Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘My dear chap, of course not. It is one thing for him to take somebody in with him; quite another for him to lend the key to somebody else, particularly to somebody who turned up out of the blue and wished herself on us the way Gloria did.’

‘I thought you might have been glad to see her,’ said Celia. ‘She must have been pretty sure of her welcome to have chanced her arm like that.’

‘What do you mean? I hate the sight of her.’

I closed the door behind me and left them to it. At the top of the stairs I met McMaster with a towel over his arm.

‘Thank God for what Rupert Brooke called “the benison of hot water”,’ he said. ‘What’s happening about our precious Gloria? I hope those two made a mistake and she isn’t still on the premises.’

‘Anthony is going over to find out.’ I was tempted to tell him that Gloria, however involuntarily, had already managed to create friction between husband and wife, but I thought better of it. It was no business of mine, anyway.

When I went downstairs again, I realised that outwardly Anthony and Celia had patched up their differences. Aunt Eglantine had opted for a tray in her room instead of joining us at table, so the company was depleted in numbers, for the Coberleys had decided to remain at the school.

Anthony had been over to the old house and reported that one of the back windows was smashed and that the portrait which Coberley had shown me had disappeared. He supposed that Gloria had broken in and stolen it. He added, without looking at Celia, that he was not sorry it had gone. Gloria had gone, too. However doubtful Anthony had been about the information which Roland and Kay had given him, the disappearance of the picture, together with the broken window (a feature Coberley would have noticed and commented upon when he had shown me over the house) bore out what Roland had said.

Anthony had hammered on the front door, received no answer, and had then gone round to the back and knocked and shouted. There had been no response, so he had climbed in and found the place empty and the picture gone. This he confided only to Celia and myself while we were having cocktails before dinner.

When dinner was over, the four young people played Scrabble for a bit, but soon drifted off to bed. Aunt Eglantine, who had come down after dinner and had been communing either with herself or with the spirits of Kramer and Sprenger, also gave us little of her company. Celia went off to the ground-floor room she had allocated to her own use, and Anthony, McMaster and I settled down in Anthony’s den on the first floor and, with the assistance of his whisky, relived our youth by adopting Celia’s suggestion and talking over old times.

We broke up at well past midnight. Mopping-up operations seemed to have been completed and the house, except for a faint sound of water dripping from a leaky guttering somewhere, was almost eerily silent.

Breakfast was a silent meal, too. Anthony seemed preoccupied and Celia, who had come downstairs, poured coffee in an absentminded manner. I deduced that their little set-to about Gloria had been resumed, but there had been no sign of any rift at dinner on the previous night. There were no morning papers and when Anthony rang up he was told that the floods had held up deliveries.

Kay came down to say that Roland had a heavy cold. She had been to his room and found him flushed and very irritable. A tray was sent up to him and Celia suggested that somebody had better take his temperature, but Kay said that this was unnecessary, as he was always one to make a fuss if he had so much as a finger-ache. They were going home, anyway, as soon as the garage could bring round Roland’s car, she added. Celia, however, armed herself with a thermometer, but she came downstairs to report that Roland’s temperature was not much above normal. He had eaten his breakfast, would be down for lunch, and he and Kay would leave directly the car came. Hara-kiri had already departed.

Anthony rang up Coberley and he and Marigold came over. He denied having lent Gloria the key to the old house and, in view of the broken window, there was no reason to disbelieve him.

‘I was intrigued to notice the quite uncanny resemblance Miss Mundy’s hair and features bore to those of the girl in the picture,’ he said, ‘and from what I was able to observe of the young lady herself during the short time she was with us — ’

‘Yes, she is hardly a model who would have been chosen by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, to name but one painter who liked his ladies well-covered,’ said Marigold. ‘And now be quiet. To my mind, the picture was obscene, and I am glad the little boys are not to see it.’

‘The Malleus Maleficarum lays down,’ said Aunt Eglantine, who was with us at table again, ‘that the soul can sometimes effect a change in its own body. That herring-gutted little witch is a case in point. What were you saying about Rubens?’