here lies gloria mundy • death of a burrowing mole
the greenstone griffins • cold, lone and still
After more than fifty years of crime-writing, Gladys Mitchell died in July 1983 at her home in Corfe Mullen, Dorset.
Mr Pythias, the geography master at Sir George Etherege school, fails to reappear for work at the end of the Christmas holidays. Also missing are several thousand pounds collected for a school trip to Greece. Pythias is suspected of having absconded with the money, but police inquiries at the school and the master’s lodging-house draw a blank.
The mystery deepens when a dead body is discovered buried on the school premises and two boys disappear from the school. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and her intrepid assistant Laura Gavin are called in to track down the boys and solve the riddle of the vanishing schoolmaster.
‘Gladys Mitchell was a much-admired member of the great sisterhood of English detective writers from the late 1920s onwards, headed by Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. They all avoided unnecessary violence and concentrated on the whodunnit puzzle.’
Gladys Mitchell’s first novel,
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd
44 Bedford Square, London WC1,1984
© 1984 by Gladys Mitchell
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner
Mitchell, Gladys No winding-sheet
I. Title
823'.912[F] PR6O25.I832
ISBN 0 7181 2399 9
Composition by Allset, London
Printed in Great Britain by Hollen Street Press, Slough, and bound by Hunter and Foulis Ltd, Edinburgh
To my grandnephew
DOUGLAS JAMES MITCHELL
1
Unexplained Absence
^ »
At the end of the Christmas vacation the Sir George Etherege school re-assembled on a Thursday and each form master kept his own class so that textbooks and stationery could be distributed, dinner money collected, timetables dictated and nametapes on shorts and gym shoes inspected. The Sir George Etherege was a well-run school, but, even so, the staff were glad enough of a weekend respite when the first two days of the term were behind them and normal working could be resumed.
Every Monday morning, however, was still a detested beginning to the week, for, until the mid-morning break, each master again had to keep his own class instead of teaching his specialised subject. There were reasons for this. On Mondays after assembly, the dinner money for the week was collected by the dinner monitors, who then took it to the school secretary’s office. With any luck they could contrive that this coveted chore kept them out of lessons for up to twenty minutes if she was on the telephone or in consultation with the headmaster. Even three- quarters of an hour was not entirely unheard of.
Then there were the winter swimmers. During the summer term swimming was a compulsory subject and was part of the physical education course, but in the Easter term only those boys were taken to the municipal baths whose parents were prepared to pay the fee.
There were also the Catholics, a small minority but one which had permission to be out of school for an hour from nine-thirty on Mondays so that they could receive instruction in their faith from the parish priest.
‘If only the Church had stuck to Latin,’ said a junior master, ‘the priest might teach them enough of that logically constructed language to improve their written English. As it is, the whole system is wrong and ought to be scrapped.’
‘What we need,’ said someone else, ‘is to extend the system, not do away with it.’
‘As how?’ asked another young man.
