“It was the nephew who brought me into the case. He came into my office one day and asked me to go down at once to this village. He couldn’t go himself, he said, because there was an important sale coming off at Sotheby’s. He was an antique dealer, he told me, and he didn’t want to mess up his own affairs if, in fact, there was nothing wrong. But he was anxious about his aunt, because he’d just been rung up by one of her neighbors who’d told him that no one had seen the old woman around for a week, and she hadn’t stopped her newspapers or left a forwarding address at the post office.
“She had stopped her milk, however. She’d left a little note on the doorstep, saying, ‘No More Milk Till Further Notice.’ So it was a mystery what had actually happened to her, and as she wasn’t in the habit of going away, people were beginning to talk.
“Well, I drove down to the village, went to the cottage, and took a look around. The windows were small and all covered up with lace curtains, so you couldn’t see in; but you could see in through the slit of the letter-box in the front door, and there on the floor just inside was a heap of newspapers and letters which had plainly been piling up for days.
“When I’d seen that, I went round to the back door and there I found the notice she’d put out to stop the milk. The milkman hadn’t removed it, and though there’d been rain once or twice that week it was still quite clear. It was written in pencil in block letters, and it was on the doorstep with a little blue bowl upside down on it to keep it there.
“That’s to say, that is what I thought the bowl was there for. It was a pretty thing, a sort of earthenware, and, as I said, a nice shade of blue, and I wondered why she’d used it when she could have used a bit of stick or a stone.
“At that point I thought it was fairly clear that there wasn’t much to worry about. She’d just gone away for a holiday, I thought, and hadn’t stopped the papers because she’d like to look at them when she got home. But still it seemed to me I’d better call on the neighbor who’d rung up the nephew. So I went along, and there on her doorstep, beside an empty milk bottle waiting to be collected next day, I saw a teacup, an old cracked teacup.
“I was a bit puzzled, so when the woman came to the door I said, ‘Would you mind telling me why you keep that teacup on your doorstep?’ It was then I learned about the birds.”
Uncle Jonas grinned at me. “Perhaps you thought I’d forgotten about the birds; but I’ve just been putting in the background to help explain how I first heard that nowadays, the modern bird being what it is, you always have to leave out a cup or a bowl or something for the milkman to put on top of the milk bottle to stop the little beggars getting at the milk.
“ ‘Amazing,’ I said to the neighbor, when she’d explained it. She said, ‘It’s just evolution,’ and then she went on to say that she felt in her bones that poor old Mrs. Toombs had been murdered, and that it was her nephew who’d done it, because, as anyone could see, he was after the thousands sewn up in Mrs. Toombs’s mattress.
“Well, while she was talking about that, I went on thinking about the birds, and as soon as I could get away, I went straight back to Mrs. Toombs’s cottage, I took another look at the little blue bowl, and then I looked carefully all round, and I found two other very interesting things on the ground nearby.
“I found a splinter of broken glass, as if from a broken milk bottle, and I found the handle of a teacup, a very ordinary sort of cheap white teacup.
“So then I asked myself why a woman who normally used a cheap white teacup to keep the birds out of the milk should put out such a pretty little blue bowl instead, particularly if she was going away for just a week or so.
“I stood there thinking for a minute or two. Then I went and got some of the neighbors and the village constable, and we broke into the cottage. And as I expected, we found Mrs. Toombs inside, with her head battered in. And we found that the mattress on her bed had been slit up, and all the cushions slashed to ribbons, and so on.
“The neighbors all said that it was bound to happen sometime, and that it was the nephew who’d done it. I told them it was the nephew who’d sent me down to find out what had happened to his aunt, but they thought that was just his cunning. Besides, they said, he’d been down to visit his aunt just before she vanished.
“That worried me. But still I somehow couldn’t believe that the man who’d come to see me in my office, a man who ran an antique business in London, would have made a mistake like putting that little blue bowl out on the doorstep. Only someone very ignorant, I thought, could have failed to notice that it wasn’t just a cheap piece of pottery, but something rather special.
“So I told the neighbors what I thought, and about what had really happened, and as a result the police arrested the milkman, and he was tried and hanged for the murder.”
I asked Uncle Jonas, “Why the milkman?”
“Because of the birds,” he said. “There’d always been a cup out on the doorstep for him to pop on top of the milk bottle when he delivered it, and he wanted things to go on looking just as usual. But when Mrs. Toombs opened the door and reached for the milk, he smashed an empty milk bottle down on her head and she dropped the cheap white cup she’d always used, and it got broken.
“That wouldn’t do, he thought. A notice stopping the milk, to explain why he hadn’t mentioned to anyone that the bottles weren’t being taken in, and an old cup or bowl as usual on the doorstep – that was what was needed. So he scribbled a note to himself and he looked around in the cottage for some old bowl to put out with it.
“Well, he found an old one all right – about a thousand years old. It was something called Chün ware, I learned later. ‘The blue of the sky after rain,’ is what the Chinese call the nice color that I liked so much. But he didn’t find any money. It was the nephew who got all that.”
“But you said she hadn’t any, Uncle Jonas,” I protested.
“I said nothing of the kind,” he replied tartly. “I said there wasn’t any in the mattress. It was on the walls and the floors, in the drawers and the cupboards – thousands of pounds worth of furniture and china and silver. She’d been a well-known antique dealer in her time, and she taught her nephew, so he told me, everything he knew. He still came to her whenever he wanted advice, and always went by what she said. He missed her very much, and gave her a very expensive funeral.
“But I still think it’s extraordinary about the birds. How did the first one find out about the milk bottles, and how did he pass it on to the others?”
THE CASE OF THE AUCTION CATALOGUE
“I never realised until I retired,” my uncle by marriage, Jonas P. Jonas, said to me one day, “how hard it was going to be to change the habits of a lifetime. There were things I’d been promising myself through forty years of active life – and it was an active life, up at all hours, on my feet almost for days at a time when I had a tricky shadowing job to do, jumping on a train going to the north of Scotland when I’d been expecting a quiet evening at home with a nice book, and of course keeping my ears open all the time in case I missed something.
“Yes, it was active all right, though it was never the rushing around that I minded. It was the dullness I couldn’t take. Most of the people I’d have to shadow would be very dull and stupid. Violent, perhaps, but that’s duller in its way than you might think, and all that talk I’d have to listen to wouldn’t ever have compared with the conversation in Dickens and Thackery.
“So one of the things I used to promise myself, all those years, was that when I retired I was going to catch up on some of the reading that had always been interrupted. Good books, long books – I was going to read them all. And what d’you think I actually read now? Newspapers, of course – and catalogues.
“I can’t say exactly why catalogues have such a fascination for me, unless perhaps it’s the way they start you dreaming and making plans. Be that as it may, I once saved an innocent man from being arrested for murder through this habit of mine of reading catalogues.
&
nbsp; “It happened on a train when I was on my way back to London from Yorkshire. I was returning from a holiday, and I was in a pretty bad mood – it had rained nearly all the time I’d been away; but just that day, on my way home, it was fine and sunny.
“Besides that, I’d somehow forgotten to get myself anything to read on the train. From time to time I looked enviously at the only other person in my compartment, a man who was reading a catalogue; the rest of the time I dozed or looked out at the lovely sunny landscape scurrying by.
“He was a nervous type, this other man, one of the sort who think they can make a train go faster by frequently looking at their watches. Across the compartment I couldn’t see what sort of catalogue he was reading, so I couldn’t tell if he was choosing roses for his garden or rare wines or long-playing records; but at least I could tell it was something that mattered to him a good deal.
“So just for practice, because in my job it might always come in handy, I started to ask myself what sort of thing was likely to be important to a man like that. But I was drowsy and dropping off to sleep when suddenly the train slowed down, and the man snatched up his belongings and rushed off down the corridor.
“But he’d made a mistake. We hadn’t got to where he thought we had. The train didn’t stop at all, and after a few minutes he was back, breathing hard and looking at his watch more often than before.
“In fact, it was another ten minutes before we got to the station he wanted. As before, he grabbed his coat, bag, and umbrella, and ran out long before the train had actually stopped. As soon as it did, he was out of it in a flash, and I saw him racing across the platform far ahead of any other passengers who’d got out there. I had a last glimpse of him outside the barrier, waving wildly for a taxi. It was only then I noticed that in his hurry he’d left his catalogue behind.
“A good many people wouldn’t have been interested, but I, naturally, perked up at sight of it. It was a catalogue of an auction sale that was coming off that day in a big house in the neighborhood, and it was due to begin within a few minutes of the time the train got into the station. All his impatience seemed to have been because the lots he was specially interested in, to judge by the pencil marks he’d made – mostly old glass, I remember – came right at the beginning of the sale.
“Well, I settled down happily to read the whole thing through and dream about picking up Queen Anne silver and priceless first editions for a song. But just about then the track curved sharply, and as the train swung round on it the sun came in at the window. I’ve told you it was a fine bright day. Well, the sun on the pages of the catalogue was too bright for me to go on reading, so I pulled down the blind. Then I settled down for a good time ‘buying’ Persian rugs.
“It didn’t last long. Suddenly there was a commotion down the corridor. I looked out to see what was up and was told they’d just found a woman strangled in the end compartment.
“They had it all clear, almost at once, who had done the murder. It was my ‘friend’ with the catalogue. The people in the two compartments between mine and the one the dead woman was in had seen him rush by, and rush back again a few minutes later. Then they’d all seen him leave the train and go flying out of the station as if the police were already after him.
“Well, I thought they were probably right. But as everyone was talking at the same time I didn’t say much myself. I just looked at the woman and the compartment she was in, and at the people who’d been in the two compartments between hers and mine.
“In the one nearest to me was a middle-aged Yorkshire woman with a daughter, a son-in-law, and their baby. They’d been having tea when the commotion was started by the guard coming along to look at tickets, and there were buns and biscuits and thermos bottles spread out all over the seats.
“In the other compartment there was a man by himself, a tall, prim-looking, elderly man, who didn’t do as much talking as the others, but was quite clear about having seen my ‘friend’ go by, and that he’d been in an obviously agitated state. When they asked me about that, I agreed he’d been agitated, but I went on looking at the dead woman and thinking about her.
“She was a flashy sort, poor girl, about thirty or so. Evidently she’d been reading when she was attacked, because a magazine and some broken spectacles with gaudy rims were on the floor at her feet. She’d been sitting in a seat next to the corridor, with all the blinds pulled down on that side of the compartment. That had been done by the murderer, I thought, to hide what he was up to and not to keep the sun out, because it was through the windows on the other side that it was coming in.
“I noticed an odd thing, though. The girl had been sitting next to the corridor, yet her luggage was in the rack over one of the seats closest to one of the other windows; and on that seat was a crumpled newspaper, while on the floor in front of it were several cigarette ends, marked with lipstick of her color. So that was plainly where she’d been sitting for the first part of the journey, and she’d moved over later. But why?
“I went on thinking about that while they were all agreeing that the police at the last place we’d stopped ought to be informed immediately about the man who’d got off there. Then I told them they needn’t trouble. They had the murderer on the train with them still, I said, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he was the officious fellow who’d noticed so much about the agitation of the other man.
“Of course my compartment companion had been agitated, I said. He’d been afraid he’d be too late at an auction sale to acquire some valuable Georgian glassware. But the fact was that the woman had been sitting and reading and smoking by the outer window, and had only moved nearer to the corridor when the train had swung round a bend and the bright sun had come in at that window. Because I’d happened to be reading myself at the time, instead of dozing, I could tell them exactly when that had been. It had been when I was in the middle of the Oriental rug section in the catalogue.
“I’d pulled the blind down then, but she’d moved across the compartment into the shade instead. And by that time the man who’d left the catalogue behind had been at his sale, bidding for cut-glass decanters and rose bowls.
“They didn’t believe me all at once, but after a bit they began to see there was something in it. The police found out later that the elderly man was a doctor on whom the woman had a hold for some unprofessional conduct.
“I kept the catalogue as a sort of memento of the case. I’ve got piles and piles of them at home, and when I might be catching up on my reading of Proust and Dostoevsky I find myself thumbing through lists of Old Masters and postage stamps instead. It’s a silly habit, but I’m too old to get out of it now.”
THE CASE OF THE LEFT HAND
I once tried to explain to Jonas P. Jonas why it would be difficult for me to write his memoirs for him, and to convince him that I was not just being contrary.
“Look, Uncle Jonas,” I said, “just compare the cases you were involved in with the stories I write. I know that I bring in a murder now and then, just to keep things going, but I make it happen among nice people usually living in the suburbs – nice, cultivated people with nice comfortable incomes, the sort of people who in real life practically never take to violence.”
Uncle Jonas smiled. He wasn’t in the least discouraged.
“I remember a man called Rupert Bardell,” he said, “who came of a very respectable family living in the suburbs. He went to a good school, got a job in a bank, and then when the war started, he went into the army and came out with a very fine record. But then it didn’t take him long to get another kind of record.
“Robbery with violence was his line. But if you’d met him in a pub, or sat next to him in a train, you’d have thought he was a promising young doctor or lawyer or university professor. He’d have fitted into one of your books, my dear, as if you’d dreamed him up for the purpose.
“Well, when he escaped from Dartmoor, his background was a great help to him, naturally. So was the fact that he was a good linguist a
nd when he felt like it, could turn himself into a foreign tourist – passport and all, of course. He wouldn’t have been careless about a thing like that.
“I won’t go into what brought me into the case, or the way I happened to get the tip that Bardell was staying at a certain pub, getting ready to hop a plane to Ireland that very afternoon. I didn’t really believe the tip, because it came from a source that wasn’t too reliable, but I knew I’d have to go along, and be quick about it too, as I’d have only an hour or two at the most to make up my mind whether the man at the pub – if there really was one – was Bardell. And that wasn’t going to be easy.
“There was only one clue I had to go on for certain, and that was that he had a partially paralyzed left hand. He’d had it smashed up in the gunfight that got him his last sentence. You’d think that would have made it easy, wouldn’t you? Well, just you listen.
“There were only three people staying in the pub – an American couple and a man who looked like an artist – long hair, you know, a beard, a velveteen jacket, and an open-necked shirt. He was about the right age and build for Bardell, and the beard, of course, was suspicious. But Bardell had always liked a collar and tie and well-pressed trousers. From that point of view the American suited the impersonation better, but I hadn’t been told anything of Bardell having a woman along with him.
“This one was a plump little forty-year-old, in a pretty little flowered hat and a good tight girdle. She was very friendly and got into conversation with me right away, telling me about all the cathedrals she and her husband had been seeing. Her husband’s only contribution to the conversation was that we could keep the cathedrals.
“He was also the right height and build for Bardell, and the dark glasses he was wearing could have been part of his disguise. But a lot of Americans wear dark glasses in sunny weather, and a lot of them let their wives do all the talking and have had an overabundance of cathedrals. And if I plumped for him and was proved wrong, it would cause one of those mildly regrettable international incidents that we all prefer to avoid.
The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries Page 2
