I gave her the reasons, so far as I knew them and she nodded as I put to her the various points. When I had finished she sent me out to walk in the forest while she mulled them over. In the hall I encountered a tall, well-proportioned woman who asked why I was leaving so soon. I explained that I had been sent off while Dame Beatrice meditated and asked whether I might borrow one of the walking-sticks which I saw in the umbrella stand, as it helped my thinking to whack at heaps of fallen leaves and stinging-nettles and suchlike extravagances of nature when I was out in the country and in a quandary.
‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘You might take the dogs out as well. George wants to clean the car and I’ve got a raft of correspondence to go through, so it would save us both a job if you would do it.’
‘So you are the voice on the telephone,’ I said.
‘And you are the scribe, but not, I hope, the Pharisee, as my esteemed boss would say. You’re staying for lunch, then, as we had hoped. There will be another guest, and Dame B. says you are already acquainted with him.’
‘Not McMaster?’
‘No. This is a man — youngish, I gather — named William Underedge. He represented her at the inquest.’
‘So that was it! I wondered why he was there. I thought it must have been because his fiancée, Mrs Wotton’s niece, sent him along.,’
‘No. When Dame B. read about your Beeches Lawn murder and the fire and all the rest of it, she thought it was very interesting. She said she had met a very capable and reliable young man at Mr Wotton’s house and bade me page him. I tracked him down, beginning with the London telephone directory and, needing to go no further, got in touch and issued him his marching orders. Apparently, like all people of taste and discernment, he had taken a great fancy to Dame B., short though their acquaintance had been, and he agreed to drop everything and go straight down to Hilcombury, which he knows well because his father used to own a woollen mill down there, and attend the inquest.’
‘I shall look forward to meeting him again,’ I said politely.
‘That will be Underedge now. What a bit of luck! You can take him out with you and give him the story. Dame B. won’t want to be bothered with him if she’s mulling over whatever news you’ve brought with you.’
She was not the type to ask what this news was, but, when William Underedge had been admitted, I told both of them that Coberley had been arrested. William Underedge said, ‘What absolute nonsense!’
Laura Gavin said that she supposed the police had something to go on, so I told her about the long dagger which had been found among the ashes of the fire.
‘But headmasters of prep schools don’t go about sticking daggers into people,’ she said. ‘It’s out of character.’
‘He wasn’t always a headmaster,’ said William. ‘He was a wealthy businessman before his marriage. My father had some dealings with him when we owned the mill. He was shrewd and perhaps a bit hard, but as straight as they come.’
‘Did you ever come up against his bad temper?’ I asked.
‘Certainly not. I’ll tell you another thing.’
‘Tell it to Mr Stratford while you’re out for your walk,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve got a lot to do before lunch. See you later.’
So William and I collected the dogs and took the forest walk to a little bridge over the stream and, as we leant on the rail and looked down at the clear brown water, he said, ‘I don’t see how they can hold Coberley on the evidence they’ve got. It isn’t really evidence at all.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. His previous record? The injury to his beautiful wife? His admission that the dagger belonged to him — well, to one of his boys from whom he had impounded it? The fact that he had a key to the old house?’
‘Yes, granted, but there is the man himself. Cranford Coberley, so-called, although not the name my father and I knew him by, might conceivably kill a man in a fit of passion — it was easy to see that he idolised his wife — but I cannot believe that he would kill a woman, certainly not by stabbing her in the back. I thought the medical evidence given at the inquest was very interesting. That stab in the back was probably a woman’s crime.’
‘Well, it couldn’t have been done by Marigold Coberley. She was in the nursing home,’ I said. William straightened up and we finished crossing the bridge and whistled up the dogs who had gone chasing off after rabbits. ‘She would have been suffering from concussion and severe bruising.’
‘I don’t know so much,’ he argued. ‘I gathered that the time of death was very uncertain owing to the extensive burning of the body. The girl could have been killed before Mrs Coberley had her accident and, if she was, the whole case against Coberley goes down the drain. As soon as he is brought before the magistrates he will be released. I’m sure of it.’
‘Well, for his sake I hope you’re right,’ I said, ‘but that dagger will take some explaining. Nobody but Coberley would have known of its existence in that wooden box in the old house.’
‘I bet every boy in the school knew about it. I bet lots of them had handled it before it was impounded. The staff would have known of it, and I daresay the servants too. The person who sold or gave it to the boy would have known of it. The police need to cast their net a lot wider than poor Coberley. I expect they are being pressurised and think that any arrest is better than none. Incidentally, how do you come into the affair? In other words, why are you here?’
‘I am Miss Eglantine Brockworth’s emissary to Dame Beatrice.’
‘Miss Brockworth isn’t as crazy as people think.’
‘I don’t know about that. I am to make a cryptic statement to Dame Beatrice.’
‘A quotation from that ancient tract she’s so fond of?’
‘I don’t think so. I am to tell Dame Beatrice that nothing will come of nothing.’
‘I wouldn’t call that a cryptic statement. I would call it a self-evident axiom.’
‘Ah, but that’s only half of it. The other half is to the effect that Gloria killed Gloria.’
‘I don’t see anything mysterious about that, either. People who get themselves murdered are often responsible for what happens to them. Think of the silly girls who thumb lifts. Think of impossible wives murdered by husbands who’ve come to the end of their tether and battered wives who can’t see any way out of their miseries except the death of the person responsible for them.’
‘Those are not the only reasons for murder.’
‘Granted. As for Miss Mundy, I did not see enough of her to judge whether she could be a possible murderee, but she struck me as being an unpleasant type of girl. What did you make of her?’
‘Like you, not much, but I don’t think I would have cared about cultivating her acquaintance.’
We turned back at the end of half an hour. During our return stroll we dropped the subject of Gloria Mundy and talked about the forest itself, its ponies, the gypsies, the rights and duties of the Verderers, the privileges granted to the commoners, the deer, the care of the trees, and on all these topics I found William Underedge far better informed than I was.
He stayed for lunch and when he had gone, Dame Beatrice, Mrs Gavin and I settled down, so to speak, and I passed on Miss Brockworth’s message. Dame Beatrice took it more seriously than I had anticipated.
‘She said that, did she? Interesting,’ was her comment.
‘I suppose what the Delphic oracle said was interesting to those who could make head or tail of it,’ said Laura Gavin.
‘Oh, I think Miss Brockworth’s statements had a very plain and straightforward meaning. I wonder whether it was guesswork on her part, or whether she has anything definite to go on? You would not know, of course, any more than I do, Mr Stratford. So the police have arrested Mr Coberley? How very precipitate of them. Well, now, is there anything you can add to what you have already told me?’