Printer's Error (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Look silly, rushing about the place for nothing,” was his subsequent expression and excuse. The sound he had heard was not repeated, so he walked ponderously towards the place of its origin, opened the store-room door, and was met by an eddying burst of misty air, which the open door had set in motion.

  “Ho! So somebody have been in,” he said, as he walked to the open window and peered out. “Now, where be they gone? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  He shut the window and then looked at the catch.

  “Funny! I seem to remember that window was shut when I looked at it just now. Somebody gone out, then, not come in,” he observed, still speaking aloud.

  He tested the catch, shook his head, inspected the second store-room for the second time, found nothing, and then went back to the four-colour printing-room to get the evening paper. It lay on the rack of the big machine in the centre of the room, carelessly tossed there by the man who had read it. It was open at the racing news. The watchman turned the pages until they were in their right order, folded the paper carefully, glanced at the heading on the first page, put the paper into his jacket pocket, and walked back to his cubby hole.

  Jonathan had gone out with the others to get some food. On long shifts the firm provided refreshment—cocoa and a cheese roll—free of charge. Coffee was to be had, and cost three halfpence, ham rolls were threepence, and there were cakes, large, various, and of a nature which might have taxed the digestion of an ostrich, at a penny each.

  Jonathan, who, like most of the men, usually took the free food and drink, this time did nothing of the kind. He had heard a very faint but familiar whistle from the other side of the wall, and, dropping his companions, he had gone to a wooden gate, opened it, and slipped out. Flossie, his girl, was there, penitent and explanatory, and the young man could do no less than listen. She kept him there until he said that he must return to his guillotine.

  About a dozen men had gone in before him. The watchman, hearing them come, had ambled as far as the inner door and then returned to his hutch outside the first packing room and continued to read the paper.

  Suddenly there was a loud, crude oath, and Jonathan appeared from behind his machine, red-faced and in need of appeasement. In his own he held a severed hand, the blood still fresh about the clean-cut sinew and bone.

  “What—done this?” he roared. “Messing up my machine with his—”

  The men in the room stood and stared, except for a youth of seventeen, who was nearest the guillotine. He took a look at the hand, gulped, bolted for the door, and was sick on the platform outside. Jonathan seized a swab to clean blood from the guillotine, but an older man came up and caught his arm.

  “Best touch nothing, mate,” he said. “Board of Trade Inspector’s job, this is. Wonder where the poor chap is as copped it?”

  “Can’t be one of our chaps,” said another. “Everybody at the canteen.”

  “Another department. Someone fooling. Got what he asked for,” said a third. They had gathered about Jonathan. He, sobered a little, was still holding the hand as though he did not know what he ought to do with it. The watchman had come up and joined them, and the other men were coming in from the canteen. The gradual influx of mist, brought in by everyone who entered by the outside door, was making the air quite dense and lent extraordinary unreality to the atmosphere.

  Just then the head of the department came in, and the bell sounded for work to recommence.

  “Better report it,” said the man who had prevented Jonathan from cleaning his machine. “Here’s Mr. Capet.”

  “Doctor on the job?” asked another.

  “Bound to be, with so many of us at work,” said a third. “He’s under contract.” The head of the department came up.

  “What’s the matter here? Anything happened?” he enquired. He was a big young man, nephew to one of the directors. He worked hard and the men liked him.

  “Yes, sir. Accident. Somebody’s hand,” said Jonathan, holding it out distastefully, and glancing again at the mess on his machine.

  “Good God!” said young Mr. Capet. “However did that happen? Where’s the poor fellow now?”

  “Don’t know, sir. Not one of our men, I fancy,” said a foreman packer.

  “But when did it happen? Cartwright?—” The watchman came forward. “Anything to report?”

  “Well, yes, and no, sir. I heard a rat, as I thought, in that there centre stack of paper, but when I poked there wasn’t no rat, sir, so I goes me rounds. Me rounds takes me, as usual, past A and B store-rooms, sir, which I examines, there being nothing untoward in either. I then continues me rounds, being near the four-colour print-room, when I hears suspicious sounds. Upon returning to the aforesaid A and B store-rooms, sir, I am aweer that the window of B store-room is wide open. I makes an investigation, and dedooces that as the window was previous shut and fastened, somebody had gone hout, sir, not come in.”

  “You didn’t hear anybody yell out anything, then, while the men were at the canteen?”

  “That’s all, sir. I heard nothing further.”

  “Very good. I’ll ring the doctor. Mabb, you’ll have to stand by for a bit until I get the doctor’s report of the accident. May mean your cutter will have to stand idle until the inspector has seen it.”

  Jonathan stood by his guillotine until the doctor appeared. He had laid the hand on a ledge behind his machine, and produced it for the doctor’s inspection.

  “Yes, but—” The doctor carried the hand away. A quarter of an hour later young Leslie Capet came back.

  “You can clean down your machine and carry on Mabb,” he said. “Somebody being funny at our expense, although heaven knows why. That hand was cut off a corpse.”

  “Something else first!” said Mabb, resentfully. He left the machine as it was, and bolted for the store-room where the watchman had found the open window. He opened it, looked out, up and down the dim little street outside. Then, following what he supposed to be the example of the grim practical joker, he climbed out and dropped to the ground. The works was not fenced off from the little street. Its own high wall formed the barrier.

  •3•

  The ears delivered at Mrs. Saxant’s house and the hand left at Lyle’s printing works provided the newspapers with a column or two and the police with a good deal of extra work. The police adopted the reasonable theory that the ears and the hand were from the same corpse, and on this opinion they based their investigations.

  The hand, it appeared (according to the newspapers, who were not quite as reticent about the case as the chief constable could have wished), seemed a more readily workable clue at first than the ears, and a thorough search had been made of the packing department at Lyle’s printing works. It was not at all clear, however, how the intruder had gained access to the guillotine in order to cut the hand off the corpse, nor what his object could have been in performing this apparently unnecessary act. It seemed most unlikely that one man, working alone, could have transported the corpse to the packing department without being seen, and the police at first suspected that there must have been an accomplice.

  A great deal of dull but essential routine questioning and checking went on, until every one of the firm’s employees had been interrogated and asked to find an alibi. The police were most anxious, however, to discover and identify the corpse from which the hand had been cut.

  The general public were apt with an explanation. Among local people the identity of the body was a foregone conclusion.

  “Find the rest of Mr. Carn,” said the public bar of the “Lion,” several evenings running, “and you’ve gone halfway to solving all the mystery.”

  The comparatively straightforward killing of Mrs. Carn, in fact, lost interest for the public immediately the newspapers disclosed to them the affair of the hand and the ears.

  The locality was avid for more excitement, but this, for the moment, was not forthcoming. Little boys, remembering a previous newspaper case, fished the local waterways ind
efatigably in the hopes, or fears, of discovering other portions of the body, but they were unsuccessful. Their elders, half-grown youths and maidens, made up Saturday afternoon and Sunday parties of hikers and cyclists, to search commons, woods, and hollows in the hills for the corpse or its component parts, but, beyond the no doubt valuable amount of fresh air and exercise which they obtained, their efforts were as fruitless as those of the boys who went fishing.

  Meanwhile, nothing whatever was heard of Mr. Carn, and all efforts to trace his movements after about three o’clock on the day of his wife’s death failed.

  Carey Lestrange and Justus Bassin still pursued their own line of enquiry, regardless (except for such information as they could glean from newspapers) of the activities of the police. One evening—both having taken up their quarters at the “Lion”—they were seated in the lounge in front of two pints of the excellent draught beer for which the house was renowned, when they were surprised and pleased to receive a message from the maidservant who helped with the service in the lounge that a young fellow was outside, and would be glad to speak to them.

  He was a good-looking young workman, and his first enquiry was for the solicitor in charge of Mr. Carn’s affairs.

  “Me,” said Bassin. “What is it?”

  “It was my guillotine they cut the hand off with. My name’s Mabb. I work at Lyle’s.”

  “Let’s all go into the private bar,” said Carey. “We can get a table in the corner, and talk this over. Come on, Mabb.”

  The young guillotine-minder was able to give them a much more complete story than they had obtained from the newspaper report. He was obliging enough to draw on the back of an envelope, produced by Carey, a rough plan of the packing department.

  “You know, Aunt Adela certainly ought to see this,” Carey said. “Apart from anything else, it’s significant that the gate-crasher knew his ground. Look at this, Bassin.”

  He traced delicately and invisibly with the point of a pair of dividers the line of approach to the guillotine, which it seemed that the intruder must have followed.

  “You see? He came in through the packing-department door from this verandah, as large as life, and, having done the deed, sloped through the store-room window just as the watchman thought. But—what about your guillotine, Mabb? Could anybody just set it in motion like that? Was the power still on?”

  “Oh, yes. We don’t do anything but switch off, like you’d switch off electric lights, when we goes off like that to the canteen. The power was on, all right. Kept on the twenty-four hours, it is, when we’ve got a rush job, you see.”

  “I see. But there, again, the man knew that. I suppose it couldn’t have been one of your own chaps, Mabb, having a rather beastly joke? Somebody got a grudge against you, and thought he’d foul your machine and perhaps have it put out of action for a time?”

  “I couldn’t say, but I don’t reckon it was one of our chaps. I haven’t had a difference of opinion, not to signify, like, for eighteen months or more, and none of our chaps, as I knows on, bears me a grudge. Besides, we gets good pay and good overtime at Lyle’s, and the fellow, if he was caught, would get the sack. Too much to risk, I reckon, for a joke. Besides, I don’t know of anyone as ’ud do it.”

  “No. I agree. I think, you know, Bassin,” he added, turning to the solicitor as the young workman applied himself with some concentration to his beer, “that the watchman probably disturbed our intruder and caused him to make off quickly and leave the hand lying. Otherwise I fancy that he would have taken the hand away with him, and posted it, as he did the ears.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Bassin. “It would have taken no longer to pick up the hand. It didn’t fall to the floor, you see. It rested on the guillotine ledge. What I want to find out is how on earth he managed to carry the corpse to the packing department. I mean, it’s easy enough to see how he got in and out; it’s quite certain that the guillotine was used to cut off the hand; yet the police can get no further because they can’t find a single witness who saw anybody carrying any suspicious-looking or even any fairly bulky package.”

  “I reckon,” said Jonathan Mabb, wiping froth from his upper lip, “as the chap didn’t carry the whole of the corpse; leastways, not into the packing-room. Look here: suppose he has the body hid somewhere; what prevents him hacking off, say, the whole arm—quite simple and easy to carry—wrap it up with a piece of sacking round the handle of a spade and carry the two together—nobody in this here town would ever notice that, either day or night—”

  “By heck, he’s got it, Bassin!” said Carey. “Just the arm, and not the whole corpse at all. It would entirely simplify the thing. I wonder whether the police have thought of that?”

  “They hadn’t, but they have now,” said Mabb.

  “You mean you suggested it to them?”

  “I did that. Likewise how the corpse itself could have been brought to our works or took away. It would only have to be shoved in the back of one of our vans. Hide it in the coke-heap outside the canteen door up there by the street wall, wait till the vans was lined up and discharging their stuff (or loading up, it wouldn’t signify which), shove it in the back van—none of the chaps would ever see it—too much in a hurry—when Lyle’s gets stuff off, they gets it off—and when the van drove away, there would be the corpse. I reckon you’ll find it in Liverpool, where our American stuff goes. If the chap had bunged it inside one of the cases, it might be in America by now.”

  “And have you told the police this?”

  “Course I have. What do you take me for?”

  “Well, not for Mr. Carn’s murderer.”

  “You got it!” said the young man, with a suddenness and intensity, which made his hearers jump. “I’ve told the police what I think, and I’ve told ’em what I done, and I’m willing to bet it’s two hundred to one they pull me in. Gave me the hint I knowed a damn sight too much for an innocent man. So I asked Mr. Capet—decent sort he is—what I better do, and he said see a lawyer.

  “Well, I don’t know no lawyers, and them in Falshanger don’t experience murders, that I know of, so Mr. Capet, he says there’s a lawyer from London looking into things for Mr. Carn, and why don’t I look you out and get you to tell me where I stand?”

  “You called at the House by the Brook, I suppose and Mr. Carn’s brother sent you on here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What have they got against you, Mabb, except that it was your guillotine which was used?”

  “Plenty. Mr. Carn and me had a turn-up once or twice about the cricket team. ’Twasn’t nothing, but seems they’ve raked it all up out of the chaps. Then I jumped out of the storeroom window to see where the chap could have hopped it and somebody saw me and got the times mixed up. Then, worst of all, I reckon, thinking it over, and my mother, she reckons so, too, is me slipping out the gate to talk to Flossie, just the time the chap come in and done it.”

  “Can’t Flossie swear you were with her?”

  “Ah, she do. Like a good ’un. But I reckon they don’t believe her, and there’s nobody else don’t know. They’ll find the corpse soon, too, I bet. I told ’em too much, I reckon, but I never had a grudge, that I’ll swear, and I liked Mrs. Carn, and I reckon, like everybody reckons, police and all, that them ears and hand came off her husband’s corpse.”

  “You knew Mrs. Carn?” said Carey.

  “Ah, I did. If you want to know, she was my Sunday-school teacher and when we fell on bad times at home she helped us out and, later on, she got me the job at Lyle’s.”

  “And you’re sure it wasn’t you?” said Bassin. The young workman replied with a strong negative expletive, finished his beer, and rose.

  “I’ll think over what you’ve told me, and I’ll let you know in a day or two whether I can act for you,” said Bassin. “You see, if Mr. Carn really has been murdered—well, he’s our client, and—”

  “OK,” said young Mabb roughly. He pushed his way out without bidding them good n
ight.

  “He never done it,” said Carey, looking at the door, which was still swinging.

  “I rather hoped for some information which has not got into the newspapers and for which it would be hopeless to apply to the police. I’m waiting, as a matter of fact, for the next move in the game, because I don’t think things are going to stand still yet,” said Bassin.

  “No. They don’t make sense at present, and won’t, until the police find the body, and dig up some motive for the crimes.”

  “They’ve still got a theory that Carn killed his wife, you know.”

  “Rubbish. What about that little girl of yours who didn’t recognise the man with the cash-box?”

  “I know we’ve agreed to go on the assumption that there’s been a double murder, and that Carn himself has been the victim of the second one, but the ears and the hand have not been identified as his, and never will be until the police can find the body they came from.”

  “I agree. But there’s no real reason to suspect that Carn killed his wife, and plenty of reason to suppose that someone else did to get possession of the proofs and the letters.”

  “How are Saxant and Senss getting on with the book, I wonder?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not changing it. I have an idea that the fun will begin all over again when those hundred copies are ready. One thing I’ve done is to get a list from Saxant of the people they were to be sent to. The book is for subscribers only, you see, and not for a general market, which is particularly helpful in a case like this. Here’s the list. I’m going to bed now. Study it at your leisure and see whether it gives you any ideas.”

  “You think, then, that on this list is the murderer’s name?”

  “I don’t think that, necessarily,” said young Mr. Bassin with professional reticence. “But I do think that perhaps there’s a pointer there, if only we could find it.”

  “Meaning to say that, up to date, you haven’t been able to find it?”