The Crozier Pharaohs

‘It’s not like you to be nervous,’ said Bryony, ‘but stay by all means, if you want to. I wonder how soon the police will know who the dead man was?’

‘Goodness knows. I suppose they’ll put out photographs, as they did of the man I found. This village will be getting itself a bad name if any more people die on holiday here.’

Nobody came forward to identify the dead man, so the police did as Susan had predicted. A day or two after Susan had returned to Crozier Lodge to make her report, Morpeth recognised a picture in the local paper. The sisters had gone into Axehead to take Nephthys to the vet for a check-up, as the hound had begun to scratch an ear and seemed slightly off her food. Morpeth had to pass a newsagent’s after she had left Bryony sitting in the car in the carpark, so she went into the shop to buy a couple of women’s magazines which the sisters favoured and which they passed on to Susan when they had finished with them.

A small pile of the papers was lying on the counter, so that Morpeth could not help seeing them. Feeling a sense of shock, since the caption above the picture on the front page was eye-catching and in large print, she picked up a paper, bought it and the magazines, and went on to the veterinary surgery with a sense of foreboding and deep unease, for she had no doubt whatever that the newspaper picture was that of Goodfellow. It was not the photograph of a dead man. It was that of an artist’s impression of what Goodfellow would have looked like before his throat was severed, but Morpeth had no difficulty in recognising the face.

In the vet’s waiting-room she realised this with a sick feeling of horror mixed with resentment at the tricks Fate seemed to be playing. The half-dozen other pet-owners, having looked up, but without curiosity, when she entered, returned to their magazines or to stroking their cats, and paid her no further attention. Her excitement made her impatient of delay. She felt that she could not return quickly enough to the carpark to show Bryony the newspaper.

Half an hour’s waiting-time before Nephthys could receive attention caused her to calm down and reflect upon what her next move should be. Obviously it was her duty to report to the police that she knew something important about the dead man and, for what it was worth, could give his name. In her naive, almost childish way, she thought the police would be sufficiently grateful for the information to give up pestering Susan and themselves about the body found in the river. Instead, therefore, of taking the hound straight back to the car park, she called at the Axehead police station. An enlarged copy of the newspaper picture was conspicuously displayed at the side of the front door. Morpeth looked at it, hitched the hound’s lead to the railings and said, ‘Good girl, stay!’

‘You’d better see the Chief, miss,’ said the desk sergeant resignedly, when she had stated the purpose of her visit. ‘Yours is the sixth story, up to date. They range from telling us the man was an oil baron to suggesting he was the victim of a secret society, so I hope your account will seem a bit more sensible. You say you knew the man?’

‘Well, I had met him. He called on us, thinking one of us was a doctor. He was quite insane, you know. I’m not a bit surprised he committed suicide.’

‘Come this way, miss.’ Morpeth and the detective-inspector had met at Crozier Lodge over the former enquiry. Harrow greeted her in avuncular fashion as soon as the sergeant showed her in.

‘Well, well, well!’ he said. ‘Sit down, won’t you, Miss Rant? So you’ve come along to help us.’

‘I don’t know how much help it will be,’ said Morpeth, ‘because I’m not at all sure that the name he gave us was his real name. He was quite mad, you see.’

‘So what name did he give you?’

‘He called himself Robin Goodfellow, but he also told us that he was Ozymandias, king of kings. When we heard that, Bryony thought he was a case for a psychiatrist and the only one we knew was Dame Beatrice, so Bryony took him to the Stone House.’

‘That would be Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, of course. I’ll have a word with her. Now, to another point, Miss Rant: the woman who acts as your kennel-maid found the body of that man in the river, didn’t she? We understand that on the morning of this Goodfellow’s death — if you are right and the dead man is the man you knew — she was out on the moor with a couple of your dogs. She met a shepherd over Cowlass Hill way, didn’t she?’

‘We always take the hounds on to the moor for a run. There’s nothing in that. Susan would naturally go there.’

‘Did she often go as far as the lower slopes of Cowlass Hill?’

‘I don’t know. We please ourselves how long we stay out and how far we go. It mostly depends on the weather.’

‘She did meet this shepherd out there, though, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she said so. She made no bones about telling us,’ said Morpeth, beginning to panic. ‘How do you know it was Susan? She wouldn’t have given the shepherd her name, meeting him casually like that.’

‘We have our methods.’ He was careful not to add that the police had not known for certain, until that moment, which woman the shepherd had spoken with. The shepherd had proved very inept at describing a female whom he had never previously met, but he had described the Pharaoh hounds this woman was exercising, so it was merely a case of finding out which of the three from Crozier Lodge had been out on the moor that morning. Harrow felt a sense of triumph now that he knew Susan had been the one. Almost too good to be true, he thought, but it was true. She had found the first body, incriminating evidence had been discovered at her cottage, and now it was clear that she had been in the vicinity of a second man on the morning of his death.

Harrow was still in the dark as to the reason for Susan’s having left her cottage so early on the morning of the Watersmeet death. He had made attempts to get her to change her story, but she adhered to her assertion that she had been for a swim, although he had made it very clear that he did not believe her.

‘Look,’ said Morpeth desperately, ‘if the man was found in Rocky Valley and Susan met the shepherd near the foot of Cowlass Hill, she wouldn’t have known anything about what had happened until the shepherd told her. There is more than one way of getting to that hill.’

‘The valley opens out on to those hill pastures, and most people go that way, Miss Rant.’

‘But you can take the cliff path to Castercombe and bypass the valley altogether.’

‘You did what?’ said Bryony, when Morpeth got back to the carpark and showed her sister the newspaper picture. ‘Well, you have put your foot in it! Poor old Susan!’