Noonday and Night

his little kiosk checking the takings against the number of tickets sold that day. Hutchings greeted him and told him that he was taking the two visitors up to the roof to look at the view.

On the outer side of the archway a stout door had to be unlocked. Hutchings was carrying an electric torch, for the newel stair which they mounted was lighted only by one slit of a window and there was no handrail.

The porter’s room was tiny compared with that above the Westgate at Winchester, but here, again, there was access to the roof and the soft, clear evening light. Hutchings had led the way up the winding stair, but when Dame Beatrice had made a brief survey, by the light of an electric torch, of the tiny, stone-walled room, she was the first to mount to the leads.

She stood aside at the top of the short, steep, straight flight of steps so that the way was not blocked for her companions, and as they joined her on the small, flat roof she said,

‘Just as well that we are in the open air.’

‘You must have known,’ said the Chief Constable, visiting Dame Beatrice at the Dovedale hotel on the following morning.

‘No,’ Dame Beatrice responded. ‘It fell out just as I told you. Laura had this obsession about gatehouses and they did seem to offer possibilities as hiding-places. It has been pointed out, more than once, that to commit a murder is easy enough. It is the disposal of the body which presents the problem. Some bury the victim’s corpse in somebody else’s grave; others burn it; some dismember it and strew the remains over as wide an area as possible; others are content to dispose only of the head in the hope that the rest of the cadaver will defy recognition and identification; and there is also a school of thought which favours placing the remains in the left-luggage offices at railway stations and destroying the incriminating reclamation ticket. It was left to the fertile imagination of my secretary to envisage the possibilities of mediaevel gatehouses.’

‘Your secretary may have been obsessed by gatehouses, but I don’t believe she thought of them as repositories for murdered bodies. That was your idea, Dame Beatrice. Well, you may as well make up your mind to stay on here for a day or two. You will be needed at the inquest. Mind you, we shall soon get the fellow who did this,’ said the Chief Constable.

‘You think so?’

‘Bound to. Nobody could have got a dead body up that newel stair. It’s so narrow that I had quite a job to squeeze myself up, and I was carrying nothing but an electric torch. The chap or chaps must have had a ladder and reared it up to the gatehouse roof from outside. What’s more, they must have killed poor Noone – we must get the body formally identified, of course, but I have no doubt myself that it’s Noone – they must have killed him somewhere else while the coach-party was inside Hulliwell Hall. Then they brought the body back to the gatehouse by night and in a car. It will be hard luck if we can’t get a line on something there, because, as I say, they must also have brought a ladder. Well, you’ve certainly led us to discover the body. We should never have thought of that gatehouse for ourselves. Now the inquest —’

‘Could I not be represented as a casual visitor taken up, as you told the gatekeeper, merely to admire the view from the gatehouse roof? It would accord better with my plans if the discovery of the body appeared to be fortuitous. I don’t want gatehouses brought too obviously into the picture. I know I was the first person to set eyes on the body, but it was only a matter of seconds before you and Mr Hutchings saw it, too. You will remember that I stood aside immediately I had stepped out on to the roof so that you and he might join me.’

‘I see what you mean. Anyway, we shall hold the inquest as soon as we can get the body identified. Not a very nice job for whoever it is. Let’s hope the poor devil was a bachelor. I’d hate a woman to have to do it.’

‘We both are going on the assumption that the body is that of Noone, and I think it a fair assumption, considering all that we know, but what if that particular identification fails?’

‘That will make a nuisance for us, of course, but the body was completely clad and the poor fellow had a pretty full set of false teeth which should be identifiable if we chase around long enough to find the dentist who supplied them. One of the more tedious jobs for my chaps, but one which usually brings results. However, my bet is that we’ve found Noone all right. As you say, given all the circumstances, I shouldn’t think there’s any doubt about it.’

‘No, I do not think there is any doubt at all.’

Papers found on the body identified it as that of Noone and the inquest, which Dame Beatrice decided, after all, to attend, made public the manner of the driver’s death. He had been stabbed in the back.

‘One blow, but whoever did it either knew exactly where to put the knife or else accidentally hit upon just the right spot,’ said the Chief Constable, discussing the inquest later. ‘Could be a Mafia job, but why pick on this particular chap? Wonder what his political affiliations were? He wasn’t an Irishman, was he? – although they generally shoot their victims, not to stab to kill. Was he Jewish, I wonder, and some Arab terrorists got him? Was any one of the coach-party involved? Oh, well, there are a number of lines my chaps can follow up, and that’s always something. As the coach-party came from all over the place, perhaps we ought to get Scotland Yard on to it. I’ll see what my Detective Chief Superintendent thinks. There’s the Welsh job as well, you see. There must be some connection. Do you expect to find Daigh’s body in the same kind of situation?’

‘Well, there certainly is a gatehouse at the entrance to the bishop’s outer courtyard at Dantwylch,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I noted that the medical evidence mentioned traces of soil in Noone’s hair,’ she added, with apparent inconsequence. ‘I think the unfortunate man was persuaded to pick up his murderer outside Hulliwell Hall and take him some short distance, perhaps towards a public house or a garage. On the way the murderer stabbed the unsuspecting man in the back and…’

‘But the coach would have been filthy with blood. Nobody has mentioned anything of that sort, have they?’ asked the Chief Constable.

‘Presumably because there was not anything of that sort. You would need to ask the medical officer about that and, of course, the driver who actually brought the coach home, but I have known cases…’

‘This idea that Noone picked up an acquaintance could only mean that he picked up another coach-driver, don’t you think? We may be able to get a line on that. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out which other coaches were at the Hall at the approximate time that day.’

‘It need not necessarily have been somebody who was in charge of a coach, of course.’

‘I suppose not, and that doesn’t help these needle-in-a-haystack goings-on. What made you mention the soil was found in Noone’s hair? They’d have had to dump the body somewhere while daylight lasted.’

‘It might be worth-while to find out whether there was any trace in a half-dug grave in the churchyard at that