‘Come down and open the door.’
‘You!’ cried Mrs Schumann. ‘Go away! I wish nobody!’
‘Did Mrs Castle come here to buy a wolfhound?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.
‘Go away! I set the dogs on you!’
‘You set one dog on us, and it is dead.’
‘You threaten me?’
‘Or did Mrs Castle prefer a clumber spaniel?’
‘You know it all, then?’ said Mrs Schumann in an altered voice. ‘Are you alone?’
‘I am not accompanied by the police.’
‘Ach, your police! Fools, all of them! Five of these silly girls I kill, and your police do nothing! I spit at your police!’
‘I know you killed five women. What made you kill your husband?’
A stream of curses, in German, was the only answer to this question. Dame Beatrice waited for the screaming profanity to come to an end. Then she said,
‘I have come to take you back home with me. In the morning you will be arrested and charged.’
Mrs Schumann laughed, an unpleasant sound.
‘Nein, nein!’ she shouted. ‘That for you and your police! You think I shall come down? You think I shall walk into prison? Yes, then! I come down! I loose my dogs at you! They see you, they smell you, they kill you! You cannot see them to shoot them! Even if you shoot one, the others tear you in pieces before you shoot them all!’
‘Come down, and let us see,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘She means it, madam,’ murmured George. ‘We wouldn’t stand much chance if she sicked all five of them on to us.’
The window was shut and a light went up in the room. George clutched the spanner he had brought from the car, and waited grimly beside his employer. The barking of the dogs had ceased at the sound of their owner’s voice. Dame Beatrice walked over to the door of the shed which housed the two wolfhounds and spoke to them gently and softly in her beautiful voice. Then, before George realised what she was doing, she unlatched the shed.
‘Meat!’ she said. ‘Come along.’ It was the keyword which she and Laura had always used when they fed the dogs during the weeks that Mrs Schumann had been away from home. They followed her to the car, George and his spanner following close behind. He opened the door of the car and Dame Beatrice took a torch from her pocket and shone it on the meat she had taken from the back seat. She tossed it, wrapped in newspaper, on the ground. ‘That will keep them happy for a bit,’ she said. ‘Come, George.’
They retraced their steps, carefully shutting the wicket gate behind them, and returned to the cottage. As they reached it, the back door was opened and Mrs Schumann stood there, framed against the light. In her hand she held a dog-whip. Dame Beatrice touched George’s arm and they slipped behind a rhododendron bush. Apparently Mrs Schumann heard the slight sound.
‘So – run!’ she shouted. ‘My dogs will soon catch you!’
(7)
‘So she came along without trouble?’ said Maisry. ‘I can hardly believe it. She’s been like a mad thing since you brought her here.’
‘I think that, by this time, she probably is a mad thing,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘Be a Broadmoor H.M.P. case, I suppose?’
‘She was sane enough when she killed her husband and, in the legal sense, she is sane enough now to stand trial for murder.’
‘How did you manage to get her here?’
‘I think she was completely staggered when she opened the wolfhounds’ pen and found that the dogs were gone. We took the opportunity of seizing her while her astonishment left her transfixed. She had no chance to resist. I held her left wrist and George her right and I think he twisted it to make her drop the dog-whip. I expect I could have managed her by myself, but it made matters easier and our progress back to the car decidedly more decorous, with him to help me.’
‘What about the wolfhounds?’
‘I called to them and they came, having finished the meat, so George kicked the wicket gate to behind them, and, although Mrs Schumann addressed them, they did not jump it. I must go over and see to them and the spaniels when you have done with me here. By the way, she made, in a boastful spirit, a full confession of her crimes while we were bringing her here in the car, but I doubt whether she will be equally obliging now that she is in the hands of the police. By her crimes, I mean the murders of the five women. Of her husband’s death she said nothing.’
‘Well, that’s what she’ll be charged with, because that’s the one where our evidence is strongest. We shall put the doctor in the box and he will admit that the death was unexpected. Then, of course, we can trace the poison to her and James will testify to her proposals to him. She’ll be asked, too, to explain her flight from her cottage and why she spent those weeks in a gipsy camp. What made you so sure she’d gone back to her home, by the way?’
‘I thought she would need a roof over her head when the gipsies moved on and refused to take her with them.’
‘You think they turned her out? She certainly wasn’t in their camp when we went there. I think they must have had their suspicions of her, you know, when she bought that lurcher, and didn’t want to get themselves tangled up with us. I still can’t see why she took the risk of going back to her cottage, though. I should have thought she’d have attempted to get over to her relatives in Germany.’
‘She may have decided that, after her attempt to set that dog on Laura, we should be too wary to go to the cottage again to feed the dogs.’
‘She abandoned them quite callously when she went to live with the gipsies.’
‘Ah, but she may have believed that, when it was
