‘Thank you, Mr Gold. Left to yourself, however, you would have supposed the shrine to be genuine?’

  ‘Well, yes, except for what I said just now about luck, of which our Society does not have very much. After all, the Neolithic man who superintended the mining at Grimes Graves most probably superintended it here. Breckland is not so very large. I saw no reason, really,why it should not have been genuine.’

  ‘If the shrine was genuine, why should Mr Streatley have taken it so lightly when the Society thought that it was a fake?’

  ‘There seems to be no reason, except that, in many ways, he is a remarkably easy-going man. It seems, then, that, after all, it was the real thing.’

  Carfrae took a different view.

  ‘Of course it was a fake,’ he said. ‘It was the spit and image of the one found at Grimes Graves. Some half-wit – I name no names – had put it there to confound us and make us a laughing-stock. It had been done before, and some of us were slow to see the joke.’

  ‘But now it is thought that it was genuine. Sir John saw what remains of it a short while ago and accepted it. Incidentally, the one thing I noticed, when I studied the records and transactions of the Society, was the absence of photographs. Were any of your finds photographed?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

  ‘They would have been if we had thought them worth it, but, as a matter of fact, we didn’t seem to find anything much that the original excavators hadn’t found.’

  ‘Except the shrine.’

  ‘Well, Downing persuaded us not to photograph it. He said it would make us a laughing-stock to the Norfolk and Norwich people, and, rather naturally, we weren’t at all anxious for that.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Dame Beatrice then thanked Carfrae and returned to the Gauntlet, rang up the City Hall and asked for Chipping. It was arranged that she should meet him on the following day when his work was over. The encounter took place in the Mayor’s Parlour, which Chipping was deputed to clean. The interview was extremely short.

  ‘Mr Chipping,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘why did you remove the walling in Pigmy’s Ladder?’

  ‘The walling? Oh, that!’ said Chipping. ‘Ay, I removed her. They walled him up, you see, and if nobody removed her, nobody wouldn’t never know what I knows.’

  ‘Ever know what? What do you know, Mr Chipping?’

  ‘Ever know how much Satan finds for idle hands to do, which is what I reckon I knows now.’

  ‘I understand you, but wasn’t it a case of locking the stable door after the steed was stolen?’

  ‘Might make you think the steed was stolen and hadn’t just bolted away.’

  ‘You do not care to enlarge upon that observation?’

  ‘Why should I? I reckon you understands. I reckon you’ve worked her out, same as I done.’

  ‘But what would be the motive? It wasn’t a simple murder for the sake of ridding the world of Mr Breydon-Waters, was it?’

  Chipping gave her a side-glance which would have done credit to Weyland the Smith.

  ‘Some is born murderers,’ he said, ‘and some becomes murderers, and some has murder thrust upon ’em.’

  With this oracular pronouncement he at once did justice to his education and terminated the interview. Dame Beatrice rang up the Superintendent and then went to see Streatley. He was at home and received her in the same gracious fashion as before.

  ‘Do sit down, Dame Beatrice,’ he said, when his manservant had shown her in. Dame Beatrice sat down, refused a cigarette and unequivocably stated her business.

  ‘I am interested in the shrine which was discovered in Pigmy’s Ladder very close to the spot where we found the body of Mr Breydon-Waters.’

  ‘Yes? Some of my colleagues thought it an obvious fake, of course. It isn’t difficult to carve a mother-goddess and a phallic symbol out of chalk. I could do it myself.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Streatley tapped the ash from his cigarette.

  ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘I thought at first it was genuine, but I soon changed my mind.’

  ‘What made you come to the conclusion that someone who lived well after the Neolithic or even Bronze Ages had carved it?’

  Streatley met her eyes and smiled slightly.

  ‘I happened to know who had done it. I found out.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter now. Oh, well! As you will. It was Breydon-Waters, of unhappy memory.’

  ‘How do you chance to know that?’

  ‘He was always hanging round the dig. Whenever we opened anything up he would go back, don’t you know, and sit and gaze at it, even after we’d replaced soil, turf and all.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard it was a habit of his to re-visit archaeological sites, but I cannot see why, on the strength of that alone, you should assume that he carved the goddess and the other fertility symbols.’

  ‘I did not assume it. I knew it. You see…’ He paused, drew on his cigarette, took it from his lips and inspected its glowing end and then repeated his last two words. Dame Beatrice waited patiently, although she could guess what was coming. ‘I lent him a flash-light photograph, which I had not had permission to take, of a similar, but genuine, shrine.’

  ‘The one from Grimes Graves, perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps, and perhaps not. As I was not an accredited member of the team of which I speak, whether Grimes Graves comes into it or not had better be left an open question.’

  ‘You were very friendly with Mr Breydon-Waters at the time, I take it?’

  ‘Not friendly exactly, no, but I certainly didn’t realise at the time what a little so-and-so he was.’

  ‘Did he ask you for the photograph, or did you offer it?’

  ‘I can’t really remember. It was at the end of the A.G.M. of 1950, when we had just arranged to make the re-dig of Pigmy’s Ladder our Festival project for the following year that I promised him the picture. I remember that perfectly well. But whether the suggestion that I should lend it came from him or from myself has gone completely from my mind. Why, does it matter?’

  ‘No, no; it is a very small point, of course. Apart from the fact that he is believed to have appropriated objects which should have been the property of the Society, had you any personal reason for disliking Mr Breydon-Waters?’

  ‘Look here,’ said Streatley, with another slight smile, ‘are you… is this a police interrogation, or what? You’re not suggesting that I had anything to do with the poor young devil’s death, are you? What on earth object could I have had?’

  ‘A fair question. You have acquired the whole of his collection of antiquities, I believe?’

  Streatley stared at her.

  ‘It’s not a thing I care to stress,’ he said, ‘but I am a very rich man and I have my own ways of sharing my money with people who are not as fortunate as I am. I purchased that junk to help Mrs Breydon-Waters, who, I was given to understand, was left rather badly off.’

  ‘You call it junk? All of it?’

  ‘From my point of view, yes. In other words, anything I purchase which I don’t really want comes under that heading, so far as I am concerned.’

  ‘You obtained an inventory, of course.’

  ‘Not from Mrs Breydon-Waters. She would not have known enough about the stuff to make one. I made a list of my own after I had collected the stuff and brought it home. May I ask why you’re interested?’

  His manner and tone remained urbane, but Dame Beatrice detected an undercurrent in the last question which had been absent even from his query about a police interrogation.

  ‘I am interested,’ Dame Beatrice replied, ‘because I have a list of my own, compiled for me by no less an authority than Sir John St John John, who recently lectured on various archaeological discoveries, and I would like, if you will agree, to check the list he gave me against your own.’

  ‘I can’t see why, but it shall be as you choose.’ He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Excuse me one moment.’ He went out of the room and was gone for almost five minutes. He returned, carrying a loose-leaf notebook. ‘Here we are. Perhaps you would like to check your list against the loot as well,’ he said.

  Dame Beatrice was more than interested in this suggestion. She leered delightedly at him.

  ‘Excellent!’ she said. ‘And, as a slight return, I will tell you, after we have completed the checking, the object of these apparently impertinent enquiries.’

  ‘A bargain. Right. Here we are, then.’

  The lists were identical in every particular, except that, as was to be expected, the objects were put down in a different order. When the checking had been done, Streatley took Dame Beatrice into his library. Here the collection was housed in glass-topped cases down the middle of the room. Dame Beatrice carried her own list and read out each item so that Streatley could point it out to her. A copper axe-head, twin to the one found in the pelican’s beak in the Castle Museum, was housed about half-way down the room, flanked and surrounded by three polished stone celts, a bronze axe-head from a British grave and a couple of Palaeolithic hammers. Dame Beatrice read on until the list came to an end.

  ‘And now – our bargain,’ said Streatley.

  ‘I had come to the conclusion that the weapon which the murderer intended to be used to kill Mr Breydon-Waters came from his own collection. That is all.’

  ‘And didn’t it?’

  ‘You have the answer to that, surely. Your inventory tallies with mine.’

  ‘Like hell it does!’ said Streatley vigorously. ‘One of us must be wrong. You mean that the police have the weapon – let us call it the possible or alleged weapon – in their possession, don’t you? You will have to tell me what it was.’

  Dame Beatrice told him what the police had in their possession. He went back to the case of celts and axe-heads and stared thoughtfully at it. Then he looked at her and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘You and the police have been barking up the wrong tree,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘A chap like Breydon-Waters would never have been able to get hold of two of these things from Kish. As for blood on a stone—’

  ‘Possibly not,’ Dame Beatrice agreed. ‘In that case, we have to discover where the second axe came from.’

  Streatley digested this ambiguous remark and finally he said,

  ‘By the second axe, do you mean this one, which was included in the stuff I bought from Mrs Breydon-Waters, or do you mean the one you found?’

  ‘It hardly matters. By the way, I have been to see a Mr Timberley.’

  ‘Timberley? Timberley? Oh, yes, I know. Used to be one of our members. A school-master, as I recollect it. That’s right. Rather flummoxed our worthy committee by wishing a couple of his grubby little boys on us.’

  ‘Mr Sansfoy and Mr Glover.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Rather surprisingly, they’ve stuck to the Society, Sansfoy particularly.’

  ‘Had you yourself any objection to Mr Timberley’s nominees?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! The more the merrier, provided they were keen. As a matter of fact, those sort of types prove to be jolly good at the actual digging. They all have back gardens, and so forth, which they cultivate, so they’re handy blokes with a spade. No, the fellow who wanted them blackballed was Breydon-Waters. Rather a cheek, considering they were full members before he even came to Nodding and joined.’

  ‘It has sometimes seemed to me curious that a man like yourself did not think it better worthwhile to join the big County association rather than the less well-known Nodding Society.’

  ‘As to that, I expect you know the Latin tag, “Better be first in a little Iberian town than second in Rome,” don’t you?’

  ‘I see. Yes, there is that aspect, of course. I wish you would tell me something else about yourself, Mr Streatley.’

  ‘Readily. I cannot have too much publicity. I revel in it, Dame Beatrice. Fire away.’

  ‘I told you, a few moments ago, that I had been to see Mr Timberley.’

  ‘Yes. Had you any particular reason? You didn’t imagine that he’d bumped off Breydon-Waters, did you? Came back dramatically to Nodding to avenge the slights offered to Glover and Bert Sansfoy?’

  ‘So far as my visit to Mr Timberley was concerned, I may say that the whole thing was fortuitous. You see, one of the mysteries connected with this case was the fact that Mr Breydon-Waters stayed in East Anglia when everybody who knew him thought he was spending a fortnight digging in Palestine. Well, I have discovered that he spent that fortnight on the motor cruiser he had once shared with Mr Vindella, whose half-share he bought. The next thing I found out was that he took the boat down to the Suffolk border and did some work at Pigmy’s Ladder from there. What I should like somebody to tell me is how his murderer came to realise that he was doing it.’

  ‘It sounds to me as though the two of them were in it together.’

  ‘And the partner, for some reason, killed him?’

  ‘Well, it all sounds very hush-hush, so it is easy enough to believe that they quarrelled, isn’t it? But what can have been the object of so much secrecy? They could scarcely have hoped to find anything of value in Pigmy’s Ladder, particularly as two lots of archaeologists had already had a go there.’

  ‘You can make no helpful suggestions, then?’

  ‘None at all, I’m afraid. Were there any signs of a struggle?’

  ‘None at all, so far as I am aware. There was the blow on the head and the leaking cylinders of calor gas.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the calor gas. Rather an original touch, didn’t you think?’

  ‘Quite foolish,’ said Dame Beatrice, with finality. ‘Foolish, and, of course, unnecessary.’

  ‘Unnecessary? Yes, I can see that, of course. You mean that the weapon had already done its work. But one couldn’t be sure of that, I suppose.’

  ‘Most killers are inexperienced. It adds to their charm.’

  ‘Charm?’

  ‘Why, certainly. You see, most killers – 1 speak now of what I may call private killers, not those people who kill in order to steal, or to avoid detection when they are in the act of stealing – are amateurs.’

  ‘Amateurs?’

  ‘Certainly. They blaze such an obvious trail that they are bound to be found in the end.’

  ‘An obvious trail? But this particular killer has not been found. My guess is that he will never be found.’

  ‘But he has been found, Mr Streatley. All we want now is proof of his guilt.’

  ‘Then I can’t see why you say he has been found. If you’ve no proof of his identity…’

  ‘I did not say that. I said we have no proof of his guilt.’

  ‘But surely that comes to the same thing?’

  ‘Does it?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘I should hardly think so, you know.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Streatley equably, ‘you came here with some specific object in mind. Are you suggesting that I know who caused the death of this miserable little Breydon-Waters? That is the most utter nonsense I have ever heard.’

  ‘It was rather nonsensical of you to tell me that you lent Mr Breydon-Waters a flashlight photograph in 1950 when I know perfectly well that he did not come to live in Nodding until well after the 1951 excavation of Pigmy’s Ladder.’

  ‘I did not say that he was living in Nodding when I gave him the photograph,’ said Streatley. ‘I think we’d better go into a huddle with some of the founder members about all this, and get a few things cleared up.’

  ‘The suggestion comes from you,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  Referred to Knossos

  * * *

  ‘And he said, “Even that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall break down their stone wall.”’

  Book of Nehemiah

  « ^

  NOW,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘for this round-table conference.’

  Present, apart from herself, were Laura, Gavin, Alice Boorman, the Superintendent, Chipping, Gold, Downing, Carfrae, Vindella and Streatley. Of these, nobody appeared entirely at ease except Dame Beatrice, Laura, Streatley and the Superintendent. The last-named opened the proceedings by announcing,

  ‘Dame Beatrice have some points to put to us, and some questions to ask, with reference to the deaths of Mr and Mrs Breydon-Waters.’

  ‘You make them sound like a married couple, Superintendent,’ said Streatley, at ease in an armchair with his arms behind his head.

  ‘Whatever they were, they certainly weren’t that,’ said Vindella, with a nervous laugh.

  ‘No, they were not that,’ Dame Beatrice agreed. ‘Now, Mr Vindella, I must put to you a possibly embarrassing and very personal question. It has been said by most of the people to whom I have spoken, that the late Mr Breydon-Waters was a conceited and snobbish young man.’

  ‘He were, too an’ all,‘ said Chipping. ‘Mind if I has a smoke, sir?’ They were seated in the Superintendent’s office. The Superintendent waved a large hand in the direction of Dame Beatrice.

  ‘By all means, Mr Chipping,’ she said. ‘Now, granting, as I do, that this description of Mr Breydon-Waters is correct, I have wondered for some time what reason Miss Priscilla Clarke could have had for transferring her affections from you to him. Can you enlighten me?’

  Vindella lit a cigarette.

  ‘I suppose a woman has the right to change her mind,’ he said. ‘I can’t see anything more in it than that.’

  ‘Yes, but she usually has a reason for exercising that right,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Breydon-Waters,’ put in Carfrae, filling a pipe so that he did not need to meet anybody’s eye, ‘was a damned young scoundrel. I suppose you all know that he jilted my girl Diana.’

 

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