The Devil at Saxon Wall

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘“Only dad and my mother, sir,” I said. So with that he crawled out and hopped it inside quicker than I can tell you, and then he made us promise solemn not to let on he was there till he gave us the word.

  ‘“Where’s the room my brother died in, I wonder?” he said, kind of under his breath. “I’ll sleep in it. By gum, I’ll sleep in it till what’s wrong has justice done to it,” he said. Then he pokes about in all the rooms till he finds the one he reckoned his brother died in, and made that his bedroom, and that’s all I know.’

  ‘Oh, no, it isn’t, Tom. Not by a very long way,’ said Mrs Bradley gently.

  ‘It’s all I’m going to tell,’ said Tom. Mrs Bradley poked him in the ribs with a forefinger like an iron bolt. Tom yelped, and moved out of reach.

  ‘Now don’t be foolish, child,’ she said indulgently. ‘Of course you’re going to tell me, unless you want your mother and father hanged.’

  ‘What do you want to know, anyway? I’ve told the police all I can. I don’t see why it’s any concern of yours.’

  ‘Did you always steal biscuits from the dining-room and take them upstairs with you?’ asked Mrs Bradley.

  ‘No, of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I didn’t. That’s why not.’

  ‘Don’t become hysterical, Tom,’ said Mrs Bradley, gently. Tom’s high flush subsided. His face grew set and obstinate. ‘I’ll tell you why you didn’t, if you like,’ she continued. ‘You couldn’t.’

  ‘Oh, couldn’t I?’ His tone had become brutally offensive, but Mrs Bradley bore with it patiently.

  ‘No, you couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You usually went to bed before Mr Middleton retired.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot,’ sneered Tom.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bradley complacently. ‘The dining-room door wouldn’t open on the night Mr Middleton was killed.’

  The sullen expression vanished from Tom’s face. He went white. Mrs Bradley continued cheerfully: ‘So you went to the window and hoped you could climb in there. Unfortunately Mr Middleton was in the room. You saw him through the window, didn’t you? It was dark—as dark as it gets at this time of the year—and it was his white face against the cushion that you saw.’

  Tom was sweating. His eyes were large with fear. He bellowed hoarsely:

  ‘I never did it! I helped ’em chase the parson and I see him fall off his bike, but I never done no murder!’

  His face was distorted with terror. Mrs Bradley reached out suddenly and clawed his wrist. Pushing back the shirt-cuff, she laid her yellow fingers on his pulse and looked at her watch.

  His attention distracted, Tom watched her nervously. She could feel that he was trembling, but he was in command of himself. He was sweating like an overdriven horse. Mrs Bradley released him. Then she said:

  ‘Listen, Tom. Apart from any question of whether you yourself killed Mr Middleton, you realise that it will go very hard with your parents if the murderer is not discovered, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Tom, but he volunteered no further information.

  There were other questions which Mrs Bradley would have liked to put to him, but she realised that it would be wiser to defer them. She walked away briskly, in spite of the fierce afternoon heat. When she was almost opposite the Long Thin Man, she seated herself on a gate, took out notebook and pencil and wrote swiftly and at considerable length.

  Then she sighed, replaced the writing materials, lowered herself very carefully from the gate, and entered the yard of the inn.

  Richard had nine measurements of footprints, five kinds of soil, and a collection of seventeen finger-prints, all duly initialled and ready for her inspection.

  ‘The women don’t seem to like me to measure their feet,’ he complained. Mrs Bradley bought him ginger beer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Have you ever considered how well, how intimately, you must know a man to murder him’

  J. C. MASTERMAN

  An Oxford Tragedy.

  … ‘the best person to murder was a friend; and, in default of a friend, which is an article one cannot always command, an acquaintance; because in either case, on first approaching his subject, suspicion would be disarmed….’

  THOMAS DE QUINCEY

  On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

  AMONG RICHARD’S MANY admirable qualities those which ranked highest in Jones’ estimation were his willingness to go to bed at the appointed hour, and his infinite capacity for amusing himself. At about eight o’clock each evening he announced his intention of doing his exercises, and, those performed to his satisfaction, he would go into the kitchen for his bath, the water for which was provided with amusing regularity by Mrs Passion and her pressed men, and then, having eaten his supper and brushed his teeth, he would put himself to bed.

  Mrs Bradley had further endeared herself to him by teaching him how to throw a knife. A fine, heavy weapon having been discovered, among other treasures, at the Long Thin Man, Richard spent endless time in the garden, with a target made by Passion, patiently practising.

  ‘He’ll kill himself,’ said Jones apprehensively, the first time. He picked up the keen-edged heavy weapon and balanced it upon his palm. Mrs Bradley shook her head and cackled.

  ‘Not he,’ she said. Then she took the knife away from Jones and, with what looked like a negligent flick of the wrist, sent it flying through the air. It stuck, quivering, in the centre of Richard’s target. She drew Jones into the cottage, whilst Richard went to draw out the knife from its mark.

  ‘I can’t get it out,’ he cried. Mrs Passion ran to help him.

  ‘Mrs Passion is strong,’ said Mrs Bradley, watching. Jones nodded.

  ‘Strong as a good many men,’ he said. ‘Are you thinking about the murder?’

  ‘I am,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘It was an interesting murder in its way, you know.’

  ‘You haven’t seen Hallam again, I take it?’ Jones inquired.

  Mrs Bradley shook her head, led the way into the sitting-room and seated herself on the settee. Jones was using it at nights, since her arrival, as his bed. She had protested at first, and had suggested that she should book a room at the Long Thin Man.

  ‘Mr Hallam’s is a curious and interesting case,’ she said. ‘He will find in the end that it does not pay to be at loggerheads with the village, I think.’

  ‘He always has been, though,’ said Jones. ‘Stops all their amusements, and so on.’

  ‘He may have annoyed the people before, but not, I think, to this extent, dear child,’ said Mrs Bradley. She smoothed the sleeve of her jumper, and shook her head.

  ‘What’s happened now to make things worse?’ asked Jones.

  ‘If you went to church, you would know,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘The vicar, in spite of everything that can be said to him on the subject, refuses to pray for rain.’

  ‘Oh, does he? Odd in a parson, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, he finds the going rather heavy, I’m afraid. He is accused, definitely, by the villagers, of being in league with the devil, as I suppose you know,’ said Mrs Bradley, carefully avoiding a direct answer to the question.

  ‘I know they call him Old Satan, for he told me that himself,’ said Jones. He laughed, remembering the adder-hunters. ‘But what’s the connection in this instance?’

  ‘The lack of rain forces them into the belief that evil is triumphant in the village.

  “God comes down in the rain,

  And the crops grow tall”—

  you remember.’

  Jones nodded. ‘I see. He absolutely refuses to pray for rain, therefore he doesn’t want the rain. Therefore he is on the side of evil. Primitive, but, from their point of view, reasonable, I suppose. But I can’t understand it. Definitely, I thought, he did pray for rain. All the parsons do. Besides——’

  Mrs Bradley, gazing at the picture of a blushing girl with a riding-crop in her hand—the jacket of Jones’ last novel—sighed and sai
d: ‘It’s difficult for him. He wants the shortage to become so acute that the people have to go to him for water.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Jones. ‘Then the faithful will get it—those who repent, and so forth—and the unregenerate will go without until such time as they are brought to a state of grace. Is that his idea? By Jove, you know, I respect Hallam. He’s got some pluck. It’s certainly a scheme, if he can only guard his well, but I am under the impression—I believe I had the idea—— Oh, well!’ He paused, and then said suddenly: ‘Good heavens! Then that’s what old Mrs Fluke was after! Fouling his well with frogs!’

  ‘Yes. He told me about the window, by the way,’ said Mrs Bradley. Jones did not attach significance to the fact that she had not concurred in his theories as to Hallam’s behaviour if the villagers had to go to him for water. He murmured the words ‘Rose-window’ under his breath. Mrs Bradley lifted her head.

  ‘I wonder why you call it that?’ she said. ‘It isn’t a rose-window at all. It’s a late thirteenth-century quatrefoil. He removed the glass because it happens to be extremely valuable. There isn’t so much thirteenth-century glass still in England that he wanted to risk having the quatrefoil panes smashed by youths from the village.’

  ‘But what I can’t understand,’ said Jones very earnestly, ‘is how on earth he could have managed without a ladder.’

  ‘Who said he managed without a ladder? Of course he had a ladder, and of course he had a light. Your old Mrs Fluke even reports that he had horns and a tail as well, according to Mrs Passion.’

  ‘Well, why did his servant Nao tell me lies about the ladder then? Nao said distinctly that the vicar climbed up the wall. I thought it rather odd, but couldn’t contradict him. I wonder what idea was in his head? Or do you think he wasn’t there at all?’

  ‘Nao is possibly a student of Sigmund Freud,’ said Mrs Bradley, with her saurian smile.

  ‘But so are you,’ said Jones. ‘So, even, once, was I.’

  Mrs Bradley cackled and waved a claw-like hand. ‘I know, I know, child. But ladders, in the Freudian sense, have no significance for you and me, except when our patients dream about them.’

  ‘You mean——Oh! well, it doesn’t matter. But—a Japanese?’ said Jones.

  Mrs Bradley wagged her head.

  ‘Son of a progressive, and, some say, an enlightened nation,’ she observed in her dove-like accents.

  Jones, at a loss, harked back to the subject of old Mrs Fluke.

  ‘Did she really tell Mrs Passion that the vicar had horns and a tail?’

  ‘Nothing so depravedly Dickensian,’ replied the little old woman. ‘What she did say was in the form of a striking, beautiful, and, so far as I am aware, original metaphor. She said, according to Mrs Passion, who has, when she pleases, the supreme gift of accurate verbal reporting:

  ‘“Parson be humbled and parson be exalted by the shadow of the long thin man.”’

  Jones thought it over, but it conveyed nothing to him. Changing the subject again, he said:

  ‘You talked about the murder being interesting. To me it’s about as interesting as that dream one gets of being in a tangled forest with no possible way out.’

  ‘I have never experienced that dream,’ said Mrs Bradley with her devilish cackle. ‘In any case, the dream and the murder are not analogous.’

  ‘Consider the facts,’ said Jones. ‘Oh, and the latest—have you seen our village constable?—he’s full of it—which, I suppose, strictly and police-forcedly speaking, he ought not to be!——’

  ‘You mean about the poker?’

  ‘The poker. Yes.’

  ‘Too light?’

  ‘Quite a bit, according to their calculations.’

  ‘No finger-prints?’

  ‘Plenty of finger-prints. Mrs Tebbutt’s. It’s one of the things about the murder which acts for her or against her, you know. There hasn’t been a fire in the house since the end of April, therefore the prints are where she has picked up the poker to clean it. Therefore, the prints may not mean anything. Contrariwise, they may. On the other hand, wouldn’t she have wiped them off, if they were made when she dealt the blow?’

  ‘That poker should not incriminate Mrs Tebbutt,’ said Mrs Bradley placidly. ‘It would need a much stronger person than Mrs Tebbutt to kill a man with a light poker by smashing his head in. It must have been a madman’s blow.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ argued Jones, ‘no one could have used that poker, wiped his own finger-prints off it and then imposed those of Mrs Tebbutt. Hers were not superimposed, you see. They are the only prints on the poker at all.’

  ‘Come, come,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘If you are going to argue that way, surely you can think of at least two people who would have had both time and opportunity to persuade Mrs Tebbutt to pick up the poker after they had wiped their own prints from it.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Tebbutt and the son?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, yes, there is that. I wonder whether you ought to tell the inspector?’

  ‘He has probably thought of it for himself. The police aren’t half as idiotic as they have to appear in stories, child, you know.’

  Jones laughed.

  ‘But there is another possibility,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Imagine it for yourself. You go into the dining-room prepared to murder a fairly active man.’

  ‘Yes, but Middleton was not in the dining-room. He went upstairs.’

  ‘We have only the Tebbutts’ word for that, and Mrs Tebbutt did not tell me about the hue and cry that night.’

  ‘Then the Tebbutts are implicated!’ cried Jones.

  ‘If they are not, then they were most conveniently blind and deaf, from the murderer’s point of view. Consider, child. If the Tebbutts are speaking the truth, and the man had gone to bed, he came downstairs again, either at the murderer’s instigation, or, if by accident, at the very time when he could most conveniently be put to death.’

  ‘How—conveniently?’

  ‘If the Tebbutts are innocent, the murderer had to get away before the house was locked up for the night. That is to say, on that particular evening he had to leave between half-past ten and a quarter to eleven.’

  ‘Only a quarter of an hour. Yes, I see what you mean,’ said Jones. ‘The murder had to be premeditated, and he had to know exactly when Middleton was going upstairs to bed.’

  ‘And how to get him down again. The man was certainly in the dining-room when he was murdered. The question is: was he Middleton?’

  ‘Now, now! The body was identified, remember. Perhaps the murderer was somebody whom Middleton wouldn’t receive in his bedroom, so he had to go downstairs to him——’

  ‘But that implies that the murderer came as a visitor, and the Tebbutts swear there were no visitors. No one ever came to the house. It was Middleton’s express command. Middleton was afraid of somebody. From what Tom Tebbutt told me, there can be no doubt of that. He had been in the village a fortnight, and nobody knew it. He was in hiding at the house.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘The Tebbutts suggested that he wanted to find out who had murdered his brother.’

  ‘But that was only a theory of my own, that Hanley Middleton had been murdered.’

  ‘It is a theory very widely held in the village, child.’

  ‘Then why on earth wasn’t something done about it when it happened?’

  ‘I suppose it was nobody’s business, and the doctor gave the certificate without any bother.’

  ‘That’s another thing I can’t understand,’ said Jones. ‘Surely, even an old man getting past his job wouldn’t have thought it was peritonitis if it was really arsenic or something.’

  ‘What makes you think of arsenic, child?’

  ‘Well, I take it Middleton was poisoned.’

  Mrs Bradley chuckled.

  ‘I have an odd feeling that it was not the wrong diagnosis but the wrong man, you know, child,’ she
said. ‘What about the symptoms of Seaman Pike?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jones, frowning, ‘I know. But, seriously, about that poker.’

  ‘Yes, what more about the poker, child?’

  ‘Well, (according to the village policeman,) the inspector, his sergeant, the police doctor, Mortmain and the Chief Constable present a united front on the subject of that poker. They don’t believe that anybody but the most exceptionally powerful man could have smashed in Middleton’s head the way it was smashed in by using that particular poker.’

  Mrs Bradley nodded.

  ‘I see. That would fit in nicely.’

  ‘What would?’

  ‘The idea that there were two pokers, one with which the murder was accomplished, and another which was merely dabbled about in the blood and brains and left for the police to find.’

  ‘Well, but——’

  ‘What, child?’

  ‘Mrs Tebbutt’s prints were on the poker,’ said Jones.

  ‘They were.’

  ‘Yes, well, then.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Her black eyes were bright as a bird’s.

  ‘She killed him with a heavy poker——Oh, no! I see. Husband and son stuff again.’

  Mrs Bradley sighed.

  ‘It was not ever thus with you,’ she said. ‘You used to have imagination. Now, I suppose, through writing those dreadful novels of yours, you’ve become earth-bound, a mere elemental, a curse to yourself and a menace to contemporary fiction.’

  ‘I am a reformed character, if you only knew,’ said Jones. ‘The next thing I’m going to write is a nice story about murder. Murder’s wholesome, murder is.’

  ‘Did you ever read Goblin Market?’ asked Mrs Bradley.