‘How does the death of Miss Minnie fit into all this?’
‘I have no idea, except that, from what I made Ellie tell me, it was Minnie, blast her! – who introduced Ellie to these Satanists.’
(2)
Niobe herself opened the door to Dame Beatrice.
‘Oh, no!’ she said, stepping back a pace when she recognised the visitor.
‘I fear so,’ said Dame Beatrice, stepping inside. ‘I wonder whether Mr Shard is at home? It is he with whom I would speak.’
‘Mandrake? I expect he’s busy.’
‘Perhaps you will be good enough to ring through on the intercommunication apparatus and let him know that I am here.’
‘Will you state your business? He won’t be pleased to have his writing interrupted unless you have business of importance to discuss with him.’
‘My business concerns the death of the man who kept an antique-dealer’s shop in the town and from whom Mrs Gavin brought a yataghan.’
‘A what?’
‘And to whom you either sold or gave a set of steel fire-irons, although you have denied doing so.’
‘You had better come into my office.’ Dame Beatrice followed her and Niobe made contact with Mandrake Shard.
‘Will you go up?’ she said. ‘He is at the end of the landing on the first floor. There is a nameplate on the sitting-room door.’
Shard, who seemed to have been working at an enormous desk which was covered with reference books, papers and a typewriter which had a half-finished sheet of quarto still sticking up in it, greeted her twitteringly.
‘Well, well, well! Hullo, hullo!’ he said. ‘How nice! How very, very nice! Sherry, I think, don’t you? Or shall we go out to tea again? No. Sherry, sherry! Oh, but do come in! Come in!’
Dame Beatrice came in and closed the door. The room, she noted, was beautifully and expensively furnished and, except for the littered desk, exquisitely neat and clean. There was only one picture on the walls, but it was a Picasso of the artist’s 1941 period. Dame Beatrice wondered whether its fantastic disorientations, exaggerations and unkind if humorous comments upon a woman’s features and bodily attitude were a kind of compensation to Shard for his own tiny but well-formed frame and his loss of the girl he had once hoped to marry.
Dame Beatrice took the armchair to which he waved her and he bustled about in the cupboards of a satinwood cabinet and produced glasses and a couple of early nineteenth-century decanters – all of them collectors’ pieces – and cried gaily:
‘Which shall it be? Which shall it be? And do you take a biscuit with your sherry? Speak now, or for ever after hold your peace!’
‘No biscuit. The sherry is at your choice,’ she said. She sat and sipped while she studied the room and Shard, she surmised, studied her. He did not drink.
‘More?’ he enquired. ‘Ah, well, later on, perhaps. One is disposed to enquire, if one does not give offence, why you have come to see me.’
‘I want to know more about the Satanists.’
‘Oh, my dear Mrs Farintosh!’
‘Since last we met, their leader has met his end. By the way, as there should be few secrets between friends, I ought to tell you that Mrs Farintosh, as such, does not exist.’
‘You don’t need to tell me, dear and excellent lady. I snooped around, you know, and placed you quite easily since you are well-known (and famous, too), but it seemed only good manners to respect your alias – or should I say your nom-de-plume?’
‘No, I write, when I write, under my own name.’
‘Then welcome to my abode, Dame Beatrice. What do you want to know about the Satanists? I am hardly a mine of information, I’m afraid. I attended only two of their meetings and those were not for the initiated. Targe came to the first of them with me, but I think he found the proceedings childish and disappointingly dull. After all, to a man who has the horrid details of Jack the Ripper’s activities propped up beside his breakfast bacon and egg, the sight of a virgin lying on a strip of black velvet and having gibberish said over her can hardly rank as a sexual extravaganza or orgy.’
‘But you yourself went a second time?’
‘By personal invitation of the Grand Master, or whatever he called himself. The initiates, when they addressed him (which they did only after prostrating themselves) moaned at him, “You, You!” So I never learned his name.’
‘Did you ever go to his shop in the town?’
‘Well, of course, but not to his shop as such. It was where the meetings were held, you know.’
‘Ah, yes, of course it was. I asked a foolish question. I shall now ask another. Was the girl on the table someone you knew?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you also recognise any of the circle of members?’
‘I thought I did, but we were all masked.’
Dame Beatrice waited, but no more information was forthcoming. Shard held up the decanter but she shook her head. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and held it up to the light (not so much, she thought, to admire the beautiful colour of the golden liquid as to make sure that she would admire the beautiful opaque spiral on the stem of the glass and its bowl engraved with flowers).
Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw. ‘The better the colour the more worthy of the priceless glass?’ she asked. ‘Or does the priceless glass make a most innocuous and healthful beverage taste better?’
‘The second, I think. You are hoping that I will disclose the names of those members of Satan’s Circle whom I thought I recognised, but that I cannot do. We were all placed under an oath of secrecy and I am sufficiently superstitious to feel that I cannot break it.’
‘It matters little. Your evidence would only be confirmation of what I already know. One thing I believe you can tell me without forswearing yourself. Was the girl on the table the same girl each time?’
‘No, she was not, neither was there any masking of her features.’
‘And you recognised both girls?’
‘No, but I did recognise one of them.’
‘Was she unusually tall, as women go?’
‘So you know who she was! Dear me! But I have said nothing, mind!’
‘No, you have kept your oath. Why did you never go to a third meeting?’
‘We were given a date, but Miss Minnie’s death caused it to be postponed, so I have never been to the place again.’
‘Was any mention ever made of a threatening letter written to the instigator of the proceedings?’
‘Not in my hearing. The writer would have been Miss Billie Kennett, no doubt.’
‘Ah, so one of the virgins was Miss Elysée Barnes. Thank you for confirming that piece of information, which I already possessed.’
‘I have told you nothing,’ said Shard. ‘Please remember that.’ He had been sipping appreciatively. He now drained his glass and set it gently down on the Hepplewhite table at his elbow.
‘Quite,’ said Dame Beatrice thoughtfully. ‘I understand that before Miss Minnie was murdered you believe she sometimes entertained a man in her bungalow.’
‘As I told you, I am a dedicated spy.’
‘Who was it?’
‘As I also told you, I don’t know.’
‘When you attended the gatherings, did anything in the nature of a Satanic romp occur?’
‘Oh, no, nothing of an orgiastic nature at all. The Grand Master gave us some promises, but I understand that we had to wait for the full moon before he could carry them out. The two young women were merely on show to whet our appetites.’
‘And Miss Minnie was murdered before he could keep his word. She, I imagine, was his procuress of virgins. If one was sacrificed at each full moon, I should think she was kept busy.’ said Dame Beatrice, with an eldritch cackle which made Shard glance at her in alarm. ‘I appreciate that you are under oath not to reveal names,’ she went on. ‘I have seen the room in which the Satanist meetings took place. Apart from the girl herself, was anything else on the table? I may add that I have made some small study of witchcraft, both black and white, so nothing you say will surprise me.’