Printer's Error

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Possibly. Did Aunt Adela think that you were the person aimed at?”

  “I gathered so. So did George, but apparently she didn’t really think so, or else she was mistaken.”

  “Ah, she’s deep, though, is the old soul. Deep as the whale’s belly. And talking of bellies, do you know the effect this place is having on me? I feel that I never want to see another female, or paint one or go to bed with one, ever any more, world without end. And so I wrote to old Jenny.”

  “I can feel for you,” said Bassin. “Well, having spotted the beaver, I think I’ll be getting back. Which would be the nearest way to the car? We seemed to do a trek of some eight or nine miles to reach this meadow.”

  “Old Pop Child showing off the terrain, that was, I expect. He’s a shareholder, I believe.”

  “What else does he do for a living?”

  “Owns about half the rapidly developing watering-place called Whinberry-on-Sea. Heard of it? Not a bad old chap. Better stuff than son Timothy.”

  “Wherefore the scar? War wound?”

  “Not much. Tim was a Conchy. Very, very gun-shy. Full of noble ideals. No, his wife gave him that because he wouldn’t divorce her. So then he let her divorce him. Physical coward of the first water. Can’t help it, of course, poor devil, but it puts one off loving him like a brother, for some reason or another. Aunt Adela could explain it. In fact, she did, uncomplimentarily to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Said I didn’t like physical cowards because I had a sort of little-child complex and was really afraid that in time of danger they would leave me to my fate and not fight to save me. Come through here, and we can get back inside ten minutes. Go canny, in case of accidents.”

  “One thing,” said Bassin, as they reached the edge of the wood and branched off sharply to the right, “could anybody get out of here fairly easily, and get back again, without being seen to go, and without being missed? I’m thinking of the beaver with the gun.”

  “Oh yes, easily enough. He’d only need to choose his time. We’ve all got access to our clothes, you see, and although the idea is to stay here all the time you’ve clocked in for, in actual practice people do slip away for a binge or a drive and things. Some of ’em come for a lark, you see, and soon get sick of a healthy, open-air life. Others go off to get a drink, or are recalled on business.”

  “Any possibility of finding out whether this particular bloke—it’s the thinner one—was out this morning and came back with tomato on his beard?”

  “I’ll see what I can sleuth. But if you recognised him, that’s that.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough for the police.”

  “No, that’s possibly true. All right, then. I’ll do my best. One thing, everybody gossips here all day long. Nothing much else to do. Hullo, George, here we are again!”

  They had reached the entrance to the grounds.

  •2•

  “And now—what?” said Bassin, when he and Mrs. Bradley were again headed for the “Lion.”

  “Carey will join us tomorrow. This evening after dinner, I will show you the results of my investigations.”

  “Oh?” said Bassin. “A great light dawns. Do you mean to say that your intelligence test, or whatever it was, led you to some information about the murder of Mrs. Carn?”

  “Well, I chose my victims carefully. About two-thirds of the colony volunteered, but the beards seemed beautifully suspicious, so I selected them.”

  “Senss and Carn, you think? Wonder which is which? Pity you couldn’t have got hold of the other German, Simplon—or, rather, Bonner.”

  “Yes—Bonner,” said Mrs. Bradley, giving him a quick glance which reminded him of a bird seeing a worm. “Child, you wouldn’t care to go for quite a long holiday—to Monte Carlo or somewhere—would you?”

  “No.” He pondered for a minute, and then said:

  “After all, you can’t be certain that I was the person he aimed at. It might just as well have been you.”

  “Or George,” said Mrs. Bradley, with a chuckle. “Yes, it might have been, but it wasn’t.”

  George drove in under the archway, which led to the yard of the “Lion.” Dinner was already being served.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Bradley, when the meal was over, “let us go to your room and I’ll tell you what I’ve discovered.”

  Bassin agreed, locked his door, drew the curtains, and pulled two chairs close together underneath the light, although it was odd, at that early hour of the evening—for it was then no more than half-past seven—to put the light on, and Mrs. Bradley took out a large note-book, extracted from a pocket, at the back of it, half a dozen folded sheets and, spreading the top one out, began her discourse.

  “Acting on the principle that people who change their names often adopt the same initial letter for the new name as they had for the old, let us assume, for the sake of argument,” she said, “that Mr. Call is Mr. Carn and that Mr. Smith is Mr. Senss. I am glad you were able to obtain that much information from Mr. Child, because I am bound not to ask for the names of my volunteers. But now to work out their identities and peculiarities from the answers to my questions.”

  “I see that none of the five has headed the answer-paper in any way whatsoever. Not even a date appears,” observed Bassin.

  “I had to agree to that, but all five have very different styles of handwriting. See how this obviously German script differs from any of the others. Here, I assume, is Miss Violet’s weak, neat hand. This illegible stuff, which is not a doctor’s, but might easily be an author’s indecipherable scribble, is surely Mr. Call. The married couple each use the same kind of nib—I noticed that—so that although their handwriting is not similar, for his is the pedagogue’s semi-printed hand, and hers is a schoolgirl scrawl, neither script looks in the least like that of the un-English Mr. Smith, who did not even use a fountain-pen. As for Mr. Call, his a’s, e’s, i’s and u’s, not to speak of his m’s, n’s, h’s, and r’s, are all interchangeable. He does not differentiate between h and l, and he makes the letter s in two dissimilar ways, even in the same word. A careless, unstable, disloyal, weak, nerve-ridden, unconventional, unjust, irresponsible, inconsistent sort of man, this Mr. Call, child, don’t you think?”

  “It’s Carn, all right. You don’t need a handwriting expert to compare this fist with Carn’s manuscript. But isn’t he too negative for a murderer?”

  “Come, let us see what they have written,” said Mrs. Bradley, without answering the question. “As I hope to obtain some information about the murder—and other things—from these papers, perhaps we had better tabulate our results.”

  She unfolded a blank sheet of paper and headed it rapidly, in her own indecipherable, medico-legal handwriting, with the names of the five volunteers. Then, in a column at the left-hand side of the paper, she wrote the list of test words which Bassin had heard her dictating.

  “I gave other general tests,” she said, “but these word-associations were what I wanted to discover the reactions of Mr. Carn and Mr. Senss. Look here, you write down, and I’ll read out. Have you a pen? Take mine. Oh, you like your own better. Of course.”

  Bassin passed her the completed sheet when it was ready. She took it, and looked it over. His delicate, masculine handwriting was a pleasure to read, she observed. The result of the tabulation was as follows:

  “How do you like it?” asked Mrs. Bradley, passing it back when she had read it.

  “Doesn’t mean a thing to me, I’m afraid, except that it looks as though you are right about it being Senss.”

  “How do you mean, child?”

  “Well, obviously, ‘Smith’ is a foreigner. The words ‘sink,’ ‘flint,’ and ‘Cheshire’ don’t seem to mean anything to him. Apart from anything else, you’ve caught him nicely over ‘woman.’”

  “And ‘storm,’ child?”

  “Oh, well, I suppose he’s inhibited because of the Nazis, isn’t he?”

  “Possibly. Nevertheless, he filled in ‘guards’ for �
��black.’ But there are blank spaces on Mr. Call’s sheet also. How do you account for those?”

  “Oh, well, he’s conscious of his false beard, I suppose. Oh, no, that can’t be right, because he filled in ‘beard’ opposite ‘beaver’ quite blithely, didn’t he? Then he left a blank beside ‘hair,’ and—oh, I see! He was the man who knocked Mrs. Carn on the head.”

  “Oh, we can’t go quite as far as that. After all, Mr. Smith-Senss filled in ‘blood,’ which looks horribly sinister! The answers are interesting, though, and in the case of the other three people, who obviously have little to hide, very easy to follow.”

  “Yes. The Leonards must have had a car smash, mustn’t they? And Miss Violet is somebody’s typist, I suppose. Just about the mentality. Oh, the Leonards don’t sleep together, and Mrs. Leonard is rather the arty-and-crafty kind of literary high-brow. I say, you must have some fun at your job.”

  He switched on the fire, for the list had taken some little time to compile, and the evening was drawing in. “What do you think of my ideas?”

  “Very promising.” She chuckled, and then added:

  “I don’t think we can do much more tonight. I doubt whether Carey can find out whether Mr. Smith—I presume it was Mr. Smith?—left the Sanctuary this morning in order to shoot at you, and whether he does discover it or not, it will be as well for you that Mr. Smith did not see you this afternoon.”

  “You really think I was the target? I’ve been trying to persuade myself that you were. In any case, why should Senss, if it is Senss, pot at me? I’ve never done him any harm. Of course, if you’re wrong, and it happens to be Carn, I suppose he might have some grudge.”

  “How so, child?”

  “Well, I look at it this way: Mrs. Carn came to no harm, in spite of the threatening letters, until she sent for me, as a representative of the firm, to take charge of those corrected proofs. You must admit that it’s a bit odd that her death came just on that particular afternoon. Looks as though the murderer, whoever he was, knew that I was coming and seized his opportunity.

  “Yes. It would be interesting, though, child, to know exactly what that opportunity was, and how it rose, and why it occurred to the murderer to seize it. It was such a sudden opportunity, you see.”

  “This all means,” said Bassin, shrewdly, “that you don’t believe Carn murdered his wife.”

  “Motive,” said Mrs. Bradley. “All murders come back to that, child. Means and opportunity bulk larger in other antisocial acts, particularly in stealing, for example, but there are, fortunately, very few motiveless murders. If Carn had a motive for killing his wife, it seems to have been that he might marry Mrs. Saxant. But as he could not marry Mrs. Saxant unless Mr. Saxant divorced her or he killed him, that motive seems a little thin.”

  “But we don’t know that he isn’t plotting against Saxant.”

  “No, we don’t know that. Why do you suppose Mr. Simplon was injured, child?”

  “What’s that got to do with Carn?”

  “Exactly. What has it to do with Carn?”

  “No connection, so far as we know. Yes, I see what you mean. But even if Senss laid out Simplon, what reason could he have had for killing Mrs. Carn? The anti-Jew business doesn’t affect him, it appears, and, if it did, he could have refused to publish the book or killed Carn.”

  “He may still kill Carn, child. It is quite possible that the book cannot be published whilst Carn remains alive.”

  “You mean there’s something on the corrected proofs that we’re not allowed to see?”

  “The proofs that Mr. Simplon-Bonner was prepared to bum down the printing press to destroy.”

  “Yes. But what’s the idea behind it all?”

  “That, we don’t know, but we can guess. The most powerful motive in the world, I believe, is revenge. We heard from Mrs. Saxant that Mr. Senss’s brother was killed by the Nazis. Simplon-Bonner represents that party, it appears. Therefore, somewhere behind all this there may be a plot against him.”

  “But we haven’t come upon any such plot yet, have we?”

  “No, child.”

  “Then—no, I’ll give it up, and wait until Carey gets back and can tell us, perhaps, a bit more. Let’s have a nightcap, shall we? And so to bed.”

  •3•

  Carey came back in the car next morning, driven by the gratified George. He looked brown and happy, and pronounced himself very sorry to leave the Arcadian beauties of the camp for the more drab surroundings of the “Lion,” but added that he should be glad to eat some roast beef and Yorkshire. Food at the Sanctuary, although plentiful, was strictly vegetarian in type.

  “And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, when her nephew had finished a plate of ham and eggs especially served to him at eleven o’clock, and the three of them were seated at his table by the window, “I think we must have a round-table conference.”

  “Look here,” said Bassin, “I’d like to go right back to the beginning. You see, I was almost on the spot when Mrs. Carn was murdered, and it might be that if we took the whole thing, step by step, from my first arrival at the house—well, what do you think?”

  “A very good idea, child,” said Mrs. Bradley. “One thing which struck me when you gave us your account of what had happened was in connection with the cash-box itself. I made a note. Yes. You quote Mrs. Carn as having said that Fortinbras (her husband) was very anxious that you should take charge of the cash-box and the letters. From that I infer, as no doubt you yourself did, that you had been sent for at Mr. Carn’s wish.”

  “Yes, I understood that that was what she meant. But they could equally well have sent them to us, you know.”

  “Or,” said Mrs. Bradley, referring again to her notes, “she could, as you suggested, have brought them to your office when she was in London on the Thursday before her death.”

  “Yes, or shoved them in the bank. She could have done that in the village, which, actually, is quite a growing little place, thanks to motorists.”

  “A more interesting point still,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and the more I think about it the more interesting and suggestive it becomes, is that she told you that Mr. Carn himself forbade her to take the cash-box and the letters to your office, urging that she might be attacked if she carried them about.”

  “Yes. That looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? I don’t wonder the police were after him. He made some pretty bad breaks, what with that and the disappearing trick. It looks as though he couldn’t face the inquest. That’s what the police based their suspicions on, naturally, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, child, one could equally well explain his non-attendance on the grounds that he had been abducted.”

  “Yes, but that would only hold ground if the body the police had found was really his. But we’re pretty sure that Carn’s in the Nudist Sanctuary.”

  “Another thing,” said Carey. “Those anonymous letters. You read them all, didn’t you?”

  “Every one. In fact, I had time to read them more than once. I’ve told you all about them.”

  “Yes. Aren’t they exactly the kind of things you’d expect a literary bloke to write? I mean, I’ve been thinking about the whole thing a goodish bit while sporting with the loonies in the colony, and it seems to me that, of all the people who’ve been connected in any way with the case so far as we know, Carn is the only one who would have written all that stuff about Prynne.”

  “That only refers to all the people we know about, though,” said Bassin. “That brings in something else Mrs. Carn told me.”

  “Yes, about the number of enemies, many of them quite unknown to him, that a literary critics makes. I know. That is the rub. Yes, all right. I withdraw. Let my observation read: Carn, or some other literary bird, wrote those letters.”

  “And where does that get us?” asked Bassin.

  “Well, I should say that it ruled out everybody we know of, except Carn.”

  “And brings in a thousand or so assorted writers that we don’t know from Adam, and that Car
n didn’t know, and that Mrs. Carn didn’t know.”

  “Don’t take on so,” said Mrs. Bradley kindly. “There is one more thing, and I believe it might supply another opening. Do you remember mentioning that Mrs. Carn told you of another letter, not one of the series—from which I assume she meant that it was signed, as well as being of a different character from the rest—which she was to show you if her husband agreed?”

  “Yes. Funny thing, that. I’ve racked my brains a good many times, trying to think who could have sent it, and what it was about.”

  “Another literary party,” said Carey, “and still about Carn’s book.”

  “I should not be one bit surprised if that letter came from Mr. Saxant or Mr. Senss, and was a straightforward appeal to Mr. Carn not to print his book,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “But, in that case—” began Bassin. Then he stopped. “No, I see. One partner alone, whichever it was, could not have stopped the printing. And, even if they agreed about it, I suppose they knew that Carn would only get it printed by somebody else if they turned the contract down.”

  “Lyle’s, for instance,” said Carey. “But I don’t think Lyle’s would touch a book like that. After all—”

  “Another interesting point,” interposed Mrs. Bradley, “is why Carn did not lecture in Southampton that day, and yet came home at about the time that his wife had expected to see him. What did he do, I wonder, after he left Mrs. Saxant?”

  “Queer he came home at all,” said Carey, “if he was going to dodge the inquest in that idiotic way. It would have been more sensible to give himself a complete alibi for the whole afternoon, evening and night. It was the most frightful damn foolishness not to go to Southampton, at least for part of the time, so that somebody could swear to having seen him there.”

  “I wish,” said Bassin, “we could trace that beastly cash-box. You see, the murderer had to get it open without the key, which I still carry about with me.”