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

by Gladys Mitchell

  “It’s all right,” said Dame Beatrice. “My business is with Mrs. Mapsted.” She stood and watched the cavalcade file out through the gate, Miss Temme on Palomino in the lead, followed by Dick, who had just managed to edge past his elder sister. Sarah and Cissie brought up the rear. When they had gone, Dame Beatrice walked over to the house and found old Mrs. Mapsted painting a rainwater barrel bright pink.

  “Cheerful, don’t you think?” asked the old lady, regarding her handiwork with considerable pride. “I’ve bought a lot of this paint. I think I shall do the pig-sties and the kitchen garden fence with it as well. I like a bit of colour about the place. What did you come about? Give me ten minutes to finish this, and we can go in and have a cup of tea. What’s Cissie Gauberon up to?”

  “She has just gone out riding with the May children and their governess.”

  “Don’t mean that. What’s she mean by sending Criollo and those other two brutes away again?”

  “I had no idea that they had been sent away.”

  “It’s happened before. They think I’ve no idea of what goes on in those stables, but I know more than I’ve ever told anybody. It’s always those same three horses that go away.”

  “I imagine that your son and Miss Gauberon used to hire them out to another stable.”

  “Then that stable is a long way from here,” said old Mrs. Mapsted cryptically. She finished painting the barrel, put away the paint, put the paint-brush into some turpentine, and went indoors to put the kettle on. “If you ask me,” she said, “it’s because of those three horses that Jack was killed.”

  Dame Beatrice begged her to enlarge upon this statement, but the old lady, apart from making weird clicking noises as she nodded her head, refused to add anything to what she had said. They went into the house and while Mrs. Mapsted made the tea, which took her some time and involved a good deal of ritual, Dame Beatrice studied the only bookcase in the room. One of the paper-covered volumes certainly gave colour to the chief constable’s theory that old Mrs. Mapsted could have given the tetraethyl-thiuram-disulphide, with the worst intentions, to Jenkinson.

  “There’s another thing,” she said, accepting a slice of very good home-made cake and a cup of tea. “Talking of horses, does Mrs. Cofts still hire horses from here?”

  “I believe sometimes she goes over to Jed Nottingham’s place since Cissie Gauberon lost her temper with her over Viatka. She tried Paddy Donegal at Linghurst Magna, but he didn’t want her, so he told her his horses were all on regular hire.”

  Dame Beatrice could not help wondering how old Mrs. Mapsted came by all this information, as it was known that she had no cronies in the village and that she and Cissie Gauberon had as little to do with one another as possible. She thanked her hostess for the tea, and added, with apparent inconsequence:

  “I suppose you were not a party to putting Jenkinson’s body among the sops-in-wine?”

  “Can’t abide carnations,” said old Mrs. Mapsted, eyeing her keenly. “Otherwise, don’t follow you.”

  Dame Beatrice returned to the Stone House. By ten o’clock that night there was still no sign of Laura. Then a telephone message came through.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE PENNY BEGINS TO DROP

  We were very fearful going over that Green as it was very dangerous. It was very hard work even for the Four Horses to get over that Green…

  PARSON WOODFORDE

  Betsy Davy had a Letter from Mr. Walker from Thetford and with it a Parcel in which was nothing but a Fox’s Brush or Tail.

  IBID

  The stables at the Blue Finn—the inn had no picture-signboard and Laura did not know whether the name derived from the appendage of a fish or from a compatriot of Paavo Nurmi—were on the side away from the water, the blind side, as it were, of the building. They were almost as extensive as the inn itself (not larger, as had been suggested by the barman), and Laura had heard that in their time they had housed the horses of the Excise-men, as well as those of the smugglers, a gentleman’s agreement allowing of this to the convenience of both sides.

  Laura assured herself that the horses were still there by going and peering over the bottom half of each door, for the old stabling had been modernised some three years previously and loose-boxes had replaced the old-fashioned stalls. Reassured upon the subject of the two mysterious horses, Laura mounted her machine and rode into New Seahampton in search of some tea. It was just before four o’clock when she passed the Seahampton Grammar School, and the boys were beginning to come out.

  Laura was a creature of impulse, and, the notion coming to her that Mr. Bond might have discovered something more about the death and laying-out of Jenkinson, she turned her machine in at the school gate and parked it under Mr. Bond’s window.

  Mr. Bond saw her at once, for it was his habit to stand at his window when his boys were let out of school and make a mental note of any boy whose behaviour was unseemly and of any master who seemed unduly anxious to get away from the building at a time when, in Mr. Bond’s opinion, masters should be conducting after-school societies, coaching games, finishing off their marking, keeping eye and ear on cloak-rooms and corridors, taking detention, or in some other sort justifying their existence and not appearing to be in any indecent hurry to quit the scene of their labours and race home to their tea.

  He had just noted, with approval, Mr. Shorthouse, in Rugby football kit, leading a small group of boys on a cross-country run and, with strong disapproval, Messires Grimball and Sykes with golf-bags slung over their shoulders, when he spotted Laura. She smiled and went up to the window.

  “May I come in?” she asked. Mr. Bond smiled unhappily. Taking this as a welcome, she was soon at his door.

  “I’m very busy,” he said. “I like to see parents by appointments, Mrs.—er—”

  “Gavin.”

  “Gavin? Gavin? Ah, yes, a little freckled boy in 2A. It is too early to say yet what we expect from him, I’m afraid. Why not leave it until the end of his third year? We shall then be in a much better position to judge—”

  Laura felt that she had better straighten matters out.

  “I’m not a parent,” she said, “and, when I am, the offspring will be at Loretto. I’m Dame Beatrice’s secretary, and I came—”

  “Why, of course! Of course! You must forgive me, Mrs. Gavin, but at this time of year, just before Easter, you know, I get a great many parents of the first and second-year boys all wishing to discuss future prospects. And really I just haven’t the time.”

  “No, no, of course not. I just wanted to know whether you’d found out any more about that business of the dead man Jenkinson.”

  “No.” But Mr. Bond sounded undecided and drew out the monosyllable to an inordinate length. He repeated it more lengthily still. “Why?” he then suddenly demanded.

  “Because I’m down here keeping an eye on some horses from the riding stables where he used to work.”

  “I don’t quite see—”

  “No, neither do I. That’s why I wondered whether you knew anything more.”

  “I had better have the caretaker in.” He buzzed for his secretary. She, at any rate, knew better than to dash away from school the moment the bell rang, he reflected.

  The caretaker took his time in answering the secretary’s summons. Like most of his kind, he stood on his dignity. Although assistant masters might scurry like flunkeys to keep an appointment with the headmaster, his was the more leisurely gait of the ambassador.

  “Sir?” said he, materializing, bucket in hand, a good man interrupted in his duties.

  “Why the bucket?” demanded Mr. Bond, eyeing the vessel with a look of extreme distaste.

  “The second caretaker being took with the faulty boiler, as reported upon last Tuesday, and the third being took with the flu, it has fell to my lot, Mr. Bond, to put down the wet sand and tea-leaves to sweep the front hall. That is all, sir,” said Betters.

  Worsted, as usual, by this ironclad adversary, Mr. Bond abandoned the
bucket theme and introduced Laura.

  “This is Mrs. Gavin, secretary to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. Tell her about the wood shavings.”

  “It being my custom, as the headmaster is awear, to take a Good Look Round before I lock up of a night, I become cognyzant, the day after the Dame last come here, of wood-shavings in the woodwork room. ‘Ho!’ I thinks. ‘What ’ave we ’ere?’ It comes to me mind as I found simular wood-shavings the Opening Evening, that time in the school flat.”

  “Well, you’d hardly expect to find them in the gymnasium,” said Laura.

  “Quite so, madam. But mark the sequel. Mixed with them wood-shavings there was wisps of ’ay. ‘Sir,’ I says to Mr. Turnbull, ‘you recollect of there being wood-shavings swept underneath one of your sinks on the Opening Evenings? Well,’ I says, ‘there’s been more, and again the woman cleaner swears she swept the woodwork shop right out before she went ’ome.’ Mr. Turnbull, it seems, ’as occasion to return to school some time just before five to get a tool he needed at ’ome, and in looking for the tool in the shed outside the workshop he finds a whole lot of shavings and had to shift the lot to get at what he wanted. He don’t want the shavings in the shed again, so he dumps them outside, but there’s a strong wind blowing on to the kitchen garden, and Mr. Pitcher, what runs the kitchen garden, being a pal of his, and him not wishing to cause him no annoyance, he takes up the shavings in a bucket—same as it might be this ’ere bucket I’m holding, and carries ’em into the workshop and puts ’em under a bench, and makes himself very plain to me in the morning about allowing of the cleaners to dump a lot of muck in his toolhouse. ‘Sir,’ I says, ‘I will personally attend to the disposal of that there flotsam, and I will pursue inquiries,’ I says, ‘but it’s my opinion that no cleaner done no such thing. It must of been boys.’”

  “Of course it wasn’t boys,” put in Mr. Bond. “Mr. Turnbull is an excellent disciplinarian and would never permit boys to place inflammable material in a wooden shed which also contains paraffin, methylated spirits, and creosote.”

  “It was the wisps of ’ay which decided me the first time,” went on the caretaker, ignoring the interruption. “‘Ho!’ I says, when I see ’em. ‘What ’ave we ’ere?’ And with that I comes to Mr. Bond ’ere, with the wisps of ’ay in me ’and, and invites of him to take a look at ’em.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mr. Bond. “Thank you, thank you. That is what I wanted Mrs. Gavin to hear. She will make her own deductions, no doubt.”

  “’Ay, sir, is conducive to a line of thought about ’orses. And ’orses was the raisong detter of the late Jenkinson,” said the caretaker, unwilling to be deprived of his climax. “Ah, ’ay equals Jenkinson, that man of straw.” He nodded portentously and withdrew, his bucket clanking gently against his leg. Mr. Bond sighed.

  “I don’t know whether he has hit the nail on the head or not,” he said, “but, apart from this very slight and, to me, unacceptable evidence that the body may have been hidden under wood-shavings here after having been secreted in a stable somewhere else, we have found out nothing more. One of the fathers, thank goodness, is editor of the local paper, so that I have been able to keep the school from unwelcome publicity over the matter of Jenkinson’s corpse.”

  “Were the wood-shavings proved to have come from the woodwork shop before somebody put them into the shed?” demanded Laura.

  “Dear me! That is very quick of you, Mrs. Gavin.” Mr. Bond looked approvingly at her. “That seems to me a most intelligent question. Unfortunately, I never thought to ask it myself, but Mr. Turnbull is still on the premises. Why not go along and have a word with him?”

  Mr. Turnbull was helping a boy to finish a rocking-horse for a young child’s birthday present.

  “That looks pretty ambitious,” said Laura, when Mr. Bond, having effected the introductions, had gone back to finish his own work.

  “That’ll do for tonight, Johnson,” said Mr. Turnbull to the boy. “That varnish has got to dry before you can touch the thing again. Yes,” he went on, when the boy had said good night and had thanked him, “they can make what they like in their fourth year if they’re still carrying on with woodwork. Do you want to see some more of the work?”

  “I suppose it all makes a good deal of mess,” said Laura when she had expressed due admiration of the exhibits and was beginning to long for her tea. “What do you do with the shavings and sawdust, and so forth?”

  “What we don’t do,” said Mr. Turnbull, who was reddish-haired and quick-tempered, “is to shove it into the toolhouse.”

  “Look here,” said Laura earnestly, “that last lot of shavings. Did they come from your wood or from somewhere else?” Mr. Turnbull looked at her in surprise.

  “What are you getting at?” he asked.

  “That body that was found in the school hall after the Official Opening—”

  “Yes? I didn’t see it, but old Bond told us about it and asked us to keep it quiet.”

  “It is thought that the body may have been hidden in your toolhouse under some wood-shavings.”

  “But why on earth should it be?” Turnbull turned suddenly belligerent.

  “We don’t know.”

  “And, if it isn’t a rude question, what’s it got to do with you?”

  “My husband is a policeman, so I’m interested. How often do you go to that toolhouse?”

  “Until I wanted this crowbar, not more than once this term. I use it a lot in the summer because the boys build huts. I keep special sets of cheaper tools for that job in case they leave them about on the field. You probably know what kids are.”

  “So it would have been pretty safe to leave anything—even a dead body—there for a time?”

  “I suppose so, but you couldn’t rely on it to be safe.”

  “No, I see that. What about the wood-shavings?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. I was mad at finding them there and chucked them out and began to clean the place up. Then I saw that they were beginning to blow over the school kitchen garden, so I collected them and bunged them in here for the cleaners to see to in the morning. The caretaker made a bonfire of them, I believe, and that’s all I know.”

  Laura thanked him, rode into the town, and moodily ate scrambled eggs on toast and some very stale cake. Then she went back to the Blue Finn to see whether the horses were still there. To her astonishment the stables were brilliantly lighted. From one of the loose-boxes came the sound of cheerful whistling. A horse was being groomed, she supposed, but this was such an unusual procedure for that hour of the day that she was considerably astonished. As she stood there in the shadow of the building—by this time it was almost dark—a man came out from the stables. As he passed before the back door of the inn, which was wide open and from which another bright light shone forth, she saw that it was the gipsy. He must have completed his business in Southampton very quickly, she thought. As soon as he had entered the inn she went up to the loose-box in which he had been working. What she saw there astonished her beyond measure. There was a handsome horse standing underneath a brilliant electric light. His head and neck were chestnut, but the rest of his body was that of a blue roan.

  “Good Lord!” muttered Laura. “What’s all this?” As at any moment the gipsy might reappear, she slipped back into the shadows, pushed her motor-scooter up to the churchyard wall, and parked it beside the lych-gate. Then she went back to the inn.

  She had never before attended an evening session at the Blue Finn and therefore had no way of knowing whether what she was listening to from outside the saloon bar was according to precedent or not. She was inclined to think that it was not. Instead of the usual roars of earnest conversation, the clink and rattle of glasses, the intermittent thumping of the penny-in-the-slot electric table games, the plonkings of darts into dartboards, and the frequent squealing of brakes as fresh customers drew up in cars outside, there came from the Blue Finn the low murmur of conspiracy, the sudden hushing of a voice as though the speaker had paused
to listen, the impatient tapping of a table as somebody was agitated into disagreement.

  “Must have let the room for a business meeting,” thought Laura. She doubted whether the business was reputable. She wished she could get a glimpse of the people inside without their knowing that she was there. The window was open at the top and was uncurtained, but, although she was tall, she was not tall enough to see in, and the glass of the window was frosted.

  “Bust in, take a slant at the company, apologise for intrusion, and sneak out,” she said to herself. “Even if one of them is the gipsy, he’s got no reason on earth to suspect that I trailed him this afternoon.”

  With Laura, to think was to act. She pushed open the door and walked up to the bar counter. The landlord was lolling behind it and welcomed her with a smile.

  “Good evening. Nice night for the time of year.”

  Laura ordered some beer and sat on a high stool to drink it. The landlord retired to an inner room. Laura took out and lit a cigarette and strove hard to catch the low conversation which was still going on behind her. She half-turned, as though in search of an ash-tray, and got a glimpse of the company. Four men were seated at a table playing cards. She recognised every one of them. She smiled.

  “Well, well!” she said. They were Jed Nottingham, the farmer Grinsted, the gipsy, and Mr. Turnbull from the Grammar School. Mr. Turnbull and Jed Nottingham stood up.

  “Look who’s here!” said Jed. “Don’t drink on your own. Come and join us.”

  “Let’s finish the game,” growled Grinsted. The gipsy said nothing. His earth-brown hands were still, one resting on the table, the other holding the cards.

  “I’m winning,” said Turnbull to Laura, with a grin.

  “Oh, don’t let me interrupt. I’ve got to get back almost at once,” said Laura hastily. She was puzzled. The company seemed ill-assorted. Moreover, she did not believe that the conversation, as she had heard it from outside the door, had any bearing on a game of cards. And why were there no other customers in the bar? That was one of the most striking things about this unexpected encounter.