The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

“Leave me the light, man!” said George. “I’d better clear up this lamp. I’ve smashed the chimney all to blazes.”

  “Don’t touch a thing,” counselled William, the romantically minded reader of detective stories. “Leave everything for the police, and come on out.”

  George obeyed, but when William had gone in quest of a policeman, George did what might seem, to some, an extraordinary thing. He went into the cabin, met his wife’s enquiring glance with a shrug, looked at the children, who, one on each of the cabin berths, appeared to have fallen asleep, and then beckoned her out on deck. Mrs. Ferrier came with them. George lowered his voice.

  “Don’t get jumpy,” he said, “but we seem to have had a visitor during the day, and, not to mince matters, she’s gone and got herself bumped off in the saloon. Very gangsterish. Bill’s gone to fetch the police. Afraid this may muck up the holiday. Can’t leave until the police arrive, of course, but, after they’ve been, I think you two had better take the kids and spend the night ashore. We must see what we can fix up.”

  “Is it—horrid, George?” asked his wife.

  “Pretty nasty, yes. In fact, I’m going to take a drawing board in there and chart the details. It’s given me an idea for a picture.”

  He went back to the cabin with the women and drew out his drawing board from under the berth on which his daughter was sleeping. He found a selection of sticks of charcoal, and went back with a couple of candles into the reeking saloon. It then occurred to him that there was no blood on the floor. The body had been dumped on the houseboat, not killed there. This, needless to say, was a relief.

  He propped up his board, selected a stick of the soft and feathery charcoal, and went to work.

  • CHAPTER 8 •

  “There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!” Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.

  —From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  “That’s a very odd tale,” said Mrs. Bradley, at the termination of the second visit of George Whitstable and William Ferrier to the police. She had been watching them closely, as they retold the tale for her benefit.

  “You’re telling me, ma’am!” the inspector, emphatically agreed. “Thank you very much, gentlemen,” he added, nodding to the sergeant to show them out. “If they hadn’t had that alibi with the landlord at Thurne, I’d say that one or both of them knew more about it than they pretend; but if they were asleep, doped out, all afternoon, and didn’t get back until after dark, it’s a bit difficult to see what they could have had to do with it,” he went on. “But we’re keeping an eye on them. Of course, they seem respectable, but you never know with murder. Look at the Seddons and Crippen; look at Madeleine Smith; look at Norman Thorne…Murder isn’t like burglary, where you’ve usually got the criminal on record.”

  “Imagining, for the sake of argument,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that they are innocent of any possible complicity in the murder, could their beer have been doped like that at a public house?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” replied the inspector. He did not invite her companionship and collaboration, and she did not offer it. Instead she asked,

  “What happens now to that holiday party, I wonder?”

  “Got the offer of a houseboat at Horning,” the inspector replied, “but they say they’ve had enough of houseboats. They’re going up to Cromer, to put in a week at the seaside, if they can get accommodation, I believe.”

  “When do they go?”

  “Packing up today. Leaving by the four-fifteen from Stalham to North Walsham. Of course, I’m keeping a pretty close watch on them, as I don’t mind telling you.”

  “I think I may be in time to catch them,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There are one or two questions I should like to put to the wives, if you have no objection.”

  “None whatever, ma’am. But I doubt whether they’ve anything more to tell. Unless, of course—two men would fit with what we know of that bungalow business.”

  Mrs. Bradley grinned, and told George to drive her to Acle, and thence to Stokesby Old Windmill, where she had arranged to pick up her three students, for whom she had claimed exemption from any more police surveillance.

  Laura, Kitty, and the faithful Alice had drawn up the Dithyramb on the left bank of the River Bure and on the Muck Fleet side of the ferry. Here the secondary road, which George had taken at Wey Bridge, a mile and a bit outside Acle, having crossed Muck Fleet, came almost to the edge of the water. George stopped the car, and Mrs. Bradley got out.

  “I say,” said Laura, “you’ve heard about the second murder, I suppose? It was in the morning paper.”

  “Quick work,” commented Kitty. “How rotten for the people on the houseboat.”

  “I want to see them,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and the easiest way will be on the water, if you’ve no objection to running me up to Stalham.”

  The Dithyramb, with twice the speed of the small cruiser hired by the Ferriers and Whitstables, made easy work of the trip up the Bure to Abbey Gate, and so up the Ant to Barton Broad. Laura, smiling happily, went at a fair speed through Barton Broad, but slowed down again for the narrow river and the cut, which took the cruiser into Sutton Broad. The passage to Stalham was by the western side of the Broad, and, upon coming into the narrow arm of the Broad, which came nearest to Stalham, they soon saw Calpurnia and moored the cruiser close to her.

  The two children saw the Dithyramb as soon as Laura brought her in to the bank. Kitty invited them aboard, but Joan Whitstable, taking Gavin by the arm, shook her head.

  “I’d love to, thank you, but we mustn’t, unless our mothers say we may.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “On this houseboat, but we’re moving.”

  “Oh, are you? Going home?”

  “No. Seaside, I think. But I’d rather stay on the houseboat, and so would Gavin.”

  “Yes,” said Gavin, breaking a well-preserved silence.

  “Well, go in and ask your mothers whether you can come on board our boat.”

  The two children disappeared, and Laura enquired,

  “When do you want to board her and beard the parents?”

  “When the children are out of the way, child.”

  “What sort of people are they?”

  Mrs. Bradley described the two men, and by the time she had finished the children returned from Calpurnia’s saloon escorted by William Ferrier.

  “Ah, it’s you,” he said, recognising Mrs. Bradley. “That’s all right, then. Only, of course, we’re rather nervous.”

  “Naturally,” Mrs. Bradley agreed. “I wonder whether you would allow these girls of mine to take charge of the children for half an hour whilst I come along to your houseboat and ask a lot of impertinent questions?”

  It turned out that the Whitstables and the Ferriers were only too willing to talk about their strange and horrid experience. Mrs. Bradley listened for a bit to the pleasant, deep tones of the artist, the excited tenor of the clerk, the lazy voice of Mrs. Whitstable (whom she suspected of being the most intelligent of the party), and the nervous volubility of Mrs. Ferrier. Then she began to put her questions.

  “Who could possibly have known that you were going off for the day like that?”

  “Well, the police asked that. I suppose any of the people at the boat-builder’s yard could have heard. We made no secret of it, naturally.”

  “Had you mentioned it to anybody on the previous day?—at the local public house, for instance?”

  “The police asked that, too. I can’t remember, but it’s perfectly likely.”

  “You didn’t get into conversation with any particular person about it?—Anybody who seemed especially interested?”

  “I may have asked—in fact, I did ask, now I come to think—whether they hired out motorboats by the day or only for a period, but I don’t know who I said it to. We were all standing at the counter—about seven or eight men—waiting for beer—and I asked the chap behind the bar. He did
n’t get a chance to answer—it’s coming back to me now—because two or three informed me. They all put me on to the chap from whom we hired the boat the next day.”

  “The trouble about these bigger villages on the Broads is that, at this time of year, they are so full of strangers that people don’t get noticed and remembered as they would in the winter,” Mrs. Bradley remarked. “Now, about your strange experience at Thurne. When could the drug—whatever it was—have been put into the beer, do you think?”

  William and George glanced at one another.

  “The police asked that, too,” said the former. “It must have been put in the second glass, not the first, and that’s as much as we know. You see, the first glass was drawn, paid for, handed over, and we both just swiped it off, standing at the bar, we were so thirsty. Then we ordered another, and asked to have it brought outside. Well, we went out to sit on one of the benches, and then—they were doing a bit of yacht racing, you know, at Thurne Mouth, and several yachts in a fresh breeze were coming down from Potter Heigham—a lovely sight—we went down nearer the water to have a look at them. When we came back the beers were there, and the boy who’d brought them was there, too, but he’d strolled to the river-edge with us, because I saw him.”

  “So the two half-pints were left on a table outside the inn, and anybody who had come prepared to do so could have slipped something into the glasses without much fear of being seen,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And, of course, you can’t possibly know whether you were followed from here to Thurne Mouth, can you?”

  “No reason why we should have been followed, actually,” said Mrs. Whitstable. “Much safer for the man to have gone to Thurne Mouth by car. I don’t know whether my husband mentioned that was where we were going, but I daresay he did.”

  “There was that man who went by along the bank while George and William were at the boat-builder’s yard,” said Mrs. Ferrier, looking at her sister.

  “But I didn’t tell him where we were going. I didn’t know,” protested Mrs. Whitstable, “and he certainly didn’t ask. That was while George and Bill had gone to hire the boat.”

  “Did you mention him to the police?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “No. I didn’t think of him until Jane mentioned him just now. Anyhow, we didn’t tell him anything. He asked whether the houseboat would be to let at the end of the month.”

  “Can you describe him, Mrs. Whitstable?”

  “Not very well. He was just like everybody else—tweed jacket, open-necked shirt, flannel trousers, no hat, aged about thirty, I should think.”

  “Thin? Tall?”

  “No. Medium. Not noticeable in any way, I’m sure.”

  “Probably as innocent as he seemed. Did he come right past the houseboat and walk on towards the Broad?”

  “I don’t remember noticing, but I think he must have done, because he did walk past that way first, as though he’d come from the village, and then came back the few yards to speak to me. I was knitting, and I was a bit annoyed when he came back because I’d just begun to count my stitches.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley vaguely. She and the husbands and wives were seated in deck-chairs on top of the houseboat. She touched the wooden edge of her chair. “Is this what Mr. Whitstable fell over when he went down the steps to the cabin?” she asked. “I should like to see how that happened. I assume that the chair was not left at the bottom of the steps when you went off for your outing?”

  “It certainly wasn’t,” agreed Mrs. Whitstable, “although, of course, we didn’t expect to have to come back in the dark. But there was no reason for a chair to be at the bottom of the steps. They are kept here on deck, folded up, and covered with a tarpaulin.”

  “We most religiously put them away after use,” asserted William Ferrier, “and, in any case, they are only used up here. The lockers form seats on the after-deck and also in the well. If we did move the deck-chairs it would only be if we wanted to go ashore and sit on the bank, and we certainly haven’t done that.”

  He led the way down the boat’s ladder on to the narrow deck, and round to the broader after-deck and down three steps to the cabin. George Whitstable followed, carrying a deck-chair, and placed it where he had his tumble in the dark.

  “Just about there,” he said.

  “Do you know which chair it was?”

  “No. I picked it up—it was folded, of course—and stood it up on end against the wardrobe.”

  “But you didn’t put it back with the others on the roof?”

  “No.”

  “I did that,” said William, “but I couldn’t say now which chair it was.”

  “You would have put it on top of the pile?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That would have been this morning?”

  “Yes. One couldn’t see to cart deck-chairs about last night.”

  “Quite so. Let us go into the saloon for a minute, please, and then we will return to the roof and see whether we cannot decide which chair it was.”

  They passed through the cabin and into the saloon.

  “The police have taken the table away,” said William. Mrs. Bradley betrayed no disappointment at this, but looked at the shelf which had supported the lamp (afterwards broken by George) and then went back and looked at the cabin lamp on its support.

  “The police took fingerprints,” said George, “including ours. Asked if we minded. Purposes of comparison, they said. Perfectly right, of course. Haven’t seen the papers since we’ve been on the Broads, but understand there’s been another murder not far away, and they’re trying to find out whether there’s a maniac at work. Just as glad we’re clearing out, if there is. The girls will be glad to quit, and there are the children to think of.”

  “Are you working with the police?” asked William. Mrs. Bradley explained her very slight connection with the police, described Amos Bleriot, and suggested that if they saw anyone answering to the description it might be in the public interest to inform the superintendent at Norwich.

  “And now,” she said, “I wish you would try to remember in what order those chairs were set out. When I arrived, you two were sitting up here, I think, and Mrs. Whitstable and Mrs. Ferrier were below.”

  “Yes, I was packing and Ethel was keeping an eye on the children,” said Mrs. Ferrier.

  “Right. Then that means that either Mr. Whitstable or Mr. Ferrier is sitting on the chair which had been placed at the bottom of the steps. Which chair came off the pile first?”

  “George’s,” said William Ferrier. “I remember, because I put them out, and I put his out first, and then placed one for myself.”

  “Get up, please, Mr. Whitstable,” said Mrs. Bradley. The chair was covered in red, white, and green striped canvas. Mrs. Bradley took out her magnifying glass and looked it over very carefully, watched curiously by the others. Then she straightened up, asked George to fold up the chair, requested permission to take it away with her, thanked them all, in her beautiful voice, for their patience, hoped she had not hindered their departure, and went back, very thoughtful, to the cruiser, George following her on board with the deck-chair.

  When the children had returned to the houseboat, and the Dithyramb, at Mrs. Bradley’s request, was cruising very slowly down the Ant, she sat in the little saloon with an ordnance map of the district spread out on the table, tracing with a yellow claw the roads from Stalham to Thurne.

  There did not seem the slightest chance that anyone in a car could even have sighted the little cruiser on its trip to Thurne Mouth, let alone kept it in sight. The roads, for the most part, were well away from the river except where a secondary road from Ludham to Horning crossed the Ant by Ludham Bridge.

  At Ludham Bridge her yellow finger paused. She studied the map again with a new idea in mind. Then she went into the cockpit, and told Laura to put about and make all speed back to the houseboat.

  “You know, there’s something a bit Ancient Mariner about Mrs. Croc.,” Laura confided to Alice, as, the Dithyram
b having been coaxed round, she opened the throttle and they began to cruise northward again.

  “She’s got the skinny hand and the compelling eye, certainly,” agreed Alice. Kitty, who was sprawled on the roof of the saloon, took no part in their conversation, but a deep chuckle from the interior of the saloon, where Mrs. Bradley was still studying the map, caused the dialogue to come to an abrupt conclusion.

  They were destined not to go far, however. Mrs. Bradley came out of the saloon, map in hand, and joined Kitty on the saloon-top.

  “Look out for the Hundred Dike,” she said, pointing to the map. Kitty bent closer to follow the yellow forefinger.

  “You can’t enter it,” said Kitty. “Dog was talking about it the other day. It ought to be a cut across to the other river, but it’s choked with reeds, and you can’t use it.”

  “No wonder I didn’t notice it as we came by before,” said Mrs. Bradley. “That settles that, then.”

  Her idea had been that anybody stationed on Ludham Bridge could have seen whether the two families in their little cruiser had taken the Hundred Dike in mistake for the eastward course of the River Bure, and a car travelling from the bridge past Hall Common and Coldharbour Farm could have arrived at the conjunction of the dike with the River Thurne before the cruiser got there, and so the direction taken by the families southward down the Thurne to Thurne Mouth could have been determined without the difficulty of following them all the way by water, with the risk, all the time, of being noticed.

  But if the Hundred Dike were impassable because of weed or reeds, this theory fell to the ground, and they must have been followed all the way by water, after all. This being the case, it was clear that none of them had had any idea that their cruiser was being shadowed.

  To satisfy herself on the point, she had Laura take the Dithyramb as far as the Hundred Dike, which was about four hundred yards below Ludham Bridge, but there was no doubt that the dike could not be used. It seemed as though Ferrier or Whitstable must have mentioned where they were going to spend the day. In that case any one of perhaps a couple of dozen men, all practically untraceable if they were summer visitors, could have received this information, and one, at least, must have acted on it.