Table of Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One THE DIARY
Chapter Two REACTIONS OF AN ELDERLY SERVANT
Chapter Three COUNSEL'S OPINION
Chapter Four THE WIDOW'S MITE
Chapter Five THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Chapter Six THE DEAR DEPARTED
Chapter Seven THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Chapter Eight THE WIDOW'S MITE
Chapter Nine COUNSEL'S OPINION
Chapter Ten REACTIONS OF AN ELDERLY PSYCHOLOGIST
Chapter Eleven THE DIARY
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WHEN LAST I DIED
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or 'The Great Gladys' as Philip Larkin described 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 along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie 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 Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.
ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL
Speedy Death
The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop
The Longer Bodies
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
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
The Dancing Druids
Tom Brown's Body
Groaning Spinney
The Devil's Elbow
The Echoing Strangers
Merlin's Furlong
Faintley Speaking
Watson's Choice
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 the 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
GLADYS MITCHELL
When Last I Died
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ISBN 9781409076803
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Copyright © the Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1941
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First published in Great Britain in 1941 by Michael Joseph
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ISBN: 9781409076803
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Chapter One
THE DIARY
But thou, whose pen hath like a pack-horse served, Whose stomach unto gall hath turned thy food, Whose senses, like poor prisoners, hunger-starved, Whose grief hath parched thy body, dried thy blood....
DRAYTON.
THE lunch had consisted of sausage-meat roll, diced swede and mashed potatoes; these covered with thick floury gravy and followed by tinned plums and custard. The boys had consumed the first course in three minutes, the second in one and a half, and still, to Mrs. Bradley's possibly prejudiced eye—for she had nephews, great-nephews and, now that Ferdinand was married, a grandson—they retained a wolfish aspect which depressed her. Her notions on diet, she informed the Warden, when he canvassed her opinion of the menu, were, she thought, about a century out of date.
The Warden wisely decided to treat this reply as a witticism, and as he was essentially a serious-minded man the subject of conversation languished. Grace, which had, to Mrs. Bradley's embarrassment, preceded the meal, now, with suitable grammatical adjustments, indicated its conclusion, and, with remarkable orderliness and very little noise, the boys filed out except for one child who re-seated himself and continued to eat.
"What on earth is he doing?" said the Warden. He raised his voice. "Dinnie!" The boy, with a regretful glance at his plate, stood up. "Why haven't you finished?"
"Sir?"
"Why haven't you finished? Come up here." The boy approached with considerable reluctance. "And step up smartly when you're called. Don't you know we have a visitor?"
"Yes, sir." He shot a half-glance at Mrs. Bradley, contemptuously, she thought.
"Well, where are your manners? Now, then, answer my question."
"It would only have gone into the swill-tub for the pigs," said the boy, in an almost inaudible voice. He had dark red hair and brown eyes flecked with lighter specks so that it seemed as though the sun danced on a trout stream. His brows slanted in an alarmingly Mephistophelean manner, and he had a wide mouth set in a grim jaw. The Americans, with their flair for good-humoured expressiveness,
would have dubbed him a tough citizen, thought Mrs. Bradley, for whom bad boys had academic and occasionally—for she was a woman—sentimental interest.
They were all bad boys at the Institution. The Government, with one of those grandmotherly inspirations which are the dread and bane of progressive educationists, had decreed, some ten years previously, that its theories with regard to the preventive detention of delinquent children were a long way out of date, and were to be re-stated in accordance with the facts so far gleaned by child-guidance clinics.
Mrs. Bradley, among other psychologists, had been called into consultation, but her simple suggestion was that delinquent children, who, like delinquent adults, can be divided into those brands which can be snatched from the burning and those which, unfortunately, cannot, should (literally) be killed or cured. The former treatment was to be painless, the latter drastic. This view was received without enthusiasm by the authorities and was treated, even by the Press, with reserve.
Now, ten years later, she had been called in again; not (be it stated hastily to those who retain the uncivilized view that human life is necessarily sacred) to assist in translating her theory into fact, but because, strangely enough, the Government had discovered that the new methods in preventive detention had again sprung a leak and badly needed plugging.
Why they should have called into consultation one with whose thought upon the subject they would be bound to disagree, not even Mrs. Bradley herself could say, well-versed though she was in morbid psychology, but she had answered the summons as a good democrat should, promptly and with an open mind.
The trouble was, the Warden had explained, that in spite of humane treatment, fewer punishments, better food, and the provision of playing fields, bad boys, on the whole, continued to be bad, and even attempted, more frequently than could be justified, to escape from Elysium—in other words, the Institution —into the wicked and troubled world.
The worst of it was, he continued, voicing his own point of view with a certain naïveté which she found entertaining, that the two boys who had run away a week before Mrs. Bradley's arrival, had not, so far, been traced, and were, as he expressed it, still at large.
It could not be helped, Mrs. Bradley suggested; for she found that she was sorry for the Warden in his obvious anxiety, although she knew that he did not like her.
"What? Never?" said Mrs. Bradley, startled; for the police, she reflected, are noted, among other things, for their bloodhound abilities. "Do you mean to say ...?"
"I mean to say," said the Warden, looking, all in a moment, haggard with worry, "that, from then until now, there has been not another sign of either of them. I received my appointment partly on an undertaking that such a thing should never happen again, and I've been careful, very careful indeed, but, if we don't get these two soon, I shall feel that I ought to ask the authorities to accept my resignation. You see, the kind of boy who is sent here—just excuse me one moment...."
He checked further revelations and confessions in order to attend to the matter of immediate moment.
"What do you mean, Dinnie?"
"You know what I mean," replied the boy.
"Don't be impudent! Answer me directly!"
"But you do know what he means," murmured Mrs. Bradley. In spite of her pity for the Warden in his distress, she found that, on the whole, humane though she believed him to be, and a great improvement on his predecessor, whom she remembered very well from her previous visit, she could not approve of all his methods, and this one, of attempting to make a boy look a fool when he was not a fool, she deplored almost more than any other. She had been an interested but disapproving witness of it several times during her stay.
The Warden, feeling, no doubt, that it was due to his estimate of himself and his position to ignore it, took no notice of the interruption, but addressed himself again to the truculent and obstinate-looking Dinnie.
"Now, boy! Answer me directly. Tell me at once what you mean!"
"There was an extra dinner, and I ate it," said the boy.
"Right. Go and finish it. To-morrow do without your pudding. If you had answered me at first when I asked you, I should not have punished you at all."
He rose briskly. The rest of the staff had left the high table and had gone out with the boys, so that, except for Dinnie, now busily and hastily gulping down the pig-food, the hall was empty but for himself and Mrs. Bradley.
"Have to be sharp on them," he said, feeling, for some reason, that some justification was needed for the combination of bullying and weakness he had shown. "No good letting him get away with that."
"How did there come to be an extra dinner?" Mrs. Bradley tactfully inquired.
"That still remains to be investigated." He investigated it by sending for the housekeeper the moment he reached his sitting-room.
"It was Canvey. He felt sick and did not go in to dinner. But as we had had no notification, his dinner was sent in as usual," said the housekeeper, looking, Mrs. Bradley thought, in the presence of the Warden like a drab female thrush confronting an imposing frog.
"I had better see Canvey." The Frog touched the buzzer which had already brought a boy to act as messenger. "Get Canvey, Williams, please. All right, Margaret, thank you.... We use Christian names with one another here. It helps the atmosphere," he remarked to Mrs. Bradley when the boy and the housekeeper had gone.
Ganvey was a rat-faced boy with handsome, wide-open eyes, affording a strange impression of cunning and frankness mingled. Call the cunning lack of self-confidence, and the frankness an attempt, probably an unconscious one, to compensate for this, and you had a different portrait of the boy and not necessarily a less faithful one, Mrs. Bradley surmised.
"What's the matter with you that you couldn't eat your dinner?" the Warden inquired. He prided himself, Mrs. Bradley had discovered, upon taking a personal interest in each boy. That this might prove embarrassing and even disagreeable to the boy, obviously never entered his head.
"Sir, I don't like sausage-meat, sir. It makes me sick, sir," responded Canvey, bestowing on the interlocutor his wide gaze.
"Nonsense, boy. Did you eat your pudding yesterday?"
"Sir, yes, sir."
"Your vegetables?"
"Yes, sir."
"No, you did not!" thundered the Warden. "You did not eat your vegetables."
The boy remained silent, but he did not drop his eyes, and he and the Warden stared at one another, until the Warden, apparently the weaker character, added :
"Well?"
"Sir?"
"Your vegetables."
"I felt ill, sir."
"No, no. You didn't feel ill. You've been smoking. Have you been stealing tobacco from the staff?"
"Sir, no, sir."
The Warden produced a cane. The boy eyed it with a certain degree of sullen speculation.
"Well?" said the Warden.
"I didn't steal anything. It was rhubarb leaves," said the boy.
"Then you deserve to feel sick. See that you eat your tea." He put the cane away, and the boy departed.
"Rhubarb leaves," said Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully.
"Yes. A good many of these boys are inveterate smokers when they come here, and we have to cure them. I have given up smoking, myself. I don't want boys coming into this room and smelling tobacco. I don't feel that that would be playing the game. But I can scarcely help it if the staff have an occasional pipe or cigarette. One can scarcely expect them to adopt all one's own standards."
"One could engage non-smokers, I suppose," said Mrs. Bradley, interested in a system which regarded the powers of self-denial of the staff as being inferior to those of the boys. The Warden, again scenting a witticism, made no direct reply. He said :
"It is very difficult to get these boys to see t
hat certain things aren't good for them, and, of course, if they come here with the craving, they'll satisfy it somehow if they can. It is one of our many difficulties, to eradicate these tendencies."