The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Nearly three hours passed. He was extremely fatigued and very hungry, having long ago eaten the sweets he had brought with him. There was always the chance that she had turned inland again, and not far away were little streams into which she might have fallen, although he doubted whether they were deep.

  In the end there seemed nothing for it but to communicate with the police, and he returned to the yacht with the intention of sailing her back to Potter Heigham. He had left the yacht the first time, in company with his sister, at a quarter to two. It had been nearly three when he discovered that he would have to go back for his pipe, for Romance walked slowly. He had got back to the dunes by a quarter to four, and it was about eight o’clock by the time he reached the yacht again.

  Here was another misfortune. He had reefed the sails before leaving, and when he came to set them again he made the discovery that the mast had been sawn almost through about five feet from the bottom. It came down as the mainsail went up, and there he was, with a stranded yacht and no very direct way by road back to Potter Heigham.

  He had to get there, however, so he rowed the dinghy all the way, having left her mast and sail at the owners’ yard, as he had not thought it necessary to take them, thinking they would be in the way. It was over four miles to row and another mile to walk to the village. It was also getting dark. He made his report to the police, and then, being utterly exhausted, slept in the village that night, and returned to the yacht, having obtained the dinghy’s mast and sail from the owners. He had reported upon the damage to the yacht’s mainmast and had listened gloomily to the estimate of expenses.

  He found his sister on board the Medea when he got back, but she was dead. Her throat had been cut, she was sprawled in the well of the yacht with her head hanging over the side, and she presented a most horrible spectacle.

  “He says he fainted, ma’am, when he saw her,” concluded the inspector.

  “No wonder,” said Mrs. Bradley. “At what time does the doctor think she died?”

  “He puts it at between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, ma’am, the time when, according to this chap’s story, he left her to go back for his pipe.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, meditatively. “Sounds bad, on the face of it, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re telling me, ma’am. It certainly does. And if it wasn’t for the viper…”

  “Oh, there was a viper, was there?”

  “Yes, put on her neck in the wound, ma’am, just like the others. Otherwise, as I was saying, we should wonder what he’d been up to. The girl was a complete burden on him financially, and he had to look after her, and all that, and the motive sticks out a mile. Still, as things are, and have been, about the other deaths…”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, still very thoughtfully. “It’s a good thing for him that the vipers have never been allowed to get into the papers, isn’t it? I’m more anxious than ever, Inspector, to get to Horsey Mere. Is the yacht still there?”

  “Oh, yes. She can’t be moved, for one thing, unless she’s towed, but we want her for further investigation, anyway, and, of course, we’re sticking to the brother, as the thing looks suspicious against him.”

  “I should like to meet him,” said Mrs. Bradley cordially.

  “You realise one damning thing, ma’am?”

  “Several damning things, as a matter of fact, Inspector.”

  “This in particular, ma’am. Him and his sister have been on the Broads three weeks.”

  “Yes. You made that clear.”

  “What’s clear to me, ma’am, is that those three weeks will cover the time of all these deaths.”

  “How very convenient,” said Mrs. Bradley, nodding. “Yes, that is certainly damning.” She nodded again, and glanced at him with simple admiration.

  • CHAPTER 20 •

  “Here, you may nurse it a bit if you like!” said the Duchess to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke.

  —From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  The police launch, proceeding under cover of the darkness and showing the three necessary lights, made short work of the trip from Stalham to Horsey Mere. At the wheel was the sergeant, a man born and bred in the district. Mrs. Bradley, Os, Pirberry, and Jonathan sat two on each side in the stern-sheets aft of the smelly little engine. The launch was an open boat sixteen feet long and capable of nearly ten knots.

  The sergeant, who had the exact position of the yacht, for he had visited it in company with the inspector earlier in the day and had helped to superintend the removal of the body, drew up the police launch, and the party went aboard Medea.

  “Now, ma’am,” said the inspector, “this is about your rendezvous, I take it. If anybody should be about, and on the lookout for you, they are sure to have seen our lights and heard our engine. So it’s up to you. We’re here on the spot if you want us, but, in my opinion, you’re doing a foolish thing in going ashore tonight.”

  “So foolish,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that I’m not going to do it, after all. With your permission, I shall remain on the yacht, prepared to receive all comers, and you, I hope, will meet me again in the morning.”

  Os bluntly observed that he preferred his bed when he could get it, but said that no doubt the sergeant would keep them company. He added that he would be over again in the morning, with a couple of men, to make another search of the sand-dunes. There must be something. Miss Copley must have left some trace, he averred.

  When he had gone, the two men, Jonathan and Pirberry, lay on the bunks in the fore-cabin, the sergeant had a cot in the bows, and Mrs. Bradley, who had no squeamishness about occupying the place recently vacated by the murdered woman, took the port-side berth in the saloon. The corpse had been laid in the well, so the associations of the saloon were, in any case, with the living and not the dead.

  She did not sleep, having no intention of doing so. She lay, wide awake in the darkness, listening to the night sounds of woods and the water, and thinking over the story she had heard. Beside her lay the worsted viper, that omen and potent of evil. She guessed what was coming, and was quite prepared for it.

  Hours passed. She was not at all sleepy, for her profession, that of medicine, had accustomed her, early in life, to remain awake all night if necessary, and the fact that she was lying down in comparative comfort did not prejudice the exercising of this ability.

  She heard the murderers come aboard at three. They were wonderfully silent, and so cautious in the boarding of the Medea that the yacht scarcely seemed to acknowledge their presence. One person on board, however, was either as wide awake as Mrs. Bradley, or else was sensitive in sleep to the slightest extraordinary occurrence, for, just as she had pushed the viper under the pillow, swung her feet to the ground, cocked her small revolver and got her thumb on the switch of her powerful electric torch, Pirberry fell off his bunk and then gave a loud exclamation of annoyance at having so warned the intruders. This woke Jonathan, who switched on a torch and demanded to know what was up. The sergeant slept on through it all.

  There was a hasty scramble of the enemy over the side. Apparently they had come in a rowing boat, for there was no sound of an engine, and the Medea rocked coquettishly from the shove with which the intruders pushed off from her side.

  “A pity,” said Mrs. Bradley, lighting the lamp in the saloon and confronting two owlish cavaliers with her mirthless and basilisk grin. “But rather a nice touch to get me to bring the viper here for myself.”

  “How many?” demanded Pirberry.

  “Two, I think, not more. And here we are, helpless to catch them.”

  “I don’t know so much about helpless,” said Jonathan. “Isn’t there a dinghy? It’s beginning to get light. Come on.”

  “Too late,” said Pirberry. “They’ve got a start, and it’s dark. We should never find them. And we’d best not divide our forces. What do you say, mam?”

  “I agree,” said Mrs. Bradley. “By the way—you remember the deck-cha
ir? Has it been returned to Calpurnia?”

  “It has, mam. And thereby hangs a very peculiar circumstance.” He paused impressively. “Mam, there was not a print of any kind whatever upon that chair. Not of any kind, by the time I saw it. What do you say to that?”

  “That we are wise not to go off on wild-goose chases in the dark,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  So the yacht’s party remained where they were, and by eight o’clock the inspector was back with two men, who, what was more, had brought some food with them and a couple of thermos flasks of coffee.

  “And now for the beach,” said Mrs. Bradley, when the overnight adventure had been described.

  “Didn’t you catch a glimpse of them at all?” enquired the inspector. “Why, one of the reasons for Mrs. Bradley’s coming, after they gave her that viper, was to act as a sort of decoy duck to the gang. They’d be sure to smell a rat, she said, as soon as we picked up their messenger. Besides, this man Bleriot knows her, and if he’s one of the gang.…”

  Mrs. Bradley, unused to being referred to as “a sort of decoy duck,” grinned mirthlessly.

  “And now for the sand-dunes,” she said, amending her first description of the shore. “I am anxious to see the spot at which Edgar Copley is supposed to have left his sister.”

  “If it weren’t for the viper…” said the inspector again.

  “I agree,” said Pirberry. “But, in any case, we’ve got to have proof. So far, there’s nothing to show that Edgar Copley didn’t go back for his pipe and tobacco, just as he said he did. It’s as reasonable to suppose that he was telling the truth as that he was lying, on the face of the story as it stands. That’s what we’ve got to keep in mind. There’s nothing basically impossible or even particularly unusual in what he did. Of course, you can argue he ought not to have left a mental of his sister’s type on the shore alone, in case she got into the water and drowned herself; but, in actual practice, these loonies are as sensible in essential things as any of us, and the probabilities are that she wouldn’t stir very far from where he left her. There’s a type of defective person who has no initiative whatsoever—not even so much as a six-months-old baby, which will, at least, do a bit of crawling around. I don’t see why, on the face of it, we shouldn’t begin by believing Edgar Copley and then we can see where that gets us.”

  This laudable suggestion was carried out scrupulously by the party. They took the road to the village, which, inundated by floods a few years previously, still presented, with its dead trees and rusty appearance, a sorry spectacle on what should have been good farmland, and then turned on to the sand-dunes.

  These formed a couple of ridges between the land and the sea, and, except on such comparatively rare occasions as the times of tremendous floods, were as arid and dry as a desert.

  Guided by Edgar Copley’s exact descriptions, and also by the line of the road by which the Copleys were supposed to have approached the coast at this point, Mrs. Bradley found very little difficulty in discovering the place where Romance Copley had been left to make her sand-hole. The inspector, of course, knew where it was, for, he said, Copley himself had guided him to the spot on the previous day. The hole was a circular dip about nine feet across, and was surrounded on every side, except for about a yard which faced the sea, by tall, coarse, spiky grass. Anyone lying down in the hole, or even squatting in it, was invisible from a distance of twenty yards, for the party took it in turn to test this point.

  “They decided to make it big enough,” commented Pirberry. “Big enough for both to lounge in, I suppose, when Edgar came back with his baccy.”

  Mrs. Bradley began to cast about, and, watched by the inspector (a trifle sardonically, she supposed, since he and his men had searched the shore for several hours on the previous day), she walked down to the edge of the water.

  “Afraid you won’t find any trace of a boat having put in here,” he said, when she returned. “The tide’s been in and out since the murder, you know.”

  Mrs. Bradley grinned, and said that she did know, and had made allowance for the possibly criminal manoeuvres of the tide. Then she sat down in the hole and spread out her map.

  “I suppose it is perfectly certain that this is the place they came to?” she observed, without looking up. “Is there anybody who can swear to having seen them approach the shore before Edgar went back for his pipe?—You see,” she added, “it seems odd to me that Edgar left the woman alone, knowing that he could scarcely expect to rejoin her in less than three-quarters of an hour. According to what he has indicated, she had the brain of a three-year-old child. Now I, personally, would not dream of leaving a three-year-old child to play alone on a lonely shore within easy reach of the water. According, again, to his evidence, Romance Copley loved paddling. There was nothing to prevent her, so far as I can see, from wading in, shoes and all, if she felt inclined.”

  “But she wasn’t drowned: her throat was cut,” said Pirberry, mystified by this excursion into what seemed to him the redundant and the unnecessary.

  “I think Mrs. Bradley means to point out that, if Edgar did leave her, he didn’t much care what happened to her—or, to go even farther, rather hoped that she might get drowned—or else, he didn’t leave her at all,” put in Inspector Os, before Mrs. Bradley could speak. “If he didn’t leave her, presumably he was the fellow who cut her throat, and his story about the pipe and tobacco is a lie, intended to give him an alibi for the time of the murder. It’s a bit odd, you know, that she was murdered during that one period when, according to his own showing, he had left her by herself. After all, this doesn’t really fit with the other murders, in which the women were decoyed. They couldn’t have got a woman of this type very far in the time before they cut her throat.”

  “Then you both believe Copley’s guilty?” said Pirberry, who, apparently did not. “But, if you do, how do you account for the viper?”

  “Planted,” said Os. “Mrs. Bradley has never thought that the murderers planted the vipers. Her theory, if I have understood it, is that the murderers have been followed up by somebody—probably, it seems, by this Amos Bleriot—who knew them and was at enmity with them, and put a trademark, as it were, on their work.”

  “But, in that case,” said Mrs. Bradley, not denying the theory attributed to her, “how could this man—call him Amos Bleriot if you like—have known of the murder of Romance, unless it had been planned by the murderers of the other three women and the farmer?—How are you getting on with that particular investigation, by the way?”

  “Slow, but sure,” said Os. “In fact, after today, I’m going on with it as a separate item. The Chief Constable’s orders. He thinks it’s the most likely field of enquiry. Says we shall make nothing of the other murders except from the London end. That means Mr. Pirberry.” He glanced at Pirberry and smiled.

  “What does he make of the vipers?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “The Chief Constable?” Os shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Says they’re the work of a maniac, and a maniac is what we’ve got to find. Says somebody must know something more about poor old Elias Bennett than we’ve been told. And, of course, there was no viper on his body, ma’am, as we keep on saying. My view, the C.C. may be right, and it’s quite a separate affair.”

  “But it is connected with Martha Huzy, and she is the maker of the vipers which her brother was supplying to this man on the marshes. All the same, I think it is an excellent idea, at this stage of the enquiry, to treat the death of the farmer as something apart from the other murders. The only thing is that—it isn’t something apart,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Copley is from London,” said Pirberry. “Matters are already in train at that end. We ought to know quite a lot more about Mr. Copley and his sister before long. Meanwhile…”

  “Meanwhile,” said Mrs. Bradley, “we ought to be able to find out exactly where she was murdered. It couldn’t have been so very far from here. Even supposing she was carried off in a car, she would have had to be transported to the car.
It could scarcely have been driven on to these dunes.”

  The inspector continued the search, but Mrs. Bradley, taking from her capacious skirt pocket the trowel she had brought with her for the purpose, began to dig in the hole.

  “What are you looking for—bloodstains?” enquired Pirberry, joining her at he end of twenty minutes.

  “I was wondering what had become of the picture papers which Edgar said he left with his sister,” Mrs. Bradley replied. She went on patiently with her excavations, burrowing and digging away with the assiduous application of a terrier which has buried a bone.

  “But you don’t expect to find them buried under the sand?”

  “Blessed is he that expects nothing,” Mrs. Bradley sententiously replied. “History repeats itself,” she added. “Remember the case of Norman Thorne, who not only buried the body, but pointed out to the police the chicken-run under which he had hidden it.”

  As she spoke she took out a bunch of withered sea-grass crushed and dark-coloured.

  “What’s that doing there?” enquired Pirberry, interested. “Hm! Wiped his hands on it! Is that what you were looking for?”

  “And the picture papers,” Mrs. Bradley insisted. She continued her excavations, but, at a depth of four feet or so, nothing more had come to light except a thick mess of blood-soaked sand. Pirberry took a sample. Mrs. Bradley looked at her watch. “Of course, we don’t know quite how much time he had, but probably not more than I have used. The papers must be somewhere else,” she said. She glanced, as though accusingly, at the sea. Pirberry placed the sea-grass in another case he had brought, and remarked that Os had already advertised for the hikers to whom Copley claimed to have spoken when he had been searching for his sister.

  “Lot of stuff to be got from the London end before we can do much more here,” continued Pirberry, again voicing his main interest in the matter. “I’ll get news soon, I hope, of whether a man answering to the description of Copley can be traced to those women who were decoyed.”