When Last I Died - By Gladys Mitchell Page 0,65

her. Terribly distressing."

"Have you the same doctor now?" asked Mrs. Bradley; and when the vicar replied that they had, and that his name was Sandys, she told him that he had been more than helpful. "All the same, I'm not at all sure you haven't laid yourself open to a charge of having been accessory before the fact," she added.

"Before the fact?" said the vicar, puzzled.

"Of murder," said Mrs. Bradley. She cackled to see the expression upon his round and amiable face, accepted an invitation to return and take tea at the vicarage, and went off to find the doctor's house. Characteristically, she had not asked where it was, and, characteristically, she found it within five minutes.

"You seem to have been enjoying yourself, mother," said Ferdinand, somewhat austerely. "What the devil have you been up to?"

"Looking at Item one pond, Item one cottage, Item one toll house, Item one murderess, mark of interrogation, as our friend Stainless Stephen would say. Not to speak of interviewing a clam of a doctor, an expansive and genial vicar, and the murderess, question-mark, aforesaid," replied his mother, looking very pleased with herself. Ferdinand, who had been looming over her, sat down on the arm of a chair.

"Not there, dear child. You're too heavy for my furniture," suggested his mother. Ferdinand removed his thirteen stone to the seat of the chair without comment and looked across at her. His expression had altered considerably.

"Are you pulling my leg, Mother?"

"No, child. I've found Bella Foxley."

"Then who was it committed suicide?"

"Well, not Bella."

"The sister ...?"

"Murdered, possibly. If so, she was held head-downward in the rain-water butt outside the woodshed of their cottage in the village of Pond, transported to the pond at Pond, left there to be found by any who would, and the rest abandoned to Fate and the crass stupidity of a coroner who wouldn't believe that what the village idiot said was evidence."

"What did the village idiot say?"

"He said that it was the rain-water washed her cheeks so white."

"I seem to have heard that before."

"Yes, I have transposed his rude rustic remark into the key of the poetic."

"You couldn't take that statement as evidence, coming from such a source."

"You could investigate it, though," said Mrs. Bradley. "Instead of that, the boy was told not to waste the time of the court."

"When is all this supposed to have happened?"

"Well, the doctor put the time of death at between noon and three o'clock. She wasn't found until almost dusk. It was winter, too, which gives the idiot boy's evidence all the more importance. Whenever you would choose to wash yourself in the rain-water butt, you would hardly do so in November, I imagine. Bella must have drowned Tessa, gone straight to the Mothers' Meeting, and then had tea at the vicarage."

"But why should she kill her sister?"

"That remains to be seen. Why should she kill Cousin Tom? We know why she may have killed the old aunt."

"You'll never prove a word of it, Mother."

"Probably not," said Mrs. Bradley, in such tones of self-satisfaction that her son lifted his black brows and grinned.

"Something up your sleeve," he announced.

Mrs. Bradley by this time had the enlargements of the snapshots.

"Ask your friend Pratt to dinner," she observed. "You see this woman?"

"Who is she?"

"That," said Mrs. Bradley, "is for Mr. Pratt to say."

Mr. Pratt, confronted with both snapshot and enlargement, did not hesitate.

"If it was ten years younger—well, say, five ..."

"Say six, and you'll be about right," interposed Mrs. Bradley. Pratt looked at her out of heavily lidded eyes.

"I should say it was Bella Foxley," he concluded. Mrs. Bradley produced the snapshot which the vicar had signed and dated.

"And this?" she said, presenting it so that the ex-journalist saw the photograph.

"The same, isn't it? Looks like the same snap to me."

"It is," said Mrs. Bradley. "And the man who developed the negative can swear to the date. That is arranged. Now read what is here." She turned the snapshot over.

"But the fellow can't be right, unless the two of them were identical twins," said Mr. Pratt.

"They were not in the least alike," said Mrs. Bradley gently, "and neither were they twins."

She then explained the circumstances under which the photographs had been taken, and then produced George's profile view of Miss Foxley.

"Oh, well, that one I'd swear to. It's the view I mostly saw of her in court," declared Mr. Pratt.

"You've got something there, Mother," said Ferdinand.

"Of course she has," said Caroline, now Mrs. Bradley's firm adherent. A diversion was caused at