‘Why?’
‘Call it instinct.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Susan, rousing herself as though she had been heartened, as indeed she had. ‘I know your reputation for catching criminals. You know who the Crozier murderer is, don’t you?’
‘Do you?’ asked Laura, when Susan, having told them a story which was an appendix to what they already knew, had got out of the car and gone home.
‘Do I what?’
‘Know who the murderer is.’
‘So would you if you thought over all that we have been told, but, as usual, it is a question of proof, as Nicholas Blake has put it. However, I hope to learn from a little experiment I am going to make with the assistance of those Watersmeet photographs which were not published in the newspapers. Meanwhile, think of what we have been told.’
‘Does Susan’s story, the one she has just told us, come into it?’
‘I think not, except that Dr Rant died and that some time after his death, when the Rant sisters decided to breed Pharaohs, Susan became kennel-maid to Sekhmet and the cherished hounds.’
‘You said she was not the murderer, but you mention Dr Rant. You don’t mean that Dr Rant was also murdered, do you?’
‘If he was not, my whole theory falls to the ground.’
Laura did not voice the astonishment she felt, but, as she drove homewards, she turned the conversation on to the story they had heard from Susan. They had known that she had been adopted by the vicar of Axehead and the twin villages of Abbots Crozier and Abbots Bay, and that her tiny income came from interest on the money he had left her in his will. They also knew that she remembered a brother. In the account she had just given them, she said that she had lost track of him after she became a member of the vicar’s household, for, as a child, she was not allowed to write to him and when she was old enough to decide such matters for herself, she found that the home where they had been fostered together had been vacated and she could find nobody who could tell her where the inmates had gone. She did not pursue her enquiries very far, for she reasoned that her brother would be old enough to be at work and could be anywhere in the British Isles or even in Canada or Australia or some other part of the globe. In any case, they had never, as children, been very close friends, so, having made some attempt to trace him and failed, she soon gave up the quest and, after the deaths of her adoptive parents, whose surname she had taken, she occupied herself by taking seasonal jobs in the hotels of Abbots Bay and Abbots Crozier and in such occupations as baby-sitting to families in Axehead, where there was a repertory theatre and a dance hall, or as an auxiliary worker in the Axehead hospital. She had also worked in the kennels of the moorland hunt and, later, for a veterinary surgeon in Castercombe, so when she discovered that the Rant sisters were keeping and occasionally breeding Pharaoh hounds, she had found, in her own words, ‘my life’s work and a couple of good friends, if only they would have me’.
Her complete independence, however, she did not abandon, for she felt, wisely, no doubt, that some of Dr Rant’s imperiousness had been bred into Bryony and that to maintain a certain amount of apartheid from the sisters was the policy to be followed. The arrangement suited all three. The sisters were happy to have Crozier Lodge to themselves each evening and Susan’s help was invaluable when they first took on the Pharaoh hounds. Susan retained her own little home and steadfastly refused any money payment for her services, though the sisters insisted on feeding her.
All this came out in Susan’s story and so did the explanation of her suspect activities on the morning of the Watersmeet death and her subsequent refusal to disclose to the police where she had been before she showed up at Crozier Lodge and found that Sekhmet was missing.
‘What made you go to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house?’ Dame Beatrice had asked. ‘Such was not your custom, was it?’
‘I have a keener sense of smell than either of the Rants,’ Susan had replied, ‘and I detected the smell of aniseed the moment I got inside the gates. I went straight to the stable yard, but the hounds were all right, although, of course, very restless and excited because they could smell the aniseed, too, so then I thought I had better check on Sekhmet. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to steal her, but Morpeth valued her and it was no secret that the Rants had money, so Morpeth might have offered quite a sizeable reward to get the dog back. That was the way I reasoned.’
‘That won’t quite do,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You have nothing to lose by being frank with me. Let us forget the aniseed and come to what you were doing before you reached Crozier Lodge.’
The rest of Susan’s story had followed. It was some weeks after she had joined Bryony and Morpeth that she encountered the poacher Adams, and it was not until Bryony mentioned his name and remarked how useful it was when he brought along rabbits for the hounds that she realised the poacher’s name was the same as that which she had been made to abandon when the vicar and his wife adopted her.
‘They wanted me to feel that I was their very own daughter,’ Susan said, ‘and that I would be proud to take their name. I don’t know about being proud,’ she added, addressing Laura rather than Dame Beatrice, ‘but it gave me a feeling of safety which was heaven after feeling so lost. They treated us quite well at the Home, but it was impersonal, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel as though you belonged anywhere and my brother and I were separated, I thought for ever, once I was adopted and went to live at the vicarage, and we never met after that until the day I first opened the back door to him at Abbots Crozier. He didn’t know who I was then, and he doesn’t now. I have never told him I am his sister. Snobbishness, I suppose, but not everybody wants to claim relationship with the village poacher. But every now and then, when my bit of interest comes in, I buy him a shirt or a jacket or trousers from a jumble sale. That’s where I was that morning, taking him a lovely wool shirt that I had picked up the previous week. He may be a poacher and perhaps a bit of a thief, but he’s a decent man and I like to think I’ve got somebody belonging to me, even if they themselves don’t know it.’
‘Well, I am deeply affected by this artless tale,’ said Dame Beatrice briskly and without irony, ‘but it does not explain, so far as I am concerned, a point of some importance. What did you do when you found that Adams was not at home when you called?’
‘I guessed he was out rabbiting. I had plenty of time before I needed to show up at Crozier Lodge and I wanted to give him my present personally, so I hung about on the moor until he came back. It wasn’t all that long to wait. I gave him the shirt but asked him to say nothing about it to anybody — ’
‘Did he never wonder why you offered him these kindnesses?’
‘He thought they were because I had been brought up in a vicarage and was accustomed to doing acts of charity. We never wrote to one another after we were separated, as I told you, so, although I suppose he had heard I was not the vicar’s own child, he had no idea that I was his sister because of the change of name.’
‘So, when you met him that morning, he told you that he had left the rabbits in the postbox and that somebody had walked off with Sekhmet,’ said Laura. ‘Simple, when you know the answer. So that’s why you went straight to Sekhmet’s kennel before you went up to the house.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell the police what you had done and where you had been, instead of letting them suspect you and search your cottage?’
‘She has answered that,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She did not want a connection made between her and Adams.’
‘I should have told them if things had got worse for me,’ said Susan. ‘I was pretty badly scared when they did search the cottage and found that ridiculous hat. I knew then what I had suspected all along.’