‘Well,’ said Shard, ‘it didn’t surprise me either. One has read the recognised authorities, of course – Ahmed’s The Black Art, Cavendish’s The Black Arts, Rhodes’ The Satanic Mass, Peter Haining’s Witchcraft and Black Magic and so on – so one knew pretty much what to expect. The meetings were held specifically to get converts, so everything was pitched in a low key not to frighten the neophytes away, but with veiled promises of all kinds of excitement to come. Anyway, in answer to your question, to which I see no harm in giving a truthful reply, there was a gold cup surmounted by a strange device also in gold and terminating in a crescent moon. The cup and this object were placed on the girl’s lower abdomen and the Grand Master, bare to the waist and wearing goat-skin trousers reminiscent—’ he gave a falsetto giggle – ‘of Robinson Crusoe, sat enthroned behind the so-called altar. There were candles on either side of him and he wore a gold headdress embodying horns with the full moon caught between them.’
‘So that, and the cup on the girl’s body, were what the metal casket contained,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘Did you get what you wanted?’ asked Laura, when Dame Beatrice returned to the hotel.
‘Yes, and a little more than I expected. Both Miss Kennett and Mr Shard were most enlightening.’
‘As how?’
‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that reminds me! There is one more question which I ought to put to Mr Shard,’ She rang through to the hotel reception desk and gave the telephone number of Weston Pipers.
‘Bradley speaking,’ she said. ‘Can you connect me with Mr Mandrake Shard, please?’
A man’s voice replied: ‘Ah, good afternoon, Dame Beatrice! Piper speaking. How are you? Yes, I’ll call him to the phone at once.’
‘There is something I have just thought of,’ she said, as soon as she and Shard were connected.
‘Oh, yes, dear lady?’ His high little voice sounded apprehensive, she thought.
‘It is merely this: at the meetings which you attended, was there an admission fee?’
‘I must admit that there was. Visitors were asked to hand over a fiver each time and we were told that, if we became members, a monthly subscription would be called for. I gathered that the society was anything but prosperous.’
‘Thank you for telling me so. I am so sorry to have interrupted your work again.’
‘Think nothing of it, dear lady.’ The little falsetto voice sounded relieved and cheerful this time.
‘Oh, and – shall we say to settle a bet?’ – I suppose it was you who wrote some of those anonymous letters?’
‘Not all, dear lady, not all. Those I did write were great fun, though.’
‘I believe,’ said Dame Beatrice, when she had put down the receiver, ‘that our tiny friend’s gift of insatiable curiosity is going to prove a most useful feature of our enquiry. He goes from strength to strength.’
‘Dirty little snooper,’ said Laura.
‘Well, after all, what are we but dirty little snoopers, if it comes to that?’ said Dame Beatrice equably.
‘At least we only snoop so that justice may be done.’
‘Justice? She has the two faces of Janus, one moral, the other legal. We may need to subvert her course in one or other of these respects.’
‘Here, what are you up to?’ asked Laura suspiciously.
‘Even I myself hardly know. Our first consideration is to establish an alibi for Mr Piper concerning the murder of the antique-dealer.’
‘I thought you were doubtful whether he had an alibi.’
‘My doubts are now resolved. The police no longer suspect him of murdering Miss Minnie and they do not suspect him of so much as knowing the dead shopkeeper, but I have a fancy for the truth and should like to know what it is. Now you would wish to know what passed between Mr Shard and myself. I will give you a full account of it and then we shall see whether your ideas march with mine.’
‘They usually follow well behind yours, and limpingly at that,’ said Laura, grinning. ‘In the old Scots word, unknown to me until I read Huntingtower (I think it was), they go hirpling. But I’m absolutely agog. Tell me all, omitting no detail, however slight.’
‘After I have had a last talk with the Superintendent, you shall know as much as I do.’
Chapter Sixteen
Assessments and Conclusions
« ^
(1)
‘OH,’ said the Superintendent almost airily, ‘we soon gave up our suspicions of Piper and the same – although I can’t say we’d ever considered her seriously – any suspicions we might have had of Miss Nutley, the only other person, so far as we could discover, who had ever had a key to the bungalow apart from Miss Minnie herself.’
‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘you discovered, as I did, that those particular keys, Piper’s and Miss Nutley’s, would not open the bungalow door. But I thought Piper had lost his key.’
‘Gave us a bit of a facer when we tried Piper’s key which we found in Miss Nutley’s desk and she swore was his, and then the duplicate Miss Nutley showed us. Miss Minnie, as she called herself, had had the lock altered unknown to Miss Nutley and Piper. Once we realised that there was no way Piper could have got into the bungalow except the way he did get in, unless Miss Minnie herself opened the door to him – and all the available evidence was that, of all unlikely things for her to do, that was the unlikeliest – we virtually wiped Piper off our slate.’
‘But did not immediately release him from custody.’
‘An old and perhaps somewhat discreditable ploy, ma’am. We thought that while we held on to Piper the real murderer might get careless and do something to betray himself, but he (or she) didn’t, so in the end we had to give the beaks the tip, the last time he was remanded, that we felt he had no case to answer.’
‘And you still have no idea of the murderer’s identity?’
‘No. Anyway, we’re now only faced with finding one murderer, not two.’
‘Oh, really? You have come to the definite conclusion that the shopkeeper’s death was suicide?’
‘Yes, we’re forced to that conclusion and would have arrived at it independent of your hints except for the little mystery of those milk bottles, but what we reckon is that somebody who hasn’t come forward – a charwoman, most likely, because the whole house was better kept and looked after than an elderly man living on his own would have kept it – picked up the bottles automatically, as it were, and put them in the kitchen.’
‘Wouldn’t she have raised the alarm when she found the body?’
‘Judging by the nature of some of that stuff I told you about in his desk and filing cabinet, ma’am, I don’t suppose she was ever allowed in the office, and that, of course, is where the body was.’
‘So what made you decide upon your verdict?’
‘The coroner’s verdict it will be when the inquest is resumed. You’ll remember (as Mrs Gavin was called upon as the finder of the body) that the inquest was adjourned at our request and will now be resumed.’
‘Ah, yes. The body was identified by the manager of the local cinema, was it not?’
‘That’s right. Well, the medical evidence showed that there was nothing to rule out the probability of suicide, and although the pathologist thought the wound was too deep to have been self-inflicted, the coroner told the jury to disregard that and the inquest will be resumed on those lines, especially as the pathologist himself could find no rational significance in the depth of the wound and was forced to agree that if Bosey had fallen on the knife, that would explain matters. This, coupled with your own hints, has settled the thing so far as we’re concerned, so now we shall concentrate on the Minnie case, for there is no doubt whatever about that being murder.’