There was nobody about except a massive policeman who walked down from the gatehouse to the car.
‘Dame Beatrice, ma’am?’ he asked politely. ‘We got word that you might be expected.’
‘Yes, I telephoned Detective-Superintendent Mowbray from the hotel where Mrs Gavin and I had lunch.’
‘I have instructions to give you access to the ruins, ma’am. We are keeping them clear otherwise, except for Mr Tynant and Mr Saltergate. We don’t even want the other members of their party tramping about until the two gentlemen can assess the amount of the damage and decide what’s to be done.’
‘I am no expert in these matters,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘so a closer inspection probably will tell me no more than I can learn from where we are standing. However’ – she walked up through the gatehouse and surveyed the scene at closer quarters – ‘it looks as though earth has been shovelled into what was the great ditch which formed a segment of Mr Tynant’s outer circle.’
‘That’s right, ma’am. The sides of the main trench have been kind of stove in and the soil dumped in the ditch.’
‘So I can see. Do you know where I can find Mr Tynant?’
‘Detective-Superintent Mowbray asked me to tell you he would be in the lounge of the Barbican along with Mr Tynant and would wait there till you came, ma’am.’
‘Splendid. Thank you, officer.’
‘Sounds as though Mowbray is keeping tabs on Tynant,’ said Laura, when they were in the car and heading for the Barbican. ‘Surely he can’t suspect him of making away with the two workmen?’
‘Did you notice that Mr Saltergate’s towers, two of them, had also been vandalised?’
‘Yes, I saw that, but only in a general sort of way. I mean, I wasn’t bothering whose work had suffered what damage, but merely getting a general impression.’
‘That rather destroys the theory that Saltergate was responsible for the damage, doesn’t it? I think it was the work of three men. One would have used a pick, and he could have worked quickly enough, I think, to keep two others busy with their shovels. Now for the Barbican.’
Laura drove in under the archway entrance to the hotel car park and she and Dame Beatrice went into the reception hall. Mowbray rose from an armchair near the door and greeted them.
‘We have just come from the castle,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘The damage can hardly have been done by mice.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘I beg your pardon. The famous Bruce Bairnsfather cartoons of the 1914 war would have been long before your time. So you are looking for three men.’
‘Two, we thought, ma’am, those being Stickle and Stour.’
‘Three is more likely, but I do not insist upon that number. You told me, when I telephoned you at lunchtime, that you thought I might be of help. In what way? I intended to come merely because Bonamy Monkswood wrote to me.’
‘So I understand, ma’am, but there is a matter over which you can be a lot of help to us, if you will. The two youngest ladies, Miss Broadmayne and Miss Yateley, have been to me with a half-told story which I should like to check, but Miss Yateley turned very timid and, indeed, got herself into what I can only describe as ‘a state’. I think she was almost dragged along to me by the other young lady and the interview turned into a horse-to-water episode which frustrated me and got the young lady herself into such a tizzy that I gave up questioning her. In the end she was repeating over and over again that she knew nothing, it was all her imagination, she had never meant any harm, Fiona was a traitor and a bully and a telltale, and so on and so forth, all very high-pitched and hysterical, until I told the other young lady to take her back to the cottage where they are now staying and put her to bed with a couple of aspirins.’
‘Did Miss Broadmayne offer an explanation of Miss Yateley’s outburst?’
‘No. All she said was that Priscilla had something to tell me about Professor Veryan’s death.’
‘Oh, not about the wreckage of Mr Tynant’s trenches?’
‘No, ma’am, nor of the damage to the foundations of two of Mr Saltergate’s bits of walling, that’s to say two of what he calls his flanking-towers. Somebody has pickaxed their foundations.’
‘So I could see. What is the present relationship between the two gentlemen?’
‘Much improved, according to Mrs Saltergate and Dr Lochlure. Each has absolved the other of what Mr Hassocks – a lively young gentleman that, ma’am – referred to as “dirty work at the crossroads”.’
‘That must be very gratifying to Mrs Saltergate and Dr Lochlure. Well, where shall I find Miss Yateley? Where is this cottage which I understand the two girls share with the two young men?’
‘I’ll take you along, ma’am. If Mr Monkswood is hoping to see you, he’ll be there.’
‘Where did you meet the two girls and when?’
‘At the police headquarters in Holdy Bay this morning. I heard about the damage to the trenches and walls from them. Mr Tynant phoned through while they were still with me, but I had had the news already, although I did not tell him that.’
‘From what I know of Miss Broadmayne – not very much, I admit – I find it a little strange that she should have laid herself open to being called harsh names by Miss Yateley.’
‘I fancy Miss Broadmayne is anxious to be on the right side of the law as represented by me, ma’am. After we’d left that gamekeeper Goole, I gave the young lady a solemn warning that, if Goole had not blotted his copybook by what amounted to kidnapping her and locking her up, she could have found herself in court on a charge of poaching. She was cavorting about all among his pheasants, and at night, too.’
‘Had she blacked her face? I believe that aggravates the offence, does it not?’
Mowbray laughed.
‘What she blacked was Goole’s eye,’ he said. ‘I’m having another word with him later on.’
Laura and Fiona swam; Dame Beatrice and Priscilla sat in deckchairs on the beach at Holdy Bay.
‘Are you really Bonamy’s godmother?’ asked Priscilla.
‘Well, I was present at his baptism,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Later on, I was able to delegate my responsibilities to his schoolmasters. Those long-suffering men made certain that he could get through the Catechism and recite the Ten Commandments and, in due course, they brought him before the bishop for Confirmation.’
‘People accept an awful responsibility when they take it upon themselves to promise for the baby that he will renounce the devil and all his works. I suppose somebody promised it in my name when I was christened, but I don’t think it has worked out very well,’ said Priscilla.
‘You mean you have murdered, stolen, lied in court and committed adultery?’
Priscilla said, ‘You ought to have been a priest. They always make sin sound so silly. No, I haven’t done those things – I haven’t enough courage – but I haven’t escaped the sin of covetousness.’
‘The sin which is apt to lead to all the others. I wonder why it is relegated to tenth place? It almost comes as an afterthought, one feels.’
‘Did you get what you expected?’ asked Laura when, having given the two girls tea, she and Dame Beatrice had watched them drive away from Holdy Bay to return to the cottage.
‘Priscilla began with one confession and ended with another. Neither helps to advance the enquiry into Professor Veryan’s death, so far as I can see. She confesses that she did not spend that weekend in London, but with her farmhouse friends, as she had arranged to do. Mr Mowbray, I fancy, will have no difficulty in confirming this.’
‘It’s the story she told at the beginning and then she changed it to this trip to London and all the balderdash she invented to bolster up the story. I suppose she, like the rest of them, got scared when the inquest was adjourned. What was the confession at the end, and what came between the two?’
‘She repeated an account she had given previously to young Fiona—’