Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. He was off before I could reach him. You can’t recognize people in the black-out. And now, whilst you get some sleep, what would you like me to do?”

  “First, find out what has happened to my friend Plug Williams. You know his shop, almost on the corner of Mild Court?”

  “Is Plug hurt?”

  “I don’t know. His shop was demolished. Second, enquire for survivors from the Cat’s Whisker, which also came down last night. Third, go to the Rest Centre in Maidenhead Close, and find out whether they want any help this morning. Fourth, you had better look out for yourself, I should think. Your earlier adventures lead me to imagine that your enemies are particularly persistent, but you have not, have you?—been attacked in Soho before.”

  “No, but I live here, you know, at any rate, during the winter. I daresay I have enemies among so many foreigners. A knife isn’t English, somehow.”

  He cleared away the breakfast things, went out, and returned at noon with his report.

  “Dodger, from the Cat’s Whisker, is in Charing Cross Hospital with a fractured thigh and concussion. They have hopes of him. Say he’s got a skull like teak and the fracture is compound but not complicated. Charlie, the barman at the Cat’s Whisker, is safe, although a bit knocked about. He went to the Rest Centre this morning, and they’re keeping him until he finds somewhere to go. The Cat’s Whisker was his home. They’re still digging for some of the customers there, but some have already been rescued. The proprietor was not on the premises. Nobody knows where he is. They think he has made for the safer areas. Plug’s shop isn’t down. There isn’t even any debris. The Rest Centre is busy and is functioning well. They’re all up to their eyes, of course, and I did what I could—chiefly washing up and peeling vegetables. Some of the people are in pretty bad shape. They’ve lost everything they ever had, and don’t know how to make a start again. The middle-aged ones are the worst. There’s a crippled woman who won’t be evacuated with other cripples. Says she likes it where she is, and shall stay. Interpreters are at a premium. They’ve got two Russian women this morning, several Austrian refugees, some Greeks, a Swede, and about a dozen French. Some of ’em understand English and others don’t. The Officers and Staff can do a bit of German and French, but the other languages are constituting a problem.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Well, now you may take me out to lunch, and then we’ll go back to the Rest Centre.”

  They lunched in Piccadilly, and picked their way back to the Rest Centre over broken glass, debris, and all kinds of rubble and mess. Demolition parties were already at work, but the business of London seemed, otherwise, to be proceeding much as usual.

  At the Rest Centre matters were going well. The patients, except for Mrs. Zellati, who, convinced that her children were all safe, had submitted to be removed to hospital, greeted Mrs. Bradley, for the most part, with humour and goodwill. The Officers and Staff were concerned with what seemed to be an eternal coping with Fate in the guise of representatives from the Town Hall to announce that an unexploded bomb had been removed: the District Officer for Repairs, who came to inform the Supervising Officer of the Rest Centre that he had no authority to carry out any repairs at the Centre except those needed for the black-out; a messenger from the Area Office to say that the removal of Elizabeth Halkins to hospital after a previous raid had not been notified to the proper authorities; the arrival of an ambulance to evacuate two old men and a woman who had signified their wish to go into the country; a young gentleman from the department of the Borough Engineer, who had selected this very inconvenient morning to inspect the electrical appliances in the medical room; and a visit from Miss Mollie O’Cann of the Canadian Press, who thought the Rest Centre just too cute and old-world, if she might say so. Then appeared an elderly gentleman who had come to find out the name and address of the caretaker, a younger gentleman who indicated that the church had a claim on the L.C.C. for damage done to the roof in a previous raid, and a middle-aged woman who came to ask what share, if any, the church members could take in helping at the Centre. A quarter of an hour later, a gang of workmen arrived to repair the roof. Questioned by the Supervising Officer, they claimed to have been sent by Holborn Borough Council, and were permitted to proceed.

  Scarcely had they begun work when the Supervising Officer and Welfare Officer were called out to meet members of the Samaritan League, who had come to offer their services. As there were always jobs for volunteers at the Rest Centre, for four meals a day were served there to upwards of two hundred people, the permanent staff cheered up, and soon found the Samaritans some employment. Mrs. Bradley had tea with the officers.

  “Better use my room, Edith,” said the Supervising Officer. “I’ve got a small table in there.”

  “You know,” said the Welfare Officer, “we made rather a curious discovery this morning, which I think would have interested you, Doctor Bradley.”

  “It has interested the police,” observed the Supervising Officer. “There’s going to be an official investigation.”

  “But what is there to investigate?” Mrs. Bradley enquired, with a horrid presentiment that she had, by her thoughts, wished something unpleasant upon them.

  “Godfrey thinks it’s a corpse, but I think it’s a practical joke. It happened like this: we’ve a young girl here—you’ve seen her—who’s going to have a baby. She felt rather faint this morning, so, to save her walking up the steps to the street, I went out with her into what we call … ‘underneath the arches.’ Have you been out there?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well, there are some old arches—most mysterious-looking, and a kind of passage—and as soon as we got out there this girl said to me … ‘Oh, look! I wonder how that got there! Doesn’t it look revolting?’ … or something of the sort. She speaks very broken English. It was a box, really, but it was almost the shape and size of a coffin, and it really made me feel quite excited to see it there, because, you know, I love anything gruesome and mysterious. Of course, I was only playing at having those feelings, but I told Godfrey, and he went and looked at it …”

  “And slightly unscrewed it,” said the Supervising Officer, “and very hastily screwed it up again …”

  “And now he’s told the police. You know, Godfrey, I do call that brave of you. The police are always so sceptical, I think, when the ordinary citizen tells them anything. What do you think, Doctor Bradley?”

  The Supervising Officer laughed. There was a close and, to most people, a surprising comradeship between the sensitive, vibrant, almost ascetic man and the practical, self-possessed, lively, dominant woman.

  “I’d like to see this mysterious box,” said Mrs. Bradley, “but as you have reported its arrival, I suppose I must wait until the police have had a look.”

  When she left the Rest Centre, David was waiting for her.

  “What have you been doing since lunch?” she enquired, for they had parted at the top of Maidenhead Close some two and a half hours earlier.

  “Oh, hanging about. After all, I live in Soho six months of the year, you know.” Mrs. Bradley thought it odd that he should emphasize this point. He added defensively, “I’ve lots of friends. I’m here all the time I’m not on the river in my old tub. Why shouldn’t I have friends as well as enemies in the neighbourhood?”

  He walked back with her to Gerrard Street and said good-bye at the entrance of the high, old, rickety house in which she had her flat.

  She was preparing to mount the staircase when from the floor above descended one of the street-walkers.

  “Oh, hullo, dear,” said the girl, upon seeing Mrs. Bradley in the hall. “That wasn’t Dave Harben, was it?”

  “Indeed it was. Do you know him?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “Only so-so. Not in the way of business, dear, if you understand. He done a book about me once. Nice fellow, ’specially if you happen to be down on your luck. And don’t want nothing in return. Haven’t s
een Billie, I s’pose? I’m going out to ’ave a look for her. She’s not been home all the morning. Cooked her breakfast for her and everything, I did. Always gets home to breakfast from her Wednesday. Gets rid of her, he does, before his lady secretary turns up. Being treated like dirt, I call it. What’s a lady secretary? Takes his money, same as we do, that’s what I always say.”

  “Whereabouts was Billie staying?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “One of them posh flats off Beau Street. Know ’em?”

  “There’s been some damage there, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I hope you’ll find she’s quite safe.”

  “Makes business chancy, these air-raids,” said the prostitute.

  Mrs. Bradley mounted the stairs, unlocked the door of her sitting-room, and then heard a sound from the kitchen. She went up the two wooden stairs at the turn of the landing.

  “Have you been here long?” she enquired. It was her old friend Detective-Inspector Pirberry of Scotland Yard. He got up from the kitchen chair to greet her.

  “Expected me, did you ma’am? Not that I see how you could.”

  “No, I didn’t expect you,” Mrs. Bradley confessed. “Why, are you here for some special reason?”

  “Well, ma’am, they’ve found something funny at the Rest Centre round in Maidenhead Close, and I thought you might like to be in on it, seeing you are kind of interested round there. The Supervising Officer reported the matter to Gray’s Inn Road, and Inspector Dewey there got on to me. Do you care to have a look-see, ma’am?”

  “I’ll walk round to the Rest Centre with you,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Have you yourself seen what has been found? I heard something about it half an hour ago.”

  “Really, ma’am? I thought you and I would have first look, perhaps. It seems to be a long box, rather like a coffin, and there’s no doubt there’s something inside.”

  “I confess to considerable interest. This box was not in the Rest Centre before the raid, I take it?”

  “Well, that’s one of the things that would have to be figured out, ma’am. It’s getting a common trick to dump bodies where it’s hoped they’ll look like air-raid casualties, of course, but …”

  “The person who put this box in the Rest Centre can scarcely have hoped the contents would look like an air-raid victim, you mean?” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Yes. Well, they rang up Gray’s Inn Road, as I said, ma’am, and Dewey asked me whether I would care to come and have a look. He said it had been put there very recently, as, at six o’clock on the evening of the raid, it had not been there, the Officers were certain. The Welfare Officer gives it out as gospel it wasn’t there, because she and the nursing sister had been testing the black-out of the emergency hospital at six, and she’s a very dependable lady. During the testing it had not been dark, and the lady seems, ma’am, positive that, had the box been where she afterwards saw it, either the nursing sister or herself would have been bound to spot it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Body

  The coffin-like box, opened in the mortuary, disclosed contents suitable only for re-interment. The police, however, thought it necessary to ask for a post-mortem examination. The result was interesting. In spite of the fact that the body had been dead for—the experts thought—between two and three years, sufficient arsenic was recovered to indicate that death was due to acute arsenical poisoning. The victim was thought to be a man of between sixty and seventy years of age.

  “It had to be murder,” said Pirberry, confronted with these sinister findings, “or else why dump the coffin in such an unlikely spot?” He returned with Mrs. Bradley, Dewey and the sergeant to the Rest Centre.

  “Good morning,” he said to the Supervising Officer. “Would you kindly place a small room at our disposal, sir? I shall have to ask your staff a few questions.”

  “You had better have the Staff Room. I’ll turn them out and put a notice on the door.”

  “Thank you, sir. That will do admirably. You can’t, of course, throw any light yourself upon the matter?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I went into the basement that morning on a routine inspection, but I did not go into the area. The last time I inspected the arches was after we had them cleared of rubbish when the L.C.C. partially blocked in the top of the area as a safety measure. I know there was nothing there then. After that we put out some junk from upstairs, but the furnace-man saw to all that.”

  “I’d better see him first, then. Will you call him, please.”

  The furnace-man, introduced into the Staff Room four minutes later, wiped his hands down the seams of his trousers and said he knew nothing about coffins. There had been no coffin on the premises before Saturday, which was the last day on which he had seen the arches. He wanted to keep extra coke down there, not coffins, and but for the idiocy of the L.C.C. in blocking all possible coal-chutes from the street, he would have had another five ton put down there, ah, that he would, chance what! They could do with it, come winter. As for coffins, he thought their place was underground.

  The Welfare Officer came next. She described the finding of the coffin, and could give the approximate time of the discovery. She could not agree that the coffin might have been placed under one of the arches, could not see, in fact, how it could have been placed there. There was no way down to the area now except from the shelter, and the door between the shelter and the arches was kept locked. The Supervising Officer had a key; so had the furnace-man. She herself had no key to the door. She had had to procure the Supervising Officer’s key in order to take out Mrs. Pibeski, who had morning sickness and had asked for a little fresh air because she felt faint.

  “We shall have to find out whether it would have been possible for any unauthorized person to get hold of the furnace-man’s keys,” said Pirberry, when the Welfare Officer had gone. “Meanwhile, we’d better have this Mrs. Pibeski, if she’s well enough to come up.”

  Mrs. Pibeski came up in the lift. She was a young, beautiful Polish woman whose English was just—but only just—capable of bearing the strain put upon it by Pirberry’s questions.

  Yes, she had been sick now several mornings. No, her place had not been bombed, but there was the bomb which did not go off. The police had told her to go away until the bomb had been taken away. It was admirable of the police to concern themselves for her safety. For herself, she did not mind, but there was the baby coming. Her husband was—had been—an airman. He was dead.

  Mrs. Bradley noted Pirberry’s reluctance to introduce the subject of coffins.

  “It is strange,” continued Mrs. Pibeski, “to find a coffin in the outside of our beds. Myself, I regard it as an omen. I am alive. I shall die. What do you say?”

  “You mean you saw this coffin before Mrs.—before the Welfare Officer had taken you into the area?”

  “No. When we go, I see. I speak French. She speak French, too. “Voilà!” I say. She say yes, she seen it. We examine. I say the church have a crypt. She say yes, certainly. The air-raid had flung up the coffin, and we are there.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Pibeski,” said Pirberry. “You have been very helpful. I think,” he added to the Supervising Officer, “we’d better see the Staff, in order, next, sir, if you please.”

  The Staff consisted of three women and two men, and the Supervising Officer, a man of modern views, asked which of the five would most suit Pirberry’s taste. Pirberry, who was intrigued and astonished by this—to him—remarkable subscription to the doctrine of the equality of the sexes, selected Miss Bond, the most experienced in the Rest Centre work.

  “Coffin?” said Miss Bond. “Well, of course, I’ve seen coffins, as it were. But in the Rest Centre, no. Not if we have any luck, that is.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Pirberry. The other four had nothing to add which could help him. They slept “all over the place” as Miss Welch, the youngest member, put it, but none of them slept in the shelter, although they went “down there if the Jerries got too saucy.” It was soon obvious that
they had nothing whatever to tell, and Pirberry soon made an end of them, and asked for the Welfare Officer again.

  “There’s no doubt, ma’am,” he said, “that I shall have to depend on you for the major part of the evidence. Can’t you add anything to what you’ve already said?”

  “I don’t think I can,” she answered.

  “We may be coming back, ma’am. Will you think things over, and hold yourself at our disposal to answer any more questions?”

  “Oh, yes. Why not?” said the Welfare Officer. She caught Mrs. Bradley’s eye and smiled. She was a remarkably good-looking woman, thought Mrs. Bradley, noting again, and with a renewal of her previous pleasure, the decisive generosity of the mouth and the humour and shrewdness of its smile.

  “Come out to lunch,” said Mrs. Bradley. But the meal, delightful though it proved to be, was productive of very little extra information.

  “I’d like to know, as much as you would, how the coffin could have got there,” said the Welfare Officer, at the end. “But I don’t see how anybody could have put it under the arches without our knowledge.”

  Her voice was low and soft, and easily audible—a wonderful voice for public speaking, thought Mrs. Bradley.

  “No?” she said. “That is the first consideration, of course. I had hoped that someone would throw some light on that. I wonder whether I might come with you back to the Rest Centre, and have a look round for myself?”

  “Oh, yes, do come.”

  They went first to the Welfare Officer’s room. Mrs. Bradley had been in it before, but regarded it with renewed interest. It was high above the roof-tops of all the surrounding houses, and had a square carpet patterned in red; dullish green walls, distempered; a piano against one wall and a camp bed against another; a large cupboard opposite the bed; a writing desk; and, over the bed, a copy of The Music Lesson by Vermeer. This was the only picture in the room. The window was in the wall above the desk, and the door was almost opposite the window. There were also two or three chairs.