Missing Susan Read online

  The tourists stood up and began to collect purses and cameras. “Should we wake up Susan?” asked Kate Conway, flashing her Bambi eyelashes at the guide.

  No, let’s leave her here with the bus running and a handkerchief stuffed in the tailpipe. Aloud Rowan Rover managed to say, “Yes, indeed. She wouldn’t want to miss seeing the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She may have heard of him.”

  Bernard had opened the coach door and was waiting outside to assist the travelers as they stepped down.

  “Are you coming with us?” Maud Marsh asked him as she descended.

  Bernard laughed. “Not me. I’ll be having a cigarette break. Take your time, though.”

  Susan, stifling a yawn, grabbed her cardigan sweater and ambled off the bus. She looked around at the thatched cottage across the road, the ponies wandering about the green, the ancient pub, and finally at the steep and narrow road that curved away through trees and hedges.

  “We have to walk?” she wailed. “Can’t we get any closer?”

  “No,” said Maud, tying the laces of her running shoes. “The bus wouldn’t make it up that narrow lane.”

  Susan sighed. “I hope it’s worth seeing. I can’t believe we have to walk a mile to look at some pokey old church. These are Italian leather shoes I’m wearing! And it’s uphill!” The pathos of this statement was diminished somewhat by the sight of Maud Marsh, some forty years her senior, striding briskly along as if she were on level ground.

  “What flowers are those?” asked Nancy Warren, appearing at Rowan’s elbow as they began the climb.

  The guide peered over the privet hedge into a cottage garden, praying for a glimpse of a Michaelmas daisy. “It don’t know,” he said, frowning at a clump of dark pink blossoms in the direction of Nancy’s pointing. “I’m afraid I’m no gardener. Now, if you could poison someone with it, I might possibly know.”

  “Impatiens,” said Maud Marsh without breaking stride as she elbowed past.

  “Nancy loves to garden,” said Charles Warren. “Of course, in San Diego it’s probably easier to get the stuff to grow. Warmer climate.”

  “What do you use for water?” asked Susan Cohen. “Stale Perrier? In Minnesota, we never have water rationing.”

  The Californians exchanged glances that suggested they’d like to hold her head under a basin full of it.

  The road ended at a wrought-iron fence surrounding the small stone church. They stood for a moment before the arched entrance to the churchyard, taking in the beauty of the weathered stone, bathed in fading sunlight, and the serenity of the grounds, dotted only with simple crosses and gravestones. They felt out of place with their cameras and running shoes.

  While Rowan Rover waited for the non-Californians to make it up the hill, he took another look at his notes. “I think we’ll find Conan Doyle past the church, under one of the trees in the western part of the churchyard. Perhaps we ought to split up and have a go at reading tombstones.”

  Charles Warren took a few carefully metered shots of the church, and then followed the others into the churchyard. “This is an out-of-the-way place for Doyle to be buried, isn’t it?” he asked the guide.

  “Surely this is the only church at Minstead,” said Rowan. “Oh, I see! You expected such a famous writer to be buried somewhere more grand? Westminster Abbey, perhaps?”

  “Something like that,” Warren admitted. “After all, they had Jane Austen in the cathedral at Winchester-and she wrote romance novels.”

  Rowan pictured certain Victorian scholars of his acquaintance ranting in apoplectic rage at this cavalier dismissal of their favorite novelist. The vision pleased him immensely. “Life is hardly fair, is it?” he remarked to Charles.

  Up ahead they saw Emma Smith and her mother standing in front of a simple stone cross and waving semaphore-style to indicate that they found the grave. Soon everyone had gathered around it for a moment of silent homage, followed by an orgy of photography.

  “You’d think he could have afforded a better monument than that,” said Susan, lowering her camera.

  “I’m surprised that it didn’t say anything about his books on the tombstone,” said Kate Conway. “I thought someone might have chiseled CREATOR OF SHERLOCK HOLMES or something like that.”

  “Perhaps as a writer he felt that it was too late to advertise,” said Rowan with all the solemnity he could muster. “Is everyone finished here? Pictures all taken? Then, I think we should move on. Before we start back, though, I thought we might have a look inside the church itself. My references indicate that there is a private pew that is most unusual.”

  He led the way to the church entrance and ushered his party inside the small sanctuary. It was a simple country church with worn wooden pews, a tiny balcony, and a Victorian stained-glass window that blazed in the golden light of afternoon. The three-paneled window featured a kneeling angel on each side in a landscape of trees and a bright blue sky. They faced the image of an armored knight leading a white horse. The inscription below was a memorial to a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, dead at twenty-four.

  “Good heavens!” said Martha Tabram, staring up at the stained-glass window. “Do you know who that is?”

  “Sir Galahad, I expect,” said Rowan Rover, reading the inscription. “It’s a memorial to a young soldier, you see.”

  “It’s Ellen Terry,” she replied. “I never expected to see her in a church.”

  “Who’s Ellen Terry?” asked Elizabeth, hoping, at least, for a lady poisoner.

  “She was the first actress to receive a knighthood, I believe, but she had a rather scandalous life. Two illegitimate children! At seventeen she married the painter George Frederick Watts, which is when she posed for that picture of Sir Galahad that the stained-glass window people so shamelessly copied. Perhaps they didn’t know who posed for it.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t care,” Rowan observed. “After all, she has the face of an angel, doesn’t she? Whereas Eleanor Roosevelt was a virtuous woman, full of good works, but hardly anybody’s idea of a celestial being.”

  “But Ellen Terry isn’t connected to any murder cases?” Elizabeth persisted.

  “No, she seems to have had no trouble keeping that particular commandment,” said Rowan. “It was the Seventh she found difficult to manage.”

  “Is that what we came to see?” asked Susan, appearing at Rowan’s elbow. “A stained-glass window? In Minneapolis, we have much bigger and more ornate-”

  “No, actually, I didn’t know about Miss Terry’s cameo appearance in the Minstead church,” said Rowan, hastening to shut her up. “My guidebooks advise me that the most renowned facets of this sanctuary are the ancient marble font and the squire’s pew. The latter dates from Victorian times. I believe it is this way.” He led them back down the aisle toward the altar and indicated a small windowed alcove in the front of the church to the left of the altar. The spacious compartment contained cushioned pews and footstools, all enclosed by a low wooden barricade. In the white wall in front of the pews was a coal fireplace, so that the squire’s party could listen to the sermon in warm comfort.

  For a moment of bemused silence, the group stared at the deluxe accommodations, contemplating the privileges of Victorian gentry. Finally Rowan Rover said, “I trust that the flames of their private fireplace provided them a foretaste of their own hereafter.” In his student days, Rowan had dabbled in fashionable Socialism, and he had not entirely lost the habit of making egalitarian noises.

  When everyone had finished exploring the little country church, Rowan Rover led the downhill march to the parking area, where Bernard sprawled in the driver’s seat, cushioned in the blare of rock music from the radio. Maud Marsh, who hadn’t had quite enough exercise yet, trotted past the group with a cheerful wave. As soon as she tapped on the door, he straightened up and adjusted the dial until somnolent classical strains again issued forth from the dashboard. “Hullo, again,” he said, pushing the door lever. “Did you have a good walk?”

  “L
ovely, thank you!” Maud assured him. “The others will be along soon.”

  Bernard consulted his map. “And the next stop is the Rufus Stone, isn’t it? That shouldn’t be far from here.”

  Several minutes later Rowan Rover escorted the rest of the group back to the coach. He counted them off one by one as they climbed on board. “Eleven. All here, then.” He nodded to Bernard. “Can you get us to the Rufus Stone?”

  “No bother,” said Bernard. “Tea first or after?”

  “After, I think,” said Rowan, glancing at his watch. “Murder first.”

  The road to the heart of the New Forest reminded Elizabeth of a stretch of woodland in the Virginia Shenandoah, where trees shrouded the road. Modern pavement aside, it could be any century at all. Sunlight filtered through the spreading leaves, dappling the road with patches of light, and an unfettered brown pony ambled along the verge, untroubled by the passing coach. A few miles beyond the village of Minstead, Bernard pulled off into a gravel parking lot situated next to the road in a grove of trees. No buildings were in sight.

  “This is where we park to go and see the stone,” he explained as he cut the engine. “It’s just across the road there.”

  They filed out of the bus and waited for Rowan Rover to lead the expedition twenty yards across an empty road to the clearing where William II had died like a deer.

  Susan Cohen was reminded of Loring Park, the city park across from the Walker Sculpture Garden in downtown Minneapolis. She was making her comparison in exhaustive narrative detail.

  “Susan, be careful!” murmured Elizabeth as they stepped out onto the pavement.

  “What do you mean? Nothing is coming.”

  “Yes, but you looked the wrong way before you crossed,” Elizabeth pointed out. “In Britain they drive on the left side of the road.”

  “Well, I’ve only been here one day,” said Susan. “It’s hard to remember petty details like that.”

  It might help if you got your mind out of Minnesota, thought Elizabeth. “Just be careful, will you? London traffic will be a lot less forgiving than this New Forest bridle path.”

  As royal monuments go, the Rufus Stone was relatively modest, even casual. It stood near the center of the clearing, well within sight of the coach: a waist-high slab of stone recording the king’s fate matter-of-factly in small chiseled letters along the side of the marker.

  While the group took turns posing beside the Rufus Stone, Rowan Rover evidently felt that some sort of summation was called for. “On this spot, at approximately seven o’clock on the evening of August second, in the year 1100, King William Rufus was felled by an arrow and died.”

  “Do people die instantly from arrow wounds?” asked Elizabeth, who was back on the case.

  “They do if it gets them directly in the heart,” said Kate Conway with medical authority. “And aside from that, they might go pretty fast anyway if the wound was severe enough. I work in the emergency room, and you’d be surprised how fast people can die if they go into shock.”

  “Pretty lucky shot for a deer ricochet, though,” Charles Warren observed with a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

  “August second,” Emma Smith repeated. “I wonder if that means anything.”

  Rowan Rover nodded approvingly. “It’s the day after Lammas, a pagan festival generally requiring human sacrifice. Did I mention that the king’s son had died of an arrow in the New Forest just three months earlier on the eve of the spring festival-Beltane!”

  Alice MacKenzie was shocked. “The king was killed by a cult?”

  “The theory has been proposed,” Rowan Rover admitted, following his Ripper custom of never saying whodunit. “There has always been a tradition of the divine victim, the king who must be sacrificed to ensure the harvest. The mumming rituals are based on those old beliefs, and so is the legend that inspired King Lear.” “It would explain why the Christian priests gave him no funeral, and said no masses for him,” Emma mused.

  Her mother nodded in agreement. “They surely would have said a mass for him otherwise.”

  “I suppose the treeline here has changed in the past nine hundred years,” said Elizabeth. “Because if it hasn’t, that’s suspicious. The legend says the hunters took cover behind trees, but there are no trees within twenty feet of this stone that marks the death scene.”

  “My sources say that the treeline hasn’t changed,” Rowan told her. “Apparently, the clearing itself is marshy and incapable of supporting trees, so the scene should look approximately as it did then.”

  “It wasn’t a hunting accident,” Elizabeth declared. “He was deliberately assassinated.”

  “Ritual sacrifices can’t be considered murder,” said Emma Smith.

  “That’s true,” said Martha Tabram. “It isn’t as if he were done in by some shabby thug for money.” Rowan Rover reddened slightly, and drowned out further comments with a smoker’s cough. “All very interesting,” he managed to say at last. “But it is getting a bit late and I for one could use a drink. Do you suppose we might continue this postmortem in a pub? I believe there’s one within walking distance, just down the road.”

  He ushered his charges back across the road, signaled to Bernard to follow in the coach, and marched them a few hundred yards around the bend to a large half-timbered pub set in its own graveled parking lot. One look at the quaintly lettered inn sign caused everyone to burst out laughing.

  “Good heavens!” said Alice MacKenzie. “The Walter Tyrrel Pub!” She pointed to the inn sign, with its carefully painted illustration depicting the deer and the deflected arrow striking William.

  Martha Tabram shook her head. “Oh, dear. How gauche. They’ve named the local pub after the king’s murderer!”

  “Sometimes crime does pay,” said Rowan Rover with a smile.

  “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  – MARK TWAIN

  CHAPTER 7

  STONEHENGE TO TORQUAY

  BREAKFAST ON DAY two of the tour was an eight o’clock buffet in the Wessex Hotel, after which they would be departing for the wilds of Devonshire. Rowan Rover, who had no objections to early hours or free meals, joined the breakfasters and found himself at a table with the smuggest of the party’s early birds: Alice MacKenzie, Maud Marsh, and Susan Cohen. Rowan, in an aging sky-blue pullover and black pants, looked rather like an early bird himself, or perhaps like an insomniac parakeet.

  Rowan began the meal with a bowl of shredded cereal, topped with milk and figs. After bidding his tablemates a brisk good morning and noting that they also had plates of food before them, he began to attack this first course in cheerful anticipation of his just-ordered coffee.

  “Aren’t you supposed to drink tea?” asked Susan, whose own cup sported a dangling string and a square of cardboard.

  “I prefer coffee,” said Rowan, halting a spoonful of cereal inches from his lips.

  “But you’re English. I thought Americans drank coffee and English people drank tea.”

  “I am a defector.”

  “And what’s that stuff you’re eating?” Susan persisted. “Ee-ooo. It looks like the sort of wood shavings they put in boxes of china to keep them from breaking. Sawdust. I ordered an English breakfast.”

  Rowan showed his teeth in a parody of a smile. “You must try the blood pudding,” he purred.

  “I know all about British customs,” she informed him. “I have all of Upstairs Downstairs on video. And I’ve read all of Dorothy Sayers.”

  This remark inspired Alice MacKenzie to a new line of questioning. “I love Dorothy Sayers! Especially Gaudy Night. You went to Oxford, didn’t you, Rowan?”

  “Somewhat after Miss Sayers’ own time in residence there, yes,” said Rowan Rover cautiously.

  “I’m really looking forward to touring Oxford,” said Alice. “In the footsteps of Peter Wimsey! Are you a Balliol man as well?”

  “Ah… no,” said Rowan, balancing another spoonful of cereal within loading distance.
>
  “Christ Church?”

  “No, that’s a rather exalted place, and I was just a clever youth without peer.” Rowan smiled at his own pun.

  Alice cast about for other possibilities. “Magdalen? Trinity? Merton?”

  “Ah!” said Maud Marsh. “T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien both went to Merton.” They looked at Rowan expectantly.

  He looked longingly at his soggy cereal. “No, actually… I went to Keeble.”

  This admission was received with a silence that made it patently obvious that they had never heard of Keeble. They may have been entertaining some doubt as to whether there was such a college. Rowan felt himself redden at this impugning of his credentials.

  “It’s one of the modern colleges,” he said petulantly. “Founded in the early part of this century. Not as arty and hidebound as some of the old ones, where they want blue blood instead of brains.”

  “I expect it was a lot cheaper, too,” Susan remarked, eyeing his ratty pullover.

  At that moment a white-coated teenager arrived, bearing a stainless steel pot which he set before Rowan Rover with a flourish of personal triumph at having remembered both the beverage and the existence of the diner. “Ah, my coffee,” said Rowan, grateful for the diversion. He poured a few drops into his cup and inspected the result. “This doesn’t look like…” He raised the cup to his lips and, seconds later, sputtered out his verdict. “Bloody Earl Grey!”

  “Do you want to call the waiter back?” asked Alice.

  “No, it took him an age to bring this. God knows how long he’d be if we asked for something else. Since the Americans evidently expect it of me, and the waiters conspire to abet them, I shall drink tea.” He reached for the cream jug.

  “Milk in first?” asked Susan, raising her eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t supposed to do that. Isn’t it-what’s the phrase?-non-U?”

  “If it’s me, it’s U,” muttered Rowan, stirring the fawn-colored beverage. Suddenly the prospect of doing away with Susan Cohen had become a little less dreadful to contemplate.