Death of a Busybody
Page 1
Death of a Busybody
George Bellairs
With an Introduction
by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1943 by The Macmillan Company
Copyright © 2016 Estate of George Bellairs
Introduction copyright © 2017 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2017
ISBN: 9781464207372 Ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Death of a Busybody
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
More from this Author
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Introduction
The eponymous nosy parker in Death of a Busybody is Miss Ethel Tither. She has made herself deeply unpopular in the quintessentially English village of Hilary Magna, since she goes out of her way to snoop on people, and interfere with their lives. On being introduced to her, the seasoned reader of detective stories will spot a murder victim in the making. Sure enough, by the end of chapter one, this unpleasant lady has met an extremely unpleasant fate. She is found floating in a cesspool, having been bludgeoned prior to drowning in the drainage water.
This is, in every way, a murky business; realizing that they are out of their depth, the local police quickly call in the Yard. Inspector Thomas Littlejohn, George Bellairs’ series detective, arrives on the train, and in casting around for suspects, he finds that he is spoiled for choice. The amiable vicar supplies him with a map showing the scene of the crime; maps were a popular feature of traditional whodunnits for many years, and Bellairs occasionally included them in his books, as he does here.
Death of a Busybody was Bellairs’ third novel, published in 1942. First editions in dust jackets of his early books are much sought after by collectors, and fetch high prices, but Bellairs’ name has long been forgotten by the wider public. This is a pity, because he wrote amusing stories that afforded his readers welcome light relief during the grim war years, and then in the decades that followed. His work was not dazzlingly original—the plot device that supplies a crucial alibi in this story, for instance, is a variation on a theme that had become very familiar to crime fans by the time the book was published—but his humour means that his books do not plod dully, like so many worthy police stories of the time. There is another feature of Bellairs’ writing that appealed to his original readers, and remains attractive today. Time and again in his work, he makes clear that he detests sanctimony, hypocrisy, and greed, although he makes his points with a light touch. One suspects that, during his day job as a bank manager, he came across a good deal of the worst of human nature, and found in writing detective fiction a pleasing form of catharsis.
George Bellairs was a pseudonym masking the identity of Harold Blundell (1902–1982), one of the few bankers to write crime fiction, rather than feature in it as a murder victim or rascally suspect. Blundell started work at the age of fifteen with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Bank, which merged with Martin’s Bank in 1928; he remained with Martin’s until his retirement in 1962. In 1941, he published his first novel, Littlejohn on Leave, a book which is now a great rarity. He said that he chose a pen-name to fit with the initials of his wife, Gwladys Blundell. The late R.F. Stewart, who wrote a fascinating article about Bellairs for the crime fanzine CADS in 1994, hypothesized that the chosen forename represented a tribute to Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret, who was an influence on Bellairs’ crime writing.
At the time when he wrote this book, Blundell was working in a bank by day, and also acting as an air raid warden, being exempt from military service because he was blind in one eye; he found that writing a detective story helped to pass the time during the blackout. His debut novel introduced Inspector Thomas Littlejohn of Scotland Yard, who became his regular series character, appearing in all but one of the fifty-eight Bellairs novels (the exception, a 1943 book called Turmoil in Zion, featured Inspector Nankivell, a not dissimilar character). Blundell also published four crime novels between 1947 and 1950 under the guise of Hilary Landon.
The George Bellairs books were published in the United States, and translated into French and other languages, but writing was first and foremost a hobby for Blundell, who became a popular public speaker; he once said that nobody wanted to hear him talk about banking once they discovered that he wrote detective stories. Because he was so prolific, the quality of his work was variable, but his best novels supply pleasant entertainment.
Blundell gained a staunch supporter in Francis Iles (also known to detective fiction fans as Anthony Berkeley), who had mysteriously abandoned a successful career as a crime writer, and become a highly regarded reviewer. Iles was good at spotting crime-writing talent—he was one of the first critics to identify the potential of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell—and he regarded Bellairs as under-rated. The two men became friendly, and Iles encouraged Blundell to negotiate improved terms with his publisher (whose contract Iles, never a man to sit on the fence, described as “utterly iniquitous…the worst I’ve ever seen”). Blundell, however, seems not to have been a man to drive a hard bargain.
Because he did not depend on writing as his main source of income, he was able to write for pleasure rather than profit, and he continued to produce stories about Littlejohn for those same publishers until the end of his life. Such an unassuming fellow would no doubt have been startled, as well as gratified, to learn that his work is now reaching new readers in the twenty-first century as part of the series of Crime Classics published by the British Library. Yet it is a just reward for a likeable author who, as R.F. Stewart said, “gave pleasure to thousands of readers and retained a faithful following over forty years…For a bank manager that is not a bad epitaph.”
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
Chapter I
The Body by the Gipsy’s Grave
The September morning which greeted the Rev. Ethelred Claplady, M.A. (Cantab.), incumbent of Hilary Magna (and Parva for that matter), made him want to leap and shout. “He slept till break of day and then he awoke and sang”, lisped the vicar to himself, flinging wide the casement, stretching out his thin, pyjama-clad arms as if embracing the whole scene, and standing on his bony tiptoes in a posture which suggested that he was about to launch himself into space. Then, expanding his narrow chest, he took a deep and noisy breath. The sudden inrush of toni
c air made him light-headed and he reeled back a pace, clutching wildly at the edge of his dressing-table for support. Gingerly, he clawed his way back to the bed where, having rested himself, he disentangled his heavy, camel-hair dressing-gown from a confusion of blankets and sheets and, swathing his shivering body in it, mentally cautioned himself against overdoing his breathing exercises. Better go gently, one nostril at a time, as in Yoga. Feeling better, he pattered to the bathroom on the other side of the house. There, he tripped to the window again, closed his eyes and one side of his nose and gently inhaled to the accompaniment of uplifting thoughts. The result was remarkable, for on this wing of the vicarage the air was no longer champagne, but a veritable blast from Gehenna filled with death and corruption. Mr. Claplady’s eyes opened and closed rapidly and wildly, he snuffled like a dog exploring his favourite tree and hastily deflated his lungs, wrestling inwardly to eject the last cubic centimetre of the foulness he had drawn in, and then rushed back to the fresher side of the building.
All around nature spread her rich cloak of autumn colour. Viewed from the vicar’s bedroom, the trees of his garden and the adjacent churchyard framed a magnificent view of the flat fields surrounding the ancient church with its square tower and crooked weathercock; the trim lawns round the old house; cattle standing mutely chewing in the field beyond the hedge; a few rabbits sporting among the laden apple trees in the orchard; and the gardener with his head among the tops of the potatoes which he was disinterring, his huge backside protruding like some monstrous, black toadstool. Widespread fields of corn, ripe and ready for harvest. The whole scene gently softened by a thin mist although the morning was well advanced. The vicar sighed. On this, of all mornings, old Gormley, the general handyman of the village, had decided to empty the clerical cesspool. “And man alone is vile…” mused the Reverend Claplady to his image in the mirror as he shaved in the room to leeward. He hurried, as it was past ten o’clock. He had overslept through late work the night before.
The face which confronted him in the looking-glass was a puzzle to its owner. Day after day, for fifty-two years, the Rev. Ethelred had seen it over and over again as he contorted it and slowly scraped the lather from it, yet he had no idea what it looked like to others. His photographs, taken at parish garden parties, rummages, cricket matches, floral fêtes, when he held the seat of honour in the centre of the front row of his self-conscious looking flock, and the more formal portraits executed for the local press when he became incumbent of the Hilarys, to say nothing of that for his passport (in which he resembled a bogus clergyman fleeing from justice), always came as a shock to him. Somehow, he knew every feature; high, wide forehead with dark, thin hair brushed tightly back, brown eyes, rather close-set in deep sockets beneath bushy black brows, a thin face with a waxy skin and a bony, projecting chin, blue from a quick-growing beard and careless shaving. The mouth was large and generous and the nose straight and regular, a perfect figure 4 in symmetry and style, with wide nostrils and a pink-shot-purple hue, suggestive of indigestion. Funnily enough, Ethelred Claplady could have enumerated every detail of his face and even assembled them all like a strange jigsaw into something like order, but the resulting picture conveyed nothing to him. Every morning, as he confronted his reflection through a froth of shaving-soap, he puzzled over it. The good man’s musings on his own baffling image were interrupted by the sight of two familiar figures engaged in conversation in the field-path which skirted his garden. He could well imagine what was going on. It was Miss Tither, the village busybody, continuing her ceaseless campaign to convert Mr. Haxley, the local atheist, to the orthodox faith.
Miss Tither, “rather long in the tooth”, as the Squire described her, was about fifty years of age and had sufficient means to pay for the domestic help which released her to poke her nose into the affairs of everyone for miles around. She was scorned and snubbed by most, but carried on her secret investigations and remedial campaigns against vice and sin with abhorrent fortitude. The village quailed in fear of her. Husbands, raising their hands or voices against their wives, paused at the thought of her. Scolding wives pitched their nagging in a lower key, lest Miss Tither should be in the offing. The lecherous, adulterous, drunken and blasphemous elements of the population held her in greater fear than the parson and looked carefully over their shoulders lest she be in their tracks. Lovers in the Hilarys never embraced or kissed in fields or coppices under the open sky, but sought the dark depths of woods and spinneys for their ecstasies, lest the all-seeing Titherian eye light on them from the blue or through rifts in the clouds. The ungodly, unpatriotic, radical and dissenting sections of the community gave her a wide berth, for she clung like a leech when she buttonholed them, wasted their time, reviled the views they held dear, and made them wish to strike her dead. Her battle against what she deemed to be sin and shame, however, did not end in ferreting out offences. Had such been the case, she would merely have been regarded as an innocuous busybody, vicariously sinning. Miss Tither was a campaigner as well. Her weapon was her tongue, which she used like a pair of bellows, fanning a spark of a whisper into a consuming fire of chatter, a holocaust of pursuing flame.
From his place at his bedroom window, the vicar could only dimly recognize the distant figures, but his imagination filled in the details, especially those of Miss Tither. She wore a knitted costume which seemed to have expanded in the wash and hung on her bony, tall frame like a sack. The long, shapeless skirt drooped round her thin, grey-stockinged ankles; the sleeves of the jacket had been turned back to give freedom to her ugly wrists and long square hands and fingers, which flapped in energetic gesticulation as she spoke. Grey-streaked dark hair, untidily gathered and tied in a bun perched on the back of the head. From the mass of hair rose a black straw hat, a cross-breed between a bonnet and a straw beehive. A long, narrow face, with a good pink skin; firm, rounded chin; large mouth, with fleshy lips, the nether one projecting aggressively. Large, slightly protruding, cunning, grey eyes, set in dark circles under thin black brows and a broad, low forehead. The nose, however, was the dominating feature of the face. Long, fleshy and slightly tilted at the tip, with narrow nostrils. A sensitive, inquisitive organ, built for foraging and rooting, and always in a condition, judging from its colour and sniffing, of impending cold in the head.
Mr. Haxley, her victim, stood good-naturedly listening to her arguments. A stocky, rotund man, with a square face framed in a short, curly brown beard and with sparkling, grey eyes behind gold-rimmed, bifocal glasses. He was a man of means, although nobody quite knew where his money came from. There were dark surmises, of course, ranging from activities on the turf to dirty work in Buenos Aires, but the truth was that he had successively married and survived three ladies of property and lived on their accumulated fortunes. He rented fifty acres of glebe from Mr. Claplady for shooting purposes (it was good for little else), and twice a week could be seen prowling round with his gun and blazing away at sitting rabbits and perching wood-pigeons, greatly to the disgust of the local gentry, who dubbed him an unsportin’ bounder and passed him by with throaty noises and popping, bile-shot eyes. Mr. Haxley contended that killing outright a stationary quarry was more humane than scaring it into activity and then sending it squealing to cover with a shattered wing or a peppered rump. He was a well-read man, especially in theology. He never attended church, but relished an argument with the vicar, whose knowledge of and beliefs in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion he loved to prove and find wanting. Miss Tither frequently assailed him with tracts and pamphlets which called on him to Turn or Burn, Repent and Be Saved, Beware of the Wrath to Come, and Prepare to Meet Thy God. As the vicar watched them, Miss Tither took from her bag a fistful of papers, waved them excitedly and pressed them between Mr. Haxley’s well-kept hand and the gun he was holding and he accepted the gift with a smile and a courteous bow. The vicar descended to breakfast.
Having attended to his morning mail and pushed aside three bills, four begging letters, an advertisem
ent for unbreakable celluloid clerical collars and a booklet on glandular therapy, the reverend gentleman rose, wiped the grease from his chin and the marmalade from his lips and set forth on his daily round.
He found Gormley shovelling metallic-looking slime from the cesspool into a wheelbarrow. The Parsonage Hinnom was in a ditch at the bottom of the orchard hidden by a screen of lush nettles and towering golden-rod, nurtured to gigantic proportions by the fertilizing refuse. The labourer raised a crafty face, sunbaked and framed in a fringe of shaggy whiskers. His small, cunning eyes shone venomously.
“That fellow did say you could drink the water if so minded,” he exclaimed to himself and spat in the drainage in which he paddled with no concern. This was a recurrent thrust, aimed by Gormley at the vicar every time the job was done. The glib-tongued cesspool salesman who sold Mr. Claplady the outfit had sworn that it would totally consume any solid or liquid meal imposed on it, leaving, as the only by-product, a stream of pure water and the good man had taken him at his word, in spite of the doubts expressed in very forthright language by Isaiah Gormley. This ignoring of his counsel, which was paramount to all in his teeming family circle except his principal daughter-in-law, added to the failure of the scheme which necessitated Gormley’s descending into the miniature Tophet to clear it every six months, was a standing grievance. The vicar was, on this morning, however, in no mood to bandy words.
“Get on with your work, Isaiah. Every time a sheep baahs, it loses a bite, you know,” he said, and then more sternly, “I wish too, that you’d see that the wind is blowing away from the vicarage when you decide to clear out this place. Most unhealthy and unpleasant with the wind in the south-west. Most unpleasant.”
“There’s nuttin’ healthier for man or beast,” came the voice of the aged one from below ground, and his voice, echoed by the metal tank, took on the brassy resonance of some hidden oracle. “Makes things thrive and grow,” boomed out from the earth, as though the cesspool itself were trumpeting its claim to virtue.