[Mrs Bradley 50] - Late, Late in the Evening Read online

  Late, Late In The Evening

  Gladys Mitchell

  Contents

  Part One: Evidence

  1. Margaret And Kenneth

  2. Mr Ward

  3. The Sheepwash

  4. Tea-Party And After

  5. Mrs Kempson Puts Pen To Paper

  6. All The Fun Of The Fair

  7. Margaret, Kenneth And Lionel

  8. Mrs Kempson Again

  9. Letters

  10. The Hermit's Cottage

  11. Our Special Correspondent

  Part Two: Verdict

  12. Mrs Lestrange Bradley Takes A Hand

  13. The Children's Crusade

  14. The Hill Village Irregulars

  15. Mrs Lestrange Bradley Again

  16. The Wrongful Heir

  17. No Alibis

  18. The Penny Drops

  19. Margaret And Kenneth

  This Large Print edition is published by BBC Audiobooks Ltd, Bath, England and by Thorndike Press, Waterville, Maine, USA.

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  Published in 2004 in the U.K. by arrangement with the author's estate.

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  Published in 2004 in the U.S. by arrangement with Gregory & Company Author's Agents.

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  U.K. Hardcover ISBN 0-7540-7688-1 (Chivers Large Print)

  U.K. Softcover ISBN 0-7540-7689-X (Camden Large Print)

  U.S. Softcover ISBN 0-7862-5948-5 (General)

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  Copyright © 1976 by Gladys Mitchell

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  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

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  All rights reserved.

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  All situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

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  The text of this Large Print edition is unabridged.

  Other aspects of the book may vary from the original edition.

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  Set in 16 pt. New Times Roman.

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  Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper.

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mitchell, Gladys, 1901-

  Late, late in the evening / Gladys Mitchell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-7862-5948-5 (lg. print: sc : alk. paper)

  1. Bradley, Beatrice Lestrange (Fictitious character)-Fiction.

  2. Women detectives-England-Oxfordshire-Fiction.

  3. Oxfordshire (England)-Fiction. 4. Large type books. I. Title.

  PR6025.I832L38 2004

  823'.912-dc22 2003060182

  To REG,

  with happy memories of Auld Lang Syne

  Part One

  Evidence

  Chapter 1

  Margaret And Kenneth

  The village looks different now. It has become an urban overspill area. Factories have grown up, a motorway runs nearby and what used to be open country, including Lye Hill and the vast common we called The Marsh, has been given over to council houses and tall blocks of flats. Even my grandfather's four or five arable acres have gone and in their place there is a housing estate of small, neat bungalows, each with its patch of front lawn and small back garden.

  In my early childhood the village occupied only two streets and these were at right-angles to one another. On the road which ran steeply uphill to the manor house my grandfather had built two imposing semi-detached villas. They had flights of broad stone steps up to the front door, basement kitchens which opened into very large, non-basement sculleries at the back and they were furnished with back and front staircases. Grandfather and his widowed daughter, our Aunt Lally, occupied the villa with the passion-flower plant at the side of the front door and the other house, which had trails of periwinkles down the side entrance, belonged to Uncle Arthur and Aunt Kirstie. Both houses had long back gardens with end-gates which opened on to grandfather's small-holding.

  My mother and father, who had shared grandfather's house when they were first married, moved to a London suburb after Kenneth was born, so neither he nor I regarded ourselves as natives of the village, although we spent our summers there. When it was term-time we attended the village school. I remember very little about it except that children of all ages were taught in a large room which had been built as a chapel and that (I suppose because of the age-range of the twenty or so pupils) we older ones spent a great deal of our time in an exercise called Transcription. This meant that, in our best handwriting, we copied chunks of history, geography and poetry out of dog-eared, grimy, tattered text-books. I cannot remember that our work was ever tested or corrected, but at any rate it put no strain on the intellect.

  When Saturday came there was our pocket-money to spend. Where the bingo hall now stands there used to be old Mother Honour's little post-office and general store and where Miss Summers had her shop, that and a few cottages have been pulled down and a supermarket built.

  In our day we usually patronised Mother Honour. She was a shrewish old lady who detested children, but if the brass bowl on her pair of scales hovered uncertainly, she would (grudgingly) drop in another sweet, whereas Miss Summers, who sold bread and buns as well as confectionery, faced with the same problem, would be content to leave the scales wavering always slightly to her advantage, never to ours. She was gushing, blonde and plump, and was said to have designs on the baker who came from the town to deliver the loaves which she sold to the villagers.

  The only reason we ever gave her our custom was that she sold so-called brandy balls, hard, dark-brown, glistening, strongly-flavoured sweets which Mother Honour did not stock. They could be pouched in the cheek and made to last a good long time. I think the two shopkeepers must have had some kind of gentleman's agreement not to duplicate their stock, so that there should be no poaching on one another's preserves. 'Live and let live' seemed to be their motto, and although neither woman was conspicuously prosperous, nor did either of them fail to make ends meet.

  We had several sets of relations in and around the village, but when we played with other children it was not with our cousins, who were mostly older than we were, but under the leadership and guidance, not to say protection and patronage, of a biggish girl known as Our Sarah. We were pleased to belong to her band, although she bossed us about, as she did all the other children. I always felt, though, that Kenneth and I were mere hangers-on, for she never addressed us by our names. It was always: 'Hoy, you young Oi say! Come on out o' that brook. Your auntie's 'olleren for you,' or, 'Hoy you young Oi say! Tuck them trousis up 'oigher, else you be goen to get 'em wet, and then you won't arf get an 'oiden.'

  The brook was our chief plaything. It conveniently ran alongside The Marsh at the bottom of our grandfather's acres, so that Kenneth and I could cross on to The Marsh by way of an iron gate and a broad plank bridge, both of them grandfather's property, whereas all the other children had to walk to the end of the village and cross by a bridge which spanned a culvert. It never occurred either to us or to them that they should take the short cut across grandfather's land. Perhaps they, like ourselves, went in awe of him, for he was in all respects the village patriarch and owned more than half its cottages.

  Apart from giving easy access to the brook, his grounds were a paradise for young children. There were raspberry canes and currant bushes which we were allowed to plunder as we pleased. There were pigs, ducks, chickens, sometimes a calf and there was also a stable containing a vicious mare named Polly whom we were forbidden to approach.

  Best of all there were Uncle Arthur'
s whippets, Floss and Vicky. Floss was a graceful fawn-coloured animal, a bitch in every sense, for she had a most unpredictable temper, loving you one minute and, for no apparent reason, viciously snapping at you the next.

  Vicky, on the other hand, was a liver-coloured little love, the sweetest-natured creature that ever allowed young children to dress her up in their sweaters, almost smother her with clumsy caresses and take her for walks with an undignified piece of string tied to her collar. Her affection for us was boundless and was as sincere as it was touching.

  We had little in common with the ducks or chickens. The latter pecked us when we turned them off their roosting boxes to collect the eggs, and we were nauseated by the former when we saw two of them disputing possession of a frog. We rescued the frog and Kenneth took it over to the well, but in dropping it in he slipped and went in, too-luckily feet first. He managed to clutch the edge of the brickwork and I held on to him and bellowed for help. Fortunately this happened to be at hand in the person of Uncle Arthur, who was boiling tiny jacket potatoes in an outside copper for the pigs. As a reward for saving Kenneth's life I claimed and was given as many of the pigs' delicious potatoes as I could eat.

  We took all our meals at Aunt Kirstie's. She was a better cook than Aunt Lally and a much more indulgent person than grandfather, who found children a nuisance at the table because he said we chattered. We would have liked to stay altogether with Aunt Kirstie and Uncle Arthur, but two of their upstairs rooms were given over permanently to a lodger, a snuff-taking, silent old gentleman named Mr Ward, who (so we heard) was some connexion of the Kempsons up at the manor house. So far as I remember, he never addressed a word to us, but sometimes we would come upon him out on The Marsh or at the foot of Lye Hill near the sheepwash. He would be digging, but for what purpose we had no idea.

  He was not the only person in the village about whom we speculated. Another was Mrs Grant. She was always to be found seated on the doorstep of her respectable little cottage and she never seemed to cease rocking herself to and fro and declaiming to anybody who was passing, 'I hab de ague, bery bad, bery bad.' She claimed to be Maltese and the widow of an English sailor. The village children used to mock her. We were neither old enough, nor courageous enough, to take her side against their tauntings, but at least we never joined in the teasing. I think now that she was not a Maltese, but an African. She was certainly darker-skinned than the Maltese I have seen since, and her lamentations had an air of African fatality about them. The village children would shout,

  'Black-pudden! Black-pudden!' as they passed her; but, as Kenneth said to me:

  'Black-puddings are very nice, and I expect she'd be nice, too, if we ever got to know her.' (We did, in a way, later on because of the murders.)

  Further down the road lived the Widow Winter, whose sole occupation, once she had whitened her doorstep, seemed to be to spy on the rest of the village from behind a barricade of flowering plants. She believed, I suppose, that these hid her prying eyes from passers-by while she watched from her parlour window, hour after hour, the comings and goings of her neighbours. I have no doubt that she knew exactly how often the people across the street washed their lace curtains, how long Miss Summers spent in her daily dallyings with the baker and exactly what was in everybody's string bag when people came back from their weekend shopping at the Co-op in the town. Everybody did the big weekend shopping at the Co-op because of something mysterious called the divvy.

  From these Saturday expeditions we could always expect a pleasant surprise on Sunday mornings, for on the bedside table in Aunt Kirstie's room would be sugar mice in pink or white with tiny black eyes and their tails made out of string, or there might be sugar pigs or a bar of chocolate cream. Another joy was bathtime. At that age we were bathed in the large zinc tub Aunt Kirstie used for her laundry. There was no bathroom and the stone-floored scullery was considered too cold, even in summer, so, as there was always a fire in the kitchen for cooking, we were bathed in front of that. I remember that there was some special soap (said to have been made in Japan) which floated, and when we had been dried we had a glorious toasting in front of the fire.

  Almost opposite our two villas there were two semi-detached cottages. They were inhabited by a brother and sister who had quarrelled many years before we were born and who never spoke to one another. They had long, beautifully-tended gardens which bordered the road and the two old people were at war every fruit-picking season with the village children, for the old lady grew strawberries and the old man had a particularly fine pear-tree. I do not believe Kenneth and I would ever have joined in the raids but, in any case, there was no temptation for us, as grandfather grew more fruit than we could eat or the aunts could make into jam.

  At the end of the village, opposite Mother Honour's shop, was a tumble-down cottage where a hermit had once lived. The cottage was in the last stages of disrepair and he himself had been ragged and indescribably filthy. After he died it was discovered that he had pulled up all the floorboards and must have used them for fuel. So far as anybody could make out, all he had to live on were the stale loaves from Miss Summers' shop. Her one and only charitable action was to leave any leftovers on her doorstep overnight. As they had always disappeared by morning, it was assumed that the hermit collected them under cover of darkness and ate them.

  Outside the village, but still in a sense of it, as were the people at the manor house, there were the gypsies who, every summer, had an encampment at the top of Lye Hill. Lye Hill was forbidden territory to Kenneth and me. The reason given to us by Aunt Lally (she who looked after our grandfather) was that the gypsies kidnapped small children and sold them as slaves, but the real reason (as I found out much later) was that Lye Hill was an extension of Lovers' Lane, which was also forbidden territory to us because the villagers did all their coupling in summer in the open air.

  To speak to Old Sukie, the gypsy who, now and again, walked into the town with a male companion to sell clothes-pegs and paper flowers, was the favourite village 'dare' and, so far as I know, had no takers until Kenneth volunteered to waylay the so-called witch and pass the time of day with her. As my pride and my sense of responsibility would not allow me to leave him to his fate, I went along, although most unwillingly and with great trepidation, to support him. Day after day we waited on the drove road which ran alongside the brook and at last, while the village children watched from a safe distance, Kenneth's opportunity came.

  When he saw the gypsies approaching, Sukie with a large wicker basket on her arm and the man slouching along beside her, Kenneth pulled his cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and then, as the gypsies came almost up to us, he raised it politely and said, 'Good morning, madam. It's a very nice morning, isn't it?'

  The man muttered something and did not shorten his stride but, to my alarm, Old Sukie stopped. However, she smiled and said, 'Good day to you, my little gentleman. Wear a flower for me, then, my lover. You have a lucky face.' With that, and with Kenneth standing his ground while I drew back a pace, she picked a paper flower from her basket and handed it to him before she strode on after her man. Although she was always known as Old Sukie, she could not have been more than thirty years of age. She was a striking-looking woman in her gypsy fashion, and she carried herself like a queen.

  The dark man with her-her husband, I suppose, although Our Sarah told us, with a great air of mystery and with what I now realise was a lascivious gleam in her eye, that if they were married at all it was 'only over the tongs-' was a furtive-looking fellow, but lithe and tigerish. He was tall for a gypsy and his slouching stride covered the ground with an effortless unhurried, prowling effect which was more frightening to us even than the reputation Sukie had of being a witch. His silence, too, and his apparent disregard of our presence, carried their own menace.

  Soon after our first acquaintance, if one may call it that, with the gypsies, Kenneth and I gained a new companion. This was a puckish-looking, unusually tall young boy wearing a blue shirt and grey-f
lannel shorts who came barefoot down the road one day and found us about to take Vicky for a walk. He stopped and spoke, with an intonation so unlike our own that we were somewhat abashed, for we recognised him, in spite of his workaday costume, tousled hair and bare feet, as what Aunt Lally called 'one of the gentry'.

  'Hullo. Is that your dog?' he asked.

  'My uncle's,' I explained.

  'It's going to rain.'

  This non sequitur nonplussed me.

  'How do you know?' I demanded. Instead of replying, he asked,

  'Has your aunt-I suppose you've got an aunt if you've got an uncle-has she a good big tin bath? A really big one, I mean.'

  'There is one, yes,' said Kenneth. 'She does the washing in it.' He did not add that we were bathed in it, too.

  'Oh, good,' said the boy. 'I should think a lot of water comes down this hill when it rains.' He wriggled a big toe into the soft surface of the road. 'Nothing but sand,' he said. 'Tell you what. I'll wait for you while you take the dog out, then you borrow this tin bath of your aunt's and a spade or a trowel, see? Then we sink the bath in the middle of the road and the rainwater fills it up and we paddle. All right?'