Spotted Hemlock

Ibid.

« ^ »

My secretary informs me that you are interested in pigs,’ said Dame Beatrice, seating herself opposite Basil at a small table in the lounge. It was a quarter to ten. Laura had breakfasted early and had gone for a walk. This was partly personal choice and partly to leave Dame Beatrice a clear field. ‘I am so glad to hear it. More people—many, many more—ought to take to pig-breeding. My nephew now—you may have heard of him—Carey Lestrange of Oxfordshire—has bred pigs almost from boyhood, and look what a fine man he is!’

Basil, who had lowered his newspaper as soon as she had begun to speak, crushed out his half-finished cigarette and looked ready to take flight, but Dame Beatrice, emulating the Ancient Mariner, held him grounded as though by some magic spell.

‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him,’ he said. ‘I only go in for pigs in a small way…’

‘But that’s just what I’m urging. People should go in for pigs in a small way. Just think.’ She gave him no opportunity to do this, but treated him to a lecture on small-scale pig-breeding until the unfortunate man was too much deflated to follow his first instinct and escape. It seemed easier, he decided, to humour the pestiferous old creature.

‘Yes,’ he said cautiously, ‘I agree with you almost entirely. But don’t you think that your scheme would bring down the price of pork until the game was hardly worth the candle?’

‘That may be so. I do not contest it. But think, Mr…’

‘Basil—er—Simnel.’

‘Mr Basil, of the effect on the human soul if everybody talked, bred and ate pig!’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Basil in a soothing tone. (She must be humoured, he supposed.)

‘Right,’ said Dame Beatrice, with sudden and startling briskness. ‘Now, Mr Basil, to the matter in hand. Exactly how did we persuade Mrs Coles to accompany us on our holiday? I refer particularly to the time spent at the camp at Bracklesea.’

‘Oh, that!’ He did not appear to be put out of countenance. ‘Well, yes, we did go there, of course.’

‘That is not what you caused my secretary to believe.’

‘Well, of course not. After all, how was I to know what she was up to? She might have… Oh, we’ll skip that!’

‘So there was something shady about the visit to Bracklesea?’

‘Shady? I don’t know what you mean by that. Your ideas and mine probably wouldn’t tally. However, for what it’s worth, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m an instructor at an agricultural college for women. I suggested to Miss Palliser —that is, Mrs Coles—that she might care to come with me to Bracklesea—strictly on the q.t., of course—for the fun of it. She agreed, and we went. At the end of a week we separated, she to go home, presumably, I to go to Scotland. It seemed providential, old Simnel breaking his leg. It gave me the chance I wanted of coming over here for a few weeks instead of going back to work. So there it is.’

Dame Beatrice shook her head and pursed her beaky little mouth.

‘I fear not,’ she said gently. ‘For one thing, Miss Palliser had been Mrs Coles for some months before you took her to the camp. For another, although she returned to college at the beginning of term, she left it under circumstances which remain unknown. She has completely disappeared. It is possible that she was abducted.’

‘I read—there was a report of an inquest — ’ said Basil. ‘I understood that the poor girl was dead. You can’t call that a disappearance, exactly.’

‘Neither do I call it a disappearance, exactly or otherwise. As you may find yourself in a very awkward situation shortly, perhaps I had better remind you—for I am certain you know —that the dead girl was identified as Mrs Coles by her mother. However, the body was not readily recognisable, and it seems certain now that it was not the body of Mrs Coles but that of an older, unmarried sister. The police have been unable to trace Mrs Coles, and one is forced to wonder whether she, also, may be dead.’

‘If she was abducted from college, I can’t possibly be suspected of having anything to do with it. I was over here long before the beginning of term.’

‘Yes. That would clear you, of course. You know, in your place, I would go to the police and tell them about that week you spent at the camp with Mrs Coles. If you have this complete alibi, it could do you no harm to contact them.’

‘No. But what good would it do if it had no bearing on what happened? And how do you come to be mixed up in it, anyway?’

‘To answer that first, I come to be mixed up in it because my nephew has taken over your work at the college, pro tem., and when Mrs Coles disappeared I was asked to look into the matter.’

‘I’m a bit dense, so may I ask why? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me that being a pigman’s aunt is necessarily a qualification for tracing missing girls.’

‘I have traced people before, most of them candidates for life imprisonment or, in less enlightened times, the noose.’

‘You’re not—yes, of course, you must be! Oh, Lord!’ Dame Beatrice studied him. A porcine individual in a ferment was not that individual seen at his best. Piggy was perspiring. Leaving him to his thoughts and his too- obvious fears, she went to her room, put on a fur coat and a witch-like hat of black, white and scarlet, and went downstairs to get the hall-porter to summon a hired car to take her for a drive until lunch-time. She lunched alone, as Laura had not returned.

Basil came to her table as she was about to leave it, and asked whether she could spare him a few moments in the hotel writing-room when she had had her coffee. It would be private in the writing-room, he added, and what he had to say was for her ears alone.