Printer's Error

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Did you get the names?” asked Carey.

  “Yes I did. Let’s get back with them, and I’ll show you. Although they don’t look much good to me.”

  “Not likely murderers?”

  “Shouldn’t think so. Still, two of them are local people, and both are males. I don’t, somehow, see petticoat influence in all this.”

  “Neither do I,” said Carey.

  There was an interesting and unforeseen development, however, which, as Bassin said, might or might not be important. After they had returned to the inn, and had discussed the list of names, it was arranged between them that they should interview the people concerned, on some pretext, so that they could get an impression of what they were like.

  “It won’t be any sort of proof, of course,” said Bassin, “but it would be better than doing nothing. My father doesn’t particularly want me back in London, and I’ve told him there are one or two things I can do before I return. This will have to be one of them.”

  They tossed for choice of victims. Carey lost, so Bassin gave him the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and he himself took the two local residents. He had shown Carey the two errors in substituting “b”s for “d”s in the proofs, but neither of them could see that there was any particular significance in the slips. Carey reminded him that Senss had promised him a copy when the book was printed, and then added thoughtfully:

  “Yet that’s a bit odd, too, you know?”

  “Why? Oh—yes, I see. You mean that if the book is to be printed and circulated privately, there won’t be a copy over? I suppose Senss didn’t think of that. Printers generally print more copies than are going to the binders, I believe; I suppose to have a few in hand in case anything goes wrong. That may be the case here. They will only send out the hundred copies that Carn has ordered, but really they’ll take off a few extra ones in case of accidents. Who’s going to tackle the lady from West London, by the way? Me, I suppose, when I go up to Town to report to my father. Where is it, by the way? Do you happen to know?”

  “Acton, or Hammersmith.”

  “Oh, I shall have to find out. All right, then, I’ll do Miss or Mrs. Sawbone, although I’ll wager a quid that she’s as right as rain. What about Mr. McGunn?”

  “Journalist. Better try Fleet Street. I’ve a pal on the Epistle who’ll give me the dope about him if anybody can.”

  “Good. That settles all of ’em, then. Finished, or do you want some cheese?”

  “I want some cheese. But don’t wait.”

  “I won’t, then. The bus goes in about four minutes from the horse-trough. Good-bye. Remember that the best way to dodge a flung flat-iron is to fall flat on your face, and let it soar over you into the middle distance.”

  “Same to you, with mud on it. Ta-ta.”

  Carey finished his lunch and then went to his room and changed his clothes, reappearing, to the gratification of the country girl who served in the lounge and occasionally helped to wait at table, in a suit of Bassin’s plus fours and with his hair brushed. He did not use the motor cycle combination this time, but caught the bus for Falshanger and, after half an hour’s ride on the front seat on top, he reached the post office.

  He was quickly and easily directed to the Grammar School. It was an Edward VI foundation, and the town was proud of it. His business there was soon over. Not only was he not permitted to interview either of the masters in question, but he did not succeed in gaining audience of the headmaster, either. The secretary told him firmly that an appointment was absolutely necessary, and asked him whether he wished to make one.

  “No,” he answered.

  “Very good,” the secretary replied, and he was left to find his own way out to the street. He felt, however, as though he were being watched. He went straight to the nearest post office, and telephoned the school, demanding to speak to the headmaster. This time he was successful, and managed to address a moving appeal to the Great Unseen, begging to be allowed to interview the two masters. He represented himself as a master from another school who was anxious to ascertain the educational advantages of taking boys round a printing works. To his surprise, this rather thin excuse was accepted, and he was informed politely that if he would present himself at the school at four o’clock, the two masters would be free, and, no doubt, would give him their views.

  That left him time, he thought, to try his luck at the girls’ school. This was about a penny bus ride away, he was informed by a courteous passer-by. He took the bus, found the school, rang the bell, and asked to see the head mistress.

  She was out at a conference, so he asked next for Miss Platt, the mistress who had accompanied the party of girls. Miss Platt was paged by a tall girl in spectacles, and appeared in due course. The girls, she said, had enjoyed the visit, but had not received the clear impressions she had hoped for, because, she felt, they had been shown too much at one time. A series of visits would have been better. Nevertheless, it had been most enjoyable, and the directors had been most helpful and most courteous.

  Carey mentally crossed Miss Platt off his list, and went back to the boys’ school, where Mr. Smith and Mr. Waters, two bonhomous young schoolmasters of the modern breed, received him with considerable heartiness, and apparently suffered no qualms of doubt at being required to accept him as a member of the brotherhood.

  “It isn’t you, it isn’t you,” muttered Carey, almost walking underneath a car. The driver pulled up sharply, and swore at him in German.

  “Himmel!” replied Carey, and then apologised for not looking where he was going.

  “Ach! Herr Bassin?” said the driver. He was the irascible little man whom Bassin had met that morning at the top of the stairs at Saxant’s and Senss’s press.

  “Well, not Bassin in person,” said Carey. He smiled pleasantly, waved his hand, and continued upon his way. Mr. Simplon scowled, and his little car leapt forward, spitting like an angry cat, and soon was out of sight.

  Bassin, who arrived at the “Lion” by five, had a more interesting report to make to Carey than Carey was able to give him.

  “The first man I went to see was this chap Simplon.”

  “Oh, yes. He nearly ran over me. You must have annoyed him, or something.”

  “Well, according to Senss, the chap is a Nazi agent. I imagine they are quite easy to annoy. Anyhow, when I mentioned Lyle’s printing works, he foamed at the mouth and practically kicked me out.”

  “It doesn’t strike you as odd, does it,” said Carey, “that the first printer’s error you hit on should have been the chap’s real name? You remember you said that Senss referred to him as Bonner, and then altered it to Simplon?”

  “Just coincidence, I should have thought. Of course, the German for thunder does change into Bonner if you substitute ‘b’ for ‘d.’”

  “But don’t you see? Simplon is the name he is ordinarily known by in England. Bonner is his real name, and Senss knew him by it in Germany before they came over here.”

  “Sounds possible. So we could bear to keep an eye on Herr Bonner-Simplon, you think?”

  “Ask me, he sounds like our man.”

  “Oh, come! You can’t just leap to conclusions like that. We’ve still got the London end to ferret out, you know—Miss or Mrs. Sawbone and the journalist. Just one thing, though. There is some connection, somewhere, between these Germans and Carn. He uses several German words in his book. When he can’t think of any more vile English names to call the Jews, he borrows a few German epithets and bungs them in.”

  “Well, what I wish is that the police would find Carn or his corpse. Or any corpse that would give us a bit of a lead. But old Donner-Bonner for me. I bet you that’s the way the cat jumps.”

  • CHAPTER 5 •

  The Corpse on the Coke-Heap

  “Oh, Sir Lancelot, thou hast betrayed me; thou hast put me to death…”

  “Within this place, as we are told… there is a shield no man may bear around his neck without receiving sore mischance or death within t
hree days.”

  •1•

  Carey’s desire for a corpse was soon to be satisfied. The police, pursuing (in an unspectacular and, in fact, laboured way) their own line, were brought, chiefly because of the suggestions voluntarily made by Jonathan Mabb before his arrest, to examine the movements of all lorries to and from Lyle’s printing works on the night of the discovery of the hand.

  Although it was still probable that the corpse had been transported thus, an examination itself proved fruitless. The police, then, merely as a matter of routine, proceeded to reexamine all possible hiding places near the works including the coke-heap outside the packing department.

  That they had already shifted and then shifted back the ten tons of fuel which composed it, appeared to cause them no impatience, and Bassin, walking up the street on his return one night from the last performance at one of the Falshanger cinemas, was amused to see them working by the light of lamps, earnestly engaged in shifting the coke again.

  Carey had returned to Stanton St. John and the pigs, and Bassin had spent a loafing sort of day. He had telegraphed to his father, who told him that he could return to London if he liked, but that there was nothing much to do, and if he liked it in the country he might as well stay.

  So he had decided to stay for another week, in case anything exciting happened, but his private opinion, which he confided to his father by letter, was that Carn had killed his wife and had contrived to disappear.

  He stood by the railings, with a small gathering of other sightseers, and watched the police at work, but had to wait until the next day to know the sensational results of their researches. He did not even know, that night, that they had found anything, for all that any of the sightseers could bear witness to was that gradually the police disappeared one by one or two by two, or, at last, four at a time, inside the building, and the dark heaps of the coke, shelving steep and black in the sidelong illumination of the street lamp half a dozen yards away, was all that was left to look upon.

  The body, as the sergeant unnecessarily pointed out, was in a partially decomposed condition. It had only one arm and was without its ears, a state which, the inspector averred, “the amount of decomposition noted couldn’t hardly account for.”

  “Carn, all right, I reckon,” he added, when the photographers and the doctor had done their respective jobs, and he was ready to make his report. The chief constable later concurred in this view, and it was supported by the younger Mr. Carn from the House by the Brook, who (retching horribly all the time, for the corpse was really extraordinarily unpleasant both to look at and to smell) positively identified the body as that of his brother Fortinbras.

  It was left to the doctor to provide the second and greater sensation. He asserted definitely, to the irritation of the British Sunday-reading public, that the arm and ears had certainly been removed after death and not before.

  The police, of course, were prepared for this statement, as it had already been established that the hand found beside Jonathan Mabb’s guillotine had been cut off a dead body.

  Thorough to the last, however, the police continued to search for the missing arm, but did not find it. A curious and unsatisfactory inquest did nothing to clear up the mystery of the mutilated dead man, and Bassin decided that, if the firm’s client were really dead, there was no longer any reason for him to remain in the neighbourhood.

  Carey’s suggestion that he might care to visit the pigfarm and meet his redoubtable aunt began to attract him, and he had already packed his bag when the morning paper, which he had strolled out to buy before breakfast, caused him to give a sudden exclamation, which made a passing dog, which was accustomed to be kicked, yelp, and dodge out of his way.

  The extraordinary news—a scoop for the paper, obtained, it appeared, by a young reporter with a more than ordinary flair for a story, which was due to break—was that an anonymous letter had had the effect of getting the police to ask for an exhumation order. The armless corpse was to be examined again.

  Later, the rest of the story came out. There had been no anonymous letter, but the inspector in charge of the case, a man by the name of Ellerton, had had the idea of once more examining the ears, which had been in the possession of the police since the evening of the day on which they had been received by Mrs. Saxant. As a consequence of this detailed examination the exhumation order had been applied for.

  It was granted; Mr. Carn at the House by the Brook offered no objection but said that he couldn’t, surely, be expected to look at the corpse a second time. He was informed that his presence at the exhumation would not be necessary, and the newspapers were able, very soon, to give their readers value for money and a welcome antidote to the usual Crisis news, by reporting officially that the body was that of a middle-aged man who had received a wound from a very thin stiletto through one of the ears, and that the ears must have been detached in the hope that the second wound might serve to disguise the first.

  The weapon itself was also traced. Bassin himself could have told the police where it had come from (had not the younger Mr. Carn told them first), for he had noticed it in the room where Mrs. Carn had received him. He had a taste for, although little knowledge of, sixteenth-century weapons, and this jewelled pin—it was scarcely more—had taken his fancy immediately he saw it, although he, as immediately, had forgotten it once he was out of the house.

  It was found trodden into the mud at the bottom of the duck-pond of the farm next to the House by the Brook, and it was not discovered by the police, but, naturally enough, by the little girl, who was paddling there, as usual. She wounded her foot on it, for, thin as it was, it had four cutting edges.

  Her father boxed her ears when he saw the cut foot, told her mother to wash it and bind it up, and went out himself with a spade to dig up what he supposed was broken glass. When he found the stiletto he had no idea that it was what the police were in search of, but, after consulting with his wife, he took it to them because it “looked valuable and he didn’t want trouble.” The hilt was set, rather flamboyantly, with semiprecious stones.

  Following closely on the finding of this weapon had come the arrest of young Jonathan Mabb. Cautioned, he was reported by the Press to have said:

  “I thought you’d pinch me for it. You won’t get away with it, though.”

  Then he put his arm round his mother and said:

  “I’m going quietly, Mother. Don’t you fret. They got to do this, but it’ll be all right. I never done it, and the law will have to say so. You’ll see it’ll be all right.”

  The inspector and his sergeant regarded mother and son with tolerance, and did not believe, themselves, that Mabb was guilty. Appearances, though (as the inspector argued later), were just sufficiently against him, and the circumstantial evidence hung together just sufficiently well to justify the arrest, although nobody, not even the chief constable, who had played cricket with Mabb occasionally, liked it very much.

  It stifled Press criticism, however, for the newspapers—or, more fairly, a section of them—professed a dreadful horror of unapprehended murderers who sent ears by post and chopped off their victims’ hands, it being urged that only monsters did these things. These newspapers then found the statistics of unsolved crimes, which were always kept handy as a goad for the police, and printed them with suitable references and mostly in italics, and when the chief constable or the inspector were teased or reproached later, on the score of Mabb’s arrest, they had their excuses to hand.

  Bassin, convinced of Mabb’s innocence, went to see his mother, and also visited Flossie, the cause of some of the trouble. They were not helpful. Flossie told again the story of the quarrel and of her subsequent and, as it seemed, disastrous choice of a time to make it up, and the mother, poor soul, could do nothing but assert her boy’s goodness and innocence.

  The discovery of the body had given Bassin fresh interest in the case, and he was not at all surprised to receive a letter from Carey stating that the Fleet Street man whom Carey had pr
omised to visit was obviously out of it. He had interviewed him, and he was well known, reputable and, apart from the special visit to Lyle’s with his conducted party, had never been to Falshanger or anywhere near it, in his life.

  Although none of these statements appeared at the time to be proved, Bassin felt quite sure that they could be accepted as true. He was convinced that his own interview with the other London visitor to Lyle’s works would produce exactly the same result, and was not considering it as a serious contribution to the unravelling of the mystery.

  For the mystery, far from becoming clearer with the discovery of the body in the coke-heap, had become far more bewildering. Bassin, seated in the lounge at the “Lion,” went over and over the more obviously difficult points. He even made notes and studied them, as:

  1. I can believe that Carn murdered Mrs. Carn, but if he did, why should he steal the cash-box and the letters?

  2. Why should he murder Mrs. Carn?

  3. If Carn was the murderer, who was the man the kid by the duck-pond did not know, and who was carrying the cash-box. Could he be an accomplice? But does a man usually need an accomplice in order to murder an obviously unsuspecting woman in circumstances, which he himself is free to contrive?

  4. If Carn were not the murderer, how was it that somebody else could take advantage of the few minutes that Mrs. Carn was absolutely alone—and when nobody could have anticipated that she would be absolutely alone?

  5. (a) Were the anonymous letters really written by Carn to try to divert suspicion from himself? Or

  (b) were they genuine threats? If so, who wrote them?

  (c) What was the idea of getting me down to the house when the cash-box could have been protected in other ways? (He had asked himself this question dozens of times, and the only answer that made sense was that Carn had plotted to kill his wife as soon as she had made the gesture of handing the cash-box over, again so that suspicion would be diverted from himself and directed towards the mysterious letter-writer.)