‘Do have some water,’ cried Felicity, returning from the kitchen with a tumbler.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ the old lady wheezed, as Felicity held the glass to her lips. ‘Old age and the night air! Time to go home to bed! So sorry to be a disturbance!’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Felicity readily.

‘I must go, too,’ said Margery, getting up. ‘Father will think I’m lost.’

‘Shall I join the party?’ asked the vicar. ‘It is a perfect evening for a stroll.’

The four of them left the house together, and in the narrow lane which led to the Bossbury road they separated into couples, the vicar and Margery in advance, Mrs Bradley and Felicity behind.

‘I am sorry to have engaged your sympathy under false pretences,’ observed Mrs Bradley, gazing up at the tall elms.

‘What do you mean? You certainly had a terrible fit of coughing, you poor dear,’ said Felicity.

‘Yes. A useful gift. I have employed it more than once,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a sigh at the recollection of her own duplicity. ‘The great advantage of it is the awful noise it makes. You were within an ace of giving away a little piece of information which had better be reserved for my private ear, I think. What were you going to tell them about the skull?’

‘Oh – it has gone from behind the Roman shield,’ replied Felicity. ‘It was stupid of me to begin blurting it out like that, but I thought Father –’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Mrs Bradley hastily agreed. ‘Still, perhaps the fewer the better when it comes to sharing news about a murder. So the skull has gone? I thought it would. The question is – where?’

Felicity laughed.

‘You’d better look up all our answers to that question,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember that game we played at your house? And you haven’t told us yet who won!’ she added.

‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Wait a minute.’ She bent down and fidgeted with her shoe. The two in front stopped, looked round, and then strolled back.

‘Go on slowly with your father, I want to talk to Margery,’ Mrs Bradley said in a low tone. This small manoeuvre was accomplished, and Margery and Felicity changed partners.

‘Now, young woman,’ said Mrs Bradley sternly, ‘I want a plain answer to a plain question, and no ridiculous quibbling in the name of honesty or honour. Who was the man who met you in the Manor Woods that night?’

‘Which night?’ The girl’s voice was defiant. Mrs Bradley sighed.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You met Cleaver Wright, didn’t you?’

Margery stalked on without a word.

Mrs Bradley clutched her arm, and caused her to moderate her pace.

‘Don’t be foolish, child,’ she said, cackling gently. ‘It doesn’t make a scrap of difference to me whether you answer the question or not. You see – I know.’

Margery looked straight ahead at the figures of the vicar and his daughter. They were turning on to the main Bossbury road, and in less than a second she lost sight of them. She was alone in the world – or so it seemed – with this terrible little old woman. She stopped short and faced her.

‘I promised I wouldn’t tell,’ she said, ‘and I’m jolly well not going to tell! So there!’

‘You haven’t told; I have guessed,’ said Mrs Bradley briefly. ‘Margery, whereabouts in the clearing did the two of you sit? No, my dear! Don’t repeat that lie you told us before. You and Cleaver Wright did not sit with your backs against the Stone – I know that! Oh, wait a minute, though. I beg your pardon. You may have done so. I wish you would be quite frank with me about the whole business.’

Margery stiffened, and set the large obstinate jaw she had inherited from her mother.

‘I won’t tell you anything. And if you want to know, it was Cleaver Wright I met, and we did sit with our backs against the Stone. We sat on the side of it facing the path which leads to the wicket gate, because I told Clef that if anything in those woods scared me, I should bolt like a rabbit down that path.’

‘I don’t know why,’ said Mrs Bradley, beginning to walk on again, ‘but when you were telling the tale to Felicity Broome and me, you managed to give me a distinct impression that the two of you sat on the other side of the Stone – the side facing the Manor House. I learned this afternoon that you could not possibly have done so.’

‘Mrs Bradley’ – the defiance had gone from Margery’s tone, and only trouble was left in her young harsh voice – ‘there’s something I don’t understand behind all this. Clef told me to think of us as sitting on the side of the Stone which faces the Manor House, so that if I did let out where we had been it might not matter so much. Mrs Bradley, what is all this mystery? It isn’t – oh, it isn’t anything to do with that terrible murder, is it?’

Mrs Bradley shrugged her shoulders. ‘Only this much,’ she said, ‘that your Cleaver Wright is a very foolish young man, to say the very least of it. He walked round the Stone after you ran away, and saw the dead body of Rupert Sethleigh. He bent down to examine it, and got blood on his hands. Dirty, careless, thoughtless, and lazy, like nearly all painters, he wiped his hands on his clothes. What can you expect of people who habitually wear overalls which other people have to wash? Then he felt rather bad. A young man of deplorable habits, as I say, he made immediate tracks for the nearest public house. Before he arrived there, however, some grain of common sense was vouchsafed him, and he realized that to walk into a public house on a Sunday evening with blood on one’s clothing and a murdered man lying in the woods close at hand is asking for trouble. So, mother-wit coming to his aid, he picked a quarrel with the young farmer named Galloway and got himself so badly knocked about that it would be impossible for anyone later on to detect his own bloodstains among those he had acquired from contact with the murdered man. You see, it is a little too much to expect that even a foolish old woman like me will believe that a young man who has won beautiful cups and belts for boxing is going to allow a great clumsy ox like Galloway to punch him on the nose and knock him about as he chooses. No, no! Cleaver Wright knew that Sethleigh had been murdered! He had seen his dead body in the Manor Woods that night!’

‘But how could he have seen Rupert Sethleigh’s dead body? Because when I came running back into the clearing I saw Rupert Sethleigh alive! He came crawling out of the bushes! I said so! I told you that!’ Margery’s harsh tones rose higher and higher in her excitement.

‘A great black slug,’ said Mrs Bradley appreciatively. ‘A great black slug! Most apt, dear child! Most apt!’

And she chuckled ghoulishly all the way to the doctor’s house.

CHAPTER XIX

The Skull

I

‘I DO wish,’ said Mrs Bryce Harringay petulantly, ‘I do wish, James, that you would get rid of that policeman! Heaven knows what he thinks he is looking for! And he worries my poor darlings almost to death!’

She fondled the obese Marie and smiled tenderly upon the corpulent Antoinette. Jim glowered. The expression had become habitual upon his beforetime ingenuous features.

‘He wanted to know the address of Rupert’s dentist,’ he growled.

‘It is in Rupert’s memorandum-book. Did you give it to him?’

‘Yes. Can’t think why Rupert went to that fellow in Bossbury High Street. Always have my teeth seen to in Town.’

‘The Bossbury man is cheaper. And he is a very good dentist. There is far too much nonsense talked about dentists,’ observed Mrs Bryce Harringay austerely. ‘If a man is qualified, he is qualified. If he is not qualified, no reasonable person would dream of attending him. There is not the slightest necessity for harping upon these somewhat depressing subjects.’

‘I am not harping on them,’ her nephew responded morosely. ‘It’s you.’

‘Really, James, you are most trying lately – most! Do please refrain from direct contradiction of my remarks! Direct contradiction,’ continued Mrs Bryce Harringay, warming to her subject, ‘is, of all breaches of manners, the most embarrassing with which to deal, and I consider it most unkind of you, James – most! – to nonplus me in this way. I cannot argue with you without sacrificing my personal dignity. This,’ she proclaimed vigorously (inadvertently upsetting the personal equilibrium of Antoinette, who had chosen an ill-advised perch on her mistress’s ample but

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