Toll the Bell for Murder (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

  Killip was a patient countryman with no ill-temper at all and calmly and methodically met the attack. Man and dog struggled briefly, blood spurted from the policeman’s hand as the flashing teeth met it, and then the cape fell over the dog’s head. There was a stifled yell and Killip held the dog firmly by the collar, his grip tightening until the animal was almost throttled. Then he slipped his handcuffs through his collar and clipped them round the wire of a fence. The dog, anchored there, continued to struggle and then, exhausted, sank on his haunches and emitted again the tragic howl. When the bobby touched the dead body of Casement, he began his tantrums all over again.

  Forms appeared through the mist and soon a little party of police and villagers approached the corpse.

  “That’ll be all for now,” said the sergeant in charge, halting them before they reached the body. “Thank you all for your help, but you’d better go home. There’s nothing more you can do. On the way back, one of you might ‘phone Ramsey and tell them we’ve found out what it was all about. Casement’s had an accident. He’s dead.”

  At first it looked like an accident. Casement had fallen on his gun and shot himself through the chest. The reason for the fall was obvious, too. He had put his foot in a wire snare, probably one of his own planting, and measured his length. It looked as simple as that. No nasty wound, no lamenting clergyman, no tolling bells. Just a mishap to a poacher in the darkness. Those were the first impressions of the police and the experts who were soon on the spot. The ground there was hard and showed no signs of footprints. This time, the experts took particular interest in the powder and shot of the cartridges which tallied with the fatal wound. The position of the wound, too, was in keeping with the way in which Casement had fallen on his gun. Apparently carried loosely in his hand, swinging by his side, it had gone off when he stumbled.

  The only queer thing was the gun itself. In the words of P.C. Moore, himself a crack-shot, it was “a smasher”. It caused a lot of discussion among the policemen, most of whom were marksmen.

  “I’ve never seen the likes of it before,” added Moore. The weapon was an up-to-date hammerless ejector, by Daintree and Hotcher, whose guns cost a fortune. It made the men’s mouths water to think of using it. “The sort of gun you can’t miss with.”

  Knell told Littlejohn all about it when he rang him up at the vicarage at five o’clock on a Saturday morning.

  “Thank you, Knell. You might please call for us in an hour’s time. And ask the northern police not to make public any details of the accident. Nothing about how it occurred, or about the gun or the snare.”

  The Superintendent and the Archdeacon had sat up late before the fire on the night before. Littlejohn seemed hardly to have settled in his feather-bed before he was out again. As he spoke to Knell, the Rev. Caesar Kinrade appeared at the head of the stairs in his nightshirt. Maggie Keggin, a dressing-gown over her nightdress, passed him with a sigh and glared at the telephone as she made her way to the kitchen to put on the coffee.

  “More poor sermons to-morrow,” she said as she ground at the coffee-mill.

  “He won’t be able to concentrate on what he’s tellin’ us. Whatever that Knell says, they’re not leavin’ this house without a proper breakfast.”

  She served them with Manx ham and eggs half an hour later and when Knell drew up at the door in a police car, she gave him the same without a cheerful word.

  “Ye’ll be the death of Master Kinrade before you’ve done,” she told Knell as she saw them to the door.

  “Then perhaps ye’ll be satisfied.”

  She wound a muffler round the neck of the Venerable Archdeacon.

  “Do ye want to die of the cold?”

  The sun was clearing the mists from Barrule as they sped across Foxdale. The village was just awake and the smoke of cottage fires rose straight into the air and vanished in the blue. Now and then workmen passed on cycles and motorbikes. Littlejohn closed his eyes and breathed deeply the perfume of the wet leaves and grass and the faint sweetness of flowers he couldn’t identify. Too nice a morning for another crime!

  Casement had met his death from an expensive gun, the kind a poacher never handles in a lifetime. If the affair was a faked accident, someone had slipped up badly. And yet, the rest of the trick, the snare in which the foot had been entangled, the position of the body, the whole set-up had been carefully thought out. Why substitute a gun quite out of character for the likely cheap one a rough-and-tumble fellow like Casement would use?

  Then a thought struck him.

  “Call at Myrescogh Manor before we go to the scene of the accident, Knell.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  It sounded queer, but Knell was used to Littlejohn’s hunches. He saw an arrest in the offing.

  “Wuthering Heights,” said Littlejohn to himself, as they turned in at the manor gates.

  “I was thinking the same myself,” said the Archdeacon, who had been quietly pondering over the case. As a scholar who had been first in his year in Logic and Method at Oxford years ago, he felt humbled to think that all his youthful days of training counted for nothing in a case like this. It concerned people, strange people, and, as his old nurse had often said seventy years ago, ‘there’s nowt queerer than folk.”

  The drive to the manor was deserted. The trees met overhead and it was like travelling through a tunnel, with the blue sky showing here and there between the interlacing twigs above them. All around, the flat country was still and solemn, the sun shone on the hills, and, somewhere in the distance, a boy was whistling Knell’s obsessive air, Don’t Knock the Rock. The house looked deserted and dead. A thin trail of smoke arose from one chimney in the kitchen quarters.

  Jinnie appeared at the door in answer to their knock.

  She made a gesture of disgust until she saw the Archdeacon and then she gave him a look of apologetic reproach.

  “It’s no use ye comin’ at this hour. She’s asleep. Took her tablets last night and it won’t be right to wake her yet. Come again, if ye must, about eleven.”

  “You can help us, Jinnie,” said the parson.

  “The Superintendent has a question to ask you.”

  “It wouldn’t be right for me to talk without Lady Skollick knowing you were here.”

  “This is quite a minor matter, Jinnie,” said Littlejohn.

  “Do you have a gun-room in the house?”

  “No, we don’t, an’ the less said about guns, the better for us all.”

  “Where did Sir Martin keep his gun?”

  “He had six. He kept ’em up in his own room, which hasn’t been turned out on her ladyship’s orders and which I can’t show you without she says so.”

  “Are they in cases?”

  “You mean leather ones for carryin’? Two are. The rest are just standin’ in the corner.”

  “May we see them please. This is important and concerns the matter of Sir Martin’s death.”

  She folded her hands across her thin bosom and her lips grew tight.

  “Not without Lady Skollick.”

  This looked like going on for hours. The Archdeacon intervened again.

  “Take me up to the room then, Jinnie. I promise I’ll stand by you if Lady Skollick objects.”

  “Very well, then. I don’t mind you, Archdeacon, but I’ll have no policemen in the private rooms without her permission. Come along and step quiet. She’s asleep.”

  The pair of them vanished indoors, leaving Littlejohn and Knell to cool their heels. The parson was soon back carrying a gun-case.

  “This, I think, will be the one you want.”

  An elegant leather affair containing one of a pair of splendid weapons. A label inside the lid. Daintree and Hotcher, London, W.I.

  Littlejohn took out the gun and assembled it. He balanced it in his hand and raised it to his shoulder with admiration.

  “I’ll bet this pair cost Skollick a pretty penny.” Jinnie, standing disapproving on the threshold, almost snarled.

  “Pit
y he hadn’t somethin’ better to spend his money on.”

  “Where’s the other gun, Jinnie? Is it in the corner?”

  “It is not. Sir Martin always carried it about with him in the car. In case he saw any thin’ about, he used to say. I have heard her ladyship grumblin’ at him about it. A gun worth three hundred pounds. God save us! Left lyin’ in a car for anybody to carry off.”

  Littlejohn replaced the gun and closed the case.”

  “Thank you, Jinnie. You’ve been a great help.”

  “I can’t see that. Flatterin’, that’s what ye are.”

  She refused to let the Archdeacon take the case upstairs again.

  “My bones is younger than yours, reverend.”

  Then, to the scene of the accident. There was nothing left to see. The body was in the morgue, the gun with the police, Moddey Beg, the little dog, cooling-off and refusing food and friendship in an outhouse at Killip’s home.

  “Where’s the Great Dog?” everybody was asking. Since the death of Casement, Moddey Mooar hadn’t been seen.

  At the police-station in Ramsey Littlejohn inspected the Daintree and Hotcher gun. It was the twin of the one he had handled at Myrescogh. It was plentifully sprinkled with the large fingerprints of Casement, and nobody else.

  When Littlejohn made it known that Sir Martin had been in the habit of carrying the gun around with him in his car, the affair began to take reasonable shape. Casement might have stolen the gun from the unlocked car at some time or other. A vagabond with a grudge, who hated Sir Martin, he would easily think he was doing himself some good and obtaining an easy revenge on Skollick by filching his gun.

  It all sounded so easy. Littlejohn, however, had formed a reasonable view of Casement from an impartial encounter. He might have revelled in poaching rabbits and game, but he had his own type of integrity and forthrightness. Not only would he have scruples about blatant robbery, but he had never struck Littlejohn as being a fool, and nobody but a fool would have thought of stealing a gun which could be identified among a thousand, one which would make its owner move heaven and earth to recover it, and could not be used or sold without arousing intense suspicion. Besides, Casement would be well aware that in the event of its disappearance, he would be thought of as a likely thief, along with the rest of the rascals of the neighbourhood.

  They visited Casement’s home in Ballaugh Glen. It stood almost at the end of the road, an old thatched cottage, which, when they entered, struck them as more like a factory for curing rabbit-skins than a dwelling-place. Skins everywhere, hanging from the bare beams, on nails driven in the walls, across the rooms on pieces of string. True, the man was out most of the day on the hills with his sheep and most of the night snaring and shooting on the mountains by torchlight. There was a squalid bed, a wash-place of sorts, primitive shaving table and a change of clothing. No signs of Casement’s ability to read or write. Not a letter, not a bill. There was a Bible in Manx, an old herbal, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress; all of them seemed to have been inherited from Casement’s family. Pilgrim’s Progress was apparently the poacher’s simple hiding-place. Among the leaves were sprinkled a number of pound notes, totalling about £25. It seemed to be all the wealth he possessed.

  In one corner of the living-room stood an old hammer gun. It had lately been used and laid aside without cleaning. Littlejohn opened the breach and sniffed the barrels.

  “This is the gun he used regularly.”

  It was in keeping with Casement and his poverty-stricken existence. An old Belgian model, cheap even when new. There were cartridges in a box on the mantelpiece over the wide old-fashioned fireplace. The same make as those found in the gun beside the body.

  “There’s nothing here to help us at all.”

  The Inspector from Ramsey who had accompanied them agreed.

  “We turned the place upside down, but everything seems straight and above board. As though when he left, he intended to come back.”

  An interruption. A powerful-looking man in a tweed cap and countryman’s go-to-town clothes put his head in at the door. A smiling, shy, pleasant sort of chap, with a ruddy clean face, and an air of well-being.

  “Morning, Mr. Kneale.”

  The Inspector greeted him with respect, for Mr. Kneale was a J.P., and a local man of substance. Introductions all round.

  “I saw you were here as I was passing on my way to Ramsey. Casement was shepherd for me. I’m sorry to lose him. A good man with the sheep. Honest enough, too, except for a bit of poaching-and shooting with lights on the hills.

  Dependable, however, and honest in his way. Drank too much; otherwise, he should have had a nice bit put away.”

  Mr. Kneale seemed to think he had to speak well of the dead, give him a send-off from life with a good testimonial. “Was he at all strange in his behaviour of late, sir?”

  “In what way, Superintendent?”

  “Did he seem afraid, overjoyed, expectant? In other words, different from usual?”

  “No. But then, he was a dour phlegmatic sort. The only queer thing lately was his asking me for a piece of paper, two envelopes, and a pencil. And why two envelopes? Perhaps in case he spoiled one. He was a rum fellow with some queer notions.”

  “When was that?”

  “Friday, this week. I never knew he could write. He always came round to the farm and asked one of my boys to do any writing or figuring he had to do. This time, he seemed to want to do it himself. He’d never think of buying notepaper if he could cadge any. It was his way of looking at life, poaching and cadging.”

  “But not thieving?”

  “Never. I always found him honest to the last penny.”

  “About the notepaper. Had he any relatives he might wish to write to? Any bills he’d have to render?”

  “As far as I know, he’d one brother who died in the war. That was the last of his family. As for accounts to render, my boys used to make out the little bills he sent for his rabbit-skins if he’d more than he could deal with by mental arithmetic.”

  “You think he wanted to write someone a letter?”

  “What-else could it be? Though what it was all about, I’m damned if I can even guess.”

  He drove away in his car assuring them of any help he could give and they locked the place and went away.

  “Any sign of the Great Dog?” people asked along the way down Ballaugh Glen. But nobody had seen or heard of him since Casement’s death.

  “What’s happened to Sullivan Lee?” asked Littlejohn as they drew into the village of Ballaugh.

  “He’s back at the vicarage, packing-up, sir. As soon as the police will allow him, he’s leaving the Island and going to join the abbey he mentioned. He’s going to become a monk.”

  “Let’s make a brief call on him, then. There’s some information he can give which may be useful.”

  It was like gleaning after harvest. A bit here, a bit there. Knell wondered where it was all leading, but was confident that it would all add up to a spectacular finish. He turned again into the curraghs.

  Smoke was rising from the main chimney of Mylecharaine vicarage and inside they found the Rev. Sullivan Lee, as black as a chimney-sweep, burning papers in front of the grate. He seemed quite unperturbed about his appearance.

  “I’m burning rubbish, Archdeacon, and as soon as I applied a light to the pile of papers in the grate, there was an appalling fall of soot. I haven’t used the grate since I came here. Oil stove.”

  He pointed to an ancient, corroded tin affair which made them marvel that he hadn’t blown himself out of the place with its assistance long ago. There was a mound of soot on the hearth. The cobwebs of the room were festooned with it and it lay thick on the furniture.

  Mr. Lee had only been there since the evening before, but in his fervour to get away to his monastery, he’d already packed-up. The furniture was stacked awaiting the carrier’s cart to the auction-rooms. An old tin trunk, a rush basket affair, a packing-case, and an oval tin hat-box were already w
aiting in the shabby hall, among a lot of books standing in piles.

  “I thought those would do for the next jumble-sale,” explained Mr. Lee, a propos of nothing at all. The Archdeacon, who stooped to read the titles, grunted. They were the sermons of ancient divines and about thirty volumes of treatises on faith, hope, charity, the Holy Land, and the communion of saints.

  Only the little shrine to Mr. Lee’s wife remained undisturbed and the light was burning in the small sanctuary lamp in front of it.

  Littlejohn almost laughed as he addressed the vicar, for he looked to have just made himself up for a minstrel show. “I want to ask you to cast your mind back, sir, to the time when you stumbled across the dead body of Sir Martin Skollick.”

  Mr. Lee recoiled a pace and rolled his eyes, which in their sooty setting made him look like a coon.

  “Please don’t bring all the horror back, I beg you. I am trying to forget it, as well as my own foolish behaviour.”

  “But this is important, even vital, sir. I must ask you to pull yourself together and try.”

  Sullivan Lee braced himself and nodded.

  “I admit I owe you a duty. Pray ask what you wish.”

  “Can you tell me how you found Skollick lying when you came upon his body?”

  “Just face downward on the grass.”

  “Grass? He wasn’t actually on the road?”

  “No. On the grass verge. As I close my eyes, I can see the whole ghastly picture. He was at right-angles to the road.”

  Mr. Lee closed his eyes. His eyelids were white. Now he looked like The White-eyed Kaffir!

  “Where were his feet? On the grass verge or in the ditch?”

  “No. Strangely enough, as I bring the scene before me, I recollect his strange position. There was a hedge, one of the familiar Manx hedges made of sods. He seemed to have been emerging from the top of the hedge, as though he had climbed over it and was just descending to the road. His body was sloping. I mean, his feet were higher than his head.”