‘Probably not.’
‘Emphatically not, because I should have sent him to the right-about as soon as I heard him talking all that rubbish to Polly at the front door.’
‘Dear me! How high-handed you have become!’
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ said Laura. ‘This business of a prowler at Crozier Lodge. Do you think he can be in league with that Susan woman who, apparently, works for the Rants for nothing? It was very odd, the way she suddenly walked herself into their lives.’
‘During their father’s lifetime she would have had no place at Crozier Lodge. There were no Pharaohs there then. Bryony told me that, when Dr Rant died, the sisters spent a long time deciding whether or not to stay on at the Lodge. The house and its grounds seemed too large for the two of them. The Pharaohs were a way of justifying their staying on. Whatever they say about her, Susan’s advent must have been a godsend. Your own acquaintance with the Rants began under far more unusual circumstances than did Susan’s, if you remember.’
‘I was a witness to the result of a car accident, that’s all. You know the story. A lorry had pushed the Rants’ car off the road and into a ditch. It happened sufficiently near here for me to give them a chance to telephone a garage from here and give them a cuppa. They were pretty badly shaken up, you know. Returning to this question of a prowler, I’ve told Morpeth that the thing to do is to tell the police.’
‘Or set the hounds on him. He would scarcely be prepared to race half a dozen of them. I wonder that two otherwise unprotected women have not thought of one or other of these alternatives for themselves.’
‘If the prowler is in league with that Susan woman, the hounds wouldn’t be much good. She has probably got them where she wants them by now. After all, she’s the kennel-maid.’
I see no reason why you should suspect her.’
‘I always suspect people who do something for nothing.’
‘But that does not apply to Susan. She is provided with food, with a task which, no doubt, she finds agreeable and, more than all, with the companionship of other women. She may feel a real need for that, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps. Anyway, I don’t trust her.’
‘But you have never even met her,’ said Dame Beatrice reasonably.
‘I know, but something about that set-up stinks.’
‘The foul odour may not emanate from Susan.’
‘I’d like a chance to size her up, but, as we are never asked to visit Crozier Lodge, I don’t suppose I shall get one.’
3
A Thief in the Dog- Watches
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Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier were sometimes referred to as twin villages, but it would be more nearly true to say that they were mother and daughter.
When seaside holidays became fashionable, people were not slow to discover the charms of Abbots Bay, but it was situated between two headlands. As it could not expand east or west, the village of Abbots Crozier came into being on the clifftop and a cliff railway was built for the convenience of visitors. Hotels sprang up, the cottagers and other householders took in holidaymakers and both villages flourished.
The coast was rock-bound and the sea treacherous, so at Abbots Bay a large sea-water pool was constructed so that bathing was safe at any state of the tide, the rise and fall of which kept the pool clean.
Abbots Crozier had its own attractions. Its hotel windows commanded wide views of the sea and the moors and there were pleasant walks to be had in the upland air and along the banks of the little river which, when it reached the top of the cliffs, foamed, churned and rushed downhill to meet the sea. It bypassed most of the residential part of Abbots Crozier, but cut its way through the middle of the village of Abbots Bay, which it had been known on one occasion to devastate with severe floods.
Susan’s cottage was almost at sea level. The house occupied by Bryony and Morpeth Rant was on the hilltop hard by the rest of the village on the cliffs. Justifiably had Goodfellow complained of the thoughtlessness of parents who saddled their off-spring with baptismal names likely to embarrass them when they grew older. Morpeth’s name was a case in point. Between the births of the two girls their mother had become an addict of folk songs (of the Cecil Sharp kind) and the old country dance tunes. The Morpeth Rant had been one of her favourites and the unfortunate Morpeth suffered in consequence.
Whenever possible she would sign herself as M. Rant, and she envied her sister the name Bryony, although Bryony herself had no liking for it. It had been her father’s choice. She had been born with black hair and he had exclaimed, ‘Black bryony! I saw some in the woods alongside the river yesterday.’
‘The berries are red,’ said her mother.
‘No matter. The plant is called black bryony. I like the name, so Bryony let the child be called.’
When their mother died, the girls were nineteen and twenty-two respectively. Morpeth became her father’s receptionist. Bryony, with the aid of a charwoman, ran the house and drove the car when Dr Rant made his round of afternoon visits to patients who were too infirm or too self-important to attend his surgery. Both girls disliked their father and, to compensate for this, had never taken down his brass plate or disposed of his effects except for his clothes.
They kept the brass plate brightly polished and although they banished to the garage lumber room his case of surgical instruments, together with the black bag and its contents which he had carried with him on his rounds, they had not parted with them.
From the time when Laura had rescued them after their car accident, they had been occasional but welcome
