Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I don’t see how she could have been. But I did not question him on the point. It was not my business. I had acted only as mother-confessor. I did think, however, that he might have his own reasons for wanting to revisit that house and in company with a reliable witness.”

  “Meaning yourself, of course, ma’am. You mean he’d hidden the body himself, and wanted the house looked into so that, if need be, you could afterwards be called upon to swear that the body wasn’t there. Equally, you now believe we’ve found it in the Rest Centre. The bit about the dressing-gown shows that.”

  “It doesn’t prove it, of course, but it’s a pointer.”

  “And a pretty good one, ma’am, as I agree now I’ve heard this story. All this you’ve told me would certainly add up with a jury, I haven’t the slightest doubt.”

  “Nor I,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But what convinces a jury is not necessarily evidence, you know. And the question is, can a jury really add?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Seekers

  The first thing which struck Harben about the house by the river was its neglected and dingy appearance. It seemed impossible that it could have changed so much until he remembered that he was comparing it with the spick and span exterior and cheerful modern comfort of The Island.

  The windows were dirty and rain-streaked; the wistaria clusters were gone. The paint had blistered in the sun and was peeling off the pillars of the doorway. Harben entered the house by pushing back the catch of a downstairs window with the blade of a strong, short knife. Then he climbed in, and opened the door to Mrs. Bradley.

  He thought at first that the house, inside, was just as he had left it, but, as they began to explore, he was soon aware that he had been right in imagining that it had had other tenants since the departure of himself and Leda. There were cigarette ends, of two different makes, in the drawing-room hearth, and the bed on which the old man’s body had lain, and from which it had so mysteriously disappeared, had been stripped of its coverlet and blankets.

  Apart from this, nothing had been removed and nothing damaged, so far as he could tell, but he had no inventory of the contents of the house, and no clue to any furnishings or appurtenances beyond those of the rooms he had seen on his previous visits.

  He was interested to watch the reactions of his companion. She neither poked nor pried, and yet he felt certain that no detail, however trivial, escaped her notice or would remain unregistered by her memory. She said nothing for some time, but followed him from room to room, upstairs and down, from the hall to the attics, and back again, doing nothing but sniff the close air.

  When they reached the hall floor again she said:

  “Cellars.”

  Harben objected that there would be no cellars in a house so close to the river, but he led the way down a steep and dark little staircase to the kitchen, which he had not previously seen. It was a low-ceilinged, semi-basement room, and a scullery of about the same size, and having the appearance of a large, square, stone-flagged dungeon, adjoining it on the west.

  A door opened out of the scullery on to the bottom of a rockery, and there was a flight of ugly little brick-built steps leading up to the level of the garden. Harben unbolted the scullery door and mounted the steps to a path. The garden was unkempt and overgrown, and there was a yellow, wet patch in the long, untidy grass where something heavy and rectangular had lain. Harben went back to his companion, and found her on hands and knees on the scullery floor, examining it with the aid of a powerful torch.

  “Worms,” she said; and Harben shuddered at the word, and saw—or thought he saw—what had been removed from the garden.

  “It’s the size of a coffin,” he said. The little old woman got up and brushed down her skirt.

  “In the garden?” she asked. Harben was surprised at the question. He did not realize until a good deal later that he was himself being subjected to the same close analysis and searching, relentless scrutiny as the house he had brought her to see. “I still think there’s a cellar,” she went on. “It ought to be easy to locate it, unless they’ve blocked up the entrance and made another for themselves.”

  She left him, and went into the kitchen. He wondered what train of thought was in her mind, and followed her to try to find out. She was bending over the kitchen hearth, her torch in play on the hearthstone, but, when he came in, she switched off and went to a cupboard.

  The door swung back, revealing shelves of food, much of it gone bad. The meat was crawling with maggots. Harben stepped back, but his companion appeared to be oblivious of any unpleasantness, and began to remove the bottles which littered the floor.

  Overcoming with some difficulty a feeling of sick repulsion for the crawling life around him and over his head, Harben stooped down to help her, but she said at once, interrupting the chivalrous attempt:

  “Touch nothing. I’m wearing gloves. Put your handkerchief over your hand if you want to help.”

  He obeyed her, anxious to bring the nauseating task to an end.

  When all the bottles were out she switched on the torch and examined the filthy floor inside the cupboard. It was six feet square, and in the middle was a trapdoor. She lifted it up. It came back on unrusted hinges, and disclosed a wooden ladder. This led steeply down into the blackness which shone with slime.

  “Here we are,” she said, in satisfied tones. “You stay up here, and keep watch, whilst I go down. I wonder what depth of water there is at high tide?”

  She descended, but not very far. Harben was anxiously combing his hair for maggots. He said nothing, and his companion stood on the ladder, her head just below the level of the pantry floor, and flashed her torch downwards at the water. Then she descended a couple of feet or so, but soon came up again.

  “We must wait for low tide. There’s nothing more to do until then,” she said. “You go out and get a meal, and meet me here again at half-past four.”

  “A meal!” said Harben, leading the way to the kitchen door. “My stomach’s completely turned by those horrible maggots!” He thought he would never forget the crawling mess.

  “Ah, yes, the maggots,” she said. She cackled suddenly. “There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.” To Harben’s horror, she returned to the loathly cupboard, collected several specimens of the maggots, and placed them in an empty matchbox which she took from the pocket of her skirt. Then, carrying the matchbox tenderly, as though it were filled with rubies, she followed him up the staircase to the hall. They went into the room whose windows looked over the river.

  Mrs. Bradley sat down at the table, took out a notebook, decanted the maggots carefully on to a page, studied them through a small lens, and made a short note.

  “I wish you wouldn’t gloat on those filthy bugs!” said Harben suddenly.

  “The Yellow Slugs,” said Mrs. Bradley with relish. “You must have read it.” She put away the lens, restored the maggots to the matchbox and then went out of the room. She was absent for just four minutes, for Harben studied his watch.

  “Where did you go?” he asked, when she returned.

  “Back to the kitchen cupboard,” she replied. “We must find some gardening implements and bury that meat.”

  “I’ll go outside and look for a toolshed,” said Harben. “There’s bound to be something of the sort.”

  He went out into the garden and found, at the end of the rockery, a shed made of planks which were falling apart, and having a roof of corrugated iron which had almost rusted away. It was easy enough to see the interior of the shed between the gaps in the planking, and, except for a sack, there appeared to be nothing inside.

  There must be a coalshed, Harben decided, for there could scarcely be coal in a cellar which filled at high tide. He looked for another shed, but there was nothing more outside the house. He returned to the scullery, to find that Mrs. Bradley had already discovered a spade.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “A good deep hole about half-way down the garden. Whilst yo
u are digging I will arrange to bring out the remains.”

  “Where was the spade?” he enquired. She waved a yellow hand towards the kitchen.

  “There is a small place through there where brooms and brushes are kept. The spade was with them. It has had earth on it fairly recently, as you can see. You might look round the garden for signs of recent digging. Not that I think you will find any. They would not have been foolish enough to bury the old man here.”

  Harben went out with the spade and looked first for a suitable spot for the interment. He had decided upon a good place when a face appeared over the wall and said conversationally:

  “Wondered when any of you people were going to do a bit of clearing up. Don’t want to complain, of course, but the seeds of your weeds are blowing about pretty thickly, and lots of them must come over the wall, I should think. Come over and help you, if you like. Anything to get the job done. Got to grow food next year, you know. Can’t grow food if it’s going to be nothing but thistles.”

  “Sorry,” said Harben. “Nothing to do with me. I’m from the Sanitary Inspector. Complaints about the drains, but it turns out to be some bad meat the last tenants left.”

  “Not surprised at anything they’d leave,” replied the stranger. “Foreigners, I should imagine. Not that I’ve seen them much. Night-birds mostly, I should guess. But haven’t I seen you before?”

  “I daresay you have,” answered Harben. “I used to keep a boat at moorings just off here.”

  “Ah, that’s it, then, I suppose. I’ve only been here since March, so I shouldn’t have known you really. Just thought I’d seen you, that’s all. Oh, well! So long! Just thought I’d mention the weeds.”

  Harben dug his hole, and then went to tell Mrs. Bradley that it was ready. She had transferred the horrid mess they were to bury to a large cardboard box she had found. Harben mentioned the neighbour, and repeated the conversation.

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley, transporting her box on the kitchen shovel. “We had better leave all the windows open for a bit. Foreigners? I wonder what kind of foreigners? Foreigners who move corpses and appear to be night-birds might interest the police, particularly, I should imagine, at a time like this. The girl you met wasn’t a foreigner, I suppose?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. I never even heard her surname. She had no foreign accent. I say, don’t you think I’d better be the one to carry that box on the shovel? I told that chap I was from the Sanitary Inspector’s place.”

  Mrs. Bradley handed over the shovel, but walked just behind him down the path and across the lawn. He had selected almost the centre of a flower-bed under a crumbling wall. It seemed a suitable place, and was eighty feet, at least, from the rockery.

  Harben filled in the hole and stamped the earth flat. Then he shovelled loose mould on the top, and, going to the foot of the wall, called over to the man who had spoken about the weeds.

  “If you do mean you’ll give a hand with those weeds, come over. I’m not due back for an hour. If you bring a spade I’ll use this one. We could get the thistles cleared out, if nothing else. I hate to see a good garden in such a state.”

  Mrs. Bradley went into the house. In less than an hour, Harben, perspiring but cheerful, joined her, and said:

  “I don’t know what to do about this spade. Are you going to bring the police in to dig over the ground for the body? I thought I’d better have that chap in to disturb the ground a bit more; then the foreigners won’t notice the place where we buried the rotten meat.”

  “Good for you, child. Well, we have had an interesting afternoon.”

  “Have you found out anything useful?”

  “There are indications that the well or cellar—whichever we choose to call it—is used for some purpose at low tide, but what that purpose is it is vain to speculate until, at low tide, we have seen it.”

  “It’s pretty nearly low tide now,” observed Harben, looking at his watch.

  “That’s another thing,” Mrs. Bradley remarked. “That clock upstairs in the hall—the grandfather—is an eight-day clock. It is going. Did you happen to notice?”

  “It sounds as though we had better get out of here before it’s dark,” suggested Harben.

  “I agree, but I want to make that trip down the cellar steps before we go. How much longer until the tide is at its lowest?”

  “As far as this house is concerned, it’s low tide now. Where do I wait? At the top of the cellar steps?”

  “You may come down with me if you would like to,” she replied. “Four eyes are better than two.”

  Followed by Harben, she descended into the depths, and soon they stood at the bottom on stone which was dangerously slippery from moss and a small, persistent kind of river weed. She flashed the torch over the floor of a sizeable cellar, part of which they deduced to be built out under the garden rockery.

  “And you think the old man was carried down here?” asked Harben.

  “There is nothing to prove it,” Mrs. Bradley answered. She shone the torch on the dripping, moss-covered walls, and then on the sweating bricks above the line of high water. “Why build a cellar under this house?” she added suddenly.

  “And yet you knew you would find one,” Harben observed.

  “The body was taken somewhere or other after you had laid it on the bed. They might have risked conveying it along the river bank and to a boat, but I do not think so.”

  “You say ‘they,’ but you really think Leda did it, don’t you?” Harben said. “But I don’t see how she could. He was a pretty good weight, and had to be brought down the stairs before he could be tumbled into this hole. A girl couldn’t do it alone.”

  “No, a girl couldn’t do it alone,” Mrs. Bradley agreed, “but, on the evidence of the neighbour you spoke to over the garden wall, two persons, at least, have had access to the house since the old man’s death, and one of them must surely be a man, since, had they been women, the neighbour would have mentioned it, I think. Well, there is nothing very much for two of us to do down here. Do you think you had better go up the steps and keep watch? It would be awkward for us both to be trapped down here when the tide comes in again.”

  Harben had been thinking of this for himself, and willingly returned to the kitchen. No one disturbed them, however. He policed the house for twenty minutes whilst Mrs. Bradley minutely examined the cellar, and, later, the kitchen, from which she took a Bible in Spanish and a volume of Spanish verse.

  “Any luck?” Harben asked, when she came up.

  “Yes, just a little perhaps. There is an entrance from the river bank to the cellar, under a flight of stone steps leading up from the strand. There are the dragging marks of a chain across the moss. A kind of sluice-gate can be dropped, and is dropped now, across the entrance.”

  “But what would be the object of getting to the river bank that way?”

  “I don’t know, child. I don’t even know whether, at the present day, there is any object at all. The house is about two hundred years old, and the cellar may be much older. Political prisoners were kept, in Tudor times, at the nobleman’s house on the other side of the bridge, I believe, were they not? A handy dungeon, which would fill at high tide, and from which the drowned bodies could readily be removed as the tide went down, might have come in very handy, so near such a house. Who knows? At any rate, I shall conclude, until we have evidence to contradict it, that the old man’s body was removed from the house this way, whether Leda helped move it or not.”

  “You still think she helped to move it?”

  “I still reserve judgement, child. The chances are that she did not. But until we know why the body was moved, we shall get very little further with the mystery. Did you examine the body?”

  “Not as a doctor would have done. There wasn’t blood about; that’s all I can swear to, I’m afraid.—Oh, except that the old fellow had been sick.”

  “On his dressing-gown?”

  “No, only on the floor.”

  �
�How do you know it was he?”

  Harben stared at her for a moment; then he said:

  “I suppose I don’t really know it; but don’t you think it was all to do with his fall? I didn’t notice it at first, not even the smell. The window was open. I shut it because it seemed funny to have a window wide open in a room where a man was dead. And I drew the curtains across. That’s when I saw the vomit on the floor.”

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Shall we go?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Encounter

  Harben’s dreams were confused that night, but one image in them persisted. He was in a boat, alone, on a wide, dark ocean, when a mermaid came swimming on a luminous track from a solitary star, and clutched at the gunwale with greenish, long, thin fingers. Her hair was one with the night, and her face was so wild and strained as to be unrecognizable, but he knew in his heart that it was Leda, and that, although she was a mermaid, she was drowning and he alone could save her. He knew that he could save her, but, in the dream, he dare not.

  He woke in a sweat, to find that it was morning.

  He got up and dressed, and went out to look at the river. The garden was nebulous and strange, for a thick white autumn mist lay over the bushes and the trees, and smoked up out of the lawn. Above the water the mist was as thick as teased wool.

  There seemed to be about six inches of clear, unmisted air, however, between the river surface and the eddying whiteness above. The face of the water was dark, and, stooping and peering, he could see for some distance ahead. For the first few seconds he stood quietly, every fibre stretched, and thought of the murderous attack he had suffered on a previous misty morning. But very soon this nervous tension left him, and he decided to skirt the neighbouring garden and walk as far as the weir.

  The wide, shallow steps from the garden went down to the bed of the river. Almost beside them, less than three yards to the left, a cut had been made in the bank and a very small boathouse built. Just as he came to this boathouse the sun came bright, and the mist began to roll off the face of the garden and, hanging about the trees for a minute or two, was swept away on a breeze which blew suddenly strong from the east.