[Mrs Bradley 41] - Three Quick and Five Dead

the New Forest, Henri the chef and George the chauffeur were playing draughts. At the opposite end of the huge kitchen table, Zena, the kitchenmaid, was exercising her one and only art, that of cutting, at incredible speed, the paper-thin slices of bread and butter which accompanied her employer’s cups of tea, while Henri’s wife was making a pile of sandwiches, some of potted meat and others of cucumber, for the sturdier appetite of her employer’s secretary.
The employer and the secretary were in the library. Dame Beatrice was reading; Laura Gayin was writing a letter to her husband. The curtains were drawn, the log fire had been replenished, the lights were switched on and the atmosphere was homely and restful. Laura finished her letter, looked it over, addressed and stamped it and said,
‘I’ll just about catch the post if I take this now. I’d rather like Gavin to get it in the morning. Hope he can manage the week-end.’
‘Yes, indeed. Shall you take Fergus to the post-box with you?’
‘Yes, he can do with a run.’
The Irish wolfhound, hearing his name, raised his noble and unkempt head from Dame Beatrice’s bony knee. Laura had bought him; she also fed him, groomed him and took him out for exercise, but it was for Dame Beatrice, who seldom so much as spoke to him, that he had conceived a supreme and totally irrational affection. On her he had doted, from his first entrance into the Stone House, with an intensity of devotion which (as Laura pointed out) would have been excessive in a priestess of Isis confronted by the goddess in person.
The dog nominally belonged to Laura’s son Hamish. A change of Staff at his preparatory school had seen the introduction of a young woman to teach biology, and it had been at her suggestion that the headmaster had agreed, with some reluctance, to allow the boys to keep their pets at school. Hamish had secured a long week-end from school in order that his mother might take him to Crufts. He would lose face, he maintained, if he turned up at the beginning of the summer term without a pet, and his choice of pet was a dog.
‘You’ve got your pony,’ Laura pointed out, ‘and you keep him at the riding stables near the school.’
‘But not in the school, mamma.’
Full of misgivings which proved to be fully justified, Laura had taken him to the dog show of his choice. Fergus was the result. The headmaster, gazing at the Gargantuan offering with horror, issued a kindly-expressed but unarguable veto, and Fergus was banished to the Stone House, where, as Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin pointed out to his disconsolate son, he would be in the proud position of guarding the place against marauders and the women from attack.
‘Although what he’ll probably do,’ said Laura privily to Dame Beatrice, ‘is to take any intruders by the sleeve and lead them to all the stuff that’s best worth pinching. What’s more,’ she added, ‘at his present rate of progress, he’ll eat us out of house and home in a fortnight.’
(2)
To reach the post-office from the Stone House involved following a country road alongside a stretch of common and then crossing a shallow watersplash by means of a wooden footbridge. The ground rose fairly steeply, after this, to the main village street with its shops. Beyond these lay the railway station and, about a mile further on, the golf-links.
When she had crossed the watersplash, Laura slipped the lead on to the dog’s collar and, in obedience to her long strides, he padded along at her side until they reached the post-office. She kept him on the lead until they had passed the level-crossing and were in a winding lane. This brought them alongside the common again, this time on its south instead of its west side. Here she set the great hound free.
They had passed some old cottages and a small guest-house when Fergus became uneasy. He stopped and gave a whimpering sound which Laura had not heard from him before.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s not dark enough for you to be seeing ghosts.’ The sun had set, and the mist and the purple twilight were an invitation and a reminder to her to get indoors to a lighted room, a log fire and her tea, but the dog remained immovable. Laura dropped a hand to his collar and could feel that he was quivering. ‘Whatever is the matter?’ she asked. For answer, Fergus backed away from her restraining fingers and, before she knew what was happening, he had given a howl and had set off across the common, following a glimmering path which led ultimately to some woods.
Laura called to him, ordering him to come back, but the great hound loped on, and she lost sight of him in the misty twilight. She took the same path and began to run, shouting his name, but the darkness was closing in, so she gave up the hopeless chase and retraced her steps, feeling sure that the dog would return in his own good time. She was, however, surprised that he should have turned disobedient to her voice, for, although he was only half-trained, he was extremely docile.
‘You’ve been a long time,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly, when Laura returned to the library.
‘Our lunatic hound felt the call of the wild and galloped off across the common. I went after him for a bit, but I lost him in the murk. I expect he’ll come home when he’s hungry.’
This was not the case. Six o’clock, his feeding time, came, but there was still no sign of his return, and at half-past six, when Dame Beatrice was about to go up to change for dinner, Celestine’s threatened hysteria caused Henri to send Zena to the library to ask whether somebody should go out in search of the dog.
‘George said he’d be very pleased to try and find the doggie, mum, and has got a torch in the car like a