Nest of Vipers mb-55 Read online

  I am sorry if this seems to be a digression, Dame Beatrice, but I think perhaps what follows will explain it. I know that the impudent joke about the name of the house and this friendship between Targe and Elysée seem unimportant, and I suppose they would have been unimportant except for what happened next.

  The first inkling I had that the jest was not as innocent as I had supposed came from Latimer Targe himself. As I have mentioned, he made a living by re-hashing true stories of murder. He was, I would have thought, far too hardboiled a type to busy himself with the occult. The thing did not begin in that way, however.

  He joined me as I was strolling beside the lake in the grounds one morning and his silence gave me the impression that he had something on his mind. We paced along side by side for a bit and then he unburdened himself.

  ‘I say, old man, I’ve been looking up the records,’ he said. ‘I mean the records of this place, you know, this nest of vipers.’

  ‘Oh, look here,’ I said, ‘surely that joke has grown whiskers by now!’

  ‘Sorry, old man. Didn’t mean to rib you. There was murder done here, you know. I looked it all up in the county library. Year of 1786. Owner got one of the maids into trouble and when her father – one of the tenants – came up to make a fuss about it, the squire shot him dead.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘Even in 1786 landowners couldn’t murder their tenants with impunity.’

  ‘Oh, the squire got off. His bailiff swore that the farmer, or whatever he was, had come armed with a dirty great knife and that the shooting had been done in self-defence.’

  ‘And the court accepted that?’

  ‘They did. The person who got hanged was the girl. She lay in wait for the squire, persuaded him to dismount from his horse, enticed him into the cottage she had shared with her father and as she followed him into the bedroom she hit him over the head with an axe.’

  ‘Couldn’t she have pleaded self-defence?’

  ‘Well, that’s the story as I unearthed it, old boy, but mark the sequel, as they say. This house is haunted.’

  ‘By the murdered eighteenth-century owner?’

  ‘Don’t laugh, old boy. No, by the killer herself. Been seen about the rooms looking for the squire all over again.’

  ‘Your readers are not likely to swallow that one. I thought your stories were strictly factual,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose a ghost is a fact like any other. Anyway, don’t you be so sceptical. The woman’s been seen, I tell you.’

  ‘Ah, and, as the priest said to the man who confessed to murder, how many times?’

  ‘Three in all.’ He repeated it. ‘Three times in all.’

  ‘By whom?’ I dropped my jocose attitude. A house like mine might well offer a temptation to burglars.

  ‘Twice by those two girls – they share a bedroom, you know – and once by your partner.’

  ‘By Niobe? Nonsense! She would have told me.’

  ‘She thought she’d been dreaming until she got together with Miss Barnes and they swapped stories,’ said Targe. ‘It was Miss B. who told me all about it. I advised her to complain. I was joking, of course, but then Niobe agreed she’d seen it, too.’

  I tackled Niobe forthwith. She was in what had been the housekeeper’s dayroom. She had furnished it at small expense but with taste and had retained its cupboards with their ornate, beautifully-wrought brass handles which she saw to it were kept equally beautifully polished by the char who ‘did’ for most of the tenants, according them a day or a halfday a week, as their wishes and, I suppose, their incomes dictated. She was what people who employ charwomen call a superior type, came in her own mini and charged the earth, but she was a splendidly conscientious worker and I am sure earned her princely pay. Anyway, in our out of the way spot, I was glad to get anybody so good and those tenants who queried her prices were soon told to take her services or leave them, and that was that. She and Niobe, for some reason, got on particularly well together.

  ‘Look here, Niobe,’ I said, as soon as Mrs Smith’s mini was churning up the gravel on its departure, ‘what’s this story about the ghost of a murderess?’

  ‘It isn’t a ghost,’ she said, ‘and I think you had better have anti-burglar devices put on all the downstair windows because that’s the way she is managing to get inside this place, I’m sure.’

  ‘She?’ (But, of course, there was only one person she could mean.)

  ‘Miss Minnie. She’s got this bee in her bonnet about a will of a later date than the one which made the property over to you. I think she’s begun creeping about trying to find it. You would do well to get rid of her, Chelion. I don’t think she’s right in the head.’

  ‘It’s up to you to get rid of her,’ I said. ‘You were the person who let her have The Lodge.’

  ‘It’s your property, not mine. I can’t turn her out.’

  I had special fastenings put on all the downstair windows and we left it at that. I did not feel prepared to tackle Miss Minnie myself.

  (2)

  As, I suppose, might have been expected, the next item was a flood of anonymous letters, most of them addressed either to Niobe or to me. They accused us of ‘living in sin’.

  ‘Miss Minnie again, of course,’ said Niobe. ‘She really will have to go.’

  ‘On what excuse? She has signed for a three-year tenancy, and we have no evidence to prove that she writes – or, rather, types – the letters,’ I pointed out. ‘Hers is not the only typewriter in the place. Everybody has one except Targe. He sends his stuff out to be typed.’

  ‘Or, of course, you could marry me and put an end to her nonsense. Where is that note Miss Minnie sent you to tell you not to disturb her on the Sabbath?’ Niobe had spoken the first sentence lightly. On the next she had struck a serious note.

  ‘I turned it over to you. Don’t you remember?’ I asked.

  ‘Then it’s been filed. Come along to my office. All typewriters have their idiosyncrasies, so we shall soon know whether her note was done on the same machine as these filthy letters.’

  ‘I wonder whether anybody else has had one?’ I said.

  ‘You or I would know, wouldn’t we? One of us puts out the letters on the hall table every day.’

  ‘Oh, beyond just setting them out, I never bother to look at them,’ I said. ‘I never even trouble to see whether more than one is addressed to the same person. I don’t make piles. I just lay them out face upward and leave people to pick out their own.’

  ‘Yes, you always were as lazy as Hall’s dog, whoever he was,’ she said. ‘Even at the swimming pool you left most of the work to me. Still, you did pick up one letter which was not meant for you.’

  I had noted that she kept her office locked when she was not in it. She unlocked it and we went through the files. Miss Minnie’s curt note was not there.

  ‘Well, I must have filed it if you gave it me,’ said Niobe. ‘It proves what I said. She is our ghost all right. When she decided to send the anonymous letters she must have got into this room and removed the only bit of her typing we had.’

  ‘I don’t see how she could have got in here if you always keep this room locked,’ I said.

  ‘The windows, idiot! That’s why I told you to get them properly fastened at night.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said, as we went out, ‘it isn’t really Hall’s dog you meant; it was Ludlam’s dog.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And who was Ludlam?’

  ‘According to the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer, L.L.D., who states that he got the story from Ray’s Proverbs, Ludlam was a famous Surrey witch who lived in a cave near Farnham. Her dog was so lazy that it even rested its head against the wall to bark.’

  ‘My home was in Surrey,’ said Niobe, laughing. ‘But,’ she added, sobering down, ‘what are we to do about these letters?’

  ‘So far as you and I are concerned, I don’t propose to give in to anonymous rubbish,’ I said, laughing in my turn. ‘But we’d better find out whether the letters are a nui
sance to any of the others, or whether you and I are especially favoured.’

  We soon knew the answer to that one. Billie came to me and said that she and Elysée would be giving up their tenancy. I referred her to Niobe, who pointed out that they had signed a three-year lease.

  ‘Although actually,’ Niobe said to me privately, ‘I think we ought to let them go. They’re rather an embarrassing couple, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t find them so. Very nice girls. As for their little idiosyncrasy, well, there are plenty of others like them, especially in these days, as people are beginning to find out.’

  ‘Personally I haven’t much use for Women’s Lib, and a misogynist like you wouldn’t give a hoot how offensive to others their conduct is, so long as neither of them makes a pass at you,’ said Niobe bitterly.

  ‘But their conduct isn’t offensive. They’re most discreet,’ I said. ‘As for Elysée, I get the impression that, if the right chap came along, she would ditch Billie like a pair of laddered tights.’ (I was rather proud of this simile, as you will have noticed.)

  ‘I don’t believe it! I’ll tell them they can go, then, shall I?’ Niobe asked.

  ‘Did they mention any letters?’ (I suppose the conclusion I jumped to was the obvious one.)

  ‘No, only the ghost, but it’s really the letters, I’m sure. They’re bound to have had at least one. After all, they’re pretty vulnerable, aren’t they?’

  ‘What, in these days? Still, if they want to leave, that’s that.’

  So the two quietest and best-behaved (so far as I was concerned) of our tenants took their leave of us, and their modest apartment on the second floor remained empty. What is more, the anonymous letters ceased as soon as Billie and Elysée had gone.

  ‘So we were wrong in suspecting Miss Minnie, it seems,’ said Niobe. ‘It was those two little misfits who wrote them.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, ‘You yourself thought that some of the letters came to them as well as to us, and that was the reason for their leaving.’

  ‘Oh, anonymous letter-writers always include themselves. I thought everybody knew that.’

  ‘Maybe, but people who live in glass houses don’t throw stones at their own dwellings. There’s still plenty of prejudice against emotional friendships between women.’

  ‘Only the other day you denied all that. What a turncoat you are. What with the witch’s dog and an altered proverb, I really am learning things this week!’ said Niobe.

  (3)

  You must not think, Dame Beatrice, that this account covers only a few days, There were quite long gaps between one happening and the next, and I suppose more than six weeks elapsed between the episode of the notepaper heading and the departure of Miss Kennett and Miss Barnes.

  Niobe had asked them to let her have their new address so that she could send on any letters which came for them, but I suppose they had already notified the Post Office, for none of their correspondence turned up, and neither did they leave a forwarding address.

  The next couple to go were Sumatra and Irelath, but although they departed from Weston Pipers at the end of September, they paid six months’ rent in advance, asked for their apartment to be dusted and aired periodically, and promised to return in the following March. Irelath was to lecture in the United States and Sumatra resigned from her job in order to accompany him. I could only suppose that his Canadian father’s money was grafting the trip, for Irelath was so very minor a poet, so far as his published work was concerned, that it was impossible to believe that he had been selected on his merits.

  My novel matured slowly. As I finished each chapter Niobe typed it for me. She had invested in a new typewriter for the purpose because, she said, it was unsuitable that deathless prose such as mine should be typed on a ten-year-old machine. That would do for making out receipts to the tenants for their rent and lists for the tradespeople, but not for my novel. Whether she was serious in her stated admiration for my work, or whether she simply wanted a new toy to play with, I did not enquire. I subbed up for the typewriter and I must say that she made my chapters look very attractive indeed, so much so that I began to admire them myself and felt that, given beginner’s luck, publication ceased to be problematical and was a near-certainty.

  So matters went on for a month or two. The sea became colder, my swims from our strip of beach less frequent, the tenants, as the soldier said of the camp-following prostitutes, became more and more like old war-comrades and we all settled down to winter in. The house was snug and comfortable, for Niobe had installed a splendid central-heating system and had provided electric fires as well. The tenants’ excursions up to town to harry their publishers and abuse their literary agents became as infrequent as my dips in the sea and, except for some unexplained excursions into the town, everybody stayed put, although harmony did not always prevail. I was aware of undercurrents.

  My novel reached the halfway stage and sometimes I wondered why on earth I had ever begun it. At about this time – I can’t remember the exact date – the weather turned wet and Constance Kent hit Evesham Evans over the head with a bottle with (according to his account) no justification whatever. He had to have four stitches in the cut. Polly Hempseed and Cassie McHaig got roaring drunk on the latter’s birthday and went staggering out into the grounds naked as they were born and performed weird gyrations on the lawn while the rain poured down on them and Niobe sent me out to remonstrate with them while everybody else crowded the windows to watch. Latimer Targe followed me out with a couple of blankets. We threw these over them to cover their nakedness although, as he said regretfully afterwards, it did rather spoil the fun for everybody, and when we got them indoors they had a fight which wrecked their living-room.

  One morning when the postman knocked me up and presented me with a registered letter for which a signature was required, I signed obediently, having no idea, until he had gone and I had taken it to my room and a better light, that the letter was not for me but was addressed to Miss Minnie at The Lodge.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ I thought, as I looked out at the pouring rain, the soaked lawn and the dripping November trees. ‘She’ll have to wait for it. I’m not traipsing out in this!’

  However, a registered letter is a registered letter, so, cursing the weather and ignoring Niobe’s call that breakfast was ready, I put a waterproof over my pyjamas, put on some shoes and ran across the lawn. Lights were on in several parts of the house, but the bungalow was unlighted and the curtains, I could see, were still drawn. I pushed the registered envelope through the letterbox, beat an exasperated tattoo on the door and pelted back to the house to get dried and dressed.

  Niobe was not very pleased.

  ‘No need to have gone out there before breakfast,’ she said. ‘I’ve kept yours hot, but it isn’t the same as when it’s first cooked. She’ll probably stay in bed till eleven or later, on a beastly dark morning like this.’

  ‘Not with the bashing I gave her front door,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder what was in the envelope? Did you open it as you opened the other one?’ Niobe asked nastily.

  ‘Money, perhaps, as it was registered,’ I said, ignoring the thrust.

  I thought no more of the matter. We were already making preparations for Christmas and I had planned a cocktail party, with a Christmas tree and presents for everybody. On Christmas Eve, Hempseed and Cassie, unusually subdued and well-behaved since their Terpsichorean exhibition on the lawn, could be heard in their flat practising carols to Constance Kent’s guitar, while the sounds of sawing and hammering from the Evans-Kent apartment seemed to prove that Evesham was carrying out a promise he had made to Cassie, a devout Catholic whenever she troubled herself to go to church – hers was a long way off – that he would make her a crib.

  All seemed set for a happy if not a particularly peaceful period when the postman came again with an offering for Miss Minnie. This time it was a fairly bulky parcel.

  ‘This is the third time I’ve brought it, and never
nobody at home,’ he told me resentfully, ‘and in this weather, sir, that’s not funny. There is never nobody at home in that bungalow, not to take in that registered letter nor nothing, so, without you’re willing to take it in for the lady, I’ll have to leave her a note that she’ll have to go and collect this parcel herself from the Post Office. I’ve done more than my duty already and I can’t tote this here parcel around no more times. It would mean her going into the town for it if I don’t leave it with you. Please yourself, of course, sir. You don’t have to accept it if you don’t want.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll take it,’ I said. I put it down underneath the hall table, did not think to tell anyone else that I had taken it in and, in the general bustle of preparations, Christmas shopping, ordering in drinks and food and being driven almost demented by Constance Kent’s guitar and Evesham Evans’s incessant carpentry, I forgot all about it. It was not until our expensive and cultured charwoman complained about it that it came to my mind that it had been in my possession for some days.

  ‘Which, if I have moved that parcel once, sir, in order to clean the hall floor, I have moved it twenty times,’ she said angrily.

  This I knew to be picturesque exaggeration, but she had made her point.

  ‘Good Lord! I’d forgotten it was there,’ I said. I fished it out and went out in the rain to deliver it. I failed in my object. The curtains of the bungalow were still drawn and seemed to say, like Macbeth’s porter, ‘Knock, knock, knock! who’s there, i’ the other devil’s name? But this place is too cold for hell.’ I continued to knock. Then I began to shout. Then I banged on each of the bungalow windows in turn. Then I became alarmed. Poor old Miss Minnie, I concluded, had been taken ill. We were so used never to see her about that it had not occurred to me to wonder why she had not answered the door to the postman or made any enquiries about a parcel which, ten to one, she must have been expecting. I felt bad about the parcel. It probably contained a Christmas present.

  I tore back to the house and hammered on Evans’s and then on Targe’s door. It would not take the three of us to break the kitchen window, which was the only one uncurtained, but I did not want the responsibility of being alone in discovering Miss Minnie either desperately ill or even dead in bed.