, Belle Elmore, Cora Turner or Cunigunde Mackamotzi; to the trial of Ronald True for the murder of Gertrude Yates, alias Olive Young; and to the trial of Patrick Mahon for the murder of Emily Kaye in the bungalow on the Grumbles at Eastbourne. Nevertheless, it had its own interest, and received, as Mrs. Bradley admitted to Mr. Pratt later, a very good press.

The trial opened on a fine but chilly morning, with Bella Foxley pleading 'Not Guilty' to the charges brought against her. Muriel and the young seaman, Larry Lawrence, should have been the most damning witnesses for the prosecution, but Muriel made a bad impression, was confused, hesitating, contradictory and nervous, and the defence scored several points in the cross-questioning. Larry, however, was unshakable. He was slow-minded, sure of his facts, unimpressed by his surroundings and obviously certain of Bella Foxley's guilt. Unfortunately, however, his early lapses, for which he had been sent to the Institution, told against him, although they were not referred to in so many words. It was enough that he had been an inmate.

Gradually the story of the crimes emerged, but the most interesting part of the trial from the point of view of the spectators was when Bella Foxley herself went into the witness box to give her own version of the occurrences.

She had heard of the haunted house through an agency, she averred, which sent her advertisements from time to time of such houses. Knowing (she did not give Cousin Tom's name at this point, and was not asked for it in case it should prejudice the jury if they remembered that she had been tried for his murder) that some relatives on her mother's side were interested in psychical research, she had informed them that this particular house was in the market and that she had already visited it and had been greatly impressed by some unaccountable happenings which she had witnessed.

Later (she did not refer to Aunt Flora's death) she went to visit them after they had taken a lease of the house, and they agreed with her that the house was under supernatural influences. She visited them on three or four occasions. The longest single visit that she made lasted from a Friday evening until the following Sunday afternoon. On other occasions, two or three in number, she could not remember exactly how many, she had stayed a single night.

It was represented to her by the prosecution that she had once spent more than a week in the house. She denied this, and then, looking very uncomfortable for the first time since the proceedings had begun, she admitted that she had stayed for several days in a hotel not far from where the house was situated. As this week covered and included the time of Cousin Tom's death, she was not asked to enlarge in any way upon her answer, and it was doubtful, Mrs. Bradley thought, whether the prosecution had scored a point or not, since the jury were not to be encouraged to realize that they were trying a woman who already had been acquitted on one murder charge and was fortunate to have escaped a previous one.

Bella then denied completely that she had had any part in the escape of the two boys from the Institution, that she had connived at it, or that she had the slightest idea of what had happened to them after they had got away.

The defence of stout denial is always a good one, Mrs. Bradley reflected, particularly if the accused does not commit the error of embroidering the denial by producing facts in support of it. Bella Foxley produced none. In effect, she challenged the prosecution to prove that the bodies which had been found in the crypt were those of the two boys who had escaped from the Institution, and she challenged them to show that she had had any knowledge of the whereabouts of the boys after they had escaped.

"All over bar the shouting," wrote Mr. Pratt to Mrs. Bradley in the court. She grimaced at him in reply. It was Larry against Bella, she knew, for Muriel could not have done more to prejudice the case in favour of the prisoner if she had been on the opposite side; and Larry, poor fellow, still had his boyhood to live down. Bella herself appeared to have no doubt of the result. She remained calm, almost phlegmatic, self-assured and clearheaded.

A scale model of the haunted house had been prepared, and from it Mrs. Bradley had made clear her discovery of the passage connecting the well with the crypt and of her further discovery of how simple a matter it was, with the aid of two boys, to reproduce psychical phenomena of poltergeist character. This, she inferred, had been Bella's motive in assisting the two boys to make their escape from the Institution.

The old caretaker had referred to screams, shouts and moans which had come up 'through the floor' of the house, but his evidence did not stand the test of cross-examination by the defence, for he was confused as to dates, and ended by agreeing (although he did not, to the end, realize this !) that he had imagined the whole thing. Miss Biddle's charwoman fared no better at the hands of Counsel for the Defence.

"You'll never get her, Mother," said Ferdinand, gloomily. "She's as guilty as hell, but old Crodders has got you on toast. You see, you yourself can't speak to anything except the finding of the bodies, and although Muriel ought to have been able to slam the nail on the head that they were the bodies of those particular wretched kids, she didn't do it. Scared of finding her own neck in the noose; that's the trouble with her."

"Oh, I knew she'd make a thoroughly bad witness," said Mrs. Bradley comfortably. Her son gaped at her, but she did not enlarge upon her answer.

The cross-questioning of Bella Foxley nevertheless remained the high spot, as Caroline called it, of the proceedings. There was a 'sensation in court,' for instance, when in reply to questions the prisoner at last admitted that she had known of the presence of two boys in the haunted house, and agreed that the phenomena were fraudulent. She persisted in maintaining, however, that she had had nothing whatever to do with introducing the boys into the house, and declared that they were there at the invitation of those relatives of her own in whose name the house had been rented.

"You helped these boys to escape?" the enquirer persisted.

"No."

"Do you deny that you helped them to file through the window bars of their sleeping quarters?"

"I deny it absolutely."

"Do you deny that you supplied them with the files?"

"Yes, I deny that, too."

"How do you think the boys got in touch with your relatives?"

"I mentioned that two boys had escaped from the Institution and were at large."

"I suggest that your relatives knew from you how to get hold of these boys."

"No, not from me."

"From whom, then?"

"I don't know,"

"I suggest that you know perfectly well."

"I'm sure I don't. It seems to have been coincidence."

The judge intervened at this point to remind the prisoner that she was on oath, 'like any other witness.'

"When you knew that the boys were in the house, did you take any steps to inform the police that you knew where they could be found?" the prosecuting counsel continued.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I believe in the idea of live and let live.' "

"But you knew why these boys had been sent to the Institution?"

"Well, yes, more or less."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean I knew they were supposed to have done something wrong."

"Something so wrong that one of them, at least, was a potential danger to the community."

"I didn't know that. We were never told the reason—not any particular reason, I mean—why any boy was at the Institution."

"Even so, did you not believe it to be your duty, as a citizen, to inform the police as to the whereabouts of the boys?"

"No."

"Would you call yourself an anti-social person?"

"No. I'm unsociable, but I liked the boys."

"When you had made up your mind not to hand the boys over to the police, did you set about organizing their activities so as to benefit yourself and your relations?"

"No."

"You didn't help to exploit these boys for gain?"

"Certainly not. As I explained before (this had been during her statement to her counsel) I had no reason to want to make money, either with or without the help of the boys. I had plenty of money. The boys were amused at playing the poltergeist tricks, and it was such a change to see them laughing and happy."

"But when their laughter and happiness grew too dangerous, you battened them down in that cellar with frogs, newts and all kinds of slimy and disgusting creatures, and left them there in the dark and the wet to starve."

"I never did that! I swear it! This is all a mistake. I am not the person who ought to be accused."

"When did the boys become a nuisance?"

"Never. I did not find them a nuisance. I had very little to do with them. I was at the Institution most of the time they were at the house."

Counsel had led up to this point very well, Mrs. Bradley thought. The next part of the argument did not take her by surprise, but it seemed to flummox the prisoner. Pointing at her (one of the few histrionic or dramatic gestures he made during the trial) Counsel for the Prosecution said clearly :

"You were not at the house during most of the time that the boys were there?"

"No."

"You were still at the Institution?"

"Yes, certainly."

"Will you tell the court the amount of your salary at the Institution?"

"I—let me see—I think I was getting about a hundred and sixty."

"And your board and lodging, of course?"

"Yes, except during holiday periods."

"Quite so. When did you begin to receive your legacy?"

"About—on—let me think. It would have been—I think I had the first payment towards the end of February."

"Towards the end of the February?"

"Yes, I believe that's right."

"And the boys escaped from the Institution on January twenty-third, according to the records kept by the Warden."

"Yes, I suppose that would be right."

"It is right. We can call witnesses to prove it, if necessary. Now, tell me: did you know, when those boys escaped—that is to say, on January twenty-third—that your aunt was going to die and leave you all this money?"

"No! No, of course I didn't!"

So she did not, even now, perceive the trap, thought Mrs. Bradley.

"Well, then, I suggest that perhaps your financial position, at the time that these boys escaped and found their way to this house which your relatives had rented, was not quite as assured and as satisfactory as you would have the court to believe?"

"Yes, but—No, I know it wasn't, but, don't you see——"

"I am afraid we do see," responded the learned gentleman, with a satisfied smile. "We see that your protestations that you did not need to exploit the mischief-making powers of the boys for your own gain are not, in the light of your own evidence, either acceptable or true, and I forbear to enlarge upon the point, which is, I am convinced, perfectly comprehended by the jury, but it was a very odd coincidence indeed that these boys, with no help from you, should have managed to find their way, not only to your relatives, but into a house where their services could be utilized in such a gainful way to their employers."

"I know all that. I agree," said Bella Foxley desperately, "but I didn't kill the boys! I didn't shut them up! There are those who know far more about that than I do!"

Counsel for the Defence cited the 'long arm of coincidence' in his closing speech. He insisted that coincidence was an everyday happening. He begged the jury to remember strange coincidences in their own lives and to attempt to explain them away in the light of ordinary reason. His client did not deny, he said, the presence of the boys at the house; she did not deny the purpose for which their services had been used. But the faking of spiritualist miracles was not murder, nor was it in any sense akin to murder, and it was for murder that his client was being tried, the murder of these boys she had befriended.

She had a long and honourable record in the Institution of which they had heard so much. She had a reputation, even, for kindness. One of the witnesses for the prosecution had been, himself, a boy at the Institution, and, in spite of the fact that his evidence had been given against the prisoner, he had had to agree that she had been a kind woman, bringing into the lives of these poor boys—victims of our social system rather than sinners in their own right!—something of a mother's care and love.

Was it likely, was it probable, in fact, was it possible at all, that such a woman could have done the deed attributed to her by the prosecution ?

"Not a bad effort," said Ferdinand. "Really not bad at all. I'm prepared to lay you a monkey to sixpence that that jury will let her off. The missing link is vital. You can't put the job on to Bella without something better than that wretched hysteria-patient of yours, and that's that. After all, Crodders ain't so far wrong about coincidences, and the jury, curse them for superstitious fatheads, know it."

Mrs. Bradley agreed.

"We have to allow for the fact that there are three women on the jury, though," she added, "and we have yet to hear the summing-up."

"Yes. Shouldn't think Nolly would be particularly prejudiced in her favour," Ferdinand agreed, more cheerfully. "After all, he must remember her former trial, even if-the jury don't, but he can't manufacture evidence, much as he might like to. He can only throw his weight about, and he's always scrupulously fair. No, I take it that the priceless Bella will drive off amid cheers come this time to-morrow. Cousin Muriel has dished us. She had the whole thing in her hands, and she chucked it clean away. She and the Naval rating, between 'em, ought to have cooked Bella's goose, but it's all over now, I fancy, bar the enthusiasm of an exhilarated populace."

Chapter Ten

REACTIONS OF AN ELDERLY PSYCHOLOGIST

Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector brave: Swords may not fight with fate: Earth still holds ope her gate. Come, come, the bells do cry: I am sick, I must die.

· · · · ·

Wit with his wantonness Tasteth death's bitterness; Hell's executioner Hath no ears for to hear What vain art can reply; I am sick, I must die.

· · · · ·

NASHE.

MR. JUSTICE KNOWLES commenced his summing-up by emphasizing to the jury the point at issue in the trial. The question for them to settle was whether or not the prisoner had, by her wilful act, murdered, by starving them to death, two boys named respectively Frederick Pegwell and Richard Kectleborough.

That two boys had died of starvation (an even more sinister report by the medical witnesses was not referred to) and had been buried beneath the floor in the cellar or crypt of a house known as Nunsuch in the village of Tonning, there could be no doubt. The facts and cause of the deaths were not disputed by the defence, and the medical witnesses who had appeared for the defence, as well as those who had appeared for the prosecution, were agreed upon the approximate date of the deaths.

It was not disputed, either, that the accused had visited, and even lived in, the house. As to her assertion that she and her relatives believed the house to be haunted, the jury must make up their own minds to what extent the accused really believed this. The question here was not whether the house really was or was not haunted, but whether the prisoner believed that it was, for this might have some bearing upon their verdict.

The question, then, resolved itself into this: Did the accused murder Frederick Pegwell and Richard Kettleborough?

The prosecution had produced a witness to show that the prisoner had connived at, and even assisted in, the escape of these two boys from what was a remand home for young criminals. The jury might ask themselves whether this young man, who had also been for some years an inmate of this home, was a reliable witness....

Here Mr. Pratt looked at Mrs. Bradley and held his thumbs down.

... or whether it could be expected that he should remember clearly all the details of his life there. On the other hand, the jury must remember that this witness, like all the other witnesses, was on oath, and that he had given his evidence straightforwardly and undoubtedly had so far improved his way of life that he was to-day in an honourable calling, the most honourable, perhaps, in the world, that of an Able Seaman in the Royal Navy.

The jury had also heard another witness declare that the two boys Pegwell and Kettleborough had been employed by the accused to counterfeit psychic phenomena in order that the reputation of the haunted house might be exploited for gain.

On the other hand, the jury would remember that this witness had contradicted herself on several important counts during the hearing of her evidence. First she had said that she tried to dissuade her husband from employing the boys, and then that she had agreed to it. She had also stated that the accused had received a share of the profits, and then she had denied that this was so. Furthermore, she had stated expressly that she had left the haunted house because she did not like what was going on there; she believed, she said, that the house was verily and indeed the haunt of supernatural beings, yet she had also made the statement that she knew that all the extraordinary occurrences which were experienced there were the work of these two boys, and she insisted that they were acting under instructions from the prisoner.

It surely would not be contended, as learned counsel had pointed out (observed his Lordship), that all these statements could be true.

"Why not?" wrote Mr. Pratt, passing the note to Mrs. Bradley. She glanced at it and grinned, pursing her lips almost immediately afterwards into a little beak, and looking again at the judge.

There were tales of screams, shouts and moans, Mr. Justice Knowles continued, but if it were so, why had nothing been said or done about them at the time? Why were they dragged into the light of day for the first time more than six years afterwards ?

On the other hand, there was the actual evidence of the bodies. Two bodies had been found under the house in circumstances which indicated foul play. If the bodies had been left unburied it might be argued that a horrible accident or even criminal negligence had taken place. But the fact that the bodies of two starved children had actually been buried, and buried in secret, and in a place where it was most unlikely that they would ever be found, indicated—in fact, insisted—that there had been foul play.

There was also the evidence of the ex-Warden of the Institution. The jury would remember that this witness had stated that no trace of the missing boys had ever come to light. The jury would also remember that this witness had stated, further (and in this part of his evidence he was supported by the testimony of the present Warden), that for the police to fail to track down two such boys, of whom a full description could be circulated and who would be most unlikely to have money with them to assist them to get away from the environs of the Institution, was most unusual.

His Lordship elaborated this part of his theme, and concluded with an exhortation to the jury to remember to give the prisoner the benefit of any reasonable doubt. Then he invited them to retire and consider their verdict.

In the interval which followed this retirement, Mr. Pratt again scribbled a note to Mrs. Bradley.

"What a pity we couldn't produce the motive for the murder of the boys!"

Mrs. Bradley wrote in reply on the bottom of the same sheet of paper:

"What was the motive for the murder of the boys? If you could tell me that I should be delighted."

Pratt wrote on the other side of the paper (thus offending, Mrs. Bradley pointed out later, against all the canons of journalism and other authorship),

"Why, what about the murder of Cousin Tom? What a blight on us that it has to be hush-hush, isn't it?"

To this Mrs. Bradley wrote in reply:

"Cousin Tom was not murdered until after the boys were imprisoned in the cellar. You've got the wrong notion. I had, too, at first, and it led to Bella's arrest. Tom may not have been a party to the killing of the boys, therefore he may have been a nuisance; he may have known facts about the death of Aunt Flora, therefore he may have been a menace; but the death of the boys must have had some connection with another matter, I think, and certainly with another person."

"The thing is," said Ferdinand to his mother that evening, when, the jury having failed to agree, the trial was postponed until the next sessions—a matter of a few weeks—"you will have to go further into the alleged suicide of the sister. There's still some sort of mystery about that. Nobody is going to get me to believe that anyone as completely hard-boiled as Bella Foxley wanted to fake a suicide because people were sending her anonymous letters. Besides, the villagers didn't know who she was, did they?—Although, of course, you can never be sure about a thing like that. Because the shepherd doesn't know there's a wolf in the fold, it doesn't stand to reason the sheep don't."

"They would be likely to betray the fact to the shepherd, though, don't you think?" observed Mrs. Bradley. "But I think, all the same, dear child, it is your metaphor and not your reasoning which is at fault."

"Pratt showed me your note about the motive for the murder of the boys," continued Ferdinand. "I thought you had made up your mind that they were killed because they knew she had murdered Cousin Tom, until you suddenly presented me with that contrary opinion of yours the other week, about Muriel."

"I did think so at first, but the evidence of the caretaker and his daughter, plus the evidence of Miss Biddle, caused me to change my mind, and the medical evidence confirmed everything. You see, Bella Foxley was arrested so soon after the death of and the inquest on, Cousin Tom that she would have had no chance of returning to the house to bury the bodies of the two boys until they would have reached an advanced state of decomposition. Now the bodies, as I saw them when they were first disinterred by the police, did not bear out this theory. The boys had been buried, I should have said, before they were quite dead, and the medical evidence at the trial bore out this suggestion of mine. Q.E.D."

"It is indeed," agreed Ferdinand. "Well, it will be a very serious thing if you don't get her at the next attempt. What are you going to do?"

"I am going to rent a cottage in the village where Tessa Foxley was drowned," Mrs. Bradley replied. "There may be, as you suggest, a more powerful motive for that impersonation than the desire to put an end to anonymous letters, and there may be a motive for the murder of the boys which has no connection whatsoever with the death of Cousin Tom or else a different connection from any which we visualized at first. I had better interview the prisoner, I think, before I go to Pond. Can you arrange that for me?"

"I don't know that she'll agree to have you visit her," replied Ferdinand.

"I know what you mean," said Mrs. Bradley, with her harsh cackle. "I did my best to get her hanged, you think. Well, let me know as soon as I can get permission to visit her."

She had few questions to ask Bella Foxley when they met. The prisoner was as uncommunicative as when they had conversed at her toll-house in Devon, so perhaps it was well that Mrs. Bradley was prepared to be brief.

"Don't worry. They'll probably get me next time," Bella announced, as soon as she was seated opposite the visitor. "What do you want?"

"Answers to a question or so," Mrs. Bradley replied, "and I will guarantee not to use what you tell me in a manner detrimental to your interests."

"Perhaps you think the gallows might serve my interests best?" said Bella with an ugly look and an even uglier laugh. Mrs. Bradley shrugged, and then, fixing her bright black eyes on the prisoner, looked at her expectantly.

"For my own satisfaction, if for no other reason, I should like to establish the truth," she said. "Now, Miss Foxley: suppose, instead of being charged with the murder of those two boys, you were charged with the murder of your sister, Miss Tessa Foxiey?"

Bella half-smiled. Mrs. Bradley waited. Her clients knew that expression of patient benevolence. It seemed to have hypnotic powers. She exercised them now upon Bella, and, to her relief, although not altogether to her surprise, the prisoner spoke almost good-humouredly.

"Poor Tessa! Of course, as you've guessed, she was mental. That's why she was taken advantage of. That's one of the reasons why I hate men. I had her to live with me after the other trial because I had nobody else, and I thought I ought to keep an eye on her as I was letting her have half the money, and—I suppose I might as well confess it and get it off my conscience—I was hoping something would happen, and it did. She was the suicide kind, I suppose. My aim was to assume her identity if anything happened to her. I suggested to her we should call each other by nicknames, and I always told people—not that we got to know many; I saw to that all right—that she was Bella and I was Tessa Foxley.

"People didn't seem to suspect anything; I suppose they thought she was what people were like when they'd been acquitted of murder.

"Anyway, one afternoon I got to her in time to pull her head out of the rainwater butt. Silly of me, because it would have done the trick all right, but, somehow, you can't watch people die. Anyway, next time she did it in the village pond, and it was all up with her by the time she was discovered."

"And you had an alibi, I believe, for the time of her death?" said Mrs. Bradley in very friendly tones.