Gory Dew (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Now, now, mother! Happen it was a genuine mistake,” said Smetton soothingly.

  “Oh, I’m sure it was,” said Sebastian. “Better not make an issue of it, since it can all be cleared up so easily. By the way, Mr. Smetton, did this young woman of Gorinsky’s have any luggage with her?”

  “Luggage? Oh, yes, sir. She had a couple of suitcases. I carried them up the stairs for her.”

  “They’d gone, of course, next day?”

  “Oh, yes, they’d gone, the same as she had. Leastways, they wasn’t in Daffy’s room, where I put ’em the night before.”

  “So there it is,” said Sebastian to his grandmother on his return to the station house. “I’m beginning to believe in the young woman. He is very certain about having seen her, and I think he’s unshakeable, now he’s not in court.”

  “Yes,” said Dame Beatrice, eyeing her grandson. “What is more, Miss Daffy was sent to buy eggs from a woman whose eggs Mrs. Smetton affects to despise. Added to that, there was this mysterious young woman who doesn’t seem to have uttered a word; there were her two suitcases; there was Scouse with her at the side door of the inn—”

  “Well?”

  “The landlord says he did not see Gorinsky that night, but he saw the woman. He saw Gorinsky next morning, but the woman had disappeared, and neither of them came down to breakfast. Can we deduce anything from this slightly suggestive evidence?”

  “But what would be the point of Gorinsky’s disguising himself as a woman? That’s what you’re getting at, I imagine.”

  “Well, it is a point which needs clearing up. Did you put my other questions to Smetton?”

  “You mean about the boy having been locked in his room? I don’t see how they can swear to that, you know. I mean, he may have been (he probably was), but the Smettons’ evidence for it isn’t viable.”

  “You think not? You may be right. What about the bottle of Dubonnet?”

  “Sorry. I forgot about that. I can’t think it’s of any importance, anyway, because any one of them could have picked it up and swung it.”

  “Maybe, but it intrigues me.”

  “Don’t you think it might be dangerous to my client to pursue the bottle motif? I mean, what more likely, from the point of view of a jury, than that an East End boy in a temper swung a bottle and crushed a skull? It’s not as though Dave is a puny little weakling, you know. Get him, with his thews and sinews, behind a heavy bottle, and you’ve got something in the nature of a sledge hammer, as the prosecution will be quick enough to point out. It isn’t disputed that he knocked his man down and kicked him. What more natural than that, in his admittedly berserk state, he finished him off? I don’t believe he did, but a jury might.”

  “Well, how did one of them get hold of the bottle? For my own information I shall pursue the matter. I need to see the Smettons again, in any case. There is something else which, so far, does not seem to have been thought of.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing important, most probably, but, to use one of Laura’s most well-worn quotations, we must leave no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored. The party of five left in one car, which they filled. Assuming that they had at least one suitcase each, these would have accounted for all the space in the boot, even in a large car. What means were employed, therefore, to transport a boxing platform, four ring-posts, a quantity of stout rope, a punching bag, a punching ball, several pairs of boxing gloves, protective head and body gear, skipping ropes . . .”

  “I suppose they sent for them. It would be easy enough. Anyway, I’m sure it’s unimportant, and I can’t even see that it’s interesting. Some removals van must have been told to load them up and take them straight to Yorkshire. You said Sparowe told you they were unloaded at an hotel in Leeds. Come to that, only ropes and ring-posts seem to have been specifically mentioned.”

  “Nothing has been said about a furniture van, but perhaps, as you say, it is a thing of no importance.”

  She changed this opinion again after she had seen Toby and Laura and had had another interview with Mrs. Smetton. The travellers returned to the station house to make their sterile report and Laura, who still scented a mystery, emphasized the fact that, even for an overnight stay, the boxing gear had all been unloaded from the car.

  “From the car? Are you sure?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “Certain,” replied Laura emphatically. “When Toby first told us his tale I was struck by the fact that they went to all the trouble of having the stuff taken upstairs only to have it all brought down again in the morning. It seemed so idiotic that I queried it at the hotel, but the receptionist and the porter remained firm. It had been unloaded from the boot of the car and was put back there on the following morning directly after breakfast.”

  “Then they couldn’t have taken anything like all of it,” said Toby. “Any good asking the Smettons whether anything was left behind?”

  “I think it might be,” said Dame Beatrice, “if only as a matter of interest.” She went across to the inn next day after Laura and Toby (who had been offered a bed there during Dame Beatrice’s tenancy of the station) had gone to the Stone House in Hampshire, and was invited into the parlour by an indignant Mrs. Smetton who obviously had been brooding on her wrongs.

  “That lawyer said somebody went to the police and said she saw Mr. Smetton and me in Heathcote Fitzprior the morning that lot left for London,” she said. “They couldn’t have done, Dame Beatrice. We wasn’t there.”

  “It’s easy to be mistaken, I suppose. I quite see that, and it seems that all the person saw was the back view of a man and a woman who were walking away from a parked car.”

  “But why should they say it was us? That’s what I’d like to know. It might get us to lose our licence. What’s going to be the outcome, if it’s thought we left the bar unattended during hours?”

  “Licensing hours, you mean?”

  ‘That’s right. We have to be open for custom every day of the year for the hours that’s laid down, and there’s no getting away from it.”

  “You are allowed help, I suppose?”

  “And where do we get that?”

  “Well, there is your cousin, isn’t there?”

  “That’s what the young lawyer fellow said. Nice boy, but he’s got a lot to learn. Put Daffy in charge of the bar? She’d have a fit, as I told him. She doesn’t know anything about the prices, for one thing, and she doesn’t know lager from light ale. She’d spend all her time reading the labels on the bottles while the customers got blue in the face swearing.”

  “Ah, yes, the bottles,” said Dame Beatrice. “Did you ever find the missing bottle of Dubonnet?”

  “No, we never have, and if the police are right—they keep on coming and pestering us, you know—we never shan’t. Got somebody’s fingerprints on it, if you ask me, and fingerprints catches murderers, so I hear.”

  “You may well be right. I suppose the police are still searching for the bottle, then?”

  “Turned the place inside out and upside down, they have. I wish they’d give over. They’ll never find out nothing more here. First I knew we’d got any bottles of Dubonnet, but Mr. Smetton sees to all the stock.”

  “When did the van come to take away all the gear? I understood that your big room on the first floor was used as a gymnasium.”

  “Van? There hasn’t been no van. They went off like that, all in a hurry, and left all that boxing stuff behind. It’s all up there, just as it was. Come on up and I’ll show you. I’d like to get rid of it, but I don’t know who I could ask to take it away. It isn’t ours, you see.”

  “By the way,” said Dame Beatrice, as they mounted the stairs, “I suppose it’s quite certain that young Dave Holley was locked in his room after he had knocked down Mr. Gorinsky, and that he wasn’t released until the party was ready to set off for London?”

  “As to that, I couldn’t say for sure. All I know is I saw that ignorant man they called Harry outside Dave’s room and I heard him
saying Dave was to cool off and behave himself or else they’d both be out of a job. Well, here’s the room, just as they left it, except I keep it dusted and that, of course.”

  “Well, this is extremely interesting,” said Dame Beatrice. “I have never seen a gymnasium equipped for boxing. This, I suppose, is what they call the ring.”

  “Portable,” said Mrs. Smetton. “It comes in these six four-foot squares and you fix them together with these metal clamps. Then the posts socket into these slots and the ropes go through these holes and there you are. You can see the way it’s fixed up.”

  “Ingenious.” Dame Beatrice pulled up one of the corner posts an inch or two. “I wonder why they had a second lot of apparatus delivered at the hotel in Leeds, when it would surely have been cheaper to send for this?” She examined all that was there, even to the extent of unscrewing the wooden handles of the skipping ropes. “I see that the cornerposts, as well as the platform, are made in sections, and that they are of metal and are hollow. Very convenient indeed if one wanted to smuggle diamonds.” She cackled. Mrs. Smetton laughed.

  “Of course, they took the gloves,” she said, “being items they could push into their suitcases, I suppose, but the punching ball they left behind, as you can see, and these helmet things and kind of body pieces, and their punching bag still hung in the garage until Mr. Smetton took it down, it being inconvenient there.”

  “I suppose they used all these things daily?”

  “Well, not the punching bag, though why they didn’t I don’t know, except I suppose the lad used poor Harry Biddle instead.”

  “I suppose they left nothing else behind?”

  “They didn’t have nothing else to leave except their suitcases, and they certainly didn’t leave them.”

  “Did any of them bring more than one, do you know?”

  “No. Daffy and I done out their rooms and made the beds and there was never but the one suitcase in each, and, ’cepting for Gorinsky’s, they was only very small ones.”

  “Why wouldn’t Gorinsky allow your husband to use his room the night the woman came here?”

  “Oh, well, it wouldn’t hardly have done seeing she wasn’t his wife, would it? It would have meant her and Gorinsky sharing.”

  “That wasn’t the reason he gave your husband, though, was it?”

  “No. He said he couldn’t be bothered shifting his gear and didn’t want nobody else to lay their hands on it.”

  “That was before he and Mr. Scouse left for the station at Morchester, of course. Did it not sound a very inadequate reason?”

  “Not if you knew Gorinsky.”

  “I wonder what you mean by that?”

  Mrs. Smetton did not attempt to explain. She said:

  “I often wonder what happened to the girl. I wish I’d set eyes on her, that I do. She come by night and she’d gone by morning, and then for there to be all that to-do and Mr. Gorinsky to be found dead like that and Mr. Smetton to have to go and look at his body. It’s not what I’ve been accustomed to, Dame Beatrice, and that’s a fact.”

  “The young woman left without a word to you, and took her suitcases with her, and did not wait for breakfast? Yes, it is most strange. I suppose Gorinsky drove her to the station, and that is why he did not breakfast with the others.”

  “Ah, well, let’s hope we’ve seen the end of the lot of them. I’m sorry for that boy, though. If he done it, he done it in a fit of temper, but they’re bound to make allowance for that, Dame Beatrice, ain’t they?”

  “Now, about the bottles of Dubonnet. Where were they kept?”

  “One on the shelf in the bar and two down the cellar, I suppose.”

  “And which one disappeared and was unaccounted for?”

  “Why, one of those in the cellar. We’d have missed the other one sooner, so Mr. Smetton said.”

  “Could your guests get into the cellar?”

  “Well, there’s no lock on the flap as leads down from behind the bar, but I couldn’t say whether any of ’em ever went down there, I’m sure. I should have thought Mr. Smetton would have knowed, if they did.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Innocents Day

  “Old Satan’s mad and I am glad—O send one angel down!

  He missed the soul he thought he had—O send one angel down!”

  Anon.—Negro Spiritual

  “You see,” said Dame Beatrice to a worried C.I.D. inspector, “it is so extraordinary that the party should have left all that quite expensive equipment at the Swan Revived and obtained some new items of the same sort somewhere and at some time between leaving the inn and arriving at their hotel in Leeds. Then there is the matter of Gorinsky’s forged signature in the hotel register.”

  “They claim he asked Smith, that is Gracechurchstreet, to sign in for him. I’ve had another go at them and done my best to turn them inside out, but I can’t get any further. Gracechurchstreet even admits that he wrote the note that seems to have started all the trouble. Says he didn’t want the boy to become friendly with Mr. Sparowe because he had found out that Mr. Sparowe was a more than useful amateur and the next thing would be not only the training spins but some sparring, and the boy could get hurt and his looks spoilt for filming. I’ve also seen Mr. Sparowe and he allows that he did spar with the boy, but claims it was only once. He also told me that he gave the lad a few tips.”

  “Of which, in his attack on Gorinsky, Holley seems to have made good use,” commented Dame Beatrice. “But, in view of the medical opinion, Inspector, together with the apparently unassailable evidence that the boy was locked in his room until the party left the inn, you cannot seriously believe that Dave Holley killed Gorinsky, can you?”

  “Somebody did, ma’am, and there’s no evidence of any other quarrel.”

  “I suppose you’ve never considered the theory that the boxing set-up and Gracechurchstreet’s manoeuvres as an impresario were a cloak for something quite different?”

  “What sort of something, ma’am? You see, I think there’s a conspiracy to protect this boy. What if he wasn’t locked in his room until after he’d swung that bottle and done for Gorinsky? None of them want the lad jugged for manslaughter, let alone murder. In their different ways they’ve all got a vested interest in him. If he goes to gaol and therefore out of the picture, Scouse and Biddle are out of a job and Gracechurchstreet and Maverick (to give them their trade names) lose this remarkably fine-looking young fellow that they want for their film. Doesn’t it make sense that they’re all in a conspiracy to cover up for him?”

  “It is the young woman who bothers me, Inspector.”

  “Well, yes, that part of it does seem a bit queer. I mean, she must have come to the inn, else why should the landlord, who had nothing to gain or lose either way, say that he’d let her in that night?”

  “Doesn’t it seem to you rather odd that it was Scouse who escorted her into the inn and Gorinsky who put away the car? As she was supposed to be Gorinsky’s friend, and as Scouse was in Gorinsky’s employment, wouldn’t you have thought it more likely that Gorinsky would have escorted the woman to the inn door and left Scouse to put the car away?”

  “Well, if you put it like that, ma’am, I could agree, but folks don’t always do things the way you’d expect, do they?”

  “No, that is true, of course. You did note that nobody seems to have heard the woman utter one single word? That, taken together with the way that, having appeared at the inn at some hour close to midnight, she seems to have left it again at some time before breakfast and, at that, nobody either saw or heard her go, makes me wonder whether there ever was a young woman at the inn at all.”

  “I take your point, and I agree it does seem strange, but why should the landlord lie about it, ma’am?”

  “Because he may genuinely believe he admitted a woman that night. I don’t think he did anything of the kind. I think he may have admitted Gorinsky disguised as a woman, and, in that case, I think Scouse had already put away the car before t
hey knocked up the landlord. And that’s another thing. If you question the landlord about it, he will still contend that he had arranged to leave the side door on the latch so that there would be no need to wake him or his wife if the two men came back late.”

  “Then why should they have knocked him up, ma’am?”

  “I think Gorinsky may have wanted a witness to the fact that a woman had arrived at the inn that night, and had brought two suitcases with her.”

  “But the others all denied it, so what was the good of one witness against five?”

  “The five (and they include Holley, who would hardly have been taken into their confidence if, as I believe, they were planning something illegal) did not contradict the landlord until after Gorinsky was dead. As I see it (and, of course, I may be totally wrong) Gorinsky and Scouse did go to meet someone that night, but it was not at Morchester station, and I would risk a guess that the person they went to meet was not a woman.”

  “You’ve got something definite in mind, ma’am, and I know you’ve had wide experience of these cases. Would you care to tell me what you’re really thinking?”

  “I should be interested to find out what was in the two suitcases which the so-called woman brought with her and which the landlord seems to have carried up the stairs. Following on that, and believing, as I do, that no woman was involved, I should like to know why Gorinsky needed to have the use of an extra room that night.”

  “You mean the room the cousin was turned out of? Well, if you’re right (which, with all respect, I don’t accept at present), it does seem there’s something behind all this that we ought to investigate. Unfortunately, the man who could explain it all is dead.”

  “Yes, but his enemies or confederates, whichever they were, are not. What do you know about the man who calls himself Gracechurchstreet? What is Maverick’s reputation in his native Ireland? How did they get in touch with Gorinsky? How did Gorinsky fall in with Scouse and Biddle? What gave Gorinsky the idea that young Holley would train to become a professional boxer? Mr. Sparowe, who has no axe to grind in the matter, says that the lad is inept and unskilled in the art. Gracechurchstreet may have needed him for a film because of his good looks, but Gorinsky can never have picked him out because of his potentialities as a prize-fighter.”