[Mrs Bradley 41] - Three Quick and Five Dead Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  Vintage Murder Mysteries

  Title Page

  Chapter One: Under the Greenwood Tree

  Chapter Two: Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind

  Chapter Three: Done to Death by …

  Chapter Four: Sigh No More, Ladies

  Chapter Five: Full Fathom Five

  Chapter Six: How Should I Your True-Love Know

  Chapter Seven: He is Dead and Gone Lady

  Chapter Eight: Come Away, Come Away, Death

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A young woman’s body is discovered in the woods. She has been strangled and a quotation from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ is pinned to her chest with a knitting needle. Soon after, another woman’s body is found, in similar circumstances. Then a third body, a fourth, a fifth ... What links the victims? Scotland Yard is baffled, and all Mrs Bradley’s ingenuity is needed in the hunt for the ruthless killer.

  About the Author

  Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin called her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

  Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G.K Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

  ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL

  Speedy Death

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  The Longer Bodies

  The Saltmarsh Murders

  Death and the Opera

  The Devil at Saxon Wall

  Dead Men’s Morris

  Come Away, Death

  St Peter’s Finger

  Printer’s Error

  Hangman’s Curfew

  When Last I Died

  Laurels Are Poison

  The Worsted Viper

  Sunset Over Soho

  My Father Sleeps

  The Rising of the Moon

  Here Comes a Chopper

  Death and the Maiden

  Tom Brown’s Body

  Groaning Spinney

  The Devil’s Elbow

  The Echoing Strangers

  Merlin’s Furlong

  Watson’s Choice

  Faintley Speaking

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose

  The Twenty-Third Man

  Spotted Hemlock

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

  Say It With Flowers

  The Nodding Canaries

  My Bones Will Keep

  Adders on the Heath

  Death of the Delft Blue

  Pageant of a Murder

  The Croaking Raven

  Skeleton Island

  Three Quick and Five Dead

  Dance to Your Daddy

  Gory Dew

  Lament for Leto

  A Hearse on May-Day

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie

  Winking at the Brim

  A Javelin for Jonah

  Convent on Styx

  Late, Late in the Evening

  Noonday and Night

  Fault in the Structure

  Wraiths and Changelings

  Mingled With Venom

  The Mudflats of the Dead

  Nest of Vipers

  Uncoffin’d Clay

  The Whispering Knights

  Lovers, Make Moan

  The Death-Cap Dancers

  The Death of a Burrowing Mole

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy

  Cold, Lone and Still

  The Greenstone Griffins

  The Crozier Pharaohs

  No Winding-Sheet

  VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERIES

  With the sign of a human skull upon its back and a melancholy shriek emitted when disturbed, the Death’s Head Hawkmoth has for centuries been a bringer of doom and an omen of death – which is why we chose it as the emblem for our Vintage Murder Mysteries.

  Some say that its appearance in King George III’s bedchamber pushed him into madness. Others believe that should its wings extinguish a candle by night, those nearby will be cursed with blindness. Indeed its very name, Acherontia atropos, delves into the most sinister realms of Greek mythology: Acheron, the River of Pain in the underworld, and Atropos, the Fate charged with severing the thread of life.

  The perfect companion, then, for our Vintage Murder Mysteries sleuths, for whom sinister occurrences are never far away and murder is always just around the corner …

  MORE VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERIES

  EDMUND CRISPIN

  Buried for Pleasure

  The Case of the Gilded Fly

  Holy Disorders

  Love Lies Bleeding

  The Moving Toyshop

  Swan Song

  A. A. MILNE

  The Red House Mystery

  GLADYS MITCHELL

  Speedy Death

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  The Longer Bodies

  The Saltmarsh Murders

  Death and the Opera

  The Devil at Saxon Wall

  Dead Men’s Morris

  Come Away, Death

  St Peter’s Finger

  Brazen Tongue

  Hangman’s Curfew

  When Last I Died

  Laurels Are Poison

  Here Comes a Chopper

  Death and the Maiden

  Tom Brown’s Body

  Groaning Spinney

  The Devil’s Elbow

  The Echoing Strangers

  Watson’s Choice

  The Twenty-Third Man

  Spotted Hemlock

  My Bones Will Keep

  Three Quick and Five Dead

  Dance to Your Daddy

  A Hearse on May-Day

  Late, Late in the Evening

  Fault in the Structure

  Nest of Vipers

  MARGERY ALLINGHAM

  Mystery Mile

  Police at the Funeral

  Sweet Danger

  Flowers for the Judge

  The Case of the Late Pig

  The Fashion in Shrouds

  Traitor’s Purse

  Coroner’s Pidgin

  More Work for the Undertaker

  The Tiger in the Smoke

  The Beckoning Lady

  Hide My Eyes

  The China Governess

  The Mind Readers

  Cargo of Eagles

  E. F. BENSON

  The Blotting Book

  The Luck of the Vails

  NICHOLAS BLAKE

  A Question of Proof

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  The Smiler With the Knife

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  Minute for Murder

  Head of a Traveller

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Widow’s Cruise

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Mo
rning After Death

  CHAPTER ONE

  Under the Greenwood Tree

  ‘She made no sound, no word she said –

  Lowlands away my John!

  And then I knew my love was dead –

  My Lowlands away!’

  * * *

  (1)

  It was the middle of the third week in November. There had been a sharply-glittering ground-frost in the early morning, followed by a clear and windless day, but by four o’clock a bluish, thin mist was beginning to fill the valley and blot out all but the tops of the trees.

  At the Stone House just outside the village of Wandles Parva on the edge of the New Forest, Henri the chef and George the chauffeur were playing draughts. At the opposite end of the huge kitchen table, Zena, the kitchenmaid, was exercising her one and only art, that of cutting, at incredible speed, the paper-thin slices of bread and butter which accompanied her employer’s cups of tea, while Henri’s wife was making a pile of sandwiches, some of potted meat and others of cucumber, for the sturdier appetite of her employer’s secretary.

  The employer and the secretary were in the library. Dame Beatrice was reading; Laura Gayin was writing a letter to her husband. The curtains were drawn, the log fire had been replenished, the lights were switched on and the atmosphere was homely and restful. Laura finished her letter, looked it over, addressed and stamped it and said,

  ‘I’ll just about catch the post if I take this now. I’d rather like Gavin to get it in the morning. Hope he can manage the week-end.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Shall you take Fergus to the post-box with you?’

  ‘Yes, he can do with a run.’

  The Irish wolfhound, hearing his name, raised his noble and unkempt head from Dame Beatrice’s bony knee. Laura had bought him; she also fed him, groomed him and took him out for exercise, but it was for Dame Beatrice, who seldom so much as spoke to him, that he had conceived a supreme and totally irrational affection. On her he had doted, from his first entrance into the Stone House, with an intensity of devotion which (as Laura pointed out) would have been excessive in a priestess of Isis confronted by the goddess in person.

  The dog nominally belonged to Laura’s son Hamish. A change of Staff at his preparatory school had seen the introduction of a young woman to teach biology, and it had been at her suggestion that the headmaster had agreed, with some reluctance, to allow the boys to keep their pets at school. Hamish had secured a long week-end from school in order that his mother might take him to Crufts. He would lose face, he maintained, if he turned up at the beginning of the summer term without a pet, and his choice of pet was a dog.

  ‘You’ve got your pony,’ Laura pointed out, ‘and you keep him at the riding stables near the school.’

  ‘But not in the school, mamma.’

  Full of misgivings which proved to be fully justified, Laura had taken him to the dog show of his choice. Fergus was the result. The headmaster, gazing at the Gargantuan offering with horror, issued a kindly-expressed but unarguable veto, and Fergus was banished to the Stone House, where, as Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin pointed out to his disconsolate son, he would be in the proud position of guarding the place against marauders and the women from attack.

  ‘Although what he’ll probably do,’ said Laura privily to Dame Beatrice, ‘is to take any intruders by the sleeve and lead them to all the stuff that’s best worth pinching. What’s more,’ she added, ‘at his present rate of progress, he’ll eat us out of house and home in a fortnight.’

  (2)

  To reach the post-office from the Stone House involved following a country road alongside a stretch of common and then crossing a shallow watersplash by means of a wooden footbridge. The ground rose fairly steeply, after this, to the main village street with its shops. Beyond these lay the railway station and, about a mile further on, the golf-links.

  When she had crossed the watersplash, Laura slipped the lead on to the dog’s collar and, in obedience to her long strides, he padded along at her side until they reached the post-office. She kept him on the lead until they had passed the level-crossing and were in a winding lane. This brought them alongside the common again, this time on its south instead of its west side. Here she set the great hound free.

  They had passed some old cottages and a small guest-house when Fergus became uneasy. He stopped and gave a whimpering sound which Laura had not heard from him before.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s not dark enough for you to be seeing ghosts.’ The sun had set, and the mist and the purple twilight were an invitation and a reminder to her to get indoors to a lighted room, a log fire and her tea, but the dog remained immovable. Laura dropped a hand to his collar and could feel that he was quivering. ‘Whatever is the matter?’ she asked. For answer, Fergus backed away from her restraining fingers and, before she knew what was happening, he had given a howl and had set off across the common, following a glimmering path which led ultimately to some woods.

  Laura called to him, ordering him to come back, but the great hound loped on, and she lost sight of him in the misty twilight. She took the same path and began to run, shouting his name, but the darkness was closing in, so she gave up the hopeless chase and retraced her steps, feeling sure that the dog would return in his own good time. She was, however, surprised that he should have turned disobedient to her voice, for, although he was only half-trained, he was extremely docile.

  ‘You’ve been a long time,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly, when Laura returned to the library.

  ‘Our lunatic hound felt the call of the wild and galloped off across the common. I went after him for a bit, but I lost him in the murk. I expect he’ll come home when he’s hungry.’

  This was not the case. Six o’clock, his feeding time, came, but there was still no sign of his return, and at half-past six, when Dame Beatrice was about to go up to change for dinner, Celestine’s threatened hysteria caused Henri to send Zena to the library to ask whether somebody should go out in search of the dog.

  ‘George said he’d be very pleased to try and find the doggie, mum, and has got a torch in the car like a young searchlight, he says, mum, to shine him on his way.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘George is to have his supper. The dog will come to no harm.’

  ‘I’ll go out there myself after dinner,’ said Laura, ‘and give vent to a couple of yells. I wonder what came over him? He can’t have been chasing rabbits. I say! You don’t think he would worry the Forest ponies? I thought I heard some about.’

  Dinnertime came, and the after-dinner coffee, but the dog had not come back. Laura finished her coffee and went upstairs to change into slacks. Her bedroom window overlooked the common and, obeying a sudden thought, before she went downstairs she took a previously unused dog-whistle out of a drawer and, with a superstitious thrill as she remembered a frightening episode in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, she opened the window and blew the high-pitched pipe. Then she picked up an electric torch and went downstairs. She found George waiting respectfully in the hall.

  ‘Madam’s orders, madam,’ he replied in response to Laura’s question, ‘and we are requested not to proceed to any great distance beyond the house, as madam thinks the mist may be getting thicker.’

  ‘Which it is,’ said Laura, when the front door was open and the mist swirled in against the light from the hall. ‘Our torches are not going to make a lot of impression on this.’

  They went as far as the beginning of the path across the common, then Laura stopped. She took the dog-whistle from her raincoat pocket and blew again, then she stood still and they waited and listened, but there was nothing but the cold, wet mist and the darkness. She blew once more and they waited for a response which did not come.

  (3)

  Laura needed very little sleep. Once before midnight, and twice between two o’clock and six, she crept downstairs and blew the dog-whistle again. At half-past seven, just after sunrise, she dressed, slipped out of the house and took the path across
the common. The ground was damp but the mist was dispersing in the face of a light wind. She crossed a culvert over a ditch and then the path climbed to a slight eminence. Here she stopped and looked about her. On either side stretched the common, but in front of her, a mile or more away, there was a considerable wood.

  The only evidences of life upon the common, so far as her keen eyes could make out, were half a dozen ponies and a donkey. Of the dog there was no sign. Laura, taking advantage of the long, gradual, downward slope which lay before her, made at a round pace, half-walking, half-running, for the woods. Between them and the common ran the pretty little Lymington River, crossed here by a broad plank bridge. She stopped to look at the clear brown water and then blew the whistle again and entered the woods.

  On one side of the broad path which formed a clearing there was a fenced enclosure barred off by a gate. The Forestry Commission’s lorries had churned up a muddy road on the other side of the fence. Laura leaned on the gate and listened, then made up her mind to try the enclosure before she explored the open woodland.

  The foresters’ lorry-track was so soft and deep with mud that she left it almost at once for an ill-defined path on higher ground which marched with the boundary fence. Here she was constantly impeded by trailing blackberry stems and, at the frequent dips in the path, she had to find a way round pools too wide to step across or jump over. There was about a mile and a half of the enclosure. At the far end was a cattle grid, then another bridge over the river, a stretch of grass interspersed with oaks and, beyond all this, the main Bournemouth road which by-passed the village and went over the level-crossing.

  Laura looked at her watch. By this time breakfast would be on the table and she was hungry. She had no mind to footslog it into the village and over the watersplash to reach home, so she pushed her way back along the path by which she had come. Unwilling to give up the hunt until she had made every attempt to find the dog, she fastened the gate of the enclosure behind her and took the broad path through the woods, stopping occasionally to call, whistle and listen.

  Giant beeches, with, here and there, a mighty oak, bordered the path on her left; the wooden fencing of the enclosure and a shallow, mossy ditch were on her right. Behind the great trees, however, there was a tangle of brushwood and thorn, and, beyond this, a further wilderness of gorse and waist-high, dead, brown bracken.