“So you didn’t think he’d be back?” said Stallard, interested.
“I never thought either way, except he went out in such an ’urry.”
“He didn’t go out without paying for his last glass of beer?”
“Stout. Oh no, he paid when he had it, same as we always do. Of course, come to think of it, if he died of poison, poor thing, perhaps he started having a pain.”
More than likely, thought the inspector.
“Who cleans up out there for you?” he asked.
“Bert!” bellowed Councillor Woods.
“Bert,” said Stallard, “are people sick any night when you close the house?”
“Not on the premises, sir.”
“How far away?”
“Matter of twenty yards, sometimes.”
“Nobody ever been sick in your place outside?”
“Not as I know of, sir.”
“Think, my good chap.”
“Well, I’d have to clean it up, and I never have, sir.”
“That’s that, then,” said Stallard, disgruntled. He did not consult the timid ladies, who, in his expression, “alibied each other.”
• CHAPTER 6 •
A glass serpent: Syrian.
Description of a Gentile Syrian glass figure, probably of the fourth century A.D.
• 1 •
“I want the car, George,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Sally is mixed up in a murder.”
“The car, Madam,” said George, respectfully, “is temporarily out of commission. I having unsuccessfully attempted an assault on the civic conscience of Mr. Thorp at the filling-station with regard to the rationing of petrol.”
“Don’t be annoying, George,” said his employer, going indoors to look up a suitable train. George saluted, stood looking at her retreating back, and then strolled off towards the village, collecting, on his way, Henri from the kitchen and the knife and boot boy from Mrs. Bradley’s small orchard.
At the crossroads, where four lanes met, stood the village smithy, now used as a fire-fighting post. Seven volunteers and an ancient car normally comprised the auxiliary fire brigade and its equipment, but seven steel helmets hanging side by side along the wall of the wooden shed testified to the fact that the personnel were taking their mid-morning refreshment at the village inn.
Beside the car stood the ambulance, a converted single-deck omnibus. George looked at his watch. The time was ten past eleven. The fire-fighters, he deduced, would be absent from their posts for at least another twenty minutes.
He took off his neat peaked cap and exchanged for it one of the steel helmets. Sufficiently camouflaged if anybody passed that way, he began to milk the tank of the motor-bus into certain empty petrol tins upon which the fire-fighters were wont to sit during their hours of duty. This questionable occupation over, he replaced the steel helmet on its nail and his own cap on his head, signed to his satellites to pick up two cans each, and picked up the remaining two himself.
Then he set the cans down again, tore a leaf from his memo-pad, took out a pencil, licked it, looked appraisingly at the seven steel helmets hanging in a row on the wall, and, grinning, wrote on the paper, Love from Snow-White.
• 2 •
“You see, Adela, Sally is glad to be doing her bit.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Bradley. Her handsome sister-in-law looked across the fireplace with justifiable irritation in her glance. It was poor Charles Lestrange’s amiable weakness to have loved and cherished the lizard-like relict which faced her from the opposite side of the hearth, but Lady Selina had never approved her brother’s choice of a wife, any more than she approved of the deep affection of her daughter Sally for this oddly saurian aunt.
“What do you mean…why?” she enquired. “I should have thought that in war-time we should all do what we can. I myself am a warden.”
“Yes, so George told me. I congratulate you, Selina.”
“George?”
“My chauffeur. He’s a warden, too. You ought to get together.”
Lady Selina snorted. Sally, curled up on a cushioned window-seat, giggled.
“Go out of the room, Sally,” said her mother, “I have to speak to Aunt Adela quite privately.”
“All right, Mother. I’ll go and dig out Pat. Aunt Adela will want to interview Pat.”
“I can’t think where Sally picks up such odd friends,” Lady Selina continued. “But never mind that now.”
Mrs. Bradley, who did not mind it, either then or at any other time, sat even more upright in her comfortable arm-chair, smiled—an expression of goodwill which always made her sister-in-law feel suspicious and slightly uncomfortable—and nodded slowly and pleasantly.
“The point is,” continued Lady Selina, coming to it with a mother’s bluntness, “that Sally is to be kept out of the law-courts. There has, of course, been an inquest. She was compelled to attend it. Later, there may be a trial for murder. Under no circumstances whatever will I permit Sally’s name to appear in connection with anything so unspeakably sordid.”
“But won’t she be disappointed?” asked Mrs. Bradley. Lady Selina wisely ignored this unreasonable contribution to the discussion.
“If anybody can do anything about clearing up the whole matter and bringing it in as suicide or something even remotely respectable, it is you,” she continued, “it is your duty to the family. And, after all, there have been two other murders in the neighbourhood. At least, there have been inquests, and it all seems to be very unpleasant.”
“‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough,’” quoted Mrs. Bradley under her breath.
“Adela!” said Lady Selina, thoroughly exasperated. Mrs. Bradley got up.
“Is Pat the reporter?” she asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“I think I’ll take Sally’s advice and go and talk to her.”
“Her name is Mort—Patricia Mort. The newspaper office is in the High Street in Willington. Then you are prepared to do something? I’m so glad.”
“I don’t know. What is it you want me to do? Suppress the facts that there are, or create evidence that there is not? Both, I believe, are criminal offences.”
She grinned evilly at her relative by marriage and walked briskly out, leaving behind her in the one arm-chair her knitting—a Balaclava helmet which mortified her fondness for crude tints by being of that uninteresting mud-coloured shade known to civilisation as khaki—and in the other an outraged sister-in-law.
“George,” she said, appearing at the garage doors, “how much petrol have we?”
“Enough to get home with, madam, just about. But Ernest is under the impression”—he drew forward a bashful, freckled village lad in chauffeur’s breeches and leggings—“that as Lady Selina has taken to her bicycle for the duration, there wouldn’t be any harm done, if you take my meaning…?”
“A couple of gallon, ma’am, wouldn’t be here nor there,” put in the bashful one, modestly measuring Mrs. Bradley up as good for the cost of the petrol plus a two-shilling piece, and proving, to his own satisfaction, to have estimated sixpence short of the actual amount he received.
Mrs. Bradley cackled at his thanks, and told George to drive into Willington. She never gave two-shilling pieces as tips, because her favourite son (not Ferdinand) had, as a schoolboy, impressed upon her that the florin was not a gentleman’s coin. A similar objection on his part had resulted in more formal presents of money being rendered him in guineas, not pounds.
It was not far to Willington. Sally, who had been compelled, by her mother’s wish, to give up her little two-seater, always paid fourpence on the bus. The actual distance was about three hundred yards more than the fourpenny fare, but Sally always gave fourpence, and had not yet been asked for the other penny.
“I can’t afford fivepence,” was the unanswerable objection she had made to her mother, when Lady Selina, shocked by the disclosure, had remonstrated about it. “They’ve no right to charge at all, really. After all, I’m on Gov
ernment service.”
The offices of the Willington and District County Record were in the High Street, as Lady Selina had indicated.
“I don’t know how long you can park here, George,” said his employer. “I may be gone some time.”
“I’ll find somewhere, madam,” said George.
The old town lay along two main roads, one running east and west, the other branching south from almost opposite the Town Hall. To the north there was a new housing estate, and farther east, but still to the north, a winding road (once a long and twisting lane) which climbed a hill into the country, and eventually crossed seven miles of common before it found the next village.
The poorer part of the town lay farther west and south of the Broadway in which Mrs. Bradley found herself when she got out of the car. She was now in the shopping centre. Opposite the newspaper office was a large bookshop, and on either side of that were, respectively, a restaurant and a jeweller’s shop. Flanking these again were a wine-merchant’s and an old-established draper’s, and across a narrow side-street opposite the draper’s was a church, a handsome Victorian-Gothic building with green lawns and gravel paths, and, behind it, still in the same neat, spacious grounds, a comfortable late Victorian vicarage and a school.
Mrs. Bradley looked up and down the main street with interest and curiosity. This was, she thought, of all the prosperous towns she had ever seen, the least likely from its appearance to be the scene of three violent deaths.
The deaths had been, as it were, topical, and their aftermath had been too spectacular to be in keeping with such a town. An occasional gas suicide, an open verdict following a fall from a second-floor window, an absconding trustee or so, some naughty boys had up for stealing apples or bicycles, a road-hog now and again, and a boy and girl suicide pact—these might have been in keeping with the place, she thought, and ought to have kept its local paper in headlines for twenty years. Instead of that, in the first two months of the war—as though reports of schools closed, children sent into the country, and descriptions (with photographs) of the new public air raid shelters, were not enough to give the paper that extra fillip which the times appeared to require—there must be a Council member poisoned with arsenic. And then, as though his death in itself were not enough to make the fortune of the proprietors of the paper, and the professional reputations of every member of its staff, there had followed the sensational discovery of his body propped up in a doorway near the local cinema; this in addition to the discovery of another body, that of an unknown woman, in the municipal A.R.P. cistern in an obscure cul-de-sac at the western end of the town. Then, ‘overdoing it,’ said Mrs. Bradley to herself (an almost exact echo of the words of the inspector of police, although she did not know this until later) there was also this apparently motiveless murder of the red-haired telephonist at the Town Hall Report Centre.
Shaking her head, she opened the street door and went into the ground floor office of the newspaper. A short, stout man, wearing a felt hat on the back of his head, sat behind a counter. He took no notice of her at first, but continued to enter figures in a cashbook.
“Photograph?” he said at last, but without troubling himself to look up. “Further along the counter.”
“No. I want to see one of the reporters.”
“Complaints by letter only,” said the man, reaching for an ink-eraser.
“Will you take my card to the editor, please?” said Mrs. Bradley patiently. “I want to see Miss Patricia Mort.”
At this name the man ceased writing, and even raised his eyes for a second.
“She’s with Mr. Eves,” he said. “She won’t see you. She’s a bit exclusive these days, after the murders. We all are here. Busy, too.”
“I have come about the murders. Please take my card to the editor.”
The man looked up again.
“Bless you,” he said, “cards don’t mean nothing to him.” He settled again to his work. Mrs. Bradley deflated but not defeated, walked out of the Record office and went to the police station.
A large, painstaking sergeant of police was seated at a desk writing somewhat laboriously in a book which looked like a ledger. He took no notice of her arrival, so she seated herself on a bench at the side of the room, rested her back against the wall, and took out a piece of knitting—this time a sea-boot stocking.
The clicking of her needles soon had the effect up the sergeant which she had hoped for. Looking up, he scowled and asked:
“What can we do for you?”
“You can tell the inspector in charge of the murder of the girl telephonist that I should like to see him.”
“Connected with the crime?”
“I am not, personally, connected with the crime, if crime it was,” Mrs. Bradley chattily commenced, “but, all the same, if you…”
She paused. The sergeant had picked up the desk telephone and was bellowing earnestly into it.
“Up them stairs and first on the right,” he said, glowering, “and don’t go telling him fairy tales. He’s heard three confessions already to-day, from ladies about like you.”
“Sergeant,” said Mrs. Bradley solemnly, “when I die your lacerating observations will be found scratched upon my heart. Ladies about like me, indeed! What next, I should like to know?”
The sergeant stared at her, shook his head significantly, and resumed his penmanship. Mrs. Bradley walked through a doorway, mounted a staircase, knocked at the first door on the right, and was admitted.
The inspector was a large, rather shapeless young man who offered her a chair and hovered uncertainly over her like a friendly mastiff with a frog. He knew her name—that was obvious—and Mrs. Bradley suspected that he had received the tidings from Sally that Lady Selina had called her in.
Mrs. Bradley observed:
“And to what, child, do you owe the honour of this visit?”
“Yes, to what?” said Stallard smiling, and removing himself to his desk. He took up a pencil and drew towards him a pad.
“First,” said Mrs. Bradley, “curiosity. I like what I hear of your murders, Inspector. I consider that they do the town credit.”
“Yes, they do, don’t they? And they’ve lost nothing in the writing up, believe me. The local paper has had the time of its life, to say nothing of the big dailies, every one of which has sent down a special reporter; not to speak of the ‘special articles’ out of which our local reporter must be making a fortune. Yes, we’ve made news here, at last. In fact, like George Joseph Smith, we’ve ‘eclipsed the European war.’ But, seriously, it’s becoming rather complicated. You see, in the one case only, that of Councillor Smith, do we seem to have anything to go on. A man like that may have enemies. He was a magistrate as well as a Councillor, and, although you might not think it, we’ve got some tough spots in Willington, particularly down by the canal. Then…well, he had relatives with expectations. Nothing has turned up yet, but I have distinct hopes, or had, near the beginning, that we should hit a trail reasonably soon.
“But then, there is this unaccountable affair of the woman found dead in the A.R.P. tank by those kids. Apart from the fact that it’s not a place where anybody sane would choose to commit suicide, there are features which are holding us up not a little, notably the fact that we can’t get the body identified. Yet it doesn’t seem to have been the body of a vagrant. The only thing we can think of—most unpopular in the town, by the way—is that she must have been the inmate of a lunatic asylum, of which we’ve got two, in or near the district, a private institution which I’ve decided to keep an eye on, and a County Mental Hospital, about three miles off at Winborough.
“We’ve interviewed people from both places, but both deny that she was ever a patient of theirs.”
“I suppose it was suicide?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.
“Well, we don’t think so, altogether. The cases have this much in common: that in two the victims had taken arsenic. It was enough to kill Councillor Smith, but, according to the medical evidence, th
ere was no trace of arsenic in the organs of either of the women. One had been sick with it, however. They had been finished off by being the one drowned and the other hit over the head with a big stone out of a rockery.”
“And no motive, so far, has come to light at all in the case of the telephonist?”
“Well, on the face of it, no. The girl, whose name was Fletcher, was an unassuming, harmless girl enough; her people have lived here for years. She had a fiancé, and it’s true they’d had a quarrel, but, apart from the fact that it wasn’t enough to hang a murder on, the lad has a pretty good alibi, and I believe he had nothing at all to do with her death. She had no shady friends, either, and there seem to have been no peculiar goings-on—you know the sort of thing I mean. Nothing to make a young fellow think she’d be better out of his way. I can’t make anything of it. We think the poison she took must have been dropped into her coffee at the Report Centre, but there, again, we come to a dead end. There was nobody there who could possibly have wished her harm. We’ve put the whole boiling through it, and every one of them came clean. In any case, there’s the mysterious fact that the body showed no evidence of poison, but the vomit did. She was killed by the knock on the head.”
“Finger-prints? Bloodstains?”
“Not a thing. Stone had blood—Miss Fletcher’s blood—but no prints. Still, every cinema-goer nowadays knows that you shove on gloves before handling the thing you’re going to kill with. This town is full of boneheads whose second home is the pictures.”
“Yes, I see. Of course, it’s in connection with Lillie Fletcher that I am here.”
“Oh, yes, I understand that. Lady Selina, of course. I know she doesn’t like it, but what can I do? For all I know, Miss Sally Lestrange might turn out to be a material witness at the trial—if we ever get as far as a trial. I can’t just let her slip out of it.”
“Of course you can’t, child. I am not here,” said Mrs. Bradley, with a grin which, although evil, was heartening, “as the ambassador of Lady Selina. If my niece is mixed up in a murder, as her mother felicitously puts it, she must accept the consequences, like anybody else. I have come merely to suggest that an old woman might be permitted to peer and pry into your very interesting affairs.”
Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley) Page 6
