‘Oh, sir, yes, sir. We knew you would not beat a little boy like Duckett, sir, so we thought he was the best one to send, being delicate and wearing glasses.’
‘Duckett did not butter the steps, then?’
‘No, sir, of course not, sir. Nobody did.’
‘Then how came the steps to be buttered?’
‘I don’t know, sir. We’re sure none of our men did it. That’s what I meant, sir. I mean, sir, we wouldn’t, would we?’
‘How can I be sure of that?’ It was clear, said Anthony, that the head boy was a privileged person, ‘as it is right and proper that a head boy should be,’ he added.
‘Well, nobody would want to hurt Mrs Coberley, would they, sir? Besides, if chaps have got money, they wouldn’t spend it on butter; they would spend it on things like doughnuts, wouldn’t they, sir?’
‘Very well. I shall suspend judgment sine die. Do you know what that means?’
‘Oh, yes, sir. My father is a QC.’
‘You might do worse than follow in his footsteps.’
‘I am going to be a psychologist, sir,’
‘That might suit your undoubted gifts equally well. All right. Be off with you.’
‘They size you up, don’t they?’ said Anthony, when the lad had gone. ‘He needn’t worry about “going to be a psychologist”. He is one already.’
‘They all are,’ said Coberley.
‘It wasn’t a boy’s voice which Marigold heard,’ said Celia, when Anthony reported the visit.
‘So she appears to have told Coberley. Anyway, he is taking no action for the present. He is beginning to think it might have been the work of town hooligans. He caught two of them a few months ago trying to steal the couple of geese the boys keep as pets.’
The affair might have remained at that, but for a report from Aunt Eglantine. Celia visited her in hospital and came back with the story. The elderly lady had had no intention of going into the town on the morning of her accident. She had popped downstairs to pick up the tray of coffee and toast and at about ten o’clock she had gone to the old house ‘to look at the picture you said was a Rubens,’ she told Celia. She had tried the front door, discovered, of course, that she could not get in, so had gone round to the back and found the broken window. She demolished the rest of it so that the aperture was wide enough to accept her bulk, ‘and then that creature came along and helped me in. She is stronger than she looks,’ she said.
‘Did you expect to see her?’ Celia asked.
‘Yes and no.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That silly couple who bogged their car down said she was there in the old house, but I thought she might have gone.’
‘She must have slept there. I wonder what she did for food and bedding?’ Celia had said. ‘There was nobody in the house when Anthony went over yesterday, though.’
‘I suppose she didn’t want anybody to know she was there. She asked me why I had come. I told her I wanted to see a picture,’ Aunt Eglantine had continued. ‘She said that she had taken it upstairs, as people could get into the house and she did not want it stolen. I did not believe her when she declared it was her property, and I looked in all the downstairs rooms to find it, but it wasn’t there. She said that if I wanted to see it I would have to mount the stairs.’
Apparently Aunt Eglantine had decided, very rashly, to do this, but rickety stairs which might have sustained Gloria’s meagre frame proved unequal to the old lady’s much greater weight and she had come crashing down.
‘And Gloria left her lying there,’ said Celia, telling us the story in a voice that trembled. ‘Left her lying there in the hall with a broken leg, and slammed the front door after herself with poor Aunt unable to get any help until Corin found her. I never heard of anything more callous.’
After I had found Aunt Eglantine lying amid the ruins of the staircase and had run back to the house, I had left the front door on the catch so that the ambulance men could get in. After they had removed the old lady to hospital I had gone back to have a look round. The nail on which the picture had hung was still there, and so was the patch on the wall where the picture had shielded the wallpaper from the sun, but the picture itself had disappeared. Whether Gloria really had braved the dangerous staircase and taken the picture upstairs, or whether she had made off with it, there was no way of telling at that juncture.
Anthony sent in his gardener to clear up the mess. ‘Make sure you leave room to get the front door open again,’ he said to the man. ‘Tomorrow I’ll have to hire a truck and get all the muck taken down to the council dump. We can’t deal with it here.’
‘Make a nice bonfire and help me burn a lot of garden rubbish which I got piling up, Mr Wotton, eh, sir?’
‘Oh, all right, then. Leave it until tomorrow and I’ll come and give you a hand.’
‘If I split up the big pieces of wood, sir, I reckon a couple of wheelbarrows would shift it.’
‘Means several journeys. Make it three wheelbarrows,’ I said, ‘if you know where to borrow an extra one.’
‘Thanks, Corin,’ said Anthony. ‘We’ve got two and Coberley will lend me another.’
However, it rained all the next day, so the heap of wood remained in situ, except that the gardener and his son, a lad of about fourteen who, I’m pretty sure, ought to have been in school, split up the woodwork of the staircase into manageable lengths and piled it up in the hall. When Anthony and I went over there in waterproofs and tweed hats, the result looked like an unlighted funeral pyre.
Now that Aunt Eglantine was in hospital, I was the only guest left in the house, so I suggested that it was about time I went, too. Anthony, echoed by Celia, vetoed this.
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I know you were only invited to stay for a week, but we need you here. Are you tired of our company already?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said, ‘but with all the upsets — well, you know.’
‘What upsets?’ he said. ‘Some ill-natured lout smears grease on stone steps and an unsuspecting woman comes a cropper, but it didn’t happen here and is no business of ours. A silly old lady who ought to have had more sense elects to climb an obviously unsafe staircase and breaks a limb. That didn’t happen here, either. Two young idiots choose an impassable lane in torrential rain, get bogged down, and one of them catches a nasty cold. That didn’t happen here. The one incident which did happen here — deplorable though it was from some aspects — turned out well. It rid us of Gloria Mundy.’
He spoke too soon. We were not rid of Gloria Mundy, not by a long chalk. I found afterwards that I remembered the evening well. The rain had eased off again at Thursday lunchtime, so I had spent the afternoon cruising around in my car. It was pleasant to get out into the countryside after having been confined to the house because of the return of the wet weather. I took the long hill up to Rodborough and then drove across the high, flat, seemingly boundless expanse of the common, had a look at the Long Stone and so on to Minchinhampton, with its seventeenth-century pillared market hall.
From here I went on to Nailsworth, crossed westwards over a prehistoric landscape with a tumulus and a long barrow on it and then swung north to Nympsfield. I had plenty of time in hand, so, instead of going straight back to Beeches Lawn, I turned south again to get a glimpse of Owlpen manor house and then went on to Uley.
I left the car at the roadside, called at a cottage for the key and the candle which were kept there — nobody was in, but the key, the candle and a box of matches were there for the borrowing — then I made my way on foot to the long barrow known locally as Hetty Pegler’s Tump.
This involved a walk on a rough but well-trodden path alongside a big field. The path was bordered by bushes on the right-hand side, but my objective was straight ahead of me and could not be missed. I went up to it, carrying my candle, matches and the key, and looked doubtfully at the very low wooden doorway with which the Ministry of Works had replaced the original neolithic stone portal, and decided not to make use of the key after all.