‘What I really want is an intelligent listener,’ he said aloud.
‘Will I do?’ asked Mrs Lestrange Bradley, appearing with Cheshire-cat-like abruptness from the side of the summer-house, and confronting him.
‘You will do very nicely,’ replied Carstairs, courteously rising. ‘That is, unless you are a murderer.’
‘Of course, I might be,’ Mrs Bradley confessed, ‘but then so might all of us. And the servants, any of them, or all of them, might be thugs in disguise. It is all very, very confusing, not to say muddling, puzzling, amazing, and irritating. I’ve been in bed thinking it over.’
Carstairs laughed.
‘Let us sit here and take it in turns to talk,’ went on Mrs Bradley. ‘You may have your say first.’ She seated herself, folded her hands, and gazed expectantly up at him. Carstairs sat down beside her and stretched out his legs.
‘That’s right. Now begin,’ said Mrs Bradley, peering in bird-like fashion into his face. Carstairs was silent. ‘Here!—have my sunshade and poke the gravel with it,’ she went on, pushing it into his hands.
Carstairs laughed again, and took it.
‘Well,’ he began, detaching a little round pebble from the main body of the path and chivvying it to and fro with the ferrule of the parasol, ‘I’m sure Mountjoy was murdered, and the fact that Bing chooses to be pigheaded has not altered my opinion one jot.’
‘Oh, our host does not agree with you? That’s very amusing,’ said Mrs Bradley.
‘I’m afraid I find it merely exasperating,’ replied Carstairs.
‘And he is leaving us to the further mercies of the thug or thugs,’ Mrs Bradley continued, in her mellifluous voice. ‘That is very amusing too.’
‘I’d give a good deal to know what motive anybody in this house had for murdering Mountjoy,’ went on Carstairs, pursuing his own train of thought.
‘For, of course, we shall not be let off with one death, or even two,’ murmured Mrs Bradley, pursuing hers.
‘What?’ said Carstairs, so sharply that Mrs Bradley stared at him in surprise.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘And I yours for shouting at you,’ laughed Carstairs. ‘No, but, speaking seriously, have you any reason for saying that?’
‘Saying what? I was thinking aloud, that’s all.’
‘Yes, I know. But why should you suppose—you don’t really suppose that we are again——’
‘I do, though.’ Mrs Bradley nodded her head very firmly several times. ‘I have thought a good deal about this sudden death of an apparently well-liked, inoffensive woman, and I begin to sense something very queer about this house. Don’t ask me what I mean. I don’t know myself. But there’s something peculiar going on, and it perturbs me.’
Carstairs knitted his brows in perplexity. ‘Can’t you explain at all?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Mrs Bradley.
‘You do think it was murder, then?’ was Carstairs’ next remark. ‘But the police——’
‘Are persons of some common sense,’ Mrs Bradley interrupted, ‘but usually of no imagination or sensitiveness whatsoever. They want facts, whereas you and I are content with feelings.’
‘Oh, I want facts too,’ said Carstairs, ‘and, after all, we’ve got them, you know. The facts are here all right. They must be all round us, numbers and numbers of little tiny facts, each one of them impotent and useless without all its brothers. And we can’t even see them. It is rather annoying, isn’t it?’
‘Well, we do know some,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Look here, I’ll say them to you, and you see how many of them you can put together. Ready?’
Carstairs drew out a small memorandum book. ‘I’ll jot them down,’ he said. ‘Then we shall both know exactly where we stand. Yes, I am ready.’
Mrs Bradley leaned forward a little, fixed her unseeing eyes on the middle distance, and began.
‘Window open at the bottom. Unlikely deceased would have had it so. Door unlocked. Unlikely that deceased would have forgotten or neglected to lock it, especially as she must have felt it important to continue concealment of her sex. Bathroom stool missing.’
‘Oh, that has been found,’ interrupted Carstairs disgustedly. ‘My best clue gone west.’
‘Oh?’ Mrs Bradley turned to him swiftly. ‘Found? Where?’
‘In the bathroom on the next floor of the house,’ Carstairs answered. ‘Through some oversight, the maids appear to have put the two stools in the upper floor bathroom and none in the lower one.’
‘That is exceedingly amusing,’ said Mrs Bradley dryly.
Carstairs glanced at her, puzzled by her peculiar tone.
‘I’m afraid I don’t see,’ he began deprecatingly.
‘Don’t you?’ A strange little smile played about her thin lips. ‘Mr Carstairs, I’m afraid you and dear Mr Bing were just a tiny bit foolish yesterday morning, weren’t you? Just a little bit blind.’
‘Were we? I must confess that I can’t see how.’
‘My dear’—Mrs Bradley laid a claw-like hand upon his arm—‘did you question the maids about it? About the stool—the elusive clue?’
‘Well, no. It seemed hardly necessary,’ Carstairs admitted. ‘But, of course, I can, if you think it should be done.’
‘It is unnecessary now,’ Mrs Bradley informed him. ‘I can assure you, out of my housekeeping and servant-managing experience, that no maid ever moves bathroom stools. They won’t even dust them unless you insist, and determinedly stand there while they do it. I don’t refer to bathroom stools only, of course. I speak generally, and out of a profound and bitter experience.’ She cackled harshly. ‘And tell me why it should ever occur to a maid to carry a bathroom stool up on to the next landing. And, again, although I grant you girls are fools, even housemaids have eyes in their heads, and bathrooms are not extraordinarily large or particularly overstocked with furniture. They must have noticed that they were putting a second stool up there, mustn’t they?’
‘You don’t mean that Miss Bing told a lie?’ said Carstairs slowly.
‘Oh, it was Eleanor brought it down, was it?’ asked Mrs Bradley in a non-committal tone. ‘What exactly did she say?’
‘Oh, merely that she had found the stool on the landing above, and that she couldn’t imagine what the maids had been thinking about to put two stools in one bathroom, and none in the other.’
‘Oh, if Eleanor said she had found two stools up there, she was probably speaking the truth. But do you mean to tell me that you didn’t even go up to the other bathroom and have a look at the other stool?’
Carstairs smote his knee. ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘What a fool I’ve been! You mean that the other stool——’
‘Exactly,’ said Mrs Bradley placidly, with her eyes on the far end of the garden.
Carstairs was on his feet before the word had left her lips. He literally dashed across the lawn, and ran up the terrace steps.
‘Too late, my friend, I fear,’ observed Mrs Bradley, noticing with quiet amusement that he still held her sunshade clutched in his hand.
In less than ten minutes he returned, with disappointment and chagrin written on his face. ‘Not proven,’ he said shortly, sitting down by Mrs Bradley’s side.
‘Wonderful what a little turpentine will do,’ said the lady calmly.
‘Are you a witch?’ demanded Carstairs.
‘No. Merely a fairly observant human being,’ Mrs Bradley replied, smiling thoughtfully and not looking in his direction.
‘Hum! Well, of course you are quite right. As I went up the stairs yesterday I thought I detected the odour of turpentine, and, sure enough, in the second floor bathroom is a stool which obviously has been freshly cleaned. I met one of the maids on the stairs, and in answer to my question she informed me that Miss Bing had noticed a dark mark on the cork top of the stool, and had given orders that it should be cleaned off.’
‘Mark of what nature?’ enquired Mrs Bradley.
‘According to the girl it m
ight have been paint or tar or even a kind of varnish stain. She couldn’t say, and I didn’t press the point.’
‘Seems to me that Eleanor couldn’t shield the criminal better if she knew who he was,’ observed Mrs Bradley, as though to herself.
Carstairs seized upon her remark.
‘You think she knows something?’ he demanded.
‘I know she does. So does Dorothy Clark. So does Bertie Philipson. So do we all, in fact. The difficulty will be to get our knowledge from us.’
‘You seriously suggest that people in this house would deliberately shield a murderer?’ asked Carstairs, horrified and incredulous.
‘No, not deliberately, perhaps. Have you ever taught children, Mr Carstairs?’ she broke off, with apparent irrelevance.
‘No,’ answered Carstairs, looking a little surprised at the question, for it seemed to have no possible bearing on the matter in hand.
‘Well, I have,’ Mrs Bradley slowly nodded. ‘Children know quite a number of little facts, Mr Carstairs. More than almost any grown-up person would give them credit for.’
‘Indeed?’ said Carstairs, polite, but bored.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Mrs Bradley; ‘but probably you can have no idea of the skill that is needed to extract that knowledge from the children in any sort of coherent and comprehensible form.’
Carstairs began to see the drift of these remarks.
‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that these people may have real information to give, but they don’t—if I may so express it—they don’t know that they possess information of the kind that is required.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Mrs Bradley. ‘You must question them, slowly and patiently, until you get what we educationists call a point of contact. Then, probably, you will be so overwhelmed with information, that your difficulty will be to know what on earth to start doing with it, and how on earth it all fits in.’
‘In the present state of the inquiry, I cannot even remotely imagine such a possibility,’ laughed Carstairs, ‘but I will certainly take your advice. But supposing these people object to being questioned? After all, I am not a police officer.’
‘They will love it,’ pronounced Mrs Bradley, with finality. ‘People love to tell all they know, especially when it is about themselves. That accounts for the popularity of the confessional. As for the criminal, he or she—or, of course, it—you have read your Murders in the Rue Morgue and Bram Stoker’s The Squaw?—must pretend to be as enthusiastic as the others, otherwise——’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Carstairs.
He looked at his watch.
‘It still wants an hour to lunch-time,’ he said. ‘Shall we begin?’
Mrs Bradley laughed, wrinkling up her yellow face into a series of lines and creases which gave her the reverse of a benevolent expression.
‘Must be very careful, of course,’ Carstairs went on. ‘Don’t want to put ideas into people’s heads.’
‘You are, as always, very right,’ observed Mrs Bradley, allowing her features to relax and her unprepossessing countenance to resume its normal expression of slightly cynical amusement. ‘Come along, then. The morning-room again, I think. Alastair Bing is there, I know, and I am fairly certain that the others are with him. I will begin, and then you can go on. The playful manner will become us best, I think.’
She herself assumed the expression of a playful alligator, and walked into the morning-room by way of the French windows. Carstairs followed her closely.
‘Now, children,’ she began, smiling mirthlessly round at everybody present including her own reflection in an oval mirror, ‘who would like to play a new game? Quite a parlour game. Nothing strenuous, or’—she glanced wickedly at Bertie Philipson, who blushed and protested—‘or, I say, unsuitable and enjoyable—like tennis! Oh, I know I was not among those present, but I heard your fine rhetorical effort this morning, Mr Philipson, on the subject of observing the decencies’—and she wagged a yellow claw at him playfully. ‘No, this is a very, very suitable game for the occasion. Now, who would like to play?’
‘Not if it includes making idiotic noises,’ said Carstairs, in order to suggest to the others that he was not in league with Mrs Bradley, for he decided that it would never do to begin with a conspiratorial atmosphere.
‘Or kissing people,’ said Eleanor firmly.
‘Or hide-and-seek in the attics,’ said Dorothy, shuddering.
‘You are a mouldy lot, you know,’ said Garde, with his moody smile. ‘I’m on, Mrs Bradley. It’s not a man-hunt, I suppose?’
‘Well, in a sense, yes,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘And I want one helper. Come here, Mr Carstairs. I think 1 will have you. Go over there, all of you, a moment, while I tell him his part in the proceedings.’
She took Carstairs aside, and affected to whisper in his ear.
Carstairs, playing up to her, chuckled and nodded.
‘Ready, all of you?’ asked Mrs Bradley, after a few seconds of this by-play.
‘Fire away,’ said Garde, settling himself more comfortably and leaning against the back of Dorothy’s chair.
‘Before you begin, you know, Carstairs,’ said Alastair Bing, ‘you should let me look again at the bumps on their heads. I did look a day or two ago, but I’ve lost my notes.’
‘I won’t have my head looked at,’ said Dorothy firmly. ‘I think it’s horrid. You told me last time that I couldn’t tell the truth and had no reasoning power.’
‘Quite right, too, Father,’ said Garde, with approval. ‘Right on both counts. But can’t we take the bumps for granted this time, and let Mr Carstairs get on with his questions? Anything for a change of subject. We’ve all been indulging our taste for the morbidly sensational in here. Carry on, Mr Carstairs.’
‘Just as you like. Just as you like,’ said Alastair, nettled.
‘Well, I’d like to start with you, Bing, if you don’t mind.’
So saying, Carstairs glanced at Mrs Bradley, and then looked round at the others. ‘I’m afraid an absolutely necessary part of the game is that you all go outside a minute while Mrs Bradley and I arrange the room. Yes, you also, please, Bing. And come in when you are called. Better have the French windows shut, I think.’
Bertie closed and fastened them, while the others, with many groans and complaints, meandered out into the hall. ‘Chair here for me. One here for you. One here for the witness,’ said Carstairs, swiftly arranging them.
He then went across to the door and opened it.
‘Come in, Bing,’ he said.
‘Just a moment,’ interrupted Mrs Bradley. ‘What are you going to ask them? We haven’t settled on any questions.’ She hissed the last sentence in a conspiratorial manner which was almost too much for Carstairs’ gravity.
‘The Lord will provide,’ said he, with his whimsical smile.
‘Come along, then, Mr Bing,’ cried Mrs Lestrange Bradley. ‘Sit on that chair, please. Mr Carstairs will ask questions and I will write down the answers.’
‘Now, are you two serious about this, or not?’ demanded Alastair, seating himself as directed. ‘I mean, you are going to talk about Mountjoy, I suppose?’
‘Yes,’ said Carstairs. ‘At least,’ he added, ‘Mrs Bradley is, but I am to start the ball rolling.’
‘Fire away,’ said Alastair resignedly. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘First,’ said Carstairs, eyeing his host very deliberately, ‘tell me why all the people in this house (I except the servants and myself) are so light-heartedly unaffected by what is, after all, an exceedingly tragic affair. They give up their tennis, and they think it indecent to be noisy, but all the same——’
‘I—I don’t follow you,’ stammered Alastair Bing, going rather pale. ‘How do you mean, Carstairs?’
Carstairs spoke with even greater seriousness.
‘The death of Mountjoy was sudden, and, in a sense, mysterious,’ he said. ‘But equally mysterious, I think, is the almost incredible effect it has had on nearly everybody here. You almost
all seem, somehow, relieved rather than horrified that this unfortunate woman should have met her death. And it is an attitude which requires explanation.’
Alastair Bing had stiffened angrily during Carstairs’ speech, and he now eyed his friend with a certain amount of coldness.
‘And so do your remarks require explanation, my dear Carstairs,’ he said. ‘What, exactly, are you attempting to insinuate?’
‘Come now, Bing,’ said Carstairs, as tactfully as he could. ‘You mustn’t take it like that. I say it is strange that nobody seems to mourn poor Mountjoy.’
‘Do you yourself?’ sneered Alastair.
Carstairs said quietly, ‘I mean to avenge her death. Aren’t you going to help me?’
‘If helping you includes answering a number of idiotic and impertinent questions, I most certainly am not!’ snapped Alastair. ‘I didn’t like Mountjoy, and I don’t mind who knows it. In fact, I think the knowledge is common property. Of course, his—I should say, her death came as a shock to me, a great shock. But we never got on together. That last little piffling dispute we had about the ancient earthwork on the old golf course was nothing, and I bear no malice, of course. But Mountjoy has said things to me—things about archaeology, you know—in a way which has made me long to strike him—her, I mean—to the ground. I have felt—I won’t deny it—I have felt passions rise within me which nothing but bloodletting would soothe. And I do not intend to mourn her. I am not sorry that she is dead, but the whole thing is a confounded nuisance, especially if it does turn but to be—well, not an accident.’
He paused. The flush died from his face. He smiled in a half-shamed manner at Carstairs and Mrs Bradley.
‘Well, how do you like that for a confession?’ he said. ‘I feel better-tempered already. Poor Mountjoy,’ he added.
Carstairs stroked his chin and reflected. At last he said: ‘Thanks very much, Bing. Do you mind going out now, and sending in Dorothy Clark?’
‘Dorothy?’ Alastair began to bristle again. ‘Look here, Carstairs, I won’t have that child upset. She was in a bad motor smash before she came down here, and her nerves are in a terrible state. She really must not be harassed.’
Speedy Death Page 5
