Spotted Hemlock

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘when Mrs Coles told you that she was married, did she happen to mention why she had decided to embrace the holy estate without waiting to finish her college course?’

‘Actually, yes. I couldn’t help sympathising, either. I mean, you can’t trust anybody nowadays, can you?’

‘I may be old-fashioned, but I confess that that seems to me a remarkably pessimistic point of view.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. People are always letting other people down, particularly the sexes. You’d be surprised how many people here have more or less broken hearts through being let down by some man or other. The Highpeppers are especially prone to it. Sometimes I think they aren’t serious types at all.’

‘Have you yourself…?’

‘Me? Oh, no. I’ve got a steady back home. He works for my father, so I’ve got the tabs on him all right. No, I was just speaking generally. If you’d tried to mend as many broken hearts as I have…’

‘Dear me! And Miss Palliser did not intend to have a broken heart, I take it.’

‘Miss Palliser? Oh, of course, you mean Mrs Coles. Too right. She was pretty hard-boiled, was poor old Norah, and she told me she had got Coles hooked while he was still impressionable. “He’s not going to be the one that got away,” she told me. Of course, she swore me to secrecy, but, well, you know how it is! I expect she swore a good many other people to secrecy as well. Do they—do they think he killed Palliser?’

‘Up to the present, there is no evidence to speak of. And now I must go and see Miss McKay.’

‘Are the police getting anywhere, do you think?’

‘I am not much in their confidence, but I think we may expect developments shortly.’

‘Of course, if he wasn’t laid up with a broken leg, I wouldn’t put much past Piggy Basil,’ said the student thoughtfully. ‘He was a proper wolf and, though harmless, may have got into a mess.’

Dame Beatrice did not comment. She waved a cheerful, valedictory claw, mounted the steps and was about to ring the front door bell when another thought came to her mind.

‘Miss Bellman!’ she called after the retreating student. Miss Bellman turned and came back. ‘You mentioned the Highpepper students, and it is clear to me, of course, that there would be a considerable field of mutual interest, let us say, between the two colleges. But how did Mrs Coles, nee Palliser, whose home is not far from Northampton, come to be acquainted with Mr Coles, who lives in lodgings in London?’

Miss Bellman shook her head sadly.

‘It was one of those pick-ups,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘She picked him up at a dog show—Crufts, I think it was— the spring before she came here in the September. He’d gone to draw dogs, and she’d gone to show a couple of Pekes. Then they met again lifting potatoes.’

Before she sought out Miss McKay, Dame Beatrice had a word with the college secretary.

‘Yes,’ said the secretary, in answer to a question, ‘a letter did come for Mr Basil. Only one. I re-addressed it to the hospital.’

chapter twelve

See Naples and Die

‘… our road led us suddenly into the most delightful country you can imagine.’

Ibid.

« ^ »

Vesuvius, with its pillar of cloud by day and its lurid glow by night, dominated the sky to the south of the city and gave a Satanic welcome to travellers, reminding them of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the state of their own souls.

In the end, it was Carey who had accompanied Dame Beatrice to Rome and southwards, for Miss McKay had decided (reluctantly, she admitted), that it would be unseemly and frivolous for her to leave Calladale in the middle of term in order to disport herself in Italy.

Before leaving the college, Dame Beatrice had had a long talk with her and had ascertained that the absent Mr Basil was in hospital in Scotland; that he had broken his leg by falling down in the Cairngorms; that Miss McKay thought it most unlikely that he would have attempted to take a girl student as his sole companion on holiday, but that she was prepared to believe anything of anybody in these days; that he would have been in no jeopardy of losing his post at the college as long as the student had gone with him voluntarily; that the college was a nursery for plants but not for silly girls, and that, if the students of agriculture and dairy farming did not know enough to come in out of the wet, she felt inclined to wash her hands of them and their affairs and write the college off as a failure.

‘But would your staff know that those are your views?’ Dame Beatrice had enquired. Miss McKay had shrugged the question aside, with an intimation that it was scarcely the sort of thing about which she could be expected to make a public announcement.

‘Of course, if parents or guardians complained, I should have to take a line,’ she had concluded, and had added, as an afterthought, that it was all a great nuisance.

‘I expect your absence from the college in the middle of the term is also a great nuisance,’ Dame Beatrice remarked to her nephew, as, in a taxi driven by an extremely fat Neapolitan, they took the road southwards on the morning after their arrival in Naples from Rome. They were driving to the hotel at which Biancini’s relative was known to have worked.

‘I say, though,’ Carey had volunteered, at one point, before they left England, ‘is our journey really necessary? This holiday the Biancinis took doesn’t cover the time of the murder.