When this happened she had had the Italian maid for three years, and a routine was fully established. The following Easter Shane had the long week-end of Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and he and his wife planned to go to Sidmouth, for, now that Agnes was again in full-time employment, money was not as tight as it had been and they had decided upon a little celebration. They took the child with them and left the maid to her own devices, provided that she locked up the bungalow at night and bolted the back door when she went out.
This agreement had been reached at the beginning of Easter week, and, as soon as he could get away from the bank on the Thursday, Shane collected his wife and child in his little car and, having paid the maid her week’s wages, off they drove to Sidmouth where, by previous arrangement with the guest-house, they were to be given a late meal.
Left to herself, the maid, a swarthy but handsome woman of thirty, bolted the front and back doors, made certain that all the windows were closed and fastened, made herself a supper of spaghetti and cheese and drank half the bottle of a cheap red wine which was her ‘Easter egg’ from her employers. Then, having said her prayers, she went to bed. She was nervous at being left alone in the bungalow, which had no near neighbours, and felt safer in bed than anywhere else.
First thing on Good Friday morning she shut the front door behind her, leaving the windows closed and the back door bolted, and tramped on her sturdy peasant legs to Mass. This involved a walk of nearly three miles into the little town where was the nearest Catholic church. She would have borrowed the bicycle on which Mrs Clancy rode to school if she had known how to ride it, but she did not.
After Mass, the priest, a kindly man, arranged for her to go to breakfast with one of his parishioners and she was invited to stay for lunch, an offer she was glad to accept although, on Good Friday, the fare was Spartan. She got back to the bungalow in the late afternoon, taking care that it should be before dark, let herself in with the latchkey which she had been allowed, bolted the door and then nervously explored the small bungalow to make certain that there was nobody lurking. Again she went to bed early, after eating the fish she had cooked for herself. She looked longingly at the wine that was left in the bottle, but decided that it must be kept for Easter Sunday. She did not live to drink it.
On Saturday morning she decided to spring-clean the bungalow, for, when she was in the mood, she was a willing and energetic worker and she felt, too, that to spend the day in toil was a fair enough substitute for making the long journey back and forth to the town to attend another service.
She knocked off at twelve for her lunch – bread and a good handful of sultanas – and then set to again. The caller rang the front-door bell as she was putting the furniture back in position after she had finished polishing the boards which surrounded the carpet in the principal bedroom. It was barely five o’clock and the sun would not set for at least another hour, so she was not alarmed and had no suspicion at all that she was opening the door to her murderer.
Fortunately for Agnes, less so for himself, it was Shane who saw the body when they returned from their short holiday. He turned the key of the front door, leaving his wife to follow with the child, and, finding the bungalow unnaturally silent, he called the maid by name, and then found her dead on the sitting-room floor. She had been garrotted and then strangled. Attached to the body, this time by a large darning-needle, was the legend, in Roman capitals, The Scholar Gipsy 1155. A bizarre addition to the scene was a burnt and blackened rag doll lying on a piece of newspaper.
(5)
‘You know,’ said Laura disgustedly, ‘something ought to ring a bell, and it just simply doesn’t. This poor woman had no relatives in England except an elderly mother, and there’s nobody, so far as the police can find out, who had anything against her. The Scholar Gipsy, well, there’s only one connection there, and I can’t see how it fits in. What on earth connection can a poem by Matthew Arnold have with the death of a maid-of-all-work from Italy?’
‘The burnt doll might be a clue either to the mentality of the murderer or to the character of the deceased,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but, until we know which, or whether it is merely a macabre but meaningless addition to an already sufficiently horrid scene, it does not help us.’
‘It helps us to the extent that the murderer must be a madman, as Phillips has thought all along,’ said Laura, ‘and, as mad-men are unpredictable, well, that’s that.’
‘Whether or not the murderer is a madman in terms of the MacNaughton Rules, he certainly seems to have a bias against foreign women, and this particular murder, as you suggest, seems curiously motiveless unless, of course, the woman had an enemy in her own country who has followed her here.’
‘The Mafia? Could be, I suppose.’
The police discounted this theory. Searching enquiries had established that the maid, although she was of Italian parentage, had been born in London. She had belonged to no political party, had never been to her parents’ country, and did not appear to have an enemy in the world.
‘They’ve called in my chaps again,’ said Gavin over the telephone to his wife, ‘and the thing, of course, is priority stuff. We may be looking for one killer or we
