The Devil at Saxon Wall

by Gladys Mitchell

  Mrs Pike was reading the Bible. She was tracing the print word by word, and was making very slow progress. She mumbled each word as she came to it, but it seemed as though she must have forgotten the beginning of each sentence before she reached the end of it, she read so very slowly. She curtsied to Mrs Bradley and then to Jones, and feverishly dusted chairs. Mrs Bradley reached out a skinny claw for the testament, Mrs Pike watching her the while, a slightly idiotic grin on her pale long face.

  ‘It be that there story of Jonah and the whale,’ she said. ‘Parson told us about it once, and I made him show me the place it was writ in the book, and marked it with a pansy off of Pike’s grave.’

  She looked at them with her timid, deprecating smile. ‘It do be a nice tale, that one, don’t it, now?’ she said.

  Mrs Bradley turned back a couple of pages and began to read it aloud to her.

  ‘Thank you so kindly,’ said Mrs Pike, when at last Mrs Bradley put down the book. ‘And he really got out again safe? It do seem wonderful, don’t it? Out again safe! It do seem wonderful, don’t it? Is it true, mam, do you suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Bradley readily. ‘Of course it’s true. Jonah was a good man. He was a brave man, too. He turned his back on his duty at first, you know, but he was ready to give his life to save the poor sailors, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Ay, sure enough,’ said Mrs Pike. Her watery eyes clouded over. ‘I don’t want to go in no whale’s belly,’ she said, ‘and never get out no more.’ Her lower lip trembled.

  ‘No, no. And of course you won’t,’ Mrs Bradley reassured her. ‘All the whales are made with small throats now, so that nobody can ever be swallowed any more.’

  ‘Just like the rainbow?’ said Mrs Pike, entirely restored to cheerfulness.

  ‘Yes. And a pity it is that we don’t get some rain,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I suppose we can hardly remember a drier summer than this.’

  ‘Time I was a gal,’ said Mrs Pike, suddenly garrulous, ‘we had a mort of dry summers. Ah, and time I come to be married, too.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Mrs Bradley, adroitly, ‘you were married in Mr Middleton’s time, I think?’

  ‘That’s it. Time little Henry was born. It was parson brought my poor Pike up to it. He didn’t want to marry me; he said as how I was a Natural, he did. And I beant no Natural. I be an honest woman, because parson did cause him to make me one in front of all the village, and me in a white starched dress and my orange blossom, which Martha Passion never had, no, not in all her life she never did. And then at first if I didn’t think it were all no good at all, when my little Henry died.’

  ‘Died?’ exclaimed Jones, glancing at Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Died,’ repeated Mrs Pike, nodding her long head. Her lugubrious expression brightened, however, to a self-congratulatory smile, as she added triumphantly:

  ‘But I went over to Mr Middleton by moonshine, and he telled me to go right along to old Mother Fluke’s cottage with my little dead baby in my arms. And I laid him on her kitchen table, pushing away they feathers where her had been plucking two fowls, and I did bid her bring un to life again, like witch did to that there Samuel in the Book. So her promised I her would do it. Her never wanted to do it, but Mr Middleton, he did command her so.

  ‘“Baby may have a bit of a different look about him,” her says, “and he’ll not favour that husband of yours too much,” her says, “that’s off to foreign parts out of Southampton Water and tells me he ain’t coming back no more to you,” her says, “but for all that, you shall have baby again,” her says. “Come you back herealong in three days’ time,” her says, “and you shall have the little dear crying in your arms again,” her says. And, sure enough, so it was! But I was to keep him from harm and not to let him be overlooked by anybody, for fear he should die again. So I kept him as close as I knew, for fear she might overlook him herself, like, her wicked old tricks being what they are.’

  ‘Then your husband was a sailor, Mrs Pike?’ said Jones.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And he went away to sea, and you have never set eyes on him since then?’

  Mrs Bradley leaned forward.

  ‘What I can’t quite understand,’ she said, ‘is how your husband managed to rejoin his ship when he was so very ill.’

  Mrs Pike looked frightened.

  ‘He be dead. I know he be dead,’ she asserted. ‘I be a respectable widow woman, I don’t trouble what they say.’

  ‘But he was very ill, wasn’t he?’ Mrs Bradley persisted.

  ‘Oh, he groaned terrible,’ said Mrs Pike. Her face brightened again. ‘He groaned more terrible than what I ever heard anybody groan in my life. And he screamed terrible, too, towards the finish. Oh, how he did scream, to be sure! You’d have thought it was a pig-killing going on.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘And at last you thought he ought to have the doctor?’

  ‘Well, old Mother Fluke, her done the best by him, but he were too strong for her, were that old devil and all.’

  ‘What old devil?’ asked Jones, tremendously excited by what he took to be a reference to the murderer Middleton.

  ‘Why, that old devil inside that tear him and make him scream and moan,’ said Mrs Pike, surprised. ‘I got old Mrs Fluke to him first, but she couldn’t do nothing for him. She told I to call in doctor, else I never would have troubled. And doctor, he seemed to think I did ought to have called him in before.’

  ‘He really was pretty bad, then?’ Jones asked sympathetically. Mrs Pike wagged her head.

  ‘Bad as bad can be. But when doctor came the second time, never a sight or sound of him left.’

  ‘But how on earth could that be?’ Jones inquired.

  ‘’Twasn’t on earth, you see, sir. ’Twere in hell,’ Mrs Pike informed him with a terrifyingly triumphant smile. ‘Oh, he were rare and wicked, were Pike. When sailors be bad they be the worst of any, sailors be. And the old devil, I reckon he were one too many for him at the last. Went clean away from me he did, and the doctor chumbling and mumbling at me as though I wouldn’t have kept him if I could. But there! It was just who’d a’ thought it, and when Mr Hanley come to die of his operation so sudden afterwards, there weren’t a mort of people worriting themselves about Pike, you may be sure. Operation and everything he had, but nothing couldn’t save him, and him and Pike dancing hand in hand round Satan’s maypole at this very day, because old Mrs Fluke she looked in the dark glass and see ’em, too and all she did, and nowt to be seen in the village but a lumbering old cartload of turmuts and that, so you wouldn’t hardly have knowed Old Satan from an honest waggoner.’

  Back in Jones’ cottage, he and Mrs Bradley looked at one another.

  ‘Pretty clear case here,’ said Jones.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ asked Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Oh, it’s obvious, I should say. Mrs Middleton died, Middleton went crazy and murdered this chap Pike, and the Fluke-Passion partnership found out about it. They began to blackmail Middleton, so he went off, and as everybody was under the impression that he had been dead some time as a result of the operation, that finished things. Then Mrs Passion worked her kid into the Middleton inheritance, palmed off the little Middleton on to Mrs Pike, and now Hanley’s come home again.’

  ‘Hm!’ said Mrs Bradley. She seemed about to add to this observation when Mrs Passion entered, so she contented herself with murmuring in her beautiful voice:

  ‘“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Jones, when Mrs Passion had cleared the table, ‘how did he manage to get Pike up to the house to be murdered?’

  ‘We must discover that. Mrs Fluke would know, but I doubt whether she will tell us. Mrs Pike did tell us, I think, but too much after the manner of the Delphic oracle to be of much assistance.’

  ‘She must tell us. Besides, if we knew all about the murders of Mrs Middleton and Pike, it might give us a clue to t
he identity of this unknown chap,’ said Jones. ‘I ought to have known that there had only ever been one Middleton, and not two,’ he added thoughtfully. He was remembering his conversation with Passion on the village green that time when he had heard from the Harpers and Mrs Corbett about the exchanging of the babies. ‘Passion recited his little piece about Carswell Middleton as though it were something which he’d had to learn on pain of death. I knew at the time that there was something fishy going on. Now we know what that was.’

  ‘There are fishier things to come,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a hoot of unfeeling laughter. ‘By the way, I am off to Kensington tomorrow to interview the late Mrs Middleton’s mother. I want to find out whether she ever suspected that Hanley might not have died when he was supposed to have done so. And I want to refute Mrs Tebbutt’s incredible statement that she was once in service there.’

  Mrs Passion entered at this point of the conversation, and observed that as the dewpond on Guthrum Down was failing rapidly, she thought that Richard would be compelled to forgo his daily bath.

  ‘Once a week, if not more, we’ll go up and fetch it down to him,’ she said. ‘Say that Dick Landlaw what he will.’

  ‘Who is Dick Landlaw?’ Mrs Bradley inquired.

  ‘He calls himself a shepherd,’ returned Mrs Passion, eyeing with stolid hatred the little old woman whose presence in the house she openly resented. ‘But the only thing he’ll ever nourish in his bosom is a viper, not a lamb.’ She turned to Jones and added: ‘And that mother-in-law of Passion’s to be ill-wishing the blessed fairy water up above the way she is! By Woden and Thodon I curse her, her and all that she has! May her bones stand out through the skin and her eyes turn black on her like the blackest midnight, and all the ants in the parish eat her alive on Saint Swithin’s day if it rains!’

  ‘That’s a remarkably picturesque curse,’ said Mrs Bradley, writing it out in her neat, illegible script. ‘Do they still swear by Thor and Odin hereabouts?’

  But Mrs Passion’s face was expressionless as ever, although she snorted when she reached the door. Mrs Bradley allowed her to get her hand actually on the doorknob, and then inquired:

  ‘By the way, was it dark or daylight when Pike was taken up to Neot House beneath the turnips?’

  Mrs Passion turned and surveyed her doubtfully. Then she answered:

  ‘It was early in the morning. Very bad all night he must have been, and frit that poor daft wife of his with his moanings and carryings-on, so she went for the doctor early—so she told that wicked old mother-in-law of Passion’s—and the doctor found him gone.’

  ‘He really was ill, I suppose?’

  ‘Ah! And that wicked old woman, she tooken the devil out of him and put him in Mr Hanley that died in Saxon Wall.’

  ‘Extraordinarily interesting,’ said Mrs Bradley, making rapid hieroglyphics. ‘And do you believe that story, Mrs Passion?’

  ‘As much as I believe any of her wicked old lies, I do,’ said Mrs Passion briefly. She looked at Jones, who nodded at her to go.

  But Mrs Bradley said quickly:

  ‘One moment, Mrs Passion. Who was it tried the arsenic on your husband every time? You remember how extremely ill he was?’

  Mrs Passion fixed her lack-lustre gaze on the wall above Mrs Bradley’s head and replied, in her dead voice:

  ‘Madam, that Passion eats the berries off the hedge like all the other childer. That simple he is, don’t know what fills belly and what pi’sons blood.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘By the way, has Mrs Tebbutt ever been an attendant in a mental hospital, do you know?’

  ‘Our Eliza work at an asylum? Nay, indeed she never did. That’s that there husband of hers that you be thinking about.’

  ‘“Even valerian,”’ quoted Mrs Bradley, to Jones’ mystification and interest, ‘“even valerian doesn’t seem to soothe him.” And that’s how the Tebbutts met Hanley Middleton, child,’ she added, when Mrs Passion had gone.

  ‘In a lunatic asylum?’ said Jones.

  Mrs Bradley nodded.

  ‘And have blackmailed him ever since they helped him to escape; I can’t prove it yet, but it must be a fact, you know. Think it out, and see, and then find the motive and the corpse, dear child.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘And only Dr Pritchard and I knew that Laura’s little son was as brown as a coffee berry.’

  HUBERT S. BANNER

  The Gamellan.

  ‘WELL, LET’S SEE what we’ve got,’ said Jones upon Mrs Bradley’s return from Kensington. ‘What do you take to be our starting point?’

  ‘That Hanley, according to the late Mrs Middleton’s mother, was a most abnormal young man.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Yes. Very interesting. I wish you had been there with me. We could have compared notes. She did not realise the significance of what she told me. That was obvious. She gave me a remarkably complete sketch of a melancholiac with marked homicidal—perhaps suicidal—tendencies, and described a most extraordinary ménage à trois with which she and her husband had to cope up to the time when Middleton cast off Mrs Passion, who was then Martha Fluke, and brought Mrs Middleton back here to Neot House.’

  ‘One thing,’ said Jones. ‘How was it that no one identified the dead body as that of Pike and not Middleton?’

  ‘No relatives appear to have come to the funeral, and, according to Mrs Middleton’s mother—who’s had a terrible time, poor woman—the coffin was screwed down by the time she arrived, and she was not allowed to see the body at all.’

  ‘I see. Smart work, but a bit suspicious-looking if anybody had had the gumption to see it.’

  ‘True, child. Of course, Mrs Pike had to be kept away from the body.’

  ‘Because it was her husband.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we don’t know it was her husband, do we? It’s only what we suspect. We haven’t proved anything, you know.’

  ‘No. But we shall, I daresay, when the police have exhumed the body.’

  ‘You are giving these theories to the police, then?’

  ‘Yes, child.’ There was a short pause, and then she added: ‘By the way, at about twenty minutes after the murder was committed, Mrs Passion, you think, was in this cottage.’

  ‘Think? I know! Good heavens, I’ve seen the woman daily for weeks. I couldn’t mistake her if I tried,’ said Jones. ‘You referred to this before.’

  ‘You’ve seen her suitably clad, and you recognise her step. Remember that on the occasion we are referring to she was wearing a raincoat, that rather conspicuous and quite shady hat, and a pair of men’s boots.’

  ‘Oh, but, look here, I know it was Mrs Passion! I’d swear to her in a court of law if necessary.’

  ‘That’s what Mrs Passion is depending on, dear child.’

  ‘You don’t mean that someone else visited me on the night of the murder?’

  ‘I believe so, but that again we cannot prove at present. I think it possible, in spite of what you say about recognising her, because otherwise it would be so extremely odd in her to visit you like that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She’s a funny customer,’ said Jones. ‘But what about Mrs Pike as a suspect?’

  ‘Possible, if the dead man had been Middleton, but he wasn’t. Besides, I expect she has an alibi. Passion was ill, and I am prepared to assert that Mrs Passion asked her to go in and keep an eye on him. Oh, something else that will interest you. I really believe that we are in a position to be able to prove whether little Richard or Henry Pike is the Middleton heir.’

  ‘Really?’ said Jones. ‘How so?’

  ‘When I was at the house of the late Mrs Middleton’s mother,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘I discovered, by accident, that the father was colour-blind.’

  ‘Good old Mendel,’ said Jones. ‘Colour blindness is a Mendelian dominant, isn’t it?’

  ‘An important one, from our present point of view.’

  ‘Colour-blind grandfather should mean colour-blind
grandson,’ went on Jones. ‘That’s the way it works, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, roughly speaking. Colour blindness is sex-linked, of course, and usually passes from a colour-blind father to grandsons through an unaffected daughter.’

  ‘But, surely,’ said Jones, ‘a colour-blind father and normal mother should have normal children? Although I realise, of course, that two colour-blind parents would be bound by the Mendelian law to have colour-blind children.’

  ‘True,’ said Mrs Bradley. She poked him in the ribs and added: ‘Likewise, if the daughter of a colour-blind father, herself normal, marries a colour-blind man, the colour-blindness will appear in all their children both male and female. Then, if one such colour-blind woman marry a normal man, all the sons of that union will be colour-blind and all the daughters normal.’

  ‘Therefore,’ said Jones, grinning, ‘if we find that Richard is colour-blind he is the rightful heir, and I have to abandon my desire to adopt him, but if he proves to be normal, as I am jolly certain he will, he can’t be the late Mrs Middleton’s son, and if that happens to be so, he may be an illegitimate son of the late unlamented Middleton, or the legitimate offspring of Passion and Mrs Passion.’

  ‘If Richard should be colour-blind, we shall have to test the Passions and old Mrs Fluke and make inquiries about Mrs Passion’s father and both of Passion’s parents with respect to colour-blindness,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a sudden scream of laughter. Jones groaned, and then smiled at her. She beamed upon him, and added in pleased tones: ‘Nervous system toned up again, I see, dear child. You didn’t even start at that raucous noise I made. Come along. Let’s find something red and something green.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Jones. ‘He may not be one of the cases that mixes up red and green, you know. There are other types of defective colour sense!’

  There was no doubt about the result. Henry Pike was unable to distinguish between red and green. Richard’s colour sense was normal.

  ‘Q.E.D.,’ said Jones triumphantly, ‘Now to get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth out of Mrs Passion and Mrs Fluke, and then we shall see.’