The vicar stared helplessly after her as she walked out of the house with the trousers slung gracefully over her arm.
II
At eight o’clock in the evening, Felicity returned. She helped the last child off the bus, delivered each of the fifteen to a waiting parent, returned the courtesies of the whole band – parents and children too – and walked straight in at Mrs Bradley’s front door, which was standing wide open.
‘Well?’ said Mrs Bradley, appearing abruptly from the kitchen, where she had been superintending the dishing up of dinner.
Felicity seized her arm.
‘I’ve seen it!’ she said.
‘Seen what, my dear?’
‘Behind the model of a Roman shield. How did you know? Had you seen it, or did you guess? Oh, but you must have seen it! But how did it get there? Nobody has a key to those cases except Father and the curator – oh, and the bishop, of course! Mrs Bradley’ – she shook the old woman’s arm – ‘do explain! What is it?’
Mrs Bradley led her into the dining-room and pushed her into a chair.
‘To the best of my knowledge and belief,’ she said, ‘it is Rupert Sethleigh’s skull.’
‘But how did it get there?’ Felicity pulled off her hat and pushed a hand through her hair.
‘That is something which I would give a good deal to know for certain,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I suppose it would be too much to ask you to take another party of children to-morrow and look to see if it’s still there? I would go myself, but I am particularly anxious not to appear in this little comedy. My part shall be that of stage-manager. Oh, and tell your father the inspector refuses to be parted from those trousers! I am awfully sorry. I feared something of the kind might be the case. However’ – she chuckled ghoulishly and bared her tigerish teeth – ‘they are not the nether garments of the late lamented Sethleigh. I can’t think why I ever thought they would be, but of that some more anon. Never mind! The skull is his if the trousers are not! Half a loaf is better than no bread. Go up and wash, child, and stay here to dinner.’
The last thing Felicity saw as she turned to go up the stairs was Mrs Bradley’s grin. She began to understand how Alice in Wonderland must have felt upon first beholding the Cheshire Cat.
CHAPTER XVI
Mrs Bradley Takes a Hand
I
‘I WANT to hear more about that suitcase,’ said Mrs Bradley to Felicity Broome. ‘Can you spare ten minutes?’
‘I should be glad to get away from this for a little while.’ Felicity waved her arms expressively at sixteen yards of curtaining which she was cutting up and machining ready for the Vicarage windows. ‘It’s ages since we had some new curtains, and I simply had to have these. Not that we can afford them,’ she added frankly, ‘but the unspeakable Lulu scorched the last lot nearly to bits, so I simply had to get some more.’ She pushed the billows of material aside and stood up.
‘Lulu? You don’t mean – ?’
‘Lulu Hirst, otherwise Savile. Yes, I do. She took a fancy to Father and offered to do anything we liked in the way of washing and ironing. She used to work in a laundry before she became an artist’s model. She does all Father’s and the choristers’ surplices, and things like that. We daren’t trust Mary Kate with anything which really matters, so when Lulu offered to wash and iron the curtains I didn’t like to refuse. But you should have seen the state in which she brought them home! She was frightfully upset about it, of course, and offered to provide new ones, but we could not let her do that, especially as she had always done everything so beautifully and so carefully before.’
‘Well, come along,’ said Mrs Bradley briskly. ‘In here? All right. Now, first I want to know who found this suitcase.’
‘I did.’
‘Where?’
‘On our dust-heap.’
‘Do you often have occasion to visit the dust-heap?’
‘Yes. You see, Mary Kate is so frightfully wasteful that the only way I can keep her in check is to visit the dust-heap daily and make myself frightfully nasty if she has thrown away anything unnecessarily.’
‘I see. And you thought it was unnecessary to throw away a suitcase?’
‘Well, I picked it up and at once noticed Rupert Sethleigh’s initials. I knew Father had borrowed it for our holiday in May, but I was under the impression that he had returned it.’
‘Now think very carefully for a minute,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘and then tell me what gave you that impression.’
Felicity’s grey eyes, lovely in their sweet seriousness, gazed unseeingly into the blue haze of the July morning. She had seated herself on the broad step which led into the garden and her hands were clasped round her knees. Mrs Bradley, looking at her, sighed inaudibly.
After some moments, Felicity looked up at the old woman and answered slowly:
‘After we came back from Hastings, Father put it on the landing outside his bedroom door, because he knows how absent-minded and forgetful he is, and so he said that seeing it would remind him to return it. Well, now. We went to Hastings in early May – I’ve got the date somewhere. Excuse me a minute. I’ll go upstairs and find it.’
She soon returned with a small blue diary.
‘Here we are.’
She turned over the pages.
‘We went down there on May 2nd, and we came home on May 12th. Short, but quite sweet, you see. The suitcase would have been put on the landing – Now, let me see, Father did not unpack it until the Monday, when I reminded him that his collars and things must be washed. The 12th was a Wednesday, so that makes it the 17th when it was put on the landing. I last saw it –’ She screwed up her charming nose in a gallant effort to remember, but at last was compelled to shake her head. ‘I am awfully sorry,’ she confessed, ‘but I can’t remember. It couldn’t have been more than a fortnight ago, I think, that I noticed it there, but I can’t remember the actual day. I know I continually badgered Father to return it, but he kept forgetting. I would have returned it myself, except that I hated going up to the Manor House alone when Rupert Sethleigh was there. I don’t mind now.’
The Reverend Stephen Broome came in just as she finished speaking.
‘Oh, I say, Felicity,’ he began. Mrs Bradley cut him short ruthlessly.
‘Be quiet, my dear,’ she said.
The vicar stopped short, and stared at her as a man might who had been wakened suddenly from sleep.
‘And let me think,’ Mrs Bradley went on. ‘Felicity, did Lulu Hirst ever wash and iron your father’s clerical collars?’
‘Always,’ replied Felicity. ‘Why? Oh, and one is missing, by the way. I must ask her about it.’
‘Do, my dear. And now, where is my friend Mary Kate?’
Felicity went to the door and called her by name. Mary Kate entered, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘And what will you be after this time, ma’am?’ she enquired, with a deference she would have scorned to display towards weaker and meeker women than Mrs Bradley.
‘First, I will be after suggesting that you do not come into my presence and that of your mistress fingering your apron in that distressingly fidgety fashion,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘Secondly, I want a piece of string and a sheet – a very large sheet – of brown paper.’
‘Is it a string and brown paper you’re expecting to get the loan of in this house!’ cried Mary Kate, lifting her hands in horror. ‘Sure, Saint Michael and all his angels couldn’t be finding string and brown paper hereabouts, without they would be bringing it with them! Sure, I’m telling you, the only bit of string that was fit to hang a cat I ever saw in this house was the same that was holding up the trousers of his reverence on him, the way he wouldn’t be knowing which way to look for the buttons that were off them when the bishop and Herself came here for a wet of tea that day. And myself baking the face off me with the scones they ate and the dog over the way snatching the cold meat from under me very nose and I grasping it from his jaws before himself could be ating it entirely, bad cess to him for a slavering brute of a great rascally thief!’ cried Mary Kate, in an inspired burst of rhetoric.