Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘whether you can confirm something the patient in there’ — I gestured towards Eglantine’s room — ‘has just told me.’

‘Oh, Granny Brockworth will say anything,’ said the young man. ‘Not that we dare call her Granny to her face. Sister tried it once to make her feel at home here, you know. She wanted to let the old lady feel that we would look after her, but she said that Sister had “impugned her honour and conferred on her a title of ignominy”. She had never married, she told us, and certainly had never had children, let alone grandchildren. If she has said anything in complaint of her treatment here, you can disregard it, because it simply isn’t true. She’s a holy terror to the nurses, but she lacks for nothing in the way of care and attention, I can assure you.’

‘It was nothing like that. She declares she has had a visit from an Italian priest and there are reasons why I would like to know whether that is true.’

‘Dashed if I know. Patients’ visitors are no concern of mine unless they upset the patient and I have to give orders that that particular visitor shall be discouraged from coming here. You had better see Sister if this priest was a nuisance.’

Sister was forthright.

‘Her visitors have been yourself and, twice a week, her niece. Nobody else has been. She seems rather friendless, and that’s not surprising,’ Sister said.

‘The priest couldn’t have slipped in without your knowledge?’ I asked.

Sister froze me with a glare which would have turned Medusa herself to stone. I apologised and made my way out, wondering what story old Eglantine had got hold of and how she had come to know about the suicide at all. I discounted her claim that it had been murder. The verdict must have been clearly given at the time and had gone unquestioned ever since, so far as I knew. I decided to go back to Beeches Lawn to find out how Aunt Eglantine had come by her knowledge of the suicide.

‘I go twice every week to the hospital,’ said Celia, ‘and it’s difficult to keep finding fresh subjects of conversation, so we mostly talk about Gloria. I must have told her about the artist and I suppose she pondered over the story and has added to it. I suppose she gets bored in that room alone, and makes up fairy tales to amuse herself.’

‘So Aunt Eglantine had the story from you and embroidered it.’

‘And I had it from Anthony and he had it from the newspapers.’

‘And there was no question of murder?’ I asked Anthony.

‘Good Lord, no! If there had been, I’m sure the boot would have been on the other foot and the artist chap would have murdered Gloria, not vice versa.’

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘suppose some new evidence has come to light? Such things are not unknown. Suppose it was murder and Gloria had reason to believe that she would be involved? Wouldn’t that be sufficient reason for her to have wanted it to be assumed that she was dead and that it was her body which was found among the ashes of the old house?’

‘Trust a writer to build up a story! The constructive brain is never at rest,’ said Anthony. ‘Still, the hue and cry has gone out for Gloria, so all we can do now is to wait upon events and hope that the police will soon drop the case against Coberley. If Gloria is alive, there cannot be a case for him to answer.’

‘Of course, the case against Gloria,’ I said, ‘rests solely on the substitution of that red and black wig for the victim’s own hair.’

‘What more do you want in the way of evidence, man? The sooner they find and convict Gloria, the better.’

From that moment I committed myself, rightly or wrongly, to Gloria Mundy’s cause. My reason for doing so I still cannot explain. It was instinctive, reactionary and, on the face of it, absurd. I suppose Anthony’s attitude irritated me.

I began to think of all the things there could be in Gloria’s favour. We had no proof that, after her tempestuous leaving of the table at lunch that day, she had remained on Anthony’s premises. It was true that Roland Thornbury claimed to have seen her at the window of the old house, but he could have been deceived. He had met her so briefly at Beeches Lawn that his identification of her rested largely, possibly solely, on her extraordinary bi-coloured hair, and, as we now knew, that could be counterfeited by a wig. It was also true that McMaster claimed to have seen her in the grounds and he, unlike Roland, knew her well and was not likely to have mistaken a stranger for her, particularly as the stranger, in other words the burnt-up corpse, had been so much taller than the real Gloria. All the same, he had seen little of her except the top of her head.

I put these thoughts aside and turned my attention to Aunt Eglantine. She had lied about the visit of an Italian priest; therefore it was more than possible that she had lied about having met Gloria in the old house.

Whether it would be of any use whatsoever to get in touch with her again and try to find out whether she would be prepared to change her story, I did not know. I thought I would ask the advice of Dame Beatrice about that. All I got over the telephone, though, was a cackle of laughter and her sardonic good wishes for the success of my efforts.

Reading this as advice not to trust either Aunt Eglantine’s moral sense or her memory, I went to see McMaster.

‘Good Lord! Of course I saw her,’ he said. ‘I saw her as certainly as I saw her in that dress shop.’

‘But you didn’t speak to her on either occasion, did you?’

‘What does that matter? You had not spoken to me when you recognised me at Kilpeck church that day, yet you had no doubt, even from a back view, who it was. I only saw Gloria over the top of some bushes in Wotton’s grounds, it’s true, but I could not have been mistaken, I assure you.’

‘But she didn’t attempt to hide from you, did she?’

‘My dear fellow, she was off like a surprised snake. One flicker and she was gone. That happened in Wotton’s grounds and again in Trends. Look here, what is all this?’

‘Only that I think somebody ought to play devil’s advocate. As things are, Gloria Mundy stands in all our minds as the murderess of that bewigged woman who was found burnt and dead in the remains of the old house in the