[Mrs Bradley 55] - Nest of Vipers

to match. I'll just type out the new address again and we'll have cards printed for the tenants to send to their friends.'
'I'll have another firm do the job, and it won't be a local one this time, I can tell you,' I said, remembering the manager's amusement.
'Nest of Vipers, eh?' he had chuckled. 'Oh, well, sir, let's hope the old saying won't work out in this case.'
'Old saying?'
'That there's many a true word spoken in jest, sir.'
Well, Constance Kent spread the story around and it became a tiresome joke for a bit. For my own satisfaction I put out one or two feelers in order to pin down the joker, but with no success. I put it squarely up to Billie Kennett and to Irelath Moore, to whose sense of humour I thought the altered address might well appeal, but both denied having perpetrated the jape. Irelath said that he wished he had thought of it. Billie said that she would have been delighted to have such an address on her notepaper, but had not the wit to think of anything so clever. I was forced to believe their denials and no clue so far has turned up to explain the substituted address.
The next contretemps was received with mixed feelings among our little group. It began with a conversation between Latimer Targe and Elysée Barnes. Owing to the nature of her work, that of a crime reporter for the county newspaper, Billie Kennett was out of the house most days and, owing to the nature of hers, Elysée spent some of the week in London attending fashion shows or studying the creations in the big London shops, and the rest of the week indoors sketching her cribs from what she had seen, writing up her copy (a word, for her, with a double meaning) and otherwise passing the time until Billie came home.
This meant that she was quite often alone in the apartment she shared with Billie and as, unlike Billie, she was a gregarious young woman, she would invite one or other of us to coffee or a drink or a stroll in the gardens with her. The two girls owned a car (Niobe had arranged for half a dozen well-screened lock-ups to be erected near the back of the house), but Elysée, on her days at home, never drove it because, on those occasions, Billie used it to get to her newspaper office. When Elysée had to go up to Town, she drove to the nearest station, nearly ten miles away, and left the car there against her return, while Billie took herself to work on her moped. It was on these occasions, I suppose, that Elysée dropped Miss Minnie in the town.
Because in some respects their occupations were complementary, Billie's as a crime reporter, Latimer's as a re-hasher of past crimes, he was the only male friend of Elysée's upon whom Billie did not look with a jealous and jaundiced eye. His work entailed a great deal of research, so he was often out of the house, but when he was at home he and Elysée were usually in one another's company. I suppose she showed him her sketches and he, no doubt, regaled her with an account of his often gruesome discoveries. Anyway, they liked to be together, although Elysée never pushed her luck to the extent of neglecting Billie in favour of Latimer Targe, neither do I think he would have wanted her to do so.
'I've stayed out of woman trouble ever since my wife died, old boy,' he said to me when we were having a drink together one evening. 'It's not that I don't like women, but once bitten twice shy, and one thing about these two girls, they're safe, if you know what I mean. You can talk to them and that's where it begins and ends.' (As I have stated, I did not think this need be true in Elysée's case, but I was not prepared to argue.)
I am sorry if this seems to be a digression, Dame Beatrice, but I think perhaps what follows will explain it. I know that the impudent joke about the name of the house and this friendship between Targe and Elysée seem unimportant, and I suppose they would have been unimportant except for what happened next.
The first inkling I had that the jest was not as innocent as I had supposed came from Latimer Targe himself. As I have mentioned, he made a living by re-hashing true stories of murder. He was, I would have thought, far too hardboiled a type to busy himself with the occult. The thing did not begin in that way, however.
He joined me as I was strolling beside the lake in the grounds one morning and his silence gave me the impression that he had something on his mind. We paced along side by side for a bit and then he unburdened himself.
'I say, old man, I've been looking up the records,' he said. 'I mean the records of this place, you know, this nest of vipers.'
'Oh, look here,' I said, 'surely that joke has grown whiskers by now!'
'Sorry, old man. Didn't mean to rib you. There was murder done here, you know. I looked it all up in the county library. Year of 1786. Owner got one of the maids into trouble and when her father - one of the tenants - came up to make a fuss about it, the squire shot him dead.'
'So what happened?' I asked. 'Even in 1786 landowners couldn't murder their tenants with impunity.'
'Oh, the squire got off. His bailiff swore that the farmer, or whatever he was, had come armed with a dirty great knife and that the shooting had been done in self-defence.'
'And the court accepted that?'
'They did. The person who got hanged was the girl. She lay in wait for the squire, persuaded him to dismount from his horse, enticed him into the cottage she had shared with her father