“Was murdered to make a further stir in the town.”
“I don’t see how you deduce it.”
“Don’t you? At Councillor Smith’s party three well-known people drank stout. At the Report Centre a good many comparatively unimportant people drank coffee.”
“Yes? Well?”
“I’m afraid that’s all, child, for the present.”
“You frighten me, Aunt Adela.”
“Yes. I have frightened you from the beginning, Sally. You do well to allow yourself to be frightened, too.”
“Are you safe, Aunt Adela?”
“No.”
“You will be careful, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did I tell you that Pat Mort is trying to get sent to Finland? She’s had an invitation from the London paper she’s managed to get herself on to, to go and wait there for events.”
“Has she? Does the editor think that interesting events are going to take place in Finland?”
“He thinks they might. He’s got his eye on Russia. Pat’s fearfully keen to go. But won’t she be wanted at the trial, if you catch the murderers?”
“Why do you ask me that, child?”
“Because of the Report Centre business.”
“She wouldn’t be wanted for that any more than for the other murders, child.”
“Oh, I see. You really intend to prove all three?”
“I don’t know yet. It depends entirely, of course, upon the evidence.”
“Is this murderer more than usually elusive, Aunt Adela?” asked Sally, gazing suspiciously upon her relative.
“I don’t know, child. After all, it is the main business of murderers to avoid detection and capture.”
“I suppose the murderer of the two women is not a homicidal maniac?”
“Good gracious, no! That murderer is dreadfully sane, within the meaning of that word as applied by Act of Parliament.”
“You mean that you’d consider it insane to murder two women for no reason, but that the law wouldn’t?”
“I did not say the murderer had no reason. I know the reason. But establishing a motive is not sufficient evidence to prove guilt, otherwise a good many people would be hanged.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes, you do. And you must now forget all about this conversation.”
“Do you think you can get enough evidence to convict the murderers, Aunt Adela?”
“We are talking in circles, child?”
“I rather hope you can’t, Aunt Adela,” said Sally, who seemed desirous of prolonging the conversation. “I don’t like to think of people being hanged, whatever they’ve done. What made you suspect, in the first place?”
“All sort of things. First a little, unimportant statement which gave me a false clue and then a real one; then the extraordinary attitude of Mrs. Commy-Platt; then the difficulty of attributing any motive to any one criminal, because of the lack of association between one victim and another; then the evidence of the fishmonger, then lots more things, the significance of which depended on whether I had hit upon the identity of the criminals. Then, of course, there were the attempts on Eddie Burt, which persuaded me that in one respect at least I was right.”
“Oh, dear! I wish you’d never come here! Nobody else would have guessed!”
“But you guessed, Sally, right at the beginning!”
“Yes, but I guessed Lillie Fletcher! You see, there was always that note. I oughtn’t to suspect Pat just because of that, but, you see, she showed it to me. I’ve been wondering for ages what I ought to do about it.”
“Do nothing about it, child. I can guess what was in that note. What did Pat do with it after she had read it?”
“Just tore it up.”
“At what time did she read it?”
“Not until the next day. She had shoved it into her pocket because we were supposed to be busy practising.”
“And the note was to ask her to meet an unnamed person at the Grand cinema, when she would be given some information for the gossip column of her paper.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it was. She said she’d had assignments like that before, and had kept them, although she didn’t much like it.”
• 2 •
“I think,” said Mrs. Bradley to the inspector, “that if we can nail down one of those half-hours when the bath was empty, we may get a confession, you know.”
“I don’t care much for confessions. They don’t do the police any good. A confession at the gallows’ foot for spiritual reasons is the best. That doesn’t concern the police, but only the prison chaplain.”
“True, child.”
“Can’t we get enough evidence without having to get a confession?”
“Possibly. And possibly not.”
“Blow. All right, then. I’ll check up on the Baths and see how we go from there. It ought to be easy enough. What are you going to do now? I feel we’ve had all the help we can reasonably expect.”
“Meaning that you’d be glad if I took myself off.”
“Well, you are a responsibility now that you know so much.”
“It’s as safe to know much as to know very, very little in this case, child. I am in no more danger now—Oh, I forgot. Yes, I am. All right. You carry on, and I’ll go back to Wandles Parva. Call me again if you want me. By the way, you’ll get no more assistance from Patricia Mort. Her London editor is sending her to Finland.”
“I didn’t know she’d got a London job?”
“It’s new, I gather. The vacancy existed for a woman correspondent, and Pat snapped it up on the strength of her newspaper work in connection with the murders here in Willington.”
“Really? I must congratulate her. She must have worked pretty hard, on the whole, you know, and I shouldn’t wonder if she hasn’t run some risks.”
“I think she has, but to her they would appear to be worth while.”
“I always thought it a shame she didn’t get a proper university training. The girl’s got brains. Sally will miss her, won’t she?”
“Yes, poor Sally. She’s very much cast down. They have been quite friendly for some time. By the way! You must go searching for the clothes that were taken off Miss Platt.”
“Thanks, I will. But don’t you think they’ve been burnt or buried before this?”
“I doubt it. It takes a big fire to burn clothes, and, burning cloth is apt to smell pretty strongly. Buried? Likelier, perhaps, but not much. The safest thing by far, it seems to me, would have been to hang them up in a wardrobe or put them away in a drawer, and take no more notice of them; in fact, try to forget, oneself, that they were there.”
“But people ferret among other people’s things.”
“You know the people of Willington better than I do, of course.”
“Oh well, I’ll do my best, but it’s like the needle in the haystack, you know.”
“And look for a brown beret which would not fit its present owner.”
“In the same place as the clothes?”
“Yes, in the same place, child. And now for Mr. Talby. I hope I shall find him at home.”
“Tom Talby? What on earth has he got to do with it?”
“Very little, I hope, but…he wasn’t present at the gala.”
“Ah, but I know about that.”
“You do?”
“Yes. It was one of those silly accidents which do happen occasionally. He got himself locked in.”
“Where?”
“A council room cupboard in the Town Hall.”
“But how on earth did that happen?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“Well, he came and apologised for letting the team down. You remember that there was a team race on the programme? We didn’t swim it, of course, because that air raid alarm broke up the meeting for us. Tom didn’t realise that, but I told him when he came to make his apologies, and it was then that I heard ab
out the cupboard. Oh well, I wouldn’t put it past Eddie Burt to make sure of winning the diving championship.”
“I think I’d like to see Tom, all the same. And, although I share your opinion of Mr. Burt, isn’t Tom the only other person in the Swimming Club who might have dived in off that top board? And that was not a competition dive.”
“You’re right, of course. I never thought of that. Somebody feeling tender-hearted about him, do you think? Didn’t want the board to come to bits under Tom?”
“I think the person who was intended to fall from that board did fall from it.”
“Yes, no doubt you’re right. Well, good luck and look out for yourself. I don’t care much for this business of tampering with diving boards and hitting people in the stomach during an air raid scare.”
“There are always hymn books, but they are not always in a handy room,” said Mrs. Bradley reminiscently. As the inspector did not follow this reference, he did not remark upon it, but, when she had gone, he went to the window and watched her all down the street.
• CHAPTER 21 •
A Siren of the Eighth Sphere.
Design by Bernardo Buontalenti for a sixteenth-century masque.
• 1 •
“Oh, that?” said Tom Talby. “Well, it must have been meant as a silly practical joke, although I must say it seemed more like a dirty trick to me.
“I had a letter—delivered by hand—just shoved through the letter-box—asking me to attend a conference at the Town Hall about the gala, and hinting that there was some hitch or other. It didn’t say what was wrong, but, of course, I went.
“Well, I don’t know whether you know the Town Hall inside at all? Anyhow, the note, which was typewritten and not signed, said that the meeting was to be in the Talbot Room, which is at the top of the Grand Staircase. On the landing outside there is a cupboard, and there was a notice on the door of this cupboard, which said: Bath Committee (Gala Arrangements) Meeting, please take one.
“I couldn’t see anything to take, so I opened the cupboard door, and at the same moment someone shoved me inside and locked the door.
“I yelled and hammered but I couldn’t make anybody hear. I was in there for about—well, I don’t know how long—but I heard the air raid warning, and was in a pretty sweat, I can tell you, boxed up there, and almost underneath a glass roof.
“Anyway, by the time the All Clear went, I found I was free. I was hammering away at the panels when the door gave, and out I stumbled. I saw somebody quickly turn the corner, and I was after him like a shot, but you know what the Town Hall is—a positive rabbit warren. I heard footsteps ahead of me, as I thought, and tore along to catch up, but it was only Price, of the Council Treasurer’s department. He looked slightly surprised to see me come bounding along, and, of course, it would be absurd to suspect him of locking me in a cupboard. He’d have no conceivable reason.”
“Who would have had a reason, in your opinion, Mr. Talby?”
“I can’t say at all. Not one of our chaps, I imagine, and yet who else would have thought of such a thing?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“No. Well, I’ve thought about it, but I can’t get anywhere.”
“Somebody wanted to make quite sure that you did not dive off that very unsafe top board, one might almost imagine.”
“Oh, but the board was an accident. Timmy thinks his assistant did it, and went away, forgetting he’d left it like that. The funny thing is that Pat Mort had a hunch there was something wrong with that board. You know, the reporter girl. She seemed very much concerned about the board when she met me at the Baths to get her programme annotated. But the board was all right then, because I went off it, myself, to make sure.”
“Yet it nearly killed Eddie Burt, Mr. Talby, did it not?”
“Look here, you’re not suggesting that I went up there and tampered with the board?”
“Such a thought would never have entered my head,” said Mrs. Bradley truthfully, “but, of course, now you’ve suggested it…! After all, you may have had your own reasons for not wishing Eddie to win the diving competition.”
Tom Talby grinned, and Mrs. Bradley went back to the Town Hall to see Mr. Price, of the Council Treasurer’s department. He was behind a kind of Post Office grille, and fortunately there were no ratepayers in the office so that Mrs. Bradley was able to engage him freely in conversation. This she did, regardless of the fact that he was busy with ledgers.
“See anyone else on the…Oh, you mean the day Tom Talby caught me up on his way down the staircase? Ah, I place the occasion. I saw nobody but the usual people.”
“And those were, Mr. Price?”
“Good gracious, I hope it’s not important. I couldn’t possibly remember. But, anyway, nobody at all remarkable, I’ll swear to that. Just people on our staff, and a few odd A.R.P. personnel, and so forth.”
• 2 •
“Child,” said Mrs. Bradley, “to whom have you explained that you were renewing the search for Miss Platt’s clothes and hat?”
“Nobody. Of course, to nobody.”
“Strange,” said Mrs. Bradley. “They’ve turned up in what we might call peculiar circumstances.”
“What? Where?”
“On Doctor Lecky’s doorstep, dear child. The maid found them when she took in the milk.”
“But that means…good heavens! I’ve arrested the wrong man, then! Who on earth put them there?”
“Nobody,” replied Mrs. Bradley, with an evil grin. “Of course, nobody.”
Then she turned on him, every trace of amusement gone.
“Think, think!” she said. “And, whilst you’re thinking, go and get hold of Sally.”
“Sally!” said the inspector. “Of course it was! Although how the devil you knew…!”
Mrs. Bradley pushed him towards the door, and followed him into his car.
“Drive fast,” she said.
“She may not be at the house,” said Stallard manoeuvring out of the gates respectfully, for they had not been designed to take a car. Once in the road, however, he increased speed, and in a time which satisfied even an anxious aunt the car covered the distance between the town and Lady Selina’s.
“Where’s Sally?” Mrs. Bradley asked the maid who opened the door.
“Miss Sally is in her room, madam.”
“Has she had any visitors, to-day?”
“Not that I know of, madam, except the young lady with her now, a Miss Montgomery, madam.”
“Y.W.C.A.,” said the inspector. “Wily as a dove, as somebody says somewhere.”
They went upstairs, and Mrs. Bradley knocked at Sally’s door. The visitor was “just going,” it appeared.
“Just one moment, Miss Montgomery,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Have you had anything to eat or drink since you’ve been here!”
“She wouldn’t, Auntie,” said Sally, who was looking particularly lively and pretty.
“Good for her,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What are you collecting for, Miss Montgomery?”
“Our new hostel and club rooms. Oh! Thank you very much!”
When she had gone, Sally, amused but rather perturbed, exclaimed:
“Well, really, Aunt Adela! Chasing away my visitors like that! What on earth’s the matter?”
“This,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I want you to tell me now, at once, without holding anything back, who it is that you suspected of the murders when I first came here to Willington, and who, if anybody, you suspect now.”
“Aunt Adela!”
“Come on, Sally,” said Stallard. “It’s important.”
“I didn’t suspect anyone. What makes you think I did?”
“Now, then! None of this ‘schoolgirl complexion’ stuff,” said Stallard sternly. “Come across with everything you know. And remember that we’re not at the end of the business. And, look here, young lady, why did you want to go and blow the gaff about those clothes the murderer took off that poor woman? I thought you’d respect my confidence, or
I wouldn’t have given it to you.”
“You shouldn’t have given it to her. You’re the prize babbler. She comes a poorish second,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“Whom did you tell, you blinking little human budgerigar?” said Stallard, disregarding Mrs. Bradley’s rebuke.
“Only Pat, and she seemed to know already. I thought you’d told her yourself, she seemed to know so much about it.”
“You told Pat! You let Pat bluff you into telling her the one thing you ought not to have told anybody?” Stallard’s voice reached an almost adolescent squeal of indignation and self-blame. “Don’t you know, you wretched booby, that to tell a reporter anything is to tell the world? I wonder you hadn’t more sense! But there! As your aunt says, it’s all my fault. Well, between us, young woman, I think we’ve mucked my case.”
“Oh, Ronald, no!”
“Yes, we have. These clothes were to have been our biggest clue. Don’t you see that once we’d found them we could have given somebody the deuce of a lot of explaining to do? And in explanations made to the police, a whole lot of things come out that the explainers don’t always intend.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have told me,” said Sally. “Aunt Adela, why did you want to know whether Miss Montgomery had had anything to eat or drink here? You weren’t thinking…? Surely you weren’t thinking of poison?”
“I am responsible for you to your mother. Her own inclination is to send you away again, you know.”
“I think I’ll go to Grandma’s. It’s a nice long way from here. I wish you’d come with me, Aunt Adela.”
“I should like to, child, but it’s impossible. You had better go with Ronald.”
“Here!” said Stallard. “I don’t know…”
“It’s in Scotland. You’re the only person I know who can get enough petrol,” said Mrs. Bradley rapidly. “And it certainly isn’t safe for Sally to go by train. You’ve made this mess, between you, and you must deal with the consequences. Get a move on, and don’t let Sally out of your sight until you get at least to Stamford. Good-bye. Sally will direct you after you get to Ballater.”
“Ballater!” moaned the inspector. “Well, she’ll have to wait at the police station whilst I make my arrangements, and she’ll have to wait at my digs, and…damn it, it’s not respectable.”
Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley) Page 22
