Death and the Maiden

‘Not to-day, thanks,’ said Mrs Grier, ‘and you leave my Billy alone! I wonder at you, pesterin’ poor children when their mum ain’t at ’ome to look after ’em! You ’op it, or I’ll call a policeman!’

‘I am a policeman,’ said Laura calmly. She held out the hat. ‘And I’m here on official business. What do you know about this?’

It was evident that Mrs Grier was too wary to be caught by so transparent a question. It was equally evident that, where the police were concerned, she had a guilty conscience.

‘What I says I says to a uniformed officer,’ she replied. ‘’Ow do I know who you are?’

‘Very well,’ said Laura. She took out a thin notebook which she used for recording small commissions or memoranda. ‘Obstructing the police in the execution of their duty,’ she said aloud as she scribbled in the book. ‘You’d better come along to the station, then. We thought you’d prefer this, that’s all. I didn’t come in uniform with good reason.’

‘Good reason is you ’aven’t got one!’ said Mrs Grier with great perspicacity before she slammed the door. She then opened the sitting-room window and shouted out of it, ‘Go and tell your — newspaper to —! I’m — sick of — reporters and swine like you!’

Laura departed amid jeers (and a stone or two) from children playing in the street, and walked thoughtfully back to the Domus.

‘The beginnings of proof against Mr Tidson,’ she said, when she met David Gavin and found that Mrs Bradley had arrived and was at Crete’s bedside, ‘although the little kid thought he was a woman. He is a bit effeminate, of course.’

Gavin shook his head, but took the hat.

‘Identification by a child of seven or eight isn’t good enough when it comes to hanging a man,’ he replied. ‘We shall need to do better than that. Still, it’s a pointer, and gives us something to start from, I’m bound to agree.’

‘There is one other point,’ said Mrs Bradley, when the matter had been put to her by Laura. ‘We do not know for certain that the hat belongs to Mr Tidson. Still, I think you have done very well,’ she added, observing that her secretary wore a somewhat crestfallen expression. ‘Particularly as I can get nothing out of Crete. Perhaps the hat will help, although I’m not sanguine.’

‘She was half-drowned, wasn’t she?’ said Laura.

‘There is no doubt of that, child. But she won’t say, at present, how she came to be half-drowned.’

‘Annoying of her. She could help us a lot, if she liked.’

‘She may have some old-fashioned ideas, child.’

‘Oh, heavy loyalty to husband, and that sort of tosh,’ said Laura scornfully.

‘Possibly. I was thinking of self-preservation,’ said Mrs Bradley flatly. ‘It is one of the primary instincts.’

‘In that case, you’d think she’d tell.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Well, well, time will show. It usually does, if you don’t interfere, but are content to sit still and let it pass.’

‘Yes, but with that Preece-Harvard boy coming back here to school—’

‘True. But events are shaping well, and if there is the slightest chance of getting the hat recognized as Mr Tidson’s I am sure your young man will manage it, although, when he does, it won’t help him. And now, child, to quiet our minds you and I will visit the Cathedral and gaze upon the remains of Saxon kings. It would be a fascinating and perhaps not impossible task to reassemble the bones correctly,’ she added. ‘I confess I should like to try.’

‘How do you mean, correctly?’ Laura enquired.

‘Well, the contents of the mortuary chests, which now, as you know, rest on top of the screens of pierced stonework erected by Bishop Fox, were desecrated by Cromwell’s soldiers, who, with Puritan frenzy and sadly misdirected zeal, flung the bones of Edred, Edmund, Canute, William Rufus, Emma, Ethelwulf and certain other persons including the Saxon bishops Wina, Alwyn and others, through the stained-glass windows of the Cathedral. The bones were collected and re-housed, but who knows whether correctly? I would give a good deal to be allowed to examine the contents of those chests. However, I don’t suppose it will make much difference, in the long run, whether the bones are correctly reassembled or not.’

‘I wonder what the odds would be in millions of chances to one that the bones are reassembled correctly?’ suggested Laura. Discussion of this eminently insoluble exercise in mathematics lasted them until they reached the west front of the Cathedral.

Once inside, Mrs Bradley confined her attention to the mortuary chests, the Early Decorated oak choir stalls and the carved vine of Bishop Langton’s chantry chapel. Laura wandered about by herself, chiefly in the north transept, and beside the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre with its wall-paintings depicting the Passion.

She encountered Mrs Bradley once in the retro-choir, where she found her employer gazing, apparently in abstraction, at the small entrance to the Sanctum Sanctorum and apparently oblivious of her presence. That this was not the case, however, Laura realized as Mrs Bradley addressed her.

‘Corpore sanctorum sunt hic in pace sepulto,

Ex meritis quorum fulgent miracula multa.’

quoted Mrs Bradley into her secretary’s ear.

‘You’ve been inside!’ said Laura. Mrs Bradley, impeccably reverent, did not cackle. She merely nodded confidentially, and fell to a further study of the entrance to the Holy Hole.

‘The vault, and not the Feretory, lies within,’ she said; and they neither spoke nor met again until they came across one another at Izaak Walton’s black marble slab. They left the Cathedral together.

‘Well, that has cleared our minds,’ said Mrs Bradley. Laura could not agree, but did not say so, and, without more words, they returned to the Domus and Crete.

Laura remained downstairs, but Mrs Bradley went up to the bedroom to which Crete had been taken, and, without invitation, drew a chair to the bedside and sat down.

Crete turned her head and looked at her persecutor distastefully. She had recovered as much colour as she usually had, and her greenish hair, now dry, was partly covered by a very charming boudoir cap which gave her the appearance of an exquisite early sixteenth-century portrait.

Her wide, strange eyes were without expression. Her red mouth neither betrayed nor illumined her thoughts. Mrs Bradley produced the panama hat more as one who produces rabbits from toppers than as one who confronts a suspect with Exhibit A, and proffered it for inspection.

‘I suppose you recognize this?’ she said. Crete smiled.

‘Poor Edris! I rated him soundly, the silly old man. He loses his hat when he is fishing, and then goes out very early on the morning that little boy is found dead and brings it back with him. Can you imagine anything so silly? I tell him to lose it again. He does, and the kind English bobbies have found it. Now, I suppose, they will accuse him of murdering the boy. It is incredible, the stupidity of the police!’

‘And, in the end, of murderers,’ retorted Mrs Bradley. ‘Why did you fish with the old boot down by the weir?’

‘To amuse the poor children,’ said Crete. ‘And I do not like to kill fish. I do not like to kill anything. It is just as much fun with a boot. But how do you know about the boot? It was just a game. Why were we spied on? It was a holiday foolishness, that is all.’

Mrs Bradley felt a growing appreciation of this redoubtable foe. She got up.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t you who entered Connie’s room and whom I caught on the side of the head with the nailbrush, was it?’

‘I entered Connie’s room?’ exclaimed Crete. ‘But why should I do that, please?’

‘To pour vitriol into her ear, I imagine. You’ve had a letter by hand from her since she went to Lewes, haven’t you?’

‘It is the first time I have heard she is in Lewes.’

‘Maybe, but she wrote to you from Lewes, all the same.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Crete. ‘I must not lie. I must not make a denial. But you do not judge jealousy too harshly, I think, do you?’

‘I never judge it at all,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘When does young Preece-Harvard return to school?’

‘Do I know him?’