Nodding Canaries, page 14
part #34 of Mrs Bradley Series
’You did wrong, captain, to mix cheese with plums,
Captain Joshua Slocum
« ^ »
THANKS to an advertisement in the local paper, large and aggressive placards both inside and outside all three branches of the public library, a notice in the entrance of the Castle Museum and some spade-work done among the older pupils in the Nodding schools, Sir John had a suitably impressed and impressive audience.
He was a gifted speaker, and the film he showed of the work of excavation being carried on, and the fine ‘stills’ of the most important finds, held that audience for nearly two hours. The chairman (Downing, as president of the Society, was in the chair) then announced that the public lecture was over, but that Sir John was prepared to give a short talk about excavations in chalk and limestone country, with special reference to East Anglian flint-mines. The talk was of particular interest to the members of the Nodding Archaeological Society, but the public were welcome to stay and listen. There would be no visual illustrations except a ‘still’ showing a plan of Pigmy’s Ladder.
Most of the audience filed out, but one or two stayed. These included Laura, Alice Boorman, Mrs Breydon-Waters and the wives of some of the married members of the Society. They closed in upon the platform and the lecturer projected the plan of Pigmy’s Ladder upon the screen. He discoursed, briefly, as he had promised, upon the Neolithic Ages in pre-history and then drew his hearers’ attention to the plan on the screen.
‘This shows the area so far excavated by your Society and by earlier excavators,’ he said. ‘Now I have a theory that there is more to be found.’
‘Surely there is,’ put in Downing (for the meeting was now informal), ‘for that can be proved by the numbers and numbers of pittings still to be seen on the surface of the heath.’
‘Ah, but that is not quite what I meant,’ said Sir John. ‘I think further excavation might bring to light a find of the kind discovered at Grimes Graves. You will all know to what I refer, I have no doubt.’
‘The statuette of a mother-goddess? Yes, we did find one,’ said Gold. Sir John inclined his head.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘The mines known as Pigmy’s Ladder are not so very far removed from those of Grimes Graves.’
His audience was dumb. Then Gold spoke again.
‘So that was what Breydon-Waters was after,’ he said softly.
‘So that is why he obtained leave of absence from school under the pretence of going to Palestine,’ said Carfrae.
‘So that is why he was murdered,’ said Alice Boorman, under her breath.
It was too late, when the meeting was over, for Sir John to view Breydon-Waters’ collection that night, and it was arranged that he and Dame Beatrice should call at ten o’clock in the morning. The members of the Society would make their inspection in the evening, after finishing work.
Dame Beatrice had warned the visitor that he would probably find himself moving in the world of the spirits as soon as he crossed Mrs Breydon-Waters’ threshold, but in Oliver’s mother the business-woman had, for the time being, superceded the communicant with another sphere. She greeted Sir John, complimented him upon his lecture, and led the way to the dining-room.
‘I will leave you to form your opinion,’ she said. ‘I have shopping to do, and shall be back in about an hour.’
‘I shall be most interested,’ murmured Sir John. He opened the door for her, closed it behind her very quietly, walked to the dining-table and picked up a Scythian dagger.
‘Probably purchased,’ he said. ‘It’s a common type.’ His expert fingers roved over Bronze Age sling-stones, ‘beaker’ pottery and a few flint implements of Neolithic origin. There were two sickles, a knife and three rather fine lance-heads. Then he picked up a copper axe-head.’
‘Like those from Kish, near Babylon,’ he said.
‘Do you care for me to make an inventory?’ Dame Beatrice asked.
‘If it would interest you. I don’t need one for myself. I have played what the Boy Scouts call Kim’s Game far too often to need a written list of these things. I’ll call out the items as I go, shall I?’ suggested Sir John.
‘Please do. Are you prepared to value the collection?’
‘Oh, no. The majority of these things have no intrinsic value, and they seem more like a magpie’s hoard than an interesting exhibition. An eighteenth- or nineteenth-century collector might have garnered such things, but junk of this sort is meaningless heaped together in this way. Well, let’s see what else there is. Aurignac-type statuette – he probably picked that up on a dig. We call them Aurignac, but they’ve been found here, too. Here’s a skull – looks mighty like those found at Alfriston – and here are a Neolithic miner’s antler pick – see how the tines are worn – and some perforated teeth – wolves’ teeth, I expect – which made a necklace. Oyster shells (an early form of coinage) and quite a nice Bronze Age sword. Here’s a brooch of the same period – am I going too fast?’
‘Oh, no, not at all,’ said Dame Beatrice, her yellow, claw-like fingers flying over a page of her notebook and inscribing, in her own particular brand of shorthand, the list he was giving her.
Sir John moved to the sideboard. ‘A good many of the specimens may have been picked up on archaeological sites,’ he said, ‘but some he may have purchased.’ He picked up a very fine Babylonian cylinder seal, laid it down and turned over a small collection of Greek coins. ‘Quite nice, you see. An Athenian ten-drachma piece of the fifth century B.C. with the Marathon owl on the reverse side; a silver coin from Naxos of slightly later date with the head of Dionysos on the obverse and a dubious-looking Silenos on the reverse. (I wonder where he bought that? There are not so very many about). Several pieces of the time of Alexander the Great; yes, yes; thousands of these in various places, and thousands more still to be found, no doubt. Ah, here is a pleasant version of Arethusa’s head from Syracuse; fourth century, of course. Here’s an earlier one; strange how fond the Greeks were of dolphins; the result of having so tremendously long a coastline and so many colonies overseas, no doubt.’
‘They are lovable creatures in themselves, and extremely decorative,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘There seem to be gold coins, too – at least, I should judge them to be gold.’
‘Yes, there are.’ He picked up an Iron Age piece. ‘British. Could have been picked up on the South Coast beach, probably in Sussex. They date from about 100 b.c. to Julius Caesar’s invasions. There was a fair amount of trade with the Empire long before the Claudian conquest, and a coinage was a necessary medium of exchange. The coins were made on the Roman model. But see here! These engraved gems of the seventh to the sixth century come from Greece; and here are some Cretan ivory seals and a Late Minoan vase. Then, these engravings on bone and this pendant, a relict of the Hyksos burials, are fairly surprising things to find in a private collection, and I should very much like to know how he obtained possession of this fifth-century bronze bowl and this Boeotian pot.’
‘What is this?’ asked Dame Beatrice, as Sir John moved across to a bookcase, the top of which held further archaeological finds.
‘That? Oh, dear, oh, dear! It is a tablet of Linear B script, Cretan, perhaps, or from one of the Argive cities; Tiryns, possibly.’
‘And the bronze battle axe?’
Sir John picked it up and balanced it in his hand.
‘I’ve seen one like this before,’ he said. ‘It resembled, as this does, the Early Bronze axes which we’ve found in Wessex, but it did not some from Wessex; it’s like one I’ve seen which came from an excavation made at Alacahuyuk. Still, perhaps we had better give him the benefit of the doubt. Well, that seems to be the lot, except for these two enamelled brooches of the early Iron Age.’
Dame Beatrice wrote the last hieroglyphics and then opened the drawers of the sideboard. They contained a jumbled collection of palaeolithic and neolithic flints. The cupboards offered nothing but the usual household articles. The small drawers of the bookcase contained some Bronze Age pins and a brooch. This ended the tally.
‘Of course,’ said Sir John, ‘Bronze Age finds can be picked up when ploughing is done, or a garden dug or when road-repairs are in operation. I will await Mrs Breydon-Waters’ return, but I must make it clear to her that it is not within my provenance to value this collection in the sense that she uses the words.’
‘She will be deeply disappointed. Tell me, Sir John, what you think about the means by which this collection was amassed. How much of it is stolen property?’
‘I hesitate to say, except in so far as objects picked up and retained by the finder during the course of an excavation may be described as stolen property. There is nothing here which cannot be matched in many museums in Europe and America. The American School has done much excellent work.’
‘Suppose that a purchaser could be found, no questions need be asked?’
‘I imagine not. Have you a purchaser in mind, then?’
‘Mr Streatley, the wealthy member of the Nodding Archaeological Society, might be interested.’
‘I see. I should like the Greek coins for my own collection, but since you think their source of origin may be doubtful…’ He smiled and picked up the Scythian dagger.
‘What does he really think?’ asked Laura while they waited for Sir John to break it to Mrs Breydon-Waters that he was not prepared to place a monetary value on the collection.
‘He does not commit himself, but I formed the impression that he feels dubious.’
‘Thinks the stuff was stolen? I’m not surprised.’
‘But he also thinks that there is very little of importance in the collection – nothing that cannot be matched elsewhere.’
‘So that, if B.W. did manage to help himself, there wouldn’t have been much of a stink? That accounts for his having been able to get away with it.’
‘Of course, some of the objects may have been purchased. It is not the only private collection of the kind.’
‘It depends upon the price that would have to be paid, doesn’t it? A school-master doesn’t earn all that much, and Breydon-Waters had bought a half-share in a cabin-cruiser and helped to keep his mother. I shouldn’t think he’d have had much money to spare to buy antiques.’
‘It would depend, as you point out, on the price. I may be able to find out a good deal more when I have studied the archives of the Society.’
She did this on the following day, closeted in the screened-off corner of the Great Hall of the Castle Museum which represented a room furnished according to the taste of the eighteenth century. She chose to sit at the one piece of furniture which was out of period, a writing-table of Regency date, because it looked more solid and workmanlike than a George II bureau, on cabriole legs ending in scroll toes, which occupied one corner of the screened-off area.
The Society’s records were contained in the four drawers of a secretaire-bookcase which housed on its shelves a collection of china. Downing saw her settled in, produced the necessary documents, wished her well and left her to it. She leered at the claw feet and gilt embellishments of the Regency table, pulled open the two drawers, which proved to contain the cleaner’s dusters and an empty cigarette carton respectively, and opened the earliest record of the Society’s transactions.
The Nodding group, it seemed, was an off-shoot of the important and well-known Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society. Why it had broken away from the parent body was not apparent, but the discovery that it had done so cleared up a point which had puzzled Dame Beatrice ever since she had examined the list of the Nodding members. There was a marked absence of the nobility and the Church, both, usually, keen supporters of the more erudite activities of their areas.
The Society had begun its activities in 1937 and had suspended them from 1940 until 1949, when Downing, according to a volume devoted entirely to copied-up letters, had been instrumental in re-forming the group under the title of The Nodding and District Archaeological and Antiquarian Society. An examination of the Transactions made it clear that the title was no misnomer, for the Society certainly had not confined itself entirely to digging up the past in the literal sense, but had given considerable attention to such matters as church brasses and wall-paintings, tapestries, seventeenth-century silver-ware, (scarce after the beginning of the Civil War), chantry chapels, sixteenth-century bills and wills, church bells and the fifteenth-century account rolls of neighbouring priories.
Dame Beatrice flipped through the painstaking articles devoted to these and gave her attention to the records concerned with archaeology as she understood it; that is to say, the records of actual excavations in which the Society had taken part and the names of the members who had played an active part in these.
To her surprise, it appeared that the work had not been confined, in England, to East Anglia. The group had visited excavations, with the consent of the Sussex Archaeological Society, at Lewes, the Trundle, Newhaven, Falmer and Pevensey and had inspected the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Early Iron Age objects housed in the Lewes museum. Dame Beatrice could not help wondering whether the museum had been the poorer after the Nodding excursion when she noted that Breydon-Waters had been present at the later digs and had also been a member of the visiting party.
As she perused the records a remark made by Streatley came back to her.
‘Besides, there was that trouble in Greece a year or two back. I always thought Waters knew more about the disappearance of those engraved gems than he ever admitted.’
Dame Beatrice turned up the list which she had taken down from Sir John’s dictation. There was definite mention of Greek engraved gems, and she returned to the archives. The Society had made one expedition to Greece, had visited some of the islands and had spent a week in Athens. There was no mention of any ‘trouble,’ but that was not surprising, she thought. Suspicion is not proof.
She worked on systematically, making an occasional note and referring, from time to time, to Sir John’s list. There was no suggestion that the Society had ever visited Crete or the Near East, so there was no clue as to how Breydon-Waters had obtained a Babylonian cylinder seal, Cretan ivory, a tablet of Linear ‘B’ or a bronze axe which, according to Sir John, was not of British workmanship, unless he had obtained them elsewhere. The copper axe from Kish she scarcely considered important until later.
She read, with great care, the lists of members and noted that of the post-war foundation members only four remained. These were Downing, Brent, Streatley and Sansfoy. Gold had joined in 1950, the year in which he had become the city librarian, Carfrae in 1951 and the others between 1952 and 1958. Breydon-Waters had joined in 1953 and therefore, it was interesting to note, had not been present when Pigmy’s ladder had been re-excavated in the Festival Year of 1951.
There seemed little more to be gained from the documents unless further clues to the mystery of Breydon-Waters’ death should direct attention to them again. Dame Beatrice put them back, unlocked the door which had been fastened to keep out the public, drew back the curtains which had shrouded her from its view, switched off the electricity which illuminated the chandeliers and went to Downing’s office to return the key.
‘Any luck, Dame Beatrice?’ he asked, when he had hung it up.
‘It is too soon to tell,’ she replied, ‘but I do not feel that the time has been wasted. I shall go to Pigmy’s Ladder again tomorrow, unless my visit to the Superintendent makes it unnecessary.’
She rang up the police station as soon as she got back to the hotel and arranged to meet the Superintendent on the following morning at ten. They talked in his office – or, rather, Dame Beatrice talked while he smoked his pipe, grunted occasionally and occasionally met her eyes with his non-committal but intelligent gaze.
‘Well,’ he said, when she had done, ‘I didn’t guarantee to do so, Dame Beatrice, but I’ll tell you how far we’ve got. We’ve traced the dead man’s history to pretty far back; it seems his mother gassed herself, so he certainly wasn’t Mrs Breydon-Waters’ son. You seemed to have reached the same point from a different angle.’
‘A slip of the tongue, as I have said, put me on the track, but that was as far as I have got. What caused Mrs Breydon-Waters to adopt the boy, I wonder?’
‘Difficult to say. Maybe she had lost her own little one or couldn’t have one. They both changed their names. Wonder why they chose to call themselves Breydon-Waters? Very odd, that. It’s too much like a name on a map.’
‘So Brent pointed out to me near the beginning of this enquiry. It would be interesting to know whether she has ever been in prison.’
‘Prison? Oh, yes, she gave it as a reason for her friends’ cooling off, you said, but there’s no prison record. In any case, ma’am, why should they suddenly pretend that she’d been in prison?’
‘Of course they did not. If, indeed, they have cooled off, I suspect it would be because they believe she knows more about her son’s – Mr Breydon-Waters’ – death than she has said.’
‘That’s about the size of it. I’ve kept out of her way a bit lately. I’ll go and talk to her again. So far, she’s been tearful (which is natural) but not very helpful. She declare he had no enemies and insist that he wasn’t killed for what he possessed.’
‘Did she mean his collection of antiques?’
‘Well, she didn’t mention it, but I guess that’s what she intend me to think. If it had been a different kind of murder, she’d be first on my list of suspects, but, as it is, she come pretty low down on it.’
‘Yet there is something interesting about the collection which I am certain has a bearing on the case.’
‘In what way, ma’am, would you say?’
‘I cannot say at present. I have been studying the records of the Nodding Archaeological Society, but I did not find them particularly helpful. Only one small item of interest emerged. Mr Breydon-Waters had not joined the Society when the most recent excavation of Pigmy’s Ladder was carried out.’
‘I don’t see the significance of that, ma’am.’
