[Mrs Bradley 41] - Three Quick and Five Dead

by Gladys Mitchell

  A. Very likely so. I do not know.

  Q. Do you deny that you proposed marriage to him?

  A. What is that to you?

  Q. Did you not often say that he was too old to make his marriage with your daughter a success?

  A. I thought it might be so. Twenty years between their ages. It is a long time.

  Q. I must stress this point, Mrs Schumann. Were you prepared to give Mr James five thousand pounds if and when he married you?

  A. What means five thousand pounds to me? It belonged to my daughter, and now she is dead.

  Q. Yes, but, until she died, you did not have the five thousand pounds, did you?

  A. No, of course I did not. You are telling me that Edward – no, I will not believe it!

  Q. Believe what, Mrs Schumann?

  A. I will not believe that Edward killed my Karen!

  Q. But why should Mr James kill her? If he married her he would still have the five thousand pounds, would he not?

  A. You did not know Karen. So mercenary. No part of the five thousand pounds for him. But with me he knows that if he can persuade me to marry him, he has it, ja, he has it all. I am of generous nature. When I love, I give – just like to Karen’s father. I give it all – love, youth, strength, money, to have the babies he want – everything.

  Q. Do you suggest, then, that Edward James killed your daughter, knowing that he would get the five thousand pounds when he married you?

  A. Me to suggest? Nothing! I say no more. You must think as you please. Myself, I stop thinking. It does no good to think. What is done is done. No use to grieve. No use to say, ‘If, if only, if’. No. I continue my life like Spartan mothers. If you think Edward James killed my Karen for five thousand pounds, I say I do not agree. Edward is a good man. Any more I do not know.

  ‘So she’s prepared to throw James to the wolves if it comes to a question of having to save her own skin,’ said Laura.

  ‘There is more,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Detective-Inspector Maisry appears to have gone quite as far as he dared in questioning Mrs Schumann without cautioning her first. The document goes on:’

  Q. I know you have satisfied Superintendent Phillips as to this, Mrs Schumann, but he was able to talk to you before my department was brought into the case. Will you tell me just how you spent the day on which Superintendent Phillips believes your daughter died?

  A. I will tell you anything you wish to know, but you must not make traps for me with my words. I will tell you what I have already told the so kind Superintendent Phillips, also Dame Beatrice, always my friend. On the day before she died, my Karen telephones me to say there is a day’s holiday for the school – two special half-days which the teachers decide to turn into one whole day – you understand? Karen asks shall she come home for the day. Edward – her fiancé, you know – wants to spend the day at his books, and the two girls who share a flat with Karen are to go out with their friends. I say no, not convenient to come, as I have an engagement at Ringwood and too late to alter it.

  Q. And you went to Ringwood to fulfil this engagement? At what time would that have been?

  A. I go to Ringwood in my car, taking my prize dog to give a service, and I get there – I do not know exactly, but it would have been – oh, I am desolate to think of it! – it would have been while my Karen was being done to death by this monster.

  Q. Yes, but what time by the clock was this?

  A. Oh, half-past eleven, perhaps. I do not know.

  Q. Superintendent Phillips has been to see the people concerned. They say that you arrived with your dog at about a quarter past twelve.

  A. No, no! Much earlier than that.

  Q. I see. You suggested to Superintendent Phillips that your daughter must have left her flat very early in the morning to have arrived at the spot where her body was found, and to have been killed there at the time the doctors stated at the inquest, but I do not follow your reasoning. How long would you say it took your daughter to reach your cottage from her flat?

  A. Twenty miles – let us say an hour, allowing for traffic. But my daughter did not come to the cottage that day. How could she, when she knows I have arranged to go out?

  Q. Well, we have come to the conclusion that she did go to your cottage that morning, that she was killed there and her body taken to where it was found.

  A. But why should you think that?

  Q. The time factor leads us to think so. Your daughter finds out that the cottage will be empty during the late morning and the middle day. She arranges to meet somebody there. That somebody kills her. Now, at what time would you say you got home that afternoon?

  A. I was invited to stay for lunch – this also I tell Karen over the telephone – and I leave at perhaps half-past two, a quarter to three, something like that. What does it matter, since, by that time, my Karen is dead?

  Q. It matters to this extent: if your daughter was killed at the cottage, the murderer had plenty of time to move her body to where it was found. What do you say about that?

  A. I have always believed – the police, they tell me nothing! – I have always believed that Karen had an assignation with someone in those woods, and that he killed her there.

  Q. The ground was expertly and very minutely examined, and there was no sign of a struggle.

  A. But she would have been taken by surprise. She would not have had a chance to struggle. The murderer came on her from behind and twisted the cord of the dog-whistle around her neck and made her unconscious, and then he – then he—

  Q. Finished the job by manual strangulation. I still think she would have threshed about a bit, you know, wouldn’t she?

  A. Please, please! I do not like this picture!

  Q. Neither do I. How do you account for the fact that the dog-whistle was round her neck at all?

  A. The murderer put it there, like I am saying, to make her unconscious.

  Q. I am trying to form another picture in my mind. She must have been on terms of some intimacy with her murderer if she allowed him to put a string round her neck. It sounds as though a playful situation had been contrived, of which he then took advantage.

  A. You mean she had a lover, my little Karen?

  Q. What does it look like to you?

  A. But she was engaged to Edward!

  Q. His alibi has never been proved, you know.

  A. You think Edward killed her?

  Q. I did not say that. Let us return to this dog-whistle. There seems to be no doubt that it was in response to it that Mrs Gavin’s dog left Mrs Gavin’s side and followed somebody across the common and into the woods where your daughter’s body lay. Further, that whoever used the whistle knew the dog and commanded him to stay with the body. Now I want you, Mrs Schumann, to think very hard about this. I want to know – and here I do not believe that anybody except yourself can help us – I want to know the names of any persons whom the dog would have known and would have trusted to that extent.

  A. There was nobody except Karen herself.

  Q. Who must be ruled out for obvious reasons.

  A. I think the dog was using instinct, not following a dog-whistle.

  Q. Another point which I find extremely puzzling is this: how could the murderer have known that Mrs Gavin was exercising her dog that evening?

  A. How should I know?

  Q. How well do you know Mrs Gavin?

  A. You think she killed my Karen and led the dog to the spot, so she can pretend to find the dog and the body next day? Well, she is so big and so strong, of course …

  Q. Yes, it’s a thought, that. I must see what Mrs Gavin has to say about it. Can you think of any reason, though, why she should wish to kill your daughter?

  A. Oh, yes, that I know.

  Q. Indeed? What reason?

  A. Karen desires to take the dog back again.

  Q. Really?

  A. Ja. Mrs Gavin – Karen tells me this, but, of course, I do not repeat it until you force it from me – Mrs Gavin has her son in mind. It is for
him that the dog is purchased. So she says she cannot part with the dog and disappoint the boy. I think they meet and argue. I see it all, now you say the killing was done at my cottage. Karen finds I shall not be there, so she makes this appointment to meet Mrs Gavin and talk things over, but there is argument, and Mrs Gavin, so much bigger and stronger than my Karen, throws the string of the dog-whistle round Karen’s neck and pulls it tight – in bad temper, you know, not perhaps intending to kill. But Karen falls unconscious and Mrs Gavin is so frightened she strangles her, so my Karen cannot live to tell of the attack.

  Q. Well, thank you, Mrs Schumann. You have certainly given me something to think about. And you have had this in mind all along?

  A. Not all along, no, but I think it is the truth.

  Q. Then how do you account for the other four deaths?

  A. Only the death of my Karen concern me. I am sorry for the others, but I do not care all that much, and I still think Otto, who is a very bad boy, killed Maria Machrado because he get her with child and she demands to be married.

  ‘And, of course, she could be right about that, you know,’ commented Laura to Dame Beatrice. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him and, of course, he is her son and she did kill her daughter. Karen went to the cottage that morning, had a bust-up with her mother about James, and that was the end of Karen. Then Mrs Schumann hid the body, probably in an empty dog-house, went off to Ringwood, came back in the afternoon and took the body to the woods. Then she must have come along here and followed me to the post-office and round the village. She knew I’d have to take Fergus for a run at some time before nightfall. All she had to do was hang about long enough. She’d have seen me leave the post-office, then she cut back to the common, went along that path, whistled up Fergus, and – Bob’s your uncle! She simply had to walk him across to the woods and leave him on guard. She knew I wouldn’t be able either to hear her whistle him up or to spot her in the mist and the darkness.’

  ‘She also knew that you would not rest until you had found him, and that, in finding him, you would also find the body and have to report it. Her suggestion that you are the murderer arose directly from this interview with Detective-Inspector Maisry and was made on the spur of the moment. He must have given her a fright for her to have invented so far-fetched a theory.’

  (4)

  ‘For the record only, Mrs Gavin,’ said Maisry, when, two days later, he visited the Stone House, ‘can you cast your mind back and remember how you spent the day on which Miss Schumann was killed?

  ‘I’ll have to work backwards,’ said Laura, ‘from the time I took Fergus down to the post-office. I left this house at about a quarter-past four, or maybe a bit earlier, because I wanted to catch the quarter-to-five post. Before that, I had been writing the letter I was going to send. That would have taken me possibly twenty minutes.’

  ‘Takes us back roughly to between a quarter to four and four o’clock. Let’s say a quarter to four.’

  ‘We finished lunch at two. We have it most days at a quarter past one, so as to get a long morning.’

  ‘And that day, so far as you remember, was no exception?’

  ‘It was no exception,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Our habits are regular, unless there is some special reason for altering them, and on that day there would have been none, since the murders, which lately have sometimes thrown the times out of joint, had not been committed.’

  ‘Right. So we are back to a quarter past one.’

  ‘From ten o’clock until I went to wash my hands before lunch, I was dealing with Dame Beatrice’s correspondence and typing a couple of chapters of her new book,’ went on Laura. ‘You confirm that, Dame Beatrice?’

  ‘Certainly. I was with Laura the whole time. I spend little time on housekeeping duties, for Henri does his own ordering of food and Celestine looks after everything else, with the help of a young girl who lives in and has her own regular routine of duties.’

  ‘Oh, well, that disposes of Mrs Schumann’s unlikely theory that Mrs Gavin murdered her daughter. To my mind, there is no doubt about what really happened, but, unfortunately, so far I have no proof on which I should be justified in arresting and charging the good lady. My next move will be to go over all the ground again in the case of Maria Machrado. Otto Schumann’s ship docks at Poole this afternoon and I shall be there to meet it. I wonder whether you would care to accompany me, Dame Beatrice? – in your official capacity, of course. I shall get him along to the station and you might like to examine him there. I also shall have a few things to say to him and, between us, we may get at the truth, so far as he knows it.’

  Otto was at his jauntiest and appeared not in the least perturbed when Maisry boarded the ship and extracted him therefrom to the annoyance of his captain and the interest of the first officer.

  ‘Glad you don’t belong to the uniformed branch,’ Otto said chattily, when he was in Maisry’s car. ‘Bad for the morale of the crew to see the second officer being carted off to the jug. I suppose it is to the jug, isn’t it? You know, like the last time, when you had to let me go because you knew you’d boobed.’

  ‘Just to the station itself, to answer a few questions,’ said Maisry gently. ‘You can refuse, of course, or you can ask to have your lawyer present.’

  ‘Mean to say you haven’t put the bracelets on your mass-murderer? Bad, you know, Detective-Inspector! A lot of slackness somewhere.’

  ‘Just as you say,’ said Maisry unemotionally. ‘I’ve got Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley at the station. She wants to talk to you about psychiatry. You’ll find her very interesting and, if I may offer a word of advice, I wouldn’t try to be too clever, if I were you. She probably eats a couple of young lads like you as a snack between meals.’

  ‘Glad you cautioned me. Where’s the bit about “be taken down and may be used in evidence”, though?’

  Maisry did not reply and a little of Otto’s ebullience appeared to leave him, for he said nothing more until they reached headquarters and he was taken into the office which Phillips had put at Maisry’s disposal. There, having mentioned that the colour of the walls clashed with the colour of his eyes, he sobered down again, took the chair which was offered him and looked at Dame Beatrice with an innocent, enquiring expression. She said,

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Schumann. Would you mind doing a word test for me?’

  ‘You say “bird” and I say “wench” – that kind of thing?’

  ‘Talking of “that kind of thing”, we now know that you were correct about one thing you told us about Maria Machrado.’

  ‘Only in one thing? Surely that’s understating it? I could tell you a bookful about that Spanish doll, and it would all be true.’

  ‘But possibly not useful. After you had parted from her, she did go back to your mother’s cottage. That is where we believe she was murdered.’

  ‘Oh? What gave you that idea?’

  ‘It fits with what we know of the other murders,’ said Maisry, ‘so it would be a good idea if you told us your story of the quarrel you had with her.’

  ‘Look here, when I told the other dick – what’s his name? – Phillips, that Maria said she was going back to my mother’s cottage, I told him a shiner. Why would she go back there? My mother hated the sight of her, and she knew it. The best she could hope for there was to be shown the door.’

  ‘And the worst, that she would be murdered,’ said Maisry. ‘Now, Mr Schumann, I am not cautioning you yet, but in fairness I must emphasize that you do not have to answer my next question. Who, besides yourself, could have known that Maria Machrado intended to go back to the cottage?’

  Otto stared at his fingers. They were thick, long and strong. He flexed them and then, turning both hands over, he studied the golden hairs on the backs of them.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said at last.

  ‘Will you give us an account, as full a one as you can manage, of the last time you saw Miss Machrado alive?’

  ‘Look, I’ve done all this before! Remember? You had
nothing on me at all, and you had to let me go. You can’t arrest a man twice for the same offence!’

  ‘You can’t try a man twice for the same offence. There is a difference. I advise you to help us, not to try to lay us a stymie. I will admit to you that we did not proceed against you that last time because we were convinced then that all the murders were committed by the same person. Now we are not nearly so sure. We know who killed your sister. We know it was not you. But it is up to you to convince us that neither did you kill Miss Machrado. No …’ for Otto had begun to bluster … ‘that kind of attitude won’t help you. Just sit there and do a bit of quiet thinking. You’re in a spot, my boy, and don’t you lose sight of that fact. You’re known to have been running around with the girl, you’re known to have had a quarrel with her at which blows were exchanged, and you’re known to have a violent temper. Furthermore, it seems as though you, and you only, knew that she intended to return to your mother’s cottage and demand shelter.’

  ‘Demand? A fine position she was in to demand anything!’

  ‘Her demand would be based upon the fact that she was carrying your child.’

  ‘You can’t prove that!’

  ‘I think we should have little difficulty in getting a jury to believe it.’

  ‘I see.’ He was silent. All the bounce had gone out of him. It was an extremely dejected boy who sat there, staring down again at his large hands.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘when you have answered, or decided not to answer, Detective-Inspector Maisry, all that you remember about your father.’

  ‘My father? What’s he got to do with it? He’s been dead five years.’

  ‘I know that. What was your relationship with him?’

  ‘Not too good. Karen was his pick. She shared his interests, such as they were.’

  ‘How do you mean – such as they were?’

  ‘Oh, religion and all that. He never made any money, you know. We lived on my mother and the dogs. I used to rile the old man by looking up things against the Faith and arguing with him.’