Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Well?” said the inspector, who had known that the experiment was to be carried out.

  “I don’t say that the wrong girl received the poison, if poison there was, because, after all, she was knocked on the head and killed,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But I do say that fate, not the murderer, must have selected the victim, if any of that coffee was poisoned.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Stallard. Mrs. Bradley told him.

  “You really don’t think that the poisoned coffee could have been passed to one particular person?”

  “Not unless somebody made a point of it, and we have Sally’s clear statement, supported by Pat and the girl on the police and headquarters telephones, that no such fuss was made. The cups were passed round, and it seems to have been purely a matter of chance who got each particular cup.”

  “That’s nasty,” said the inspector.

  “On the contrary, it brings back forcibly to our minds the fact that no arsenic was discoverable in Lillie Fletcher’s body,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “You mean, it proves your theory?”

  “Heavens, no, child! I have no theory, in the sense that you mean. I deal in facts, like all the good detectives, and as every psychologist should. And your honour does not mean the cherry brandy, ma’am,” she added with a hideous cackle.

  The inspector looked at her reproachfully.

  “What have you been up to?” he demanded. “There’s something more in this than you’ve been telling me.”

  “All that I’ve been up to,” replied Mrs. Bradley, with a grin, “is to get somebody more capable than the police to find Mrs. Commy-Platt, who, you may remember, has left Willington…”

  “For her health. Yes, I know. Pat. She told me. How can Pat trace her, when we haven’t a thing to go on? I could dig her out easily enough, of course, if I used all our…”

  “Ponderous machinery,” said Mrs. Bradley, in return for the double meaning attaching to Mrs. Platt’s health.

  It was two days later that Pat reported that Mrs. Platt had gone to Lowestoft.

  “Funny place to evacuate herself to, surely?” said Stallard, when he heard it.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” replied Pat. “School-children have been sent there, haven’t they? Are you going down there to see her, or are you going to hike her up here to see you?”

  “I haven’t decided,” the inspector replied mendaciously.

  “O.K., George Washington,” the reporter replied. “Give me something about it when you can.”

  “I shall leave Mrs. Platt to simmer,” Stallard observed, when Pat had gone. “Now we know where she is I shall have her checked up on. I suppose Pat’s right, by the way?”

  “I have little doubt of it,” Mrs. Bradley responded. “She has a habit of being right.”

  “I wonder how she got on to Mrs. P.?” said Stallard thoughtfully.

  Mrs. Bradley put this query to the young reporter when next she met her. This happened to be at the inspection of A.R.P. volunteers by Sir Gonnington “Stormalong” Phipps, a notable from the borough of Winborough—in fact its Mayor—knighted on the occasion of the Royal opening of Winborough’s new by-pass road.

  “Lot of twaddle, but I suppose I must report him fairly fully,” Pat observed, edging up to Mrs. Bradley, who had been given a prominent position beside her son Ferdinand in a kind of grandstand from which (in Ferdinand’s view, unnecessarily) a good view of the whole of the A.R.P. personnel and its inspection could be obtained.

  Mrs. Bradley grinned, and Pat moved away to the Press seats, which were in front of those occupied by Mrs. Bradley and her son.

  “How’s it all going, Mother?” Ferdinand enquired, when the inspection had run about half of its course and the knight was shaking hands with the fire-fighting units.

  “Did poor Coffin remind you of the murders?” his mother enquired, as the hand-shaking reached the young man to whom she referred.

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “I don’t think it’s going particularly well,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “As a matter of fact, we are hoping great things from the next interview we have with Mrs. Platt.”

  “Why?”

  “She seems to have behaved rather badly towards her husband’s sister, the unfortunate woman whose body was found in the A.R.P. tank near the canal.”

  “Oh, yes? I don’t know Mrs. Platt.”

  “You have missed an interesting experience.”

  “And you are going to get her to tell you something important?”

  “Yes, we hope so. I don’t see how we should have managed it, though, if it had not been for that girl reporter in front of us—the one in the dark blue beret.”

  Pat lifted her head, and then went on with her shorthand.

  “Good gracious, Mother! I hope I’m not babbling questions and queering the pitch,” said Ferdinand. “I think she can hear us. Does it matter very much?”

  “It doesn’t matter at all, child, fortunately. The local paper is almost entirely in our confidence.”

  “But, if she can hear, so can others.”

  “True. I think we are expected to applaud the successful conclusion of the hand-shaking.”

  She leaned forward and managed to attract the reporter’s attention.

  “The inspector is anxious to know how you found Mrs. Platt,” she remarked.

  “Quite blooming,” Pat responded, with a smile. “No, I know what you mean. Well, I had a fair amount of luck. I went to the Post Office—although I knew it was about the first thing the inspector would have thought of—and asked whether Mrs. Platt had left an address so that her letters could be forwarded. The postmaster said that…”

  “Mrs. Platt had left no address,” Mrs. Bradley interpolated, “but that she sometimes received communications from…”

  “A friend at Lowestoft. Yes. So I went to Lowestoft and inspected all the bath-chair occupants…”

  “Oh, I thought that was Bournemouth.”

  “…until I found Mrs. Platt. She did not see me, but I followed her home and discovered that she is staying near Sparrows’ Nest.”

  “Under her own name?”

  “No. Under the name of Smith. Funny, rather, isn’t it?”

  “Not particularly,” Mrs. Bradley answered. “Have you told the inspector?”

  “No. I thought perhaps I’d better tell you first.”

  “That was most considerate. All right. I’ll let him know, if you’ll give me the exact address.”

  Pat wrote it on a leaf of her reporter’s notebook, and then said that she had to hurry off, as she had an appointment.

  “For a real job,” she announced, as she reached the door. “The sort of thing I’ve been hoping for, I think.”

  “A London newspaper?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. “I suppose your handling of the news about these murders here has assisted your application.”

  “I expect so. I’ve no other influence, anyway,” the girl answered with a hard little laugh. “Good-bye.”

  • CHAPTER 20 •

  Trotting Race.

  Title for a painting by Max Slevogt.

  • 1 •

  “I wish,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that you would also arrest Patricia Mort.”

  “Oh, lor! Aunt Adela!” responded Stallard. “I can’t go about arresting everybody.”

  “That would only make two, dear child.”

  “Yes, but you wanted me to arrest Burt, as well.”

  “Burt is accounted for now. Pat, I regret to say, is not.”

  “Why, what danger could Pat be in?”

  “Well, she gets about and pokes her nose into things, and finds out secrets, I think.”

  “Why doesn’t she report them to us, then?”

  “She has her career to think of.”

  “Yes, but, still, it’s her duty to help the police. I’ll have a talk to her about it.”

  “Do. And if she proves to be in the slightest degree indiscreet, arrest her without delay or compunction, child. And if anything
else happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  When she had parted from him she went to the Public Baths and asked for Tom Talby’s address. It was probable, she thought, that the superintendent would know it.

  The box-office attendants seemed a little shy of sending for the superintendent to answer Mrs. Bradley’s questions, but eventually were persuaded, and the boy who went between the basket at the end of the bath, into which the soiled towels were dropped, and the Baths Laundry, which was again functioning, was pressed into service to go and find him.

  “Mr. Talby?” said the superintendent. “Yes. He lives in Cheepers Road. Number eleven, I think. Past the Town Hall, first turning on the right, past the pond, and up the hill. It isn’t far from here.”

  “Thank you. And have you discovered yet why the top board fell with Mr. Burt on it?”

  “Yes. It was easy enough to locate the trouble, and don’t I wish I could satisfy myself who did it! You see, that’s a movable board. Matter of four nuts and bolts. Somebody had them all out seemingly with the intention of taking the board right down to give a better view from that end of the gallery—comes across your eyes, you see, if you get right up the far corner, and we move it away sometimes if we think it won’t be wanted for the gala, and I often have it down when I’ve got some of those daring monkeys of school-kids in the place and nobody much to give an eye to them. My assistant’s a good boy, and a very nice swimmer, but lacks firmness. So, as it’s shifted so often, it’s what you might call easy shifted.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well, whoever began the job—and I’ve moved heaven and earth to try and find out who it was!—never finished, but left the board balanced on the supports without being bolted in. Once you might manage to dive from it without a thing happening, but in the takeoff you’d displace it. See what I mean? And then a second dive, which is what Burt took, would finish it off, and down you’d come along of it, and lucky if you managed to do what he did—get as far forward as the water.”

  “There was a chance, then, he might have been killed?”

  “More likely very badly injured, but, of course, he might have been killed.”

  “Thank you very much. Now, can you tell me the last time that board was looked at, to your certain knowledge, before the gala commenced?”

  “Yes, I can that. Funnily enough young Tom Talby didn’t seem too satisfied with it, and mentioned it to me that he’d been off it—a practice dive—when he left the Baths the day before the gala. So I had a look at it myself, and I swear it was all right then.”

  “And that was…?”

  “Oh, about four o’clock, I suppose.”

  “On the day before the gala?”

  “Yes, that’s it. I know it was just before tea, or something around that time.”

  “And who, in your opinion, might have tampered with it afterwards?”

  “Upon my Sam, I don’t know. My boys all deny it, of course, and, seeing how nearly it turned out a nasty accident for Burt, I can’t really say I blame them. Whoever did it didn’t mean any harm, but I wish they’d wait to get orders. I suppose they thought that as we had it down for the Boy Scouts’ gala in August, it had to come down again. The trouble is that the staff here is always changing. The pay is poor, you see, and the hours are pretty long, and the conditions are mostly unhealthy, so the consequence is that I can’t really keep a staff—except the pay-office women—they go on and on—from one summer’s end to another. I nearly always have at least a couple of new attendants every winter. The summer ones get sick of it and leave.”

  “I see. Thank you for explaining it all to me. And now—you won’t like this question, but—is there any possibility that the board could have been loosened mischievously, and not by a member of your staff at all?”

  The Baths superintendent paused before making his reply.

  “There’s only this,” he said. “These Baths—if you’d like to walk with me I’ll show you—back out on to the clinic.”

  They walked out of the building by the front doors and went past the Baths superintendent’s house, which had a small front garden bounded by a wooden fence. Next came some iron railings painted green, and these enclosed a small park or public garden with a gravel path leading alongside the Baths superintendent’s garden palings to a red-brick building which had been added to the original structure of the Baths.

  “This is the clinic—the school clinic—and the Welfare,” the Baths superintendent explained, “and it joins on to the Baths, as you can see. Now, through here”—he led the way into a broad brick tunnel to double doors made of wood—“is the big bath itself. Go through”—he produced a key and unlocked the door—“and we come to the lavatories.”

  This also was obvious, for the three small doors were wide open.

  “Now here’s what I think must have happened, if your idea is the right one—and the more I think of it, the more I reckon you’re hot on the cause of the trouble. When these double doors are open—which they often are, to air the place a bit—we shut the entrance with this iron grille.”

  He inserted an iron rod at the side of the doorway, and pulled across the opening the same kind of grille as is often used for the inner door of a lift.

  “There, you see! Nobody can get in—or shouldn’t be able to!—and the place can get a bit more air with no more draught to the bathers, unless they come through that further opening there. Go through and have a look.”

  Mrs. Bradley walked forward to a very short, narrow passage between two dressing boxes, and came to the edge of the bath. She was less than a dozen feet from the diving stands. Regardless of the bathers, who were all men, for the women’s time that day was earlier, and the Town Council allowed mixed bathing only twice a week, for some reason best known to Mrs. Commy-Platt and Councillor Grant, who were at one in suspecting the townspeople of low ideals and crude, insatiable desires, she walked to the stands and began to climb to the top. The top board from which Mr. Burt had so cleverly fallen was no longer in place, but she was able to get an idea of the way that the boards were clamped to the uprights and to appreciate how little time need be taken by anybody handy with a spanner or a wrench to make a board unsafe for people to use.

  “You see,” said the Baths superintendent when she returned to earth, “how easily it could be done. By the way, we won’t stay in here long, if you don’t mind, as I’m not allowed to have ladies in here during gentlemen’s hours, if you’ll excuse me.”

  They popped back into the apparently permissible environs of the lavatories, and the superintendent then pushed back the iron grille with the short iron rod and then invited Mrs. Bradley to close the opening again.

  She did so, but the superintendent then pulled the grille back with his hand to make an aperture about eighteen inches wide. He squeezed his body past this, and invited her to follow. Her small wiry frame slipped as easily through the opening as a cat.

  “What have I left undone?” she asked, as they both went back again.

  “What my assistant did, I reckon, although he’ll deny it,” the Baths superintendent answered. “You’ve got to hear it click. Listen.”

  He clicked the latch into place, and then demonstrated that the grille could no longer be withdrawn without the insertion of the rod.

  “That’s how it was done, for a pound!” he said. “But no good bothering now. We’d never find out who did it. Boys, most likely. You’d be surprised, since the schools can only have the children half-time with the evacuees, what they get up to.”

  Mrs. Bradley said sympathetically but untruthfully that she supposed she would be surprised, and then, as they walked back to the front entrance of the Baths to the superintendent’s little lair by the shallow end of the bath, she enquired whether the superintendent could tell at what time the fixing of the board had been tampered with.

  “Certainly, within half an hour, if that’s any good to you,” he answered.

  Mrs. Bradley replied that it would
be wonderful.

  “Between five and half-past on the evening before the gala, or between eight and half-past on the morning of the gala, or—Oh, lor, that’s torn it! Of course it could have been done at any time between twelve midday, when we closed the bath to the public, up to when the gala started, pretty nearly.”

  “Not so good,” thought Mrs. Bradley. Aloud she thanked the superintendent for his help, and went back to Lady Selina’s house.

  “So that’s how it was done,” said Sally, who was there to greet her aunt.

  “Yes. How are the potatoes?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “I don’t know, until next year. It’s all fun, though. I’m only home for a few days, you know. Aunt Adela, how are things going?”

  “Things, child?”

  “Yes. The murders and what not. Have you found out any more?”

  “Well, yes, I think perhaps we have.”

  She described Mr. Burt’s part in the affair, and detailed the evidence given by the laundry proprietor.

  “So it really looks like Mrs. Platt,” said Sally. “But somehow, I can’t believe it. I’m sure she hasn’t the courage. Besides, she couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the death of that poor girl Fletcher.”

  “She could have poisoned Councillor Smith, though.”

  “Funny. That’s what Pat suggested—that the death of Lillie Fletcher had nothing at all to do with the other two deaths. Don’t you think there’s something in that?”

  “Possibly, child. But not, I think, a great deal.”

  “Why not?”

  “As I see it, child, the two murders to be linked together are not those of Councillor Smith and Miss Platt, but those of Miss Platt and Lillie Fletcher.”

  “Oh—the two women!”

  “An enlightening way of putting it, child.”

  “Then Councillor Smith…”