‘So go on,’ said Laura, challenging her husband. Gavin rubbed his jaw and glanced at Dame Beatrice.

  ‘I choose the most fanatical archaeologist in Nodding, but I can’t name him,’ he said.

  ‘Neither can I, at present,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘so you are at the stage I have reached, and I cannot get any farther until I have examined the records and transactions of the Nodding Society and Sir John has given his lecture and looked at Oliver Breydon-Waters’ partly ill-gotten collection of antiquities.’

  ‘Breydon-Waters? said Gavin. ‘Why does that name ring a bell?’

  ‘It is an invented name, as was pointed out to me in the first stages of the enquiry,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘Of course, it could be that Mrs Breydon-Waters changed her name when she came out of prison. It would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do, particularly as her husband was dead and she had a child to support.’

  ‘What sort of woman is she? – apart from being slightly unbalanced.’

  ‘She lives partly in the spirit world with her son.’

  ‘Is she resentful about his death?’

  ‘I do not think “resentful” is the word. She has confessed that she would not want him back.’

  ‘Does she realise that he may have stolen some of the items in his collection?’

  ‘She must know that he has misappropriated finds from excavations in which he has taken part, but I doubt whether she realises that some of the properties may have been taken from antique shops and, possibly, from museums.’

  ‘What are you going to do next?’

  ‘As soon as Sir John has given his lecture and seen the collection, I shall consult the police. I have undertaken to share with them any facts I may come across. Then I have a considerable amount of work to do on the Society’s records, which may or may not help matters. The most immediate task, however, is to visit Miss Hooper, the young teacher who lives in Ilfracombe.’

  ‘An early start for Ilfracombe indicates an early bedtime, so far as I am concerned,’ said Laura, getting up. ‘Are you staying the night, Gavin?’ She addressed him invariably by his surname, urging that it was a baptismal name in its own right and was, in any case, a much more agreeable word than Robert. Robert, she averred, was a stodgy name, a policeman’s name, a suet-pudding of a name.

  ‘But I am a policeman,’ Gavin had pointed out at the beginning of their acquaintanceship.

  ‘I know, but there’s no need to over-emphasise the fact,’ Laura had retorted; so Gavin he remained, so far as she was concerned.

  ‘I will certainly stay the night, if Dame B. will have me,’ he replied, in answer to his wife’s question, ‘so, if you’re going to bed now, I suppose I’d better come too, although I don’t see any point in your going early, as you never seem to need more than three hours’ sleep.’

  ‘Ah, but I love my bed,’ said Laura, ‘so come on. What time breakfast, Mrs Croc.?’

  ‘Six,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘We leave at half-past seven.’

  ‘Breakfast at six does not appeal to me,’ said Gavin. ‘Celestine can give me mine at nine, then I shan’t be in anybody’s way.’

  ‘Very considerate of you, you lazy pig,’ said Laura. ‘Good night, Mrs Croc. dear. Sleep well.’

  The early start was negotiated successfully. By one o’clock they were lunching in Frome and then they made a leisurely trip to Ilfracombe. Miss Hooper was to dine with them at half-past seven, so there was time for Laura to take a walk. She went by way of the cliff path towards Lynton and Lynmouth, and as she walked she turned over in her mind the evidence which Dame Beatrice had unearthed. She had seen every member of the Nodding Archaeological Society except the two boys, and it was clear that both Gavin and Dame Beatrice were convinced of the guilt of one of those older members.

  Laura, tramping sturdily along, considered each in turn. There was Downing, the president, surely a keen archaeologist or he would not have accepted office; but she wondered whether he was keen enough on archaeology to have committed murder for the sake of preserving finds.

  There were the other officers of the Society, Gold and Carfrae, but the same measure of doubt applied to them. The women she left out of her calculations. A woman was as capable as a man of poisoning the air with butane, but she was not, in Laura’s opinion, nearly as likely to hit a man over the head with sufficient force to kill him.

  She allowed her mind to rove over the humbler members, Sansfoy, Brent and Chipping, but decided that, although knocking a man on the head was probably within their scope, the use of the butane seemed somehow foreign to their natures.

  Bell and Glover hardly seemed murderous types, although Laura had had enough experience of Dame Beatrice’s detective work to realise that there is not a murderous type in any exact sense, so that left, if one excepted the schoolboys, Streatley and Vindella. It must be one or other of these, she thought. The difficulty was to decide which, for it seemed highly unlikely that two with such different backgrounds would have been in collusion to kill a fellow-member.

  She brooded upon Vindella. First, he was an Irishman and, as such, might behave with ill-considered recklessness. Second, he had had a strong reason to dislike Breydon-Waters, apart from anything to do with archaeology. Third, he, at one time, had been sufficiently friendly with Waters to go shares with him in buying a cabin cruiser. It is notoriously easier, as de Quincey has pointed out, to murder a friend rather than an enemy or a chance acquaintance because he trusts himself with you in circumstances which might give a stranger pause.

  Then there was Streatley, an assured and wealthy man, accustomed, because of his wealth, to get his way. In a case where wealth could not help him, he might be tempted to take the law into his own hands, Laura thought. Besides, with a wealthy man, there was always the threat of blackmail. True, nothing of the kind had been suggested, but the victim of a blackmailer rarely allows his troubles to be broadcast, otherwise the threat would cease to have any effect. Streatley was clearly a name to be kept in mind.

  There was another aspect, too. Streatley, she had learned from Dame Beatrice, had made a half-promise to buy Breydon-Waters’ collection from the mother. It was possible that he had known of its existence and had killed Waters in order to obtain possession of it. Laura liked this theory so much that she turned it over in her mind during the rest of her walk and presented it to Dame Beatrice as soon as she got back to the hotel.

  Dame Beatrice considered it gravely and pronounced judgment.

  ‘It is possible,’ she said, to Laura’s gratification. ‘There is nothing against it.’

  ‘Had you thought of it yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall you work on it?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘There! You usually laugh at my ideas, but, you see, I do get a good one occasionally. I had another one, too, while I was out.’

  ‘The North Devon air appears to agree with you.’

  ‘Do you want to hear what it is?’

  ‘If you please.’

  Laura launched into her theory that Waters had been blackmailing Streatley.

  ‘And I take it that Streatley jibbed at continually paying out the hush-money,’ she concluded, ‘and got shut of Waters in the manner indicated. What do you say about that?’

  ‘Nothing, except that I do not see how you can hold both these opinions at the same time.’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t. They are alternatives, that’s all. Of the two, I prefer – no, I don’t know that I do. Oh, well, we shall see. Wonder what Miss Hooper will have to tell us?’

  Miss Hooper arrived at the hotel at seven in an attractive black dinner-gown and with an obviously recent hair-do. She was a trifle shy and very attractive, spoke with a slight drawl – a release, Dame Beatrice supposed, from the more incisive speech necessary for her work – and, to Laura’s relief, proved to have an excellent appetite and to prefer a red to a white wine.

  They took coffee in the lounge and she gave her account of the visit to Pigmy’s Ladder.

  ‘I reached Miss Boorman’s flat on the Friday evening,’ she said, ‘had a hot drink – I’d had dinner on the train – and was jolly glad to get to bed. I’d been on my feet all the morning at school, including a dinner-hour tennis coaching, and what with that and the train journey, which took ages and involved going into London and out again to Nodding, with a change from Paddington to Liverpool Street, I felt I’d had about enough for one day.

  ‘The other candidate, Miss Maxwell, arrived at about a quarter to ten. Miss Boorman had let me sleep on until nine, so we were still having breakfast. A bit later on we decided to go out and have a look at the city. It was very enjoyable and we had a jolly good lunch at one of the hotels, a very old, very interesting place, and then it was arranged that we would go in Miss Boorman’s little car to some flint-mines called Something or Other Pigmy.’

  ‘Pigmy’s Ladder,’ said Laura.

  ‘Yes, Pigmy’s Ladder.’

  ‘You were the one who suggested going there, I take it,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Oh, no, I was not! I’d never heard of such a place. It was Miss Maxwell who wanted to go.’

  Laura nudged Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Odd!’ she said, in a low tone. Dame Beatrice shrugged.

  ‘Why should it be odd?’ asked Miss Hooper. ‘It turned out to be a most important pre-historic thing, with a man in charge of it, and sixpence each to pay.’

  ‘It is a small point,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but Miss Maxwell, whom we have already interviewed, seemed to think that the visit to Pigmy’s Ladder was made at your request.’

  ‘Oh, I know what she means, I think. I did ask whether we had time to see something of the country round about Nodding, and Miss Boorman agreed that there would be time to have a run out in her car. But I couldn’t have suggested going to Pigmy’s Ladder, because, as I say, I didn’t know of it.’ She sounded anxious about this.

  ‘Quite,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Pray continue.’

  ‘Well, we got there, and there was a slight hold-up because the man wanted us to wait and see whether more people came before he opened up, but we explained that we couldn’t hang about, so he unlocked the trap-door which covers the main shaft, and Miss Maxwell and I went down with electric torches. Just as well, as it turned out. There was poison gas down there, the stuff they use on boats and in caravans, and if we’d used matches and candles we’d have been blown up, I suppose.’

  ‘Who went first?’

  ‘I did, I think. I can’t really remember. Does it matter?’

  ‘Not a great deal.’

  ‘When we got to the bottom of the ladder, and shone our torches around, we saw several little low tunnels branching out. As they seemed very narrow, we decided to explore different ones. I hadn’t gone far when I noticed a funny smell.’

  ‘Had you ever smelt calor gas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you didn’t recognise the smell.’

  ‘No, but I soon realised I ought not to have been smelling it. The trouble was that I had chosen a particularly narrow tunnel and had to crawl out backwards or else go on probing and hope to find a turning. I thought this was the better idea, particularly as the passage did a sort of dog’s-leg turn, but I was overcome by the gas and don’t know another thing except what I’ve been told by the police and in a letter I had in hospital from Miss Boorman. Is it true that she was accused of trying to murder us so as to be sure of getting the Organiser job?’

  ‘It did not get as far as an accusation. Did Miss Boorman visit you in hospital as well as write a letter?’

  ‘Oh, yes, and brought us flowers and fruit and sweets. You know, whoever put the calor gas down there was horribly irresponsible as well as very wicked. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘You know,’ said Laura, when Miss Hooper had returned home and she and her employer were turning over in their minds what they had been hearing, ‘two things strike me about that girl.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘She’s not altogether a reliable witness. She told us that Maxwell suggested visiting Pigmy’s Ladder, whereas Maxwell told us it was Hooper’s idea, and then she reversed the order in which they climbed down the main shaft.’

  ‘It is possible, of course, that Miss Maxwell is the unreliable witness.’

  ‘Maxwell is a Scotswoman, and whatever a Scotswoman is not, she is reliable.’

  Dame Beatrice cackled, but knew better than to argue when Laura was riding the hobby-horse of praising her fellow-countrywomen.

  ‘These debatable points are of little real consequence,’ she said, in easy tones. ‘What was the other thing about her which aroused your special interest?’

  ‘You must have noticed it, too, and it ought to be a real help in eliminating some of the members of the Archaeological Society.’

  ‘You refer, no doubt, to her use of the words “horribly irresponsible.” I did notice them, but to me it was not a new thought.’

  ‘You disappoint me. I hoped it was. But it does eliminate most of them, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It is simpler to enumerate and name those whom it does not eliminate.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Your turn first.’

  ‘Am I to display my ignorance of psychology?’

  ‘Not necessarily. You can sum up character as accurately as I can.’

  ‘Thank you for those kind words. Here goes, then: Vindella, Glover, Bell, Chipping and Mrs Rambeau.’

  ‘Most interesting. Pray elucidate.’

  ‘Take those I’ve left out, then, first. The officers of the Society must be responsible people. It seems to me that that goes without saying; otherwise they wouldn’t accept office, much less continue in it.’

  ‘I think that interpretation of the facts is questionable, but pray go on.’

  ‘Diana Carfrae seems sensible and level-headed enough.’

  ‘Her fiancé jilted her, remember, and has been murdered, but, again, I agree.’

  ‘Sansfoy is a bus driver, therefore, presumably, he has a sense of responsibility, or he wouldn’t hold his job very long.’

  ‘His sense of responsibility may apply to nothing but his work, of course.’

  ‘Brent is just an old stick-in-the-mud and, I’m positive, is completely harmless.’

  ‘We cannot be certain, but I feel as you do.’

  ‘Streatley is as rich as Croesus and very rich men, unless they’re bad men (and I’m sure Streatley isn’t), must have a sense of responsibility.’

  ‘They often also have a sense of Lord High Everything Else, though. Was not that one of your alternatives when you described to me your thoughts about him?’

  ‘Above the law; the rules don’t apply to me. That kind of thing? Yes, I suppose I did say that. And the blackmail business – I still rather cherish that thought. But, all the same, can you see Streatley as a murderer?’

  ‘I have not studied him sufficiently to say one thing or the other. I think his character might turn out to be considerably more complex than that of some others we have met.’

  Triscilla Clarke I’m not sure about, but she’s a teacher…’

  ‘So is Constance Rambeau, whom I notice you retain on your list of suspects.’

  ‘Well, yes, but remember how she behaved at that meeting. She didn’t seem a very reliable type to me. Of course, mine are snap judgments. I haven’t seen nearly as much of these people as you have.’

  ‘I appreciate that. Now what about those of whom you entertain suspicions?’

  ‘Bell and Chipping are bachelors. That doesn’t seem to argue a sense of responsibility to the community. Vindella is also a bachelor.’

  ‘But did something to remedy this anti-social state.’

  ‘Until his girl was enticed away by Waters. But the enticement was his motive. Actually, I think Vindella is my suspect-in-chief.’

  ‘And what about Glover?’

  ‘Divorced,’ said Laura, with finality, ‘and therefore, to my mind, de-humanised.’

  ‘Surely very few people would agree with you?’

  ‘As to that, I suppose you are right. Anyway, I do think you might swop ideas. I’ve told you mine, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t tell me yours.’

  ‘You have named all the probable suspects, except for the wealthy Streatley, with the exception of three.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘I would not except the officers of the Society, in the present state of the enquiry.’

  ‘Surely the officers of a society don’t murder the members?’

  ‘It would depend upon the circumstances. I am of Robert’s opinion. When we have found the most fanatical archaeologist, we have found the murderer.’

  ‘But who is the most fanatical archaeologist?’

  ‘I am hoping that the Society’s records may give me a pointer there.’

  ‘So you are not going to swop theories?’

  ‘Ask me that after Sir John’s visit.’

  ‘There’s a mystery there, too. Why are you having Sir John come to Nodding – apart from wanting him to edit Waters’ collection of junk?’

  ‘I want to take him on a secret tour of Pigmy’s Ladder, child – secret from the Society, I mean.’

  ‘But how can you keep it secret from the Society?’

  ‘From one member of the Society it will not be secret.’

  ‘Chipping, the dry-stone expert?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Can you trust him not to blab?’

  ‘I shall not approach him until the day following Sir John’s inspection of Mr Breydon-Waters’ collection. All he will be told is that Sir John has expressed a wish to have all the known parts of the workings opened up in order that he may inspect them.’

  ‘Won’t Chipping think it fishy?’

  ‘Nobody thinks anything fishy when it is demanded by a man of Sir John’s eminence, child.’

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  Antiques and Archives

  * * *

  ‘Biting off a large quid of black twist, he said:

 

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