Dead Men's Morris (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I say! Oh, look! It’s Hugh!”

  Hugh Kingston struggled to his feet. But, almost before he could gain them, two men stepped forward, and one laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “It was foolish of him to persist in his intention. I even warned him. I sent him the Sinister Hand,” said Mrs. Bradley. She picked up the Fool’s stick, which was heavily weighted, and handed it to Tombley. “Feel it,” she said.

  Tea was over and the excited villagers had all been persuaded to go home. “Luckily the steel hat which Priest was wearing was more than equal to the strain. He was hit on the head the minute he entered that tent where the murderer, who had blacked his face in the house, was lying in wait for him. He was going back to make sure he had finished the job when I ran after him and pulled him out again.”

  “I think you’re a marvel,” said Tombley, handing the stick to Pratt. “This is the Bâton Sinister, I suppose?”

  “One finds it difficult, if not impossible,” said Pratt, “to imagine how you finally discovered the identity of the murderer. Are we really to believe that Mr. Kingston—one cannot bring oneself, somehow, to refer to him by his baptismal name—murdered Mr. Fossder and Mr. Simith, and attempted to murder Priest?”

  “It was easy enough to discover the identity of the murderer. The difficulty has been to prove it to the satisfaction of others.” She looked at Carey, who was sitting, glum and unhappy, at the opposite end of the table. “To begin with, there was Hugh’s character. He was timid; he loved to kill things; and he was conceited.”

  “But how do you know he was? You never saw him like that when he was here,” said Carey, surprised. Mrs. Bradley wagged her head.

  “I didn’t see it all at once, of course, child. But do you remember telling Denis one day that Hugh was afraid to play games against the masters when you were both at school?”

  “But you couldn’t go by that! To begin with, I meant it in joke. To go on with, plenty of chaps bar playing against the masters.”

  “Then plenty of chaps are timid,” said his aunt, with her sea-serpent grin. “At any rate, you agree he loved to kill things.”

  “But once again—”

  “Very well, child. Once again, plenty of chaps are murderers in embryo or by proxy. You won’t deny he was conceited.”

  “Conceit is a relative term.”

  “I know. Do you remember his saying that one of your sows was the only female who had ever taken a dislike to him except for the lady who gave out the prizes at school one year?”

  “But, hang it all, Aunt Adela—”

  “Have it your own way, child. Now, as to the murders themselves, the first thing that intrigued me in connection with the death of Mr. Fossder was that Hugh had taken Jenny for that walk along the towing path in the course of which she stumbled over the body.”

  “They went in chase of old Fossder to get him to go home because Tombley wouldn’t keep the appointment, and the night was so beastly cold,” protested Carey.

  “It was Hugh’s suggestion, child, not Jenny’s. I took care to find out. I should have thought that a young man’s instinct would have been to return with the girl to Old Farm without delay. The time was then past midnight.

  “Well, as we know, they found Fossder. Jenny tumbled over him. Now I found out from George that Hugh had already gone after Fossder once to warn him that Tombley did not intend to keep the appointment. There seemed singularly little object in going again unless—an idea which came to me fairly early in the case—Hugh wanted a witness to the finding of the body, a witness who was—forgive me, Jenny!—both innocent and fairly ignorant.

  “Later, when I heard about the will, it struck me that of all the beneficiaries Hugh stood to lose the most if Jenny were to be disinherited. The money, you remember, was to go, not to the girls themselves, but to their husbands. Hugh was a poor man. He was employed as librarian in a London suburb. He was solvent, I know, and apparently had no debts; nevertheless the money he would inherit if he married Jenny would make a tremendous difference in his life. Fossder, he knew, was inclined to speculate, and was inclined to be lucky. The chances were that by marrying Jenny he would gain several thousand pounds.

  “The point about Fossder’s death that made the police suspicious, and upon which they undoubtedly would have acted had there been the slightest suspicion of foul play, was the ridiculous wager. A bet of two hundred pounds made in such circumstances made me think that the person who laid such a bet must have a very strong reason for wanting to get Fossder to Sandford that night. It was not easy to trace this bet to Hugh, but, as his Post Office savings were suspiciously small for a young man contemplating marriage, I concluded that he had a banking account to draw on, and that the two hundred pounds came out of it.”

  “But the bet took not only Fossder to Sandford, but Tombley, too,” said Carey.

  “Tombley, too.” She nodded. “Well, it seemed to me—this all came later, of course—that Fossder must have told Hugh, in a frank and honourable way, that he proposed to disinherit Jenny. Before that could be done, Hugh decided to kill Fossder. He knew that for Fossder to get a shock, or to have to run very fast, was enough to cause his death, and he thought he saw a way to kill him without the slightest risk to himself. The mistake was his choice of a locality in which to carry out the deed. Instead of the utterly deserted landscape he had anticipated, the whole performance was seen and heard—more heard than seen, as the night was dark—by a very cruel old man.”

  “Simith,” said Pratt. “But what was he doing there at that time of night? He was the horseman who went through Garsington in the daytime. That was never in doubt, but how did he—?”

  “I thought at first that he went to spy upon his nephew, for he probably knew about the bet. Later I decided it might have been for another reason. He might have been going to meet Fossder at some house or other, to witness Fossder’s new will.”

  “What, the one disinheriting Jenny?”

  “Exactly. Mind, we shall never know for certain which it was. No will was found on the body, but Hugh would have searched the pockets. I imagine that the will was one of the subjects brought up by Simith when he sent for Hugh to go to Roman Ending. You remember the gramophone, Carey? That was an excuse to get Hugh over there, so that he could torture him by describing the ghost and its activities on the towing path on Christmas Eve. Simith also described in detail, I have no doubt, the fancy dress the ghost had worn, and which he himself had impounded.”

  “Why didn’t Kingston chuck the clothes into the river?” Carey enquired. “That’s what I should have done.”

  “I don’t know whether he heard suspicious sounds—Simith coming along on his horse, perhaps—or whether he hoped, if anything ever came up later on, to try to incriminate Tombley, whose reason for failing to keep the appointment he probably knew. Well, that accounts for the murder of Simith. It was the direct result of the murder of Fossder, you see.”

  “Uncle Simith got what he asked for,” said Tombley. “And Priest has behaved like a fool. What do you think?”

  “Priest knows!” said Mrs. Bradley. “Of course, the attack on you, Carey, was due to the fact that today Hugh has seen for the first time something which his vanity has not permitted him to see sooner—Jenny’s obvious preference for you. There was also some attempt to put me out of the way. He discovered, too late, that I was more dangerous to his safety than he had thought.”

  “Did you get anything from those little shields?” asked Carey.

  “Not at first, except that they helped to eliminate from my list of suspected persons people like Priest and Linda Ditch. Hugh, as I realised very early in the enquiry, was in the most favourable position of anybody to obtain all the necessary oddments of information which kept cropping up in the case. I was able to verify all my suspicions in this direction on Easter Monday, when I obtained special permission to visit the library in which Hugh worked. From a book on Heraldry which I saw there he could have obtained the models for those little
shields, and the library also contained a county directory of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire which gave notes on the churches in addition to other information. There was a book describing some of the villages round here, and there were also the Morris Book, and, in the Reading Room, the current number of the EFDS News. Denis will remember the challenge, that I accepted, to place a quotation from it. In the Reference Library, there was even a little book about the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap—the one referred to in Shakespeare’s Henry IV from which Hugh quoted.”

  “So Priest did help Hugh Kingston in the murder of Simith?” said Carey, later on, when he was alone with Mrs. Bradley.

  “He helped to get Simith’s body out of Nero’s sty, he took your boar Hereward out and carted him over to Shotover, and he killed the pig for Hugh and poured the blood on the body as it lay on Shotover Common.”

  “Didn’t Simith hear the pig being killed?”

  “I expect Priest took it to the other side of the little wood. Tombley, of course, was at church. Simith had already seen Hugh Kingston that morning, and the pig was killed on Christmas Day, you remember. There was no doubt in my mind that Priest was willing to help anyone to be revenged on Simith. He owed him something for Linda.”

  “Yes, I see that. What I can’t understand is that Kingston should have turned on him like that.”

  “Hugh was timid. Too timid to trust Priest. I thought at first that Priest might be blackmailing him, but that was not the case. That was why I found it almost impossible to convince Priest of his danger. He could not believe that Hugh had turned against him, and wanted him out of the way. Hugh, for his part, did not see that by incriminating him—if it ever came to that!—Priest would have incriminated himself as well.

  “Hugh had to square his conscience all the time. That is another point we must not altogether lose sight of. He tried to do this by sending the warning messages—the little shields, and the arrows in the churches, for example. His guilty conscience may have given him an additonal reason for wanting Priest out of the way. The presence of the pigman reminded him all the time of his own dreadful deeds.”

  “But how could he reconcile with his conscience the murder of Priest, if that had come off?” asked Carey. He was already looking a little less strained and ill, Mrs. Bradley noticed with satisfaction. It was good that he was willing to have the whole matter discussed and fully explained. And there was Jenny to comfort him, and be comforted.

  “On the principle that to the average European the slaughter of coloured people is not a matter of conscience in the same way that the slaughter of whites would be. Abyssinia is a classic example, of course!”

  “I say, that sounds rather terrible! You mean that just because Priest was poor, and a countryman, and uneducated—” His voice trailed off. He shook his head.

  “Of course the warnings were rather obscure,” went on Mrs. Bradley cheerfully, “and, for the most part, he sent them when it was too late for them to fulfil their office, even if they could have been understood by the victims. Even after Fossder had been killed, it took me some time to find that the Cross Patée of the Knights Templars on the gateway of Temple Farm was the same as the cross on the pencilled shield, and the red paint decoration on Fossder’s gate. When I did, it connected, not precisely with the ghost of Napier, but at least with the ghost’s venue. You noticed the flaw in time, of course! Later than midnight at Sandford! That made me suspicious. A genuine practical joker would certainly have made it midnight, the proper time for the ghost.

  “Then there was the warning of Simith’s death—the boar’s head in the window of Horsepath Church. It was depicted on the end of a spear, you remember. The murderer of Fossder also reminded us of the boar’s head by making reference in conversation to ‘a little Bartholomew boar-pig.’ That was in this very house. Perhaps you don’t remember the quotation? Henry IV again.”

  “Yes, I remember. Of course he used to spend hours of his time in that library with very little work to do, and I suppose he read most of the books. He had a mind stocked with odds and ends of information that he had picked up simply by browsing.”

  “So I imagine. Well, then came two more shields. In Simith’s case I did not see those until after his death, but they were particularly interesting ones, particularly the Chief Embattled, giving, as you pointed out, the impression that the murderer’s blood was up. Poor Hugh! His trouble was that he had no knowledge of human nature. When it came to the point, I think that a man of Fossder’s type would have altered his will again in Jenny’s favour. Simith would not, and, in fact, could not have exposed him as Fossder’s murderer in the face of the doctor’s certificate and the fact that there was no mark of violence on the body. As for Priest, I explained before that the pigman hated Simith so much that he was prepared to regard as his benefactor the man who put Simith to death.”

  “That was pretty obvious to you, then, about the Chief Dancetté and the Batôn Sinister?” said Carey. “But you couldn’t have gathered from those that he intended to murder Priest. I mean, you could connect the Sandford stuff with Fossder because he had taken the bet to meet the ghost, and you could, by a bit of a stretch, see the point of the boar’s head in the case of Simith, as he was a pig farmer on such a large scale. But Priest was not even a dancer. It was well known to Kingston that Scab was going to play for the Morris men, and that therefore Ditch would dance, and Priest would be the Fool.”

  “I had deduced that Priest was in danger as soon as I had proved to my own satisfaction that he had helped in the murder of Simith. Instructed by me, the inspector pressed him hard for a confession, but Priest is brave and obstinate. As to the intention to murder him, the murderer gave us, boldly—he was vain, as I said before, and really thought that I was quite at sea over the other deaths—an absolutely unmistakable clue to the identity of the proposed third victim. His attack on you was sheer overmastering jealousy, and was unpremeditated. By the way—” She broke off and grinned at him. “Do you remember the pig-farming book that Fay and Jenny came for that time at Roman Ending when Geraint Tombley shut you into the old foundations by mistake?”

  “Yes. Something cryptic or something.”

  “The murderer’s time-table, child. Worked out in idle sport one day, I fancy, and suddenly remembered. I thought at the time that Fay had come to get something for Geraint Tombley, but it was equally possible that it was Jenny who had come in search of something for Hugh. Then when I realised that the pig book had been borrowed from Old Farm—!”

  She produced the copy of the government publication on pigkeeping.

  “Lot MsoNormal60. Gilt edged, not until January MsoNormal193?” she read. “That was Fossder and his money, child. “Bampton foot-up” refers, without doubt, to Simith, who was a Bampton man and had taught Linda Ditch, when first she took his fancy, the Bampton version of the words of “Constant Billy”! Next in the time-table comes the desire to go to America by air, and start a new life and so forth. The line which begins “d.v. bMGP.” is a caustic reference to the fact that Hugh was aware that Tombley (referred to as Bold Baron Round Table—his name is Geraint, you see) had usurped the affections of Fay, and indicates that the murderer had no great love for either Tombley or Pratt—the small ‘b’ in front of Pratt’s initials gives us the state of Hugh’s feelings towards him, I fancy!”

  “And you think it was all written out in fun?”

  “Oh, yes. It was the occupation of an idle hour, that’s all, but the murderer thought it was dangerous, and wrote to Jenny asking her to get it.

  “As I say, it was your copy, really, and Hugh did the scribbling in it here, not realising that the book belonged to you. Then when the Roman Ending copy was found near Simith’s body and impounded by the police, Tombley, I expect you remember, borrowed yours. Hugh wrote to Jenny asking her to go over and get it for him, I think, but I have not asked Jenny anything about it, because it’s of little importance.”

  “Interesting, though,” said Carey. “But
to go back to where we left off—I still can’t see how you got the definite warning that Priest would be a victim.”

  “Oh, the Becket window, and the wall painting in South Newington church,” said Mrs. Bradley. She smiled and stroked the sleeve of her orange jumper. “None of the chroniclers seem to be in complete agreement as to the actual words used by King Henry II on the historic occasion of his having desired to be rid of the Archbishop of Canterbury.” She looked at Carey appraisingly. “Of course, there was the business of my car on Christmas Eve,” she broke off, suddenly. “I soon decided that Hugh himself had put it out of action, hoping to be relieved of George’s company and to go to Iffley alone with the motor-cycle combination.”

  “Lord!” said Carey.

  “Pratt’s coming over to Old Farm like that, on Christmas Eve, simply convinced me that Fay was somewhere in the neighbourhood, and that he suspected it,” she added. “And when Tombley fell against the parlour door I knew I was right.”

  “Gosh!” said Carey devoutly. “But what was that about the identity of poor old Hugh’s third victim?”

  “Well, in one of the books in that library, the words of Henry II with reference to Becket’s murder were as follows:

  “ ‘What a parcel of fools have I in my Court, that not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart Priest!’ ”

  About the Author

  Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, Oxford, in April 1901. She was educated at the Rothschild School in Brentford, the Green School in Isleworth, and at Goldsmiths and University Colleges in London. For many years Miss Mitchell taught history and English, swimming, and games. She retired from this work in 1950 but became so bored without the constant stimulus and irritation of teaching that she accepted a post at the Matthew Arnold School in Staines, where she taught English and History, wrote the annual school play, and coached hurdling. She was a member of the Detection Club, the PEN, the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. Her father’s family are Scots, and a Scottish influence has appeared in some of her books.