The Longer Bodies

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Gladys Mitchell

Title Page

Chapter One: Vagaries of a Rich Relation

Chapter Two: The Gathering of the Clan

Chapter Three: Rabbit and Javelin

Chapter Four: Friday Night and Saturday Morning

Chapter Five: Abrupt Termination of an Inglorious Career

Chapter Six: Great-aunt Puddequet is Happy

Chapter Seven: But Inspector Bloxham is Not

Chapter Eight: Irritating Attitude of a Lady Old Enough to Know Better

Chapter Nine: Kost and Caddick, or the Babes in the Wood

Chapter Ten: Night Birds

Chapter Eleven: What Happened to Anthony?

Chapter Twelve: Mrs Bradley visits the Scene of Crime

Chapter Thirteen: May Fair

Chapter Fourteen: The Little Mermaid

Chapter Fifteen: Mrs Bradley Listens In

Chapter Sixteen: And the Cowes Jumped Over the Moon

Chapter Seventeen: Noughts and Crosses

Chapter Eighteen: Questionable Behaviour of a Champion Cyclist

Chapter Nineteen: Autobiography of a Murderer

Chapter Twenty: The Story of the Second Roman Gladiator

Chapter Twenty-One: Mrs Bradley Takes the Bun

More Vintage Murder Mysteries

Copyright

Great Aunt Puddequet was reputed to be enormously wealthy. It was also a tradition in the family that she was extraordinarily mean. So when the malicious old bird summons her grand-nephews to perform in a games tournament in order to secure their inheritances, they gloomily oblige. Before long, the country house games are interrupted by murder.

The police are baffled, but fortunately Mrs Bradley, an unusual psychoanalyst with a flair for sleuthing, has begun to take an keen interest in the Puddequet Olympics.

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys' as Philip Larkin called her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

Her first novel,
Speedy Death
, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

Speedy Death

The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

The Saltmarsh Murders

Death at the Opera

The Devil at Saxon Wall

Dead Men's Morris

Come Away, Death

St Peter's Finger

Printer's Error

Brazen Tongue

Hangman's Curfew

When Last I Died

Laurels Are Poison

The Worsted Viper

Sunset Over Soho

My Father Sleeps

The Rising of the Moon

Here Comes a Chopper

Death and the Maiden

Tom Brown's Body

Groaning Spinney

The Devil's Elbow

The Echoing Strangers

Merlin's Furlong

Watson's Choice

Faintley Speaking

Twelve Horses and the Hangman's Noose

The Twenty-Third Man

Spotted Hemlock

The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

Say It With Flowers

The Nodding Canaries

My Bones Will Keep

Adders on the Heath

Death of a Delft Blue

Pageant of Murder

The Croaking Raven

Skeleton Island

Three Quick and Five Dead

Dance to Your Daddy

Gory Dew

Lament for Leto

A Hearse on May-Day

The Murder of Busy Lizzie

Winking at the Brim

A Javelin for Jonah

Convent on Styx

Late, Late in the Evening

Noonday and Night

Fault in the Structure

Wraiths and Changelings

Mingled With Venom

The Mudflats of the Dead

Nest of Vipers

Uncoffin'd Clay

The Whispering Knights

Lovers, Make Moan

The Death-Cap Dancers

The Death of a Burrowing Mole

Here Lies Gloria Mundy

Cold, Lone and Still

The Greenstone Griffins

The Crozier Pharaohs

No Winding-Sheet

GREAT-AUNT PUDDEQUET
was reputed to be enormously wealthy. It was also a tradition in the family that she was extraordinarily mean.

‘The only thing she seems inclined to give away without stint,' said her nephew Godfrey on his wedding day, ‘is unasked-for advice.'

He eyed her wedding present, the plated silver teapot and cream jug to match, with unaffected disgust. The unstinted advice she had seen fit to bestow upon him on this important occasion had been a solemn recommendation to marry Money instead of his chosen bride, the meek and gentle Elizabeth Tully, daughter of a country clergyman and a nursery governess in her own right, and Godfrey had replied briefly and suitably to the suggestion. For three years aunt and nephew neither met nor corresponded.

‘And now,' Godfrey remarked to the unassuming Elizabeth three days after the birth of their first child, ‘it's up to us to buck things up all round. The old girl shan't have the satisfaction of seeing my son grow up a poor man. She says she's sending him a christening mug.'

There is nothing more conducive to success than a definite aim. By the time his fourth child, also a boy, was of an age to attend a preparatory school, Godfrey Yeomond was a prosperous man.

It took Matilda Puddequet exactly thirty-two years to forget the cause of her quarrel with her nephew. At the end of that time she summoned her paid companion, an angular, romantically minded, unmarried woman who had spent twelve years of self-abnegation in the old lady's service, and observed, without preamble of any kind:

‘Companion Caddick, I am growing old.'

‘Yes, Mrs Puddequet?' replied Miss Caddick hopefully. She had read in the paper only the day before of a housekeeper-companion to an aged gentlewoman who had been left a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds on the demise of her employer, and Miss Caddick, who was of a mathematical turn of mind, had put down, in the form of a proportion sum at the back of her diary, her own hopes and expectations, thus:

‘Housekeeper-companion receives £15,000 out of net personalty of £161,512 after ten years' continuous service. Companion-secretary receives £
x
out of net personalty of £
y
after twelve years' (minus three days for Cousin Aggie's funeral) continuous service, taking gross fortune of employer to be £500,000.

‘N.B.—Or it might be a little more.'

She had worked out the answer by using various approximate amounts in the place of £
y
, and had then found the average of the results. The sum of twenty-five thousand pounds, which evolved from these complicated proceedings, frightened her, so she scribbled all over it to hide it from view.

‘Just in case . . .' she murmured to herself, thinking of eyes other than her own which might read the astounding answer to the sum.

Like a murderer who has hidden the corpse in the wardrobe, however, she knew that it was there. Twenty-five thousand pounds! Twenty-five thousand!

Old Mrs Puddequet regarded her companion-secretary with suspicion. She was a very old lady, parrot-beaked, shrill-voiced, and imperious.

‘What do you mean by agreeing with me in that tone?' she squealed. ‘Why did I quarrel with Godfrey?'

Immediately and intelligently perceiving that if any possible beneficiary was in her employer's mind it was one of the several relatives whose names were so seldom mentioned in the house, Miss Caddick relinquished her dreams of the twenty-five thousand pounds, screwed up her pale eyes, wrinkled her pointed nose, and adopted an expression of agonized mental stress. She had learned by experience that it did not pay to remember things which her employer had forgotten; therefore, after a period of facial contortion lasting perhaps fifteen seconds, she shook her severely neat head, pursed her thin lips, frowned again in stern concentration of thought, and finally shook her head again.

‘I am really very much afraid, Mrs Puddequet—' she began.

‘You're a fool, Companion Caddick,' squealed old Mrs Puddequet viciously. ‘Order the bathchair, and send for the cook.'

The cook was Scottish, unafraid of her employer, strong, capable, and a woman of one remark which she produced, apparently from the pit of her stomach, on all domestic occasions. It was short, and to the point, and consisted of the words, ‘I'll see masel' drooned first.' She came into old Mrs Puddequet's room on receipt of the summons from Miss Caddick, gazed dourly on her employer, and listened in scornful silence whilst Great-aunt Puddequet outlined the meals for the day. Then she spoke.

‘Is it the hash ye'll hae for lunch? I'll see masel' drooned first!'

‘And why cannot we have the hash for lunch?' screamed old Mrs Puddequet, who, by a daily encounter with this redoubtable foe, had kept herself alive and healthy for the past ten years.

‘And why will ye no be hae'ing the hash? Forbye, ye puir body, there'll no be mair than a quatter o' a poond o' the beef remaining since Mr Timon was feeding his beasties wi' it the morn.'

‘Oh,' squealed Great-aunt Puddequet, ‘he was, was he? Well, cook, suggest something yourself, and don't be a fool!'

‘Ou, ay!' retorted Mrs Macbrae. ‘Is it me to be daeing your wark for ye? I'll see masel' drooned first! Cook the guid meat I will, but fash aboot thinkin' it oot I winna! Ye ken me.
I'm
no' the leddy o' the hoose!'

‘Promptly at one you will send a well-cooked, well-served lunch to table, and no more nonsense!' squealed Great-aunt Puddequet, ‘and I don't care whether you see yourself drowned or not!'

The cook went away, and old Mrs Puddequet turned again to Miss Caddick. The passage-at-arms had restored her good humor. She lowered her cracked old voice and spoke kindly.

‘You will find Godfrey Yeomond's address at the back of my bureau,' she said. ‘Write to him, Companion, and say that I am going to visit him on Thursday. I want to have a look at his children.'

Godfrey Yeomond guffawed when he read the letter.

‘She wants to see the children before she dies,' pronounced his wife. ‘Poor thing. I expect she's very lonely and unhappy right out there in the country. Write back quickly, dear, and tell her how very welcome she is.'

‘I'd better tip the boys the wink to be civil to her,' said Godfrey, pursuing a different train of thought. ‘Her money's got to be left somewhere, and she was never one to be fond of cats.'

He paused.

‘I don't see why she shouldn't take a fancy to the boys or Priscilla,' he went on. ‘They're nice kids though I say it. But, of course, there are the Brown-Jenkins lot and the Cowes, besides that Anthony family she married into. I'll drop the boys a hint to mind where they put their feet while she's here. They'll have their work cut out to be civil, though, if she's the same vinegar-tongued old hag she used to be.'