Fault in the Structure mb-52

by Gladys Mitchell

  Fault in the Structure

  ( Mrs Bradley - 52 )

  Gladys Mitchell

  Fault In The Structure

  Gladys Mitchell

  Bradley 52

  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  Contents

  PART ONE: Flaws in the Façade |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|

  PART TWO: Seepage in the Cellar |8|9|10|11|

  PART THREE: Cracks in the Plaster |12|13|14|15|

  PART FOUR: Demolition |16|17|18|19|

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  speedy death

  mystery of a butcher’s shop

  the longer bodies

  the saltmarsh murders

  death at the opera

  the devil at saxon wall

  dead man’s morris

  come away death

  st. peter’s finger

  printer’s error

  brazen tongue

  hangman’s curfew

  when last i died

  laurels are poison

  the worsted viper

  sunset over soho

  my father sleeps

  the rising of the moon

  here comes a chopper

  death and the maiden

  the dancing druids

  tom brown’s body

  groaning spinney

  the devil’s elbow

  the echoing strangers

  merlin’s furlong

  faintley speaking

  watson’s choice

  twelve horses and the hangman’s noose

  the twenty-third man

  spotted hemlock

  the man who grew tomatoes

  say it with flowers

  the nodding canaries

  my bones will keep

  adders on the heath

  death of a delft blue

  pageant of murder

  the croaking raven

  skeleton island

  three quick and five dead

  dance to your daddy

  gory dew

  lament for leto

  a hearse on may-day

  the murder of busy lizzie

  a javelin for jonah

  winking at the brim

  convent on styx

  late, late in the evening

  noonday and night

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 52 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3EF

  © 1977 by Gladys Mitchell

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical; photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner

  ISBN 0 7181 1601 1

  Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Limited Trowbridge and Esher

  Fiercely intolerant of what is false,

  Fiercely zealous for what is true.

  TO

  JULIAN McDONAUGH,

  From whose poetic drama, A Pageant of English Dominicans, the above quotation, the title of this book and all its chapter headings are borrowed with gratitude, admiration and love.

  PART ONE

  Flaws in the Façade

  CHAPTER 1

  ^ »

  Hardened in error by pride of intellect

  Osbert Swineborn proposed to Dora Ellen at the New Year’s Eve dance which his mother, who knew Dora Ellen to be the only child and heiress of a wealthy expatriate American, had given for that purpose.

  ‘Well,’ said the young lady, ‘well, all right, O.K. then, but a Condition goes with it and, until that condition has been fulfilled, I want no part in your future life and happiness.’

  Osbert had no inkling of what was coming. However, grateful for his mother’s efforts on his behalf and mindful, as ever (for he was a dutiful son) of her wishes, he promised that he would do anything — positively anything — which would result in his winning Dora Ellen’s hand in marriage.

  It was not that he loved the young woman. The ability to love was not one of his endowments. It was simply that he agreed with his mother, who had often, although without rancour, expressed the opinion that he was unlikely ever to make what she called ‘a decent living’ for himself and that therefore his aim should be to marry a wife whose dowry would result in his leading that life of ease and leisure for which both his mother and he were convinced he was best fitted.

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked his fiancée. ‘Just say the word and, if I can, I’ll do it.’

  ‘That’s binding on you, then. Look, honey, it’s this way. I am not going through the rest of my life calling myself Dora Ellen Swineborn. I’m kind of allergic to hogs.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ said Osbert. ‘Is that really the case?’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s really the case, so what’s wrong with planting that cute little letter e some place else and changing that little letter o into a little letter u?’

  ‘Such as how?’ asked Osbert, who was no dabbler in poetry, although he had heard of Shakespeare and had enjoyed Miss Joyce Grenfell’s rendering of an imaginary American mother attempting to introduce an imaginary American child to the glorious works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

  ‘Such as spelling it Swinburne, of course,’ said Dora Ellen impatiently. So, by deed poll, accustomed from his earliest years to female domination, Osbert slightly but significantly changed his surname and Dora Ellen became Mrs Osbert Swinburne.

  When, in due course, her son was born, the mother insisted that he be named Alfriston (after his place of birth) and Calliope, after the Muse of epic poetry. With a name like A. C. Swinburne, she contended, a poet of some kind he was surely destined to become.

  ‘Alfriston Calliope?’ said Osbert doubtfully. ‘A bit tough on the poor little so-and-so, isn’t it? Besides, I thought Calliope was a kind of steam-engine.’

  ‘Honey, don’t show your ignorance,’ said his wife.

  ‘Anyway the kid will only be called Alf if you stick to this Alfriston label, and I’ve always thought Alf was, well, you know, rather a common sort of name; the sort of name they give barrow boys and plumbers’ mates and the chaps who wear cloth caps and belong to Unions.’

  ‘Alf?’ said his wife distastefully. ‘There was Alfred the Great and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I never heard either of them referred to as Alf.’

  ‘He might even be called Al, like Al Capone,’ said the father rebelliously.

  ‘Whatever he’s called, he will be able to sign himself A. C. Swinburne,’ retorted Dora. ‘I would have liked to name him Algernon Charles, but I guess it would hardly do to plagiarise that far. Anyway, so far as what he’s to be called is concerned, we must insist on Alfrist, nothing shorter.’

  ‘Alfrist?’ said Osbert. ‘Oh, yes, Alfrist would be all right, I suppose. Rather classy in a way. Alfrist C. Swinburne? Yes, your father might like that! It sounds quite American, I mean to say, doesn’t it? It may reconcile the old buster to our marriage, what?’

  ‘We never would have married if I hadn’t seen the possibilities of this A. C. Swinburne set-up,’ said Dora Ellen, at last uncovering what had always been a mystery to her spouse, for Osbert knew that, in spite of his mother’s favourable opinion of him, he was anything but an eligible parti. ‘Pop acted kind of tough when I broke the news,’ Dora Ellen went on, ‘and if I hadn’t of gotten this Swinburne idea I guess I would have listened to his arguments.’

  ‘But who was Swinburne?’ asked Osbert. He had wished to ask before, but had lacked the courage. His wife looked at him with pity and contempt.

  ‘All I can say, honey,’ she remarked, ‘is that I guess I’m aiming to see that Alfrist gets a better educ
ation than you appear to have gotten for yourself.’

  ‘I was too delicate to be sent to school,’ said Osbert. ‘I was educated at home.’

  ‘I wonder what that explains?’ said Dora Ellen, handing the baby to the nurse. ‘The first thing you do, honey, you put his name down for a dozen or two of these Eton and Harrow schools. That way we’ll be sure he gets in somewhere good when he’s old enough. A boy with the name of A. C. Swinburne has got to be going places.’

  What would have happened to A. C. Swinburne had his mother lived became a matter for speculation, for she died when the child was thirteen and in his first term at his public school. After her death, Osbert discovered, to his dismay, that she had had but a life interest in her fortune and that her father, who had returned to America, had married for the second time and now had a son of his own. He had diverted his fortune to this child of his old age, leaving Alfrist with a small annuity payable when he attained his majority. Nothing whatever was willed to Osbert, who, for the first time in his life, was faced with the hideous prospect of having to earn a living for himself and his son.

  The boy was taken away from his expensive public school and sent to a State school where he did well enough so far as work was concerned, but where he was never popular and soon became known as ‘teacher’s creep’.

  That was by no means the worst of it. At his public school a waggish master had referred to him as Algernon Charles, to the mystification of the form. They were more familiar with Latin than with English verse. Questioned on the matter by his peers, Alfrist, who had no intention of disclosing the truly dreadful names bestowed on him by his American mother, had replied that he supposed the master had been trying to show what a funny swine he could be. As the master in question was known and despised for his untimely and unkind wit, this definition of his humour was accepted.

  Unfortunately for Alfrist, his new comrades at the State school discovered, from the classroom anthology of English poetry which was supplied by a paternal government, exactly what the public school master had had in mind, although they knew nothing of the incident. Someone found that the book of poems included Swinburne’s Itylus, so the lad was set upon in the playground one dinner-time and, to joyous yells of ‘Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow’, a cake of soap from the washroom was forced chokingly into his mouth.

  From that time on, Alfrist set himself two objectives: to change his name as soon as he could (but not, for he was an intelligent although hardly a likeable lad, until after he had made sure of the annuity he was to be given by his American grandfather) and to fit himself to take vengeance upon society. He reached neither of these goals while he was still at school, but kept them in the forefront of his mind against the time when he should attain his majority.

  Having reached his sixteenth birthday and his O levels, he received, to his surprise and chagrin, the now very unwelcome news that his father proposed to take him away from school and put him to the task of beginning to make his own way in the world and pay for his keep.

  ‘But I can’t,’ he said blankly. ‘Not yet. I’ve got my A levels to do.’

  ‘I don’t earn enough to go on keeping both of us,’ said his father. This was at the end of the Easter term and for another three months Osbert allowed the subject to drop. He had no wish to try conclusions with his son too soon. The long summer holiday at the end of the following term would be a better time to elaborate his point of view, he thought.

  He himself had tried one kind of unskilled employment after another, disliking each a little more than the last. He particularly objected to his present job although it brought in a little more money than any of the others he had tried. The work necessitated the wearing of overalls and sometimes breaking the nails of his so far fastidiously-kept hands. It also brought back unwelcome memories of his autocratic wife who, as time went on, had become more and more authoritative and exacting and (what in his opinion was worse) more and more inclined to hang on tightly to the purse-strings.

  One of the economies on which she had insisted was that small adjustments, tunings and running repairs to the family car should be made cheaply at home instead of expensively at a garage. Osbert had attempted to rebel against this, but his bid for independence was soon quashed. In the course of the years, therefore, he had become a reasonably competent mechanic and when the time came for a show-down between himself and his son, he was in the employment of a garage proprietor who specialised in tarting up and reconditioning used cars and selling them at a reasonable profit.

  One of the perquisites of this particular employment was that there were opportunities for the mechanic to go joy-riding in the repaired cars. When he did so he imagined himself to be the owner and the car a brand-new and expensive model. During the school holidays, he occasionally took Alfrist with him on these jaunts, but there was little fellow-feeling between them. Alfrist despised his father and when it became clear at the beginning of the summer vacation that, instead of joining the privileged Sixth Form to sit his A levels, he really was to be put out to work, he renewed his protests.

  ‘I want to go to University,’ he said. ‘You’ve only got to keep me another two years, father. I’ll get a student grant after that. Why can’t I stay on?’

  ‘Money. Do you realise what your clothes cost, let alone your food?’

  ‘Mr Churt says I’m a cert for my A levels. I got nine Os, father.’

  ‘Yes, I know you did and they ought to stand you in good stead. You could get a very decent job in a bank, I shouldn’t wonder. You wouldn’t want your poor old dad to go on keeping you for another five or six years, would you? Even with a grant you’d cost me a lot of money.’

  ‘I’m your son and I reckon it’s your job to see me through. Look, dad, I’m not a cretin. I get jolly good marks all the time at school. I’m worth being given my chance.’

  ‘If your mother had lived, everything would have been different, you see,’ said Osbert, with the resentment he always felt when he thought about his wife.

  ‘Well, she didn’t live, so now it’s up to you,’ said the youth realising, however, that he was fighting a losing battle.

  ‘I can’t manage it, son. My health isn’t good. Never has been. It’s time you took on some responsibility. What would you do if I pegged out as, with my heart condition and the sort of work I do, I easily might?’

  This argument carried no weight with his unsentimental son, who treated it with the contempt he felt it deserved by saying:

  ‘Oh, if anything happened to you, I should go and live with my grandfather in America, I suppose.’

  The school term ended in mid-July and, as had been the case for several years, Alfrist found himself at a loose end with six or seven weeks of summer holiday to get through as best he might. He had no friends with whom to spend his time. He was still only tolerated at school, not liked. There were no holiday outings for him, either, except an occasional drive with his father when Osbert was trying out one of the reconditioned cars.

  He might have found himself temporary employment, as many of the other lads did, but he felt that this would be playing into his father’s hands. He also decided that the kind of job he could get was far beneath his notice, for, with his mother’s obstinacy and pertinacity, he had inherited her wealthy-woman’s snobbishness. In the hotels in a neighbouring seaside town there were vacancies for temporary waiters, kitchen hands and porters, but Alfrist did not think for a moment of applying for any of them.

  The consequence was that he was restless and bored. He spent a certain amount of his time in the reading and reference rooms of the local public library, but also, less admirably, he became adept at shoplifting, first because he wanted sweets or fruit which he had no money to buy; then just for the thrill of seeing what he could get away with and still escape detection. Later, because he found that in the Saturday street-market it was possible to dispose of stolen goods without being asked too many questions about how he had come into possession of them, he became more darin
g, but knew he was living dangerously.

  Sometimes he really did think of writing to his American grandfather; sometimes he thought of his father’s question: What would you do if I pegged out? Sometimes he thought of both at the same time. On the last Wednesday of the holiday, when they were out for one of their infrequent spins in a recently reconditioned car, he made his last appeal to Osbert.

  ‘You do mean to let me go back to school and take my A levels, don’t you, father?’

  ‘Sorry, old man. Shouldn’t really have let you idle away these last six weeks,’ said Osbert. ‘You might have been settled in a nice little billet by now. Pity it didn’t occur to me sooner. I’m so much accustomed to your long school holidays that I never thought of putting you to work. Well, you’ve had your fun, so the best thing now is for you to turn up at school the first day of term and ask your headmaster for a reference. That’s another thing I’ve only just remembered. We ought to have seen to it before you left.’

  ‘If I go back they’ll expect me to stay, so why jolly well can’t I?’ demanded the boy.

  ‘There’s no question of it, son. I’ve told you that I simply can’t afford to keep you on at school any longer. I’m surprised you don’t want to pull your weight to keep our home going. It’s not a very manly attitude, is it?’

  ‘I’d be able to pull a much heavier weight if I got my A levels and my degree,’ said Alfrist sullenly.

  ‘That’s enough! We’d better be getting back to the garage now,’ said Osbert. ‘I’ve got a customer coming to look over this car at six.’

  ‘When you’ve turned her, let me drive a little, Dad. You know I can handle a car,’ said Alfrist, changing his sullen tone to one of conciliation and pleading.

  ‘Public road. You’re under age,’ objected his father.

  ‘There’s never much traffic along here. Anyway, couldn’t we go back by way of the fenced lane? That’s always empty and there are never any police about.’

  ‘We can go that way if you like,’ said his father, relieved by the change of tone, ‘and, if there’s nobody about, I don’t see why you shouldn’t drive for a bit.’