Pageant of Murder (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Be interested to find out how the fracas ended. Why don’t you give Julian a ring?” asked Laura.

  “What, worry the poor innocent after the kind of day he must have had?” cried Julian’s kindhearted aunt. “I only hope he isn’t drowning his sorrows too deep. He’s got to go to school again tomorrow.”

  “I think you’ll find that, from his point of view, the pageant was a great success,” said Laura.

  “With that awful battle at the end, Dog?”

  “The usual give-and-take of an eighteenth-century election. I bet he’s delighted the yobs turned up in force and started a brouhaha.”

  This view was confirmed by the young man himself. He held a long telephone conversation with Kitty at ten o’clock that evening and, professing himself delighted with the way things had gone, canvassed her opinion upon the proceedings. Kitty replied, without reserve (for she was a generous-hearted woman), that she thought the pageant had been an all-out success. She enquired whether there had been any trouble with the police.

  “Not a whisper, after the gangs had scarpered,” Julian replied. “I indicated that the in-fighting had been a put-up job and received official disapproval for provoking a breach of the peace, but everything ended with goodwill on their side and malice towards none on ours. I have received innumerable tributes from my lads to the effect that they hadn’t had such a good time for months. I gather that there will be more than one oik with a nasty headache tonight. I must cultivate this game of rounders, complete with lethal weapons. It has its own attraction.”

  “He’d talk himself out of anything,” said Kitty, returning to Laura and Twigg. “No wonder he got himself elected on to the Council.”

  Two days later there was a different story, however. Laura had returned to Dame Beatrice’s Kensington house after lunching with Kitty on the morning which followed Julian’s pageant, and was rung up as she was dealing with Dame Beatrice’s correspondence. An agitated Kitty was on the line.

  “That you, Dog?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I say, something terrible has happened.”

  “Always something nasty in the woodshed. Say on.”

  “While we were milling about in the Butts, that man Gordon—you know the one I mean?”

  “He who took Edward III and the second servitor upon him? Spey’s schoolmaster buddy?”

  “Oh, Dog, he hanged himself from the Druid’s Oak!”

  “Half a minute, while I confer with the Great Panjamdrum.”

  Kitty obediently stood by while Laura went to give the news to Dame Beatrice.

  “Looks an open-and-shut case,” she observed, when she had given Kitty’s news to the head of the household, “at least, I suppose the police will think so. Falstaff is killed; Spey, who knew how and why, is done in; the murderer of both, either in a fit of remorse or because he has reason to believe that the police are wise to him, jumps out of the vicious circle. I don’t believe a word of it, you know.”

  “Do you not?” said Dame Beatrice. “I am inclined to agree with you. Go back to the telephone and comfort Mrs. Trevelyan-Twigg, and then we will ask our dear Robert for his reactions. He is not the man to come to hasty decisions, except in one particular.”

  Laura grinned.

  “Go on with you! Don’t rub it in,” she said. “Even now that I’ve had leisure to repent of marrying him, I don’t really think I do.” She returned to the telephone.

  “Oh, thank goodness for that!” said Kitty, when Laura had slipped her the information that Dame Beatrice did not believe in Gordon’s guilt. “No more do I, and as for Julian, selfish little beast as he is as a general rule, I’ve never known him so upset about anything. He says Dame Beatrice must find the murderer.”

  “I think she knows who it is, but it’s going to be awfully difficult to prove it,” said Laura soberly.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Some Questions Answered

  “Now with the language of trees, and the literature of the running brooks we have no concern for the moment…”

  Laura’s discovery of the head had produced some information. An examination by a leading authority on forensic medicine showed beyond doubt that Spey had been hit on the head with sufficient force to stun him if not to kill him. The inquest on Gordon resulted in a verdict of suicide without the merciful adjoinder that the balance of his mind had been affected.

  “In other words, he’s supposed to have cheated the law,” said Laura. “Well, I stick to what I said. I still don’t believe it. I think he was murdered, the same as the other two.”

  This opinion was stoutly upheld in another quarter. Miss Cattrick, headmistress of the Primary School at which Spey and Gordon had worked, took up the cudgels in the form of a letter to the local press. She could not believe (she wrote) that Gordon would have taken his own life in so extraordinary a manner; in fact, she did not believe that he had taken his own life at all. She realised that, in company with other members of the Brayne Dramatic Society, he had been under severe pressure since the death of Luton, and she realised, also, that the dreadful fate of Spey, his friend and fellow-teacher, had affected him greatly, as, indeed, it had affected everyone connected with the school. But if Gordon had committed suicide (she continued) he was “the gas oven type” or, if he was set upon hanging himself, there were the banisters in his own home. He had lost his wife and child in a road accident, and had lived alone for the past six years, so that there would have been nobody in the house to prevent or dissuade him. She reiterated that she did not believe he had committed suicide. If he had, she insisted, it certainly would not have been in the melodramatic fashion described. She added that she had had him on her Staff for fifteen years and understood his mind and character. She believed, in fact, that he had been murdered, and that the motive was the same as that in the case of Spey. He knew, or had guessed, the identity of the murderer of Luton, and so was as much a danger to this maniac (she used the word advisedly and deliberately, she said) as his fellow-teacher had been.

  The editor of the local paper did not print the letter. He showed it to the police. These passed a copy of it to Gavin, knowing him to be interested in the extraordinary deaths at Brayne, and Gavin came down to the Stone House in Wandles Parva to show the copy to Dame Beatrice.

  “I know our chaps weren’t altogether happy about that suicide verdict, any more than they still are about the Misadventure pronouncement on Luton,” he said. “Look here, Dame B., why don’t you have a private look-see into things? I’ll tip off the lads, so you needn’t look to having any of them interfere with your fun. You see, between ourselves, there are far too many question-marks with regard to these deaths. To begin with—well, look, I’ll list ’em, and perhaps you’d care to make a note or two.”

  His list answered some of the queries which Dame Beatrice had already put to herself. It cleared up some doubtful points and spotlighted others. Exhaustive enquiries on the part of the police had shown that it was not only unlikely that the death of Luton had taken place during the interval at the Town Hall show, but that this was virtually impossible. If it had not taken place during the interval, then it had not been brought about through the agency of the sword which had been borrowed to replace the one which the costume people had neglected to send.

  “Old hat. We worked that one out ages ago,” said Laura.

  “I wonder,” said Dame Beatrice, looking up from her note-taking at this point, “why the Dramatic Society did not telephone for the missing foil when they discovered, at the dress rehearsal, that it was not among the properties? It seems to me that it would have been a very simple matter for the costumiers to despatch it in time for it to reach the Town Hall for the performance.”

  “I know. Our chaps went into that pretty thoroughly and elicited the fact that, as each member was responsible for paying for the hire of his own costume, there was an unresolved argument between Collis and Carson—the two who took the parts of Ford and Page—as to whose job it was to send for the
missing sword. Neither would give way, so no second sword was worn at the dress rehearsal, but the real sword turned up on the night, borrowed, of course, from Colonel Batty-Faudrey’s collection at Squire’s Acre Hall.”

  “Who borrowed it?”

  “Ah, that’s where we come to a blank wall. Nobody at the Hall has any idea. Colonel and Mrs. Batty-Faudrey had gone out to dinner—a private invitation from the Mayor, apparently—the servant who answered the door could give only the vaguest description of the visitor—‘he wore a raincoat and a trilby and spoke educated’—and Giles Faudrey, told of the request to borrow a sword, ‘had said to bung him up to the long gallery, and then you can go to bed. Tell him to help himself. I’ll toddle up there as soon as I’ve finished my chapter.’ We’ve tackled Giles, of course, but he says that he forgot all about the fellow until he heard the front door being shut, and so never saw him at all. Evidence obtained from Mrs. Batty-Faudrey in support of this is that whenever Giles has an interesting book he becomes so much absorbed that he probably wouldn’t notice if the room was on fire. His powers of concentration were out of the ordinary. This statement was slightly qualified by Colonel Batty-Faudrey, who added that Giles was a lazy lie-about who ought to be in the Army, where they’d occupy his time for him and teach him a few manners into the bargain. Giles, it appears, has no consideration for anybody. Comes and goes as he pleases, and at all hours of the day and night, is a supercilious puppy, leaves his car outside the front door because he’s too bone-lazy to put it away now there’s no manservant to do it for him, and, to be brief, is, generally speaking, the Colonel’s pet pain in the neck.”

  “Where was Giles when the sword was borrowed?” asked Dame Beatrice. “In which room, I mean.”

  “In the library. It’s a ground-floor room. The long gallery, as you probably know, is on the first floor.”

  “At what time, approximately, did the sword-borrower arrive?”

  “Soon after half-past ten. He came in a car, but the servant can’t speak to the make or the number. That’s natural enough, of course.”

  “And at just after half-past ten, Colonel and Mrs. Batty-Faudrey had not returned from their dinner-party? I wonder when the visitor left?”

  “Giles puts it at about a quarter to eleven, but can’t be sure. The servant didn’t hear the car drive away. Colonel and Mrs. Batty-Faudrey didn’t get back until half-past eleven because the Mayor had run a series of cine-films after dinner, and as one of them showed the Mayoress and the Mayoral children on holiday in Spain, including a visit to Gibraltar, where the Colonel had once been stationed, the session had been protracted.”

  “So, except for the servant, who is unable to give any useful description of the visitor, nobody saw him at all? Nevertheless, a visitor came, and at a time which indicates that the dress rehearsal was over.”

  “I know. Oh, there’s no doubt about its having been one of the actors. Nobody else would have bothered whether a sword was missing from the play or not.”

  “I suppose the visitor, left to himself, didn’t borrow two swords while he was about it?”

  “We put that theory to Giles Faudrey, but both he and the Colonel dismissed it. All the same, the medical evidence showed that the wound must have been caused by an instrument having the same measurements, so to speak, as the first few inches of the borrowed sword, and our inference still is that a precisely similar sword was used, so our men had a very good look at the rest of the Batty-Faudrey armoury. It contains three other precisely similar swords, all of their hilts well finger-printed by Giles and the Colonel, who keep them clean—one of the very few jobs which Giles deigns to undertake.”

  “When were they last cleaned, I wonder?”

  “According to the Colonel, his wife, and Giles, on the morning of the pageant. Mrs. Batty-Faudrey insisted on their being given a special bit of spit and polish because she was having all the notables to tea in the long gallery that afternoon. She was rather peevish, it seems, about anything having been lent, because it spoilt the symmetry.”

  “It looks bad for the Colonel and young Mr. Faudrey, does it not?”

  “We can’t go as far as that, you know. It’s true that neither of them has an alibi for the time of the murder. Both were out for the evening and so was Mrs. Batty-Faudrey. She went to spend the evening with her sister who lives in Maidenhead, but, although the Colonel drove her there, leaving Squire’s Acre at just after six, he merely dumped her, drove on into North Oxford, and looked up some friends of his own. He hasn’t any alibi, because he did not get to North Oxford until well after the murder had been committed. His story of having trouble with the car on Henley Fair-Mile may sound a little thin, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be true. Besides, he doesn’t seem to have had the shadow of a motive for plotting Luton’s death. I don’t suppose he even knew the chap.”

  “Oh, yes, he did,” said Laura, who, except for one remark, had been a silent listener to the conversation. She rehearsed the incident of the girl on the Colonel’s knee at the Squire’s Acre masque, and referred also to the donkey which had turned a dignified display of dressage into a comic turn.

  “And Luton was thought to be responsible for both,” she added. “He seems to have been known for a practical joker of a harmless sort of type. Once, in one of the drama club’s efforts, he let off a gun in the wings instead of bursting a paper bag.”

  “They’re not the kind of things you kill a man for doing,” said Gavin. “You’d have to be potty to take them to heart to that extent, and, whatever the Colonel is, he certainly isn’t insane.”

  “What about young Mr. Faudrey?” asked Dame Beatrice. “Is it known how he spent the evening?”

  “Oh, Giles says he dined on some cold stuff he found in the pantry, read a book for a bit, became bored and so went out in his car, picked up a girl and took her out for a night drive and a late supper. He didn’t pick her up until nearly nine o’clock, though, so he has no alibi for the time of the murder, but there, again, like his uncle, he had no motive for it, either.”

  “He’s the one for my money, all the same,” said Laura. “A nasty, mean little bit of work if ever I saw one. Look at the way he thought he could pull his rank with old Kitty, and ride beside the float with that frightful girl on it! Look at the way he showed off on the schoolboys’ trampoline in front of the whole of Brayne! Look at the way he flaunted that same beastly girl in front of his aunt and uncle and the Mayor and Mayoress! Kitty told me all about that. It was disgusting behaviour. He’s a rotten little cad. Moreover, although he pretended to treat the donkey episode as a joke, he was just as livid about it as his aunt and uncle were.”

  “All this doesn’t add up to murder,” said Gavin patiently. “In fact, what it does add up to is that it is far more likely somebody would have murdered him, rather than the other way about.”

  “I suppose the police have returned the borrowed sword to the Colonel by this time?” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Oh, yes. They had no option, once it was established that that particular sword could not possibly have been the weapon. There’s one interesting point about that, though. There were traces of blood on some of the rags that constituted the dirty linen in the clothes-basket. The rags, it seems almost certain, had been used to wipe the blood off a knife-blade of some sort.”

  “Mrs. Croc. thought that had been done before the basket was dumped in the Thames,” observed Laura. I’d wondered why the murderer bothered to do that. I suppose he thought the tide would come up and wash off the bloodstains. At first I thought he wanted the river to float the basket away.”

  “Has anything more come out about the other two deaths?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “Nothing more than you already know. Spey’s wife has been interviewed, of course, poor woman, but she’s firm that her husband had no enemies. There doesn’t seem any doubt but that he was killed because he knew too much about Luton’s death—or somebody thought he did.”

  “Well, doesn’t that abso
lutely prove that Luton was murdered?” enquired Laura.

  “Not absolutely, no. Even if that death was by misadventure—not, as I say, that we think it was—it’s amazing the things people will do to avoid being blamed. Look at hit-and-run motorists. The majority of people, if you ask my opinion, will go to almost any lengths to avoid facing the music.”

  “So the instrument which must have been used to decapitate Spey hasn’t turned up, then?”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “You should jolly well turn Squire’s Acre Hall inside out. Somebody there—and I plump for Giles—is the nigger in the woodpile, you know.”

  “My dear girl, without the hell of a lot more evidence than the slight amount we’ve got, we’re not in a position to do anything of the sort.”

  “What about my having found Spey’s head bang opposite the end of Squire’s Acre park?”

  “Ask yourself! You found it easy enough to go along that path when you left the canal. What was to prevent the murderer finding it just as simple?”

  “Well, he’d got the head in a bag. I hadn’t.”

  “He’d have gone by night, of course. There wouldn’t be a soul along the towing-path after dark.”

  “It would have been much safer, and ever so much easier, to have strolled down through the park with it. Don’t forget you wouldn’t even need to have a key to the gate in the railings.”

  “I know. I’ve been along and had a look for myself. The fact that two of the railings have been wrenched apart doesn’t mean a thing. Boys are always up to that kind of lark.”

  “You don’t convince me,” said Laura obstinately. “Added to the Batty-Faudrey sword, it seems to me that the thing’s in the bag.”