Death and the Maiden

Mr Tidson spilt the rest of his matches, deliberately this time, and began to make patterns with them, moving them about on the cloth.

‘I don’t quite follow you,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me you actually saw her?’

‘You mean you don’t believe me,’ said Mrs Bradley serenely. ‘Perhaps you don’t think me the kind of person to whom a naiad would think it worth while to appear?’

‘I – I don’t think so at all,’ said Mr Tidson, frowning in concentration upon the matches. ‘I can’t understand, as I say, but, then, one doesn’t pretend to understand miracles. I – Where did you say you saw her?’

‘Come with me whenever you like, and I will show you the exact spot. You must often have passed it, I am sure.’

She rose from her table, and, followed by the enquiring gaze of those guests who had been fortunate enough to overhear the conversation, she went out of the dining-room followed by Mr Tidson. Crete had not come in to dinner. She had pleaded a headache. Miss Carmody, who owned to considerable anxiety on Connie’s behalf, had caught the mid-morning train to Waterloo and had not yet come back to the Domus, and Alice, who had now joined forces openly with Laura and Kitty, had, in their company, left the dining-room some ten minutes before Mrs Bradley’s conversation with Mr Tidson. The two of them were therefore alone.

‘Would you like coffee?’ Mr Tidson enquired. ‘Perhaps we’d better have it in the lounge.’

‘I should like coffee very much,’ Mrs Bradley replied, ‘and I should also like some brandy. I wonder what Thomas can do? We had better find out. What about this walk? Would to-night be the best time? Perhaps not. The naiad might be resting. What do you think?’

‘Not brandy for me,’ said Mr Tidson. ‘And I think, on the whole, that coffee so near my bedtime would not be the wisest thing. Some other time, perhaps. And the naiad—? Perhaps to-morrow – I don’t think to-night. No, I really do not think to-night!’

He rose, and almost fled from her presence. Mrs Bradley ordered coffee and brandy, and when Thomas brought the tray she looked up to see Miss Carmody come into the room.

‘You will be in time for dinner, I think, if you go straight in,’ said Mrs Bradley. Miss Carmody shook her head and dropped wearily into a chair. The weariness was exaggerated, Mrs Bradley thought, but, without doubt, Miss Carmody showed signs of pessimism.

‘I don’t want any dinner. Connie has gone for good!’ Miss Carmody said tragically. ‘I’ve looked in at my flat. I’ve looked everywhere! I’ve questioned or rung up her friends. She was always a thoughtless, selfish girl, but I really can’t understand her going off like this without a word. I am worried and displeased. I feel very tired after my long, fruitless day. I shall go to bed. I think she must have caught a touch of the sun. Nothing else would excuse her!’

‘Are you still determined not to consult the police?’

‘Oh, she can’t be in any danger, wherever she is. But I will still think that over. It is not a step that one takes lightly. There is something degrading in going to the police to find one’s relatives. I do not like the idea of it at all.’

Mrs Bradley agreed that it was not a very pleasant idea, and again suggested that Miss Carmody would be much better off if she dined. Miss Carmody allowed herself to be persuaded of this, and went off to the dining-room. Mrs Bradley was about to go to her bedroom when Thomas came into the lounge to say that she was wanted on the telephone.

The telephone was in a little kiosk in the hall. Mrs Bradley discovered herself to be in communication with Scotland Yard.

‘That naiad of yours,’ said the voice from the other end. ‘We don’t think we like her much, and the local police seem to think she comes from London. Whom would you suggest we sent down? You know our bright young men.’

‘It had better be someone who knows all about dry-fly fishing,’ said Mrs Bradley.

‘And nymph-fishing, surely?’ said the voice at the other end with a happy chuckle. ‘I’d like to come down myself. I’m due for some furlough. What do you say? Shall I come?’

‘Well, if you think you will be of any use,’ said Mrs Bradley. The voice replied with further laughter, and said that if Mrs Bradley felt like that, it would send young Gavin, and not risk its own reputation.

‘Seriously, though,’ it added, ‘two boys in a fortnight is overdoing it. We’ll send Gavin in time for the inquest. It’s all right. As I said, the local people have asked for us. The bishop or the precentor, or, maybe, the dean and chapter, have been a bit terse with them, it seems. Why couldn’t both the deaths have been accidents?’

‘How do you know they were not?’

‘The bumps on the heads had nothing to do with phrenology. Don’t be naughty! Oh, and please speak kindly to young Gavin. He’s apt to burst into tears if roughly handled. I had dinner with Ferdinand last night. What on earth induced you to give your only son such a name? A bit tempestuous, surely?’

‘He isn’t my only son,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘And his father named him, not I. He was his only son, but that’s not what you said. I remember Detective-Inspector Gavin, bless his heart, and shall be very glad, and very much relieved, to see him. Is he going to stay at the Domus?’

‘No. At a pub nearby. He hasn’t chosen it yet. No doubt he’ll go round and take samples. We hope you’ll be nice to the boy. And whatever he does, don’t shoot him. Remember, he’s doing his best.’

That night Mrs Bradley had another visit from the ghost. It had long since been discovered that she and Connie had changed rooms. The management had been discreetly reticent, but not secretive, when various guests had enquired the reason for the blocking-up of the entrances to the air-raid shelter, but the real reason did not come out. Argument, therefore, was brisk, for the Domus had several residents, elderly invalids for the most part, whose subjects of controversy and conversation were strictly limited by a narrow environment. These had held some exhaustive and lengthy discussions upon the subject of the air-raid shelter entrances, and several schools of thought had their adherents. Mrs Bradley told nobody the facts, but the change of rooms became known by the time that Connie went away.

For some days prior to her second visit from the ghost, Mrs Bradley had removed all obstacles to its ingress, and had waited patiently for its reappearance, for, although its easiest bolt-holes were now filled in, there remained the original priest-holes by which it could reach and leave the bedroom. She had deduced that the ghost she had hit with the hard edge of the nail-brush might possibly have been Crete Tidson, but it might equally well have been Miss Carmody. Both had shown bruises in the morning. Mrs Bradley dismissed Mr Tidson from her thoughts because she was almost certain that the intruder had been a woman (although she was also of the opinion that Connie’s own squeaking nun might have been a man), and because his black eye, she decided, was a far more serious injury than any the small, light nail-brush might have inflicted.

Of course, the nail-brush might have left no mark on the person who had been struck, but, in that case, the arm of coincidence which had blacked the eyes of Miss Carmody, Connie, Crete and Mr Tidson would seem to have been ungainly long. The notion that the ghost had been entirely spirit, and not flesh at all, Mrs Bradley dismissed. There had been something definitely tangible about the figure struck by the flying nail-brush, and she was not a believer in ghosts when these made noises. The spirit world, she felt, should be silent unless it could produce sounds in keeping with its own mysterious dimension. Gasps and squeaks were, to her mind, automatically excluded from the list of sounds which any genuine spirit ought to be able to make. She would not have found it at all easy to defend this theory, but she held to it very firmly. Poltergeists, of course, came outside her argument.

The ghost paid its third visit at, in Mrs Bradley’s view, an inopportune time, for its arrival must have corresponded with Mrs Bradley’s trip downstairs to answer the telephone call of which a sleepy, dressing-gowned, slightly reproachful chambermaid apprised her at just before midnight.

Mrs Bradley had not gone to bed. She was seated at the small table she had asked to have in the room, and was writing an article for the Psycho-Antiquarian Society on the probable neuroses of Saint Simon Stylites, an unprofitable and idiotic task which gave her considerable enjoyment, for contemplation of the extraordinary and complicated psychological make-up of the more anti-social of the saints had always been to her a most fascinating way of wasting time.

When the call came through, she answered it in good faith, although this faith was considerably shaken when a voice at the other end said:

‘I am speaking for Miss Constance Carmody. Will you hold on, please? I have to let her know you are on the line.’