Bismarck Herrings (Timothy Herring) Read online

  Titles by Gladys Mitchell

  Speedy Death (1929)

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929)

  The Longer Bodies (1930)

  The Saltmarsh Murders (1932)

  Death at the Opera (1934)

  The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935)

  Dead Men’s Morris (1936)

  Come Away, Death (1937)

  St. Peter’s Finger (1938)

  Printer’s Error (1939)

  Brazen Tongue (1940)

  Hangman’s Curfew (1941)

  When Last I Died (1941)

  Laurels Are Poison (1942)

  Sunset Over Soho (1943)

  The Worsted Viper (1943)

  My Father Sleeps (1944)

  The Rising of the Moon (1945)

  Here Comes a Chopper (1946)

  Death and the Maiden (1947)

  The Dancing Druids (1948)

  Tom Brown’s Body (1949)

  Groaning Spinney (1950)

  The Devil’s Elbow (1951)

  The Echoing Strangers (1952)

  Merlin’s Furlong (1953)

  Faintley Speaking (1954)

  On Your Marks (1954)

  Watson’s Choice (1955)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956)

  The Twenty-Third Man (1957)

  Spotted Hemlock (1958)

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)

  Say It with Flowers (1960)

  The Nodding Canaries (1961)

  My Bones Will Keep (1962)

  Adders on the Heath (1963)

  Death of a Delft Blue (1964)

  Pageant of Murder (1965)

  The Croaking Raven (1966)

  Skeleton Island (1967)

  Three Quick and Five Dead (1968)

  Dance to Your Daddy (1969)

  Gory Dew (1970)

  Lament for Leto (1971)

  A Hearse on May-Day (1972)

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie (1973)

  A Javelin for Jonah (1974)

  Winking at the Brim (1974)

  Convent on Styx (1975)

  Late, Late in the Evening (1976)

  Noonday and Night (1977)

  Fault in the Structure (1977)

  Wraiths and Changelings (1978)

  Mingled with Venom (1978)

  Nest of Vipers (1979)

  The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)

  Uncoffin’d Clay (1980)

  The Whispering Knights (1980)

  The Death-Cap Dancers (1981)

  Lovers, Make Moan (1981)

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982)

  Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982)

  The Greenstone Griffins (1983)

  Cold, Lone and Still (1983)

  No Winding Sheet (1984)

  The Crozier Pharaohs (1984)

  Gladys Mitchell writing as Malcolm Torrie

  Heavy as Lead (1966)

  Late and Cold (1967)

  Your Secret Friend (1968)

  Shades of Darkness (1970)

  Bismarck Herrings (1971)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1971

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle, 2014

  www.apub.com

  First published Great Britain in 1971 by Michael Joseph

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  E-ISBN: 9781477869413

  A Note about this E-Book

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original British edition and includes British vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation, some of which may differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, with only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  To Joan, Mig, and Arnold at Freagair

  To Joan and Mig

  It was not in the Winter

  Our loving lot was cast;

  It was the time of roses—

  We pluck’d them as we pass’d.

  Thomas Hood—Time of Roses

  To Arnold

  You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays,

  You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent;

  He has been our fellow, the morning of our days;

  Us he chose for housemates, and this way went.

  George Meredith—Phoebus With Admetus

  Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE Warlock Hall

  CHAPTER TWO The Ghost-Hunter

  CHAPTER THREE Exit Macbeth

  CHAPTER FOUR The Creek

  CHAPTER FIVE Rumours of Wars

  CHAPTER SIX Almshouses

  CHAPTER SEVEN An End to Matilda’s Rest

  CHAPTER EIGHT Death of an Elderly Woman

  CHAPTER NINE Speculation and an Inquest

  CHAPTER TEN Desultory Conversation

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Ghost Materialises

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Plumb Line

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Suspicions and an Invitation

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Lorrimere Court

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Various Ladies

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Herrings at Leisure

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All the quotations used as chapter headings are taken from Robert Herrick’s poems included in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Warlock Hall

  “I could wish you dispossest

  Of that Fiend that marres your rest;

  And with Tapers comes to fright

  Your weake senses in the night.”

  To All Young Men That Love

  Even in sunshine the mansion looked formidable and forbidding, an ugly, ill-tempered, grotesque chunk of masonry rising behind its gatehouse in a weedy, neglected courtyard and backed by pine-trees in which the wind kept up a perpetual fretful murmuring. Its new owner, his hands in his trousers’ pockets, stared at it in perplexity.

  “What the devil am I going to do with it, Tom?” he asked. “Do you suppose there’s any chance of selling it?”

  “Oh, if it were mine I wouldn’t think of getting rid of it until I’d seen what it was like inside,” said his companion. “Did they send you the keys?”

  “No. I was told there’s a caretaker or a housekeeper or somebody living on the premises and looking after things. She’ll let us in.”

  “Why didn’t you bring Alison with you? Isn’t she interested?”

  “Only morbidly, so to speak. I think the name of the house has put her off.”

  “Oh, really? Warlock Hall? Is she allergic to Merlin and his kind?”

  “I suppose she must be. It’s not surprising, considering what happened to her sister. Oh, well—Childe Roland to the dark tower came, and what he did we can do, I imagine, so let’s demand admittance and find out the worst. If it’s anything like this courtyard, the house must be in a rare mess. I suppose my great-uncle got past caring. He was almost a hundred years old when he died. It’s taken the lawyers twelve months to sort out his affairs, poor old chap, but, honestly, I wish he’d left the place to somebody else.”

  “This
doorway,” said Tom Parsons, approaching it, “has come from a church.” He and Timothy studied it. “Late Norman. I suppose the sixteenth-century owner collected it from a monastery after the Dissolution. There’s one something like it at a Cornish hotel where I stayed.”

  “Odd ideas some people have,” said Timothy.

  Hammering on the door and prolonged tugging at an ancient wrought-iron bell-pull produced no response, although the two men could hear the reverberation of the one and the clanging of the other resounding inside the house.

  “Somebody may be at the back,” said Timothy Herring. “Let’s stroll round.”

  To the right of the front door stretched a long stone wall pierced by several tall windows. From the end of this wall a room with an oriel jutted out into the ragged courtyard. The two men rounded the house, picking their way among weeds and stunted bushes, until they came to what had been the garden entrance, but it was smothered in climbing roses which had become so entirely out of hand that it was clear that the doorway had not been in use for years. The walls on either side of it were beginning to crumble and a flagged terrace, which ran the whole width of the house, had its stones forced apart by weeds and self-sown garden plants. Out to the left of the terrace were some decrepit, neglected outbuildings, all that was left of the stables.

  “Well, Tim,” said Tom Parsons, “are you going to emulate the intrepid prince of La Belle au Bois Dormant and brave the rose-thorns, or shall we try tooting the horn of the car? Was the caretaker expecting you, by the way?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. If she got my letter, she should be here to let us in. Perhaps she’s gone shopping or something, unless she’s drowned herself in the creek. I know I should, if I had to live alone in a place like this.”

  When they reached the front of the house once more, they found a woman of past middle-age and a hulking, heavy-shouldered, surly-looking man of about thirty waiting in the courtyard.

  “Good afternoon. Would you be Mrs. Gee?” asked Timothy.

  “Which I am, sir, and this is my boy, Jabez. Would you be Mr. Herring, sir? Which you will be requiring the keys of the ’ouse. Jabez, top shelf of the pantry.” The young man, who carried a shot-gun over his arm, shambled off in the direction of the gatehouse. “Which maybe you could do with a nice cuppa tea, sir, the kittle bein’ on the ’ob and the water nicely a-simmerin’. I always think there’s nothing like a nice cuppa tea, sir, to refresh you after a journey.” Her tone was suspiciously sycophantic.

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Timothy, “but I’m afraid we’ve only time to look over the house. I understood you were living in it, but we couldn’t make anybody hear.”

  “Which I am truly sorry about that, sir, but my front door is under the archway and to the far side, so, as I didn’t hear nothing, it wasn’t until I thought you must be here, sir, as Jabez and me come out and see your car in the lane, sir.”

  “Yes, it’s too wide for the archway. Are you living in the gatehouse, then?”

  “Which I am, sir, it being more convenient that way.”

  At this point Jabez reappeared without his gun and handed over the keys.

  “I s’pose you won’t be thinkin’ of livin’ up at the ’ouse, sir?” he enquired.

  “I don’t know why you should suppose that!” said Timothy somewhat sharply. “You had better come along and show us round. There may be things I shall need to ask you.”

  “Very good, sir, though it’s mother as knows most about it, her keepin’ it clean and aired out and the like of that.” He followed Timothy and Parsons across the courtyard.

  “What’s your job here, then?” asked Timothy, over his shoulder. The man caught up with him.

  “Why, I don’t have no reg’lar job ’ere, sir. I belong to work down on the boats. I keeps Mother company of a night when I aren’t wanted down on the Hard, which is a mile or two up-river where the yachting gents keeps their boats, sir, but I don’t get paid for nothing to do with the ’ouse, sir.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Timothy, ignoring the suggestion he detected from the last remark. “What made your mother decide to live in the gatehouse? Wouldn’t she be far more comfortable in a room up at the Hall?”

  “Which I’m not denying as she would, sir. Trouble is, you see, as Mother don’t fancy the ’ouse, sir. Her got proper nervous up there.”

  “Even when you were with her?”

  “Well, that couldn’t be every night, sir, not with me on the boats, so her got on to fancyin’ things. Not as I blame her, sir. It’s a funny old place, is the Hall, as you’ll soon find out if you thinks for to live in it.”

  Timothy frowned. There was nothing objectionable in the words themselves, but he detected a threat behind them.

  The great hall of the mansion was sombrely impressive. At the end which the three men had entered by way of the screens passage there was a minstrels’ gallery ornamented with the antlered heads of stags which certainly had never been born and bred in that flat, well-watered countryside. Along the interior wall opposite the windows hung a collection of forbidding family portraits. The open-timbered roof was of crown-post construction and behind what had been the mediæval dais an enormous Tudor fireplace had been built to replace a central hearth whose remains could still be seen beneath an elaborately carved, heavy, oak table.

  From the great hall there were three exits, excluding the one to the screens passage. On the right of the fireplace a door opened on to a space (not much more than a lobby) leading to the room with the oriel window. This was a gloomy, almost square chamber, darkly panelled and having a heavy, ugly ceiling plastered with sixteenth-century patterning and blackened by smoke from a fireplace similar to the one in the hall.

  A door on the left led into the same short passage and this ended in a newel staircase which also formed the third exit from the hall. It led downwards into a vaulted undercroft considerably older than the rest of the ancient house, and upwards, past a room containing a magnificent four-poster bed, to the long gallery which seemed to be in use as a library. Beyond this were a couple of rooms with a connecting door between them, and a landing from which a Tudor staircase descended. The landing also opened on to the minstrels’ gallery.

  A window at the further end of the landing overlooked the unkempt, overgrown grounds, and in the middle of these there was a huge, scum-covered pond almost large enough to be called a lake. Beyond this was a belt of pines whose murmuring seemed to intensify the desolation of the lonely, uncomfortable mansion.

  Jabez remained on the landing, staring out of the window. Timothy, his depression increasing as he went from one room to another, stepped on to the minstrels’ gallery and shivered in an icy draught. He tried to discover the source of this, but failed to do so. There was no window to light the gallery itself and its dark panelling had neither crack nor any man-made aperture, so far as he could see, except the archway by which he had entered. The front of the gallery, as he saw when he looked down from it into the great hall, was of solid oak. As he stood there, Parsons joined him.

  “My word! Isn’t it perishing up here!” he said. “Where does the draught come from? Haven’t you felt it?”

  “I can’t make out where it comes from. I’m feeling it all right,” replied Timothy, “and it isn’t so much a draught as an area of bitter cold. We might almost as well be inside a refrigerator, mightn’t we? I can’t make it out, because it’s very warm outside in the courtyard, so I don’t see why it should be quite so cold up here.”

  They found Jabez still standing by the landing window.

  “Why doesn’t this staircase go any higher? There’s another floor above this, isn’t there?” asked Timothy.

  “Only the attic floor, sir. There’s nothing to see up above except a lot of junk. As to this staircase, sir, well, I did hear from somebody some time back as it wasn’t, so to speak, born with the ’ouse, sir, but, as they say, imported.”

  “It’s Tudor all right,” said Parsons, examining the open carving of the o
ak newels and bending to look at the uncarpeted treads and risers, “but I see what you mean. It’s been brought from some more stately mansion and wedded to this one. It doesn’t really belong in this part of the house at all.”

  “Well, how do we reach the attics?” asked Timothy. “The newel stair seemed to end on this floor, too.”

  “Yes, so it do, sir, but there’s a back staircase goes up from the passage you come in by, sir. Something for the use of the servants in the days when the gentry could get what servants they wanted, I daresay.”

  Parsons looked at his watch.

  “I don’t want to hurry you, old man,” he said apologetically to Timothy, “but I ought to be getting back pretty soon, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, lord, yes. That goes for both of us. Is there anything else to look at downstairs, Gee?” asked Timothy.

  “Just the two rooms where, so I was told, the kitchen and all that used to be, sir. The old gentleman’s quarters, I was told.”

  “Oh, well, we may as well see them on our way out. Is it of any use to go down this stairway? Does it lead anywhere, or is it merely for ornament?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. Best way is to try it and find out.”

  The tone again stopped only just a little short of insolence.

  “Oh, well, we can try it without your help,” said Timothy, curtly. “Go and find your mother and tell her that we’re off now, but that I shall be back very soon, so that she’d better get the four-poster bed properly aired, in case I decide to stay the night.”

  Jabez turned to go back by the way they had come, but he muttered something as he left them.

  “What was that?” said Timothy sharply.

  “No offence, sir. I only said as I reckoned you’d find one night in this place quite enough to be a-goin’ on with. It’s a nasty old house, sir, and that’s a fact. Something wrong with it.”

  “And he’s about right, at that,” said Timothy, when the man had left them. The Tudor stair ended in a cul-de-sac whose open end led to the screens passage, and Timothy gave his verdict after they had returned to the ground floor and had inspected the only two rooms which appeared to have been inhabited. They were underneath the bedrooms which were on the same floor as the library and were furnished as a bedroom and a small sitting-room.