‘None at all. He said he needed a doctor to examine his knee and then he went off into incoherent talk and a lot of silly posturing. He alarmed us very much. We were desperate to know what to do with him.’
‘Did he make any mention of your Pharaoh hounds?’
‘Yes, that was when he said he was Ozymandias, king of kings. I suppose the word Pharaoh made some connection in his mind. It was then that we decided he was mad. Morpeth went so far as to bring Osiris into the house, although not into the room where I was talking with Mr Goodfellow. She wanted to assure herself and him, Goodfellow, that we had some protection at hand.’
‘I see. Well, I should dismiss him from your mind unless he pesters you. If he does, tell the police.’
‘What worries me is that he had only to ask at the hotel if he really thought he needed a doctor. They would have referred him to Dr Mortlake down at Abbots Bay. Everybody goes to him now that my father is no more. As for the knee — well, there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. The Headlands is nearly halfway down the cliff and it’s a very rough walk and all steeply uphill to get to us from there. Then, when he got here, he pirouetted about like a dancer. I’m sure he hadn’t injured his knee. Well, I rang up only to apologise to you and to thank you for seeing him.’
‘I don’t think either thanks or an apology is due from you. We were interested to meet him, although I do not think we shall see him again.’
‘Did he pay for the consultation?’
‘No, but the interview hardly amounted to a consultation. He gave us an interesting interlude in our trivial round and I am grateful for that.’
About three-quarters of an hour later the telephone rang again at the Stone House and Laura answered it.
‘That was Morpeth,’ she said, when she returned to the room in which she had left Dame Beatrice.
‘Don’t tell me that she or her sister has disregarded my advice and gone to the Headlands hotel to check up on the length of Mr Goodfellow’s stay there.’
‘Not gone to it, but Bryony has rung it up. There is not, and never has been, a Mr Robin or any other Goodfellow staying there.’
‘Interesting, but not surprising. He refused to name the hotel to us.’
The next bit of news also came from Crozier Lodge by telephone. Immediately after breakfast on the following day, Bryony rang up to say, ‘We have lost Sekhmet. We think she has been stolen by a man who had put aniseed on his clothing. Her kennel stinks of it. Susan went a while ago to look at Sekhmet and found her gone. We’ve been all over the grounds, but there’s no sign of her. The strange thing is that none of the hounds gave any warning that a thief was about. Of course, Sekhmet’s shed is a good way from the stables where the hounds were, so, if he was very quiet and Sekhmet herself didn’t make any fuss, they may not have bothered, but it seems strange. Their hearing is acute and, although they are amenable creatures, I don’t think they would tolerate an intruder about the place, particularly at night or before we were up and about.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Susan is out now, with a couple of the hounds, looking for her.’
‘Is Sekhmet a valuable dog?’
‘Well, not compared with the Pharaohs, so far as we are concerned. That is our real worry. We wonder whether this was a try-on to find out how easy it was to get into the grounds and walk off with a dog. Of course, Sekhmet herself is an amiable lunatic. She probably went off like a lamb and kept her nose glued to the man’s knee to drink in the lovely stink of the aniseed.’
‘Would it be as simple to steal a hound?’
‘Gracious, no. The stable yard is locked when the hounds are in at night and there is a high perimeter fence to enclose it which nobody could climb and, anyway, the hounds would gang up on him if anybody did get in.’
‘Could not the dog have roamed off on her own?’
‘We don’t see how. There is no padlock on the front gates, but Susan always shuts them after herself when she goes home at night. For once, she went to look at Sekhmet even before she came up to the house for breakfast, so we had early warning that the dog was gone.’
‘Is there a record of any other dogs having been stolen in your neighbourhood recently?’
‘Not so far as we know, but not much of the local news comes our way. In any case, I shouldn’t think the village dogs would be worth stealing. There is an Alsatian at the pub and the village poacher owns a lurcher, but I can’t imagine either of them being much of a temptation to anybody, still less that they would go off with a stranger. Sekhmet, of course, is such a trusting fool that she would go off with anybody who spoke kindly to her.’
‘So it was Susan, not one of yourselves, who discovered that Sekhmet had disappeared, was it?’
‘Yes. At this time of year she comes along not later than half-past six. She went to the shed, found it empty, looked all about and then reported to us and we all searched and called, but when Susan mentioned the smell of aniseed we thought we knew what had happened, although we couldn’t smell it in the shed.’
When the telephone call was over, Laura said to Dame Beatrice that it was strange that Susan had gone straight to Sekhmet’s shed before breakfast. Dame Beatrice agreed, but added a rider to the effect that people did do strange things and that there was nobody more unpredictable than a more-or-less educated middle-aged spinster.
‘We don’t know that Susan is middle-aged,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, a former theory comes back to me. Couldn’t there be a connection between this dog-stealer, if there is one, and the mysterious prowler we’ve heard about? He taps on windows, apparently, and the Rants are too scared to go out and challenge him. Couldn’t he have been making sure that the coast would be clear for dog-stealing because the Rants would never venture out of the house at night? It seems like that to me. Anyway, I’ll give the Rants a ring after tea and ask whether Susan found Sekhmet.’
4
Dead in the River
« ^ »
When Laura made her telephone call, she was told an interesting story which was likely to last the village gossips and the frequenters of the only public house in Abbots Crozier for some time to come.
Susan’s narrative had begun, as narratives should, at the beginning and it lost nothing in the telling or in Morpeth’s version of it which came over the telephone.
That morning, Susan had tramped uphill by the zigzag path from Abbots Bay as usual and had found the hounds very restless. She had inspected each one and Nephthys, in particular, had seemed very unhappy. Susan let her and Isis out and although Isis only sniffed around as though she had detected some unusual aroma in the air, Nephthys made a bee-line for the garden shed.
Susan followed, for she had never known the bitch to do such a thing before. It was immediately clear that Sekhmet had gone. Susan called her by her ‘calling’ name — each dog had one, since their official names were not altogether suitable by which to summon them in public. Sekhmet was called Fret. Usually she came at once and made wild demonstrations of affection even to Susan, who had no use for them, but on this occasion she did not respond to her name.
Susan had been told about the prowler. She jumped to the conclusion that he had taken Sekhmet in mistake for a hound bitch — ‘although he can’t know much about dogs,’ she said ‘if he couldn’t tell a Labrador from a Pharaoh, even at night, when the job must have been done.’
She took Isis and Nephthys back to the stables, shut them away and let the other hounds out into the stable yard, then she went to the front gates. They had been shut, but, as usual, not locked when she arrived. When she had heard about the prowler she had suggested a chain and padlock, but, so far, this had not materialised, for the sisters were dilatory even though they were scared.