Mystery at the Rectory (Musaicum Vintage Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

how he had first missed Colonel Spots, the trout in question, when the telephone rang. The Major still talking, still with his mouth full of devilled kidneys, reached for it. As he listened, the amused reminiscent look was wiped away as though by a magic sponge, and his face grew rigid. His eyes told Pointer as they lighted on him that what he heard concerned him too, but he hung up before he turned to his guest.

      "The rector's been found dead in his study about two minutes ago. That was Dr. Rigby on the telephone. He lives almost next door. A case of toadstool poisoning, he thinks. Care to dash along with me? Unofficially? It's not likely to be anything but a genuine accident. Avery hadn't an enemy in the world. Avery! Best of parsons I Best man I ever met!"

      A quick affirmative, and Pointer ran upstairs three steps at a time for the small attaché-case which he always had with him. The Chief Constable sent word to his Superintendent to be at the Rectory to meet him, then he hurried out to his car. Pointer joined him, and the two were off at top speed.

      "About the likelihood of its being a case of toadstool poisoning," Weir-Opie began at once, "I must explain that. Some months ago three children in the village died from eating what they thought were mushrooms. The parents nearly went mad with grief: The rector was with the children when they died, and brooded on it a bit. Finally, he got the idea that it might be possible to find out something which if cooked with the damned things would make them harmless. We have a very clever chemist called Ireton who believes he can do the trick. The rector is—was—tremendously keen on it." The Major could not immediately get used to speaking of John Avery in the past. "He's financing it. As Ireton's a family man with half a dozen kids, the toadstools are boiled down at the rectory, and Ireton fetches the resulting extract in a bottle whenever he needs some fresh stuff for his experiments. Here we are. There's Shilling on the steps!"

      A moment more, and the three stepped into a large sunny room beside the front door.

      There on a couch that ran across one corner from wall to wall, lay the twisted, contorted figure of the rector. His face was dreadful to look at, bearing as it did every sign of his having died in torment. The doctor looked shaken as he straightened up and nodded to the two newcomers.

      "Been dead for some hours. About eight, at least, I should guess. Just as I think I can guess what happened." His eyes rested for a minute on a door facing the one by which the Chief Constable and Pointer had entered. "People were saying only last Saturday that Ireton had found what he was after—the antidote, or rather the nullifying agent. I hope the rector didn't believe this too implicitly, and try it on himself with this result."

      The three police officers, to include Pointer in a section where he did not strictly belong, had moved away from the body to a tray on a table by a window. On the tray was a plate with remnants of cold beef and smears of dark brown liquid on it. A bottle half full, marked as a well-known brand of mushroom ketchup, stood beside the plate. There was, besides, some bread and butter, what looked like the remains of some sort of a sweet, and an empty quarter-bottle of a good Australian wine.

      The doctor came over and looked down at it too. "That stuff on the plate must be toadstool extract. See how it has blackened the fork? That wouldn't be true of the ketchup. However, plate and bottle will be analysed, of course. Not that it will bring Avery back to life! He'll be terribly missed. Terribly And to have died in such torment! I can't think why he didn't ring one of the bells in here."

      The Chief Constable went to the mantel and lightly touched both. Two distinct rings could be heard.

      "Now I must see to the housemaid who found him. She's had a shock, poor girl! That face will give her nightmares for weeks!" The doctor went on out.

      Pointer stepped into a room that opened out of the study. The library as he saw that it was. It had no other entrance or exit. Going to the fireplace, he touched the bells there with his gloved finger. Nothing happened.

      "Don't they ring?" asked the Chief Constable who had followed him in.

      "Oh, yes, sir, they ring all right," came the voice of Fraser who had been summoned by the study bells.

      Pointer pressed again.

      "That's queer!" The butler was surprised. "They rang all right yesterday afternoon. All the other bells are all right. Must have these two seen to," and then his automatic, professional interest dropped away, and he turned back to the other room and the body of his master. Weir-Opie and Pointer followed him.

      "What about the ladies? Are they up yet?" Weir-Opie asked.

      To his relief he heard that the early morning cups of tea had only just been brought them. Breakfast at the rectory was at nine.

      "Too bad that Mr. Richard Avery isn't back yet," murmured the major. "But failing him, I ought to see Miss Avery first."

      Fraser, a shortish man with an honest and conscientious face, just now pale and tremulous-looking, only nodded.

      "The rector! To think of him being gone!" he said, staring in horror at the couch.

      "I know!" Major Weir-Opie said sympathetically, "it's a terrible business. But now tell me exactly how he was found."

      "Margaret, the second housemaid, came in to open up the room as usual, sir. I was outside having a look at the front door varnish when I heard her scream. I rushed in to find she'd fainted dead away—she had touched the rector, sir. Cold and stiff and all screwed up as he is. I carried her out into the lounge and telephoned for the doctor. He got here before I had more than hung up. Then I took her downstairs to my pantry and told cook and the maids to stay that side of the baize door. I locked the door as well, in case—and I've just let the doctor through—and locked it again."

      "Quite right, Fraser," Weir-Opie said approvingly, "though the ladies must be told shortly, of course."

      "What was it, sir? He looks awful!" Weir-Opie and Shilling had covered up the body on the sofa with a rug. "Maggie thinks it's heart," the butler said "but I know that it's worse than that from the questions the doctor asked me."

      "Let it be thought to be heart at first," Major Weir-Opie ordered, "it won't be such a shock to the ladies that way. But between ourselves, the doctor thinks he may have eaten some of those toadstools of his by mistake. Who brought in that tray there?"

      He learned that Fraser himself had. The rector, every now and then, liked to work late at his writing, in which case he would skip the regular dinner, and have a tray instead.

      After he had brought in the tray Fraser had as usual on Sunday gone off for a walk, got back by ten, and went to bed, after locking up at eleven.

      Had he looked in on the rector? asked Shilling. Fraser had not. As usual, he had taken every care not to disturb him, for the rector was writing in the library. He had closed the shutters both in the library and the study when he brought in the tray. He had opened them this morning after telephoning for the doctor. In reply to a question of Pointer's he said that no bells had rung after ten last night, or he could not have failed to hear them. No, he would not have heard the rector calling, not if the study door had been shut, but he would at once have heard the opening of the door in question, as, unless done with the utmost caution, it jarred the house, and he slept on the ground floor, at the back of another wing.

      "Were the lights on?" Shilling asked him.

      "No, they had been turned off, or I should have noticed them this morning, for the study door shows a ridge of light under it. The rector must have turned them out so as not to dazzle his eyes when he felt queer, and lay down on that sofa," the man volunteered.

      Fraser answered all the questions put to him very carefully and helpfully. Pointer, for instance, learnt among other things that the rector kept the library exclusively for religious work—even to the talks in there, even to every book and paper in the drawers of his writing-table. Worldly—in which he included friendly—affairs were transacted in the study, where he wrote all letters that came under that heading. Fraser said that the dead man did not like him to come into the library with a message, let alone with a tray. In short, the library was really consecrated ground to the rector, a sort of chapel, but one in which he wrote on religious subjects.

      Weir-Opie's