When Dr Rant died, his partner moved out and took house at Abbots Bay, so Abbots Crozier then had no doctor.
At nine on the evening of Goodfellow’s visit, Bryony rang the Stone House and apologised for bringing him over without warning.
‘I hope we shall never see him again,’ she said to Dame Beatrice. ‘I am inclined to go to the Headlands hotel and find out how long he is staying there. We don’t want him badgering us again.’
‘I think it would be inadvisable to go to his hotel. Your motives would be misunderstood. You have done what you could for him. I would leave it at that, if I were you. You can always appeal to the police against a nuisance. There is just one thing I would like to know. Did he give any indication of knowing, before you brought him along, that you and your sister were acquainted with me?’
‘None at all. He said he needed a doctor to examine his knee and then he went off into incoherent talk and a lot of silly posturing. He alarmed us very much. We were desperate to know what to do with him.’
‘Did he make any mention of your Pharaoh hounds?’
‘Yes, that was when he said he was Ozymandias, king of kings. I suppose the word Pharaoh made some connection in his mind. It was then that we decided he was mad. Morpeth went so far as to bring Osiris into the house, although not into the room where I was talking with Mr Goodfellow. She wanted to assure herself and him, Goodfellow, that we had some protection at hand.’
‘I see. Well, I should dismiss him from your mind unless he pesters you. If he does, tell the police.’
‘What worries me is that he had only to ask at the hotel if he really thought he needed a doctor. They would have referred him to Dr Mortlake down at Abbots Bay. Everybody goes to him now that my father is no more. As for the knee — well, there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. The Headlands is nearly halfway down the cliff and it’s a very rough walk and all steeply uphill to get to us from there. Then, when he got here, he pirouetted about like a dancer. I’m sure he hadn’t injured his knee. Well, I rang up only to apologise to you and to thank you for seeing him.’
‘I don’t think either thanks or an apology is due from you. We were interested to meet him, although I do not think we shall see him again.’
‘Did he pay for the consultation?’
‘No, but the interview hardly amounted to a consultation. He gave us an interesting interlude in our trivial round and I am grateful for that.’
About three-quarters of an hour later the telephone rang again at the Stone House and Laura answered it.
‘That was Morpeth,’ she said, when she returned to the room in which she had left Dame Beatrice.
‘Don’t tell me that she or her sister has disregarded my advice and gone to the Headlands hotel to check up on the length of Mr Goodfellow’s stay there.’
‘Not gone to it, but Bryony has rung it up. There is not, and never has been, a Mr Robin or any other Goodfellow staying there.’
‘Interesting, but not surprising. He refused to name the hotel to us.’
The next bit of news also came from Crozier Lodge by telephone. Immediately after breakfast on the following day, Bryony rang up to say, ‘We have lost Sekhmet. We think she has been stolen by a man who had put aniseed on his clothing. Her kennel stinks of it. Susan went a while ago to look at Sekhmet and found her gone. We’ve been all over the grounds, but there’s no sign of her. The strange thing is that none of the hounds gave any warning that a thief was about. Of course, Sekhmet’s shed is a good way from the stables where the hounds were, so, if he was very quiet and Sekhmet herself didn’t make any fuss, they may not have bothered, but it seems strange. Their hearing is acute and, although they are amenable creatures, I don’t think they would tolerate an intruder about the place, particularly at night or before we were up and about.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Susan is out now, with a couple of the hounds, looking for her.’
‘Is Sekhmet a valuable dog?’
‘Well, not compared with the Pharaohs, so far as we are concerned. That is our real worry. We wonder whether this was a try-on to find out how easy it was to get into the grounds and walk off with a dog. Of course, Sekhmet herself is an amiable lunatic. She probably went off like a lamb and kept her nose glued to the man’s knee to drink in the lovely stink of the aniseed.’
‘Would it be as simple to steal a hound?’
‘Gracious, no. The stable yard is locked when the hounds are in at night and there is a high perimeter fence to enclose it which nobody could climb and, anyway, the hounds would gang up on him if anybody did get in.’
‘Could not the dog have roamed off on her own?’
‘We don’t see how. There is no padlock on the front gates, but Susan always shuts them after herself when she goes home at night. For once, she went to look at Sekhmet even before she came up to the house for breakfast, so we had early warning that the dog was gone.’
‘Is there a record of any other dogs having been stolen in your neighbourhood recently?’
‘Not so far as we know, but not much of the local news comes our way. In any case, I shouldn’t think the village dogs would be worth stealing. There is an Alsatian at the pub and the village poacher owns a lurcher, but I can’t imagine either of them being much of a temptation to anybody, still less that they would go off with a stranger. Sekhmet, of course, is such a trusting fool that she would go off with anybody who spoke kindly to her.’
‘So it was Susan, not one of yourselves, who discovered that Sekhmet had disappeared, was it?’
‘Yes. At this time of year she comes along not later than half-past six. She went to the shed, found it empty, looked all about and then reported to us and we all searched and called, but when Susan mentioned the smell of aniseed we thought we knew what had happened, although we couldn’t smell it in the shed.’
When the telephone call was over, Laura said to Dame Beatrice that it was strange that Susan had gone
