The Crozier Pharaohs

‘But you couldn’t have any connection with the murder in the valley,’ said Laura. ‘It took place in the late evening. You would have been back in your cottage, not roaming the moor seeking whom you might devour.’

‘That’s all you know,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t always go straight home from the Lodge. I’m not liked in the village but I do go quite often to the Crozier Arms. I’ve got my bit of money, and I like my pint and I don’t see why unfriendliness should do me out of it.’

‘I wonder you don’t patronise a pub down here in Abbots Bay,’ said Laura.

‘Chance would be a fine thing. The chairman of the licensing justices owns both the big hotels here, and he sees to it that there’s no pub, as such, in the place. Well, I’m not the type to feel at home in a hotel bar. I stink of dog, I suppose, and my clothes aren’t exactly haute couture. At the Crozier Arms, they’re not particular what you look or smell like, so long as you can pay your shot. I might be more popular there if I could stand my round, but, for one thing, I can’t afford it and, for another, one pint is my limit. Sorry! I’m talking too much.’

‘Far from that, ’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘In fact, I hope that you will be prepared to tell us a great deal more.’

‘Such as what?’ Susan’s mood, which had been expansive although slightly melancholy, changed. She became wary and suspicious.

Dame Beatrice sensed the change. She said gently, ‘You need help. You have admitted that, but I cannot and I will not work in the dark. Where were you on the evening of Goodfellow’s death?’

‘I told you. I was in the Crozier Arms.’

‘And after that?’

‘Oh, well, I visited a friend.’

‘The same friend as you visited on the morning of the Watersmeet death?’

Susan’s expression turned to one of mulish obstinacy.

‘How much do you know? — not that you’ll tell me,’ she said.

‘Certainly I will tell you. All that I know is that you did not go for a bathe that morning. The rest is surmise.’

‘Oh, yes? Well, that isn’t much help to you because you wouldn’t be right and I’m still not saying anything.’

‘Not even if I mention a poacher named Adams?’

‘The Rants pay for the rabbits and he’s never been convicted for poaching or stealing or anything else.’

‘And, so far, he has not been identified as your brother.’

‘How did you find that out?’ Susan blurted out the words in alarmed surprise.

‘I mentioned that it was surmise, but my guesses are always based upon deduction, which is another way of saying that I am trained and experienced in putting two and two together. You may trust me. I know you have killed nobody.’

‘Why?’

‘Call it instinct.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ said Susan, rousing herself as though she had been heartened, as indeed she had. ‘I know your reputation for catching criminals. You know who the Crozier murderer is, don’t you?’

‘Do you?’ asked Laura, when Susan, having told them a story which was an appendix to what they already knew, had got out of the car and gone home.

‘Do I what?’

‘Know who the murderer is.’

‘So would you if you thought over all that we have been told, but, as usual, it is a question of proof, as Nicholas Blake has put it. However, I hope to learn from a little experiment I am going to make with the assistance of those Watersmeet photographs which were not published in the newspapers. Meanwhile, think of what we have been told.’

‘Does Susan’s story, the one she has just told us, come into it?’

‘I think not, except that Dr Rant died and that some time after his death, when the Rant sisters decided to breed Pharaohs, Susan became kennel-maid to Sekhmet and the cherished hounds.’

‘You said she was not the murderer, but you mention Dr Rant. You don’t mean that Dr Rant was also murdered, do you?’

‘If he was not, my whole theory falls to the ground.’

Laura did not voice the astonishment she felt, but, as she drove homewards, she turned the conversation on to the story they had heard from Susan. They had known that she had been adopted by the vicar of Axehead and the twin villages of Abbots Crozier and Abbots Bay, and that her tiny income came from interest on the money he had left her in his will. They also knew that she remembered a brother. In the account she had just given them, she said that she had lost track of him after she became a member of the vicar’s household, for, as a child, she was not allowed to write to him and when she was old enough to decide such matters for herself, she found that the home where they had been fostered together had been vacated and she could find nobody who could tell her where the inmates had gone. She did not pursue her enquiries very far, for she reasoned that her brother would be old enough to be at work and could be anywhere in the British Isles or even in Canada or Australia or some other part of the globe. In any case, they had never, as children, been very close friends, so, having made some attempt to trace him and failed, she soon gave up the quest and, after the deaths of her adoptive parents, whose surname she had taken, she occupied herself by taking seasonal jobs in the hotels of Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier and in such occupations as baby-sitting to families in Axehead, where there was a repertory theatre and a dance hall, or as an auxiliary worker in the Axehead hospital. She had also worked in the kennels of the moorland hunt and, later, for a veterinary surgeon in Castercombe, so when she discovered that the Rant sisters were keeping and occasionally