Dead Men's Morris (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “It might be a passage,” she thought. “It might even go up to the secret room Denis found in Carey’s house. Interesting, but readily deduced. Linda might have come that way from Old Farm on Boxing Night.” She emerged from the woodshed and walked towards the back door of the house. Her first cursory tour of inspection revealed no means of entrance, but closer scrutiny proved that a pantry window was very slightly ajar. “Queer of Priest to lock up the house. Oh—morbid sightseers, of course,” she added to herself, as she climbed in through the window.

  The pantry door was locked. Mrs. Bradley produced a thin pair of pliers especially made for the purpose, and turned the key from inside. She opened the door and came out into the stone passage opposite the kitchen door. The kitchen was the only room in the house to which she had ever been admitted, and she made it the first object of her researches.

  It had the usual two doors: one into the passage and another into a kind of scullery or outhouse at the back. The scullery, to which she immediately turned her attention, was a long narrow enclosure containing a pump, a copper, and a collection of ancient harness, somewhat mildewed and obviously out of use. Below the pump stood a large zinc bath, and the copper fireplace was clean swept and gave no indication of having been lighted for months. Wherever the domestic washing of clothes had been done, it was apparent that it was not usually done on the premises at Roman Ending. A small strip of matting lay on the floor by the pump, and a couple of pig-buckets stood just inside the doorway.

  Mrs. Bradley inspected the pig-buckets and shifted them, explored the recesses of the copper, tentatively pumped a little water, ran a yellow forefinger over the decayed looking harness, sighed, and went back to the kitchen.

  She looked at the Windsor chairs, and searched the floor. There was nothing in the kitchen to reward her patient scrutiny, not even a suspicious scratch on floor or chair. After about a quarter of an hour’s exhaustive inspection of the sparely-furnished room, she relocked the pantry door and went out by the scullery door, which she closed behind her. She did not wonder that the inspector had found no clue at Roman Ending. Before going over the rest of the house she went off to look at the boar.

  Nero was restless and troublesome. He was a wicked looking old beast with one great yellow curling tusk, and little savage red eyes.

  “I wonder?” said Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully. She returned to the outhouse and pumped water into one of the empty pig-buckets. She carried the heavy bucket to the primitive sty in which Nero was housed, and, exerting an amount of strength unsuspected of her frail-looking body and skinny arms, she raised it on to the top of the fencing which surrounded the sty and tilted it so that some of the water splashed down near the boar.

  At the flicking of the small cold drops, the old boar looked up suspiciously and hastily backed away.

  “I wonder?” said Mrs. Bradley again. Carefully, taking care not to spill water over herself on the one side nor the boar on the other, she lowered the bucket and swilled the water over the ill-smelling yard. “Your manoeuvres are not proof positive that you’ve been annoyed by being doused to get Simith’s blood off you, Nero, poor old thing,” she continued. “But—” She put the pig bucket into the outhouse and went back into the house. Only two of the bedrooms were furnished with beds, and none of the rooms in the house possessed either bolt or lock. She knew that Priest lodged with an old woman in the village. She wondered whether Linda Ditch had been in the habit of going home to Old Farm each night. In the face of all she knew about the girl and her mother, it seemed unlikely, else why had there been such disturbance when she turned up on Christmas Eve? Mrs. Bradley was sufficiently puzzled to be interested. She continued to search the house.

  “It’s really rather odd,” she said to herself. Then another solution struck her. “Perhaps the murderer has had to get rid of Simith’s bed. Awkward, that. I must present the idea to my inspector. It isn’t very easy to burn a bed. Perhaps he buried it. But when? And where? Oh, dear, it looks more and more like poor Geraint, and yet I can’t believe it. I’ll go and see Priest’s landlady. I expect George will be able to tell me where she lives. She can confirm whether he slept in her cottage on Boxing Night. That will clear up a bit of the muddle, anyway.”

  She left the house and was about to return by the field path and the wood, the way she had come, when she saw her nephew Carey come striding across the stile which gave on to the road. She waited for him.

  “Why, child! Where’s Priest?” she said.

  “Staying the night with those friends. He’s vetting a sow for them. She’s supposed to farrow tonight. Lot of rubbish really. Sows shouldn’t want any help if they’ve always been properly cared for. These cottagers’ pigs make me sick. Anyway, here I am, to see that you don’t get into too much mischief. I don’t like this business of your poking about alone.”

  “So we have the place to ourselves. Come into the woodshed, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley. She pointed out the ring in the floor.

  “ ‘Oh, the days when I was young!’ ” sang Carey softly. He bent and tried to lift the slab.

  “We want a lever,” he said. “Now, what have they got, I wonder, that will do?”

  He went outside, and came back with a long iron staple.

  “I must put it back when we’ve finished. It closes the cartshed door. They used to keep a bull in that cartshed once, and had to secure him sometimes, wherefore the staple. Now, Aunt Adela! What ho! for the smugglers’ cave!”

  Between them they moved the stone slab away and disclosed a short wooden ladder. Carey began to descend.

  “Wait a minute. Take the candle,” said Mrs. Bradley. She lighted it and handed it down to him. “If it goes out, child, come back. I think the passage goes to Old Farm,” she said. “If it does, you— Look here, I’ll come with you, I think.” She had remembered that Carey, as a little boy, had hated narrow passages and the dark.

  “Better not, in case somebody closes the slab,” said Carey. “Nice fools we should look, lying dead in each other’s arms, like the woman in the Mistletoe Bough. You stay where you are, love. Cheer-oh.”

  He disappeared under the flooring.

  Mrs. Bradley listened for some time and then went back to the door and stood there, looking out. She had been there twenty minutes, and was feeling cold and forlorn, when she saw a car coming up the lane to the house. Her first thought was, “So it does come out at Old Farm, and Carey has come to fetch me in the car, or else he’s sent George along.” Her second, as soon as she saw the car more clearly, was, “No, that isn’t my car! Now who on earth is coming here at this time in the evening? More people who want to see where poor Simith lived?”

  It was rapidly growing dark. The woods were a blur of shadow; the lines of the furrows of the half ploughed field she had crossed were lost in the dusk. A pale streak in the western sky was all that was left of the day, and an owl called, and suddenly flew, as it heard the sound of the car.

  Mrs. Bradley determined to hide. She could not very easily explain her presence and the next best thing was to conceal it. She went back into the woodshed and shut the door. A very small, cobwebbed window, beneath which stood a rainwater butt green with slime, gave on to the north of the yard. She planted herself by this, and, clearing some of the cobwebs with a yellow forefinger, she peered out cautiously at the strangers, who proved to be two young women.

  “Good heavens! Fay and Jenny,” thought Mrs. Bradley. “Now, what on earth do they want?”

  They tried the outhouse door and seemed surprised to find it open. After a whispered consultation they entered the house. In less than five minutes they emerged, and, shutting the door behind them, glanced hastily round, and then ran away as fast as ever they could, making pretty going, vaulting the stile, one after the other, in spite of the clinging mud on their heavy shoes.

  Mrs. Bradley waited until the car drove off, and then she also emerged, and quickly went into the house. They had come to the house for a definite reason; they had come with a
purpose; that was evident. If they had come to make a search they must have stayed longer, she thought. She concluded that they had come to take away something, and that they knew where it was to be found. She wondered what it could be.

  The darkness was now setting in, but she had an electric torch. She did not want to use it for fear of attracting attention, but had no choice. Her memory was remarkable. At “Kim’s Game” she had few equals. She thought she could remember the inventory of the house sufficiently well to notice whether anything was changed, so, begin­ning with the kitchen, she made her second inspection of Roman Ending. In the bedroom over the parlour a drawer which had been partly open was now shut tight. She noticed this at once, and opened it. It was empty except for a copy of the bulletin published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries on the subject of pigkeeping.

  “Queer,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I wonder what they took? Some letters, I suppose.”

  The thin little yellowish book had its interest for her, since a similar copy had been found near the body of Simith, and had been impounded by the police. She picked this one up and carried it down the stairs. At the kitchen door she heard voices. Quick as thought she whipped the key from the pantry door, slipped in, and locked the door upon herself, keeping well away from the window, which she had fastened.

  “But there wasn’t anything else,” said Jenny’s voice.

  “Wasn’t there a paper-covered book? Perhaps he means that,” said Fay.

  “I believe there was, now you say it. We had better go up and see.”

  “It’s horribly dark. I hate to go in there again. I’m sure Mr. Simith was murdered here.”

  “Well, the police think so too. But come on. Don’t let’s be soft. There’s nothing to be afraid of, and you promised!”

  “Yes, I know, but— Very well. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Mrs. Bradley could hear their feet on the stairs, and again as they tramped overhead. Then the footsteps ceased, as the girls went further away to the bedroom over the parlour.

  “But the book’s not here, and I—and I thought I left the drawer shut!” said Fay, in a terrified voice which Mrs. Bradley heard clearly in the quiet of the old stone house. There was clattering overhead and a rush of feet on the stairs.

  “Oh, oh, I’m so frightened!” said Fay, as they shot past the pantry door. Mrs. Bradley counted one hundred, standing there in the dark, before she followed them out. She soon saw the lights of the car and a little later she heard the moan of the engine across the silent fields. She went back into the woodshed and stared at the black hole down which Carey had gone. She shone her torch on to her watch. He had been absent for forty-five minutes. She began to feel worried about him. She shone her torch into the hole and leaned over and called his name. Then she went into the yard and at the sound of her footsteps the pigs gave shrill squeals of welcome, and came up to the gate of the yard and poked their snouts through the bars.

  She scanned the unlighted countryside for any sign of her car, then went back into the woodshed up to the hole. Suddenly she pursed up her lips into a little birdlike beak and softly whistled. When she shone her torch this time she was met by the fact that the flagstone had been lowered into place. As she stood there, from under the floor of the barn came a muffled knocking. Mrs. Bradley called Carey by name, then flew for the iron staple, but, inserting it, wrestled in vain.

  Carey had gone blithely down the ladder into the underground passage, carefully carrying the candle, and having, beside the matches on the saucer, another box of his own.

  For a little while he found he could make slow progress whilst keeping his feet, although he had to bend his back a good deal, because the passage was low. Soon he had to put out the candle because it singed his front hair. It was pitch dark, clammy and cold down there under ground, and Carey, who still suffered from slight claustrophobia, began to feel a considerable amount of mental and physical discomfort. To add to the horrors, the passage grew lower and lower, and soon he had to break the candle away from the saucer, abandon the latter, stuff the now cold candle into his pocket, and crawl on his hands and knees. He began to wonder whether he would come out alive, and only the utter impossibility of turning round in the passage prevented him from giving up exploring it and returning to the comforting presence of his aunt, a Freudian reaction at which, he reflected ruefully, she would probably cackle with joy. He comforted himself a little by reminding himself that the passage had certainly been constructed by human agency, and that therefore the probabilities were strongly in favour of the supposition that it led somewhere and certainly had a second outlet.

  He struggled on until he was sweating and panting. The going was rough. His hands and knees were sore. He had gone through the knees of his trousers and fancied that the palms of his hands were bleeding. The passage seemed to specialise in what seemed to be elongated S-bends. He began to count them, but soon was in too pitiable a state to trouble about the number of them he traversed. Sometimes he fancied that the supply of air in the passage was giving out. It was truly a dreadful experience. He began to wish he had never embarked upon it. If Linda had chosen this means of reaching the bed of the pigman she deserved every possible pleasure the night had bestowed on her, Carey decided grimly. His courage sank lower and lower. He wanted to burst into tears of panic and despair. He had not the slightest idea how long he had been in the tunnel. It seemed like hours upon hours. Actually, at the end of fifty minutes—the most dreadful he ever remembered—the passage widened again, and he was once more able to stand almost completely upright. Instead of doing so, he seated himself on the ground, drew a breath of the fresher air which now surrounded him, fished out the candle and lighted it again, and began to survey his environment.

  As the candle flame burnt steadily and gave a more certain light, he saw a flight of steps in the form of a short and almost upright ladder. . . . Something about the ladder seemed familiar.

  “Good God!” said Carey aloud. The truth dawned quickly on him. “All that sweat, and I’ve come back again to the beginning! That beastly passage is circular!”

  Soon he explored, and found the two entrances opposite one another and narrowing off very quickly into tunnels.

  Too much relieved to be irritated, he began to ascend the ladder. He held the candle aloft and then received a shock. The aperture above his head was gone. The slab was in place again. He began to hammer on the underside with a tobacco tin he had in his pocket. Mrs. Bradley, who had just come back to the barn, sank down on her knees, put her lips almost on to the ground, and shouted loudly, “Carey! Carey!”

  “It’s me! It’s me!” yelled Carey, in answer to the thin tones which reached him through the thickness of the slab. He heard her steps overhead, and knew she was fighting to release him.

  “Don’t! Don’t! You’ll kill yourself!” he cried. Mrs. Bradley realised that, at any rate, she was not, of her own strength, going to be able to lift the heavy slab. She gave up the reckless attempt, and, panting from over-exertion, knelt down and bellowed, “Hold on. I’m going for help!”

  She took off her heavy coat, her hat, and her skirt, and tucked her silk petticoat into the top of her knickers. Then she set off, across country and through the wood, running as hard as she could in her quite outrageous garb, and fell in on Mrs. Ditch in Old Farm kitchen and gasped with relief to find George and Ditch there as well.

  She gave the two men instructions and shoved them off. Then she went up to her room. Mrs. Ditch appeared at the door with a cup of wine.

  “My gracious, mam, you never run all that way from Roman Enden? Well, there, I never ded!”

  Mrs. Bradley, lying on the bed, done, but indomitable, cackled.

  Later, after dinner, she and Carey exchanged experiences. Carey told his first.

  “But fancy the wretched passage being circular!” Carey con­cluded. “Who on earth do you think would perpetrate such a joke? I mean, apart from the senselessness of the thing, it must have been damned hard work to make a
passage that length, I should have thought.”

  “I fancy it’s part of some old foundations. I’m going to explore it myself,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Oh, don’t! It’s pretty beastly!” Carey said. “I was jolly glad to get out, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Which brings us to the second mystery,” Mrs. Bradley observed.

  “Says which?”

  “Who put on the lid again, child, in the woodshed? Fay and Jenny didn’t, that I declare.”

  “Fay and Jenny? What on earth has it got to do with them?” asked Carey. Mrs. Bradley explained.

  “Fay and Jenny?” Carey seemed astounded.

  “I’ve got what they came for, I think,” continued Mrs. Bradley. She produced from beneath a cushion on the sofa the thin, yellow publication she had secured from the parlour bedroom.

  “But what’s the good of that?” It’s only the government publica­tion on pigkeeping,” Carey said. He took it and began to turn the pages. “There’s a lot of stuff underlined, but people do annotate books, especially practical stuff—”

  “And poetry,” said Mrs. Bradley sadly.

  “Yes, but—Hallo! Look here! This is something different, I should say. And, dash it, it’s my copy!”

  Just over halfway down the sixty-first page was an English Sale entry, dated the thirtieth of November, 1930. Under the heading it began as follows:

  “Lot MsoNormal60.—Gilt No. MsoNormal4, born January MsoNormal19, 1930: sire—Edmonton King David MsoNormal74th, 64783, by Bourne King David MsoNormal145. 52353.”

  The next line ran:

  “Dam—Westacre Surprise MsoNormal104th, Vol. MsoNormal47, by Histon King David MsoNormal17th. 61115.”

  Under that again was:

  “G.d.—Westacre Surprise MsoNormal31st, 173612, by Bourne Baron MsoNormal137—47429, etc.”