may have heard that I have a passion for finding out the truth, so, if she really believes that he murdered Miss Mundy, she will do everything she can to keep him out of my clutches. Well, now, Mr Stratford, I need to know the address of the hospital. I shall look in on Miss Brockworth tomorrow morning at eleven. Would it fit in with your plans to meet me at the hospital gates at twelve?’
‘But they won’t let you in at eleven,’ I said. ‘The visiting hours, you know.’
She grinned at me with a mirthless stretching of her mouth. Laura Gavin told me impatiently not to be silly.
‘There isn’t a hospital in the land which would keep Dame Beatrice out,’ she said. I apologised. Dame Beatrice cackled and our next meeting was arranged forthwith. I parked in the hospital grounds at a quarter to twelve to make certain that I did not keep Dame Beatrice waiting, got out of my car to stretch my legs after having driven to the hospital from McMaster’s Dorset hotel where I had spent the night, and saw Laura Gavin at the wheel of another car. I went up to it and she wound down the window.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’ve been wondering why Dame Beatrice asked me to meet her here.’
‘I think she wants to tell you what she and Miss Brockworth have had to say to one another. Are you free for the rest of the day?’
At this moment Dame Beatrice emerged from the main door of the hospital. She was accompanied by nurses who were attending her as though she were royalty. I walked towards them and Dame Beatrice took her leave. I escorted her to her car.
‘We are all to lunch at Beeches Lawn,’ she said. ‘Will you lead the way and then Laura can follow you.’
It was clear that Anthony and Celia welcomed us with relief as well as with enthusiasm. Celia, in fact, went so far as to say that poor Cranford Coberley would be all right now.
‘Not necessarily,’ Dame Beatrice said. ‘So much depends upon when the murder was committed. Unless that can be established — and upon present evidence it looks almost impossible to say when the killing took place — it is the vexed question of an alibi which faces us. This afternoon I shall hear all that Mr Coberley can tell me about his movements after the last time that Miss Mundy was seen at the old house.’
‘The worst of it is,’ said Anthony, ‘that people living their ordinary lives and carrying out their normal duties have no idea that they may need to provide themselves with an alibi for any particular time. I doubt very much whether I could remember what I was doing or where I was at any particular time between when Gloria rushed out of this house in a blazing temper because of naughty old Eg and the soup, and the time the body was discovered after the fire.’
Over lunch the three of us, Anthony, Celia and myself, filled in the blanks to the best of our ability. After lunch Dame Beatrice went over the various points and Laura Gavin took down our answers. It did not seem to me that these helped very much. She had a complete list of the people who had been at lunch on the day that Gloria had shown up, and I had already told her of the visit paid by McMaster and how he had had to stay the night because of the storm, and we mentioned the departure and return of Kay Shortwood and Roland Thornbury on the same day.
‘They saw Gloria at the window of the old house, so she was certainly alive then,’ said Celia, ‘and Aunt Eglantine saw her after that.’
‘So that narrows the time a bit,’ said Anthony. ‘Aunt Eg met her at the old house when she elected to climb that rotten staircase and brought it down with her.’
‘She told me about that,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It seems that she wanted to look at a valuable picture which was kept in the old house.’ She looked enquiringly at Anthony and added, ‘It seems a curious place to have kept it, if it really was valuable.’
‘Oh, my aunt got it into her head that it was a Rubens, but, of course, it was nothing of the sort. It was by an unknown artist and I shouldn’t think it was worth more than a few pounds.’
‘It was a striking bit of painting, though,’ I said. ‘I saw it when Coberley took me into the old house. It could have been a portrait of Gloria herself, as a matter of fact.’
‘So Anthony told me when he first came clean about his association with Gloria before we were married,’ said Celia.
‘So you refused to have it in this house, I suppose,’ said Laura Gavin.
‘No. It had always hung in the old house,’ said Anthony. ‘My father would not have it in here.’ He told the story of his great-grandfather and the original of the portrait. ‘I imagine the woman had a child by the old reprobate,’ he concluded, ‘and Gloria was her direct descendant. To that extent I suppose she can claim — as she did — to be a distant relative of mine.’
‘What form did the portrait take?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘Was it a portrait-bust, a full-length study, or what? Was it in the clothes of the period, and, if so, what would that period have been? Miss Brockworth could not describe the portrait to me, as she said she had never seen it.’
‘We took care she didn’t see it,’ said Celia. ‘It was a reclining nude and, although the girl was so thin, there was a sort of horrible suggestiveness about it which was — well, would have been to anybody of my aunt’s generation — quite revolting.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Anthony. Celia opened her mouth, but caught my eye and said nothing. Dame Beatrice asked what, to me, was a surprising question.
‘I know from William Underedge, who kindly attended the inquest for me, that you and Mr Stratford were called upon to identify the body,’ she said to Anthony, ‘and that it was the parti-coloured hair alone which aided you. Would you, Mr Wotton, have been equally sure of your identification if you had been shown the whole body of the deceased?’
Considering what, presumably, had been Anthony’s previous relationship with Gloria, I thought this was an outrageous question. Anthony did not look at Celia, but he answered Dame Beatrice steadily and seriously enough.
‘I don’t see what difference it would have made,’ he said, ‘because I suppose the body wouldn’t have been recognisable, either by me or by anybody else, if it had been burnt as badly as the face was burnt.’
Dame Beatrice turned to me.
