[Mrs Bradley 41] - Three Quick and Five Dead

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Right. I’ll stay here with you.’

  ‘But Hamish will be coming home for his Easter holiday. It would be better for him in Hampshire than in London.’

  ‘Yes, but he won’t be coming yet. That’s what my letter is about. As Easter is so ridiculously early this year – why they don’t fix it I can’t think – the headmaster isn’t going to close the school until the middle of April. Parents can have their boys home for the Easter week-end if they like, but there will be full religious observance of the festival at school and a school outing (weather permitting) on Easter Monday. If it’s wet, the boys will be taken to the pictures. Fair enough, I think? That means I don’t have to put up with him for another three weeks. Incidentally, Gavin says he ought to have a baby sister. What do you think?’

  ‘What are you going to call her?’

  Laura first stared at her employer and then laughed.

  ‘Eiladh,’ she said. ‘That’s if and when. There’s nothing on the horizon at present.’

  ‘Hamish, I am sure, will approve.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. There’s always something attractive in being the only pebble on the beach. I can just imagine his disgust if I present him with a brother.’

  ‘If I know Hamish, he will become guardian angel to a baby of either sex.’

  ‘Yes, you do know Hamish. I wish I did,’ said Laura.

  They made a flying visit to the Stone House on the Wednesday before Good Friday, and, back in London, received, via the newspapers of the following Tuesday, the first news of the third murder.

  (4)

  Shane and Agnes Clancy had moved into their new bungalow in May, 1964. They were a young and pleasant couple and had been married for less than two years. Shane was a bank clerk and, until the first baby was expected, Agnes had held the post of secretary at a school in the small town of Milton Cliffs, some ten miles from the Stone House at Wandles Parva.

  When Agnes was five months with child, Shane was promoted from his post at the local bank, where most of the staff at his wife’s school had their accounts, to a much larger branch in Southampton.

  ‘We shall have to move, I’m afraid,’ he said, at the end of a month. ‘I can’t go on doing a forty-mile journey twice a day every day. It’s beginning to get a bit much. A pity, now we’ve got the garden going so nicely.’ He looked with regret at the well-tended lawn and the flower-beds, at the small lilypond he had installed and at the crazy-paving round it. ‘Promotion is all very fine, but there are disadvantages.’

  ‘Could we put off moving until after the baby comes?’

  ‘We must. You’re in no shape to cope with a big operation like moving.’

  ‘“Shape” is about right, but please don’t mention operations.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Shane, dropping a kiss on the crown of her head, ‘we’ve still got to find somewhere, and that’s going to take a bit of time. Besides, I’ve got to sell before I can buy.’

  ‘Shall we have to live in Southampton itself? I wouldn’t fancy that.’

  ‘Not after this place, no, neither would I.’ The bungalow looked out over a valley to green hills beyond. ‘I’ll have to go into digs for the present, but I can come home on Saturday afternoons and go back early on Monday mornings, so it won’t be too bad for a bit.’

  ‘I shall hate being left alone here all the week. Could we afford to have an au pair girl?’

  ‘It’s the only solution, although if we could find a proper maid it might be more satisfactory.’

  ‘It’s an added expense, just when we didn’t want one, but I dread the idea of being on my own. It isn’t even as if we had any near neighbours.’

  ‘Funny how the chickens come home to roost, isn’t it? When we fell for this place it was simply because we hadn’t any near neighbours.’

  The spring and summer passed, the baby was born, but the bungalow had found no purchaser and the Italian maid, whom Shane had found through the kind efforts of one of the bank’s customers, stayed on. She proved to be an efficient nursemaid and, what with her keep and her pay and the cost of Shane’s digs, Agnes decided that, as soon as the baby was old enough, she herself would look for a job. She obtained a post, again as school secretary, but this time at the Old Bridge Comprehensive School.

  When this happened she had had the Italian maid for three years, and a routine was fully established. The following Easter Shane had the long week-end of Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and he and his wife planned to go to Sidmouth, for, now that Agnes was again in full-time employment, money was not as tight as it had been and they had decided upon a little celebration. They took the child with them and left the maid to her own devices, provided that she locked up the bungalow at night and bolted the back door when she went out.

  This agreement had been reached at the beginning of Easter week, and, as soon as he could get away from the bank on the Thursday, Shane collected his wife and child in his little car and, having paid the maid her week’s wages, off they drove to Sidmouth where, by previous arrangement with the guest-house, they were to be given a late meal.

  Left to herself, the maid, a swarthy but handsome woman of thirty, bolted the front and back doors, made certain that all the windows were closed and fastened, made herself a supper of spaghetti and cheese and drank half the bottle of a cheap red wine which was her ‘Easter egg’ from her employers. Then, having said her prayers, she went to bed. She was nervous at being left alone in the bungalow, which had no near neighbours, and felt safer in bed than anywhere else.

  First thing on Good Friday morning she shut the front door behind her, leaving the windows closed and the back door bolted, and tramped on her sturdy peasant legs to Mass. This involved a walk of nearly three miles into the little town where was the nearest Catholic church. She would have borrowed the bicycle on which Mrs Clancy rode to school if she had known how to ride it, but she did not.

  After Mass, the priest, a kindly man, arranged for her to go to breakfast with one of his parishioners and she was invited to stay for lunch, an offer she was glad to accept although, on Good Friday, the fare was Spartan. She got back to the bungalow in the late afternoon, taking care that it should be before dark, let herself in with the latchkey which she had been allowed, bolted the door and then nervously explored the small bungalow to make certain that there was nobody lurking. Again she went to bed early, after eating the fish she had cooked for herself. She looked longingly at the wine that was left in the bottle, but decided that it must be kept for Easter Sunday. She did not live to drink it.

  On Saturday morning she decided to spring-clean the bungalow, for, when she was in the mood, she was a willing and energetic worker and she felt, too, that to spend the day in toil was a fair enough substitute for making the long journey back and forth to the town to attend another service.

  She knocked off at twelve for her lunch – bread and a good handful of sultanas – and then set to again. The caller rang the front-door bell as she was putting the furniture back in position after she had finished polishing the boards which surrounded the carpet in the principal bedroom. It was barely five o’clock and the sun would not set for at least another hour, so she was not alarmed and had no suspicion at all that she was opening the door to her murderer.

  Fortunately for Agnes, less so for himself, it was Shane who saw the body when they returned from their short holiday. He turned the key of the front door, leaving his wife to follow with the child, and, finding the bungalow unnaturally silent, he called the maid by name, and then found her dead on the sitting-room floor. She had been garrotted and then strangled. Attached to the body, this time by a large darning-needle, was the legend, in Roman capitals, The Scholar Gipsy 1155. A bizarre addition to the scene was a burnt and blackened rag doll lying on a piece of newspaper.

  (5)

  ‘You know,’ said Laura disgustedly, ‘something ought to ring a bell, and it just simply doesn’t. This poor woman had no relatives in England except an elderly mother,
and there’s nobody, so far as the police can find out, who had anything against her. The Scholar Gipsy, well, there’s only one connection there, and I can’t see how it fits in. What on earth connection can a poem by Matthew Arnold have with the death of a maid-of-all-work from Italy?’

  ‘The burnt doll might be a clue either to the mentality of the murderer or to the character of the deceased,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but, until we know which, or whether it is merely a macabre but meaningless addition to an already sufficiently horrid scene, it does not help us.’

  ‘It helps us to the extent that the murderer must be a madman, as Phillips has thought all along,’ said Laura, ‘and, as mad-men are unpredictable, well, that’s that.’

  ‘Whether or not the murderer is a madman in terms of the MacNaughton Rules, he certainly seems to have a bias against foreign women, and this particular murder, as you suggest, seems curiously motiveless unless, of course, the woman had an enemy in her own country who has followed her here.’

  ‘The Mafia? Could be, I suppose.’

  The police discounted this theory. Searching enquiries had established that the maid, although she was of Italian parentage, had been born in London. She had belonged to no political party, had never been to her parents’ country, and did not appear to have an enemy in the world.

  ‘They’ve called in my chaps again,’ said Gavin over the telephone to his wife, ‘and the thing, of course, is priority stuff. We may be looking for one killer or we may be looking for two, but it’s hardly reasonable to imagine that there are three, and, as the only real suspect, this young Schumann, can’t have committed either the first or this third murder, we may be back to square one.’

  ‘What line are the police taking?’

  ‘We’ve worked out what the movements of this Italian maid must have been, so now they are sorting out all the mental hospitals and any private nursing homes who may have batsy patients, to see whether anyone is missing. We’ve put out radio and television broadcasts on all networks, and we’ve got every squad in the country sorting out their own local loony-bins.’

  ‘You’re pretty sure the criminal is mentally disturbed, then?’

  ‘Must be. The absence of motive shows that. This last murder makes even less sense than the first two.’

  ‘You know, all the murders have taken place in this part of the country, haven’t they? And in each case there has been a connecting link, in a way.’

  ‘You mean the fact that none of the victims was English, and that there were those notices on the bodies?’

  ‘Not only that. Haven’t you noticed that, in every case, there has been a sort of tie-up with Mrs Schumann and with James?’ said Laura.

  ‘Don’t say any more over the phone. I’ll come along. Expect me for tea.’

  ‘A tie-up with Mrs Schumann as well as with James?’ said Dame Beatrice, when Laura had replaced the receiver.

  ‘As I see it. Mrs Schumann’s daughter was engaged to James and is killed. Mrs Schumann’s lodger is killed. James is a teacher at the school where this Mrs Clancy was the secretary, and this third dead woman was Mrs Clancy’s servant. Don’t you think there’s a tie-up?’

  She put this theory to her husband that same evening.

  ‘Yours is a long shot and, in my view, an unfair one,’ said Gavin, when he had listened to her argument. ‘There’s nothing to connect either Mrs Schumann or James definitely with any of these crimes. I admit we looked at him pretty hard over the first one, simply because he was engaged to the girl and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in the picture, but, apart from that—’

  ‘They’d had rows, he and Miss Schumann.’

  ‘Oh, but, look here, Laura! Suppose you’d wanted to give me some gosh-awful tie, or a billy-goat or an overcoat trimmed with astrakhan, and we’d had a toss-up because I refused to wear it or accept it, would that mean I’d murder you? And suppose, on another and, actually, a former occasion, I’d called you a misguided little – what shall I say?’

  ‘That I would consider insulting?’

  ‘Yes. Well, never mind what it might be, but, if you took umbrage, you might (just conceivably) murder me, but it wouldn’t make sense if I murdered you, would it?’

  ‘You did say, though, that, in cases of murder, you always looked hardest at their nearest and dearest, and, in Karen Schumann’s case, her nearest and dearest were her mother and James.’

  ‘My dear girl, in the case of Karen Schumann, Phillips looked at the unfortunate Edward James until his eyes nearly fell out of his head. He got nowhere. In the case of Maria Machrado we have no reason to suspect that James so much as knew her. He only seems to have met her twice, at most.’

  ‘He knew that Machrado went there for week-ends and the Christmas vacation.’

  ‘But what could he possibly have against her? My chaps have never even looked at James twice, once we’d got on to this fellow Otto Schumann.’

  ‘Who couldn’t have committed this third murder, because he was on remand, awaiting trial, when it happened.’

  ‘I grant you that. I’ll go further and tell you a state secret. We’re going to let him go. He won’t come up for trial.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve got that much sense.’

  ‘But, of course, he’ll be tailed. No jury will convict him now that it’s known he can’t have murdered this Italian woman …’

  ‘And is hardly likely to have killed his twin sister …’

  ‘And we don’t want to bring him to a trial where it’s a moral certainty he would be acquitted.’

  ‘So you’re going to wait for the murderer – and you still really think it’s Otto Schumann – to have another go?’

  ‘Well, be reasonable, my love. If he’s innocent it’s right we should let him go, and if he’s guilty we must get him some way or another. He won’t be able to get away with a fourth attempt. We shall see to that all right.’

  ‘By the way, you were going to tell me something about Otto Schumann being on his ship at the time of his sister’s death.’

  ‘Oh, yes. His guardian angel was working overtime that week, because, if it could be shown that he had had the opportunity to kill his sister, we’d be bound to get him for the murder of Machrado.’

  ‘Yes, I see that, but what did his guardian angel have to do with it?’

  ‘Plenty, according to information received. After we knew about the fuss over that Lascar seaman, my chaps naturally wanted to find out as much about Otto as they could, so as to strengthen their case, so we rounded up the shipping magnates who control that particular line and asked them for a detailed account of the ship’s – Schumann’s ship’s – movements as from the beginning of last November.

  ‘Well, they let us have a copy of her itinerary or schedule, and we thought we were on to something pretty warm, because on November fifteenth she was due in at Poole and was supposed to stay there a week, unloading and loading up again and having something done to the refrigerating plant in one of the holds.’

  ‘A week beginning on the fifteenth, and Karen Schumann was killed on the nineteenth,’ said Laura. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Two days out from Las Palmas they got an S.O.S. from a Dutch ship which had started a pretty bad fire, so they were delayed while they helped fight the blaze, then they (and another couple of ships which had picked up the call) had to take off some members of the crew and rush them back to Las Palmas to hospital – burns, you know – so that delayed them another two days and they eventually put in at Poole on the twentieth, the day after the murder of Karen Schumann.’

  ‘And Otto didn’t go home that particular time?’

  ‘He didn’t have the chance. That’s why he had no idea that anything had happened to his sister. There was no shore leave for anybody. The company ditched the refrigerating improvement for the time being, and the ship unloaded and loaded at top speed to make up for the lost time.’

  (6)

  ‘If,’ said Laura, when she was alone with her employer, ‘you de
lved into Edward James’s family history, I wonder what you would find?’

  ‘You are thinking of skeletons in cupboards, no doubt?’

  ‘Something of the kind. I mean, we’re agreed, I take it, that these murders are the work of a maniac, so I thought perhaps a study of the antecedents of some of the people who’ve come into the picture might not be a bad thing. It’s obvious that the police are up a gum tree.’

  Dame Beatrice refused to identify herself with this opinion.

  ‘The police are taking their own line,’ she said, ‘and at present I am not prepared to cross it.’

  ‘You don’t think Edward James’s family tree would be worth investigating, then?’

  Dame Beatrice cackled.

  ‘There are certain points in Edward James’s favour, it seems to me,’ she said.

  ‘Such as? – I mean, I know we’ve nothing against him that a court of law would consider evidence …’

  ‘Quite so. Let us go back to the death of Karen Schumann. I have been studying the notes I made, and there are one or two interesting points which seem to me to emerge. The first of these is Edward James’s alibi.’

  ‘A very clever one, I thought. Can’t be proved or disproved.’

  ‘A matter of chance. How could he have known that nobody would come to the library while he was (or was not) there? It would have been a most dangerous and unwarrantable assumption.’

  ‘But with the entire teaching staff and domestic staff off duty …’

  ‘I am wondering whether the school secretary would have been accorded the full day’s holiday.’

  ‘Oh, I see! The school secretary was this Mrs Clancy whose Italian maid has been murdered. You mean Mrs Clancy might be able to give James an alibi?’

  ‘Well, not for the whole day, and possibly not at all. I mentioned her merely to indicate that, if James was lying, but intended to claim his visit to the library as an alibi, he was tempting fortune to a very foolish extent. Again, how could he have known that the contractors for cleaning the school windows might not send their men that day? Or school stock might have been delivered, and a signature required for it. In such a situation, the school would be searched for someone in authority. Boys, knowing the school to be empty, might have come in and have been larking around. The caretaker, or one of the cleaners, might have left something behind in the library and come back to look for it. There are dozens of possibilities which a guilty man would need to consider before producing such an alibi.’