Winking at the Brim (Mrs. Bradley) 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 1974

  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 1974 by Michael Joseph

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

  E-ISBN: 9781477869185

  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.

  To

  my student nephew ARNOLD MAURICE DUNCAN SPENCE with love and best wishes

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1 An Invitation

  CHAPTER 2 Preliminary Soundings

  CHAPTER 3 The Volunteer

  CHAPTER 4 Reconnaissance

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 5 The Gathering

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 6 Leviathan Stirs

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 7 Cross-Currents

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 8 The Sighting

  CHAPTER 9 Sally Gets Her Rights

  CHAPTER 10 The Body at the Crofter’s Cottage

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 11 Two Letters for Dame Beatrice

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 12 The Vicar Denies Liability

  CHAPTER 13 Dame Beatrice Goes North

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 14 The Hunting-Lodge and the Island

  CHAPTER 15 With Beaded Bubbles

  CHAPTER 16 Excavations and Enquiries

  CHAPTER 17 Hubert Pring

  CHAPTER 18 Sparkling Burgundy

  CHAPTER 19 Leviathan Speaks

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  An Invitation

  “The young lady was most tenderly educated, and it is a certain fact that she was never suffered to see the moon for fear she should cry for it.”

  James Boswell.

  Like all old-established and old-fashioned households, that of the psychiatric adviser to the Home Office, Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, was ruled to a great extent by routine. The servants, who knew their place and approved of it, were downstairs by seven in the morning, breakfast was at eight-thirty and, as soon as the postman had called, the secretary picked up the mail and sorted it.

  One fine morning in early April, the secretary, whose name was Laura Gavin and who was the friend as well as the confidante of her employer, came down, as usual, before Dame Beatrice or the guest who was staying in the house had appeared, and found the regular collection of letters and bills beside her plate. She began to sort through them while waiting for the others to appear.

  She made four piles. One contained Dame Beatrice’s personal correspondence from relatives and friends; the second was Laura’s own mail, and the third was addressed to the guest who was staying in the house, Dame Beatrice’s granddaughter Sally Lestrange. This lively young woman not long down from Oxford was waiting for a flat in London and had been invited to live at the Stone House in Hampshire until the friends with whom she would share had found something suitable. The fourth, and by far the largest pile, consisted of business correspondence, bills, and (as Laura put it) anything typed and not hand-written.

  Dame Beatrice came down just as Laura had finished opening this last pile, which would be dealt with after breakfast. She served Dame Beatrice from the dishes which had just been brought in, heaped her own plate, and then, handing over an elegant piece of gold-printed pasteboard, she observed:

  “ ‘An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.’ We don’t know anybody called Calshott, do we?”

  “No, but I do,” said Sally Lestrange, coming into the room. “I told the Calshotts I was st
aying here. I had their invitation the day before I came. Phyllis Calshott was one of the seniors in school and I got lugged into visiting them one vac. It’s her birthday on the fourteenth, her twenty-sixth. Hence the dinner-party. We’d better go, if you don’t mind. Sir Humphrey is on the board of some publishers and I’ve written a novel.”

  “They will do it, dear boy. They will do it!” murmured Laura, raising her eyes towards the ceiling.

  “Nevertheless, although what you quote is very true,” said Dame Beatrice, “perhaps I owe it to Sally to accept the invitation. What kind of people are the Calshotts?”

  “Well, Sir Humphrey is all right,” said Sally, “but Lady Calshott isn’t anybody I’d particularly want to know, and Phyllis is the dreariest kind of drip.”

  “But you are prepared to put up with the mother and daughter in order to ingratiate yourself with the father, are you?”

  “Well, it’s not all that easy to get a novel published nowadays,” argued Sally, “and Phyllis is so utterly spoilt and indulged that, if Sir Humphrey gets the say-so from her and her mother, I think my opus is in the bag.”

  “You speak with confidence, I notice. Why is that? Why should mother and daughter support your endeavour to have your book accepted?”

  “Well,” said Sally, avoiding her aged relative’s sharp black eyes, “thereby hangs a tale.”

  “You’re in a position to blackmail this unfortunate family, are you?” asked Laura, grinning. “How is that?”

  “Oh, well, it’s not as shocking as blackmail,” said Sally, “and of course, I’d never dream of putting the screw on in any way whatsoever, but, if I drop a hint to Phyllis that I’ve written a book, she’ll squeal with excitement and go straight to Mummy and tell her that Daddy must, simply must, put me into print.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, it seems quite idiotic now, but it all began when I was in the lower fourth at school and she was in the sixth form. First of all I got involved with her over some poetry I’d written. Because her father is in publishing she was made editor of the school magazine. Well, I sent in one or two bits of childish verse and she went all enthusiastic over them and asked whether I’d written any more, because she thought she could get Sir Humphrey to publish it. You can imagine what that meant to a kid of fourteen, and I must say that Sir Humphrey was very nice to me, although, of course, he didn’t publish my poetry, thank goodness. My novel is a different matter.”

  “I shall be interested to meet the rash Miss Calshott,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “She isn’t rash; she’s merely goofy,” said Sally.

  The small manor house to which Dame Beatrice and Sally had been invited was only forty miles from where they lived, but a warmly-worded note from Lady Calshott, after they had accepted the invitation, begged them to stay the night, as the party was to finish rather late.

  When they arrived, Sally was immediately claimed by Phyllis. A fairish, grey-eyed, nondescript kind of young woman with an exaggerated Oxford accent, she had a gushing manner and wore a trouser-suit which was of no help to her narrow, slightly stooping shoulders and disproportionately wide hips. Dame Beatrice, taken in tow by Lady Calshott, was shown up to a pleasant, low-ceilinged room on the first floor and told that Phyllis and Sally would bring her down to tea. At this repast she met her host and was compelled to admit that he was by far the most charming and disarming member of the household.

  “Daddy,” said Phyllis, handing him his tea-cup, (she had an embarrassing way of waiting on her parents as though, Sally said later, they had one foot in the grave and she was in trembling expectation that the other foot would soon follow) “here is your tea, darling, and before you drink even the teeniest drop of it you must promise to publish Sally’s book.”

  “Oh, has Sally written a book? You know, that’s what you could do, Phyllis, dear,” said her mother, “if you thought you could find the time. If Sally can do it, you can, and it would make a nice change for you, wouldn’t it? And, of course, Daddy…”

  “Phyllis would need to find another publisher,” said Sir Humphrey hastily. “We couldn’t do it, my dear.”

  “Why ever not?” demanded Lady Calshott.

  “Kissing mustn’t go by favour. I don’t want a charge of nepotism levelled against me.”

  “Of course I couldn’t write a book,” said Phyllis, looking to her mother to contradict her, which Lady Calshott immediately did. “What kind of book is yours, Sally?”

  “A novel, I’m afraid,” replied Sally, glancing at Sir Humphrey.

  “Oh, dear!” he said. “I wish it had been a travel book or a biography. Have you brought it with you?”

  “Oh, no, of course not!” Sally lied valiantly. “But I would like to send it to you if I may. I mean, when I’ve had another go at it, of course.”

  “Oh, no, Sally! You mustn’t touch it,” cried Phyllis. “I’m sure you’ll spoil it if you do. There’s nothing like the first fine careless rapture, is there, Dame Beatrice?”

  “According to Robert Browning, not even for thrushes, perhaps, and certainly not necessarily for authors,” Dame Beatrice replied.

  “Send it to us by all means, Sally,” said Sir Humphrey kindly. “We can, at any rate, give you an opinion, although I’m not sure that ours is the best firm for you to approach with a first novel. Our list…”

  “Oh, Daddy, of course it is!” cried Phyllis. “You must have more confidence in yourself. Of course yours is the best firm for Sally.”

  “It is not confidence in myself or my firm which I lack, my dear girl,” said Sir Humphrey. “I was merely pointing out…”

  “Daddy, if you don’t publish Sally’s book I shall never speak to you again!”

  “I wonder which of them would be the loser?” said Dame Beatrice, referring to this passionate declaration later in the day when Sally had gone along to her room to find out whether she was ready to go down to the birthday dinner.

  “She didn’t mean a word of it,” said Sally. “Do you remember calling her ‘the rash Miss Calshott’? I’m beginning to think you’re right. If you are, she’ll land in trouble one of these days. Nature never intended her to act like a bull at a gate. She’s too spoilt for words, that’s her trouble. I’ll tell you which of the party impresses me even less than Phyllis, though. After all, Phyllis, although goofy to the eyebrows, is well-meaning enough in her irritating way, but that cousin of theirs, the Barton woman we met at tea, is a menace. Spiteful and ill-natured to the core, wouldn’t you say, Grandmamma? She’s a cesspool of slander.”

  “She is all that you claim, I fear. What is more, one may feel sorry for her. Ill-nature makes of her a born victim, don’t you think?”

  “A victim?”

  “Yes, but whether of murder, an unhappy love affair, or merely of some tiresome financial involvement, I could not possibly guess. She talks far too much for her own good, and all of it is spiteful and censorious. Nobody’s guilty secret is safe with a woman like that.”

  “Have you any guilty secrets, Grandmamma?”

  “So many that I have lost count of them,” said Dame Beatrice. “How about you?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Preliminary Soundings

  “…there is that leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein.”

  Psalm 104, Authorised Version.

  The conversation, half-serious, half-frivolous, had been carried over from dessert in the dining-room to coffee and liqueurs in the drawing-room. The company, including the host and hostess, numbered fourteen. With Sir Humphrey and Lady Calshott and their daughter Phyllis was the rat-like little woman with the bitter mouth and hostile eyes who had been introduced to the guests as “our cousin, Angela Barton, who has come to live with us.”

  The guests themselves were Major Tamworth, his wife Catherine and their son Jeremy; a young couple called Nigel and Marjorie Parris, friends of Jeremy’s; an apparently quiet young fellow named Hubert Pring who had been invited because he was week-ending with the Parrises;
twin sisters who occupied a cottage on Sir Humphrey’s estate and were dabblers with paint and clay, and, finally, Dame Beatrice herself and Sally.

  Of the fourteen people at table, only the twin sisters appeared to be not entirely at ease. Their surname, Dame Beatrice learned, was Benson, and they were rather astoundingly named Godiva and Winfrith. Their father had been an artist—a painter—of some note, but, according to Lady Calshott, had bequeathed little of his talent to his daughters. These, however, enjoyed their dilettante existence and this, perhaps, justified it. They had been added to the gathering fortuitously, having met Lady Calshott in the village that same morning and invited her, rather timidly, to sherry. She excused herself by explaining that she was preparing for guests and saw nothing for it but to reverse the invitation, as she had explained unnecessarily to Dame Beatrice earlier.

  “So, thanks to the Bensons, it will be a monstrous regiment of women,” she had said to her husband at tea-time after the embarrassing subject of Sally’s novel had been shelved.

  “It doesn’t mean that,” Sir Humphrey had explained. “John Knox meant that women should not rule a country; in his case, it was the country of Mary, Queen of Scots, and it was to her regiment that he took exception.”

  “Well, it will throw the table out,” his wife had angrily retorted. “That’s what I mean.”

  “Anyway, they may be interested in my project,” Sir Humphrey had pacifically observed, “and it might be very useful to have a couple of people who can sketch a bit. Sometimes a lightning impression dotted down by an artist has an advantage over a photograph.”

  “Well, I wish I hadn’t had to ask them. They don’t fit in, and, far from stopping to do lightning sketches, the Benson girls are much more likely to scream and run if they do see anything in Loch na Tannasg,” Lady Calshott had said. “And why you want to drag Phyllis to such an out of the way spot, where she’ll meet nobody, I cannot think.”

  Her reference was to Sir Humphrey’s project which, later that evening, was destined to engage the attention of the entire party.

  When the host touched on the subject of monsters in Scottish lochs it was energetically taken up by the company, each of whom had something to say about it. The scoffers, as usual, were in the majority. The only person who did not express an opinion was Dame Beatrice.