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by Gladys Mitchell

  “I am under the firm impression,” said Mrs. Bradley, “That the contents of the cash-box were so well known to the murderer in their every detail, that he wouldn’t bother a bit about opening it. His only aim was to prevent anybody else having access to the corrected proofs, that’s all.”

  “Then that could point to Carn as much as to anybody,” said Carey. “But, somehow, although I can’t say how, I feel that a cloud somewhere has been lifted from my brain during this little parade of all our knowledge. Doubtless I shall wake up in the night giving my Patrol call or yelping like a hound in full cry.”

  He had scarcely spoken when the door opened suddenly. Bassin, with the practised action of a man who had represented his university in putting the shot, picked up the uncut cottage loaf which was on the table—Carey had eaten toast—and lobbed it scientifically and with remarkable accuracy of aim, full in the bearded face of the intruder.

  A gun exploded and the bullet hit the ceiling. Bassin and Carey were out of their chairs in an instant. Mrs. Bradley, no less nimble and even more intelligent, swung open the casement window and dropped out into the yard, where she scurried for her car.

  George, who was in the public bar, heard and recognised his own engine, left a pint pot standing on the counter, trod on his cigarette, and leapt for the garage.

  “All right, madam,” he shouted, recognising his employer in the driving-seat. Mrs. Bradley moved over. The car crept out of the garage and George, to save time in turning, backed her out under the archway into the road.

  “Motor bike! Ballington way!” shouted Carey, leaping on to the running-board. At the turn they picked up Bassin, who had sprinted after the marauder, with more idiocy than courage (as Mrs. Bradley severely pointed out) since he was the object of the revolver attacks, but, she admitted, helpfully.

  “Wanted to see which turn he took,” said Bassin. “Left, towards Lower Ballington.” He, too, climbed aboard, and George, who was scarcely ever permitted to drive fast, now won a secret bet with himself that the car could do Ballington Rise on top gear if she and he chose that she should.

  But there was no sign of the motor cycle, and at the first cross-roads, which occurred about seven miles over the top of the Rise, they gave up the actual chase and merely drove to Ballington police station to give a description of the shooting incident. This had to be done, since people at the “Lion” must have heard the sound of the shot.

  “And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, when George turned the car and was heading for the “Lion” at a discreet and comfortable forty, “we are going to the railway station, child, and you are going to rejoin your father in London.”

  “No,” said Bassin.

  “No, perhaps you are right. It’s too obvious. Have you any aunts in Scotland, say, or are you inclined to take a short holiday in one of the Channel Islands? Some parts of the Norfolk Broads are attractive. You could live on your craft.”

  “I want to stay here,” said Bassin. “I can’t help it if some lunatic in a beard decides to keep potting at me.”

  “It was the tomato fellow, I suppose?” Carey enquired.

  “You bet it was.”

  “Any suspicion of tomato still clinging to the whiskers, did you notice?”

  “It was a different beard, I think,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “It is Senss, I suppose?” said Bassin. “I wish I knew why the fathead has picked on me.”

  “I told you why it is. It is because he remembers that he let out to you the fact that Mr. Simplon and Mr. Bonner are one and the same person.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything to me if he did. Suppose Bonner likes to change his name over here—who cares? I can’t see that it’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Well, the fact that Bonner’s name appears in Mr. Carn’s book—”

  “Yes—as a misprint for Donner, which Senss has surely altered back again by now.”

  “He may not have altered it back again, child. If you remember, the letter was altered by Mr. Carn on the typescript, it was correct on his own manuscript and yet was wrong again on the galley proof. Most suggestive, I consider.”

  • CHAPTER 11 •

  External Evidence

  “… and saw his sword lie naked on the bed: anon she drew it from the scabbard and looked at it a long while, and both thought it a passing fair sword; but within a foot and a half of the end there was a great piece broken out, and while the queen was looking at the gap, she suddenly remembered the piece of sword-blade that was found in the brainpan of her brother Sir Marhaus.”

  •1•

  “There’s just one point,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “And what’s that, darling?” Carey enquired.

  “It’s about the little girl who trod on the stiletto. A helpful child,” she added ruminatively, to Bassin.

  “Yes. If she didn’t give us much positive information, she was at least able to establish that the chap who bolted with the cash-box after the murder of Mrs. Carn couldn’t have been Carn himself. I suppose he had an accomplice. I mean, she was very far from being a fatheaded child, and she assured me that she didn’t know the man who ran off with the cash-box. Therefore I deduced that the man couldn’t have been Carn.”

  “I agree that she was intelligent. Do you remember mentioning to us how incredulous you were when she assured you that she had already been given sixpence for her information?”

  “Well, the police don’t usually give kids money, do they?”

  “Possibly they do not; but the child didn’t say the police.”

  “She said ‘the other gentleman.’ Whom else could she have meant but the inspector? He would have been in plain clothes. She wouldn’t have known that he was a policeman.”

  “But the sixpence, as you say, is almost conclusive. I suggest that it was not the inspector but the murderer who provided the sixpence. If you had wanted information you should have offered her a shilling.”

  “Do you think she told lies, then, about not knowing the man? And about the cash-box?”

  “No, only about the direction which the man took when he left Carn’s house. She told the police what she had been bribed to tell anybody who asked her.”

  Bassin groaned.

  Mrs. Bradley cackled. “Of course, as you say, she didn’t know the plain-clothes inspector was a policeman,” she observed, “and the murderer banked on that, too.”

  “And, of course,” said Bassin, “I did discover afterwards that you could take a car round by the church. But, look here! Suppose Carn killed Mrs. Carn, then killed somebody else to make people think he himself was dead, why is he now hiding in the nudist Sanctuary? I mean, there’s no warrant out for his arrest. Officially, he’s dead, as far as he knows. He isn’t being watched for at ports or airports. He could leave the country. He could even go to Scotland or Cornwall or somewhere, and change his identity. Why is he still stuck in the neighbourhood? It seems a potty way to behave.”

  “Now,” said Mrs. Bradley with great enjoyment, “you have come to the very core of the problem. One thing I can tell you, and one only. If Carn was the man who bribed the little girl to tell that lie, the child did not recognise him. He was no longer wearing his small, neat beard. And that brings us back to the theft of the proofs and letters.”

  “If we could only get hold of a copy of that book!” said Carey.

  “I agree,” said his aunt, “but that will come all in good time. You know we wondered how Carn spent the interval between his leaving the house at ten minutes to one and the late hour at which, according to the servants, he came home? Well, I think he spent some of that time in a barber’s shop—the police will find it, no doubt—and had his small beard removed. Then I think he ‘tried out’ his appearance on one or two people who knew him—that will be much more difficult to prove—and then—”

  “Yes,” said Carey, “but don’t forget the time he spent with Mrs. Saxant, and that he returned to people who knew him perfectly well by sight—his own servant
s—”

  “Yes, child. I was about to add that no doubt he had had the foresight to provide himself with a smaller false beard, similar to the one he had had removed, so that he could return in his own likeness, thus causing no comment upon his appearance.”

  “Fantastic, love,” expostulated her nephew.

  “I don’t know so much,” said Bassin. “You’d be amazed at the things people do. And, besides, unless he had altered his appearance pretty completely, it’s hard to see why the police, with their thorough methods (and, mind you, they’re marvellously thorough over that sort of thing—it’s right up their street), can’t find out what he did that afternoon and evening. Of course, they don’t know about Mrs. Saxant—that was just our luck, getting that.”

  “All right, then,” said Carey. “I concede that. We assume that he got himself shaved. We tip off the police to establish that. Of course, he may have had it done in London—”

  “All the better. He’d have to get to London, remember, and we’ve no evidence whatsoever that the car he used was his own.”

  “Yes, but there’s a snag in all this,” said Carey suddenly. “I knew something was eating me.”

  Mrs. Bradley regarded him with fond attention which mothers bestow on babies who seem about to make some intelligible remark.

  “Yes, of course,” said Bassin.

  “No, shut up! I had it first. Look, here, Aunt Adela, you said the child didn’t recognise him because he’d got rid of his beard. Now you say that he had it shaved off that afternoon, after he left Mrs. Saxant. I don’t see how he had time. You must be wrong.”

  “He left Mrs. Saxant, murdered his wife,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and then—”

  “Yes, and then rushed off with the cash-box, spotted that the child was watching him as he pelted past the duck-pond, bribed her to say he’d gone in the opposite direction—that’s to say, towards the village, instead of towards the church—”

  “Got into the car that he had waiting, still wearing the very heavy false beard which we think he is still wearing at the Sanctuary,” said Mrs. Bradley, grinning, “took it off, to disclose his own beard underneath, then went and had his own beard shaved off and passed the rest of the afternoon trying out the disguise. I also expect he had his hair cut, and that is why his hats didn’t fit him. I think we could get him identified in an instant if we could take that child to the nudist colony, and yet that, of course, is just what we cannot possibly do, is it not?”

  She sat back and cackled amiably.

  “You really mean that Carn did murder his wife, then?”

  “It seems to me that he must have done. The theft of the cash-box could have been achieved without murder, surely, if that was the object of the raid. The knowledge of Justus’s presence—and the immediate grasping of the chance directly his back was turned; the careful preparations—all the anonymous letters, the refusal to allow the cash-box to be sent away or taken to a place of safety so that it could be mistaken for the motive, the damnable business of the second murder—some poor tramp, I expect, devilishly kept and fed, and manicured and pedicured, probably for two or three months, to get him in condition for the impersonation. I’ve given the police all these hints, by the way. The chief constable used to be a very nice little boy.”

  “Good heavens, it does add up. If true,” said Carey cautiously. Mrs. Bradley assured him that it was true.

  “The police theory now is that the man was killed before Mrs. Carn. He must have been planning her murder and his own disappearance for at least a couple of years.”

  “But—not because of Mrs. Saxant?”

  “That we still have to find out. I am inclined to think not. She, of course, was infatuated with him, thus causing agonies of jealousy to Mr. Senss.”

  “Oh, yes, Senss,” said Bassin thoughtfully. He shot a suspicious glance at Mrs. Bradley. “I thought you thought it was Senss who had committed both the murders.”

  “But, dear child, why should he?”

  “Well, this beastly book. Surely we haven’t been chasing a red-herring all this time?”

  “Time will show, child. And here, I perceive, is the railway station. A good train leaves for London in—” she looked at her watch “—twenty minutes. I wish this car had bullet-proof glass, like Herr Hitler’s.”

  “You don’t really suppose,” said Bassin energetically, “that any bearded German crank with a couple of guns is going to get me on the run, do you? I’m staying here. We can put the police on to Carn any moment we feel like it. If we can’t take the little girl there to identify him in the beard, we can jolly soon get the police to hale him, clothed and in his right mind, in front of her here.”

  “In his right mind?” said Carey. “All I can say is that The Open-Bellied Mountain doesn’t sound like it.”

  “We’re talking about Senss,” said Bassin.

  “The book was a good indication of deep-seated mental disturbance, as, of course, all this anti-Jewish propaganda is,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I knew the man was a potential murderer when I read those proofs, although I did not think it right to allow the fact to prejudice the course of the investigation.”

  “Yes, but we’ve still got to identify him,” said Carey, “and I might tell you that it’s going to be a practical impossibility. He couldn’t possibly have chosen a better hiding place than among those half-witted sun-bathers, half of ’em whiskered and all of ’em wearing tinted glasses for the major part of the time. Why, Methuselah, supposing he could still get about on his pins, could hide there, and nobody suspect that he was the oldest man in the world, and Mahatma Gandhi could pass among the tin-ribbed platoon of vegetarian prohibitionists without a syllable of comment, as long as he shed the loin-cloth and talked about calories and vitamins.”

  “You don’t appear to have enjoyed your residence at the Sanctuary,” remarked his aunt, “although the point you make is a good one.”

  “It’s such a good one,” said Bassin, in the same vigorous way—for nobody likes to be shot at by a bearded man resembling, as Carey expressed it, the patriarch Abraham in motor cycling costume, “that I’m dashed if I don’t have a stab at hiding up there myself. Provided with the essential beaver, I’m going to search out the past history of the other inmates as with a small-tooth comb.”

  “A thing some of the beavers could do with,” said Carey vulgarly. He clapped Bassin on the back. “Attaboy!” he added, blessing the scheme. “I knew Aunt Adela was going to lob me back into the rude, as my most engaging model persists in calling it, but with you alongside it won’t be nearly so bad. So up, George, and at ’em!” he concluded.

  •2•

  At the “Lion” Mrs. Bradley insisted upon taking the most extraordinary precautions, and, in Carey’s bedroom, the two young men speculated upon her hen-like attitude.

  “If she thinks that bearded pea-shooting perisher is Senss, and not Carn, she must have something more up her sleeve than the mere apprehending of Carn for murder,” Carey observed. Bassin, who had just concluded a preliminary survey of the beard, which Mrs. Bradley had produced, apparently from thin air, and bestowed on him, regarded it dubiously. “Have you ever worn the facial adornments, old man?” he added, tenderly feeling his chin.

  “Yes, I was a Caliban once, and had hair glued practically all over me. Hellish, it was, but I survived. In fact, I took first prize and a duchess patted me. She was about a hundred and seven, and laboured to the last under the firm impression that she was judging at a dog-show and that I had won in the class for all-comers.”

  There was a tap at the door. It was George.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, addressing Carey, “but madam suggests I lay off with the car in the same little copse I did before, and remain the night, so if you wanted any message taken, or, possibly, to make a hasty exit, the means would be at hand.”

  “All right,” said Carey. “Good idea.”

  “The car, sir,” said George, wistfully, “would be all right on its own, and—”


  “No, George. You stick to the car. We shall be all right. I could never look Aunt Adela in the face again, once you had been exposed to the horrors of that Sanctuary. Do you realise, George, that every day in that place they have community singing, and that you would be expected to join in?”

  “Very good, sir. The car is ready at any moment, sir.”

  “OK. Lay in plenty of cigarettes for us, and provisions for yourself. Aunt Adela coming this time?”

  “No, not this time, sir. She proposes to go to the farm next to the House by the Brook and make enquiry of the little girl there.”

  “Oh, good idea. Pump her as to the beaver, I suppose. Put some bottled beer in, George. I know where to hide it up at the Sanctuary. I suppose you won’t wait after dawn?”

  “I have orders to wait until precisely eight o’clock, sir. Madam thinks you should come away then.”

  “All right. Our first step, as I see it,” he added, when George had gone, “is to discover and impound that chap’s gun. After that we must get hold of Call and find out whether he’s Carn. After that, if we escape with our lives, possibly another idea of what next to do for the best will be vouchsafed us.”

  Bassin agreed, and fitted on the beard, which Mrs. Bradley had provided. It looked, as he expressed it, noticeably false. He canvassed Carey’s opinion on this point. Carey agreed that it did look noticeably false, but added that the majority of the beards in the Sanctuary also looked, and were, false, so that he saw no need for Bassin to worry.

  “It gives men self-confidence,” he said. “Marvellous how much less naked you feel in a beard.”

  “How do you know?” enquired Bassin, dabbing with spirit gum. Carey’s only answer was a yelp of admiration as the beard, to quote his statement, “swung into place.” Even the sober Bassin was pleased with the effect. The beard was youthful and slightly curly.

  “Makes your ruddy eyes look blue,” said Carey, smiting him between the shoulder-blades. “Come on, you lecherous devil! You look like Priapus in person.”

  •3•

  The way for Bassin’s entry into the Sanctuary had been paved, by a fortunate accident, by the excuse, which Carey had made to the Leader upon leaving.