‘I’ve heard things and seen things. Mamma says that there must have been a terrible crime committed here. It is!’ She was more emphatic.
Mr Goodman thought that her mother let her mind dwell too much on murders and crimes. For the stout and fussy Mrs Elvery wallowed in the latest tragedies which filled the columns of the Sunday newspapers.
‘She does love a good murder,’ agreed Veronica. ‘We had to put off our trip to Switzerland last year because of the River Bicycle Mystery. Do you think Colonel Redmayne ever committed a murder?’
‘What a perfectly awful thing to say!’ said her shocked audience.
‘Why is he so nervous?’ asked Veronica intensely. ‘What is he afraid of? He is always refusing boarders. He refused that nice young man who came yesterday.’
‘Well, we’ve got a new boarder coming tomorrow,’ said Goodman, finding his newspaper again.
‘A parson!’ said Veronica contemptuously. ‘Everybody knows that parsons have no money.’
He could chuckle at this innocent revelation of Veronica’s mind.
‘The colonel could make this place pay, but he won’t.’ She grew confidential. ‘And I’ll tell you something more. Mamma knew Colonel Redmayne before he bought this place. He got into terrible trouble over some money—Mamma doesn’t exactly know what it was. But he had no money at all. How did he buy this house?’
Mr Goodman beamed.
‘Now that I happen to know all about! He came into a legacy.’
Veronica was disappointed and made no effort to hide the fact. What comment she might have offered was silenced by the arrival of her mother.
Not that Mrs Elvery ever ‘arrived’. She bustled or exploded into a room, according to the measure of her exuberance. She came straight across to the settee where Mr Goodman was unfolding his paper again.
‘Did you hear anything last night?’ she asked dramatically.
He nodded.
‘Somebody in the next room to me was snoring like the devil,’ he began.
‘I occupy the next room to you, Mr Goodman,’ said the lady icily. ‘Did you hear a shriek?’
‘Shriek?’ He was startled.
‘And I heard the organ again last night!’
Goodman sighed.
‘Fortunately I am a little deaf. I never hear any organs or shrieks. The only thing I can hear distinctly is the dinner gong.’
‘There is a mystery here.’ Mrs Elvery was even more intense than her daughter. ‘I saw that the day I came. Originally I intended staying a week; now I remain here until the mystery is solved.’
He smiled good-humouredly.
‘You’re a permanent fixture, Mrs Elvery.’
‘It rather reminds me,’ Mrs Elvery recited rapidly, but with evident relish, ‘of Pangleton Abbey, where John Roehampton cut the throats of his three nieces, aged respectively, nineteen, twenty-two and twenty-four, afterwards burying them in cement, for which crime he was executed at Exeter Gaol. He had to be supported to the scaffold, and left a full confession admitting his guilt!’
Mr Goodman rose hastily to fly from the gruesome recital. Happily, rescue came in the shape of the tall, soldierly person of Colonel Redmayne. He was a man of fifty-five, rather nervous and absent of manner and address. His attire was careless and somewhat slovenly. Goodman had seen this carelessness of appearance grow from day to day.
The colonel looked from one to the other.
‘Good-morning. Is everything all right?’
‘Comparatively, I think,’ said Goodman with a smile. He hoped that Mrs Elvery would find another topic of conversation, but she was not to be denied.
‘Colonel, did you hear anything in the night?’
‘Hear anything?’ he frowned. ‘What was there to hear?’
She ticked off the events of the night on her podgy fingers.
‘First of all the organ, and then a most awful, blood-curdling shriek. It came from the grounds—from the direction of the Monk’s Tomb.’
She waited, but he shook his head.
‘No, I heard nothing. I was asleep,’ he said in a low voice.
Veronica, an interested listener, broke in.
‘Oh, what a fib! I saw your light burning long after Mamma and I heard the noise. I can see your room by looking out of my window.’
He scowled at her.
‘Can you? I went to sleep with the light on. Has anyone seen Mary?’
Goodman pointed across the park.
‘I saw her half an hour ago,’ he said.
Colonel Redmayne stood hesitating, then, without a word, strode from the room, and they watched him crossing the park with long strides.
‘There’s a mystery here!’ Mrs Elvery drew a long breath. ‘He’s mad. Mr Goodman, do you know that awfully nice-looking man who came yesterday morning? He wanted a room, and when I asked the colonel why he didn’t let him stay he turned on me like a fiend! Said he was not the kind of man he wanted to have in the house; said he dared—“dared” was the word he used—to try to scrape acquaintance with his daughter, and that he didn’t want any good-for-nothing drunkards under the same roof.’
‘In fact,’ said Mr Goodman, ‘he was annoyed! You mustn’t take the colonel too seriously—he’s a little upset this morning.’
He took up the letters that had come to him by the morning post and began to open them.
‘The airs he gives himself!’ she went on. ‘And his daughter is no better. I must say it, Mr Goodman. It may sound awfully uncharitable, but she’s got just as much—’ She hesitated.
‘Swank?’ suggested Veronica, and her mother was shocked. ‘It’s a common expression,’ said Veronica.
‘But we aren’t common people,’ protested Mrs Elvery. ‘You may say that she gives herself airs. She certainly does. And her manners are deplorable. I was telling her the other day about the Grange Road murder. You remember, the man who poisoned his mother-in-law to get the insurance money—a most interesting case—when she simply turned her back on me and said she wasn’t interested in horrors.’
Cotton, the butler, came in at that moment with the mail. He was a gloomy man who seldom spoke. He was leaving the room when Mrs Elvery called him back.
‘Did you hear any noise last night, Cotton?’
He turned sourly.
‘No, ma’am. I don’t get a long time to sleep—you couldn’t wake me with a gun.’
‘Didn’t you hear the organ?’ she insisted.
‘I never hear anything.’
‘I think the man’s a fool,’ said the exasperated lady.
‘I think so too, ma’am,’ agreed Cotton, and went out.
MARY went to the village that morning to buy a week’s supply of stamps. She barely noticed the young man in plus-fours who sat on a bench outside the Red Lion, though she was conscious of his presence; conscious, too, of the stories she had heard about him.