The Echoing Strangers (Mrs Bradley)

by Mitchell, Gladys

  ‘Oh, honey-girl,’ said Darnwell, genuinely concerned, ‘you shouldn’t do that when we’ve got visitors! Just look at those mucky little paws! And, anyway, I don’t have girls clean my shoes.’

  ‘To-day you do,’ said Sadie sunnily. She got up—a little creature with the natural balance of a dancer—yawned and added, ‘What about a nice cup of tea?’

  ‘Get yourself one,’ said Darnwell. ‘Mrs. Bradley and I are going to take a little walk. You don’t want to come, I suppose?’

  ‘Not if I’d be in the way.’

  ‘You would a bit, darling. Shan’t be more than about an hour. Got to go to the other side of the village.’

  ‘O.K. big boy. Try and not get your feet wet.’ She stooped and picked up a stout pair of shoes. ‘Put these on. It rained this morning.’

  ‘See what I mean?’ said Darnwell, promptly kicking off his slippers and pulling on the newly-cleaned shoes. ‘Treat ’em rough is my motto.’ He kissed the nape of Sadie’s pretty neck.

  He backed out a small motor-launch and he and Mrs. Bradley chugged upstream to the public moorings just below the bridge. Here they tied up and stepped ashore. Darnwell led the way across the road and round the corner past the hotel. From the hotel to the railway station the pavement still bordered the roadway, but at the station it ended, and, once they were under the railway bridge, they were in a country lane.

  To the left the pasture and the cornfields dipped to the river. A church-tower came in view. Hedges divided the meadows. There were hayricks and oak trees, poppies among the corn and occasionally the lively blue of the flax. The road, as though to confound those ignorant persons who believe that all Norfolk is flat, was gently switch-back, and walking was pleasant and interesting.

  After about three-quarters of a mile, a very narrow, rough lane branched off from the country road.

  ‘Up here,’ said Darnwell. High ragged hedges, broken only occasionally by gates, hid most of the landscape from view. The church had disappeared among trees, but sudden flights of swifts indicated that it was at no great distance from the travellers.

  At the end of half a mile the lane divided. Darnwell, without even a half-glance at what appeared to be the obvious route, branched off suddenly to the right. Deep trees shaded the way, and the lane, not more than a track now, led steadily downhill towards the river.

  ‘And here we are,’ said Darnwell. ‘Over this gate, and we can find it.’

  The hide-out was a cunning affair made of branches over a natural hole in the ground. A short distance off was a clearing, small, but close-turfed and very private.

  Mrs. Bradley crawled towards the hide-out. Flies buzzed around its entrance and there were imprints of birds’ feet, although what the species of bird which had made them she neither knew nor cared. She lay flat, a thin, inconspicuous figure, and inveigled from a deep pocket in her skirt a powerful magnifying glass, and studied the ground. Then she lay beside the hide-out and unslung field-glasses. With these she scanned the immediately-surrounding terrain and pronounced judgment.

  ‘A well-chosen spot. I congratulate Mr. Campbell.’

  ‘Looks nice and comfy,’ said Darnwell sardonically. Mrs. Bradley stood up.

  ‘You should know,’ she responded serenely. ‘I presume that you fought in the trenches in the 1914 war, and in-habitated a dug-out?’

  ‘Hell! I thought I looked younger than that. I was only twenty, you know.’ He laughed. ‘Seen all you want to see here?’

  ‘Not quite.’ She walked into the neat little clearing. ‘Very few people would come here, I imagine.’

  ‘Very few indeed. It’s off the main road … if you can call it a main road … and the village has about a dozen houses and one well which serves the lot of them. Come and see the well. I don’t want to get back sooner than I said. Gives girls wrong impressions.’

  ‘You’re a chivalrous man, Mr. Darnwell.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Experience teaches, you know.’

  ‘It teaches very few people. One needs more than average intelligence to learn anything by experience.’

  ‘Have you learnt anything by it?’

  ‘One thing which coincides with what you have learnt, I think. It doesn’t do to upset other people’s dignity. One should never catch one’s fellow-sufferers out.’

  Darnwell grinned.

  ‘You’re telling me. So I shan’t get home under an hour. Who knows who Sadie might be entertaining!’

  ‘You have the virtuous vice of tolerance, Mr. Darnwell.’

  ‘It makes life easier,’ said Darnwell. ‘Tell me where I mustn’t tread.’

  ‘Stay just where you are, then. That will do very nicely.’ She quartered the ground, treading carefully. ‘No more clues which mean anything to me,’ she announced. ‘Come, Mr. Darnwell. Let us take a look at the village and waylay the first small boy we meet.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To determine whether he also knows of the hide-out. How did you come to find it, by the way?’

  ‘That’s telling. But, since you ask, I will tell you. I trailed Campbell to it. It was after he tried his games on with me and failed. I thought two could play, maybe, and so I simply followed him.’

  ‘But didn’t he know?’

  ‘Not he. I’ve been deer-stalking before now. Never got a glimpse or a smell of me. I was inside the hedge all the time and he was on the road. Next day, when I’d seen him catch a train, I penetrated further and saw the hidey-hole, but I didn’t go close up. I didn’t want to leave footprints near the entrance.’

  ‘Simple. Yes. I don’t suppose it’s the only one he had.’

  ‘No. There would have been one, at least, among reeds.’

  ‘I agree with you entirely.’

  ‘That’s right. And another one out on the marshes.’

  ‘The marshes?’

  ‘Sure. Go straight on after the bridge instead of turning up by the station, and keep right on past the signpost. Then take the first on the right and still keep on.’

  ‘I will do so, Mr. Darnwell, and I thank you very much. No, I won’t come back to your bungalow. I’m going to have tea with a friend of mine in the village.’

  They met no village children at all.

  When Gavin turned up again Mrs. Bradley had much to tell him, including an interesting fact she had not disclosed to Darnwell. There were traces of blood in the mud at the entrance to the hide-out. She had been back and had possessed herself of a sample. There had been no blood in the derelict bungalow.

  ‘Right,’ said Gavin. ‘Now what about some little boy in that village? You and Darnwell didn’t encounter one, I gather.’

  They found one trailing a stick and whistling dolefully, a grimy, chubby child of about eleven. Mrs. Bradley stopped him.

  ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Is there a policeman in the village?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you boys never worry?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You know that, whatever you get up to, nobody bothers you.’

  ‘My dad do.’

  ‘No doubt. Do you boys play in the woods here?’

  ‘Some do.’ He began to edge past her.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a man with field-glasses watching the birds?’

  ‘No.’ He tried to escape but Mrs. Bradley gripped him by the jersey.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Gavin, joining in at what he thought was the crucial point. ‘I am a police officer, and I want to know all about this man. To begin with, can you describe him?’

  ‘If you mean Mr. Campbell, I was with Ben Thetford, but we didn’t upset Mr. Campbell.’

  ‘When were you with Ben Thetford?’

  ‘Last year, in our summer holiday.’

  ‘Oh, yes. What was Mr. Campbell doing?’

  ‘Watching through the glasses.’

  ‘Watching what?’

  ‘Courting
couples, I reckon to think.’

  ‘Why should you think that?’

  ‘Ben Thetford told me that’s what Mr. Campbell do.’

  ‘I see. Is Ben Thetford any relation to Malachi Thetford?’

  ‘Yes. They’re uncles.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘They’re uncles.’

  ‘You mean Malachi is Ben’s uncle, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Bertha Coltshall, that marry Malachi Thetford’s brother Billy, and Ben, she’s his mother.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Gavin, disentangling this. ‘I suppose it would have been Malachi who told Ben that Mr. Campbell watched courting couples through his field-glasses?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you often go to the hide-out when Mr. Campbell wasn’t there?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Did you,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘ever go there after Mr. Campbell was dead?’

  The boy tried to wrench himself away. When he found he could not escape he began to cry.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know nawthen! Lemme goo! I h’an’t done nawthen wrong!’

  ‘All right,’ said Gavin. He hesitated, looked at Mrs. Bradley. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘if you’re a sensible chap you’ll keep this conversation under your hat. Understand me? Mr. Campbell was murdered. You know that, don’t you? Now, you needn’t worry about it so long as you don’t talk. Are you scared?’

  ‘No, sir.’ But he was.

  ‘Good lad. And you won’t report that you’ve seen me and this lady?’

  ‘No. I better tell me dad.’

  ‘All right. There’s no harm in that. Where do you live?’

  ‘Number Six, the village.’

  ‘Right. I’ll speak to your father myself. I’ll tell him you’ve been helpful. If anyone asks you where you got this half-crown, you tell them you got it showing some people the way to Wroxham Broad.’

  ‘I don’t know the way to Wroxham Broad.’

  ‘Oh, well, you think of somewhere, then. Good-bye. I’ll be round at your house later on, when your father’s at home. It’s just confirmatory evidence,’ he added to Mrs. Bradley. ‘But you were right. It was well worth while. Bit of luck we happened upon the very boy who knew about Campbell’s hidey-hole, though.’

  ‘All the village boys knew. If they had not, Campbell might still be alive.’

  ‘How do you make that out, I wonder?’

  ‘He was killed because the twin brothers discovered that he was watching them. Village boys are a good deal more observant, as a rule, than youths of the type of the Caux brothers when it comes to fish, feathers and fur. If the twins discovered the hide-out, the village boys are more than bound to have done so.’

  ‘Ably argued. Where do we go from here?’

  ‘To Sir Adrian Caux, I fancy, unless you desire to find Campbell’s little sanctuary on the marshes.’

  ‘I don’t think so. We’ve got what we want. What shall you say to Sir Adrian?’

  ‘I shall advise him to re-make his will.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Of course, child.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I get it. There can be only one reason for the murders of Campbell and Witt. Either or both of them must have been in a position to give away to the grandfather the fact that the boys changed places. They most probably changed places for one chief reason. They are determined to inherit Sir Adrian’s worldly goods at an earlier date than his normal earthly span will dictate. It will appear that Derek, his named heir (so I suppose) has killed his grandfather, since no one else will have any obvious motive for encompassing the relative’s death. Derek (quite a clever young devil) makes his brother an offer. “You help me,” he says, “by mixing up our two identities so that no one can tell t’other from which, and we’ll probably both be arrested and have to appear in court. One of us has a fool-proof alibi, the other then must be the murderer, but, since no one is able to prove which one of us is which, and as one of us is palpably innocent, it turns out that they can’t hang either of us. Try us separately, or try us together, it makes no earthly scrap of difference. One of us is a murderer and the other is an innocent man. They’ll have to let us both off, and there we are, with all grandfather’s money to spend between us, for, of course, I shall see you get half. We’d better go abroad, I should think. There’ll be too much criticism here. But we shall be made for life. It’s as easy as falling off a log.” And, of course, it probably will be,’ Gavin gloomily concluded.

  ‘Nonsense, child. To get the money, one of them will have to be Derek, and whichever one claims to be Derek automatically fixes a rope round his neck. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Lord, yes! I suppose that point would have come to my mind in time. Tell me your version, then.’

  ‘It is the same as your own. Like you, the boys haven’t quite finished thinking things out.’

  ‘What are you going to tell Sir Adrian about his will, then?’

  ‘The obvious thing. He’ll have to make the boys joint heirs and let them both know it if he wants to preserve his life.’

  ‘Or, preferably, cut both the young devils out of it.’

  ‘They might kill him then for revenge, and they might get away with that, you know. You see, if nothing was coming to either of them, a very big motive for murder would have gone by the board. Revenge, as a motive for murder in England, makes a very poor show compared with financial gain and sexual opportunity.’

  ‘I agree, of course. May I give one word of warning?’

  ‘You may, of course,’ said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. ‘I think that you mean to tell me to look after myself. But I bear a charmed life, child. The Wandering Jew is not more unlucky than I.’

  Gavin courteously snorted. He had not the faintest idea of what she meant.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Echo from the Past

  *

  ‘… Who said, “Ay, mum’s the word!”—Sexton to willow.’

  Walter de la Mare: Peacock Pie

  *

  MRS. BRADLEY SOUGHT OUT Sir Adrian early on the following morning. His grandsons had gone out together in a punt. So much she knew because, from the hotel garden, she had seen them go and had taken one of the hotel launches to reach the riverside bungalows in good time.

  Sir Adrian was disconsolately digging the garden.

  ‘Wrong time of year,’ said Mrs. Bradley, disengaging herself elegantly from her craft and leaving George to tie up. ‘Why dig now, when October might be a better month?’

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Sir Adrian, without enthusiasm. ‘And what do you want now, may I ask?’

  ‘A copy of your will. And don’t look at me like that. You have me between yourself and sudden death. Are you really such a silly old man?’

  ‘Do you know, I expect I am,’ said Sir Adrian disarmingly. ‘Say on. I am all attention.’

  ‘But are you? I rather doubt that. I’ve warned you already. I can’t do more, you know.’

  ‘You’ve warned me, yes. But I’ve brought up Derek from babyhood.’

  ‘A boy of seven is not a baby. You know what the Jesuits say.’

  ‘Give me a boy until he is seven … yes, you’ve got something there. My son was a very bad hat. You probably know that already, but Derry … he’s like my own child.

  ‘Not a bit of it, and don’t you believe it. I know what I’m saying.’

  ‘And what exactly are you saying?’

  ‘I’m advising you to re-make your will, and to let both boys know that you’ve re-made it.’

  ‘As … how?’ He looked, suddenly, twenty years older than his age.

  ‘Leave your property to them jointly, and at some date far into the future. Alternatively, leave it to a cats’ home.’

  ‘But … Derry is my own flesh and blood.’

  ‘I am warning you,’ said Mrs. Bradley solemnly. ‘Your life means nothing to me, but I presume you wish to preserve it as long as you can. Don’t be an idiot. You’ve done quite enough harm already. There’s a g
ood deal of sense in religious verse, you know, even if it seems trite and, from a literary point of view, deplorable.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Something had already happened to frighten him, Mrs. Bradley concluded. These were anything but his native woodnotes.

  ‘I mean “he that one sin in conscience keeps when he to quiet goes, more (let us say completely and criminally reckless) is than he who sleeps with twenty mortal foes.” An interesting, and, you may say, unnecessary incursion into your private and personal business.’

  ‘No, I don’t say that,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘Look here, have you ever played cricket?’

  ‘When I kept wicket for Australia,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, ‘strong men did slow clapping. Apart from that …’

  ‘I thought we were talking seriously,’ said Sir Adrian. He looked worried and anxious.

  ‘But of course we are. Cricket is the only serious subject, except, possibly, the devaluation of the pound and the chances of some remote animal winning the Greyhound Derby, that one can possibly discuss.’

  ‘It would be nice to swim the Channel, don’t you think?’ asked Sir Adrian, obviously outclassed.

  Mrs. Bradley gazed speculatively at him.

  ‘Very nice,’ she agreed. The conversation lapsed. Then Sir Adrian observed, defensively:

  ‘Of course, the boys are alike.’

  ‘So much alike,’ said Mrs. Bradley earnestly, ‘that I would defy you to tell one from another.’ Sir Adrian was offended.

  ‘Of course I can tell one from the other,’ he said. ‘One talks like a child of seven, the other like a professor of philosophy.’

  ‘Then which of them played cricket on the day of Mr. Witt’s death?’ asked Mrs. Bradley remorselessly. Sir Adrian looked at her, horrified.

  ‘You don’t mean …? You can’t seriously tell me …? That is … damn it, I don’t know! I never thought of that, except that when I sent Derry—oh, I’ll swear it was Derry—I’ll swear it in court if necessary——’

  ‘You’ll be swearing his life away if you do. Don’t lose sight of the fact that it was while this boy was absent from the field of play that the murder of Witt was accomplished. Derek … if you cling to your theory … is still the only person without an alibi.’