Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Upon receipt of Woods’ message, Mrs. Bradley rang up the police, and set out upon an investigation of the most probable scene of Harben’s disappearance. From his previous descriptions of the house, she did not anticipate any difficulty in finding it.

  The riverside was lively and colourful, the autumn air brisk and cool. The tide was high, and a little creek, which had been a muddy trickle a few hours earlier, now carried boats at moorings, and a depth of five feet of water.

  Several people noticed the small, black-haired, incongruously clad old woman who walked up to the door of the double fronted, empty house, but no one appeared to be more than ordinarily interested in her movements.

  From a bunch of keys in her possession she selected one which provided dignified admittance by way of the handsome old door. She had discovered this useful key on her previous visit—or, rather, had discovered that it fitted.

  In the hall Mrs. Bradley stood still and sniffed the air. Then she withdrew into a small recess between the hall-stand and the front door, and, producing a small handbell, removed plasticene from its stopper and clattered it as loudly as she could. It did not ring, as some of the plasticene still adhered, but it made sufficient sound to startle the inhabitants of the house.

  These proved to be, once again, the small grey monkey which came chattering out of one of the downstairs rooms to swing itself on to the carved post which supported the banisters, and the parrot, which walked in a stately manner out of the dining-room, bowed twice in the direction of the front door, and observed theatrically, “No, not Cripplegate, old boy,” several times in succession.

  Mrs. Bradley, from her post of vantage, surveyed the bird and the small mammal, and then swung the bell-clapper again. The monkey gave a short scream and bounded away up the stairs. The parrot walked with a comical strut to the foot of the staircase, appeared to look up to where the monkey cowered and gibbered at the top, then lifted one claw and said genially:

  “A dirty night at the Cat’s Whisker, old boy. Old boy, old boy, old boy.”

  Mrs. Bradley stepped out from her hiding-place and proceeded to explore the house. The parrot accompanied her, except downstairs to the kitchen. The monkey remained where he was until she began to mount the stairs. Then he fled, screaming with fear and annoyance, to the floor above.

  There was no clue to Harben. Mrs. Bradley searched and explored, sounded walls, opened cupboards and clothes chests, and spent, altogether, nearly two hours in the house. A minor mystery was the fact that the front door, which she distinctly remembered closing, was wide open when she came down again from the attics.

  She examined the fastenings, but there seemed to be nothing amiss. The telephone was in order, so she rang through to Sister Sebastian to say that she would not be back that night, and then, for the second time, rang up her friend, the Assistant Commissioner, to suggest that the local police might like to keep watch on the house. She did not tell him the story over the telephone, but promised to give it him later.

  Nothing happened; and Scotland Yard was gently humorous over the telephone in the morning. Harben, however, did not appear, and no news came of him. Mrs. Bradley, ignoring official gibes and rude suggestions, suggested, in her turn, that the police might like to undertake to help her to trace her young friend. She also gave them Harben’s description of Leda.

  The Assistant Commissioner arrived in person at three in the afternoon to find her talking to the monkey (which had adopted her fairly readily once it had been fed) and, alternately, listening to the parrot, whose conversation seemed to her full of interest. The Assistant Commissioner came alone, and was careful to explain that he was paying a private, friendly, strictly unofficial visit. She grinned, and explained that the local police had frightened away all visitors.

  “And now, what is all this?” the Assistant Commissioner demanded. “This is no time to amuse yourself, you know.”

  Mrs. Bradley disclaimed any frivolous purpose in enlisting the support of the police, and told of Harben’s message and disappearance, and added that she was anxious about the young man. She described him minutely and well, and told of the visit which he and she had already paid to the house. She described the night she had spent, and added that whatsoever dark secrets the house contained remained hidden. Her only discovery, which she suggested might be pigeon-holed at the back of the official mind for future reference if necessary, was that, since her last visit, persons unknown had made their way into the garden. The rectangle of damp and yellowish grass which she and Harben had seen, was covered partly by a large zinc cistern. That it was not the original container which had occupied the site was clear, for it had an almost square base, whereas the rectangle of yellowish grass was both longer and narrower than the cistern, and showed for nearly ten inches at either end of it.

  Upstairs, in a cupboard at the top of the steps to the attics, was the cistern belonging to the house. It was in good order. The Assistant Commissioner, still not at all impressed, helped Mrs. Bradley to inspect it.

  Out in the garden they moved the empty cistern and measured the yellowish patch on which it stood. The measurements certainly suggested those of a coffin, but, as the Assistant Commissioner unnecessarily and facetiously pointed out, to stand an empty coffin in one’s back garden does not, in itself, constitute an offence against the law.

  Even Harben’s disappearance he was at first inclined to take lightly. He observed that Mrs. Bradley had known nothing whatever about the young man before he turned up at The Island in charge of the nuns and the boys, and, upon her retorting that the young man was a fairly well-known novelist, he laughed.

  She remained unruffled, and showed him the entrance to the cellar, demanding, as she did so, whether he had ever seen a cellar flap made in a pantry floor.

  He replied that he did not see why the opening should not be where it was, but she retorted to this that it was evident to people who had eyes in their heads that the pantry floor had originally been of stone.

  “Well, let’s go down,” he said. It proved impracticable to carry out this suggestion, for the tide was in, and the cellar was half-full of water. “Now, that is odd,” he admitted, closing the trap and dusting the knees of his trousers. “But what’s odd isn’t necessarily criminal, you know, and, of course, you’ve only the word of this young fellow, who probably lives in a world of moonshine, anyhow, that he’s ever been attacked and that there was anything strange about this house.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Bradley, “be that as it may, I’d like very much to know where David is.”

  “Oh, we’ll bear it in mind. If the local people don’t make any objection, I’ll give you Pirberry for a bit. You like him, and have worked with him before. But I can’t see anything to go on. You might let us know if Harben turns up all right. And now—what about dinner tonight?”

  But Mrs. Bradley refused the invitation. The Assistant Commissioner, she noted with inward amusement, had made no reference to his having found her on enclosed premises on which she was certainly trespassing, and she noted, too, that he had a word with the policeman on duty outside, before he walked to where he had left his car. Mrs. Bradley waited for ten minutes, and then telephoned her Kensington house for carriers for the monkey and the parrot.

  There were two immediate courses of action she could take, she thought. Both involved interviews with people she did not know. She remembered that David Harben had spoken to the next-door neighbour over the wall on the subject of weeds. It might well be that this apparently genial and simple-minded gentleman would have valuable information which he could be persuaded to share.

  She went out into the garden and yodelled over the wall. Up came a head with the cautious enquiry of a tortoise.

  “Good-day,” said Mrs. Bradley. “You remember, perhaps, a young man whom you helped in clearing weeds from this garden?”

  “Ah, yes. The young fellow from the Sanitary Inspector’s office. Said he kept a boat at moorings off here. I said I thought I knew his face.” />
  “Was that the last time you saw him?”

  “Yes. Why, is anything the matter?”

  “I want to get in touch with him.”

  “Well, why don’t you ring up the Sanitary Inspector?”

  “Oh, yes, I could do that,” Mrs. Bradley agreed. “You don’t happen to know whether his cousins have been here lately?”

  “There have been people in and out, but I’ve taken no particular notice. I’m almost a newcomer to the district and I don’t know people yet. I’m a bachelor, you see. A woman would know all about the neighbours by now, but—well, rightly or wrongly, I don’t. Come over and have a look at my air-raid shelter.”

  Mrs. Bradley thanked him. There was no house on the other side for a distance of almost forty yards, and she did not feel that it would be of much use to extend the scope of her enquiries by visiting a house which, in town parlance, was scarcely that of a neighbour.

  Instead, she decided to visit the almshouses. She had heard Harben speak of them, and believed that he had been accustomed to show the old men some little kindness when his boat was at moorings in their neighbourhood. Then another thought struck her. There was the public house not far from the almshouses, and Harben had turned in there for a drink before going on to the house—if to the house he had gone. She knew that Harben had met his friend Woods in this public house and that the message to her over the telephone had been agreed upon there.

  It was just after two, and the little place was still open. It took less than five minutes to obtain the information she sought, and also to hear the name of the man who had telephoned, and to get some idea of his standing in the locality.

  She went next to the six old men, but saw only five of them, for one was visiting his daughter. The little group of houses was built sideways on to the river, and a flagged pavement at right-angles to the concrete path led past all the front doors. Two of the pensioners were seated outside in the sun, so that it was easy enough to enter into conversation. These two brought out the others.

  The old men were very ready to talk about Harben, but seemed to know nothing in particular about the inhabitants of the house.

  “He were proper good,” said one old fellow, speaking of David. Another avowed that he was a gentleman.

  “Many’s the bottle of beer he’ve smuggled in here, to give us a treat, like,” said a third. The fourth remembered that he had been seen with a girl, but, so far as Mrs. Bradley could make out from the description, it was not the girl from the house. The old man was over ninety and his memory was failing. Patiently she elicited all that he could tell her. She avoided putting leading questions, and correlated all that the old man said with what she already knew. She left presents of tobacco, and took with her the knowledge that she would be welcome (“baccy, or no baccy, ma’am,” said one old man) whenever she called again.

  She went back to the house, and by half-past four a servant arrived with a cat-basket for the monkey and a screened cage for the parrot. At sight of the cage, the parrot observed sarcastically, “Among the Otamys. Among the Otamys, old boy,” and bit Mrs. Bradley’s finger. The servant returned to Kensington with the pets, and Mrs. Bradley to an anxious Sister Mary Dominic, to a consolatory Sister Mary Sebastian, and to a little group of unconsolable small boys.

  “What, isn’t he coming here any more?” asked one. “Then who’s going to take us fishing, like he said?”

  “I’ll take you myself,” said Mrs. Bradley; but no one realized more fully than she did that this would not be the same thing.

  She had noted, during her stay at the house by the river, the sage remarks of the parrot. It had spoken continuously of a dirty night at the Cat’s Whisker, and also of Cripplegate, the latter in a negative sense, since it was “not Cripplegate, old boy.”

  Almost her first action was to write and rewrite the parrot’s unusual remarks, first in one sequence and then in another, until she had six combinations. Then she put away her notebook, took out a volume of poetry, and dismissed her guest and his affairs completely from her mind.

  These tactics had their usual success. By the time she was in her tall, narrow London house on the following day, seated before a modest, cheerful fire and eating toast and drinking China tea (then still procurable) the problem had resolved itself to this:

  The fact that the monkey and the parrot had been left in the house was no accident.

  The monkey, which could be of no obvious use to her in tracing Harben and the girl, had probably been left to lull suspicion, since the parrot could be very useful indeed, and therefore it was invidious to draw too much attention to it.

  If these premises were true, it followed that the girl, whatever her past deeds, might be friendly to Harben, wished to help him, and had left what clues she could on the parrot’s raucous tongue to assist his friends to trace him.

  The proper order of the parrot’s remarks must be left to Fate to determine, since Mrs. Bradley’s subconscious mind had produced no indisputable sequence. One point, however, had emerged. Cripplegate inevitably suggested St. Giles’ Church. If it was not Cripplegate, a point on which the parrot seemed clear, it might be another St. Giles’. This, taken together with the reference to Otamys and to the Cat’s Whisker, seemed to suggest that a visit to St. Giles’-in-the-Fields might be rewarded, since the Cat’s Whisker was thieves’ slang for a very differently named hostelry in the Soho area. She remembered, too, that Harben’s winter quarters were in the Charing Cross Road. The word Otamys gave no trouble, for out of the back of her mind came a quotation from the Beggar’s Opera: “Poor Brother Tom had an Accident this time Twelvemonth, and so clever a made fellow he was, that I could not save him from those fleaing rascals the Surgeons; and now, poor Man, he is among the Otamys at Surgeons’ Hall.”

  “Dear me!” murmured Mrs. Bradley, upon acquiring this discouraging idea. “I really do hope not, I must say.”

  “Of course, I can see the point of you telling me this part of the yarn, ma’am, although, at first sight, it wouldn’t seem to get us anywhere,” said Pirberry. “You want to make clear, I take it, that Mr. Harben was telling the truth some of the time. I suppose the tale about being hit over the head, and all that stuff about the dream and then waking up in an open boat and going to the Canary Islands and bringing back those women, and so on, might have been partly true, too.”

  “Or wholly true; or, of course, not true at all,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I’ll emphasize one thing, though, Inspector. His account of his dream is very interesting, as I think I mentioned before.”

  “All this psychology again, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  Pirberry’s face fell. She laughed.

  “The subconscious, ma’am?”

  “Yes. But there’s something more, something which you may find interesting.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “To begin with, it’s the sort of report of a dream that you would expect a novelist to make. Its craziness is nicely rounded off; the story is complete; there are no loose ends, as it were.”

  “You mean he invented the dream, ma’am?”

  “Not necessarily. He may believe he reported the dream as he dreamed it, although we ourselves, less accomplished story tellers, may feel quite certain that gaps have been filled in and situations filled out in a way that is hardly natural. But all that is by the way. One can make allowance for it. Lots of people embroider their dreams in the telling of them. They cannot bear an incomplete and pointless narrative. No; did you not gather that the dreamer was very pleased with himself over something? There is, to me, an immense amount of self satisfaction in that dream.”

  “I can’t see how that bears upon his disappearance, ma’am.”

  “I don’t know that it does bear upon his disappearance, Inspector, but it does indicate his state of mind, I think, and that state of mind should give us food for speculation if not for concrete ideas.”

  “So you don’t accept his story, ma’am?” said Pirberry.

&nbs
p; “I think he moved the body. I think he moved it not when he declared that it had gone, but rather later.”

  “Why did the young lady run, ma’am, if the body was where she had left it?”

  “It wasn’t where she had left it. I believe what he says when he tells me that he placed it on the bed and covered the face. What does intrigue me, though, is the fact that the old man was poisoned; I don’t think David poisoned him. In fact, it’s pretty clear to me that David had no idea the old man had been poisoned, although I think perhaps the girl knew all the time.”

  “The girl, then? You think she did it?”

  “Possibly she did it. David was certain that she had committed the murder, I should say, but I am inclined to think that her flight indicates very strongly that she believed him guilty, and was afraid because of what he’d done.”

  “But the note on the pennon?”

  “Worded as he has stated, very likely. She did not want to get him into trouble. She distrusted her own discretion. Rightly, I feel. She has hardly shown herself discreet.”

  “All surmise, ma’am, if I may say so.”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Bradley. “You trace the arsenic, and if it isn’t where I think it is, I’ll give up all my theories.”

  “You’ll agree you’re partial, ma’am?”

  “Certainly I am, Inspector. I wonder whether you would try a little experiment?”

  Pirberry looked at her dubiously.

  “An experiment, ma’am?”

  “A very simple one. Will you confront the next-door neighbour at the house by the river in Chiswick with the Spanish captain and Don Juan?”

  “I will, if you say so, but why?”