Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 15

  The gong went and we adjourned for lunch. The dining-room was full and, except for one mixed party at a central table which seated eight, all the guests except Imogen were men.

  “I always try to pick a place which caters mostly for men,” she said, when we were seated, “then I know I’m going to get enough to eat.”

  “I always used to think you were on a perpetual diet. That’s one reason why old Hara-kiri mistook you for Gloria when he took his wife to buy a dress at Trends.”

  “I was called Gloria at Trends. Not my choice, needless to say. I inherited the name from my predecessor. As to my physique, I suppose I’m a fausse maigre like that girl in a novel by (I think) W.J. Locke. She looked like a starved cat in her clothes, but peeled to a goddess when she put on her swimsuit.”

  “Ah!” I said. “Splendid! When do I—?”

  “No lechery, please. I am convent bred,” she said, laughing. “Now tell me your story.”

  “Not here and not now. I intend to do full justice to this meal. Game soup and Southdown lamb—the local produce, I trust—don’t go with murder and arson, so let me have my lunch and then you shall walk me round the town and I’ll tell you all. Remind me, though, to send a telegram before we begin our peregrinations. I’ve got to scrub the false information I enclosed in a letter to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.”

  “Goodness me, you are flying high! Do you really write informative letters to Dame Beatrice? I met her once when she lectured to the lit. soc. on Macbeth.”

  “I missed that. Yes, we are fellow sleuths. Get on with your soup or it will be cold. Everything shall be revealed when we are up on the Downs this afternoon.”

  But I decided that it would be sacrilege to talk about burnt corpses while we were walking on the Downs so, as soon as I had sent off my telegram to the Stone House, I told Imogen all that I knew about Gloria Mundy as we explored the town.

  We walked up the slope to the castle gatehouse and, as we were looking at what had been the outer bailey I said, “I knew old Hara-kiri was mistaken.”

  “About what?”

  “He thought you were the ghost of Gloria Mundy.”

  “Who is Hara-kiri?”

  “Do you remember a vast man with a lot of yellow hair? I brought him to one of the lit. soc. dinners when my first book was published.”

  “The man I called the Viking?”

  “That’s the chap.”

  “But how could he have thought I was Gloria Mundy’s ghost? That’s the one and only time I ever saw him.”

  “No. You saw him a few days ago in the Trends shop. He came with his wife to look at evening dresses.”

  “But, Corin, I wasn’t at Trends a few days ago. I left there weeks ago. That’s why you didn’t find me at that rather awful little guest-house. I was at Trends on a month’s approbation and I left at the end of that month. I had got what I wanted and they had had enough of me. Don’t look so moonstruck. Does it matter?”

  “No. I suppose not. Strange, though, that the light-haired girl I spoke to thought I meant you and not Gloria Mundy.”

  “I expect you asked for Gloria. We all had special names in that department. The light-haired girl you mentioned, and anybody who succeeded her in the job, was called Dorella. My number was five and all the fives would be known as Gloria and all the fours as Dorella and the third is always called Violetta, and so on and so forth. Just an old Spanish custom at that particular shop.”

  “But what an odd coincidence that you, of all people, should have been called Gloria.”

  “Life drips with coincidences.”

  “God bless them,” I said. “Do you know something? An elderly disciple of Sprenger and Kramer told me I should meet you again.”

  “You could have done that at the lit. soc.” There was a silence after this. I broke it.

  “I ought to have tumbled to it, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully.

  “Tumbled to what?”

  I glanced at the fine dark-brown hair which a breeze was ruffling and replied, “Brown hair, not really black. And you left Culvert Green almost a fortnight before the real Gloria would have done. That has rather upset my theories.”

  “Oh, it was a bit of a dump, you know, and if you wanted a drink you had to go to the local. There wasn’t even a table licence at the hotel. I used to get bottles from the off-licence and drink secretly in my bedroom. How on earth did you come to get mixed up in this murder business? How did it start?”

  So I began at the beginning which, in a sense, was my meeting with McMaster outside Kilpeck church, for it was there I received my first report of Gloria Mundy, and told her the story.

  “So there was really no connection between that and your meeting the actual girl at Beeches Lawn,” said Imogen. “How strangely things work together!”

  “Things don’t always work together for good,” I said. “In this case, they worked together for ill. I wish to heaven I had never gone to Beeches Lawn, especially now that I’ve mucked up my end of the enquiry.”

  “But nobody asked you to make the enquiry, did they? Anyway, if you hadn’t gone to Culvert Green we shouldn’t now be heading for the ruins of a Cluniac priory.”

  “I thought it was a Cistercian abbey.”

  “Have it your way. Have you now told me all?”

  “I think so. What do you make of it?”

  “I’ll answer that next time we meet, although goodness knows when that will be. Let’s skip the ruins and go up on to the Downs. There are the remains of a hill fort and a couple of disc barrows up there. We can look at them and brood on the irrevocable past.”

  “Is it so irrevocable?” I asked. She did not answer, so I went on, “You can tell me nothing I don’t know already about what is up on those hills. I’ve sub-edited a holiday booklet on this neighbourhood, don’t forget.”

  The Downs, as ever, were exhilarating, if that word can be used to describe anything so sublimely peaceful as “here, where the blue air fills the great cup of the hills,” and as we climbed towards the top of Firle Beacon there was one prospect which made me stop in my tracks. Away to the left the softly swelling contours took the shape of a woman’s breasts. I said, looking at the hills and not at the girl beside me, something I had been longing to say to her years ago, but had been too poor, at that time, to offer her marriage.

  “Will you have me, Imogen?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll have you, but I’m going to write my book first. You ought to have asked me ages ago. I always hoped you would. Am I the reason you stopped coming to the lit. soc. meetings?”

  “Yes. I didn’t have any money for marriage in those days.”

  I booked dinner at the White Hart for the two of us and a room for myself for the night. I spent all next day with Imogen, lunched and dined with her again, and then drove back to my flat under a hunter’s moon. There was a heap of correspondence awaiting me. It included a letter from Dame Beatrice in answer to my telegram. She had written:

  No, no, my dear Corin Stratford, I have a feeling that neither you nor Mr. McMaster was wrong. I will attempt to supply chapter and verse in support of this theory and shall be very glad to know why you sent a telegram repudiating all your previous statements. Do telephone me when you have received this. As your telegram was not sent from London, I deduce that you are still on the trail, so I do not expect to hear from you immediately, but, please, when you have telephoned to say that you are at liberty, do come and see me as soon as you can and let me have all the latest news by word of mouth and face to face—so much more enjoyable and stimulating than a talk over the telephone or barren words couched in the restrained vocabulary of littera scripta.

  Here there have been developments of a most satisfactory kind. I asked for and have obtained a full copy of the pathologist’s report. It is most interesting and is one of two reasons for my thinking that the news you gave me in your letter bears the stamp of authenticity. The first reason is that, if Mr. McMaster was ever in a state of such intimacy wit
h Miss Mundy as he postulates, it is in the highest degree unlikely that he mistook another young woman for her at Trends. Ghost or no ghost, I am sure he saw Gloria Mundy days after she was thought to be dead.

  As for the pathologist’s report, as you will appreciate, forensic science has now reached such a stage of meticulous accuracy, due in large part to the work of Professor Keith Simpson and others, that the reconstruction of even the most maltreated corpse is not only possible but may be accepted without question.

  In the case under review, the evidence is positive. Up to a point (which is to say it cannot tell us who the deceased was), it disposes of the myth that the body in the burnt-out house was that of Gloria Mundy.

  You saw Gloria at Beeches Lawn and I am sure that you will endorse the views not only of Mr. Wotton and his wife (asked separately for their opinion), but of William Underedge, Miss Brockworth, Miss Kay Shortwood, and Mrs. Coberley, with all of whom I have been in contact, that Miss Mundy was not more than about five feet five inches tall. The corpse, however, was well above that height before the fire charred off her feet. Moreover, the report gives an estimated age for the deceased of not fewer than sixty years. Is not science wonderful?

  There was also a letter from Anthony Wotton. He wrote that he had telephoned my flat but had no answer. He supposed I was taking a holiday on the strength of the money I had received for the brochures and hoped I had not been spending all my time out on the tiles. When I got back, he and Celia would welcome it if I felt inclined to pay them another visit. There was a postscript:

  Dame B. has been here again and insisted on seeing Celia and me separately. When we compared notes afterwards, it seemed that she asked both of us to estimate the height of Gloria. Celia said that Gloria was at least two inches shorter than herself. I chanced naming an actual figure and put it at five five, which really comes to about the same thing, as Celia is five six and three-quarters.

  I read this and then telephoned Dame Beatrice to say that I was back in London. She responded by saying that Coberley was up on remand in a day or two and that, in view of the evidence which was now available, there was much less chance of his ever being brought to trial unless the police could establish some connection between him and the so-far-unknown deceased.

  “Of course,” she said in conclusion, “the most telling evidence against him now is the fact that he knew where he had placed that impounded dagger, but I doubt whether it will amount to much. The broken window, which nobody disputes, means that some unauthorised person forced an entry, whereas Coberley had a key. Moreover, the dagger was in a wooden box which Coberley had made no attempt to hide—I believe you yourself saw the wooden box when he let you into the old house—and there is every probability that the intruder investigated the contents of the box. Whether the long dagger which Mr. Coberley had placed in it was the weapon used to kill Miss Mundy’s deputy I now have strong reason to doubt, as it appears to be beyond dispute that the murder was not committed at the old house or the body burnt there. When can you come to see me?”

  “Is tomorrow too soon?” I asked. She answered that that would be splendid and that I was to get to the Stone House in time for lunch.

  15

  Little Progress

  “Of course,” said Dame Beatrice when we met next day, “one thing stands out clearly. Miss Mundy must have needed to have it supposed that she was dead. She took some risks to achieve this and at first it seemed that she had succeeded. The first thing which drew my attention to the facts was Miss Brockworth’s assertion that the red and black scorched (but not burnt-up) hair was a wig. This could have been merely a spiteful remark from somebody who, quite obviously, disliked Miss Mundy, but when I challenged the police, the detective-inspector was compelled to admit that Miss Eglantine’s possibly irresponsible statement was correct. The striking coiffure was indeed a wig and was the only means, so far as you and Mr. Wotton were concerned, of identifying the body.”

  “But of whom should Gloria have been so scared as to go to such lengths to fake a corpse to look like her own?” I asked.

  “That has yet to be discovered. There could be two inferences, both of which will have to be examined. She may have feared that the police were on her trail for some crime she had committed earlier, or else she may have a personal enemy of whom she was desperately afraid.”

  “Could be some relative of that Italian who committed suicide on Gloria’s account,” I said, not really meaning my words to be taken seriously. Dame Beatrice, however, seized upon them.

  “An Italian who committed suicide on Miss Mundy’s account?” she said. “Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t. I had the story at second hand and was given no details. I don’t know how he killed himself or where or even when.”

  “But there was some connection with Miss Mundy. From whom did you get the story?”

  “I don’t remember. I expect Wotton mentioned it. It would have come either from Wotton or McMaster. Nobody else I know would have spoken to me about Gloria. She must have been living with the Italian—he was an artist, it seems—and so got dragged into giving evidence.”

  “There was no suggestion that it was anything but suicide, I suppose? But how should you know, since you had such a brief, undetailed account of it?”

  “Are you wondering whether Gloria murdered the bloke?” I asked flatly.

  “Well,” said Dame Beatrice, “I do not rule out the possibility, since there seems a strong likelihood that she murdered that woman found in the old house at Beeches Lawn.”

  “Well, if the police are of that opinion, it won’t be long before they catch up with her.”

  “London is a good place in which to hide.”

  “She skipped from Trends pretty quickly when she realised that McMaster had recognised her.”

  “That is dependent upon whether she did realise it, but let the inference stand. Do you know whether Mr. McMaster has informed the police that he recognised her?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure not. He’s the kind of bloke who would always let the hen partridges fly.”

  “Shades of Peachum, Mr. Stratford?”

  “I’ve just thought of something,” I went on. “I’ve got myself a fiancée through this business and that fiancée may have been for a time on the staff of Trends while Gloria was there. Would you care to have a word with her? She herself was called Gloria, strangely enough, and the real Gloria would have been called by anything but her real name, it seems, but I have no idea what her shop name was. It could have been Violetta.”

  “Is there any chance that your fiancée would have known Miss Mundy’s address?”

  “I should hardly think so. She was only at Trends to gather material for a book. I don’t think she would have been in the least interested in the other assistants’ private lives. I’ll tell you who might be able to help, though. There is a silver-haired, pleasant young miss on the staff who knew more or less where my Imogen hung out during her stay at Trends, so she might be the best chance of our locating Gloria.”

  “Well, we must not ignore any opening. Are you persona grata with this silver-haired young woman?”

  “I don’t know. I told her I was a policeman.”

  “Enterprising of you, but perhaps, under the circumstances, not too helpful. People dislike what they call ‘getting mixed up with the police.’ I think perhaps it would be best if I myself made the next enquiries at the shop, but let us consider a few points before I do so. It is certain that Miss Mundy presented herself at Beeches Lawn on a Sunday, a day on which Trends would have been closed, but the evidence at our disposal suggests that she was also in the neighbourhood of Mr. Wotton’s residence on the Tuesday.”

  “If McMaster is right in thinking that he saw her still working at Trends some time after that, she probably sent in a doctor’s certificate to cover her absence, don’t you think?”

  “It seems a reasonable theory. On the other hand, if she had a car it would be quite possible for he
r to drive to Beeches Lawn directly she had finished work, do whatever she had decided to do there, and still get back to London and to the shop on the following morning.”

  “A car? I don’t know why, but I never thought of her having a car.”

  “It is an ubiquitous possession nowadays.”

  “Yes, of course. You don’t mean she stole that car the police found outside the convent building, do you?—and burnt a body in it? Oh, no, that’s far too fantastic.”

  “That was a stolen car, according to the police theory, but, even if it had been her own, she still had to get back to London. Of course, there is always the train, but there is something more important than the fact that Miss Mundy does not appear to have given up her position at Trends until after Mr. McMaster’s visit.”

  “I still think there is just a chance he may have been mistaken. He saw a girl with black hair and a dead-white make-up. I believed I was convinced that he saw Gloria in this girl, but I find a lingering doubt,” I said. “Would she have dared to go back to Trends, where she might be recognised?”

  “We will shelve the point and go to another matter. Has it struck you that somebody, Miss Mundy or another, must have had that red and black wig in readiness and that the murder was premeditated and carefully planned?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it along those lines. That means all the murderer had to do was to find the right time to commit the crime.”

  “And to select the right victim, of course.”

  “The right victim? How do you mean?”

  “She had to find a woman sufficiently of her own build, (although not necessarily of her own age), somebody who would be unsuspecting, and somebody who would not be missed for some time. Is there a picture forming in your mind?”