Your Secret Friend (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 1968.

  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 in Great Britain in 1968 by Michael Joseph.

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

  E-ISBN: 9781477869390

  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 ELIZABETH and PATRICIA my much-loved sisters-in-law

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE Monkshood Mill

  CHAPTER TWO Purfleet of Purfleet Hall

  CHAPTER THREE Little Monkshood

  CHAPTER FOUR The Coven

  CHAPTER FIVE The Incoming Tenant

  CHAPTER SIX Phisbe Commits Itself

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Postulant

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Spell

  CHAPTER NINE The End of a Summer

  CHAPTER TEN Reconstruction

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Hallowe’en

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Witches’ Curse

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Stool-Pigeon

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Confessional

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Inquisition

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Ugly Sister

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Purification Ceremony

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Phisbe Meets Again

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Vere

  CHAPTER TWENTY Your Friend Alone

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monkshood Mill

  Thirteen cottages, a public house called the Purfleet Arms, the mill from which the hamlet takes its name, together with a Georgian mansion known as Purfleet Hall and a small, sequestered Early English church dedicated to Saint Simon Zelotes, make up Monkshood Mill.

  The river which, half a century ago, was still being used to work the mill, is weedy now, grown over with coarse water-cresses and, in places, with the poppy-head flowers of the yellow water-lily. It still tends to flood in early spring and there is a painted line on the customers’ side of the bar in the taproom of the Purfleet Arms to mark high-water level during the near disastrous floods of 1931.

  It was the mill which Timothy Herring had come to see. The Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest, of which he was honorary secretary, had asked him to go down and look it over. It had been recommended to his committee by a woman member whose special gift, as Timothy sometimes sourly pointed out, was to get him sent on fools’ errands.

  This turned out to be another of them. He drove southwards from his Cotswold home to discover that the mill had been turned into a restaurant with rose-gardens on its river frontage and clematis and honeysuckle on its roadside wall. It was beautifully kept, retained much of its original character, and served a most respectable lunch. He studied it from the road, from the interior, and from the river bank, and then smoked a pensive pipe while he looked out over the water-meadows on the further shore and watched a flotilla of ducks on what had once been the millpond.

  Coming upon the hamlet from the east side, he had not driven past the church, but he had spotted it upon its slight eminence and he decided to stroll along and take a look at it before he drove home. It was an unremarkable but disarming little edifice. It had a lych-gate, an overgrown churchyard in which the eighteenth-century tombstones leaned drunkenly and the mausoleum which housed the defunct lords of the manor was covered in moss. The chancel was unspoilt Early English with three narrow lights at the east end, and the buttresses along the north and south walls were flattish, plain, and had the usual gable offsets. In all, a typical, unpretentious, pleasant little building with nothing outstanding about it except (as he noticed when he went in by the porch and the south door) for a remarkably fine fifteenth-century font reminiscent, to him, of the Seven Sacraments font at East Dereham in Norfolk.
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  Timothy was admiring this font when he was addressed by a middle-aged woman wearing a summer frock, a cardigan, and an unfashionable hat, who, on the Saturday afternoon, was arranging the flowers for Sunday.

  “Ah,” she said, as soon as he turned away from the font, “how kind of you to come. Mrs. Gorman promised she would send somebody. Too bad, her falling off the step-ladder cutting back that tiresome creeper. She must be badly shaken up. What a mercy she didn’t break a leg! Now if you’ll just explore underneath the tower, you will find some big vases for the delphiniums. The water-tap is outside, at the top of the steps to the crypt.”

  Timothy pulled aside the curtain which hid the tower junk-hole from the rest of the church and sorted out two tall brass jugs and a couple of earthenware pitchers. These he filled and brought back to the chancel step, whereon lay a large heap of assorted flowers and greenery.

  “That’s it,” said the woman. “Now, if you’ll do the picking out, I’ll do the arranging. Isn’t it good of the school to send us so much out of their garden? I hardly know how we should manage without it.”

  Timothy, selecting the long, fire-blue spikes of delphinium from out of the lavish heap, remarked upon the beauty and size of the blooms.

  “Yes, indeed,” the woman assented, taking the inflorescences as he offered them, “there are no finer delphiniums in the county except, perhaps, those in the dove-cote gardens at Athelhampton and those at Compton Acres. Of course, the school has kept on Sir Thomas Purfleet’s gardeners, Bob and Ted Short, and that makes a difference, no doubt, but we hardly dared hope the headmistress would keep up the tradition of the church flowers.”

  “Which school will that be?” Timothy enquired.

  “Oh, dear! You are a stranger to the place! I should have thought Mrs. Gorman would have told you, but perhaps it’s stale news now. Some years ago Sir Thomas sold Purfleet Hall and the estate was bought by the trustees of a boarding school for girls which needed bigger premises. It’s called Purfleet Hall School now, but very little has been changed.”

  “Good,” said Timothy. “Well, that seems to be the lot, so far as the delphiniums are concerned. What comes next?”

  What came next was a village maiden aged about fifteen years.

  “Sorry I’m late, Mrs. Cox,” she said. “Mrs. Gorman wanted some shopping from Wimborne, so I had to go on me bike.”

  “Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Cox, gazing in consternation at Timothy. “I’m terribly sorry! I mean, I took it for granted—oh, dear! Here have I been ordering you about as though I knew who you were! I took you for Mrs. Gorman’s nephew! I know she’s expecting him, so I had no idea . . .”

  “It’s quite all right. Glad to help,” said Timothy. “By the way, talking of Purfleet Hall, I suppose that’s the house which I saw from the road as I drove to the mill. It looks a particularly fine place. As it’s now a school, do you think there’s the slightest chance I might be shown over it? I mean, a school isn’t exactly a private residence, is it?”

  “Gloria, dear,” said Mrs. Cox, “go and find the vases for the chancel windows and then sort out the carnations. Well, I don’t know, I’m sure,” she went on, turning again to Timothy. “Are you a prospective father, by any chance?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’m not married.”

  “Oh, well, Miss Pomfret-Brown is a little bit starchy, you know. I doubt very much whether she’ll let you look over the house unless you’ve got a special reason.”

  “I think I’ll try, all the same, I’m interested in old houses. Now is there anything more I can do for you here before I go?”

  “Oh, no, really, thank you. Gloria and I can manage. You say you are interested in old houses? Well, then, you really ought to go and look at Little Monkshood. I’m sure that’s very old; much older than Purfleet Hall, I should think. It’s only about three miles up the road, towards Dorchester. It lies well back, up a lane, but there’s a signpost. Of course, it’s quite a neglected place now, but it’s up for sale, so nobody will say anything if you go and look at it. Mr. Trimble, at the mill, has the key, if you want to go inside.”

  Timothy was accustomed to receive encouraging and ill-informed statements about buildings that were “very old.” The majority of English people, he had good reason to know, were indifferent to the centuries of building which lay between 1150 and 1550. Nothing but the uncompromising, massive, time-defying style of the Normans seemed to him to have forced itself upon their consciousness. The realisation that the thirteenth was not the fifteenth century, and that “Tudor style” was not necessarily related to the sixteenth century, seemed to have passed them by. However, being, above all things, careful and conscientious so far as his voluntary job was concerned, Timothy decided that, as, in any case, his homeward drive could take him past the end of the lane which led to it, he would look at Little Monkshood in the hope, but not the expectation, that it would repay a visit. His sights were set on Purfleet Hall.

  Unlike most houses of its size, this one was not hidden from the public gaze by high walls and immemorial elms, but stood boldly out upon its treeless eminence, a well-proportioned, austere mansion whose only concession to elegance and the picturesque was an impressive portico in the Roman-Corinthian style of James Wyatt. A long drive led past a big lodge at the wrought-iron open gates, and on either side of the drive tennis courts had been laid out and the pleasant plonking of balls struck by tennis rackets accompanied Timothy almost as far as the magnificent outside double staircase which led to the front door.

  This, like the lodge gates, was wide open and on an artist’s easel a neat notice in beautiful Italianate script rendered in Indian ink upon a square of cardboard read: Please ring and enter. Timothy obeyed, and from the nearest doorway on his left a young woman emerged.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. “Have you an appointment with Miss Pomfret-Brown?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” He produced Phisbe’s official card. “This is my excuse for troubling you.”

  “Mr. Timothy Francis Herring. The Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest,” she read aloud. “I see. Well, I shouldn’t think we need preserving at present. The whole house was done up at considerable expense just before the school moved in.”

  “Oh, yes, I can see that,” said Timothy. “Is there any possibility that I might be allowed to see the principal rooms? I really came to look at the mill, but that doesn’t need restoring either.”

  The young woman looked doubtful.

  “Have a look round the school? Well, I suppose I could ask,” she said. “Miss Pomfret-Brown is out this afternoon, so it will have to be Miss Salter. Excuse me.” She retreated through double doors at the end of the hall and Timothy studied the ceiling and was still admiring the details of its plaster-work when his messenger reappeared accompanied by an older woman wearing a lime-green linen frock and a dark-green cardigan. She came up and offered her hand.

  “How do you do, Mr. Herring. I know all about your Society, of course, and quite an amount about you. We have your cousin, Miss Bounty, on the staff, as I suppose you know. I’m afraid she’s out this afternoon—quite a number of people like to take themselves to Bournemouth, and so forth, on Saturdays in the summer—but if you would like to look over the school I shall be very happy to show you round.”

  Timothy had seldom any occasion to feel grateful to his cousin April Bounty. She was regarded by the family, in fact, as its stormy petrel, and fell in and out of jobs and friendships with such rapidity that it was beyond her relatives’ capacity to keep up either with the latest form of employment or the current crush.

  The room into which he had entered was the hall, and, according to the fashion of the time in which it had been built, it was by far the largest room in the house. It was in Robert Adam’s Roman style, with impressive Corinthian pillars down either side and, at both ends, round-headed niches for statuary. There were more columns, similar to the others, on either side of the doorways.

  His guid
e led him through an archway into the room from which the girl who had greeted him had emerged, and in which she now was seated at a very fine mahogany desk of the Chippendale period.

  “This used to be the family’s music room,” said Miss Salter, “but now it’s the secretary’s office. That corridor leading off from it goes to Miss Pomfret-Brown’s private apartments in the south wing, so I can’t take you there. Through here is the drawing-room, in which Miss Pomfret-Brown entertains parents, and this”—leading him through a doorway—“is the library.”

  From the library they passed through another doorway into the splendid salon which lay at the lower end of the hall. This room was domed and contained alcoves intended for statuary or pedestalled urns. The floor was boarded in oak, polished to brilliance, and extremely slippery, and the only piece of furniture was a grand piano.

  “This is the deportment room,” explained Miss Salter, “and is also used for choir practice. The music room itself is upstairs, but I shall not take you beyond this floor, because the rest of the house, as you can imagine, is mostly classrooms and dormitories. Through here is what used to be the boudoir belonging to Lady Purfleet, with her bedroom next door, but the Sixth have the boudoir as their ‘quiet’ room and the bedroom is now the staff common-room. Oh, I see it’s occupied! So sorry, Vere! I am just showing Mr. Herring the principal rooms. Mr. Herring, Miss Vere Pallis. Mr. Herring represents the Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest . . .”

  “Known to its members as Phisbe,” said Timothy. “How do you do, Miss Pallis?”

  “How do you do,” said the spare, unsmiling woman.

  “Vere teaches chemistry and physics,” explained Miss Salter, when they had left her and had closed the door. “We have half-sisters here, Miss Vere, who is the older by several years, and Miss Marchmont, who teaches history. This room we are in was the dining-room and, as you can see, it still is. That corridor, which corresponds to the one you saw on the other side of the hall, leads to a back staircase, the kitchen regions and the servants’ quarters, so we won’t go there. Well, that is all I can show you, I’m afraid, in Miss Pomfret-Brown’s absence.”

  “Thank you very much indeed,” said Timothy. I have enjoyed that.”