Dead Men's Morris (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Boars,” replied Mrs. Bradley.

  “Oh? The Queen’s College legend of the bloke and the volume of Aristotle? Rather a good idea, as we’re both thinking about Hereward and Nero. Incidentally, I’ve been handing the sergeant our version of the Sandford ghost affair and the results of our researches. The police can’t touch it, he thinks. The doctor’s certificate was quite in order.”

  “The doctor’s certificate covers everything at present. There were no suspicious circumstances from the point of view of the police except the wager. I did mention that to the inspector.”

  “The money, you think, was a decoy.”

  “Oh, yes. But the point of interest is—did the dead man know who had sent it?”

  “Do you think he did, Aunt Adela?”

  “One might deduce it, child.”

  “Oh, yes, I see. The chap who put up the money was someone Fossder thought he’d be able to trust, so that even if Tombley didn’t show up at all, Fossder still knew—or thought he knew—that the chap would fork out the cash.”

  “The ‘chap’ had already done so,” Mrs. Bradley pointed out.

  “It’s queer to think that Fossder trusted so well a bloke who was going to murder him,” Carey remarked, as they turned off the road and approached the entrance to what had once been the farmyard. “By the way, what makes you so much interested in the passage and the priest’s hole and so on?” he enquired, pushing open the gate.

  “Protective colouring,” said Mrs. Bradley vaguely. She stopped at Hereward’s empty sty, and stood looking into it. Then she opened the door, stepped in, peered at the flooring, took an electric torch from her capacious skirt pocket, and, by its light, looked into the sleeping quarters.

  “Have pigs an acute sense of smell?” she enquired, coming out again, and shutting the door of the sty.

  “Difficult to say.”

  “I mean, child, suppose you went among Mr. Simith’s pigs after you’d been in Tom’s house, would the pig react more or less favourably towards you than if you had gone among them with your Sunday clothes on?”

  “Oh, it would make a difference. I don’t know how much, of course.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. She did not press the point.

  They decided to have a very early lunch, and to go to Shotover immediately afterwards. The snow had entirely disappeared. There were no traces of it in even the most sheltered crevices. Walking, even up the cart-track on to the road for Stanton Great Wood, was muddy, and their shoes were clogged and heavy by the time they reached the gate. They turned left, climbed past the post office up to the church, then inclined to the left again to reach the main road through the village. Fields were on either side of them, Stanton St. John was a huddle of roofs at their backs, and Forest Hill was ahead. Beyond the fields on their left, some of which were in plough, rose deep woods, massed with the gloomy leafless trees of late December. The woods were the colour of woodsmoke, and had almost the same dense obscurity; on the opposite side of the road, far off beyond fields and hedges, a line of trees, a thin straggle of windblown trunks and leafless arms, stood up on the crest of a ridge like ragged clouds in the wake of a wind­blown storm. The sky was grey behind them, and they were silhouetted against it, a scarecrow brood with menace in their very shapelessness.

  “How are your shoes, Aunt Adela?” Carey asked when they had passed through the little old village of Forest Hill and had come upon the Headington-Wheatley road with its buses, cars, and telegraph poles and the A.A. box at the crossways.

  “Suitable for tramping through a bog,” replied Mrs. Bradley cheerfully.

  “Good. The footpath through the park, then, is the quickest and prettiest way. It will bring us out on to the turning to Horsepath, or near it, and we shall then be on top of Shotover.”

  The stile they crossed was invitingly low, and from it the path sloped up past a lodge and skirted a circular pond. Dark woods, squirrel- and bird-haunted, but looking too thick and too grim for that friendly countryside (strongly fenced, moreover), climbed the slope with the travellers, and hid the view on the right. To the left were tended trees, an obelisk, and, further off, the house.

  At the top of the slope—the path was as muddy as Carey had foreseen that it would be—another stile gave on to a made-up lane on the farther side of which a bank dipped steeply to a wattled sheepfold, beyond which a field was in plough. The lane was lined with tall trees. At the end of it was a hedge. Beyond the hedge was a way out on to a narrow sandy road bordered by bushes and promising autumn blackberries.

  They turned to the right along it, and were soon on Shotover Plain. Ignoring the invitation of a sign-post which pointed the way to Horsepath, on they went, and stood at last on the top of Shotover Hill, looking down towards Oxford city.

  “Ah, here we are!” said Mrs. Bradley suddenly. She plunged forward down the slope, soon followed by Carey. Whatever she had seen escaped his eyes. A bird flew up from the bushes with a scream. Mrs. Bradley stooped and parted wet fronds of the bracken that grew in an open space surrounded by stunted oaks. Carey, stopping short, gave a sudden exclamation and gripped Mrs. Brad­ley’s arm. Before them lay Simith, dead. Mrs. Bradley knelt down.

  “Good Lord!” said Carey unsteadily. “He’s been savaged by a boar!”

  Mrs. Bradley straightened herself, and glanced at him sharply.

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “Seen it before. Not to death, but pretty bad. Fellow I had as pigman. Dropped a pig-bucket on a boar I had, called Sam. Sam went for him. Got him down and savaged him. I had to kill the boar. Only way to save the man. They’re terribly savage. Sam was of Nero’s type—you know—that boar they’ve got at Roman Ending. Thick-headed and hated everybody. Good Lord, though! Poor old Simith! What on earth can we do?”

  “Something which is against all the canons of correct procedure,” said Mrs. Bradley briskly. Again she knelt on the ground, beside the body. “You keep guard, child, will you? Nobody must come here until the police arrive. But I don’t even want the police for a minute or two.”

  To Carey’s amazement she began, with strong, swift fingers, to take the clothes off the corpse. She was neat and deft, and handled the dead man with gentle dexterity; she carefully laid aside each blood-soaked garment, until the naked body, with its pitiful old-man’s thinness, was lying on the bracken before her. Expertly she examined it. The wounds, which were chiefly on the abdomen, were savage and horrible, but they seemed to be of less interest to the long yellow fingers and rapidly darting black eyes than were a purple contusion near the base of the spine, the corpse’s broken nose, and the extraordinary amount of blood on the clothing and on the brown bracken.

  Having concluded her inspection, she dressed the body, laid it as she had found it, and nodded several times like a satisfied Chinese mandarin.

  “Murder, child,” she said.

  “You can’t hang a boar,” said Carey. His aunt wiped her hands on some snow-wet bracken twenty yards away from the corpse, and dried their resulting dampness on her handkerchief.

  “What do you mean?” she enquired, as they walked to the path at the top.

  “Simith was killed by a boar.”

  “But a human being planned the murder, child. Otherwise, where is the boar?”

  There were marks of a boar’s hoofs, on the crumpled soil of the bank at the summit of the path, and wheel-marks, possibly of a car, possibly of a cart, had been roughly but sufficiently obliterated. Carey bent and examined them.

  “You’d have a job to prove that the boar was taken into the vehicle,” he said, “although, I grant, it looks just like it to me.”

  “There don’t appear to be other tracks made by the boar, and there is no sign of flattening of the bracken,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We’d better go back to that A.A. box and get the scout to telephone, I suppose.”

  “Did you really come to Shotover to find the body?” asked Carey.

  “Well, someone takes great interest in the local legends,
child,” was Mrs. Bradley’s oblique, unsatisfactory reply. She turned out the dead man’s pockets. In one of them was an envelope, and inside it, on a rough piece of unlined paper similar to the one which had been sent to Fossder from Reading, were two little shields in pencil. One bore a horizontal embattled line, the other a crude but recognisable boar’s head. On the back were the words “B. H. T. Eastcheap.” The postmark on the envelope was Reading.

  Sir Selby Villiers leaned back and grinned at Mrs. Bradley.

  “The Chief Constable doesn’t like you a bit,” he said.

  “Why ever not?” asked Mrs. Bradley, stroking the sleeve of the orange and purple jumper she was wearing.

  “You’ve put murder into his head. He doesn’t want Simith to have been murdered. Spoils the county record or something, I think.”

  “I thought that was Bucks,” said Carey. “Besides, there’s no doubt it was murder—or so Aunt Adela says, and I’d back her opinion against anybody else’s, any day. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I realise, and so does the Chief Constable, that a contused back and a broken nose are not usually the results of falling on bracken in Shotover Woods. I realise, too, that there is no evidence of a struggle with the animal. There is no animal, even, to be found on Shotover Hill. It is all perturbing, very perturbing, to a peace-loving man, you know.”

  He looked pensive and slightly reproachful, and Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “I suppose they’ll arrest Geraint Tombley,” Carey said. “He had the best motive, I suppose? And, added to the death of old Fossder, there doesn’t seem very much doubt.”

  “The police haven’t made up their minds,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Now, how do you know that?” asked Sir Selby. “You are not in their counsels, surely?”

  “Oh, no. It stands to reason,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There is Priest to be considered. He married Linda Ditch. Linda Ditch is with child. Priest himself may be responsible, but it is possible that Simith is the father.”

  “Or Tombley,” Carey observed.

  “In which case, the motive of Priest for murdering Simith falls to the ground,” Sir Selby pointed out.

  “Do you think Tombley’s motive for the murder a strong one?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “I don’t know. It would be, if he wanted his inheritance in a hurry. But we don’t know that he did. And, of course, they quarrelled, didn’t they?”

  “And fought,” said Carey. “I expect that’s how Simith got the broken nose.”

  “And the badly-bruised back, I suppose?” said Mrs. Bradley. She picked up her knitting. “The bruised back, the broken nose, partial strangulation, then the savaging by the boar—it must have been a curious sort of fight. What does puzzle me, though,” she continued, “is how the murderer managed to get the boar away from the body without being hurt himself. Priest, the pigman, might have been able to do it, I suppose?”

  “Roman Ending aren’t the only owners of boars, you know,” said Carey. “I might be suspected myself.”

  “You will be, later on,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “The whole thing’s very odd,” said Sir Selby slowly. He frowned. Mrs. Bradley watched Carey.

  “Go on,” she said encouragingly to him. Carey looked up with a sigh.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “I mean people don’t take boars about on leads, so to speak, as though they were dogs. For breeding, one takes the sow to the boar, not the boar to the sow. And if it had been with the idea of selling it—”

  “I know,” said Mrs. Bradley, pensively. “But the death took place at Roman Ending, child. The Shotover setting is accounted for partly by the curious mentality of the murderer, and partly by the necessity for lending verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and improbable tale. The trouble is that the setting chosen happens to make this particular tale less bald, certainly, but even more improbable.”

  Sir Selby looked at her sadly. “You’re a nuisance, you know. You shouldn’t have examined the body. Nobody else would have bothered about that bruise, and the broken nose, and the partial strangulation, Adela.”

  “Are you certain, child?”

  “Pretty certain. And the broken nose, as your nephew suggested, may have had no connection with murder.”

  “I know.” She still watched Carey. “Go on, child,” she said, encouragingly.

  “When do they think he died?” asked Carey, looking towards Sir Selby.

  “Your aunt can tell you. She deduced it when she, very unpublic-spiritedly, decided to examine the body. The police doctor came to the same conclusion later. Simith died at between eleven p.m. and two a.m. In other words, probably at midnight.”

  “Queer,” said Carey. “Did you know that at one o’clock in the morning my pigs were disturbed and I had to go out to them? They’re pedigree stuff and I don’t take any risks, you know. One or two were restless, but my younger boar made no sign. I thought, at the time, that he must have been asleep, but since then he’s developed a chill or a cold or something, and—well, I’ve a definite impression that, his sty being what it is, he caught the cold outside it.”

  “You don’t mean your boar got loose and killed Simith?” Sir Selby asked.

  “I don’t know what to think. I feel pretty sure that my boar was taken out of the sty that night, and that that accounted for the restlessness of the other animals and the fact which puzzled me at the time—that he didn’t hear me when I halted outside his run.”

  “You’ll have to tell the police,” Sir Selby said.

  “If I do, I incriminate either myself or my pigman.”

  “Not yourself, surely? Someone can vouch for you.”

  “Not after about eleven o’clock, I imagine. I know it was just turned eleven when I went up to bed, and I was the last left downstairs.”

  “But surely other people in the neighbourhood besides yourself or your pigman are capable of taking an animal from his sty, and putting him back again later?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Carey. “You see, a boar is a very suspicious customer. Hereward is young, I know, and not really savage, but to kick up the devil of a fuss and go for the nearest person is second nature to a boar. They’re damned awkward brutes to handle if you haven’t just the knack.”

  “But that’s my argument! It might easily have been someone with just the knack. In fact, if it had been someone without just the knack, surely he wouldn’t have risked it?” Sir Selby put up his eyeglass and looked triumphant.

  “But that’s just the reason why he might have risked it,” Carey argued stolidly. “Anybody who realised the risks wouldn’t have taken them. As it happens, Hereward is a boar in a thousand. He’s more like a dog than a boar. But very few people are aware of that. I should say the chap who took him out knew nothing at all about pigs.”

  From this point of view Carey refused to be moved.

  “Well, it isn’t really my business, and, after I’ve condoled with the Chief Constable, and advised him to make Mrs. Bradley responsible for tracking down the murderer (as a penance for raising the accident to Simith on to the plane of murder), I must get back to town,” said Sir Selby, accepting the drink which Carey had just poured out.

  Mrs. Bradley waved a claw-like hand as his car was leaving Old Farm. Carey went over and stood just behind her left elbow.

  “Well, are you going to jug your nearest and dearest?” he asked, with his arm round her shoulders. She cackled and jabbed a sharp elbow into his ribs.

  “I want to go and look at boars again, child.”

  “Which boars?”

  “All the boars in the neighbourhood. Tomorrow you and I will make a circular tour, inspecting all the boars.”

  “With the excuse that I want to purchase?”

  “Except at Roman Ending. We don’t need to make that excuse to the astute and suspicious Tombley. We will complain that Hereward does not seem to be better, and then we will enquire tenderly after Nero. Poor Nero! I wonder what they cleaned him with?” she added.
r />   “You think Nero savaged Simith?”

  “I think so, child. Don’t you?”

  “It might have been an accident, then?”

  “With the body found on Shotover Common, child?”

  “Why not? Simith may have been fearfully drunk, and have taken him out for a walk. People do do odd things when they’re tight, you know, and, if you remember, Tombley told us that Simith was going a bit soft in the head.”

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I think poor Simith was thrown to the boar as an early Christian might have been thrown to the lions—with malice aforethought, and with a very lively appreciation on the part of the murderer that the boar would certainly kill him.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Carey, lifting the elf-lock gracefully out of his eye with a sweep of his long brown hand, “but I don’t think you know too much about boars, you know, or you wouldn’t be quite so certain. I mean, granted the chap let Nero loose on Simith, and granted that Nero is horribly savage and intractable: even so, how could the chap—the murderer, you know—be certain that the boar would go for Simith and maul him to death? It would have been equally boar-like to savage the person who egged him on, or even to go rooting off on a toot without bothering about savaging anybody. That’s what’s so odd to me about the whole affair, unless the wrong person got killed.” He glanced hopefully at his aunt. “I suppose you’d considered that, had you? I mean, there’s nothing particularly dependable about the behaviour of a boar. You couldn’t possibly bet money on it; much less stake a murder on it, you know. Simith may have intended murder, and been the victim instead!”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Bradley, unconvinced.

  “And, if you think Nero was the culprit, why did the murderer drag in my Hereward?”

  “To make the tracks that Nero didn’t make.”

  “Riddle?”

  “Sober fact. Hereward was the boar that went to Shotover Hill that night. Nero, I am certain, did not go.”

  “Yes, but—you don’t think Hereward would kill a man, Aunt Adela?”

  “You mean that you don’t think he would.”

  “And, hang it, Nero is Simith’s own boar, and, in spite of what I said about the uncertainty, a man ought to be able to handle his own boar, oughtn’t he?”