There's Trouble Brewing

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘H’m. That is as may be, but——’

  ‘Stop it!’ cried Sorn. ‘Will you stop it! I tell you I didn’t do it!—talking about me as if I was something under a microscope! Don’t you see—it’s silly, I mean—I couldn’t—this sort of thing can’t happen to me! And now you’ve made me feel very ill: I’ve got a headache: I wish you’d go away,’ he added, snuffling ridiculously.

  ‘Control yourself, sir. Will you kindly tell me exactly where you went for your walk, with approximate times?’

  After a good deal of trouble, this was elicited. Sorn claimed to have gone out again between 11.30 and 11.45, to have walked down Long Acre, over the railway bridge at the south end of the town, then turned right along the outskirts of Honeycombe Park, and so down Honeycombe Hill into the town again. He had passed the brewery gates, he supposed, about twenty to one.

  ‘Your statement is that you didn’t enter the brewery, then?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. How many more times do I have to——? And if——’

  ‘You saw or heard nothing suspicious? No lights on the premises?’

  ‘No. Unless you call a man on a motor-bike suspicious.’

  ‘Oh, dear, dear,’ thought Nigel. ‘Guilty or innocent, the young fool is now going to be too clever.’ With ponderous and quite transparent geniality, as though he might be saying to an errant motorist, ‘Oh, you were driving at twenty-five miles an hour, were you?’ the inspector took up this point.

  ‘A motor-bicyclist, eh? And where might you happen to have seen him?’

  ‘When I’d got—oh, almost fifty yards beyond the brewery, I heard a motor-bike being started up somewhere behind me and ridden away in the opposite direction.’

  ‘And this cyclist of yours came out of the brewery yard, did he?’

  ‘He’s not a cyclist of mine. And I don’t know where he came from—or even if it was a man: it was far too dark. He might have been visiting at one of the houses opposite. All I know is that he hadn’t passed me as I came into the town. I’m surprised,’ Sorn added with an accent of suspicion, ‘that whoever it was saw me passing the brewery didn’t see this cyclist.’

  ‘Very surprising, I’m sure, sir, very surprising,’ replied the inspector, heavily sarcastic.

  ‘But I tell you——’ wailed Gabriel Sorn.

  ‘Oh, forget it!’ Nigel said impatiently: ‘it can be verified easily enough, one way or the other. There is a question I should like to ask you, though, Sorn.’

  ‘Go ahead. Don’t mind me. Only please don’t ask me again if I committed the murder. I do find repetition tedious,’ said Sorn, something like his old self again

  ‘No, it’s not that. I just wanted to ask how long it is that you’ve known Eustace Bunnett to be your father.’

  Gabriel Sorn’s whole head jerked back, as though a fist had been aimed at it. Then his face was suffused with blood and he sprang at Nigel viciously. The inspector had quite a job pulling him off and dumping him down in his own chair again. After a little the glare went out of his eyes; he smiled a wry smile and panted:

  ‘I apologise—how primitive one’s reactions are—devoted son defends mother’s honour—I’ll thrash the cad who calls my mother a—too terribly Victorian and feuilleton-ish.’

  ‘So you did know?’ said Nigel gently.

  ‘I didn’t know. Suspected, if you like. A certain unfortunate resemblance in feature did begin to obtrude. Really, too humiliating. I wonder nobody else noticed it.’

  ‘It’s very slight. It didn’t occur to me—except that you vaguely resembled someone I’d met—till I heard that clause in the will. That explains the bequest, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose so. But there’s something else—something I can’t explain anyhow,’ said Gabriel Sorn in a voice they had not heard before.

  ‘What’s that?’

  The young man’s voice was almost inaudible; he wasn’t really talking to them at all.

  ‘Why my mother ever—how could she go with that swine, Eustace?’

  VII

  July 18, 9–10.15 p.m.

  It was a maxim with Foxey—our revered father, gentlemen—‘Always suspect everybody!’

  DICKENS, The Old Curiosity Shop

  ‘I NEVER THOUGHT I could fancy a drop of beer again,’ said Sergeant Tollworthy. ‘But you never knows till you tries, do you?’

  Herbert Cammison and Nigel applauded this neat statement of empirical philosophy, the sergeant took a hearty draught and wrung the moisture from his moustache back into the tankard. It was nine o’clock on the same evening. The sergeant seemed to be enjoying a brief respite from his labours, sitting with his collar unfastened and a pint of beer at his side in Herbert’s most comfortable armchair. Sophie had gone up to bed early: a bad headache.

  ‘Suppose I really oughtn’t to be accepting your hospitality, seeing as I’m here partly on a matter of business, doctor,’ said the sergeant. ‘Still, I never did hold with red tape, and there’s a bleeding sight too much of it in the Force.’

  He took another and more contemplative draught.

  ‘I thought it was only suspects you weren’t allowed to drink with,’ said Dr Cammison, eyeing the sergeant keenly. ‘Got me on the list, too, Jim?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, sir, yes. Of course, you and I know one another. You knows I’ve got my duty to do, and I knows you’re OK, so what I says is—why shouldn’t we have a friendly drink on it? Combine business with pleasure like?’

  ‘A very sound sentiment, nobly conceived and nobly expressed,’ said Nigel. ‘Well, here’s wishing.’

  ‘You see, doctor,’ Tollworthy explained, ‘it’s this way. I wouldn’t’ve come bothering you myself, but that Tyler—he’s a fair terror, he is, and no lie. No respecter of persons, Tyler isn’t; and seeing as how certain information had come to his ears, he sent me up here—just as a matter of routine, sir, I need hardly say—well, the fact of the matter is he wants to know where you was on the night of the murder, the silly chump.’

  Sergeant Tollworthy, having got this out of his system, broke into a profuse perspiration, sighed with relief, produced a red and white handkerchief the size of a medium bath-towel and mopped himself.

  ‘The night before last?’ said Cammison. ‘We had a party. The guests were all gone by 11.30. Strangeways and I had a last drink. Went up to bed about quarter to twelve. In bed the rest of the night. No witnesses, I’m afraid. I sleep in a different room from my wife, and the maid was presumably snoring in the attic.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me, sir,’ said the sergeant, raising his hand in a point-duty gesture. ‘You was in bed, and we’ll leave it at that—inspector or no inspector. Mind you, sir, I didn’t want to come up here—official, I mean. It’s that Tyler. Suspicious, he is. Ar, a very suspicious man, Tyler. He’d suspect the backside off Hare Tiler, Tyler would. Give him half a chance, and he’d suspect the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

  ‘Well, it’s his job after all, isn’t it?’ said Herbert.

  ‘Job be blowed! There’s no sense I can see in stirring up trouble. But Tyler’s suspicious, y’see. A very low view of human nature that man has.’

  ‘Have some more beer?’

  ‘Thank you, I won’t say no … Here’s your very good health, sir, and yours, sir.’

  ‘Didn’t you say some special information had come to Tyler’s ears, though?’ pursued Dr Cammison.

  Sergeant Tollworthy looked exceedingly embarrassed. He fingered his neck-band, shifted his feet, breathed heavily; then blurted out:

  ‘It’s that bastard, Feather, been making trouble.’

  ‘Feather? You mean——?’

  ‘Ar. Him that works in the brewery. Came along to the station this evening and said he had some information to lay, the shifty little——, if you’ll pardon the expression, gentlemen. If I had that Feather standing up at the wicket, just for one over, I’d bowl him some information: just one over, and there’d be nothing left of him barring what they scraped off the sight-screen
. Information? Pah!’

  ‘But what did he say?’

  ‘Says he overheard a quarrel between you and Mr Bunnett down at the brewery a while back. Says he heard you say you’d see Bunnett dead before you let him get away with something or other; so when Mr Bunnett is murdered, he puts two and two together—this Feather does—and comes along to Tyler with the answer. That’s his story. Had quite a bit of trouble to keep my hands off the ruddy little liar, I did.’

  ‘Unfortunately it’s quite true—the quarrel part, I mean. We had a row about the conditions in the brewery, and no doubt Bunnett saw to it that this spy of his was listening in somewhere.’

  ‘Is that so, sir? That’s bad, isn’t it? Awkward like for you, I mean. Of course I know very well you didn’t do it. But that Tyler, being a suspicious chap—Oh, well, least said, soonest mended. But that’s not the worst of it. Tyler says to me, “What for does the murderer put the body in that there copper?” He says, “Why,” he says, “to destroy evidence of how the crime was committed. Which suggests that the murder was done in such a manner as to give away the murderer supposing there was remains. Now,” says Tyler, “who’s more likely to be able to kill someone in a specialised sort of way than a doctor—drugs, poison, or a neat bit o’ work with a knife”—begging your pardon, sir. But there it is, you see. Quite bright for Tyler, really.’

  ‘Alas,’ said Nigel. ‘I’m afraid I fathered that sinister idea on him. Still, there are other ways of looking at it. The night-watchman, according to this schedule, was due to visit the platform where the coppers are at about ten minutes before midnight. The murderer might have killed Bunnett up there, then heard the watchman coming or known that he was due, and chucked the body into the copper in a hurry, just to get rid of it.’

  ‘You’re not in your best form, Nigel; I could puncture that in about twelve places. As for instance: whoever did the job must have been familiar with the workings and geography of the brewery; therefore he would have taken care to do it when and where the night-watchman was certain not to be coming.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel abstractedly. ‘What’s worrying me is why he put old Bunnett into the copper at all. It was either part of the murderer’s plan, or it was done on the spur of the moment. Your argument, Herbert, seems to dispose of the second alternative. Why was it part of his plan, then?’

  ‘Sort of poetic justice, sir,’ said Tollworthy, ‘chucking him into his own beer?’

  ‘Poetic justice? I wonder. Gabriel Sorn, of course. That is a possibility.’

  ‘Just a blind fit of rage?’ suggested Cammison.

  ‘But that would imply the whole crime was unpremeditated, and the anonymous letter contradicts that.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Cammison. ‘A certain type of character—the moral weakling, sensitive, neurotic type, to put it roughly—would be apt to see red after the first blow was struck. You know, the sort of chap that would run over a cat in his car, and then get out and pretty well beat it to a jelly; it’s fear, really; a combination of fear and sadism.’

  ‘Yes, there was a lad like that at my school. Timid, bullied, solitary. One day another boy was ragging him, and this lad turned on him and knocked him down with a lucky blow, and then he damned nearly beat out his brains on the floor. It took three of us to pull him off, and the other chap was in the san’ for a fortnight. But would that type ever work out a murder and screw himself up to striking a first blow? That’s what I doubt.’

  ‘I should say it was unlikely, but not impossible,’ Cammison replied. ‘The type we have in mind is probably a phantasy-builder. He would work out the execution of the murder in phantasy; he would be quite capable of sending the anonymous letter and even going to the brewery himself. In the ordinary course of events he would stop there. But, supposing he was discovered by Bunnett lurking about the place, supposing there was any sort of a row, his phantasy murder might actually be committed in real fact—in self-defence, almost. Once he’d knocked him silly, he might quite well taste blood—so to speak—and do the thing properly.’

  ‘Yes, that’s reasonable, I think. Again, the cap seems to fit that wretched Sorn most accurately. One can’t call the head brewer, for instance, or Miss Mellors a phantasy-building neurotic.’

  Nigel was wondering, though, who it was who had been recently described to him as ‘a bit of a moral weakling!’ Not Gabriel Sorn, surely. No, Sophie had used the phrase about Joe Bunnett.

  ‘Then again, there’s the possibility of dementia praecox. What they call “dual personality”, Jim,’ Dr. Cammison said. ‘The mind becomes split and its two parts work alternately. It’s what’s behind those cases of clergymen and schoolmasters of the most exemplary character suddenly committing indecent assaults in trains. Your murderer may be some normally harmless chap—and quite unaware of what he’s done. Jekyll and Hyde, you know.’

  ‘Give us a chance, doctor,’ protested the sergeant. ‘You’ll be telling me next it was Tyler, or your own missus, who did it.’

  Nigel said, ‘I wonder whether a deliberate, conscious splitting of the personality can make the subject specially prone to the morbid condition. Sorn, for instance, seems to keep himself pretty successfully in two separate compartments. He’s quite a different person in the brewery from what he is chez Bolster.’

  ‘That I’m afraid I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s all very abstract. What we want is some more facts. How about that anonymous letter, Sergeant? Is anything being done about that?’

  ‘We’ve had a man on it, sir. The afternoon collections in Weston Priors are taken at 2.20 and 7.20. The letter must have been put in the box between those times, so I’ve been inquiring about people’s movements on the afternoon of the 15th as well as the night of the 16th and 17th. Here’s a list of people Tyler gave me, with their statements filled in. Care to have a look?’

  ‘My hat!’ exclaimed Nigel, glancing at the sheet of paper, ‘your inspector certainly is pretty broad-minded in his choice of suspects.’ He read it out to himself.’

  ‘Um. I doubt if the July 15th column is much help. There are so many more ways of getting a letter posted than dropping it into the box oneself. Barnes, Mrs Bunnett, Joe Bunnett, Parsons and Miss Mellors all might have done it, as far as we know at present.’

  ‘What’s all this about?’ asked Herbert.

  ‘Question of who posted the anonymous letter, at Weston Priors between 2.20 and 7.20 on the 15th. You’d better fill up your little space while we’re about it.’

  ‘The 15th? Dear me, I was over at the Eglintons’ that afternoon. Passed within a couple of miles of Weston Priors on the way back—you know, Jim, the road-fork at Aldminster. I seem to be qualifying rapidly for the rôle of first murderer.’

  Sergeant Tollworthy laughed heartily. ‘Well, sir, you will have your little joke. If you’ll just let me have the details——I expect Tyler’ll want me to go routing after the AA man at Aldminster and such like.’

  Cammison gave them. Nigel was studying the list. ‘I see you’ve got Ariadne down. Why wouldn’t she tell you where she was that afternoon?’

  ‘Search me, sir. Blew up very strong about it, she did; said her private affairs were nothing to do with a bunch of nosey-parker policemen. I felt like a house of cards in an earthquake, and no error. We’ll have to look into it, I suppose. If Miss Mellors was anywhere on the blinking landscape, somebody couldn’t have helped spotting her.’

  ‘I see this Ed Parsons has got a motor-bike,’ said Nigel. ‘I suppose the inspector told you Sorn’s story to us about the masked raider and all.’

  ‘Masked? Cor! I never heard he was masked.’

  ‘Figuratively speaking. By blackest midnight masked from human view. Blank verse.’

  ‘Ar. Tyler’s going after Parsons himself. His landlady might have made a little mistake about when he got in, and that Lily Barnes—a saucy bit—she said she was joy-riding with him, but——’

  ‘But why should Ed Parsons do in Bunnett? Had he a
motive, too? Is there anyone in the whole town and county who hadn’t got a motive?’

  ‘Knowing Bunnett, I should be inclined to doubt it,’ said Cammison grimly.

  ‘Ed Parsons’d had a bit of trouble with Mr Bunnett. About the lorry-loading. Case of some of the lorries being overloaded. We brought it into court. Young Ed said he had only acted on instructions from Mr Bunnett, which Mr Bunnett denies very vigorous. Ever since then, according to my Gertie who used to be regular thick with Lily Barnes—Lily being sweet on young Ed—Mr Bunnett made his life a fair hell for him—always chivvying him about and finding fault and that. Got on his nerves, you might say. And that’s not the whole of it. My Gertie told mother that Lily’s been put in trouble and blames it on Mr Bunnett, though you needn’t let that go beyond you for the present, seeing as Gert told mother confidential.’

  ‘Yes, that’s motive enough, I suppose. But I can’t see that, if Parsons had murdered Bunnett, he’d advertise his presence by roaring out of the brewery gates on a motor-bike at midnight.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. And Parsons is a decent, straight youngster too—a sight too good for that Lily, if you ask me.’

  ‘I wonder did Mr Barnes know about his daughter being in trouble.’

  ‘That’s what Tyler would ask, too. Only I’ve not told him about Lily yet.’ The sergeant shifted his feet and tugged his moustache uneasily. ‘I was just thinking, sir—if I might be so bold—would you have a word with Lily first yourself. You being unofficial like, she might be more willing to talk to you than to us.’

  ‘Mm. I don’t know that I fancy myself as a squire of errant dames. Still. Yes, I’ll do it. I’ve got to talk to her anyway about this Truffles business. What’s the news from the Poolhampton front, by the way?’

  ‘Mr Joe Bunnett arrived there in his car about 3 o’clock. Spent the rest of the afternoon getting in stores, petrol for his engine and that——’

  ‘Petrol for his engine?’ said Nigel. ‘Didn’t—surely Sophie told me that he despised engines, wouldn’t have anything but sail?’