Bodies from the Library 3

by Tony Medawar

  While Bush is best-remembered for the crime fiction published under his own name, he also wrote a Ruritanian adventure, The Trail of the Three Lean Men (1932), published as by ‘Noel Barclay’, combining a variant of his given forename and Marjorie’s surname. He adopted another pen name, the euphonious ‘Michael Home’, for a series of novels set in and around the East Anglian village of Heathley, a thinly disguised version of his birthplace. The first of the series, known as the Breckland novels, God and the Rabbit (1933), is a semi-autobiographical story about a boy who wins scholarships and becomes a schoolmaster while supporting his strait-laced mother from London and his dissolute father, a poacher. In later years, Bush would claim that, as had happened with The Perfect Murder Case, the publisher had required the manuscript of God and the Rabbit to be cut by half. True or not, the novel was very well-received and a second quickly followed. In This Valley (1934) is a melodrama about a Methodist farmer and his son, an ambitious man with two women in his life, suggesting autobiographical elements in this novel too. In all, there are around twenty Michael Home novels, including David (1937), a biblical biography, and three overtly autobiographical books, Autumn Fields (1945), Spring Sowing (1946) and Winter Harvest (1967). As well as the Breckland series, there were several Home novels involving Britain’s military intelligence services, including two featuring Major John Benham of MI5: The Strange Prisoner (1947) and The Auber File (1953).

  In 1941, after leaving the Home Guard, Bush made headlines locally for restoring the medieval wood carvings on the exterior of Horsepen, working to a Tudor design as specified by advisers from the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was also active in civic matters in the nearby town of Hastings as a member of the Twenty Club ‘for men and women prominent in literature or art’ and he was a patron of local artists and galleries, on one occasion donating to an exhibition ‘A portrait of Mr Michael Home by Mr Christopher Bush’. And he was also prominent in the Detection Club, to which he had been elected in the late 1930s.

  In the early 1950s Bush and Marjorie moved to the Great House in Lavenham in Suffolk where, while continuing to write, he again became a pillar of the community, opening art exhibitions and giving talks about being a writer. A modest man, Bush had no time for what he called ‘literary arrogance’, seeing himself as simply ‘a public entertainer whose chief duty is to be thoroughly competent at whatever line of writing he decides to adopt’. But while many of Bush’s novels have good ideas and interesting settings, others seem to some to fulfil the criticism levelled at lesser lights of the Golden Age by H. R. F. Keating—a former President of the Detection Club—that their work is characterised by ‘ingenuity of plot, cardboardity of character [and] chunter of story’. Nonetheless, Bush remains popular and has been praised in particular for his ability to create and deconstruct the unbreakable alibi, a trait shared with the ‘alibi king’ himself, Freeman Wills Crofts.

  With Marjorie’s death in 1968, Bush lost his enthusiasm for writing. He died on 21 September 1973 at the age of eighty-four.

  One of two versions of ‘The Hampstead Murder’, this text was published in the November 1955 issue of The Saint magazine.

  THE SCARECROW MURDERS

  Joseph Commings

  It was the murder that drew Senator Brooks U. Banner to Cow Crossing, a town in the upper reaches of New York State. The study of crime had been Banner’s hobby for years. Now Banner, a whopping big man, stood before the flimsy office door over the post office and gave it a brisk drubbing. The moulting gold-leaf lettering on the door read: Judge James Z. Skinner.

  Skinner himself opened the door. Behind him his office was stuffy and smelled of mouldering papers. Dusk was shadowing all the corners and Skinner had been getting ready to close up shop for the day. Skinner recognized Banner at once, probably from Banner’s many colourful political billboards.

  ‘Senator Banner!’ said Skinner, half surprised and half delighted. He spoke with a fruity voice.

  ‘Yessiree, bub. Life-size, in the flesh, fulla beans, and raring to go.’ Banner chuckled and came in. A liver-coloured leghorn was pushed back on his grizzled mane. He carried his frock coat over his arm, for the evening was still too warm to wear it. His silk shirt was mottled with sweat. He stood up straight, but his baggy grey britches looked ready to sit down. On his feet were a pair of brogans spotted with clay.

  ‘I just horse-and-buggied into your burg, friend,’ he said with a boom. ‘I’m on a tub-thumping junket. After each sentence of my speech I pitch a forkful of hay. That puts the farmers behind me one hundred per cent. I think I’m gonna need the farm vote to carry me back to Washington this fall.’

  Skinner bobbed his narrow head soberly. ‘Your oratory is welcome in the hinterlands. Demosthenes on the stump. Usus loquendi.’ He smiled bleakly. He was the law in Cow Crossing. He was in his sixties, long and weedy, with carefully parted grey hair and eyes like the heads of new ten-penny nails. Winter or summer he wore an antique beaver hat that reminded one of an abdicated kingdom: it had a fallen crown. He had the hat in his hand.

  Banner eyed the old man sharply. ‘I was in the next town when I heard that Cow Crossing had been glorified with a murder. It tempted me like a kid is tempted with custard. I had to come. Puzzles have teased me ever since I tried to take my socks off with my baby booties still on. They tell me you’re the johnnie I have to see.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Skinner. ‘If there’s any law in this place, I’m it. I’m the lex loci, so to speak. People see me when they’re married, they see me when things go wrong, and they see me after they’re dead, only then they don’t care.’ He took a flat silver case out of his pocket. ‘A fresh cigar?’

  Banner remembered he had a corona between his teeth. It looked as if the rats had been at it. He took it out of his mouth and glowered distastefully. ‘I’ll own up to you,’ he said. ‘I never smoke seegars. It’s all window-dressing.’ He pegged the gnawed fag-end into a spattered cuspidor. ‘About this murder, judge, what’s the score?’

  Skinner said there was not much to tell. He related all the known circumstances. In the shallows of the creek some fishermen had discovered Beverly Jelke’s body. Farther upstream they found her clothes piled neatly on the bank. The body was in a common black bathing suit. Half her head had been blown away by the charge of a double-barrelled shotgun.

  Apparently the victim had been swimming about ten feet off shore in the deep water near where her clothes were found. The murderer had fired from the heavy brake that overhung the banks at that point.

  Hudson Jelke was Beverly’s younger brother by a year. He was in his early twenties, with a face as pasty as dough, shaggy-haired, and unshaven. He had greedy eyes. He had lumbered into the mortuary that hot August afternoon and claimed the body. He had taken the dead girl’s hand in his own. For a moment, the judge said, it looked like an affectionate gesture, but Hudson went ahead to strip the heavy ring off one of the fingers.

  Skinner had said, ‘Do you have to be so ghoulish, Hud? Can’t you wait?’

  ‘It’s an heirloom,’ responded Hudson. ‘It’s mine now.’

  When he left, Hudson had all Beverly’s personal belongings. He went back to the farm, knowing that all of it belonged to him now.

  Banner shifted his feet in the gloomy office. ‘Got any wild guesses who killed Beverly Jelke?’

  ‘No idea.’ A little cough cleared Skinner’s long throat. Then he went on, in a gossipy manner, about the Jelkes. ‘This is a pretty sparsely populated region, Senator. The Jelke farm—they call it Blackmarsh Grange—is about eight miles out of town and there are no farms in between. There were two Jelkes, Beverly and her brother Hudson. Hudson married a French Canadian girl from just over the border. There’s an uncle living there too, and a hired man.’

  Banner waited.

  Skinner went on, ‘Blackmarsh Grange is a big sprawling place, named on account of the dismal quagmire that was originally on the land, but most of that has been filled in. In the last couple of years the Jelkes haven’t
been happy. They’ve produced merely enough to get by on, and the brother and sister have been having one long hot argument.’

  Banner was attentive. ‘Argument?’

  Skinner said, ‘About selling the Grange. I offered them five thousand for it—a fair price, considering. Beverly wanted to sell right off and hie herself out of here and start fresh in one of the bigger cities. But Hudson was all against it. He had something to say about selling the farm. And he wasn’t going to budge an inch. They came close to blows over it more than once.’

  Banner grunted. ‘Now that Beverly’s dead, Hudson’ll have it all his own way.’

  Skinner’s nail-head eyes dulled. He said slowly, ‘That’s the size of it.’

  ‘And,’ said Banner, ‘you won’t get the farm for love or money.’

  Banner couldn’t see Skinner’s expression, for the judge had turned away to flick dust off a law tome with a flame-coloured bandanna.

  ‘I’m anxious to see that crowd,’ went on Banner.

  Skinner looked at him. ‘The Jelkes? You mean you want to help me solve this murder?’

  Banner shrugged his bulky shoulders. ‘Skunks and rabbits, they have habits,’ he said.

  They rode up through the long lane of dark poplars in the judge’s buggy with the wobbly top, pulled by a spavined horse. The old buildings spread over acres. Lights were on in the kitchen and the front parlour.

  Skinner, who had phoned the local constabulary and ordered no interference with Senator Banner’s prowlings, had added a hawthorn stick to his rig since leaving the office. He courteously rapped the head of the stick on the front door. A girl in a printed house dress popped out at them.

  ‘Come in,’ she said at once.

  They moved through double sliding oak doors into the parlour. There was a heavy brass lamp on a tabletop that was glazed with turpentine and beeswax. In the light Banner saw that the girl was small and slight. She had dark brown hair that she had begun to neglect and it was getting stringy. Her arms, bare from the elbows down, were sunbrowned till the skin looked like tan satin. Banner liked her wholesomeness. Skinner introduced her as Celeste Jelke, Hudson’s wife.

  ‘So you’re the little girl the judge’s been telling tales about,’ said Banner as he shook her firm hand. She turned shyly away and called for Hud.

  The doughy-faced, shaggy young man with the greedy eyes tramped in and stared suspiciously at Banner as the judge made them known to each other.

  ‘I’m sorry we can’t offer you any supper, Senator,’ said Hudson coldly. ‘We just finished.’

  ‘I’ll raid your ice chest,’ Banner stated blandly. ‘I’m needing a shakedown for the night. The hotel in town is fulla drummers.’

  Hudson’s brow blackened. ‘You’re damn cagey, ain’t you? We all know what you’re up to. Come right out and say it’s about Bev!’

  Banner grinned. ‘That’s throwing in your blue chips, son. We understand each other. Tray bone, as we used to say to the Frenchies in the Big War. We all wanna see punished the person who killed your beloved sister.’

  Hudson was brutal. ‘I didn‘t love her.’

  Celeste’s hazel eyes grew round at his audacity.

  ‘If everyone’s as truthful as you,’ said Banner sourly, ‘we won’t have much trouble cleaning house. This’s like catching another man with your wife: the situation calls for action.’

  Celeste spoke up. ‘I do have something to tell you. That double-barrelled shotgun we kept behind the kitchen door—it’s gone.’

  ‘Have you looked for it?’ said Banner.

  ‘High and low,’ Hudson replied.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Then Banner said, ‘Haven’t you got an uncle?’

  ‘He ain’t here,’ said Hudson curtly. ‘He’s out prowling around.’ He made it sound sinister.

  A sinewy young man in overalls came into the parlour. His hair and eyebrows were bleached by the sun. He stopped and took a smoke-blackened clay pipe out of his mouth and looked at the others with blank ocean-aqua eyes.

  Celeste said quickly, ‘Senator, this is our hired man, Wayne Markes.’

  ‘How dee do,’ said Wayne.

  Hudson seemed to take a perverse delight in making others uneasy. He said, ‘Wayne’s got things on his mind, Senator. He’s thinking all the time about that girl student over at Foxchase Hall.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Banner asked. ‘A school?’

  ‘Yeah. A finishing school for girls. It’s the nearest place to ours. Her name is Joan Vicars, ain’t it, Wayne? He met her down by the creek a couple of times. He thinks it’s love.’

  Wayne’s cheeks were as red as a Valentine heart. ‘The Senator ain’t interested in that, Hud,’ he said resentfully.

  ‘Ain’t he, though?’ Hudson persisted.

  ‘I ain’t,’ said Banner. He patted his punchbowl tummy. ‘Which way’s the kitchen?’

  ‘I’ll get something for you,’ Celeste said hurriedly. ‘Wayne, straighten out one of the rooms upstairs for the Senator.’

  Wayne went back out through the sliding doors. Hudson followed Celeste into the kitchen.

  All this time Skinner had kept a keen-eyed vigil on Banner. ‘There isn’t much to go on, is there?’ said Skinner.

  Banner hitched up his pants. ‘What kind of a damsel was this Beverly Jelke?’

  ‘Not bad looking, not bad at all.’ Skinner paused to think about it. ‘I knew her all her life. She was a tomboy, always running around barefoot and going fishing. Her favourite pastime was horseshoe pitching and she was expert at it. She was clever—and heartless …’

  There were plenty of rooms in the house. After a cold supper, Banner followed Celeste up a dark stairwell. Celeste lit a dim light in the upper hall. They passed one locked door. It was Beverly’s room.

  Banner eyed the steel-springed cot, the feather mattress, and the fat pillow. Inconveniences never fazed him. Celeste said good-night softly and left him. He tossed his toilet articles on top of a pine bureau. From his pocket he had taken a straight razor with a bone handle, a shaving brush, and a toothbrush for his upper plate.

  He jimmied off his shoes and threw them away from him. They landed like kegs of nails. He dropped his clothes in piles on the floor. There was a crazy quilt on the cot. The night was getting cool. He pulled the quilt over him and went to sleep.

  At a quarter to one Banner bounced like a gutta-percha ball into a sitting position. The echoes of a shot were still reverberating. He swung his feet over the side of the cot, feeling for his pants. As he tangled himself up in red suspenders[1] he heard doors slam and feet running inside the house. He kicked his feet into the widely-flung brogans and scrambled down the stairs without a shirt on.

  The others were already clustered on the porch step. Celeste sobbed hysterically. Banner pushed his way through and looked down on the step.

  In the moonlight Hudson Jelke lay sprawled with part of his scalp and his face blown away by buckshot.

  Wayne Markes got a quilt and covered the body with it.

  Skinner, who had also decided to stay overnight, phoned to Cow Crossing for a wagon to take the body away. Banner, consoling Celeste in a fatherly way, took her to her room and made her lie down. He came downstairs again to study the ground in front of the porch step.

  Skinner came out and looked stupidly at Banner. Two murders were getting to be too much for the legal lights of Cow Crossing.

  ‘There’re some footprints,’ said Banner. ‘We’ll have to wait till it gets daylight to follow them.’

  ‘Do you think we can?’ questioned Skinner doubtfully.

  Banner was grim. ‘We can use a coupla hounds.’ He raised his head as if to listen. Skinner and Wayne listened too and understood.

  The dogs were strangely silent. The sound of the shot had stirred them up a bit, but they soon grew still.

  Wayne said, ‘We had a house-breaker come one night and the hounds bellered till dawn.’ He shook himself. ‘All right if I take a look around, Se
nator?’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Banner.

  The hired man melted into the dense shadows.

  In time a wagon came with a fussy coroner who bawled everybody out merely for being there. Finally Hudson’s body was taken away to keep his sister company.

  Banner and Skinner went into the farmhouse. They could hear Celeste still crying in her room. Skinner went up to offer a few words of comfort.

  Wayne came into the parlour looking ashen under his sunburn. ‘I just saw something,’ he gulped. Banner eyed him narrowly. ‘I was wandering among the fruit trees,’ went on Wayne. ‘I saw something moving—flitting. It seemed to have a human shape. And it was luminous!’

  ‘Luminous?’

  ‘It gave off a glow.’

  ‘Did you get near enough to—’

  ‘No, no, it was gone in a flash.’ Wayne turned abruptly towards the door. ‘I’m going to bed.’ Banner heard his feet stumble on the stairs.

  No one knew if Banner went back to bed again that night or not. He didn’t.

  The first pink of dawn sifted through the heavy screens on the parlour windows. Banner heard a sound of pots and pans in the kitchen. He went in and found Celeste preparing breakfast. She had cried herself out and now managed to present a weak smile.

  Skinner and Wayne came down shortly afterwards. Skinner looked more than his sixty years. Wayne was as fresh as if he had had a full night’s sleep. That’s what age does to you, thought Banner.

  ‘Get us a doublet of hounds,’ Banner said. Wayne brought a pair on chain leashes to the front of the house.

  The footprints of the killer were plain in the early light. The hounds caught the scent and they bayed like muffled bells.

  The footprints went on and on, past the storage shed and out towards the open fields. The trackers pressed into a clump of sassafras, the hounds sniffing confidently. The murderer’s heavy ungainly shoes made perfect impressions in the loam. They crossed some shale where the prints disappeared, but the pace of the hounds never slackened.