Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 19

  “Are you telling me that she risked staying in a local hotel all those nights after she had burnt the car with the body in it?”

  “I don’t know. She was in the old house for part of the time. She was seen by others and I met her there when I had my accident.” She chuckled. “She wasn’t expecting any of us, I’ll wager,” she said, “neither those young people who got caught in the rain or me so early in the morning.”

  I thought of the empty cans of food and drink which had led to Rouse’s enquiries about squatters. Her explanations could have covered those, too. Hotels are expensive nowadays.

  “She would have been pretty cold in the old house,” I said. Aunt Eglantine had an answer to that.

  “Not if she chanced the staircase and made a fire in one of the bedrooms,” she said. “The stairs would have borne a lightweight like her, I daresay, whereas I brought them crashing down.”

  “Smoke from a bedroom fire, or anywhere else in the old house, would have been noticed,” I pointed out.

  “Well, it wasn’t. It took a conflagration to draw attention to the old house, didn’t it? Do stop raising silly objections. All that I’ve told you covers the known facts, so have done with your contumacious carpings, young man.”

  I returned to my flat and tried to settle down to work, but it was impossible to concentrate on the new book. What with the conversation with Aunt Eglantine and my approaching marriage, I found myself incapable of serious application to creative writing. I soon gave up the attempt and wrote to Imogen instead. That is to say I was half-way through the letter when Anthony’s call distracted me. He sounded incoherent.

  “Stop!” I said. “Take a deep breath and begin again. Are you tight?”

  Apparently he relinquished the phone to Celia, for it was her voice which came through.

  “It’s that girl again,” she said. “Do come.”

  “Has she been arrested?”

  “No, and Cranford Coberley is free. Drop everything and come, please. We need you badly.”

  I did as she asked. I left my letter unfinished, got my car, and drove straight to Beeches Lawn, stopping only to pick up a sandwich and some coffee on the M4. When I had pulled up in the forecourt of Anthony’s garage, I locked the car, a precaution I had never taken before at his place, and as I walked by the kitchen garden I met Platt, the gardener.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but, in case you didn’t know, there’s trouble up at the house.”

  “Yes, I had a telephone call,” I said.

  “That’s all right then, sir. You won’t be getting a shock.”

  I did not ask him to explain what the nature of the shock would have been. I knew that Anthony and Celia were alive and that was all that concerned me at the moment. I hurried along to the house. Celia opened the front door.

  “The servants are having hysterics and Anthony isn’t much better,” she said. “Come in and have a drink. We can all do with one.”

  She took me into the enormous drawing-room. Anthony was at the window staring out at the almost leafless trees. He turned round as we came in.

  “Hullo, Corin,” he said. “Good of you to come. We’re in trouble again.”

  Celia went out and returned from the dining-room next door with bottles and glasses.

  “I met your gardener,” I said. “What’s happened now? Not Aunt Eglantine, I hope?”

  “Oh, no, it’s Gloria Mundy. She’s dead,” said Celia. “The servants found her lying outside the back door. The police have been here again and so I suppose all hell will be let loose once more. Will that wretched girl never stop causing trouble? Help yourself, Corin, and don’t stint.”

  I poured drinks for all of us. Anthony was almost too shaken up to hold his glass. I wondered whether he had gone on caring for Gloria after all, or even whether he had killed her.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “We don’t know. The servants came in just as we were finishing breakfast and blurted out the news, so Anthony went out there. She was quite dead. Of course the police had to be told and Detective-Inspector Rouse came again. He is becoming quite an old friend,” said Celia bitterly. “He badgered us and the servants with questions and then had the body taken away. We could tell him nothing, of course, and we don’t know where we stand. It really is unutterably awful.” Her calm demeanour suddenly crumpled. She burst into tears. This pulled Anthony together. He took the glass from her hand, laid it very precisely on the side table, and collected her on to his lap. At the same moment the doorbell pealed.

  “I’ll go,” I said; but the maid also had pulled herself together sufficiently to answer the door. She let in Rouse. I met him in the little vestibule and took him along to the drawing-room. I gave a loud knock on the door to suggest to the others that they had better unscramble themselves.

  They were in separate chairs when we went in and, although Celia’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes were dry.

  “You are just in time for a drink, Detective-Inspector,” she said.

  “No, thank you, madam. I shan’t keep you a moment. There will have to be an inquest, of course, but we found a letter on the body. It will be handed to the coroner in due course, but it is addressed to Mr. Wotton, so I think he had better read it.”

  Anthony took the envelope and unfolded the letter which was inside it. He perused it and then handed it to me. There was no doubt about its being a suicide note. In it Gloria said that she knew the game was up, that she had no intention of spending years in prison, that she regretted the death of the elderly cleaner, but not the murder of the American cousin—“she only came over here to sponge on me because she thought I was still Hardie McMaster’s mistress and he is a very rich man”—and the letter went on to mention the photograph “with which I never intended any harm, but only something to hold, Tony, over your rather stupid head, but she went off with it and I did my best to buy it back so that she could do you no harm with it. Tony, my weak-kneed old darling, if your gardener must keep all that lethal stuff in his shed, he should keep it locked up. There is enough poison in there to lay out a regiment.”

  She named some of the substances. All of them, I knew, contained hydrocyanic acid, more commonly known as prussic acid. There would have been pesticides such as rat poison, wasp-killer, and a fumigatory for trees and fruit. Which she had used she did not say. The letter ended:

  I have read somewhere that certain natives kill themselves on the doorstep of an enemy so that their ghost will haunt him. I bear you no malice, but I will haunt that bitch of a woman you married until she kills herself to get rid of me. She looked at me as though I was scum. Even that Coberley woman only laughed when the soup went over me. I can forgive her for that, but I won’t stand being treated like dirt by that wife of yours.

  I handed back the letter. He gave it to Rouse without showing it to Celia.

  “I must ring up Hara-kiri,” he said, when the inspector had gone. “I don’t want him to hear about this from the newspapers. I wonder, Corin, whether you would do it for me? You’ll do it better than I would, because you are in no way involved.”

  “I’ll ring him up from my flat, then,” I said. “Now that you are out of trouble, I think the two of you are better on your own.”

  The fact was that I was anxious to get away. There was nothing useful that I could do by staying and I was superstitious enough not to want the Wottons’ bad luck to attach itself to me.

  Back in my flat, I had a dream I shall not forget. I am well aware that nothing is so boring as having to listen to an account of someone else’s dreams, but, because of Aunt Eglantine’s strange and bizarre request later, this dream of mine still seems of peculiar significance. It began when I dreamed I received a “Tag Map” from Hara-kiri.

  19

  A Kind of Pilgrimage

  In my dream I was not only mystified; I was alarmed. A “Tag Map” went back to our college days. It was a code which meant “Time all good men aid party” and one was in honour bound (by
an initiation oath taken in the Junior Common Room) to honour it. I remembered the row at Pontyprydd after the rugger match there and wondered in what fresh trouble and harassment Hara-kiri intended to involve me.

  At first the dream was uncoordinated and chaotic. I found myself outside his house, but it had changed. Instead of the modern homestead which he had built in the Sussex countryside, it was a replica, on a smaller scale, of the second of the Cornish hotels I had visited. There was the same mixture of architectural styles, from the mediaeval to the early Georgian, there was the grim gatehouse, and there was the tall turret with the little room at the top where I had slept. I found myself up there again and below me were the coast and the rocks and a tiny cove which had not been there before.

  Hardie came into the room. I knew it was he, although some of the time I thought he was Anthony. He invited me to look over the house and took me into a room which I seemed to recognise, although in fact I had never been inside it. It was beautifully decorated and furnished and over the mantelpiece was Ruben’s Adoration of the Magi which, in my dream, I knew to be the original, but it turned into the naked figure of Gloria Mundy and Aunt Eglantine laughed and said, “The quickness of the hand deceives the eye,” before she turned into Hara-kiri again.

  He said, “She’s in the room which used to be the chapel.”

  “Aunt Eglantine?” I asked. However, it turned out to be Gloria, as I might have guessed. I thought of Kate and asked where she was.

  He said, “I have divorced her. Didn’t I tell you? This is to be purely a stag party.”

  “But I’m not going to be married for a good many weeks,” I said. “What are the candles for?”

  “A lyke-wake dirge. If you want to see Gloria, she is on the bed.”

  I could see that we were now in a chapel. The windows were small and gave an ecclesiastical appearance to the room and the candles, six of them, were the only form of lighting. The only furniture was a four-poster bed on which lay a coffin with no lid. There in it lay Gloria, her black and red hair neatly arranged, her unprepossessing little face looking rather like that of Kay. There was a cat-like smile on her lips and her predatory hands were clasped together on her breast.

  As I looked down on her I knew that one of the candles had gone out. I straightened up and lighted it with a snap of my fingers, but the little room went dark and I found myself in the courtyard in front of the house. Instead of Hardie’s big car there was a hearse and behind it a smaller car with four men in it. I could not see their faces, but I knew that they were William Underedge, Cranford Coberley, Anthony, and Anthony’s gardener.

  “We had to bring Platt,” said Hara-kiri, “because we need an experienced man to do the digging.” At that I knew we were going to bury Gloria.

  “Requiescat in pace,” I said under my breath.

  McMaster either heard the words or guessed them correctly, for he said, “Yes, but will she?”

  “Will she what?”

  “Rest in peace. Wotton doesn’t think so. She is to be dealt with tonight. She threatened to haunt him. We can’t allow that.”

  “Surely you don’t believe that sort of rubbish?” I said.

  “I don’t altogether disbelieve it. Anyway, I have everything ready, but we need your help.”

  “To do what?”

  “Well, never mind that now. We’ll discuss it when the others turn up.”

  “Others? But they are here, Anthony and the rest.”

  “Anthony is bringing a young, tough chap named William Underedge. You and I met him at Beeches Lawn on the day the storm set in. There really ought to be six of us, but the fewer who know of this business the better. What shall we carve on the headstone?”

  “You are at your old game of collecting epitaphs, then. Not in the best of taste on the present occasion, I would have thought,” I said with grave disapproval.

  He took no notice. He took me along to his dining-room. There was food laid out and wine on the table.

  “I’ve given the servants the evening off,” he said. Then he added, “I’m serious, Corin, and your guess is perfectly correct. Don’t you know some rhyme or other about six pall-bearers? Sit down and let’s tuck in. We shall need our strength for this night’s work.”

  “Aren’t we going to wait for the others?”

  “No. They will have something on the road. Spout away.”

  I told him that I thought I could oblige him with a couple of verses. I recited,

  “Tell me, thou bonny bird,

  When shall I marry me?

  When six braw gentlemen

  Kirkward shall carry ye.”

  He had brought a notebook to the table, but he did not use it. He wrote the lines on the table-cloth which I now realised had been Gloria’s winding-sheet.

  “Any more?” he asked. “You said a couple.”

  “The only other one I can think of concerns a man. It won’t do for Gloria.”

  “Perhaps it will do for me myself later on.”

  “Hardie,” I said, “did you really love that girl?”

  “Difficult to remember. I suppose I must have done. But come! Your epitaph, for your question needs some excuse.”

  “A very nice derangement of Shakespeare! All right, but I shall alter it a bit from the original. It’s really a cowboy song, but, as you are a Scot, here goes:

  “Find six lusty clansmen to carry me kirkward,

  And six sonsie lassies to greet on my pall,

  And on my black coffin strew handfuls of heather

  To deaden the sound of the sods as they fall.”

  “I wish there could have been six of us,” said McMaster, “but she is only a lightweight, so perhaps we can manage.”

  “There are six of us,” I said, and there we all were.

  Anthony said to McMaster, “Is everything ready?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I cut and sharpened the stake of holly this morning and there is a box. It will be lighter to carry than the coffin. Besides, we mustn’t risk damaging that. The other funeral is to be tomorrow and everything must be in order, because you are a churchwarden.”

  Then we were back in the hearse. I had no idea where we were going. Anthony and Hardie had carried out a long narrow box with a fitted lid and I knew it had come from the room which had been a chapel. The box was put on to the back seat of Anthony’s car. William Underedge squatted on the floor to keep the box from sliding off the seat and Hardie and I took the lead in the hearse with Coberley and the gardener sitting on the empty coffin.

  It was when we got to Cirencester, with its unmistakable church porch, that I began to have some idea of what our destination was to be. As we headed for Cheltenham, Hardie said, “Belas Knap is what we want. You’ll have to guide me. In fact, you’d better drive.”

  “Pull up,” said William Underedge, who suddenly appeared beside me. “I want to change places. For one thing I’m stiff and cramped and for another I expect I know the route better than you do in the dark.” So they changed over and for the last few miles of the drive William and I were in charge of all that remained of Gloria Mundy, for she was in the coffin again.

  Our progress was slower once we were on the byroads, but the journey was finished at last. We waited for Anthony to pull in behind us and then he and McMaster lifted, not the coffin, after all, but the long box, out of Anthony’s car and we began the steep climb up the shoulder of Cleeve Cloud. The moon had risen and the cold night was clear.

  Anthony and Hardie carried the box, occasionally relieved by William and myself. Coberley and the gardener followed behind with spade and pickaxe. We slipped and stumbled. I thought of the cowpats and hoped I would not measure my length among them. Hardie swore now and then, but Anthony and William plodded on. I thought of some caving I had done in Derbyshire, and of how I was once lost in the Sahara. I have explored caverns in the Carpathians and I have visited the Callanish stones at midnight on Midsummer Eve, but I have never made so extraordinary a journey as on the long and diff
icult ascent of Cleeve Cloud in my dream. For every step we took upwards we seemed to slip back two.

  The moon, bereft nowadays of all its mystery, gazed blandly down on us and then suddenly above us loomed the great mass of Belas Knap. As we reached the skyline, the wind, from which we had been sheltered on our side of the hill, struck us with its full force and we had to hold on to the box to prevent it from blowing away, for I knew that, even with Gloria inside it again, it weighed no more than a piece of paper.

  We were now standing in front of the false portal with its two upright blocks of stone, with their lintel top. The massive boulder which appeared to be the door only served to conceal the fact that an entrance did not exist on this, the highest and widest part of the mound. The openings were all in the sides. (Here my dream played no tricks.)

  The wind dropped and the bearers laid the box down. Hardie removed the lid. The body was covered by a folded sheet. Hardie took this out, spread it on the ground and then he and Anthony took up the frail corpse and laid it carefully on to the sheet. In the moonlight the meagre features looked grey and disquietingly old. The red hair seemed to have lost its colour, but the black locks lay like soot against the grey face. Clumsily, and yet with tenderness, Hardie, who was still on his knees, bent forward and stroked the hair back a little. Then he stood up and said, “Well, this is it.” He took from his pocket a short piece of sharpened stick. William shone his torch on it and I saw that it had been freshly cut from a living plant and was bleeding.

  “You’ll want a piece of stone,” said Anthony, “to bash it in.”

  “No. I’ve brought a mallet. Make a quicker and better job,” said William. I now noticed that he had a hessian bag slung over his shoulder. “There ought to be crossroads,” he muttered.

  “You or me?” asked Hardie of Anthony.

  “You,” said Anthony. He knelt and carefully pulled up the ridged sweater and uncovered the pitiful little breasts. Hardie knelt on the other side of the body, placed the sharpened end of the short stake over the heart and struck the holly branch one sharp blow. There was silence. The two men remained where they were. Then Anthony said, “Goodbye, Gloria. Don’t come back, there’s a good girl.” McMaster pulled down the sweater, but I saw that it had turned into the Kilpeck warrior’s byrnie of leather and chain mail.