What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  By the time Mrs. Butcher was ready to leave, Elsa, strange to say, had not yet returned. ‘If I were you, Mr. Fletcher-Store, I’d be getting quite anxious. Won’t you run down to the cove and see that everything’s all right?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said, uncertainly, ‘I suppose I could.’

  ‘I mean, it’s getting very chilly. She can’t still be bathing.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Mr. Fletcher-Store.

  ‘You mean…? But, Mr. Fletcher-Store—oh, no! You can’t really mean…’

  ‘One doesn’t like to seem to be—well, spying.’

  ‘I could come with you,’ suggested Mrs. Butcher. ‘I would, if you’d like me to. Then it wouldn’t look as if—’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ said Gerald, violently. He covered up quickly: ‘I couldn’t let her have the humiliation of being—well, being found out—with a stranger present.’

  ‘But you don’t know. It may be all quite untrue. If we were to go down, talking quite loudly, so as to make ourselves heard… As you say, horrible if she were, well, quite innocent; and had to suspect you of creeping down, keeping a watch on her.’

  He shook his head heavily. ‘I’m afraid, you know, it’s true enough. I’ve—well, to say it flat out, Mrs. Butcher—I’ve seen them.’ And in reverie, he saw them: strolling together across the wet sands. Elsa amorously gay, swinging the white cap in one hand, her rough brown hair all curls; he with his arm around her, a big chap, dark and good-looking. ‘A dark man, Mrs. Butcher, broad-shouldered, good-looking.’ He confessed, a bit shame-faced, ‘Actually, that’s why I was—sort of fishing about just now, asking you about the people round here.’

  ‘You actually saw her? With this man? But… It could have been just a chance meeting?’

  ‘Then why didn’t she tell me about it? And anyway, this wasn’t any chance meeting. One—well, one knows, doesn’t one?’

  But Mrs. Butcher didn’t know and evidently didn’t want to know. ‘I’d better go,’ she said, ‘and leave you to deal with it. I think you should… Well, I don’t know what to advise, Mr. Fletcher-Store.’ And she got into her little Mini and wobbled off down the rutty lane towards Hartling. To suspect naughty assignations by moonlight was one thing, Mrs. Butcher’s departing rear-light seemed to say, winking in and out like a glowworm as she sped through the night; but to know—that was much too much like horrid real life.

  He went back to the rhododendron bush. Elsa was still lying there as he had left her. He ran to the shed, rinsed out the bucket—no tell-tale salt there—caught up his jacket and returned to her again. As he had hoped, the thick, soft wool lining had prevented weals upon her body and arms from the struggle. He picked her up—strangely leaden, she was, who in life had been so small and energetic: he had to fight back nausea at the feel of her, hanging so limply, yet heavily in his arms—and carried her to the car.

  It was not a very large boot but he had better put her there; not that there was the faintest chance of his meeting anyone, but—well, be on the safe side, leave nothing to chance. A bit of a joke if there really was a lover, waiting for her down at the bay! However, surely he’d have gone home, long ago? Better keep a look out for any footprints, just in case.

  It was slow going, down to the cove. The moonlight obscured and distorted the ruts and holes in the rough cart-way, long unused: the car jerked and jolted—he was terrified of what might be happening to the curled-up body in the boot: what marks might be inflicted that could tell tales. But he got her there at last and parked the car in deep shadow, and got out and stood looking down at the bay.

  He had not been able to spend much time in reconnoitring—she might have thought it suspicious; and now he must work out how best he might get her down to the water, without leaving traces whereby a keen-eyed policeman could observe that he had borne across the sand a burden as heavy as he had carried back. He must pick a way carefully through the rocks that ran down on either side of the cove; and hope that the fast in-coming tide would wash away even such traces as he might leave there.

  First, however, he must run straight across the sand: straight across and then this way and that, a little, as though calling to her, searching for her. The sands would in time be covered by the tide but one might as well take no chances; and it would give him a legitimate reason, moreover, to look behind rocks and in the single small cave, just in case any observer might be lurking there.

  But there was nobody; nor had there been—the sand was unmarked. He recollected that it should not be altogether unmarked—there should be prints of her own progress down to the sea. Well, he would have to make sure that no alarm was given until the tide had covered all—so in fact his artistic work of the past ten minutes would have been wasted. Never mind; there was time enough. He walked along through the ripples to the line of rocks and picked his way up through them, back to the car.

  She was jammed in pretty tight; it took further time getting her out without inflicting scratches and bruises. But he had her at last and staggered with her, slipping and stumbling, back through rocky ways. Slipping and stumbling, carrying his murdered wife in his arms: with the moonlight brilliant, patching with silver the rippled black-treacle of the sea, the great rocks throwing nightmare shadows on the unscuffed sand. His arms ached and his back was nearly breaking, his damaged hand throbbed and bled through its bandages. He was almost physically sick with the strain of it by the time he reached the water’s edge.

  Along this coastline, nothing was simple: the bay was broken across by a row of rocks, at this moment of the tide’s in-coming, already six inches below the water level. He splashed with his burden to a place upon the sea-ward side and there laid the body down—not for all the hounds of hell could he, as once he had proposed to himself, have flung her down or even let her fall; but knelt and turned her softly out of his arms, and let her lie: let her lie there in the shallow water, face down in a cleft of the rocks, with the dark sea lapping over her, soaking her, salting her, weighting down the black woollen bathing dress with the damp drift of the sand, smearing with it her dead face and arms and hands: submerging her, soaking her, silting her up as though all the time for those past hours, she had been lying there. He had put on the tan jacket against the night chill and was now content to lean back against the rock and recover something of his strength before he must lift her once again, dripping now with sand and sea water, and carry her back to the shore. Something of his strength: and something also of his courage. ‘Stop thumping!’ he said to his racing heart, and ‘Be still!’ he said to his churning stomach and fogged, sick, swirling brain. ‘Pull yourself together: it’s all over, it’s finished now.’

  And it was all over, and finished. Nothing now could go wrong: there was no false move he could make. He had but to lift her up, go back to the bay with her, lay her down somewhere above the high-water mark and drive like a mad thing into Hartling—for they had no telephone at home—with the news. The very first informed eye to see her would recognise that she had long been dead.

  Meanwhile, gasping, leaning back, spent, against the rock, while the little ripples washed their evidence over his wife’s dead body, face down in the sand at his feet—he forced himself to run through the whole thing in his mind, just to make sure. Black costume, white cap, all correct: Mrs. Butcher had seen her leave the house in them; the beach-robe would logically be up there somewhere on the dry sand. The bucket of sea-water had been emptied out and rinsed; and who would look for signs of a drowning under a clump of rhododendron bushes at their gate? His own hands and arms were free from scratches and the jacket had kept her unmarked by the struggle before death: anything after death might surely be accounted for by two hours of submersion, abraded by the rocks and the sand. He had examined the boot of the car to see that it held no signs of the rough journey to the bay; with every moment the tide was creeping up over such marks as he had made while he carried her down through the rocks. There was nothing to fear: nothing—even signs of agitation on his par
t would be accounted for by his natural distress. His wife had been seen to leave the house alive and well, he had been in Mrs. Butcher’s company for the following hour and a half; examination would prove that Elsa had been dead during most of that time. And if all else failed, if accident ever came to be doubted—still there was the scapegoat lover who could never clear himself of suspicion because in fact he had no existence. ‘All right,’ he said, grimly muttering to the still body lying at his feet, ‘a failure I may be and you’ve told me it, often enough. But not this time, my dear: not this time!’

  And, sick with the effort of it, yet still resolutely strong, he picked her up and gathered her to him and, holding her in his arms, the white cap cradled against his shoulder like a lover with his lass, stepped out from behind the rock and to the beach.

  Someone was there now. A small thin figure standing uncertainly at the top of the bay, looking out across the sea. And he saw that it was Mrs. Butcher. Well, all the better—just exactly what he needed. Curiosity alert, she would have gone home, thought it all over, crept back to do a bit of Peeping Tom and see what it was all about… And could now be a first-hand witness of the tragedy. He stood there, holding the lolling body cradled in his arms; and put on a face of grief and desperation as he waited for her advance.

  And she advanced: screaming out suddenly, sharp and shrill, flying down the steep slope of the bank above and across the sands towards him: running, screeching—‘You brute, you filthy, cheating, lying beast, pretending you were working late; when all this time…!’ And she was upon him: and as beneath the violence of her assault he stumbled and half fell, spilling the body to the sands, plunged into his breast the kitchen knife she held in her hand.

  And lay there for a moment, spread-eagled across him, tumbled over upon him by the violence of the knife thrust; and raised herself and looked down: and screamed out: ‘Fred? Oh, my God, it isn’t Fred! Oh, God, what have I done?’ And beat at the blood-drenched breast and cried: ‘But you told me it was Fred. You said he was there with her every night, making love to her you said; you said you knew. A big man, you said, dark and handsome—well, isn’t that Fred, what other man is there round here that looks like that?—only Fred.’ And as the red life-blood ebbed away, sinking into the white fleece, oozing out through the gashed tan leather above his heart, she sobbed: ‘And this is Fred’s jacket. The minute I saw it, I knew it, this—this horrible jacket of Fred’s…’

  As Mrs. Fletcher-Store had long ago said, Mr. Fletcher-Store should have been more careful what he bought off strangers in pubs. And meanwhile…

  Meanwhile: hic jacet. Here he lies.

  15

  Murder Game

  THE OLD MAN WAS simply delighted to make his acquaintance. ‘You’re most welcome, my dear boy; not often I see a fresh face, these days, not one that I like, anyway—and you remind me a bit of myself when I was a lad. You’re staying, I hope?’ All about them stretched wide lawns, velvety green in the bright spring sunshine; over the shining flower-beds, men were working with spud and hoe. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘The Gemminy case,’ said Giles.

  ‘Yes, well you know, I’m pretty hot on a murder puzzle; I’ve heard a lot of confessions in my time.’ He thought about it. ‘Gemminy. The solicitor? The name’s familiar but my memory’s all to pieces, these days. A good chap, I seem to recall?’ His old mind searched back over recent months. ‘I do remember something in the papers, that brought the name back. Sealed Room Mystery, didn’t they call it?’

  ‘He was in his office, bolts drawn inside the door, window broken—glass still vibrating: but four storeys up. He’d been strangled and then tied to his chair and then stabbed. The wound so fresh that it was still bleeding when the police broke in. But nobody in the room.’

  ‘Well, my goodness!’ He hooked his heavy, veined old hand into the young man’s arm. ‘Give us a haul up this slope and we’ll sit on a bench under the mulberry tree—not many gardens nowadays can boast a mulberry, can they?—and you can tell me all about it. I’ve forgotten, I forget everything nowadays, so you can start from scratch.’ And his bright eyes shone. ‘Test me! We’ll play a sort of game of Hunt the Thimble—Hunt the Murderer, if you like. Tell me the outlines, tell it to me as the police will have got it, clues, bits of evidence—not necessarily the truth, you know, but as it came to them. Let me work it out and see if I can beat them to it…’

  Now that it had come, a sort of horror grew in Giles’ mind, a sort of sickness at the thought of going over it all yet again, of dragging Helen’s name again through the blood and the terror and the doubt. But they had said to talk about it as much as he could, to get it out of his system, to try to forget. Try to forget me, Helen had said, try to forget… And so…

  And so they came to the bench; Giles Carberry sat with the old man there and told him the story of the Gemminy case.

  Old Gemminy’s office: a bare, square room, not very large. Strong, heavy door. Opposite the door, the single window—one large pane of glass, the glass broken to form a jagged hole, perhaps two feet in diameter. A little broken glass on the floor beneath the sill; much more in the deserted warehouse yard below. As Giles had said, the window four storeys up.

  And at the desk, between window and door, Thomas Gemminy, solicitor dealing largely in criminal matters; seventy years old. Tied to the chair with a length of cord torn from the blind, tipped sideways, half asprawl across the paper-strewn desk, staring with empurpled face towards the door; his own silk handkerchief twisted about his neck and, for good measure, a knife thrust between the shoulder-blades; only a little blood, but the wound still oozing. The paper knife, which had always lain on his desk, not there.

  And at the door, as the police came pounding up the stairs, Rupert Chester hammering, double-fisted, shouting out that there was smoke coming from under the door, that Uncle Gem wouldn’t answer…

  ‘Rupert Chester?’

  ‘Rupert was one of his wards. We were all his wards—he constituted himself guardian to all sorts of children he came across with—well, with unhappy backgrounds. You must remember that? Anyway, I’ll tell you later. But Rupert was one of them.’

  ‘All right. Well…’ The old man considered it, forming the picture in his mind’s eye. ‘The general scene? The buildings opposite?’

  Giles Carberry drew angles on the gravelled path. ‘This is the office block; big old house, actually—we took up the whole top floor of it. Stairs, no lift. No one else working there of course on a Saturday afternoon—and the day of the World Cup Final, what’s more. Street here. These are Rupert’s rooms and mine, looking across the street to the police station opposite. Uncle Gem’s the end room, the corner room; only one window and that overlooked the warehouse yard, at right angles to the street.’

  ‘Narrow yard?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t start on rope bridges and pulleys and things from the opposite roof; or ledges or painters’ cradles and the rest of the gimmicks. They’ve all been considered and counted out.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ said the old man like a child playing a game.

  ‘Well, but these are facts, not evidence which might or might not be true. And the fact is that no one could have got out of the jagged hole in that window, fifty feet up.’

  ‘All right. Well?’ He twiddled his gnarled old thumbs. ‘This Rupert Chester? Another of old Gemminy’s wards, you say?’

  ‘Wards, adopted children, whatever you like to call us. His “Crickets”. Rupert and me and Helen; and lots more of us, of course…”

  A good chap, the old man had said; and so indeed he had been, Thomas Gemminy—good, kind and compassionate. Thrown by his work a great deal among criminals, his heart had bled for innocent families, left to the mercy of an undiscriminating world. Financial help, help in finding new jobs, new homes, often even new lives far away from England where the past would not catch up on you… ‘We used to think that the ones he encouraged to emigrate were the ones with really dangerous
pasts,’ said Giles. ‘But of course we never knew; none of us ever knew about the others, he said it would not have been fair.’ While his wife had lived, his own home, even, had been open to pitiful children, often too young to know, themselves, what their parentage had been. The Gemminy Crickets, he called them: one of his foolish, gentle jokes. There was a Gemminy Crickets Trust, to which all those who had passed through his hands might turn for help in time of need; his will left everything to the trust. (‘So no clues there; you can leave money out of it.’) He had been to great lengths to cover their tracks, even from themselves; (not with Giles, however—Giles had been old enough to remember that night, the night his mother and father had been hacked to death by the madman with an axe—it was not only the children of criminals, Thomas Gemminy befriended: there had been the victims too.)

  Of them all, in his old age three had been most close to him—Giles, Rupert, Helen: Giles and Rupert because they had qualified and gone into partnership with him, and Helen, his pet, his darling, last to be adopted in his own home before his wife had died: Helen with her great eyes looking out so bravely from beneath the cloud of her soft, dark hair…

  ‘His Talking Orchid he used to call her,’ said Giles. ‘But she’s very tough, really. Spent all her life with us boys doing everything we did, and most things better…’ The smile died out of his eyes. ‘All that emerged at the trial.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ said the old man again. ‘Let me guess.’ He eyed the young man shrewdly. ‘You were in love with her?’

  There came upon him the sickness, the stab of sickness and pain that came whenever he thought too closely about Helen; but he said, keeping his tone light: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘And Rupert?’

  ‘Rupert too.’

  ‘Which did she favour?’

  Rupert, gay, sweet-tempered Rupert with his smiling blue eyes and his heavy, curling auburn hair, so ruthlessly brushed flat only to come curling up again… Himself, dark, slender, serious, who could yet be so full of jokes and laughter… ‘One day it was one of us, one day the other; she just made hay with us. And then when this third party came along—’