Tom Brown's Body

Table of Contents

About the Author

Author's Note

Preamble

Chapter 1. French Leave

Chapter 2. Witches' Brew

Chapter 3. 'Mr Perrin and Mr Traill'

Chapter 4. Noblesse Oblige

Chapter 5. 'O Weep for Adonais'

Chapter 6. Policemen's Feet on Ida

Chapter 7. Dead Men Speak Dutch

Chapter 8. Nancy's Fancies

Chapter 9. An Assembly of the Elders

Chapter 10. Hecate at School House

Chapter 11. The Ladies, God Bless Them

Chapter 12. The Case is Clearer

Chapter 13. The Prince of Darkness

Chapter 14. Enter Priapus Minor

Chapter 15. And Puppy-Dogs' Tails

Chapter 16. 'A Night at an Inn'

Chapter 17. 'A Peep Behind the Scenes'

Chapter 18. Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Just Plain Nastiness

Chapter 19. Nymph Errant

Chapter 20. A Scrum for a Line-Out

Chapter 21. The Hunt is Up

Chapter 22. Hare and Hounds

Chapter 23. Aroint Thee, Witch

TOM BROWN'S BODY

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or 'The Great Gladys' as Philip Larkin described her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

GLADYS MITCHELL

Tom Brown's Body

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Spey is not intended to represent any public school ever founded by king, bishop, guild, worshipful company or private citizen.

Preamble

*

What a dickens is the Woman always a whimpring about Murder for?

John Gay – THE BEGGAR'S OPERA (Act 1, Scene 4)

THE village of Spey is delightfully situated. It has woods and a river to the north, and to the south and west the undulations of its open fields meet the gorse and heather of the moors. It has a blacksmith, livery stables, a haunted Priory, and a witch.

The manor house of Spey was built in 1730, and in 1829 it became a public school. Nowadays the Headmaster, his wife, and, when they are at home, his two daughters, live in one wing of the manor, and the School House boys, some of the masters, the Headmaster's servants, and his butler's budgerigars, occupy the rest of the building.

Around the eighteenth-century mansion, like satellites around a noble planet, courtiers around a king, or his family of sheaves bowing down to Joseph the Dreamer, are other and lesser Houses which, with the mansion itself, make up the School.

There are twelve of these lesser Houses, and they are so discreetly situated – having been added one at a time as the School increased its numbers – that they do not impair the prospect of the original mansion. Unfortunately, together with Spey itself, they come to the number of thirteen, and, by superstitious boys and masters, that lesser breed, the parents, and that influential hierarchy, the Old Boys, to this mystic number has been attributed the dire misfortune which fell upon the School soon after the conclusion of the war.

The School, in short, has added to its other traditions the dubious one of a murdered junior master.

1. French Leave

*

We run great Risques – great Risques indeed.

IBID (Act 3, Scent 6)

ON Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a delightful and mild October, Merrys and Skene were about to make a plan to be A.W.O.L. It was their reaction to the unjust and unreliable behaviour of their seniors. In other words, Merrys had had a row with his form-master, and Skene had been put down to play in the House Third instead of the House Second, where he considered that he belonged.

'And if that ass Cartaris thinks he can sack me in favour of that ass Timms, he can jolly well get his head looked at with X-rays, because it just means we shall lose to those asses in Mayhews,' said Skene. 'Just because I happened to fumble the ball once – and only once, mind you! – and that ass Scallamore picked up and just happened, by the most fearful bit of luck – and I'm not sure he wasn't offside at that! – to drop a goal, Cartaris needn't think I funked. He practically said I did, and I practically called him a liar, and, anyhow, I'd been kicked over the heart – that ass Felles did that; I hacked his shins for him in the next scrum; and, anyway –'

'Yes,' said Merrys, who had been waiting with some impatience for this tirade to end, and now deemed it best to interrupt it, 'and if Conway thinks he can shove me in D for not being able to translate a lot of rot which nobody would have got up to if that ass Micklethwaite hadn't been put on first and rattled off all the bits everyone knew without even stopping to breathe –'