Twelve Horses and the Hangman's Noose (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “She told me,” said the first-named at a late lunch, “that she did not care for her son John, but that she could not imagine any reason why a horse, or, for that matter, a man, should have done him bodily harm.”

  Laura mentioned the little business of Palomino and the gipsy. Dame Beatrice nodded tolerantly. Laura added, “And did you get anything more from the old lady?”

  “Yes. She knew all about the smuggling at the airport.”

  “Did she indeed? And was John mixed up in it?”

  “She thinks he may have been, at one time, but that he had given it up some months before his death.”

  “Did she say anything more about the quarrel she overheard when she was in the pig-sty?”

  “Yes. It was with one of the pilots.”

  “The plot thickens!”

  “I doubt whether it does, you know,” said Dame Beatrice placidly. “The quarrel had nothing to do with smuggling. It was about a horse.”

  “Which horse?”

  “An animal known as Appaloosa. It appears that the pilot, whose name is Hangover—pronounced Han-gouver but spelt, according to Mrs. Mapsted (whose sense of humour, if acute, is also rudimentary), like the morning-after lassitude which is apt to succeed the torrid night-before—”

  Laura grinned.

  “I admire the old lady,” she said.

  “Quite. Mr. Hangover, I was about to say, was angry with John Mapsted because the horse Appaloosa won a point-to-point in which John Mapsted had insisted it stood no chance.”

  “Oh, I see. By the way, did John collect heavily on the result of that point-to-point?”

  “I asked Mrs. Mapsted that. It appears that, far from collecting substantial winnings, her son lost money on the event, but not as much as Mr. Hangover because he had not plunged nearly as heavily.”

  “Then I can’t see what Hangover was beefing about,” said Laura indignantly. “At least it proved there was no funny business with the horse.”

  “That remains to be proved. To employ your own idiom, there may have been wheels within wheels,” said Dame Beatrice. “Never forget that Pegasus had wings and that Sleipnir possessed eight legs.”

  CHAPTER 10

  VAIN SPECULATION

  The water is wide, I cannot get o’er

  And neither have I wings to fly.

  Give me a boat that shall carry two,

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  OLD SONG

  “Monsieur Robert is on the telephone, madame,” said Célestine.

  “Bless his heart,” said Laura. “Dog here,” she confided to the receiver. “Yes, chump, of course you can come down. Quite pleased to see you, on the whole…I said On the Whole. What? Good Lord, yes…Can’t you get here by seven?…Yes, oysters. It’s March. Yes, Cissie can fix you up with a horse. What do you take her for?…No, we can’t prove anything. It’s just a muddle. You’d think people did it on purpose…What? Yes, get themselves suspected, I mean…No, of course not. That’s just the trouble, but we’re sure they were. Yes, Dame B. as well, and the little local airport is a hive of busy-bee smugglers…No, no proof. No proof of anything!…O.K. Be seeing you at about seven.”

  Detective Chief-Inspector Robert Gavin was an extremely personable young man; a young man, moreover, of charm and address. His wife was proud of him, Dame Beatrice was fond of him, Henri admired him, Célestine adored him, George respected him. Of all these tributes, the last, perhaps, was the most dazzling and the first (to Gavin himself, at any rate) the most surprising.

  He arrived at ten minutes to seven and at half-past that hour he presented himself in the drawing-room of the Stone House, Wandles Parva, for sherry.

  “Hm, yes,” said Laura, walking round him and regarding him with the eye of a connoisseur. “I don’t know of anybody who looks better dressed than you do. How long can you stay?”

  “Oh, three or four days unless I’m sent for. Have you fixed me up a mount?”

  “Yes, and there’s a meet at Wadshurst the day after tomorrow.”

  “Good. You coming?”

  “If my duties permit. Well, cheers.”

  “Cheers. Where’s Dame B.?”

  “Coming. She always gives us time to drink the first one without her, if you remember. Then we can start again with her, as from scratch.”

  “Of course. Well, what’s all this mess you’ve got yourself into? Can’t you ever leave well alone?”

  “I could, if it would leave me alone, but I’ve just happened to walk into these two things, and, of course, I had to drag Mrs. Croc. in to get them sorted out. So far, however, we haven’t.”

  “You’re losing your grip, my dear girl.”

  “I don’t really think so,” said Laura, perplexed. “The trouble is that we’re both perfectly certain there have been two murders, but there’s nothing to show. At least, there is, but it doesn’t hold water.”

  “What does show, besides what you’ve told me in your letters?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, don’t lose heart. Who are the suspects?”

  “There aren’t any, in a way, and, in a way, there are. It’s just one gosh-awful mess. Drink up. Henri’s still trying to convert us to Dubonnet. Says anything else is an insult to his cooking. But the Dame, bless her heart, stands firm, and still opts for the exports of Jerez de la Frontera.”

  “Good. Ah, here she is!”

  The mistress of the house was wearing a dark-red dinner gown and looked, as Laura affectionately and disrespectfully announced, almost human. Gavin, who, since his marriage, had promoted himself to the rank of nephew-by-courtesy, took her by the elbows and kissed her yellow cheek. His adopted aunt leered at him lovingly and patted his arm as soon as he had released her.

  “And now, after dinner, for a solution of all our troubles,” she observed. So, when dinner was over, they returned to the drawing-room for coffee, and then, when Célestine had removed herself for the last time, the three of them settled round the fire, Gavin with a cigar, Laura with cigarettes, Dame Beatrice with the Siamese cat which had lately become her familiar.

  “Now,” said Gavin, “fire away.”

  “When is a murder not a murder?” demanded Laura. “I’ll tell you. (a) When a man has been kicked on the head by a horse who didn’t do it, and (b) when somebody fills a chronic drunk with something to stop him drinking—which it did, drastically, by finishing him off.”

  “Yes, I see. You told me all about that. The last I heard was that you were awaiting the result of the p.m.”

  “It came through all right. The trouble is that nobody can discover who served Jenkinson the stuff, and nobody’s going to confess to it now that he’s died, even if no harm was intended.”

  “I don’t see what makes you suspect foul play in either case. You can say to a dog, ‘Bite him,’ and the chances are that if he’s been trained that way he’ll do as he’s told; but I’ve never heard of training a horse to kick a man’s head in. As for Jenkinson’s death, couldn’t it simply have been the result of a mistaken kindness, as you suggest? I agree that nobody’s going to come forward and admit this, now that he’s dead, but you can’t rule out the supposition that somebody acted in well-intentioned ignorance, can you?”

  “I wouldn’t have given it another thought except that it was Jenkinson, and that somebody put his body among those flowers and things.”

  “I see what you mean. Jenkinson was the man who found John Mapsted dead in the loose-box after the horse had made the noise at the wrong time. Your theory, I take it,” he added, looking at Dame Beatrice, “is that somebody took revenge on Jenkinson because Jenkinson was responsible in some way for Mapsted’s death. Isn’t that about the size of it? Personally, I’d leave the whole thing alone. You’ll never be able to prove anything.”

  “We shall begin,” said Dame Beatrice, “by finding out who it was who placed Jenkinson’s body among the plants and flowers at the Seahampton Grammar School. Whatever else may be incapable of proof, the identity of t
hat particular practical joker should not be very difficult to establish.”

  “It wasn’t a practical joke. That’s what she means,” said Laura.

  “My meaning is my own business,” said Dame Beatrice.

  In the meantime, Mr. Sebastian Bond was involved in a private investigation of the same problem.

  “The police,” he said to Mr. Gadd, “are only moderately interested. They even advance the theory, which to me appears to be utter nonsense, that this man Jenkinson felt ill and, wandering into school, laid himself down among the plants and died. One would suppose that the depositions of the man Garbour would have disposed of such nonsense as that!”

  “Of course, sir, no suspicion of foul play is involved,” said Mr. Gadd.

  “I know,” Mr. Bond drummed irritably on his desk. “I know. What I tell myself is that if foul play was not involved, something much nastier was.”

  “Sir?” At the Seahampton Grammar School, sex, except for jokes in the masters’ Common Room, was taboo.

  “Religion,” said Mr. Bond.

  “Religion?” Mr. Gadd looked surprised. Even at School Assembly religion was also almost taboo.

  “One of those fancy faiths. There are hundreds of them about. It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire! And I’ll tell you another thing, Gadd. All this business of interplanetary travel. It’ll be a reality within a decade. If these parsons, and so forth, had any sense, they’d preach a crusade against it. Where’s it going to get them? What’s going to become of their job if we discover there’s life on Venus?”

  “There’s life in her, at any rate,” said Mr. Gadd involuntarily, ignoring the jungle fetich.

  “I was speaking seriously,” said Mr. Bond. “I wouldn’t put it past some sect—there’s so much wrong thinking since these evangelists have discovered the virtues (sic) of modern methods of advertising—to have worked out this ‘say it with flowers’ business according to some extraordinary beliefs of their own. Why flowers at a funeral, anyway? You and I know, of course, the psychology which lies behind it. It cheers up the mourners and makes what is horrible and desperate, and, in a word, unbearable, into something sentimental and unreal. Yet there are people—one hundred per cent among the semi-educated classes, I imagine—who really think they are bestowing the flowers on the dead.”

  “Yes?” said Mr. Gadd, who had heard all this a good many times before and could not see, in the present instance, what it was leading up to.

  “Well, if he didn’t put himself among our plants of his wilful act—and I don’t believe he could have done—how did he get there? That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

  “Why?” thought Mr. Gadd; but he knew better than to ask this aloud. “How do you think we should set about things?” he inquired.

  “Staff meeting? No—at any rate, not yet. I’ve questioned all the caretakers, both separately and together, and I’m convinced they know nothing about it. No. We’ve got to keep our eyes and ears open, especially for chance remarks let fall by the boys. There was something behind that business, mark my words, and that something was very unhealthy—how unhealthy is debatable.”

  The vexed question of the body among the flowers had been debated by the police and the chief constable. The local superintendent’s view that it was “all of a piece with what boys at the Grammar School get up to” was not shared by Sir Mallory Thomas. He had three sons of his own. To be sure, they were at public schools, but he did not believe that there was all that much difference ’twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  “Boys wouldn’t touch a dead body. Superstitious as Tom Sawyer,” he averred.

  “But if it wasn’t done by the boys, sir, as being their idea of a joke, like, who was it done by?” argued the superintendent. “The body, according to the evidence given at the inquest, had been dead for at least eight hours when it was examined at the mortuary.”

  “Got to find out where it was hidden all those hours,” said the chief constable. “Foul play or no foul play, the whole thing is outside my experience. There’s no point in the business; that’s what’s so fascinating.”

  “I can’t spare men to investigate a mare’s nest, sir,” said the superintendent firmly. “If we could show evidence of murder it would be a different matter. But in Seahampton nowadays, why, the traffic controls alone at the juncture of North Slope with the High Street—”

  “I’ll go and see the headmaster again,” said Sir Mallory. “Matter of interest. I agree you can’t put men on the job unless we suspect crime. This seems, on the face of it, mere freakishness. All right. But I still want to know where they hid it. It’s so extraordinary that I suspect it of being a blind. Now, why do people draw blinds, eh, Superintendent?”

  “In the interests of decency,” said the superintendent, permitting himself to grin. The chief constable studied him for a moment and then nodded.

  “Good,” he said cordially. “And what about the blind that bus-drivers draw at night?”

  “Saves getting a reflection on the windscreen, I suppose, sir.”

  “And in those two answers, or in one or other of them, lies the clue we need,” said the chief constable. “Oh, well, Superintendent, you look after the traffic controls and I’ll look after the corpses.”

  The superintendent was not amused.

  “Seahampton has a very good record for street accidents,” he said stiffly. The chief constable opened his eyes wider, and said at once:

  “You may have got something there! See whether you can find out about this man Jenkinson being nearly run down or something. He may have died of heart failure, assisted by that anti-alcohol stuff.”

  “The hospital would have notified us, sir.”

  “Not if the chap who did it bundled the body into the back of his car in a panic and didn’t report it. If it had been reported there’d be no mystery! I suggest you tell your men to make a routine check. The chap who moved the body must be someone who knows the neighbourhood, otherwise he wouldn’t have chosen the Grammar School hall. He must have known about the function there that evening, too, and picked his time. Check with the chief caretaker at the school. He managed the car parking in the school grounds that night. Find out all the people who came by car, and let me have a list. I’ll do the rest myself. It’s not as though it’s an ordinary police investigation. I simply want to know.”

  “The whole question boils down to this,” said the headmaster, addressing Sir Mallory. “When could it have been done? The answer,” he went on, lifting his hand to prevent the chief constable from speaking, “is that it must have been done between the end of afternoon school and the beginning of the Official Opening. And yet”—a worried frown replaced the professionally benevolent gaze of the pedagogue—“I still can’t see when there was the opportunity. There was certainly no body in the hall when it was locked at two p.m., and from then onwards it remained locked until half-past six. From half-past six until the ceremony began I do not see how there could have been any opportunity. I shouldn’t think the hall was left entirely empty for a moment.”

  “I should be glad of a word with your chief caretaker, Mr. Bond. You state that he was in charge of the parking arrangements that evening.”

  “Quite so. Your own view, I take it, is that the body was brought by car and was introduced into the hall after the ceremony was over? Wait a moment, though! I’m not at all sure that that will do. It would depend upon when the plants and flowers were rearranged. But see the caretaker by all means. I doubt whether he can help you very much.”

  The chief caretaker—thorough man!—produced his parking list. (One job less for the superintendent, thought Sir Mallory.)

  “I marked out a plan on the asphalt,” the caretaker explained, “being that it would be dark when they wanted their cars to go home, and some of them not being used to the layout here. So, as they parks, I takes their name and the number of the car, and it’s all wrote down here, sir, to expedite getting them away after the ceremony and refreshments.”
>
  “Some job to check all these cars,” thought Sir Mallory, thankful that it was one which he had already delegated. “May I keep this?” he asked. “You’ll have heard, of course, about the body that was found here after the ceremony.”

  “Saw it, too, sir. But I’ll swear it wasn’t there when I popped my head in as soon as I unlocked at half-past five, sir.”

  “You mean at half-past six, don’t you? Mr. Bond—”

  “I unlocked at half-past five, sir, to take a last look round, it being too late at half-past six, with people and boys arriving.”

  “Mr. Bond seemed certain that the hall was locked from two until half-past six.”

  “The school, sir,” said the caretaker firmly, “is, as I see it, my responsibility when the building is vacated as for immediate school use, and, whether known, or, as in this case, unknown to Mr. Bond, I make it a practice to look into anything that’s been locked up. If you had my experience of boys, sir—let alone Science masters—you would appreciate that the same is absolutely necessary in a building of this sort. Taps left running, electric lights left on, lavatory cisterns running over, Bunsen burners left alight, vomit what’s never been reported, ground-floor windows left wide open—you wouldn’t believe! I’ve had it all in my time, let alone boys locked in the gymnasium changing rooms by mistake through taking showers at illicit times, and one of the women cleaners getting herself shut in the biology lab cupboard with the skeleton and screeching herself silly when the lock jammed.”

  “How long did you leave the hall doors open from half-past five, then?” asked Sir Mallory, hastily re-forming his ideas.

  “Let’s see, now. Half-past five I unlocks and has a look round. All serene, except the piano wants dusting. The women have all gone. Knock off at five, they do, after sweeping the classrooms. Collins, that’s my second in command, is putting down tea-leaves and sand in the lower corridor and the other three is having a last tidy-up round the gardens and quad.”