breeding Pharaoh hounds, she had found, in her own words, ‘my life’s work and a couple of good friends, if only they would have me’.
Her complete independence, however, she did not abandon, for she felt, wisely, no doubt, that some of Dr Rant’s imperiousness had been bred into Bryony and that to maintain a certain amount of
All this came out in Susan’s story and so did the explanation of her suspect activities on the morning of the Watersmeet death and her subsequent refusal to disclose to the police where she had been before she showed up at Crozier Lodge and found that Sekhmet was missing.
‘What made you go to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house?’ Dame Beatrice had asked. ‘Such was not your custom, was it?’
‘I have a keener sense of smell than either of the Rants,’ Susan had replied, ‘and I detected the smell of aniseed the moment I got inside the gates. I went straight to the stable yard, but the hounds were all right, although, of course, very restless and excited because they could smell the aniseed, too, so then I thought I had better check on Sekhmet. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to steal her, but Morpeth valued her and it was no secret that the Rants had money, so Morpeth might have offered quite a sizeable reward to get the dog back. That was the way I reasoned.’
‘That won’t quite do,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You have nothing to lose by being frank with me. Let us forget the aniseed and come to what you were doing before you reached Crozier Lodge.’
The rest of Susan’s story had followed. It was some weeks after she had joined Bryony and Morpeth that she encountered the poacher Adams, and it was not until Bryony mentioned his name and remarked how useful it was when he brought along rabbits for the hounds that she realised the poacher’s name was the same as that which she had been made to abandon when the vicar and his wife adopted her.
‘They wanted me to feel that I was their very own daughter,’ Susan said, ‘and that I would be proud to take their name. I don’t know about being proud,’ she added, addressing Laura rather than Dame Beatrice, ‘but it gave me a feeling of safety which was heaven after feeling so lost. They treated us quite well at the Home, but it was impersonal, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel as though you belonged anywhere and my brother and I were separated, I thought for ever, once I was adopted and went to live at the vicarage, and we never met after that until the day I first opened the back door to him at Abbots Crozier. He didn’t know who I was then, and he doesn’t now. I have never told him I am his sister. Snobbishness, I suppose, but not everybody wants to claim relationship with the village poacher. But every now and then, when my bit of interest comes in, I buy him a shirt or a jacket or trousers from a jumble sale. That’s where I was that morning, taking him a lovely wool shirt that I had picked up the previous week. He may be a poacher and perhaps a bit of a thief, but he’s a decent man and I like to think I’ve got somebody belonging to me, even if they themselves don’t know it.’
‘Well, I am deeply affected by this artless tale,’ said Dame Beatrice briskly and without irony, ‘but it does not explain, so far as I am concerned, a point of some importance. What did you do when you found that Adams was not at home when you called?’
‘I guessed he was out rabbiting. I had plenty of time before I needed to show up at Crozier Lodge and I wanted to give him my present personally, so I hung about on the moor until he came back. It wasn’t all that long to wait. I gave him the shirt but asked him to say nothing about it to anybody — ’
‘Did he never wonder why you offered him these kindnesses?’
‘He thought they were because I had been brought up in a vicarage and was accustomed to doing acts of charity. We never wrote to one another after we were separated, as I told you, so, although I suppose he had heard I was not the vicar’s own child, he had no idea that I was his sister because of the change of name.’
‘So, when you met him that morning, he told you that he had left the rabbits in the postbox and that somebody had walked off with Sekhmet,’ said Laura. ‘Simple, when you know the answer. So that’s why you went straight to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell the police what you had done and where you had been, instead of letting them suspect you and search your cottage?’
‘She has answered that,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She did not want a connection made between her and Adams.’
‘I should have told them if things had got worse for me,’ said Susan. ‘I was pretty badly scared when they did search the cottage and found that ridiculous hat. I knew then what I had suspected all along.’
‘That the man in the river had been murdered?’
‘Oh, I had had my suspicions before that. Nobody could have got that deep gash in his head from slipping and hitting his head on one of those rounded boulders. It wasn’t so much the police I was scared of. It was the murderer. Nobody else could have palmed off that silly hat on me. He must have spied on me at Watersmeet, I think, and that’s a horrible thought.’
‘How much of her story is true, do you suppose?’ asked Laura later. Dame Beatrice shook her head.
‘We can check a good deal of it with Adams without giving away his relationship to Susan, since she is sensitive about that.’
‘Don’t you think he has put two and two together by now?’
‘That is more than likely. Several points in her story are inconsistent. Susan is not very good at deceit. What I
‘You don’t mean she nicked it!’
‘She felt that the end justified the means, no doubt. I have heard that the Jesuits hold similar views, although they do not express them by stealing woollen shirts from haberdashers.’
‘Anyway, if the rest of the story is true, we know where she went that morning and why she went to Sekhmet’s kennel before going to the house, so those are two niggling little points cleared up, not that they matter, but I do hate unsolved mysteries and one can’t do with them in a case of murder, ’ said Laura. ‘Shall you go and see
