Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘That’s all right then, sir. You won’t be getting a shock.’

I did not ask him to explain what the nature of the shock would have been. I knew that Anthony and Celia were alive and that was all that concerned me at the moment. I hurried along to the house. Celia opened the front door.

‘The servants are having hysterics and Anthony isn’t much better,’ she said. ‘Come in and have a drink. We can all do with one.’

She took me into the enormous drawing room. Anthony was at the window staring out at the almost leafless trees. He turned round as we came in.

‘Hullo, Corin,’ he said. ‘Good of you to come. We’re in trouble again.’

Celia went out and returned from the dining-room next door with bottles and glasses.

‘I met your gardener,’ I said. ‘What’s happened now? Not Aunt Eglantine, I hope?’

‘Oh, no, it’s Gloria Mundy. She’s dead,’ said Celia. ‘The servants found her lying outside the back door. The police have been here again and so I suppose all hell will be let loose once more. Will that wretched girl never stop causing trouble? Help yourself, Corin, and don’t stint.’

I poured drinks for all of us. Anthony was almost too shaken up to hold his glass. I wondered whether he had gone on caring for Gloria after all, or even whether he had killed her.

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know. The servants came in just as we were finishing breakfast and blurted out the news, so Anthony went out there. She was quite dead. Of course the police had to be told and Detective-Inspector Rouse came again. He is becoming quite an old friend,’ said Celia bitterly. ‘He badgered us and the servants with questions and then had the body taken away. We could tell him nothing, of course, and we don’t know where we stand. It really is unutterably awful.’ Her calm demeanour suddenly crumpled. She burst into tears. This pulled Anthony together. He took the glass from her hand, laid it very precisely on the side table and collected her on to his lap. At the same moment the doorbell pealed.

‘I’ll go,’ I said; but the maid also had pulled herself together sufficiently to answer the door. She let in Rouse. I met him in the little vestibule and took him along to the drawing-room. I gave a loud knock on the door to suggest to the others that they had better unscramble themselves.

They were in separate chairs when we went in and, although Celia’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes were dry.

‘You are just in time for a drink, Detective-Inspector,’ she said.

‘No, thank you, madam. I shan’t keep you a moment. There will have to be an inquest, of course, but we found a letter on the body. It will be handed to the coroner in due course, but it is addressed to Mr Wotton, so I think he had better read it.’

Anthony took the envelope and unfolded the letter which was inside it. He perused it and then handed it to me. There was no doubt about its being a suicide note. In it Gloria said that she knew the game was up, that she had no intention of spending years in prison, that she regretted the death of the elderly cleaner, but not the murder of the American cousin — ‘she only came over here to sponge on me because she thought I was still Hardie McMaster’s mistress and he is a very rich man’ — and the letter went on to mention the photograph ‘with which I never intended any harm, but only something to hold, Tony, over your rather stupid head, but she went off with it and I did my best to buy it back so that she could do you no harm with it. Tony, my weak-kneed old darling, if your gardener must keep all that lethal stuff in his shed, he should keep it locked up. There is enough poison in there to lay out a regiment.’

She named some of the substances. All of them, I knew, contained hydrocyanic acid, more commonly known as prussic acid. There would have been pesticides such as rat poison, wasp-killer and a fumigatory for trees and fruit. Which she had used she did not say. The letter ended:

I have read somewhere that certain natives kill themselves on the doorstep of an enemy so that their ghost will haunt him. I bear you no malice, but I will haunt that bitch of a woman you married until she kills herself to get rid of me. She looked at me as though I was scum. Even that Coberley woman only laughed when the soup went over me. I can forgive her for that, but I won’t stand being treated like dirt by that wife of yours.

I handed back the letter. He gave it to Rouse without showing it to Celia.

‘I must ring up Hara-kiri,’ he said, when the inspector had gone. ‘I don’t want him to hear about this from the newspapers. I wonder, Corin, whether you would do it for me? You’ll do it better than I would, because you are in no way involved.’

‘I’ll ring him up from my flat, then,’ I said. ‘Now that you are out of trouble, I think the two of you are better on your own.’

The fact was that I was anxious to get away. There was nothing useful that I could do by staying and I was superstitious enough not to want the Wottons’ bad luck to attach itself to me.

Back in my flat, I had a dream I shall not forget. I am well aware that nothing is so boring as having to listen to an account of someone else’s dreams, but, because of Aunt Eglantine’s strange and bizarre request later, this dream of mine still seems of peculiar significance. It began when I dreamed I received a ‘Tag Map’ from Hara- kiri.

19

A Kind of Pilgrimage

« ^

In my dream I was not only mystified; I was alarmed. A ‘Tag Map’ went back to our college days. It was a code which meant ‘Time all good men aid party’ and one was in honour bound (by an initiation oath taken in the Junior Common Room) to honour it. I remembered the row at Pontyprydd after the rugger match there and wondered in what fresh trouble and harassment Hara-kiri intended to involve me.

At first the dream was unco-ordinated and chaotic. I found myself outside his house, but it had changed.