Pageant of Murder

“Shades of Anne Boleyn? How do you mean?”

“Well, it’s true that, in the script, Falstaff’s basket, with him in it, was stuck into Thames mud, but Falstaff, in Shakespeare’s play, wasn’t stabbed. As I remember it, he died in bed. As for Henry VIII, well, he cut other people’s heads off, not his own.”

“Rather difficult to cut your own head off, what?”

“I’m serious, Dog.”

“I know you are. Despite the flippancy, so am I. But it’s really no business of ours.”

“I was responsible for organising the beastly pageant. I feel it all began with that.”

“Stop having this feminine guilt-complex. You didn’t think up the pageant. It was wished on you, so it’s nothing to do with you if these burghers do one another in.”

“Oh, Dog! How can you?”

“What now?”

“You shouldn’t have called them burghers.”

“Why not? I suppose that’s what they are, now Brayne is a borough, isn’t it?”

“I can’t help thinking of the Burghers of Calais. You know—ropes round their necks, and all that! And that other man, Gordon, was Edward III, don’t forget.”

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

“No, Dog, it isn’t my imagination; it’s my deep-rooted instinct that, from the very beginning, there’s been a jinx or a gremlin or some extraordinary hoodoo brooding over this pageant. You can see now how things are going to tie up. Everybody who gets murdered is going to be dressed in the costume they wore at the pageant. It’s enough to give me a permanent nightmare.”

“Oh, rot! Look here, snap out of it. If Luton had got to be murdered there and then, he’d have to be killed while he was wearing the Falstaff costume. That’s if he was murdered. We don’t even know that for certain, although I’m bound to admit that this new development doesn’t leave much room for doubt.”

“That’s all right about Falstaff, but why, after the pageant is over, should Spey have been trotting around looking like Henry VIII?”

“I wonder exactly what he did when he left school on Friday afternoon—because, obviously, he didn’t go home.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Councillor Perse Takes a Hand

“…and the fourth horse, inscribed Broken Down, represents the position of Mr Roche.”

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Laura returned to Kensington on the following afternoon, there to await her employer, who was not expected in London until the next day. Henri and Celestine, the domestic staff, welcomed Laura. It had been a dull week, they said.

Dame Beatrice returned at the appointed time and she and Laura were kept busy at the London clinic until the second week in June, when most of the patients recovered sufficiently to take their summer holiday, a phenomenon which occurred yearly. Dame Beatrice and Laura, therefore, cruised in a large liner and visited the West Indies, returning to the Stone House in the Hampshire village of Wandles Parva towards the end of July.

Here they were blessed by the society of Laura’s son Hamish and two schoolfellows, named Gibbs and Honeybun, until all three went off on a school outing to Yugoslavia by sea.

“Schools are a big improvement on what they were,” said Laura, when she returned from having seen the children safely into the care of a young master of angelic aspect but commanding eye. “It’s too marvellous to get rid of Hamish so easily and for three glorious, carefree weeks. I’m glad they’re not going to fly, though. I don’t like aeroplanes.”

“It is as well, then, that Hamish shares your passion for the sea,” said Dame Beatrice. “By the way, a letter came for you. I think it must be from our dear Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg, from what I remember of her handwriting.”

The letter was indeed from Kitty, and it struck a protesting and mournful note. Laura read it twice and then passed it to Dame Beatrice.

“Wouldn’t you say that this is an epistle written by a woman wailing for her demon lover?” she enquired. Dame Beatrice handed back the letter as soon as she had read it.

“Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg certainly appears to be somewhat agitated,” she said.

“Yes. Just fancy her wretched nephew wanting to hold another pageant! Thinks it may help to bring something to light! Furthermore, thinks the last one didn’t really do justice to the history of the borough.”

“Well, child, from what I have gathered, it did not do justice to the history of the borough. I became interested and made a few notes. It seems that, apart from the Romans and Saxons in general, the Roman commander Aulus Plautius visited the place with elephants. Later on, it was known to Offa of Mercia and was ravaged by the Danes. A synod of the Church was held there, and there Saint Dunstan was given a bishopric. Two kings, Edmund Ironside and Canute, fought a battle at Brayne, the Norman knight Maurice de Berkeley was connected with the place and, in its later history, it housed a Chapter of the Garter. Shakespeare refers to one of its inns, a battle of the Civil War was fought in its streets and it was well-known, during the eighteenth-century elections, to John Horne Tooke and John Wilkes. Tooke, in fact, was the vicar of Brayne at the time.”