Bleeding Hooks

by Harriet Rutland

  “But you said you knew shorthand.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Pussy. “I told you that I once learned shorthand, which is quite a different thing. I did begin a course in it, but I never did any good. My spelling is too bad, for one thing, and I can’t concentrate, for another. I’ve no brains.”

  “You certainly haven’t,” said Mr. Winkley bitterly. “I shall have to find someone else, and start all over again. I suppose that was the idea. You’ve done nothing but hinder me ever since the beginning of this case.”

  “If you’d asked Piggy instead of me...” began Pussy, but Mr. Winkley was already unlocking the door.

  “Have I your word that you will stay here till I come back?” he asked Mr. Weston.

  “You have,” was the reply. “I won’t move from this room, I promise you.”

  He waited until the door had slammed behind Mr. Winkley, then moved towards Pussy.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I knew I could rely on a friend of Claude’s.”

  Pussy’s eyes filled with tears. He seemed such a tragic little man, and she still found it impossible to think of him as a murderer. Such emotions as had been revealed during his confession were beyond her comprehension, and yet she felt indescribably sorry for him.

  “I’m glad I could help,” she said simply. “You can escape now, can’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “I can escape now.”

  Chapter 41

  The hall was empty when Pussy left the smoking-room and closed the door softly behind her. She wandered along the corridor into the lounge, where she found her mother talking to Major Jeans.

  As soon as he saw her, the Major jumped up, and pushed his chair forward, but she ignored him rudely, and seated herself instead on the arm of her mother’s chair, swinging her shapely legs.

  “Ha-ha, the little salmon fry!” said the Major in his hearty voice. “We were just talking about you, my dear. Were your little gills burning?”

  “No,” said Pussy shortly, without troubling to look at him.

  Major Jeans glanced across at Mrs. Partridge inquiringly. She nodded her head.

  “Listen to me, Pussy.” The Major lowered his voice with difficulty. “Your mother and I have been talking about you. It’s rather an important matter, and she has given me permission to speak to you about it.” He leaned across, and took her hand in his. “You don’t hate me, my dear, do you?”

  Pussy snatched her hand away as if his touch had scorched her, and jumped to her feet.

  She had just been in contact with stark tragedy, and this old fool must choose this moment to make love to her, she thought. With her mother’s permission, too! Well, she’d soon put a stop to it. Her patience had been tried long enough!

  “All right,” she said, raising her voice. “You’ve asked for it, and now you’ll get it! Yes, I do hate you. How could I help it? Ever since we came to this hotel, you’ve done nothing but pester me. You can’t come near me without putting your arm around me, or trying to kiss me. I can’t bear to be mauled, especially by an old sugar-daddy like you!”

  ‘Tansy, be quiet!” ordered Mrs. Partridge.

  “I won’t be quiet. It isn’t my fault. He’s an old satyr, I tell you. He can’t leave any woman alone. I’ve watched him stroking your arm, and making goo-goo eyes at you, when he didn’t think I was looking. But you didn’t know that he was making love to me at the same time, did you? I’ve put up with it for your sake, because I knew you’d hate to have a scene in the hotel. But when it comes to the two of you dis-cussing me behind my back, and arranging my future for me, I think it’s just about time I told you where you both get off.” She turned to Major Jeans, and put her hands on her hips. “Now listen to me, old lobster-face,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you, I never have wanted to marry you, and I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth. And you can tell my mother if you like!”

  Major Jeans got up, and sent his chair crashing backwards with a well-directed kick.

  “Good God!” he roared. “Marry you? Do you think I’m mad, wench? Don’t you know that it’s as much as I can do to be civil to you? I don’t like your clothes, I don’t like your manners, I don’t like your painted nails, or your painted face. The trouble with you young fry is that you imagine every man you meet is in love with you. Upon my soul, you’re as bad as Mrs. Mumsby! Marry you? I’d sooner marry a fish! You’re just about as cold-blooded. Haven’t you any eyes in your head, girl? Can’t you see that it’s your mother I want to marry? Been in love with her for years, but she wouldn’t hear of it, until I made you like me as a father. Marry you? God bless all little loaves and fishes!”

  He turned on his heels and strode out of the room. They could hear his bellows of laughter echoing all the way along the corridor.

  Mrs. Partridge rose to her feet, and perked her small body up and down like a belligerent robin. She spoke very softly.

  “I hope you’re satisfied, Pansy,” she said. “I never believed that a child of mine could be so gauche or so rude. This is all the thanks I get for giving up my life to you. I’ve stinted myself for years of clothes, and sometimes of food, so that you could go to good schools, and be finished abroad, and have everything you wanted. All I’ve succeeded in doing, is to make you selfish and self-centred. Nothing is sacred to you. You only laugh at people’s feelings. I’ve been told enough times that I’ve spoiled you. So I have. But I shall do it no longer. You’re so sure of yourself, that you can go your own way in future, and do what you like. You’ll have no further consideration from me. I’m going to marry Major Jeans, whether you like it or not. You won’t fool me any more.”

  She turned and walked out of the room.

  In the corridor outside, she bumped into the Major.

  “Winkley,” he said. “Have you seen Winkley? I want Winkley.”

  He scarcely waited for her to shake her head, but brushed impatiently past her, and a few seconds later she saw him running into the smoking-room, followed closely by Mr. Winkley and Gunn.

  She shrugged her shoulders and went upstairs to her room.

  Inside the smoking-room, the three men stood looking down at the lifeless body of Mr. Weston.

  “He kept his promise,” said Mr. Winkley. “I ought to have had enough sense to realize that this was bound to happen, but he seemed so resigned to things that it never occurred to me that he might kill himself. Besides, I left Miss Partridge here with him...”

  “You – what?” exclaimed Gunn. “Do you mean to tell me that you left her alone with him, knowing that he had killed one woman already? God help you, if any harm had come to her!”

  Mr. Winkley surveyed him through mild blue eyes.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “He wasn’t a violent man. Mrs. Mumsby’s murder was purely psychological. He saw it as the only means of freeing his son from her. Otherwise he was a very kind man. He wouldn’t dream of attacking Miss Partridge.”

  “Sez you!” retorted Gunn. “He’d already half-strangled her.”

  “There’s no revolver,” remarked Major Jeans, who could only think of one way of committing suicide. “How did he die?”

  Mr. Winkley knelt down beside the body, took a small, wide-necked bottle from the floor, and placed it carefully on the table. Then he turned each of Mr. Weston’s hands palm upwards. In the right hand, so drawn and twisted, was the upstanding hackle of a salmon fly, its furred body stained with the blood which oozed around it. The forefinger and thumb of the left hand still gripped a length of gut.

  “Poetic justice again,” remarked Mr. Winkley. “This was the way he murdered Mrs. Mumsby. He thought he’d elude me without a confession, but the P.M. will prove it for me this time. The inquest will reveal a verdict of ’Death by prussic acid poisoning’, and then we shall be able to exhume Mrs. Mumsby’s body, and prove that she was killed in the same way.”

  “If you do,” said Gunn, “there’ll be another death on you
r hands for certain. Thomas Lloyd will expire for joy!”

  Major Jeans looked down on the face of the man with whom he had exchanged favourite flies and fishing stories. With some difficulty, he recaptured his habitual flippancy of speech.

  “That’s the second biggest fish I’ve seen killed on a fly in these parts,” he said.

  Chapter 42

  A week later, Mr. Winkley, with the tang of the crisp Welsh air still in his nostrils, and the sound of his screaming reel still in his ears, was back again in the little room at Scotland Yard, which was known to his colleagues as “ Winkley’s Hatchery”.

  He was talking to Paget, a sparse-fleshed, sandy-haired man, with alert eyes and a confident manner, who was the Yard’s recognized expert on toxicology.

  “So although they brought in a verdict of ’Death from natural causes’ at the inquest,” Mr. Winkley was saying, “Weston really committed suicide. Of course you couldn’t expect a Welsh country doctor, whose chief job in life is to deliver twins, to spot prussic acid poisoning when he did the P.M., but as Weston was a self-confessed murderer, the whole case will have to be reopened. If that stupid girl had only had the brains of a louse, I should have had his signed confession to put in as evidence, but as it is, the Commissioner will probably take a bit more convincing. I’ve asked you about it, because I want to be sure that I’ve got the technical details about the poison correct, before I send in my report.”

  Paget thrust his hands into his pockets, and perched himself on the edge of Winkley’s desk.

  “In other words, Winkley,” he said with a grin, “you want me to lend my authority to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

  “Well – yes,” agreed Mr. Winkley, squirming slightly in his chair (Paget often affected people in that way), “but you needn’t put it quite so offensively.”

  “Very well, then,” returned the other, with an even broader grin, “this bloke committed suicide by dipping a salmon fly into something, which you optimistically call prussic acid, and after sticking it into the palm of his hand, expired forthwith.”

  “Why optimistically?” asked Mr. Winkley.

  “Because I’ve yet to be convinced,” returned Paget, “that any prussic acid found its way into his hand at all.”

  “But surely –” expostulated Mr. Winkley. “There was the bottle with the stopper out, the hook stuck in the man’s palm. He obviously died from prussic acid poisoning.”

  “Oh yeah?” drawled Paget offensively. “Look here,” he went on, “what do you really know about prussic acid?”

  Mr. Winkley looked uneasy.

  “I know that it’s the most powerful poison known,” he said. “I know that if you take even small quantities of it by the mouth, it is almost instantaneously fatal, and that if it is injected into the blood stream by means of a hypodermic needle, its action is even more speedy.”

  “And,” interrupted Paget rudely, “every criminal carries a small capsule of it in his pocket, which he swallows on the threshold of Scotland Yard, thus relieving Inspector Horn-rims of the necessity of explaining a lot of difficult technical details in the course of the book. And, of course,” he added, “the whole of Scotland Yard stinks of bitter almonds for weeks afterwards. Am I right?”

  Mr. Winkley opened his mouth to protest, but Paget, who, like most experts, liked to hear the sound of his own voice, continued before he could speak.

  “Just let me tell you what the facts are,” he said in his best professional manner, taking out a slim gold pencil, and waggling it in Mr. Winkley’s face. “Prussic acid, or more accurately hydrocyanic acid, is a gas. Or rather,” he corrected himself, “it is an extremely volatile liquid, which boils at the temperature of an ordinary warm room. If you dipped a fishhook, or any other hook, into it, the liquid would evaporate almost before you could withdraw it from the bottle. So that, really, pure liquid prussic acid is nothing more than a laboratory curiosity. What is usually known to the public as ‘prussic acid’, is a dilute solution of the gas in water, and is known to us as ‘Scheele’s Acid’.”

  “Yes, I know that,” interrupted Mr. Winkley. “I’ve realized all along that that was what was used in this particular instance.”

  Paget changed his rising exasperation into an exaggerated air of patient resignation.

  “I believe you said that the room he died in was hot,” he said.

  “Yes,” agreed Mr. Winkley. “I should say it was well over seventy.”

  “Well then, if you dipped a pin in water...”

  “Salmon hook,” amended Mr. Winkley.

  “Same thing,” retorted Paget, with the expert’s lofty disregard of the unimportant details. “And if you held it in the air of a warm room for a minute or two, how much water do you suppose would be left on it by the end of that time?”

  “Not much,” admitted Mr. Winkley.

  “Not any,” returned Paget decisively. “In fact, I should say that a fish-hook dipped in ’prussic acid’ would be a damned sight safer than one out of your fly-box, Winkley, because it would probably be sterilized, and the fellow wouldn’t even have been able to give himself a septic hand with it.”

  “But all this is absurd,” protested Mr. Winkley. “Everybody knows that people commit suicide with prussic acid...”

  “In books,” put in Paget. “The lay public knows so little about it, that it’s a positive godsend to the writer of detective fiction. The very name has come to be synonymous with ‘sudden death’, whatever the circumstances. But consider the facts for a minute, Winkley. You’re suggesting that this fellow Weston was in such a hurry to kill himself (before you could get at him again), that he dipped the hook into the acid, stuck it into his hand, and died, all within the space of ten seconds; whereas you and I know perfectly well that in real life, suicides like to do things in style. They rarely stick their heads into gas-ovens, for instance, without first providing a soft cushion to lie on. Now this fellow probably seated himself in a comfortable chair near the fire, dipped the hook into the acid, and then meditated cosily on his past life, and consoled himself with the suicide’s usual flood of self-pity. He would have decided several times, probably, to stick the hook into his hand, and each time, he would funk it, and give himself a few more moments to live. By which time, the hook would have been quite harmless, since prussic acid, being a gas,” he grinned, “does not leave a deposit similar to that employed by the Jujube Indians on their arrowheads.”

  He got up, and turned towards the door. Mr. Winkley followed him.

  “You think, then...?” he began.

  “I’m afraid I think,” said Paget, “the fellow probably died of shock. And don’t forget that definition that you threw at my head when I once ventured to remind you that I was supposed to be an expert.”

  “What was that?” asked Mr. Winkley to Paget’s receding back.

  Paget poked his head back through the door.

  “‘An expert always knows what can’t be done’,” he said, with a wide grin.

  “But what about Mrs. Mumsby, then?” shouted Mr. Winkley.

  But Paget had already disappeared, leaving behind him, like the Cheshire Cat, nothing but his grin, and, to Mr. Winkley’s imagination, the faint odour of bitter almonds.

  THE END

  About The Author

  Harriet Rutland was the pen-name of Olive Shimwell. She was born Olive Seers in 1901, the daughter of a prosperous Birmingham builder and decorator.

  Little is known of the author’s early life but in 1926 she married microbiologist John Shimwell, with whom she moved to a small village near Cork in Ireland. This setting, transplanted to Devon, inspired her first mystery novel Knock, Murderer, Knock! which was published in 1938. The second of Harriet Rutland’s mysteries, Bleeding Hooks, came out in 1940, and the third and last, Blue Murder, was published in November 1942. All three novels are remarkable for their black comedy, innovative plots, and pin-sharp portraits of human behaviour, especially concerning relationships between men and w
omen.

  Olive and John were divorced in the early forties, and Olive apparently did not publish anything further. She died in Newton Abbot in 1962.

  Also by Harriet Rutland

  Knock, Murderer, Knock!

  Blue Murder

  Harriet Rutland

  BLUE MURDER

  That settles it, thought Smith savagely. He shall be murdered, even if I have to do it myself!

  The Hardstaffe family are not the nicest people in the world. In fact, he – schoolteacher, lothario and bully, she – chronic malcontent – and their horsey unmarried adult daughter seem to be prime candidates for murder. A writer planning these deaths, on paper at least, and a young girl, chased by old Hardstaffe, are the only outsiders in a deliciously neat, but nasty, case.

  Blue Murder was the last of Harriet Rutland’s mystery novels, first published in 1942. This new edition, the first in over 70 years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘(A) newcomer of exceptional promise’ Howard Haycroft

  CHAPTER 1

  Mr. Hardstaffe had reached the critical time of life when elderly gentlemen gaze at the legs of schoolgirls in railway carriages.

  Mr. Hardstaffe was definitely elderly, and he looked very much like a clergyman when he read the lessons at Sunday morning services in an Oxford drawl, pitched in a slightly falsetto voice guaranteed to hit the back of the church.

  But his eyes were not engaged, at the moment, in the above-mentioned occupation.

  He was seated in a leather-covered armchair in front of a meagre fire in his study in the village school of Nether Naughton, to which he had succeeded as Headmaster some thirty years ago. And although the youngest and prettiest of his staff, Miss Charity Fuller, was sitting near him, wearing a knee-length skirt which showed the slim beauty of her near-silk-clad legs, his protuberant blue eyes were gazing unmistakably at her elfin-pointed face, at her green eyes, reddened lips, and waved auburn hair.