The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop mb-2

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘And Savile? Why, that Lulu girl up at the Cottage as good as told Mrs Bradley that Sethleigh was her lover. “There’s one man dead for me already,” she said. What else can you make of that? A husband that’s been fooled isn’t the sweetest-tempered creature on earth, you know, and you say yourself the chap’s got muscle enough for the job.’

  ‘What was that about the doctor?’

  ‘Blackmail.’

  ‘Oh, that illegitimacy business. What of it? Good Lord, if every man who has an illegitimate kid turned into a murderer, what the devil would the world come to?’

  ‘Oh, well, a doctor, you know. Got to be pretty careful. The patients and all that. Especially when they’re county families. Don’t like it, you know. Family doctor’s got to be a bally Joseph as far as they’re concerned, or else – nah poo!’

  ‘Was it ever proved, though?’

  ‘Cleaver Wright.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fact. Don’t you spot the likeness?’

  ‘I – well, now you mention it – oh, I don’t know, though. One’s reddish and the other nearly black.’

  ‘Not an unusual result in father and son. Probably the mother was dark, too.’

  ‘But the eyes and mouth?’

  ‘Different, yes. The mother again, I should think. But the family likeness is unmistakable, once you’ve got on to it. And, of course, Cleaver’s been sponging on the doctor ever since he’s been here!’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Rumour says so. May not be true, of course. But we might look into it, I think. I’ve often wondered why those folks came to live here. Easy money was probably the reason. The doctor wouldn’t want –’

  ‘But Mrs Bryce Harringay?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about young Redsey and that will, and I’m dead sure that boy’s telling the truth. Put it this way. As soon as the will was altered and Sethleigh died, young Harringay came in for the house and land.’

  ‘Yes. I know that. Go on.’

  ‘Redsey swears he didn’t know the will was going to be altered. Hadn’t heard a word about it.’

  ‘We’ve thrashed all that out before. I say he did know.’

  ‘Half a minute. Just take the other side for a moment. Suppose he didn’t know, but that Mrs Bryce Harringay did.’

  ‘We needn’t suppose at all. We know she’d heard the will was to be altered. She said as much.’

  ‘More than once.’ The inspector grinned ruefully. ‘And always with chapter and verse, not to mention whole book of words, complete with song and dance! What I’ve put up with from those two old women – her and the scraggy one –’

  ‘Bradley?’

  ‘Ah. Never mind! Well, as I say, supposing she not only knew that the proposed alteration was in the wind, but that she actually thought the will had already been altered?’

  ‘But she didn’t think so.’

  ‘We can’t prove it, either way. Neither can we prove that Redsey is telling the truth when he swears he didn’t know. It cuts both ways, you see, and if you say one of ’em’s a liar, you’ve got to keep your weather eye lifting because the other one may be lying too. See my point?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But the crime? You don’t tell me she did in Sethleigh and then carved him up?’

  ‘I think she might have killed him. Big, hefty, very heavy woman, you know, and determined – damned determined!’ said the inspector feelingly. ‘She could have followed the two of them into the woods, seen Redsey knock out Sethleigh, gone up and stabbed Sethleigh in the throat with her little fruit-knife –’

  ‘Fruit-knife?’

  ‘Ah. Poor woman’s one of these vegetarians, you know. They all cart their fruit-knives about with them. At least, the Miss Mindens always do; and this one is always got up in gold chains and things, so she could easily hang a fruit-knife on herself somewhere. Silver or stainless steel they’re made of, and are beautifully fashioned and finished. And nobody would think of such a thing as a weapon. You could clean it up after the murder, and go on carting it about with you, you see. Not like anything big and suspicious – like a dagger, for instance.’

  ‘That’s a point. We’ve never discovered quite how the murder was committed. We only know the chap wasn’t killed at the butcher’s, because there was not enough blood. A little neat nick in the neck would have done the trick very nicely, I should say.’

  ‘Yes,’ went on the inspector, ‘and she’s got no alibi at all from about a quarter to eight until ten o’clock that night.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been nosing round that house a fair number of times now, and getting out a few ideas – you know the way – and it has sort of come out that she didn’t go to church that night, and she went up to her bedroom at about a quarter to eight because she had a touch of neuralgia or something. Well, nobody saw her from then until two farm hands brought Redsey home drunk from the “Queen’s Head” that night. What do you make of that?’

  ‘And you think she had an idea the will had already been altered?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And by doing in Sethleigh she could grab the lot for the kid?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There’s something in it, but not much.’

  ‘There’s as much in it as in your tin-pot idea that Redsey did it,’ retorted the inspector, grinning. ‘The fact is, Mr Bidwell, they’ve neither of them got the stomach to carve up the corpse. It seems to me we’re up against that all the time. Those that had enough motive to do the murder couldn’t rake up the guts to cover their tracks by messing up the identity of the body. And those that are blood-thirsty enough to hang bits of a dead man on hooks don’t seem to have had enough motive to kick a dog – let alone commit a crime!’

  II

  ‘Then there’s the question of Savile,’ said Mrs Bradley, after a pause. ‘A very vexed question, that of Savile. You see, the Stone itself would be such a temptation to him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Aubrey.

  ‘A most curious person, Savile,’ Mrs Bradley went on. ‘I’ve made a whole sheaf of notes about him. I shall incorporate them in my small new work for the Sixpenny Library. It is entitled Psycho-Analysis for the Many. You might recommend it to your mother with my compliments! No, but Savile really is a gem. I wouldn’t have missed him for anything. And the vicar, too. Excellent. Surprisingly excellent, both of them.’

  ‘But Savile hadn’t any reason for hating Sethleigh,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘Hadn’t he? You go and ask Lulu Hirst about that.’ Mrs Bradley pursed her lips and shook her small black head.

  ‘Oh? Oh, really. Oh, I see.’ He didn’t, in the least, but at fifteen and three-quarters one hesitates about confessing ignorance on any subject under the sun.

  ‘Yes, Savile liked things done just so,’ Mrs Bradley went on, as though she were talking to herself. ‘And I wonder sometimes whether the Stone was too much for him. Somehow, though, I think he wouldn’t have carried the thing through so boldly. He is consistent, I am sure; neat and tidy to a fault – it was a very tidy person who left that butcher’s shop in such good order! – and he has a curious kink in his mentality. Have you observed it, child? But I don’t think he has the requisite amount of nerve, quite, for a murder.’

  ‘I’ve observed he’s a greasy swine,’ said Aubrey, without heat. ‘Can’t stick him at any price.’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t mean that. No, this that I am referring to struck me very forcibly when I went to call there one afternoon and discovered him in the act of interring a small dead bird – a canary which in life had belonged to Lulu Hirst.’

  ‘Oh?’ The hot afternoon was making Aubrey sleepy.

  ‘Yes. He was wearing a clergyman’s collar.’

  ‘Clergyman’s collar? Absent-minded blighter – like the vicar! Fancy two of them in one parish!’ He began to laugh.

  ‘Not absent-minded. That collar was a bit of ritual. Surely you noticed the Robin Hood suit when h
e nearly shot me in the Manor Woods that afternoon?’

  ‘Robin Hood suit? Oh, yes. But he told us he was rehearsing for a play.’

  ‘Rehearsing my foot!’ pronounced Mrs Bradley firmly. ‘He was dressed for the part he was playing in his imagination, that’s all. And that’s why I think he must be the butcher. You see, to him a dead body – dead flesh – would signify meat. Meat is cut into joints. Very well. He cuts it into joints!’

  ‘But that’s a bit of a skilled job, you know.’ Aubrey was wide awake now. ‘I mean, you can’t just pick up a butcher’s cleaver and hack about. It’s scientific. I’ve often watched them, and I bet it takes a bit of doing, not to speak of heaps of practice.’ He spoke decidedly.

  ‘Undoubtedly. But Savile had a chart hanging up in the studio. He used it to correct his drawings. It was a mass of red-ink dots and little crosses, and was annotated very freely. It was a human body with the skeleton marked in black, and had fainter lines showing the shape of the flesh on the bones. A most fascinating work. Oh, and Wright didn’t like to see me looking at it, I remember. That is interesting, too.’

  ‘But Savile looks such a miserable little dago,’ argued Aubrey. ‘Butchers are generally hefty lads.’

  ‘So is Savile.’ Mrs Bradley drew a vivid word-picture of Savile’s strength and muscular development.

  ‘Shouldn’t have thought it,’ said Aubrey. ‘Well, he had the strength, then. What else?’

  ‘The Stone. Apart from any question of motive from the viewpoint of revenge or gain, we get the fact that the Stone is the centre of some weird and wonderful legends. It may even have been a sacrificial altar in some remote age, as its name suggests. I wonder sometimes whether the urge to offer a human sacrifice upon it would not be motive enough for a mind like that of Savile to cause him to commit murder. It is a pleasing idea. Rather fantastic, perhaps. . . .’

  ‘Then, if you are right, Savile could have been the chap who must have been sneaking about in the woods that night and boned the suitcase while I’d gone up to the house,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘Yes. Undoubtedly. And it would fit in well with my theory of his guilt that he should have buried the fish with it and inscribed that peculiar legend upon the piece of paper. “A present from Grimsby” !’ She cackled with pleasure.

  ‘I see the inspector at the gate. I wonder whether they’ve tried to find the origin of that piece of paper?’ she continued, staring down the long garden path.

  ‘I don’t think they have. The chap kept trying to get me to confess I’d written it myself,’ said Aubrey. ‘Got quite huffy when I stuck to it that I knew no more about the bally paper than he did! But do you know who I think did that? Cleaver Wright. He’s just that sort of feeble ass, you know. I say, I think the inspector wants to speak to you. Oh, no. He’s gone. But I say! Wouldn’t what you say about Savile apply pretty equally to Wright? I mean, he’s a mad coot, isn’t he? And I could more easily imagine him killing a chap than that worm Savile. And he’s as strong as an ox, and he’s pretty keen on Lulu Hirst, too; and he’d think it a good jape to cut up the body and hang up the limbs like bits of meat! I can see him grinning all over his face at the thought of it! And we know he was in the Manor Woods that Sunday night with Margery Barnes, and we know she ran away from him. And then, the chap she saw crawling out of the bushes could not have been Sethleigh, so that it may have been the murderer. Had you thought of that?’

  ‘Ad nauseam,’ said Mrs Bradley, with no intention of snubbing him. ‘But then, child, don’t you see? If it was the murderer, then the murderer couldn’t have been Cleaver Wright, whom she’d just left in the clearing.’

  ‘Why not? He could have sneaked behind the bushes when she ran away from him, and started crawling out without noticing that she had run back to the clearing again.’

  ‘With what object should he hide himself then? You are not proposing to tell me that, in the few seconds whilst Margery Barnes was lost to sight, Cleaver Wright killed Sethleigh, hid the body, and crawled into the bushes and then out again, are you?’

  ‘Well, no, but –’

  ‘And if you are not telling me that, why then, if he was the murderer, that means he murdered Sethleigh at some time between five minutes to eight, when your mother saw Sethleigh and Redsey going into the woods together, and a quarter to nine, when he met Margery Barnes. Well, that part of the theory is tenable. After all, given reasonably favourable circumstances, it does not take long to kill a fellow-creature. But, supposing Wright did that, do you really think it conceivable that he immediately brought Margery Barnes to the spot where he had just committed the murder? And, even supposing that he were bold or foolhardy or coldblooded enough to return to the spot with the girl, why should he have fled to the “Queen’s Head” in that panic-stricken way and at once set about providing himself with an alibi? You see, I’m sure he saw the corpse in the woods that night, and he may have got blood from it on to his clothes. Of course, the fight with Galloway was a capital mistake. It was a confession that he knew of, even if he did not actually participate in, the crime.’

  ‘Knew of?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Cleaver Wright has been shielding somebody for a long time now. The curious part of it all is that I rather fancy he is shielding somebody who is not the murderer!’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘No. I expressed myself very badly, child. Take a concrete case. He is in love with Lulu Hirst. Suppose he imagined she had done it. She couldn’t possibly have done it, as a matter of fact –’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Wrong type, my dear. These passionate, tigerish, rather primitive persons don’t go about things so deliberately. All the details of the murder of Rupert Sethleigh have probably been planned for months. All that the murderer needed was a favourable opportunity. He prowled about, and had the wit to take advantage of one of those freaks of fortune which do occasionally occur. He saw that James Redsey imagined he had killed his cousin. I can’t see why a man who had the presence of mind to take advantage of a fact like that should have made the tremendous mistake of transporting the corpse to Bossbury and attempting to get rid of all evidence of its identity. Only the fact that it was impossible for your cousin James Redsey to have dismembered the body has saved him from arrest all this long time. I dare say that if the butcher person had contented himself with stabbing the prostrate Sethleigh as he lay unconscious on the ground, and had gone away leaving the corpse undisturbed, James Redsey would have been hanged.’

  ‘Motive,’ said Aubrey, under his breath.

  ‘Exactly. James had the best motive of anybody, and, in my opinion, your mother had the next best. Then come Dr Barnes and Savile, with about equal motive, I should say, and then Wright. Perhaps Wright’s motive was stronger than Savile’s, though. He is in love with Lulu in his crude animal fashion, whereas Savile is merely married to her. And – Aubrey!’ She leaned forward and slapped his knee excitedly. ‘Quick! Run! Get the inspector to find out which of Lulu’s admirers scorched the collar and handkerchiefs and Felicity Broome’s curtains! Run, child, run! Yes, he went that way! Find out whether it was Savile or Wright, or somebody else! Particularly whether it was somebody else. It’s important!’

  Aubrey returned, breathless, in ten minutes.

  ‘He’s going to find out. Wants to know why you want to know.’

  ‘To-morrow he shall hear,’ promised Mrs Bradley.

  ‘What was I saying? Oh, yes. About Wright shielding Lulu.’

  ‘You think he doesn’t know the real murderer? You think he thinks it is somebody else?’

  ‘Yes. Queer state of affairs, isn’t it?’

  ‘I should say so. By Jove, yes! First of all old Jim certain he’d laid Rupert out. Then everybody having such a frightful bother to prove that the – that Rupert was really dead. . . . Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you! Who did pinch the skull from Cleaver Wright’s studio that afternoon?’

  ‘Cleaver Wright, perhaps.’

  ‘Still on this false tack o
f thinking the murderer was – well, you know! – somebody it wasn’t?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Then,’ said Aubrey, disappointed, ‘he was the one who put it in the Culminster Collection?’

  ‘Of course, child. I’ve known that all along. His peculiar sense of humour again, you see.’

  ‘The – I mean – you can’t prove anything from the skull being moved back to the butcher’s shop.’

  ‘Well’ – Mrs Bradley smiled at him thoughtfully – ‘it just depends who moved it back, doesn’t it? Wright would be bound to share his little joke. No fun keeping it all to himself. See?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I thought you gave the names of all the people you suspected to the police, and told them –’

  ‘I did tell them quite a number of strange things, child. There is a surprise in store for Cleaver Wright, I think. Of course, he stole the key of the Museum from the vicar. A man like that is a menace to the whole parish! The vicar, I mean. Anybody could steal anything from him!’

  ‘You know,’ said Aubrey, wrinkling his brow, ‘I feel in an awful muddle about all this. Do you know who the murderer is? And can you be certain that Cleaver Wright could get into the butcher’s shop?’

  ‘I am not quite prepared to answer those questions,’ said Mrs Bradley, smiling with quiet enjoyment. ‘Ask me again to-morrow. And now, dear me! Whoever is this? Mary Kate Maloney, as I live! She seems perturbed.’

  Mary Kate flew up the garden path in an ecstasy of importance, terror, and blazing excitement. She had not even troubled to remove her apron.

  ‘Glory be to God, Mrs Bradley, ma’am!’ she declared, fervent but out of breath. ‘Do you be running over to the house with all your legs this day! Sure, and there’s poor Mr Savile from the Cottage on the Hill does be hanging by his braces from the wood-shed door entirely.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s entirely,’ said Mrs Bradley calmly, as she stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘I am bored to death by mere limbs and joints. What’s come over him that he should do a silly thing like that?’

  ‘Sure, they do be saying it must be unrequited love, the poor young fellow, ma’am.’