‘Goodness me, you are flying high! Do you really write informative letters to Dame Beatrice? I met her once when she lectured to the lit. soc. on
‘I missed that. Yes, we are fellow sleuths. Get on with your soup or it will be cold. Everything shall be revealed when we are up on the Downs this afternoon.’
But I decided that it would be sacrilege to talk about burnt corpses while we were walking on the Downs so, as soon as I had sent off my telegram to the Stone House, I told Imogen all that I knew about Gloria Mundy as we explored the town.
We walked up the slope to the castle gatehouse and, as we were looking at what had been the outer bailey I said, ‘I knew old Hara-kiri was mistaken.’
‘About what?’
‘He thought you were the ghost of Gloria Mundy.’
‘Who is Hara-kiri?’
‘Do you remember a vast man with a lot of yellow hair? I brought him to one of the lit. soc. dinners when my first book was published.’
‘The man I called the Viking?’
‘That’s the chap.’
‘But how could he have thought I was Gloria Mundy’s ghost? That’s the one and only time I ever saw him.’
‘No. You saw him a few days ago in the Trends shop. He came with his wife to look at evening dresses.’
‘But, Corin, I wasn’t at Trends a few days ago. I left there weeks ago. That’s why you didn’t find me at that rather awful little guest-house. I was at Trends on a month’s approbation and I left at the end of that month. I had got what I wanted and they had had enough of me. Don’t look so moonstruck. Does it matter?’
‘No. I suppose not. Strange, though, that the light-haired girl I spoke to thought I meant you and not Gloria Mundy.’
‘I expect you asked for Gloria. We all had special names in that department. The light-haired girl you mentioned, and anybody who succeeded her in the job, was called Dorella. My number was five and all the fives would be known as Gloria and all the fours as Dorella and the third is always called Violetta and so on and so forth. Just an old Spanish custom at that particular shop.’
‘But what an odd coincidence that you, of all people, should have been called Gloria.’
‘Life drips with coincidences.’
‘God bless them,’ I said. ‘Do you know something? An elderly disciple of Sprenger and Kramer told me I should meet you again.’
‘You could have done that at the lit. soc.’ There was a silence after this. I broke it.
‘I ought to have tumbled to it, I suppose,’ I said thoughtfully.
‘Tumbled to what?’
I glanced at the fine dark-brown hair which a breeze was ruffling and replied, ‘Brown hair, not really black. And you left Culvert Green almost a fortnight before the real Gloria would have done. That has rather upset my theories.’
‘Oh, it was a bit of a dump, you know, and if you wanted a drink you had to go to the local. There wasn’t even a table licence at the hotel. I used to get bottles from the off-licence and drink secretly in my bedroom. How on earth did you come to get mixed up in this murder business? How did it start?’
So I began at the beginning which, in a sense, was my meeting with McMaster outside Kilpeck church, for it was there I received my first report of Gloria Mundy, and told her the story.
‘So there was really no connection between that and your meeting the actual girl at Beeches Lawn,’ said Imogen. ‘How strangely things work together!’
‘Things don’t always work together for good,’ I said. ‘In this case, they worked together for ill. I wish to heaven I had never gone to Beeches Lawn, especially now that I’ve mucked up my end of the enquiry.’
‘But nobody asked you to make the enquiry, did they? Anyway, if you hadn’t gone to Culvert Green we shouldn’t now be heading for the ruins of a Cluniac priory.’
‘I thought it was a Cistercian abbey.’
‘Have it your way. Have you now told me all?’
‘I think so. What do you make of it?’
‘I’ll answer that next time we meet, although goodness knows when that will be. Let’s skip the ruins and go up on to the Downs. There are the remains of a hill fort and a couple of disc barrows up there. We can look at them and brood on the irrevocable past,’
‘Is it so irrevocable?’ I asked. She did not answer, so I went on, ‘You can tell me nothing I don’t know already about what is up on those hills. I’ve sub-edited a holiday booklet on this neighbourhood, don’t forget.’
The Downs, as ever, were exhilarating, if that word can be used to describe anything so sublimely peaceful as ‘here, where the blue air fills the great cup of the hills’, and as we climbed towards the top of Firle Beacon there was one prospect which made me stop in my tracks. Away to the left the softly swelling contours took the shape of a woman’s breasts. I said, looking at the hills and not at the girl beside me, something I had been longing to say to her years ago, but had been too poor, at that time, to offer her marriage.
‘Will you have me, Imogen?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll have you, but I’m going to write my book first. You ought to have asked me ages ago. I always hoped you would. Am I the reason you stopped coming to the lit. soc. meetings?’
