Say It With Flowers Page 12

  “Saturday, the eleventh.”

  “And stayed until . . .?”

  “The following Wednesday week.”

  “And Mr. and Mrs. Carmichael?”

  “Not until the Saturday after that. We had expected Hilary to stay until the Saturday morning, but she had this letter from an aunt, inviting her to go and see her before she sailed.”

  “You did not see the letter, of course?”

  “No. Neither was it delivered to the house. Hilary told us that she took it from the postman at the gate and said that it was from her aunt who lived in Bournemouth.”

  “Well, that isn’t far from Southampton, where she was to embark. All the more curious that her body was found in Northumberland, except that we have no idea where she was killed. I think perhaps we should make contact with the aunt.”

  “If we knew the aunt’s surname, you could go to Bournemouth and look her up in the directory or even in the telephone book. Oh, I wonder . . .?”

  “Yes?”

  “I wonder whether she ever mentioned the aunt’s name to Gascony.” She went immediately to the door, opened it and called out, “Darling, are you in your study?”

  He was, and came out, fountain pen in hand.

  “What is it, my dear?”

  “Did you ever hear Hilary Beads mention her aunt’s surname?”

  “Yes, it is the same as her own. She was joking about it. Her unfortunate aunt was baptised in the name of Carnelian. The full name, as I recollect it, was Carnelian Jetta Beads.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “So poor Hilary told me. People often saddle children with unfortunate names—or try to. Don’t you remember how angry and upset Abel and Mary Bates were when I refused to accept the names of William Conqueror Hastings for their first-born and insisted upon William Rufus Henry instead?”

  “Just as historical, if it was history they wanted. Yes, I do remember. Thank you, dear, for remembering about Carnelian Jetta. How awful!”

  Dame Beatrice drove to Bournemouth on the following day and located Miss C. J. Beads without difficulty with the aid of the telephone directory. She rang her up and was invited to call at half-past three, so, after a leisurely lunch and a pleasant stroll along the sea-front, she drove to Miss Beads’ address. It turned out to be a very superior type of boarding-house and she was shown by the maid into the private sitting-room.

  Miss Beads, in a black jersey suit and pearls, begged her to be seated, rang the bell and ordered tea, and then turned with some curiosity to her distinguished guest.

  “About my niece, I think you said, Dame Beatrice,” she observed. “It has all been very trying. Have you anything to tell me? I suppose I ought to bring the police into it, but, you know, a place like this”—she waved a hand at the room in which they sat—“could soon be ruined if I had policemen nosing around.”

  “I understood from the vicar and his wife in the village I come from—Wandles Parva—that you invited your niece to pay you a visit before she went to America. Is that correct?”

  “Oh, yes, I did, but that was before Christmas, when she first wrote and told me she was going to New York. She also suggested that I should lend her some money as a kind of bulwark. I promised it if she’d come and see me.”

  “But you wrote to her some weeks ago and renewed your invitation,” Miss Carnelian Beads stared in surprise.

  “That I most certainly did not,” she said. “Those girls were always most casual. I should not dream of repeating an invitation to her to come and stay. As for her married sister, well, I wasn’t even invited to the wedding.”

  “Had she mentioned any specific date on which she would be likely to call and see you?”

  “She said she had to embark on Saturday, May twenty-fifth, and would call in on the morning of that day.”

  “Now, Miss Beads, what was your reaction when your niece did not turn up?”

  “I did not have a reaction. Nothing more had been said, and I had not the slightest idea of whether really to expect her or not. You see, like so many of these clever, modern people, Hilary would never put herself out in any way. If you asked her to come, she would either turn up or not turn up, and then, if the latter, you might hope to get a postcard or a telephone call at any time during the next couple of months, without a word of apology. She was extremely casual, as I say, but she said, when I mentioned it once, that she was very sorry, but she was afraid all her family were like that, and that life was short enough, anyway. What really worries me is the way she seems to have left those nice Americans in the lurch. She simply seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. They cabled me first of all at the end of the first week in June.”

  “They had your address, then?”

  “Hilary must have given it to them, I suppose, although I can’t think why. I didn’t trouble to answer the cable. Hilary’s bad manners are no concern of mine. But now they’ve cabled again and I simply don’t know what to think or to do.”

  “Did your niece—was she ordinarily resident in London? I know she had business premises, but had she a flat or rooms?”

  “Yes, she had two very nice rooms in Chelsea. Well, she always said they were very nice rooms. I never saw them.”

  “Whereabouts in Chelsea?”

  “I’ve still got the last letter she wrote me—the one in which she said she was going to America. Her letters, as I told you, were so few and far between that I got into the habit of keeping the last one.”

  “Are you her only living relative?”

  “No. My brother divorced Hilary’s mother ten years ago. He died soon afterwards, but, so far as I know, the mother is still alive, although I could not tell you where she lives. She may have married again, for all I know. Then, of course, there’s the sister I mentioned, but I haven’t seen her for years and years.”

  “Have you any idea whether they have kept in touch with Hilary?”

  “Hilary never spoke of them to me, but then, of course, she wouldn’t. My brother and I were very close—unmarried sisters are often very much attached to their brothers, I think—and Hilary would understand that my sympathies over the divorce were entirely with him.”

  “Yes, of course. O-ho!” said Dame Beatrice.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Dame Beatrice waved a yellow, much-ringed hand.

  “I beg your pardon. A passing thought only. Will you be kind enough to show me the Chelsea address?”

  Shown it, she copied it, in her neat, illegible, medico-legal calligraphy, into a small, morocco-covered notebook. Then she said:

  “What I have to ask you now, Miss Beads, may give you a shock. Would it surprise you very much if I told you that your niece has not only disappeared but may be dead?”

  Miss Carnelian Beads stared at her. Then, her face very pale, she said:

  “Are you telling me that she is dead?”

  “A body has been found in Northumberland. The police may contact you. I take it that they have not already done so?”

  “No, they have not. You mean they might want me to. . .?”

  “Identify the body. Yes, that is what I mean.”

  “No, no! I couldn’t do that. I am not the next of kin, as I’ve told you. There are her mother and her sister. In any case, I could not possibly leave my hotel and take a long trip like that!”

  “If the police need you, I am afraid . . .”

  “There are others,” said Miss Beads very firmly. “The police must contact them. I thought, though, that the police might want me to account for my movements.”

  “Your movements?”

  “Well, it would be only common sense, wouldn’t it? My niece plans to visit me on the Saturday before she embarks for America. Instead, she leaves the place where she has been staying and disappears. Now you tell me that she may be dead. What position does that put me in?”

  “Are you able to account for your movements?”

  “Certainly I am. That’s one advantage of a public position. One has plenty
of witnesses.”

  There was a little desultory conversation over the tea-cups and then Dame Beatrice took her leave. She was back at the vicarage by half-past six.

  “Hilary Beads did not intend to go to Bournemouth on that Wednesday,” she said. “Such, at any rate, is my opinion. I think she kept a tryst with someone else. Did anybody except yourselves know that she had announced her intention of visiting her aunt on that day?”

  “I don’t think anybody else knew. There was no reason for us to mention it, and I don’t suppose she told anybody. I don’t believe she knew anybody here but us.”

  Laura had not come back by the end of the week. Veronica, returning on the Saturday from an outing with small Hamish, who had been promised a walk in the woods, brought a bit of news which, she thought, might have some significance. It chanced that Saturday afternoon was a half-holiday for the little boys of Pelican House Academy, and the woods were alive with them. Veronica was popular with the children and soon she and her charge had a talkative, cheerful escort.

  “I say, Mrs. Pierce,” said Simon, “wasn’t it jolly dee, that skeleton turning out to be murdered?”

  “I prefer not to discuss that,” said Veronica.

  “It was an awful swindle, us having to give it up to the police,” said Andrew, not in the least put out by this heavy attitude. “It would have been super to have a murdered modem corpse in school.”

  “It was an awful swindle not finding it ourselves, though,” said Simon. “Fancy its being wasted on the vicar and that man who knocked Sysko’s heel on! He looked like an artist or something. He stopped that Miss Beads who was staying at the vicarage. I expect he was asking the way or something. Of course, we only saw them in the distance, but they stopped and talked a bit.”

  “How do you know she was staying at the vicarage?”

  “Well, she sat in church with you, Mrs. Pierce, and she couldn’t have been staying anywhere else because there isn’t anywhere else, and, anyway, she walked back with you from church, too, because our crocodile followed you. Some of us sing in the choir, as you know, so we come away from church later than the other people, and we saw both of you.”

  Dame Beatrice listened with great interest to this seemingly artless recital, and, at the end of it, made no comment, so Veronica said:

  “Don’t you think it’s significant that the Carmichaels met Miss Beads here?”

  “It is certainly interesting. I wonder what made Simon notice them?”

  “He’s a noticing sort of kid. Besides, Phlox’s get-up is usually rather striking, and then, apparently, he put back the heel on Simon’s shoe.”

  Dame Beatrice, whose own get-up was also usually rather striking, for she possessed no sense of colour at all, did not comment on this observation. She said:

  “My instinct may be misleading me, of course, but I think I should suggest to Robert Gavin that he pays some attention to the period during which the Carmichaels were in the village but were not staying at the vicarage.”

  “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and most of Saturday morning of the week in which we may presume that Hilary Beads disappeared,” said Veronica. “Let’s ring him up at once.”

  “There is no need. Robert rang me while you were out with Hamish. He will be at my house in time for dinner and will be staying until he has concluded the next stage in his enquiries.”

  “Oh, good! Hamish, your daddy’s coming home.”

  “Coming home,” said Hamish, with a curt nod. “Bringing puppies.”

  “Really? How exciting! Are you sure?”

  “Coming home; bringing puppies; two, six, nine, three, one puppies, all for Hamish.”

  “One puppy is the way to say it. What shall you call it?”

  “Hamish.”

  “You can’t have two Hamishes in one house.”

  “His name,” said Hamish firmly, “is Hamish.”

  “And that’s that,” said Dame Beatrice. “Hamish is his father’s son.”

  “Hamish,” said the last-named, looking up from the tower of bricks he had been patiently building up, “is a very good boy. I like him.”

  “Pelion on Ossa!” said Dame Beatrice. Hamish glanced at the clock.

  “He says ‘Cuckoo’ for tea-time now,” he observed. The cuckoo clock obligingly struck five. Hamish stood up, kicked over the tower he had so painstakingly constructed, and added dispassionately, “The puppy will eat you all up.”

  Laura left Newcastle early on the following Monday morning, and brought news that the inquest had been adjourned and that there was going to be some fun when it was resumed, as the police doctor declared that the corpse had been dead for at least four months and probably longer.

  “As, of course, it couldn’t have been,” declared Laura roundly. “We know for a fact that Hilary Beads was alive on May the twenty-first, because she didn’t leave the vicarage until May the twenty-second. Still, it wasn’t my business to contradict him. I know it was Hilary Beads. The BBC broadcast for her nearest relative, and some elderly female who said she was her mother turned up to identify the body. The woman was half fainting, I’m told, but said at once that it was Hilary. Oh, the police doctor was wrong. It’s quite easy to mistake the length of time a person has been dead. It depends on all sorts of circumstances. Besides, it must be Hilary Beads, and the Carmichaels are guilty. Work it out for yourself. First of all, there’s the locale where the body was found. We know the Carmichaels walked the Wall. We know the route they took.”

  “We know nothing of the route they took, once the driver of the hired car had set them down and they were out of his sight, and you are jumping to conclusions much too readily,” declared Dame Beatrice.

  “Well, I think it all fits much too well to be wrong. And, if the corpse isn’t Hilary Beads, she’s in America and can be traced, and that will settle it once and for all.”

  “We know now—we have known since I returned from Newcastle without you—that Hilary Beads is not in America. We have been in touch with her aunt whom she had promised to visit before she embarked.”

  “Not in America? Then there you are!” said Laura, in great triumph. “I’m right and the police doctor is wrong. Inexperienced, probably. I don’t suppose he’s seen all those many bodies which have been exposed on a Northumbrian moor.”

  “It is the Northumbrian moor which troubles me,” said Dame Beatrice. “One is apt to think in terms of time and mileage.”

  “Time and mileage?”

  “Exactly. Consider the facts: we know that Hilary Beads did not leave the vicarage until after tea on the Wednesday. Phlox and Marigold Carmichael established themselves at the vicarage after lunch on the following Saturday. That only left Phlox Wednesday night, all day Thursday, all day Friday, and Saturday morning to murder Hilary, transport the body from place unknown (but Wandles Parva must be regarded as his base) to Northumberland, hide it in those bushes which can only be reached on foot, return here, and establish himself and his sister at the vicarage. I suppose it could be done, but . . .”

  Laura screwed up her nose. She was a reasonable being, on the whole, and a highly intelligent one.

  “Oh, Lord !” she said. “Have we really gone and identified the wrong body? Poor Gavin will be pleased when he has to unravel all that!”

  As it turned out, Gavin had nothing to unravel. It was established that the woman had been struck on the head at a considerable distance from where she had collapsed and died, and that what had struck her was a falling small boulder. The body was never correctly identified, but that was not Gavin’s business.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Robert Gavin Comes to Stay

  “. . . my humble speculations have another Method and are content to trace and discover . . .”

  Ibid (Section 13)

  * * *

  “THINK aloud as you brood darkly on the psychology of Phlox Carmichael,” said Laura, after dinner that night. “Light your cigar, Gavin, and listen. This is important, in spit
e of what I’ve done.”

  Detective Chief-Inspector Robert Gavin crossed one nylon-covered ankle over another and obediently settled himself with his cigar.

  “So you really think the Carmichaels are involved with that skeleton?” he said, in a tone that stated a fact rather than asked a question.

  “Well, what do you make of this?” asked Dame Beatrice. “He came to me of his own freewill, by the way, so . . .”

  “So he asked for what he’s going to get,” said Laura.

  “I tested him by asking, not for the first word which came into his head as a reaction to the word I chose to give him, but for the second one.”

  “Crafty work—not that I understand psychiatry except in the most general sort of way. How did you expect it to work?” asked Gavin.

  “As it did work. He could have had time to think, you see, and, to a guilty mind, time to think can be fatal. Of course, I also followed the usual technique of watching for the unusually long pause.”

  “And it came?”

  “Yes, it came.”

  “Was it—did it suggest anything definite to you?”

  “Taken in conjunction with other answers and with a piece of information which I possess in common with Laura, the late (I am afraid) Hilary Beads, and the Pierces, it was very suggestive indeed, so I do hope I have interpreted it aright.”

  “It’s of no use, at this stage, to ask what your interpretation is, I suppose?”

  “You know it isn’t,” said Laura. “She hasn’t proved anything yet.”

  “It might help my enquiries, though, if I had a line to go on. Come on, Dame B.”

  “Hear the evidence which Phlox Carmichael has offered against himself and check your deductions with mine.”

  “All right, so long as you explain the psychological mumbo-jumbo.”

  “Disrespectful,” said Laura. “Kindly remember that you are speaking to my boss, and keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  “Right. I apologise.”

  “We began,” said Dame Beatrice, “with the statement by Mr. Carmichael that he was suffering from hallucinations. He said that he ‘saw things’—a condition which one usually associates either with mental derangement or with alcoholic excess. However, I came to the conclusion that neither of these factors affected the situation, so I drove out Marigold Carmichael and went to work. I may add that Mr. Carmichael was as anxious as I was to be rid of her.”