No Winding Sheet
Gladys Mitchell
Bradley 65
A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
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Contents
1: Unexplained Absence
2: In Retrospect
3: An Addition to the List of Missing Persons
4: Parade of Tenants
5: Hounds in Leash
6: Labour in Vain
7: A Question of Water-Lilies
8: Digging Up the Past
9: Self-Appointed Sleuth
10: A Finger in the Pie
11: Concerning Chickens
12: Lost, Stolen or Strayed
13: Writers and Painters
14: Hounds in Cry
15: The Runaways
16: The Official Opening
17: Every Picture Tells a Story
Also by Gladys Mitchell
speedy death • spotted hemlock
mystery of a butcher’s shop • the man who grew tomatoes
the longer bodies • say it with flowers
the saltmarsh murders • the nodding canaries
death at the opera • my bones will keep
the devil at saxon wall • adders on the heath
dead man’s morris • death of a delft blue
come away death • pageant of murder
st. peter’s finger • the croaking raven
printer’s error • skeleton island
brazen tongue • three quick and five dead
hangman’s curfew • dance to your daddy
when last i died • gory dew
laurels are poison • lament for leto
the worsted viper • a hearse on may day
sunset over soho • the murder of busy lizzie
my father sleeps • a javelin for jonah
the rising of the moon • winking at the brim
here comes a chopper • convent of styx
death and the maiden • late, late in the evening
the dancing druids • noonday and night
tom brown’s body • fault in the structure
groaning spinney • wraiths and changelings
the devil’s elbow • mingled with venom
the echoing strangers • nest of vipers
merlin’s furlong • mudflats of the dead
faintley speaking • uncoffin’d clay
watson’s choice • the whispering knights
twelve horses and the hangman’s noose
the twenty-third man • the death-cap dancers
here lies gloria mundy • death of a burrowing mole
the greenstone griffins • cold, lone and still
After more than fifty years of crime-writing, Gladys Mitchell died in July 1983 at her home in Corfe Mullen, Dorset. No Winding-Sheet, which went to press shortly before her death, is set in the school surroundings that she knew so well from her many years of teaching. It is her 66th crime novel.
Mr Pythias, the geography master at Sir George Etherege school, fails to reappear for work at the end of the Christmas holidays. Also missing are several thousand pounds collected for a school trip to Greece. Pythias is suspected of having absconded with the money, but police inquiries at the school and the master’s lodging-house draw a blank.
The mystery deepens when a dead body is discovered buried on the school premises and two boys disappear from the school. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and her intrepid assistant Laura Gavin are called in to track down the boys and solve the riddle of the vanishing schoolmaster.
‘Gladys Mitchell was a much-admired member of the great sisterhood of English detective writers from the late 1920s onwards, headed by Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. They all avoided unnecessary violence and concentrated on the whodunnit puzzle.’
—Daily Telegraph
Gladys Mitchell’s first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929, and she continued to write until just before her death, building up a devoted following. Her style and originality received consistently glowing praise. She spent over forty years as a schoolmistress, and several of her books are set in a school environment. She died at the age of 82, in July 1983.
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd
44 Bedford Square, London WC1,1984
© 1984 by Gladys Mitchell
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mitchell, Gladys No winding-sheet
I. Title
823'.912[F] PR6O25.I832
ISBN 0 7181 2399 9
Composition by Allset, London
Printed in Great Britain by Hollen Street Press, Slough, and bound by Hunter and Foulis Ltd, Edinburgh
To my grandnephew
DOUGLAS JAMES MITCHELL
with love and best wishes
1
Unexplained Absence
^ »
At the end of the Christmas vacation the Sir George Etherege school re-assembled on a Thursday and each form master kept his own class so that textbooks and stationery could be distributed, dinner money collected, timetables dictated and nametapes on shorts and gym shoes inspected. The Sir George Etherege was a well-run school, but, even so, the staff were glad enough of a weekend respite when the first two days of the term were behind them and normal working could be resumed.
Every Monday morning, however, was still a detested beginning to the week, for, until the mid-morning break, each master again had to keep his own class instead of teaching his specialised subject. There were reasons for this. On Mondays after assembly, the dinner money for the week was collected by the dinner monitors, who then took it to the school secretary’s office. With any luck they could contrive that this coveted chore kept them out of lessons for up to twenty minutes if she was on the telephone or in consultation with the headmaster. Even three-quarters of an hour was not entirely unheard of.
Then there were the winter swimmers. During the summer term swimming was a compulsory subject and was part of the physical education course, but in the Easter term only those boys were taken to the municipal baths whose parents were prepared to pay the fee.
There were also the Catholics, a small minority but one which had permission to be out of school for an hour from nine-thirty on Mondays so that they could receive instruction in their faith from the parish priest.
‘If only the Church had stuck to Latin,’ said a junior master, ‘the priest might teach them enough of that logically constructed language to improve their written English. As it is, the whole system is wrong and ought to be scrapped.’
‘What we need,’ said someone else, ‘is to extend the system, not do away with it.’
‘As how?’ asked another young man.
‘Well, we get rid of the swimmers and the priest’s lot, so why not the C. of E’s, the Free Church adherents and the Sally Anns? We have one or two Jewish boys also. If we could get shot of the lot of them on Monday mornings, we could all have a free period until break or even not come in at all until about eleven. How about that?’
‘Might work if all the parents were worshippers,’ said Pybus, the art master, ‘but with seventy per cent of them never going anywhere near a church of any sort, you might find yourself worse off if you put your idea into practice. You might have to keep your own class until Monday dinner-time. Ten to one you wouldn’t persuade the various denominations to stick to the nine-thirty to ten-thirty schedule that the priest accepts.’
At this point, on this particular Monday morning, the deputy head (still known to most of the profession as the head assistant) came into the staffroom, looked around at the assembled company and said, ‘Oh, Pythias not in again? I expect there will be a medical certificate this morning. Oh, well, we’ve all got our own boys until break, so I can leave the sixth to get on with private study and double up for him when I’ve seen my lot settled. At break I’ll let you know who’s got to lose free periods for the rest of the day.’