Crooked Wreath

by Christianna Brand

  “I’m up and dressed long ago,” said Cockie, austerely, standing in his pajamas still warm from his bed.

  “Only my cousin has had the most brilliant idea during the night, he’s absolutely discovered how the whole thing was done, and I was terribly anxious to let you know so that you could tell my wife and ease her of her misery; of course, it wasn’t her at all. It was Brough!”

  “Oh, was it?” said Cockrill, sourly.

  “It’s extraordinary how it’s never been thought of yet. After all, one of the oddest things has been–where was the draft of the will? It’d been hidden or destroyed; but, as Edward says, why, if it hadn’t been signed? So it must have been signed. Are you there, Inspector? Are you listening?”

  “Intently,” said Cockrill, holding the receiver against his hunched shoulder with his chin and groping in his pockets for the first cigarette of the morning.

  “Well then, the thing was, if it had been signed, who witnessed it? No one in the house, because we were all involved; but Brough and his wife were just across the drive from the lodge, and just before eight o’clock Brough was rolling that path outside the lodge. So what do you think of this, Inspector–Grandfather called him in and told him to fetch Mrs. Brough, and made them both witness his signature, before she came up to the house for her work at eight o’clock. And because Brough thought it was wrong and unfair and because, for some idiotic reason, he happens to be particularly devoted to me, we think that when she’d gone he killed our Grandfather, and drew back the curtain, and all that, and then backed away from the lodge, scattering sand over his own footmarks as he went.” He waited, breathless, to hear what Cockie had to say to that.

  Cockrill had contrived to roll and light the cigarette; he took the first deep puff of the morning and suddenly was galvanized into action. “Well, all right, all right, all right, Doctor March … Now, look here–you get your family up and dressed and I’ll be along in twenty minutes. I dare say Lady March will give me some breakfast when you all have yours. Meanwhile, I don’t want a word of this, not one word, to anyone outside the house …” He had long ago taken the precaution of putting one of his own men at that centre of rumour, the telephone exchange. “Above all, of course, not a hint to that old servant woman, or the Broughs. Nobody is to leave the house, and, above all, nobody is to go near the lodges. Got that? Good-bye.”

  Philip rattled wildly at the telephone hook. “Here, Inspector, Inspector, don’t go! What about my wife? Can you get a message to her? Can somebody let her know? You won’t leave her in suspense a moment longer than you must? You will tell her right away, won’t you? Tell her that it was Brough all the time.”

  “I told her last night,” said Cockrill; and rang off with a click.

  Sergeant Troot came round for him in the police car. “They’ve tumbled to it up at the house,” said Cockie, settling himself next to the driving seat, holding the white panama hat in his lap. “I shall have to move now. However, it doesn’t matter; I was more or less ready. As long as it didn’t all come wooshing out at the inquest, that was all I cared; and if only that fat fool Bateman hadn’t lost his head and let them bring in that absurd verdict against poor Ellen March, all would have been well. It’s rough luck on the girl, but I shall be able to get her out now, I think; once I’ve brought Brough in; and anyway, the Assizes are next week. I gave her a pretty broad hint last night that she had nothing to worry about; but I didn’t dare tell the family in case they should give it away before I was ready for him.”

  “I never did like that beggar Brough,” said Troot, who had often been driven from a favourite pub corner by the loquaciousness of Brough.

  “This may not be a bad thing after all,” mused Inspector Cockrill, nursing the hat as they sped along the dusty country road. “It might just be possible to force an admission out of him, if he thinks Ellen March is suffering for his crime. After all, she is Philip’s wife, and that’s where Brough’s devotion appears to lie; not that I think for a moment there was much philanthropy behind all this. Anyway, I’ll have a shot at it; let him see that his own chance is hopeless and then get him to own up to the whole thing and set the girl free. There’s nothing like a nice, neat, written confession to plank before a jury!”

  It was a nice, neat, written confession, but it would never be planked before a jury for it was written in dust. Brough lay beside it on the floor of the sitting-room in the little lodge, the room where Sir Richard, also, had died. His body had fallen from the dreadful, convulsive arch, but his face was cyanosed, his eyes wide open and protruberant, his hands and feet like claws, and in his left arm the needle of a hypodermic syringe had broken off. On the dusty tiles of the little hall, close to his right hand, was written in printed characters: I KILLED SIR R. And underneath, like a signature, his initials, J.B.

  The police seal had been carefully pried from the doorpost, and with Brough’s own key–his bunch still hung in the lock. Inside the lodge, nothing appeared to have been disturbed. The windows were securely fastened from inside, as was the back door, with the outside police seals intact. Brough lay across the doorway leading from the little hall to the sitting-room–his footprints made a straight line between the two doors, a distance of perhaps six or seven feet. He wore pajamas and a dressing gown; his heel-less slippers had apparently been kicked off during his paroxysms and were tumbled at his feet. One hand lay just through the doorway, on the tiled floor of the hall, and near it were the printed letters, firm, small characters, evidently made with a broken matchstick which lay beside them: I KILLED SIR R. and the initials, J.B. For the rest, the dust was undisturbed as it had been on the day on which Sir Richard had died, when Bella had bundled the vacuum cleaner into the hall, out of the way. It still stood propped in its corner, just inside the door, and but for it the hall was entirely bare. At Brough’s left hand was a phial of crushed glass that had once held strychnine; he had been dead since dawn.

  10

  MRS. BROUGH stood gaunt and tearless beside the sofa in her stuffy little parlour. Ugly lace curtains kept out the brave morning sunshine, and everywhere were fringes and bobbles and hideous china plates. From beneath the merciful covering protruded a stiffened hand. She took it and held it in her own warm live one; and so holding it, faced her questioners.

  “When did you last see Brough alive?”

  “I ’aven’t seen him since last night,” said Mrs. Brough, sullenly. “He went off to bed same as usual; I don’t have him in my room no more–I’ve done with all that. He usually got up and made himself a cuppa tea and went out to his work and came in again for his breakfast at half past seven or eight; he slept badly, and he liked to get the work done while it was cool. I’d be up and have breakfast ready for him, when he come in. I didn’t hear him go out this morning, but I often don’t. I sleep ’eavy,” said Mrs. Brough, eyeing Inspector Cockrill as though about to add that he could put that in his pipe and smoke it.

  Cockrill considered. “He looks to me as if he’d been dead some time; an hour at least, perhaps two.” He stood watching her, his short legs apart, a cigarette, as always, pinched between thumb and forefinger, and suddenly changed his tack. “Mrs. Brough–when I asked your husband for an account of his movements on the night of Sir Richard’s death, he told me you had gone up to the house at eight o’clock; he said, ‘I came in from the …’ and he hesitated a minute before he said ‘the garden.’ He had been going to say ‘from the lodge.’ Hadn’t he?”

  “I dare say,” said Mrs. Brough.

  “Sir Richard called you in–didn’t he? And you witnessed the new will before you went up to the house; you and Brough witnessed it. Brough told me about his supper that evening; he said that you had told him you ‘would get him an onion and some cheese to his bread: and that you hadn’t time to make him tea–he’d better have a glass of beer.’ The reason your meal wasn’t ready, Mrs. Brough, was that he had taken you over to the lodge to witness the will. Wasn’t it?”

  “He told me to say nothing,”
said Mrs. Brough, glancing down at the covered body on the couch, “but I suppose I’d better, now. Yes, the old man called us in and he showed us a couple of great long sheets of paper and he says: ‘I want you to watch me sign,’ he says, ‘and then put your names here.’ ‘I’m signing nothing I don’t understand,’ said Brough; he was always a fly one, was Brough. ‘I’m changing my will,’ says Sir Richard, impatient. ‘That’s all it is, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m leaving all to her ladyship,’ he says, ‘and after her to Mister Edward. I’m leaving all away from my grandchildren,’ he says, and he starts in leading off something dreadful about them and their wicked ways, ungrateful and immoral and such. ‘Oh, get on with it,’ I thought, ‘I got to get up to me work at the ’ouse,’ and at last he’s finished his rigmarole and signs his name and I signs mine, and Brough signs his as I’ve taught him to do, me being the one that had the schooling, for all he talked so grand: and then I went over to the lodge to get his supper. After about ten minutes or so he came in and a little after eight I went on up to the house. The old woman gets the dinner, but I helps with the clearing away and washing up.”

  “Did Brough say anything to you about the will when he came over for his supper?”

  “He said it was a shame to do the doctor out of his birthright. He was fond of Doctor Philip, along of what he done for our Rosy once. He thought the doctor ought to be master here, not a pack o’ women, and he said he would’ve been, only for that Mr. Garde interfering. When Mr. Philip first came home, Sir Richard would’ve changed his will then, but Mr. Garde went round asking a lot of questions and in the end he persuaded the old man to leave the whole lot to Miss Peta; meaning to marry her himself some day, I suppose, these lawyers are that sly!”

  “When did Brough tell you that Sir Richard was dead?”

  “He told me next morning,” said Mrs. Brough. “He came up from ’is fire watching–so called; sitting up drinking with his pals at the Swan, more like–and told me he’d heard it straight from Mrs. Hoggin, her whose daughter runs the telephone exchange. I’d been out at the back of our lodge, and I hadn’t heard the commotion over the way. ‘They’ve found the old man dead,’ he says. ‘And seemingly they can’t find the will,’ he says. ‘Florrie Hoggin heard Mr. Garde ringing up for Inspector Cockrill. He said there was some poison missing and that they couldn’t find the will. This is our chance to do something with–something for the doctor,’ he said; meaning that now the doctor would keep his own,” elaborated Mrs. Brough; but she was walking warily among her words.

  Cockrill considered for a long time, scattering the spotless linoleum with a layer of cigarette ash. “I see. And he didn’t–didn’t tell you before he went up to the house that evening that Sir Richard was dead?”

  “How could he? The old man was alive and kicking ten minutes before.”

  “He’s dead now,” said Cockrill, “so perhaps we could have a little more respect in speaking of him. Now, Mrs. Brough–is there any reason why, between the time you left the lodge and went up to the house, and the time Brough went off to his fire watch in the village, he shouldn’t have slipped into the drawing-room at the big house while the family were safely at dinner; taken the coramine and gone back and given it to Sir Richard, or placed it in the glass on the desk beside him; and then have left the lodge, covering up his footsteps with the sand as he went? Can you see any objection to that theory?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Brough. “I don’t think there’s any reason why he couldn’t have done that; no reason at all.” She added calmly: “And no reason why I shouldn’t have been in on it with him.”

  Cockrill lifted an eyebrow. “Well, I don’t know what you’re trying to provoke me into, Mrs. Brough, but, of course, we both know that that would have been impossible. Mrs. Ellen March left Sir Richard at a quarter to eight, and you were up at the house a few minutes after eight. There wouldn’t have been time for you to be called in, witness the will, obtain the poison and murder Sir Richard, let alone discussing the whole thing and working it out. As to whether you knew about it, that’s different; but Brough had gone off to his fire watching before you left the house. The Turt–er, Mrs. Featherstone, testifies that you and she were in the kitchen at the back of the house all that time.”

  “So we were!” said Mrs. Brough, rather sneeringly, as though she were humouring an obstreperous child.

  Cockrill ignored the sneer. “He could have managed it all sometime between eight o’clock and twenty to nine, and hidden or destroyed the will, and concealed the strychnine and the hypodermic–in case of accidents. He didn’t think there’d be any accidents, but there was one–Mrs. March was accused of the murder that he had committed. He had thrown the blame onto just the person he had done it for. He couldn’t save her without confessing to the murder, so he killed himself.”

  Mrs. Brough ejected a sort of horrible, snorting laugh; she still held the dead hand in hers and she gave it a rough little jerk, looking down at the covered body with a curling lip. “Well, well, Brough,” she said, sneeringly again. “Fancy you!”

  Bella, entering the narrow doorway, stood appalled; but she came forward immediately and, ignoring Cockrill, went up with a little gesture of pity and kindliness to Mrs. Brough. “I came down to tell you … We’re all so sorry, Mrs. Brough. It’s dreadful for you; if there’s anything in the world any of us can do–though I don’t know what there could be …”

  “Thank you, m’lady,” said Mrs. Brough stonily. She lifted the cover of the couch and pushed the cold hand under it. “Such sights are not for the like of you,” she said.

  For answer, Bella went up deliberately to the sofa and pulled back the rug and looked down pitifully on Brough’s terrible dead face. The grey hair had become disarranged by the covering and she put out her hand and gently brushed it back. “Poor Brough,” she said, and covered him up again. Cockrill, watching her from the hearthrug, could scarce forebear from giving a little cheer.

  “It’s very good of your ladyship, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Brough, coldly.

  Bella took her unresponsive hand. “Oh, Mrs. Brough, I do feel for you; I do understand. After all, I’ve just lost my husband, too; and though perhaps it isn’t as bad as this–well, it is dreadful, you know, to have to bear the loss and to know as well that the person you loved has been–murdered.”

  “If you care so much–it’s funny you don’t seem to hold it against Brough and me,” said Mrs. Brough, but without humility.

  “Well, this isn’t quite the time or the place to hold it against you or him; I try to remember that whatever he did, however terrible it has been for me, and for all of us–at least when he found someone else was to be punished for it he–he prevented that.”

  Mrs. Brough laughed again.

  Bella had driven herself to come, meaning only to be kind. She said now, growing indignant: “Considering everything, Mrs. Brough, I think you are–well, not very kind. All I have done is to tell you that I and my family are sorry that so much of this tragedy has fallen on you, the innocent one …”

  “Innocent’s right,” said Mrs. Brough. “And well you know it.”

  It was more than a gibe; it was an accusation. “What do you mean?” said Cockrill quickly, coming forward, tossing his cigarette butt in among the pleated crepe fans in the fireplace.

  “I mean that she’s right when she says I’m innocent; and she knows it well enough; and she knows he’s innocent, too …” She jerked her head in the direction of the sofa. “Her and her sympathy! Do you think I don’t know that you’re all rejoicing up at the house because your precious Mrs. March can come out of prison now? Much you care, the whole pack of you, as long as you can go free, that he lies dead, to pay for your sins for you. Let the servants suffer! Don’t dream of punishing the rich or suspecting the rich, or saying a word that might hurt the precious feelings of the rich–not if you can find a servant to suffer in their place! You know as well as I do that he never killed Sir Richard! Brough! Brough kill a man to prevent an
injustice! Him get himself into trouble to help somebody else! I can just see him! And then kill hisself to prevent another injustice …” She laughed again, the same short, ugly, mirthless laugh. “He kept back the business of the will and that’s all he did … He never killed the old man; not he!”

  “But then … But, Mrs. Brough, then who killed him? And why? Why should anyone kill poor old Brough?”

  “Because poor old Brough could use his wits, my lady! Oh, yes, he saw you sitting there all right, sitting on the window sill with your back to the garden, talking to Sir Richard while he ate his dinner, while Miss Peta was in the kitchen. Brough was outside the lodge, rolling the paths. ‘They asked me if she moved,’ he said. ‘Well, she didn’t move, and I told them so. It wasn’t for me to put ideas into their heads–what do I care who killed the old beggar!’ says Brough. ‘But didn’t I see Doctor Philip squirt out the water from that there syringe, the afternoon before? Squirted it out across the terrace, and it went in a big curve a couple of yards across and landed up in in a little pool right near where I was standing. And haven’t I seen her, time after time,’ he says, ‘chucking lumps of sugar and bits of biscuit to that dog of hers? Is it the dog that’s clever, sitting still with its mouth open? No, it isn’t, of course. It’s her. If she didn’t aim straight–but she does; she’s got a damn good eye, that’s all,’ he says. ‘Sir Richard looks round for a minute, perhaps to call to Miss Peta in the kitchen,’ says Brough, ‘and her ladyship presses the plunger of that there syringe and the poison stuff squirts in a curve across the desk and lands on his plate of food!’ That’s what Brough knew, my lady, my fine lady!–and that’s what you knew he’d tell if you let Doctor Philip’s wife be accused of your dirty work. So you killed him, too. You and your ‘innocent!’” She bent over with a swift movement and stripped the cover right off Brough’s misshapen corpse. “There–look at him! Look at him! Look how he suffered, look at his poor face and his eyes sticking out of his head, look at his mouth and his hands …” And suddenly she threw herself down on her knees beside the couch and burst into hysterical tears.