“I say!” said Gillian. She expelled her breath slowly as she gazed at the house, which had been copied from Sir Walter Scott’s residence of Ashestiel. “Do you know, Lesley, I believe this must be the very house that Aunt Adela’s been in search of?”
As though in echo of her own name, Mrs. Bradley suddenly appeared at the side of the house, and walked towards the gateway.
Her surprise and that of the two girls was mutual and exhilarating. Explanations were forthcoming, and the girls had parked the car beside Mrs. Bradley’s, in the stables, long before the story of their pilgrimage was ended. Mrs. Bradley took them into the house, and Elspat made them up beds. It was still a little before sunrise.
“And now,” said David Ker, as soon as breakfast was over, “I think you’d better tell me all about it.”
“That’s Aunt Adela’s job,” said Lesley, polishing off her porridge, and seizing (again this was literally true) a plate of eggs and rashers from Elspat Fenwick. “But I expect she’s put you wise to most of it.”
“We’ve no time for fairy tales now,” Mrs. Bradley observed. “We have to put the house in a state of siege, unless I am much mistaken. Mr. Joshua and his friends must have arranged a meeting-place, and may be here at any time.”
“But why? What could they do here?” Lesley enquired.
“Murder me, it seems,” said David Ker. “But still I want to ken why.”
“I’ll tell you; and at the same time I’ll apologise to Gillian for having given her a good deal of unnecessary work,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Actually the only clue we needed was the one we found in Edinburgh—the seventeenth-century plan. That conveyed the words Marie Hamilton. Now the buried treasure, as I very soon guessed, is not gold and jewels, at least, not in the sense that we thought. By the way, David,” she said, breaking off and turning to him, “where is the gold bonnet-piece you used to wear on your watch-chain?”
“Aye, it’s sad about that,” he confessed. “I must have lost it, although I can’t think how or why.”
“Lost it? Ah, well, you’ll likely get it back when all this business is over, and our wicked Mr. Joshua brought to book.”
“Why, where would my bonnet-piece be?”
“On the watch chain of a cataleptic gentleman named (for purposes of convenience) Frere.”
“What is the treasure, then, Aunt Adela?” Gillian asked. “And why, when I decided that the ballads gave one set of clues, did you go and fix on others?”
“I didn’t, child. We interpreted differently what we read, that is all. Take the name Hamilton. What do you know about it?”
“Well, it’s Mary Hamilton’s surname, and it’s a town and—”
“That will do, I think. Whereabouts is this town?”
“Oh, well, somewhere in the Lowlands—I could find it on a map.”
“Yes. And now I’d like Elspat to read you an extract from Mr. H. B. Morton’s In Search of Scotland. What do you make of this? Go on, Elspat, please. You know the passage I mean—the one we discussed this morning.”
“A few miles from Glasgow are the chimneys of Hamilton …Over the Clyde, winding here in almost a country mood, the sullen stacks of Motherwell’s steel furnaces lift black fingers to the sky. In the middle of this is the saddest house in Scotland. It is the ancient home of her premier dukes, the ancestral seat of the princely family of Hamilton,” read Elspat, in a drone.
“Now,” said Mrs. Bradley, “it seems to me that the treasure, which is indicated all the way through this rather extraordinary story, which we have been tracing out, is either coal or iron—both, perhaps. So when I worked out my topographical clues from the ballads I went always considerably further west than most of the references seemed to indicate. To give you one example of what I mean: you won’t remember Gillian, the ballad called Young Hunting? In that it seemed possible, and, considering our object, quite likely, that we were intended to take as our main clue the stanza:
“Young Hunting kens all the fords of Clyde.
He’ll ride them, one by one;
And though the night was ne’er so mirk,
Young Hunting will be home.
“Well, having taken that as a starting-point, I then looked for any further indication of direction. I was not always lucky, but these I did get: in the very same ballad, too:
“Leave off, leave off, your day diving,
and dive upon the night;
And where that sackless knight lies slain
The candles will burn bright”
“Note the play upon ‘sackless!’ Rather neat! In another stanza we obtain:
“The deepest pot of Clyde Water
They got Young Hunting in,
With a green turf tied across his breast
To keep the good lord down.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Bradley went on, “none of this was conclusive, either to young Graham or to me, when first he and then I began to work out the clues. But there is, all through, the striking indication that the wealth in question was, as I said just now, coal or iron, or both.”
“But you spoke of direction. I don’t see much direction, except the Clyde,” said Lesley.
“Of course, a good deal of it was guesswork,” Mrs. Bradley admitted. “You see, although it did not come in as part of the acrostic, I could not avoid the implication of the title of the ballad Young Hunting, especially as I was looking for a reference to the Clyde. At first I was on the look out for one particular spot, but it soon became obvious that, if coal was in question, a whole stretch of country was the correct answer to my riddle. David is still the only one of us, however, who knows the exact position and extent of that stretch of country, I imagine.”
“I do not, though,” said David Ker, “but I mind me, now you say it, of some tale of lost title deeds; and I mind me of something further. I told you I had little to do with my kin; that I didn’t like them. But here’s two bits of news may stand you in stead. You remember, maybe, speiring at my groom did I kick him? Do you ken when that would have happened?”
“Yes, of course.” Mrs. Bradley replied. “It happened when you received a short visit from your nephew Geoffrey Ker, although his visit was a surreptitious one, and you never knew anything about it. I wonder who first discovered, by the way, that there was coal under that part of the family inheritance. David?”
“That must have been old Joshua. He was forever poking about. It would never surprise me if the whole scheme of the murders originated with my Uncle Joshua. Aye, there’s black blood in our family, and old Joshua had his share of it, I’m thinking.”
“Aiblins!” said Mrs. Bradley, in the belief, apparently, that this peculiarly Scottish word was either an expletive or conveyed some impression of regret. David Ker looked slightly bewildered, Gillian and Lesley giggled, and Elspat, who had begun to clear away breakfast, clicked her tongue and observed, in sibylline tones:
“Dule and wae is me!” And added, “Ye’se gae busk and boun, I’m thinking.”
“You believe, then,” said Gillian, “that old Mr. Joshua, not young Mr. Joshua, first made the murder plot: but why?”
“He was the youngest of the family,” David Ker explained. “Graham was the heir: next came Geoffrey; after him I should have the property, and after me old Joshua, my uncle, the only one of his generation left alive. Failing him, of course, it would come to young Joshua, his grandson.”
“So Geoffrey did not realise that you and old Joshua were to be murdered?” Lesley enquired.
“He could not have done, because there was no point in murdering them, either or both, unless Geoffrey himself was also to be disposed of,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Geoffrey was a party to the murder of his cousin, Graham; there seems no doubt about that. But he could not have visualised the rest of young Joshua’s plans.”
“Do you think old Mr. Joshua thought it was Graham, and not Geoffrey, who was playing chess with him that day when both were murdered?” Gillian enquired.
“He was very old, and I think it
most likely that he did not distinguish the one young man from the other, as they were superficially alike, and of about the same height, build, and age,” Mrs. Bradley agreed. “Besides, I imagine that there was method in the madness of Geoffrey’s visit here. He must have gone over to the tower and ingratiated himself with old Joshua at young Mr. Joshua’s orders.”
“But why, if he didn’t think old Joshua had to be murdered?” asked Lesley, following the argument with knitted brow, as though she were in attendance at a lecture which was, on the whole, a bit above her head.
“Why, of course, silly! To see whether old Joshua had the map!” said Gillian.
“Old Joshua and young Graham had compared their maps, I think,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I doubt, though, whether old Joshua realised what he was giving away to his eldest brother’s heir. He probably hinted and chuckled, and teased young Graham, giving him bits of information and teasing him with his own surmises, for probably they were not facts but only inferences. But young Graham had brains. He pieced together the scraps, accepted the hints, joined up the tags of ballads and worked out at last the crude acrostic of Marie Hamilton. I agree with David’s theory—it is no more—that old Joshua plotted murder just as certainly as young Joshua did.”
“So that old Joshua only got his deserts in the end. I should like to think that,” said Lesley.
“Geoffrey, too, come to that,” said her sister. “Well, go on, Aunt Adela. What’s our next move?”
“Whatever it is, I don’t think we need be in any immediate hurry to make it,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I see it like this: the police are bound to be much in the neighbourhood for a day or two, if not longer. They will be at the tower, because the murders took place there, and they will come here to interview David and me. I discovered the bodies, and they will suspect our poor David of the crime.”
“Oh—?” said David.
“Well, obviously, my dear. You stand to gain a good deal if you become heir to a property from which good coal can be mined. It will be shown that you were from home on the day of…” she consulted her note-book…“June twenty-third—”
“Well, so I was,” said David Ker, in some surprise, “but you couldn’t know that! How could you?”
“Because it was the day on which the first murder took place. On June twenty-third, at just after nine o’clock in the evening, your nephew, Graham Ker, was stabbed to death outside a music-hall in Newcastle.”
“But I wasn’t in Newcastle!”
“Where were you?”
“I went to Lockerbie. I was nowhere near Newcastle.”
“Which station did you travel from?”
“Why, Biggar, of course.”
“The booking clerk will remember you?”
“Aye, I should think, maybe, he would.”
“That’s something. Now, may I be forgiven for asking why you went?”
“To have a crack with William Annan.”
“Did you have your crack?”
“Well, no. You see, he’d been called away by telegram—”
“The old dodge,” said Lesley, a reader of detective stories. “You’ve been spied on pretty closely, Mr. Ker.”
“What’s that, lassie?”
“Oh, you know—the murderer always sends a bogus telegram.”
“Nephew Joshua, that would be, again.”
“Yes, Nephew Joshua,” Mrs. Bradley responded. “Well, you see, David, the police would find enough to question you on. And I hope,” she added, with a cackle, “that there’s enough to arrest you on. You’d be very well out of all this for a couple of weeks.”
“I’d like to see them arrest me,” responded David Ker belligerently. “I’d …”
“Never mind what you’d do, just now, Mr. Ker,” said Gillian. “There’s a policeman coming up the path already. Shall I tell Elspat she can let him in, or do we slug him, Aunt Adela? It’s really for you to say.”
There was considerable police activity in the neighbourhood for a day or two, as Mrs. Bradley had predicted, but a day came when, so far as they knew, the preliminary investigation into the murders was over. David Ker had the treble advantage of being well-respected in the district and of having the booking clerk at Biggar remember not only the day on which he had travelled to Lockerbie and the train he had travelled by, but, by some extraordinary bit of luck, also the time of this return. The clerk had been in the booking hall talking to the ticket-collector when David had given up his return ticket. As this time (corroborated by the ticket-collector) happened to be just before seven o’clock, it was not possible that David could have been in Newcastle at nine o’clock on the same evening unless he had chartered an aeroplane. The police did not think it necessary to find out whether or not he had done this.
His alibi for the time of death of Geoffrey and old Joshua was just as easy to establish, and here he was lucky again. The medical evidence fixed the time of death as having been not earlier than midnight. Not only was Elspat prepared to swear that her employer had not left the house during the night, but there was the fortunate coincidence that Mrs. Bradley, through fortuitous circumstances, was able to corroborate this evidence, since her car had pulled up at such a short distance from the house that she must, she said, have been aware of the fact if anybody had left the house during the night.
Although her evidence could scarcely be called conclusive, it was accepted in conjunction with what Elspat, who had been known and respected in the neighbourhood for nearly sixty years, had had to say.
The girls were sure that Mr. Joshua had gone straight in and murdered the chess players when they had set him down outside the castle at dawn.
The newspapers were inclined to call it the Mystery of the Lone Tower, and, for all the hope that there seemed of fixing the guilt on Mr. Joshua, a mystery it seemed likely to remain.
“But surely,” Gillian said, “we can find some evidence of where he was, and what he did, and when he did it! I mean—three murders! And what becomes, now, of the man in the fit at the other house, the one in the marshes?”
Mrs. Bradley herself was interested in this aspect of the subject, so much so that she installed George, armed with Gillian’s revolver, as defender-in-chief of David Ker, sent a telegram to the warlike Henri, her cook, to come north with all possible speed, sent the two girls home to their mother, instructed Michael and Elspat, and then departed to look up the landlady and young Tom at the ‘Rising Sun,’ and the cataleptic Mr. Frere at the house in the marshes.
She left David Ker on a Saturday, and, before going further south, broke her journey at Newcastle (driving herself, a practice of which George whole-heartedly disapproved) to gossip with the inspector.
“There is one thing at least which I cannot understand,” she said, when she and the inspector had exchanged news and views, “and that is about the birth certificate. Didn’t you tell me that the headmaster of the school at which young Graham had taught declared that he had seen the boy’s birth certificate giving the surname of Graeme?”
“I did that. And that is what he said,” the inspector declared. “But I’ll have him sorted for ye. Maybe it was not a birth certificate, but a college certificate, or something of that nature, that he saw. He was a doddering old wife, at the best.”
Mrs. Bradley readily accepted this estimate of the dominie’s character, and cackled harshly.
• CHAPTER 12 •
“ ‘Ye’se get a sheave of my bread, Willy,
And a bottle of my wine;
But ye’ll pay me when the seas gang dry,
For ye’ll ne’er be lord o’ Linne.’ ”
The funeral of “Mr. Lancaster” had, of course, taken place, and conducted by young Tom, Mrs. Bradley went to see the grave. She then returned to the “Rising Sun” and telephoned to her son Ferdinand in London.
“Home Office?” said Ferdinand.
“Exhumation order?” he enquired.
“But, Mother, suppose, you’re wrong?”
“But, Moth
er…”
“But, really, Mother…”
“Oh, well, if you say so, but…Oh, well, then…Yes, all right.”
Satisfied, and but little wearied, Mrs. Bradley sat down to a meal. It was six in the evening, and the day had been perfect, although, for most people, rather too warm. Mrs. Bradley, however, had a lizard’s love of dry heat, and had been out in the garden all day, having arrived very late on the previous evening.
“Haven’t sacked thy chauffeur, like?” young Tom sympathetically enquired.
“Oh, no. George is staying in Scotland to drive my niece, who can’t be trusted with a car.” Mrs. Bradley satisfactorily but mendaciously replied. She had gone to bed soon after supper, had risen early, but, except for the escorted visit to the cemetery, had lain remarkably low.
The landlady had commented on this, and had indicated possible walks and excursions in the neighbourhood, which would well repay the labour and trouble of taking or making them. But Mrs. Bradley, with a mixture of truth and levity, which had served many times, and upon many occasions, to disguise her intentions or views, observed that she was afraid of encountering the Dark Gentleman.
“Ah,” said young Tom’s mother, in immediate reaction to this, “he’ve been seen about again, so I do hear.”
“Really?” said Mrs. Bradley, who had hoped for this.
“Rare frit, our Tom was,” Tom’s mother continued, with a slight but happy laugh. “Side-stepped proper, that did, when he did see en over to Doubledyke Bend, t’other day.”
“ ‘Why, our mam,’ that say to me, all of a tremble, ‘Why, our mam,’ that did say, ‘if that had a white face instead of that there black un, that ud be spitting image of him that’s gorn, dead and buried.’
“ ‘What thee do be saying, our Tom!’ I says. ‘Thee be dreaming,’ I says. ‘That be old Mr. Lancaster that’s gorn,’ I says, ‘and this be Mr. Frere, come back to village after three years,’ I says. But Tom, that pull at my arm, and home we have to come, and bless me and all if that didn’t say, the minute we got inside door, ‘Our man,’ that say, ‘do thee think the Dark Gentleman saw I?’
Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 18
