‘We’d better let somebody know,’ said Laura. ‘I looked in through a back window and I think the chap’s dead.’
‘Did you try the back door?’
‘Yes. It’s open, but I’d said I wouldn’t go in, so—’
‘We had better both go in. There may be something I can do. In any case, the shop will be on the telephone.’ She was hurrying Laura along as she spoke. They reached the head of the narrower alley which led to the back of the shop past derelict patches which had been the gardens of houses long since pulled down, and got to the shop itself. There was no garden gate and the garden itself had been turned into a dumping ground for unsaleable merchandise or for pieces too cumbersome or too large to be taken inside the house.
The two investigators picked their way amongst this rubbish and, reaching the back door, Laura, who was in the lead, turned the handle and went in. Dame Beatrice followed. Laura led the way through a neat, clean scullery and kitchen. On the kitchen table stood three bottles of milk. Dame Beatrice noted them, but made no remark, although she saw that the kitchen, in addition to its store-cupboards, also housed a refrigerator.
Laura led the way up four linoleum-covered stairs to the room behind the shop, for the building was on the slope which led up from the sea-front. She opened a door and stood aside to let Dame Beatrice in.
The little room was furnished as an office. There was a roll-top desk, a filing cabinet, a swivel chair and, on a small table, a typewriter and a telephone. Everything was spick and span except for an almost imperceptible layer of dust on the desk and table and the untidily spread-eagled body which lay in a pool of blood on the carpet not far from the desk.
‘Stay where you are,’ said Dame Beatrice. She herself went forward and looked at the body. There was no need to touch it. The post-mortem signs of death were all too obvious. ‘I shall not telephone from here. Nothing must be touched. Go back to the hotel and telephone from your room.’
“The call will go out through the hotel switchboard.’
‘That cannot be helped and the hotel desk will only put your call through. Tell the Superintendent that I am here. He is an intelligent man and will guess that something serious has happened.’
‘Do I tell him nothing more?’
‘Nothing. And stay at the hotel until I come.’
‘Suppose he asks questions?’
‘Tell him I think we have something which bears on the Minnie case.’
Laura departed. Dame Beatrice looked out of the window, which was some way from the ground owning to the slope of the hill, and saw a broken step-ladder lying among the other rubbish in the yard. She assumed that it had formed the means by which Laura had managed to reach the window to peer into the room. Leaving the door open, she went down into the room which formed the shop. The picture was gone. In its place hung a tattered rag doll with a piece of paper pinned to its soiled and torn clothing. On the paper was a carefully executed drawing in red ink. It depicted the head of a goat, formalised and with three stars, one on either side of, and one between, its horns. Below it was a five-pointed star from which splashes of red ink appeared to denote drops of blood.
‘So?’ said Dame Beatrice to the doll. She left the shop and mounted the main staircase, being careful not to touch the banisters. The landing disclosed an open doorway. She looked in. It seemed that the chamber was a bedroom and nothing more. The bed was made, the furniture was simple and the room was clean and tidy.
Next door to it was a bathroom and then a short flight of stairs led to two more rooms, one over the shop and the other, the nearer, over the office. The door of the nearer room was open, that which was over the shop and looked out on to the street, was closed.
Dame Beatrice looked in at the open doorway and discovered that, by the removal of the party wall, the two rooms had been knocked into one. Thick black velvet curtains hung at the front and back windows, but were drawn back so that there was plenty of light in the room, despite a somewhat overcast wintry sky.
Around the two long walls and on either side of the window a frieze of life-size nude figures had been drawn in black paint. They were alternatively male and female, but there was nothing lewd or in any way remarkable about them. In fact, Dame Beatrice thought, they were the work of a quite considerable artist and although the first effect was somewhat startling, it was not repugnant.
The floor of the room presented another and a more sinister appearance. It was covered from wall to wall in black carpeting on which had been drawn a white circle contained within a square. At each corner of the square were cabbalistic designs which could be interpreted by any student of the occult. The circle itself was bare, but between it and the window was a long, heavy table, painted black and having at one end what appeared to be a headrest padded with white velvet and having embroidered on it in red a facsimile of the goat’s head which Dame Beatrice had seen downstairs on the piece of paper pinned to the doll.
Also on the table, laid out in what appeared to be ritual fashion, were a long knife, a sword, a large silver cup, a nine-thronged scourge, a glass jar containing a white substance which Dame Beatrice identified as salt (although she did not attempt to taste it), a carafe of colourless liquid which, from her knowledge of witchcraft, she diagnosed as water, and a V-shaped metal object up the arms of which two serpents, joined at the tail, were climbing. There was also a tall, curiously-ornamented metal cabinet, but it was locked.
Experimentally Dame Beatrice walked behind the table and pulled the cord which operated the black velvet window curtains. Immediately the curtains in the other half of the room also came together and the dim red light from a chandelier, which switched itself on as the curtains closed, balefully illuminated the scene.
‘Very pretty,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Black, rather than white magic, I fancy, with overtones of Satanism and, for good measure, a splash of voodoo.’ She pulled the cord again to draw the curtains apart. The light extinguished itself and, after a last look around, she went downstairs and into the shop.
When the police arrived she put a handkerchief over her hand before she drew the front door bolts and let them in, although there was not likely to be any evidence, she thought, that the murderer had been the last person to handle the bolts.
The police superintendent wasted no time. ‘Serious ma’am, so Mrs Gavin said.’
‘A dead man. This way,’ said Dame Beatrice, going towards a door at the back of the shop.
‘When we heard it was the chap who kept the shop here, we smelt a rat.’
Dame Beatrice looked at Laura, who said:
‘Sorry, but I had to give this address and the police insisted on a detail or two. I didn’t say the chap had been murdered.’
‘It has not been established that he died by the hand of another,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘not yet.’
‘Anyway, I’ve brought my boys and the police surgeon has been notified and will be here at any minute, so if you two ladies would show us where the body is, we’ll get weaving,’ said the Superintendent.
Dame Beatrice conducted him, the fingerprint expert, a sergeant and the official photographer to the office. The fingerprint expert got to work on the room, the sergeant, wearing gloves, methodically turned out the desk and the filing-cabinet, the photographer stood by, waiting for orders, the Superintendent and Dame Beatrice studied the blood-soaked figure on the floor.
‘All right, Ford,’ the Superintendent said. ‘Take from all angles. The knife is still in the body, but it looks like murder all right. And I’m not altogether surprised,’ he added, leading Dame Beatrice out of the room and away from the sweetish, horrible stench of decay. ‘We’ve thought for a long time that this shop was a cover for something illegal, but we’ve never been able to pin down what it is. We got a tip-off from the local manor of his last place of residence, which was in a suburb of Manchester. They hadn’t been able to get anything on him, but they’d have loved to pull him in.