Whose bones were they? Littlejohn could imagine Pochin reading the burial service over them in the dark earthy mausoleum. Would it be by candlelight in the established manner of old-fashioned melodrama? Pochin certainly had a good imagination, even if he were off his head!
The voice of Cromwell went on, however.
“The police doctor’s on his toes, and no mistake. He told the Coroner that he’d need a Home Office expert to check his findings, but in his opinion, the skeleton tallies with a woman like Mrs. Beharrell. He even rang up old Brodribb at Peterborough. I bet he was mad at being disturbed again!”
Littlejohn could hardly refrain from telling Cromwell to cut out the fun and games and get on with it.
“It seems Grace Brodribb broke her arm when she was a girl. Brodribb said she fell downstairs. Stumbled over his foot as they were playing, as children. I bet he tripped her up … Brodribb described exactly where the break was … The doctor found the fracture tallied on the bone of the skeleton … So it’s ten to one that it’s her … Are you there, sir?”
Yes. Littlejohn was there, but he didn’t quite know where he was.
14
RAGS AND BONES
“WHY did you do it?”
Littlejohn was sitting by the bedside of Vincent Pochin at the local cottage hospital. The case was not serious, for Sam had found his brother in time to prevent his losing much blood. Sam always seemed to find him in time! There had been a brief transfusion and Vincent would be able to go home in a couple of days. Meanwhile, in his usual neurotic way, he behaved as though any breath could be his last and lay in bed like a dying man.
“I was just at the end of my resources. After all these years to find Grace’s remains … just a skeleton.”
“Although you’d expected something of the kind?”
“I admit it, Littlejohn, but reality is sometimes worse than expectations. And then to be accused of killing Beharrell … You did me a great injustice there, Littlejohn. I thought you’d have known me better than that. I’d looked like being at peace at last. I’d found my poor Grace and laid her to rest. Then you came along …”
Pochin closed his eyes. His brother, standing at the foot of the bed, glanced at the Superintendent and shrugged his shoulders. The sister-in-charge had said they could stay as long as they didn’t exhaust the patient.
“Don’t you feel fit for further talk, sir?”
Pochin languidly opened his eyes again.
“I want to tell you everything, Littlejohn. But I didn’t kill Beharrell. I swear it. If you arrest me, it will kill my mother. The shame of it would finish her. Rather than that, I wanted to end my life. She’d get over that better … Sam said …”
Sam interrupted in his usual fashion, with irrelevancies.
“He’s tried it once before, you see. Sleeping tablets. He’s very highly strung and suffers from melancholia now and then. I’m sure he won’t try again. If only this cloud could be cleared from him, he’d settle down …”
Littlejohn would have been prepared to bet Vincent didn’t take enough sleeping tablets to kill him! Just sufficient to cause a commotion and attract everybody’s undivided attention for a while.
“This cloud … This disgrace …” muttered Vincent without opening his eyes.
“Are you sure you found the body in the strong-room?”
Vincent opened his eyes suddenly.
“You’re surely not accusing me of being a liar as well as a murderer. Of course I found the body. I …”
“I believe you, sir. Now, what did Dr. Beharrell say when he met you coming from the secret staircase?”
The change of subject acted as a tonic. Pochin almost sat up in bed. His eyes lit up.
“He said ‘So it’s you, is it? After all this time, you’ve done it at last. And I suppose you intend to get me hanged for it. Inform the police, eh? Well, you never will. You’re going to join Grace in the vault. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? To join Grace …’ Something like that, it was.”
Pochin, in a firm voice, declaimed the melodramatic scene between himself and his old rival. He was enjoying it!
“And then what?”
“He went across to the chest of drawers. I told you, I thought he was going to get out his revolver. So I hit him in the way the Jap had taught me.”
“The one who used to find out the sex of chickens,” added Sam almost instinctively.
“What time was that, sir?”
“It’s funny isn’t it, how even in moments of peril, you observe little things. I noticed the Guildhall clock was striking five just as Beharrell and I faced each other in silence and I remember thinking how the clock at St. Hilary’s had struck the same time five minutes ago when I’d come up for the cloth in which to place poor Grace’s remains.”
“You opened the door behind the wardrobe on entering and left it open?”
“No. I closed them behind me. Anyone might have entered and then the open door and wardrobe would have betrayed me. The wardrobe was easily drawn back to its original place. After all, it was constructed on a pivot for such a purpose, if necessary. When I returned for the cloth in which to place the remains, I opened them again.”
“You never had a key to the strong-room?”
“No. Beharrell must have had them all, if there was more than one. It may be there was only one key made … for security’s sake.”
“What was the body like when you first found it?”
Pochin closed his eyes and then, bracing himself, opened them again.
“It lay in one corner, decently composed, as though Beharrell had, at least, dealt reverently with it. It must have been left naked, presumably to make it decompose more quickly or to confuse its future identity. The scoundrel! It was nothing but a skeleton.”
“He’s had enough, Superintendent. It’s half past ten.”
Sam Pochin interrupted, opened a gold hunter, showed them the time, and snapped the case to again.
The sister arrived to tell Littlejohn he was wanted on the telephone.
It was Plumtree.
“Can you come right away, sir? There’s been another murder. In the square in front of the church. A hawker called Watson, this time.”
Plumtree was snorting with emotion and, in his confusion, alternated between his posh and his everyday voices.
“I’ll come right away.”
It wasn’t far. The hospital was in an enclosure behind the church and the waiting taxi covered the ground in a few minutes.
The square was ominously silent, save for a group of men standing round the front of St. Hilary’s. The gas lamps threw a pale green glow on the pavements, lights shone here and there in the windows and through the fanlights of the old grey houses, and the silhouette of the bronze soldier was just perceptible, frozen in perpetual readiness to charge down Sheep Street.
“Hullo, sir. Another murder.” Cromwell’s voice from the gloom.
At the very door of the church, a knot of officials was gathered round a human form stretched on the pavement in the semi-darkness between two lamps. One hand hung in the gutter, the other above the head in a helpless, pathetic posture. The legs spreadeagled across the parapet. A pair of old shoes with the soles worn through and naked flesh visible between them and the bottoms of the frayed trousers, for the body wore no stockings. An ambulance stood nearby, turned so that one of its headlamps fully illuminated the scene.
“It’s a hawker … a rag-and-bone man called Watson, though locally nobody knows ’im by that name. His nickname’s Tommy Drop, because he’s always got a drop on the end of ’is nose.”
Plumtree whispered hoarsely. With him were the police doctor, another constable, Cromwell, and a few silent civilians who seemed to have materialised from the darkness around.
“When was he found?”
“Half an hour ago.”
“I found him as I was coming out of church. I’m choirmaster and it’s practice night. The boys had left half an hour earlier so he
must have been killed between their leaving and my letting myself out. I stayed preparing the music for Sunday.”
Littlejohn couldn’t see the man, who, however, spoke in a tired cultured voice.
“He must have been brought from elsewhere,” said the police surgeon, the same who had given evidence at Beharrell’s inquest. A tall, white-haired, energetic man who never wore a hat and had old-fashioned pince-nez on his nose.
“I’d think on first examination, that he’d been dead more than a couple of hours. Around eight o’clock, I’d say at a guess … Usual way. Blunt instrument, perhaps a poker. The skull’s been fractured by a shocking blow. Look!”
Under the blazing light, he raised the head from behind, for the body was face downwards. All the hair on the crown had been smashed into a pulp of bone and brains.
“Horrible! The work of a monster— Yes, a monster!”
The choirmaster sobbed it out.
Other people and faces appeared one by one in the beams of the headlamp. Everybody who entered the square seemed attracted like moths to the gruesome glow.
A couple of journalists arrived in a little old car and then a van containing experts from Dofford. Flashlamps began to snap and two local detectives started to search round the body for clues and other odds and ends.
“Who is he?” asked Littlejohn of Plumtree.
“Tommy Drop? He’s a chap who makes a tour of Caldicott two or three times a week gatherin’ rags and bones, bottles, jars and such like. Old iron, lead, clothes … Most people are glad to get rid of such rubbish for a copper or two. He collects and sorts them out in a shed near the Town’s Yard. He stables his donkey and cart there, too. I don’t know what ’e was doin’ in these parts at this time o’ night. He’s usually in the pubs. Lives in a dirty little cottage near his stables with a lot of cats … He was up to no good here at this late hour, believe me …”
“Had he a police record?”
“Yes. Drunk and disorderly mostly, though he’s done a stretch or two for receivin’ stolen goods and pinchin’ lead from old buildings.”
“Nothing else? In that case, take the body to the mortuary. I’ll deal with it tomorrow morning. Arrange for Hubbard to assist as usual, Plumtree,” interposed the surgeon.
The doctor was anxious to be going. Hubbard, on account of his phlegmatic and accurate slowness, always represented the law at his autopsies.
The journalists were here, there, and everywhere seeking details of the crime.
“I was just coming out of church after the choir practice …”
The tired voice of the organist sounded from the gloom of the periphery, telling his tale for the third time.
The ambulance left and its red light disappeared down Sheep Street. The party slowly broke up. Plumtree clung to Littlejohn and Cromwell, for he felt the importance of his official status and his collaboration with Scotland Yard. Not a detail missed him. He piled them up in memory ready to retail them later to his wife in bed.
“Could it be an insane killer, a homicidical maniac?” he asked in an awful voice, remembering a story he’d once read in a book from the circulating library at the end of the street.
Littlejohn was silent for a minute.
“Do you know where Watson lived, Plumtree?”
“Yes, sir. I told you, near the Town’s Yard. It’s only two minutes away. I’ll give the whole place the once-over first thing in the mornin’.”
“Let’s go now.”
Plumtree breathed hard. He thought of the fleas and other vermin which Watson’s dirty little shed harboured, as well as the fetid cottage which stank abominably of cats.
“If you wish, sir …” he said half-heartedly. They walked there, through narrow silent streets illuminated now and then by an odd electric lamp, naked on the top of a wooden standard.
Watson occupied the last standing property on a spot called Angel Meadow. Anything but a meadow now, but in the old days it had held the Angel Inn, with a paddock of grazing ground behind. Now, the plot was sour and dirty, the property all demolished except a solitary cottage in which Watson had lived, two up and two down, with a stable adjoining and an old barn which the rag-and-bone man used for his store.
“It’s been condemned, sir, and is due to come down any time. It was left until the council could find Tommy Drop alternative accommodation.”
No need for more explanations, they were at the door of the cottage. In the stable they could hear the donkey moving about and, as they stood there, the darkness dispelled round the door by Plumtree’s torch, the animal began to bray.
“He’s not bin fed, sir. That’s what he’s after.”
The door was locked.
“Use your shoulder, Plumtree.”
“If you say so, sir.”
Two heaves and the door gave way at the lock. A horrible stale blast of cats and filth met them as they opened it. Inside, the gas had been cut off, but there was an oil lamp on the table, which Plumtree lit after two attempts. The room was indescribable. Bare boards for the floor, a cheap bare table with dirty cups and screws of paper from which Watson had eaten his last meal. A few embers in the untidy hearth from which the ashes hadn’t been removed for weeks. A bed of sacking and old blankets in one corner on the floor. And scattered about the place, wide-eyed from the light, four or five cats of all colours and sizes. One had three kittens under the table. A fierce ginger tom glared and spat at Plumtree, who made noises at it and drove it from the room into the dark. Two others began to mew and rub themselves round the bottoms of Cromwell’s trousers. He bent to stroke them, whereupon they clawed at him in ecstasy and he had to chase them off.
“I think we’ll accept your suggestion, Plumtree,” said Littlejohn, hastily lighting his pipe and handing his cigarette-case to Cromwell and Plumtree. “You can give the whole place the once-over tomorrow.”
Plumtree didn’t seem at all amused or repelled either. It was simply in the way of just being another unpleasant constabulary duty. One thing was quite certain to Plumtree, however. He daren’t tell his missus he’d been in Tommy Drop’s flea-ridden house that night. Otherwise, she’d refuse to allow him the privilege of her bed until he’d had a bath, changed his underwear, and performed upon all his clothes with D.D.T.
“Let’s look in the store place.”
Even worse! Plumtree groaned inside him.
They had to break in there, too. A large single room, vast and incredibly dirty. Rats scuttered away from the light of the torch, cobwebs festooned the beams and wooden walls, damp and rot added the atmosphere of decay to the general stink of old wood, rusty iron, filthy cast-off clothes, rags, and old oil. The roof leaked and there were pools of water here and there from the earlier storm. Two of the cats had followed them and were capering after rats and mice like demons. Piles of scrap iron, woollen and cotton rags, tin, copper, and other rubbish stood where Watson had perfunctorily sorted and left them.
Littlejohn took Plumtree’s torch and shone it around. Here and there, the beams caught the gleaming eyes of the cats and of a bold rat or two, which stood transfixed by the sudden commotion. There was a workman’s bench by the door, in a space among old bedsteads, bed irons and garden seats. The throw-outs and unguarded rubbish of Caldicott, which Tommy Drop had collected, lawfully or otherwise, and accumulated like a thieving magpie.
The bench held the more precious items sorted out from the general mass of refuse. Lead piping, copper and brass valves and plumbing connections, boxes of brass and copper screws, some unused tins of corned beef and tinned fruit rifled from dust-bins, old electric light bulbs, a car accumulator, a motor-horn.
And lying apart from the rest, a piece of lead piping, almost a foot in length, with a bulge in it, where a plumber had mended a burst. Then, another fracture too formidable for repair. So the piece of piping had been subject to a major operation, and cut out of the main pipe, in which a new section had been inserted. Littlejohn gingerly picked it up. Then he examined it more closely under the torch. T
wo or three grey hairs were embedded in the ragged unrepaired burst in the pipe. He looked at Cromwell and at Plumtree, who was breathing deeply as he struggled to remember every detail of the investigation to report to his missus later.
Littlejohn wrapped up the piece of lead in an old newspaper from the bench. Then he handed the parcel to Plumtree.
“Take good care of that, Plumtree. See that the police lab at Dofford get it first thing in the morning. Ask them to examine the two or three hairs wedged in the crack in the pipe, and tell me if they are Beharrell’s or Watsons.”
They had to force the door of the stable, too, and then Plumtree fed the donkey and gave it water to drink. The place was as foul as the rest of the buildings, a mere hovel which leaked and let in wind and weather. The animal stood patiently watching its benefactor’s ministrations, and nuzzled his hands as he gave it hay, and then drank copiously.
“We’ll send the R.S.P.C.A. up to you in the mornin’, old girl,” said the sergeant to the donkey, which seemed to understand, had taken a fancy to him, and didn’t want him to go. It brayed forlornly as he closed the door.
“Thank you, Plumtree,” said Littlejohn as they reached the door of the Red Lion. There was a light on in the hall of the hotel and they bade the sergeant goodnight as St. Hilary’s, after a commotion of chimes, struck midnight.
Mrs. Hope was waiting for them in her office. She was just sitting there, doing nothing, looking distraught.
“How is your husband, Mrs. Hope?”
“Better, sir. He’s asleep. He’s not been himself for some time. He is very unhappy.”
She seemed to be expecting Littlejohn to say something in reply, but he waited, looking her in the face. There was tragedy written all over her good looks, her eyes were red and tired, and little lines had gathered round them.
“We both wish to speak with you tomorrow. It is too late tonight, and my husband is not fit for an ordeal of any kind, just now. Tomorrow, then? Your suppers are ready in the dining-room. I will make you some coffee now.”
She hurried away to the kitchens. Littlejohn and Cromwell sat at the table eating their beef sandwiches in her absence.
Death Sends for the Doctor (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Page 17
