Death and the Maiden (12 page)

By ten Miss Carmody and Connie were ready, and at lunchtime the party found themselves at a hotel on the front at Bournemouth and in full enjoyment of the yellow sand, the sparkling sea, the combes, the cliffs, the balmy air and all else that the queen of watering places has to offer.

When lunch was over, Connie took herself off to Christ-church Priory with the remark that she would be back in Bournemouth in time for a bathe before tea, and the two elderly ladies, left alone, sat in deck-chairs on the sand. They indulged in some lazy conversation and some even lazier knitting, and thoroughly enjoyed their time beside the sea. It was an ideal afternoon. The front was crowded, the air was warm, a band was playing, and there were plenty of people to look at; there was even time, if they cared for it, to sleep.

Mrs Bradley, who cared nothing for an afternoon nap, and minded the immoderate heat not a bit more than a lizard does, gazed out to sea and thought deeply and constructively on the subject of the ghost and the bruises. Miss Carmody, giving up both knitting and conversation, soon dozed off, and was no liability to anyone.

Connie came back at a quarter to four and woke Miss
Carmody up by searching for her bathing things in Miss Carmody's bag. When she had entered the water and could not be distinguished, except by the eye of love and faith, from the dozens of other swimmers, Mrs Bradley said to Miss Carmody:

‘Does Connie inherit anything under your will?'

‘Oh, yes, of course, dear girl!' said Miss Carmody, opening her eyes.

‘And what about Mr Tidson?'

‘Edris?'

‘Yes. I have reasons for asking.'

‘Oh, Edris gets nothing from me.'

‘Does he know that?'

‘Yes. I made it clear soon after they came. As a matter of fact, he asked me. You would scarcely believe that, would you?'

Mrs Bradley, who was beginning to think that she would believe anything, either good or bad, of Mr Tidson, did not answer this question. She said:

‘I'd like to get it quite clear. Do I understand that under no circumstances whatever does Mr Tidson come into your will?'

‘You mean if Connie – if anything happened to Connie?'

‘That's what I mean.'

‘If anything happens to Connie, either before or after my death, the money goes to charity. In any case, it isn't much, you know. But why—?'

‘Yes, I know these blunt enquiries must be puzzling,' said Mrs Bradley, ‘but, after all, you did bring me down to Winchester, didn't you? And upon a special mission.'

‘And how thankful I am that I did!' said Miss Carmody roundly. ‘You don't mean that Edris is dangerous to Connie, I hope?'

‘Well, no, I don't say I mean that. But I thought it as well to inform myself of what he might have to expect from you, that is all.'

‘I
wish
I could get rid of them both!' cried Miss Carmody. ‘It is really too much of a strain on my resources to keep them all this time! But I don't know how to make them
go! And for Connie's sake . . . Oh, dear! I would love to be rid of them!'

‘Perhaps we shall find a way,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘By “both of them” you refer, of course, to Mr and Mrs Tidson, and not to Mr Tidson and Connie.'

‘Oh, Connie will soon be quit of me, anyhow,' said Miss Carmody, with a hard and hurt little laugh. ‘Connie has made up her mind, as you surely must have heard her saying, to leave me as soon as she can. I really do
not
understand her.'

‘Well, children will be children,' said Mrs Bradley indulgently, ‘and part of being children is that they have to pretend to grow up. You are not going to let that worry you? What about when she gets married? You'd lose her, in any case, then.'

‘I don't know that she would find it so easy as all that to get married,' said Miss Carmody. ‘Do you call her attractive? I hardly think I should if I had not become her foster-parent, you know.'

‘I don't know whether she is attractive,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘She is very young. I am interested in all young things, and feel very sorry for most of them.'

‘There is good reason to be sorry for Connie, I suppose,' said Miss Carmody. ‘She has had some disappointments which have gone very deep, I am afraid. They have spoilt her nature. She is rather irritable and selfish. Still, I should not like to be without her, and I am hoping she will soon tire of this adventure of launching out on her own, and come back to live at my flat. Of course, Edris and Crete are the trouble. One cannot expect her to like them, and, as I say, I don't know how to get rid of them. Edris has really no scruples, and secrets are not secrets to him.'

Mrs Bradley volunteered no advice, except to say:

‘If I had to choose between them and Connie, I think I know what I would do, and, if you will forgive me for saying so, I think you should have made it clear before.'

‘Yes,' agreed Miss Carmody. ‘It sounds very simple, put like that, but, you know, Mrs Bradley, it is not at all easy to dislodge people, particularly when they are one's own
relations and have made up their minds to stay. And I'm rather afraid of Edris. He is a strange person – this business of the naiad, for example – and, of course, he drowned that little boy. I have no doubt whatever about that. But, then, he has lived abroad for so long that his ideas are not quite ours.'

‘His ideas of morality, you mean?' asked Mrs Bradley.

‘Yes, I do not understand him. And Crete, as you know, is half Greek – the wrong half.'

‘The wrong half?'

‘Her father was Greek. That counts for a good deal with me. One can smother up a foreign mother, I always think, but not a foreign father.'

Mrs Bradley professed interest in this view, and they discussed it at some length. In the animated talk on heredity which followed, Connie and the Tidsons were forgotten, and it was with surprise that Miss Carmody, upon noticing that Connie had come out of the water and was walking up the beach towards them, glanced at her watch and saw that they had been sitting there for more than an hour.

‘Ought you to have stayed in the water so long, dear?' she enquired, as Connie, in a two-piece bathing suit of which her aunt almost violently disapproved but in whose defence Connie had long ago been victorious, came up to them shell-pink from the sea.

‘Oh, I've been in and out several times,' said Connie. ‘I'll dress now. What about tea?'

‘As soon as you're ready, dear. Wipe yourself quite dry, for fear of rheumatism.'

‘She certainly does not look unattractive now,' remarked Mrs Bradley, as Connie, tall and well-made, walked back to her dressing cubicle and disappeared into its interior.

‘No, indeed,' Miss Carmody, agreed. ‘I see why Venus was, perhaps, well-advised to rise from the waves.'

Mrs Bradley disguised her reactions to this remark, but she could not help remembering Mr Tidson's extraordinary outburst against spinsters, monomaniacs and curates. The ivory tower might be delicately constructed and to a mild,
Edwardian pattern, but its secret inventory remained the same, it appeared.

George picked them up at just after six. They spent half an hour at Wimborne Minster, and the drive home through the New Forest was a delightful ending to the day. They came back through Ringwood to Fordingbridge, thence by way of Romsey to Winchester.

The Tidsons, it seemed, had finished dinner by the time the travellers returned, and were found – Mr Tidson behind an evening paper, Crete with her embroidery – enjoying their coffee in the lounge in that polite dissociation from one another which, as Mrs Bradley pointed out when Connie, indiscreetly, made a rather loud remark on it, is the hall-mark of a well-matched, middle-aged couple.

That her explanation, also loud, was not one whit more tactful than Connie's remark was shown very clearly by Crete, who, upon hearing herself referred to as middle-aged (an obvious libel) turned upon both of them a dark, bleak stare of intense loathing before proceeding with her embroidery. Between her temple and her left eyebrow was still an inch of black and yellow bruise, a mild edition of Mr Tidson's now very impressive black eye. Withdrawing from all four of the mysteriously ill-starred group, Mrs Bradley escaped to her room. She had locked it that morning and had unlocked it only to wash her hands before dinner. She now unlocked it again, and, once inside, she re-locked the door behind her.

She then made sure that the window was fastened before she began to go over the interior of the wardrobe cupboard.

She soon found a button to press; the wall at the back of the cupboard swung away, and a passage opened before her.

She scarcely needed to explore it. She could deduce where it led. Still, to assure herself of all the possibilities, she followed it. It led into the air-raid shelter, and it was a fair piece of deduction that both Connie and Miss Carmody could have known of it, but the Tidsons probably did not. There was one more passage to find. She tapped and pressed for twenty minutes or more. She guessed
that the passage opened somewhere between the dressing-table and that end of the fireplace wall which was nearest the window. This part of the room formed a wide recess the depth of the chimney-breast, and the wall area measured at least a hundred square feet, half of which could be discounted as being too high. Almost another quarter could also be disregarded because of the position of the dressing-table.

About thirty square feet of the lower half of the wall were therefore to be explored. Mrs Bradley tried every dodge which she knew of, or of which she had ever read, but for a long time all was in vain. Then, in the way things often are brought about, she leaned against the wall to take the crick out of her back, and immediately precipitated herself into the secret – or not so secret – passage.

It led into the air-raid shelter, and was parallel with the passage from the wardrobe cupboard. It was an old passage reconditioned. Mrs Bradley kept watch that night but was not disturbed. Next morning, after she had had an interview with the management, workmen sealed off both the passages which led from the air-raid shelter to her room.

‘Who comes now, comes down the chimney,' thought Mrs Bradley. The idea gave her great satisfaction. She thought it extremely unlikely that the Tidsons or Carmodys knew of the way in by the chimney.

‘Yes, we used to notify our guests of a passage through one of the principal bedrooms on every floor if they did not want to run across the lawn to reach the shelter,' the manageress had said. ‘Of course, we have had no raids to speak of in this neighbourhood, but we did get the warning sometimes, and in winter, I must say, the guests were very thankful that they did not need to come outside the house to reach the shelter. We are most anxious, however, that no one should be disturbed now the war is over. We really ought to have blocked up the passages before this.'

Mrs Bradley agreed that the comfort of the guests was the first and last consideration in any well-managed hotel, and slept remarkably soundly that night, for a complicated booby
trap was in the hearth to discourage ghostly invasions. Before she slept she mused again upon the Carmody and Tidson bruises. She had come to a very definite conclusion about them.

Chapter Eight

‘If any soft or perished Place appear on the Outside, try how deep it goes, for the greater Part may be hid within.'

Mrs S
ARAH
H
ARRISON
(
The Housekeeper's
Pocket Book, etc.
)

 

T
HE
second seaport of England and the greatest cotton market of Europe seemed at first to Laura Menzies dirty, congested, dull and inextricably confused. She had set out, however, in the spirit of adventure which characterized her outlook, and the hotel and Kitty, between them, reconciled her to the greyness of an atmosphere which seemed to be compounded in equal parts of drizzle and soot.

‘Well, Dog,' said Kitty with candour, ‘I don't know why on earth you brought me here.'

‘As I told you, young K., to improve your education and give you food for thought,' replied Laura, summing up the sandwiches with which she had provided herself before retiring to rest, and then selecting the largest. ‘Anyway, the grub's all right. What are you beefing about? Don't you
want
to help your Auntie Laura?'