With a Bare Bodkin

by Cyril Hare

  “It sounds simple enough,” said Pettigrew, stifling a yawn.

  “Anybody who chose,” the inspector repeated slowly. “That implies a good deal, when you come to look at it. It isn’t everybody who would choose, is it?”

  “Obviously not,” said Pettigrew, beginning to feel like a participant in one of Plato’s dialogues when Socrates really got going.

  “Somebody,” Mallett went on remorselessly, “who knew what to look for. Somebody who was expecting this very document, or something like it. That means, somebody who knew what was going on in this case already. Have you lost any other papers since you’ve been here, sir?”

  “No. I often wished I could, but not one has managed to escape before. But——”

  “But what?”

  “Three-quarters of an hour is ample time in which to prig a few papers, skim through them, even copy the parts that interest you most and replace them.”

  “If,” Mallett put in, “if the individual had taken the trouble to ascertain beforehand exactly what the messenger’s movements were. And——”

  “By Jove!”

  “Yes, Mr. Pettigrew?”

  “Only something that has just struck me. But go on with what you were saying.”

  “I was going to say: Why take the risk of stealing this report, which was bound to be found out, instead of just reading it and replacing it, if there was all that time to spare?”

  “Because on Friday there wasn’t time to spare,” said Pettigrew, now beginning for the first time to shew some animation. “Because on Friday, before the messenger came back on his round, there was Miss Danville in the room next door——”

  “Wasn’t she always there about the same time?”

  “Yes, yes, but she was deaf anyway. She doesn’t count. But this time, there was also Miss Brown and Mrs. Hopkinson and myself, trying to get in.”

  “Somebody else, too, before that,” observed Mallett very quietly.

  “Somebody else? I don’t quite follow.”

  “Unless, of course, either you, or Miss Brown or Mrs. Hopkinson stabbed Miss Danville.”

  “Good God, yes! For the moment I had forgotten. The whole thing fits in. . . . Look here, Inspector, you’ve simply got to take up the Danville case now!”

  “It’s certainly beginning to look like it,” said the inspector. He did not seem at all unhappy at the prospect.

  “Of course,” Pettigrew went on, “the person who pinched your report may have been the same person that killed Miss Danville.”

  “That is a possibility. But aren’t we running on a little too fast? Where I should like your assistance, sir, is in trying, to determine who that somebody we spoke of just now could be. This is a fairly quiet corridor as a rule, isn’t it? You should know who is normally about this part of the building in the afternoon and who not. Have you noticed anything——”

  “Stop, stop, Inspector! Give me a moment to collect my thoughts and I will answer all your questions and several you haven’t asked yet. I’m beginning to understand quite a lot of things about this madhouse which I never did before. Now, listen and I will a tale unfold that. . . . No, Miss Brown I am not going to sign those letters now. I don’t care if they miss the midday post or not. I’m busy. And I shall not answer the telephone, not for the Lord Chancellor himself. . . . No, I am not expecting him to ring me up, but in case he should. . . . Please, please Miss Brown, go away! . . . Now, Inspector, just see what you can make of this. . . .”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Pettigrew,” said Miss Brown, a quarter of an hour later.

  “Miss Brown, I said I was busy!”

  “I know, but I think you should see this. It seems to be important.”

  “Very well then, put it down on the side-table, and I’ll attend to it directly. . . . What is it, anyway?”

  “The Inspector’s report about Blenkinsop, Mr. Pettigrew. It came in just now, by the midday messenger.”

  Chapter 12

  THE INQUEST AND AFTER

  Mallett looked with an impassive face at the document which Miss Brown had laid on the table. Neither he nor Pettigrew said anything for a moment or two. Then he rose to his feet, rather wearily.

  “Well,” he said, “it is what one might expect, isn’t it? Borrowed and returned. I’m only surprised it hasn’t got the usual Civil Service minute, ‘Seen, thank you’, at the end. I don’t suppose the messenger has the slightest idea where he picked it up, either. He just found it in someone’s tray along with a lot of other stuff and brought it along in the ordinary way. And if I hadn’t happened to come in this morning, there’d have been nothing whatever to show that it hadn’t come here straight from the Controller’s room.”

  “It makes me wonder how many of my other files have taken the same trip,” said Pettigrew.

  “I don’t suppose we shall ever know that. I blame myself for ever letting the report leave my hands, but it’s too late to think about that. Well, it all fits in, doesn’t it, Mr. Pettigrew? We’ve had a very interesting talk, anyway, and I shan’t forget what you have told me. I’ll see you at the inquest this afternoon.”

  The inquest was sparsely attended. Besides Pettigrew, the only member of the Control who was present was the Establishment Officer, who presumably had come to ascertain where and by what means his establishment had been reduced by one. The local press was represented by an untidy young woman, from whose lack-lustre expression it was easy to see that no advance information of the morning’s discovery had been allowed to leak out. A jury of seven looked as wooden as juries do all the world over. Apart from these, there were not a dozen people in court, and nobody who had not noticed that at least half of them were plain clothes policemen would have guessed that the proceedings would be of the smallest interest.

  A troubled looking middle-aged man with a black tie was the first witness. He proved to be Miss Danville’s brother and only near relation. He gave evidence of identifying his sister’s body in the hospital mortuary and disappeared from the witness-box in a matter of seconds. The untidy young woman jotted down a few words, tapped her pencil against her teeth and yawned. She was still yawning when the doctor whom Pettigrew remembered from Friday afternoon briefly described being called to the offices of the Pin Control and finding Miss Danville already dead. Then the county pathologist came into the box to detail the result of his post-mortem examination. It was couched in language of the severest technicality and it was an appreciable time before the reporter realized its purport. Then she began to scribble furiously.

  In plain English, Miss Danville had died from a stab wound in the abdomen. The wound was very small and very deep. It had penetrated the renal artery and caused internal haemorrhage which might be expected to produce death in a matter of minutes. The weapon used was evidently long, rigid, thin and sharply pointed. It was certainly not a knife of the ordinary type. Rather, the pathologist suggested, a stiletto. The edges of the wound were not incised. It was a puncture wound, indicating that, apart from the sharp point, the instrument was cylindrical in shape. If he might hazard a guess—But the coroner was not encouraging guessing, and the witness passed on to an elaborate but irrelevant description of every other part of Miss Danville’s anatomy, none of which showed any particular signs of abnormality. Pettigrew, who knew nothing of medicine, was interested to note that her poor, muddled wits had apparently inhabited a physically unimpaired brain. There were, the pathologist concluded, no other traces of injury.

  As Mallett had predicted, at this point the coroner formally adjourned the inquest. While he was explaining to the jury that their duties were for the time being at an end, Pettigrew sat in a daze. He had known in advance what the gist of the pathologist’s evidence would be, but none the less it had come as a shock to him. He tried to picture that small, deep punctured wound. “If I might hazard a guess,” he repeated to himself. It would have been interesting to know what the fellow was going to say. Not that it mattered. He could guess better for himself. He felt as if he had known
it all along. What was it Edelman had said? “We have fixed everything, even to the weapon. . . . Known locally as bodkins.” All part of what Mrs. Hopkinson called “the giddy Plot”! And now in some nightmare fashion the plot had come alive, the silly farce turned itself into grim tragedy. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. Then he came to himself and realized that everyone in court was standing up, and that Inspector Jellaby was beckoning him.

  Pettigrew meekly followed him to the police-station. Mallett, who had occupied an inconspicuous seat at the back of the court, had preceded them and was already in Jellaby’s office when they arrived. Here also, he seemed determined to make himself as small as it was physically possible for him to do, and for the first part of the long interview that followed remained seated quietly in a corner, idly watching the smoke curling upwards from his pipe.

  At Jellaby’s request, Pettigrew went through in detail all that he could remember of the events of Friday afternoon. It was little enough that he had to tell, and in retrospect he could think of nothing that could at the time have led him to suspect that Miss Danville’s death was a violent one.

  “You saw nothing that might have been used as a weapon?” Jellaby asked.

  “No. I wasn’t looking for anything, of course. But the room was small and pretty bare.”

  “And since then there have been three days to clear it up in,” said Jellaby bitterly. “Still, it must have been a fairly unusual kind of instrument.”

  “There are plenty of them about in the Control,” said Pettigrew. “I think my secretary has one.”

  “What are you speaking about, sir?”

  “Sharp, pointed instruments. Known locally as bodkins. They are used for piercing holes in bundles of papers for filing.”

  “And why are you so certain that was what was used in this case?”

  “This,” said Pettigrew wearily, “is going to take rather a lot of explaining.”

  “Would it be connected with what was known as the Plot, sir?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard about that, have you?”

  “Mr. Mallett has given me a few notes of what you told him this morning, and perhaps it will save you some trouble if I just run through them with you now.”

  He pulled from a drawer in his desk some closely written sheets of paper and from them read an amazingly accurate résumé of the conversation of the morning. Glancing across to Mallett, Pettigrew fancied that he could detect on that broad, good-humoured face a subdued glow of self-satisfaction as the recital proceeded. He had taken no notes of the interview and the exactitude of its reproduction was a sample of the phenomenal memory on which he prided himself.

  “Well, sir,” said Jellaby as he finished reading, “does that statement cover your experiences since you have been at Marsett Bay, so far as this case is concerned?”

  “Not altogether. You must remember that I was primarily concerned with the inquiry into the Blenkinsop affair, and all that that entails. Also, I hadn’t then heard the evidence at the inquest.”

  “That brings us to what you were telling us just now, sir. Where do the bodkins come into it?”

  Pettigrew repeated what he could remember of the conversation with Edelman that had haunted his mind ever since he had heard the pathologist’s evidence.

  “I didn’t mention it to Inspector Mallett this morning,” he added. “I couldn’t see that it was relevant.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” said Jellaby shortly.

  “I know,” said Pettigrew faintly. “It doesn’t make sense that Edelman should advertise to me in advance the means by which he intended to commit a murder. It doesn’t make sense that he should want to kill Miss Danville, anyway. I don’t say for a moment that he did. Yet I feel positive that whoever did it used that very weapon. You can ask the pathologist about that. But does anything in this case make sense? Why should anyone want to kill Miss Danville, of all people?”

  Inspector Jellaby made no reply. His expression said plainly enough that he regarded it as his function to ask questions rather than to answer them.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us, Mr. Pettigrew?” he went on.

  “Only this. When I spoke to Miss Danville at lunch on the day that she died, I got the very clear impression that she was trying to tell me something.”

  “You have told us that already, sir.”

  “Yes, but what I want to make clear is this. The reason why I refused to listen to her—and I shall never forgive myself for it—was that I took it for granted that she was simply wanting to do what she had already tried to do the previous evening—explain her outburst at the Fernlea Club, which, of course, was simply part of her sad mental history. But looking back on it now, I feel sure that she really had something important to tell me. And if that is right, it must have been something that had happened or that she had got to know during that morning. It’s a point that might be worth following up.”

  “I see,” said Jellaby doubtfully. He wrote down a few notes and then sat silent. The interview seemed to be at an end, or at all events at a standstill. Then Mallett took his pipe out of his mouth, cleared his throat and said in an almost deprecatory tone, “There are just one or two points that occur to me. For one thing, I am rather interested in this locked door. The door of the room where she was found, I mean. The messenger opened it, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there usually a key in the lock of that door?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea.”

  “We’ve all been assuming—at least, I have—that it had been locked from the outside. But could it have been done from within? What about the window? Was it open?”

  “Certainly not wide open. I have a vague idea it wasn’t completely closed, but I can’t be sure.”

  Mallett clicked his tongue against his teeth. “And all this happened three days ago, so now there’s no possible means of knowing. Now, another thing,” he went on. “Before the Thursday evening, did anybody at the Fernlea Club know that Miss Danville had been in a mental hospital?”

  “So far as I can tell, no. It was common knowledge that she was somewhat abnormal in some ways. Wood was the first person to spot it, I remember. I suppose his training as a novelist would make him exceptionally alive to that sort of thing. But I think I can say the fact came as a surprise to everyone in the room.”

  “And everyone in the room at the time was on more or less bad terms with her?”

  “I should hardly put it that way, Inspector, because that implies some reciprocity, and you couldn’t say that Miss Danville ever shewed up to that evening that she was much affected by what other people thought of her. But it is true to say that the only people, myself apart, who didn’t dislike her in one way or another were Phillips and Miss Brown. Miss Brown, of course, was away on leave on this particular evening.”

  “Which of them would you say shewed the greatest enmity towards her?”

  “That’s a very difficult question to answer. I should think the word ‘enmity’ much too strong in every case, if by that you mean a feeling powerful enough to induce a motive for murder. So far as my opinion is worth anything, it is that everyone concerned had a different attitude towards her. Miss Clarke, for example, regarded her just as a blot on the landscape from the official point of view. She wasn’t much use in the department, and Miss Clarke doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Mrs. Hopkinson was a good deal more personal in the matter. She seemed to feel rather bitterly towards her, because of the encouragement she had been giving to Phillips and my secretary. Whether it was, as she represented to me, because she thought Miss Brown was throwing herself away or because of some more personal reason, I couldn’t say.”

  “Mrs. Hopkinson’s real enmity was towards Mr. Phillips, was it not?”

  “Apparently so. Indeed, the trouble on Thursday night began from her taking the opportunity of Phillips being out of the room to slander him behind his back. She had got it into her head that he was a potential bigamist, and told poor Mi
ss Danville such a circumstantial story that she was thoroughly upset. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t think she would have broken down as she did later on.”

  “I don’t think you mentioned this to me, this morning, sir,” said Mallett reproachfully.

  “I’m sorry, but it seemed quite irrelevant. It still does, for the matter of that, but you are the best judges of what is important and what isn’t.”

  “Anything may be important at this stage,” said Jellaby. “So she thought Mr. Phillips had a wife alive, did she?”

  “A wife and several children, to be accurate.”

  “What should make her say that?”

  “Pure spite, I imagine. There was not a word of truth in it, of course.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I don’t know how Mr. Pettigrew knows it,” said Mallett, “but he is right about Mr. Phillips being a widower. I have seen Mrs. Phillips’s death certificate.”

  Pettigrew looked at him in surprise.

  “Why on earth, Inspector?” he asked.

  “Routine,” Mallett answered. “I told you I have made a study of a number of the employees in the Control for my own inquiry, and I naturally checked up on their personal histories. I believe in thoroughness in these matters.”

  “Well,” said Pettigrew, “I didn’t go quite as far as you, but for my own purposes”—he flushed uncomfortably—“that is to say, because I felt a certain responsibility towards Miss Brown, I had made inquiries through other channels, with, of course, the same result. Consequently, I was able to stifle Mrs. Hopkinson and reassure Miss Danville.”

  “Was that a great relief to her?” Mallett asked.

  “Very much so. In fact, she burst into tears, and had to leave the room. It was most embarrassing. She came back just in time for Rickaby to precipitate her final breakdown. You know of that already.”

  “So much for Mrs. Hopkinson. I’m afraid she’s been the cause of rather a digression. You were describing the attitude of the residents to Miss Danville, and there are still the men to deal with.”