Toll the Bell for Murder (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

  “What did you do, then?”

  “I was horror-struck. This was cold-blooded murder and as I saw her face, frozen with fear and horror, yet unrelenting in her purpose, I realized that she was mad, and I hated her. She poured abuse on me for being out when she rang up. I gave her some brandy from my flask. She said I must help her home, that I was in it, too, and unless I supported her, she’d see that I suffered exactly the same as she did. I’d been her accomplice in the Skollick affair; this ‘accident’ of Casement’s was just the same-a double job. Nobody would believe I wasn’t involved. It seemed to me that she was right. I calmed her by pretending I understood and sympathized, and I told her to get in her car and drive slowly behind me. I took her home. Then, she said the boot was stained with blood. We had to shut ourselves with her car in the garage and dean it. Stained with blood was an understatement. It was swimming in it. I shall never forget.”

  Pakeman paled, sat in his chair again and tugged at his collar. All the blood had again drained from his face as though he were living the horror over again. Knell half-filled a glass with whisky and passed it to Pakeman, who gulped it eagerly down.

  “I tied Skollick’s head in a plastic bag when we handled him. Gillian had taken no such precautions.”

  He was breathing hard and struggled to speak. And as he struggled he seemed somehow to enjoy it, like a martyr blessing the irons and flames. The Archdeacon rose and unfastened Pakeman’s collar and tie.

  “It’s all right, sir. It’s just the thought of it all. I feel better again now.”

  But he didn’t look it.

  “So that’s how it happened. I shall have to take my punishment, although I didn’t commit either crime. I simply got involved in something beyond me and before I knew where I was, I was in it, up to the neck.”

  “Yes, Pakeman, and you thought you’d found an excellent way out. If Mrs. Vacey died, especially through the dog, she would bear all the blame and you might get away with it! The dog wasn’t dead. He recovered, turned wild, and in his faithful way, set out after his master’s killer. He prowled the curraghs with one instinct. He’d no time for anyone except Mrs. Vacey, who had about her still, in her car, the scent of his master’s blood. That was how Sullivan Lee came to find him, half-starved, foraging for scraps of food round the vicarage and when he telephoned you to say he’d got Moddey Mooar locked up in the shed there, an idea came to you. Old Juan Kilbeg had told you that Casement had written to the Archdeacon before he died. You thought the letter contained a denunciation of Mrs. Vacey. You had no intention of allowing her to obtain and destroy it. For her to be caught, or better still, found dead with it in her possession would solve everything and incriminate her fully. Or, what is perhaps more likely, you wished her to die, either to be rid of her whom now you hated, or else to be avenged on her for her treatment of you. You telephoned and told her about the letter.”

  “No, no. It’s a lie. I didn’t.”

  “You told her it would be delivered on the first round on Monday. You followed her to Grenaby.”

  “You were there. I appeal to you, Knell. Archdeacon. I was nowhere about. He’s trying to incriminate me for his own ends.”

  “You called on Lee after his message about the dog. You slipped a dish of drugged food into the shed. Before he had eaten it all, the dog was asleep. You smuggled him away in your car. The rats finished the rest. One of them ate too much. He, too, collapsed under the drug. He’s probably lying there dead by now. When you followed Mrs. Vacey, you had Moddey Mooar, now fully conscious, in the boot of your car. You watched her and then you released the now savage hound either to kill her or impede her until she was captured. Unfortunately for her, perhaps, he took some time finding the scent. Had he come upon her hiding in the Archdeacon’s garden waiting for the postman, she would probably have had to shoot him with the gun she held. Instead, he caught the scent of the car as she drove along the road to the bridge. He sprang.”

  Pakeman was on his feet, unsteadily groping for the bell by the side of the fireplace. He pressed the button. Mrs. Vondy entered and looked at him in horror.

  “Oh, sir. You’re ill again. Your heart.”

  “Be quiet! Open the front door. Open it, I say.” Slowly, her eyes wide with terror, she went into the hall and obeyed.

  In two swift strides, Pakeman had reached the corner and turned to face Littlejohn, his gun in his hand.

  “Now, get out. All of you, get out or I’ll blow you out.” The Rev. Caesar Kinrade was the first to act. Before the others could move, he rose, fixed Pakeman with his calm blue eyes, and walked sternly to him.

  “Give me that gun. You’ll do some damage. Give it to me, I say.”

  Pakeman, like someone bemused, slowly and calmly surrendered the weapon to the old man.

  And then, he sprang to the door. Before the other three had quite realized it, he was running up the garden path, out of the gate, and along the footway which borders the Lezayre Road. The rest of them followed, Knell and Littlejohn at the trot, the Archdeacon at his usual calm pace. His face was set and grim and then he calmly gestured with his hand to the other two.

  “Let him go. He won’t get far. Don’t you see.”

  He was right. Pakeman, running in the distance, steadily, looking neither to right nor left, unheeding the flabbergasted stares of passers-by, threw up his hands, flung himself forward, and lay sprawling and still, on the roadside.

  When they reached him, the doctor was gasping for breath, his face blue, his eyes staring, and they gently carried him home.

  Mrs. Vondy met them at the door. She was almost hysterical and they had to shake her to calm her and get her to help them with the sick man.

  “His heart was terrible bad,” she said as they followed her upstairs and laid Pakeman on his bed. “He used to take tablets that kept him well. Lately, he’s not been taking them, in spite of the way I reminded him. I got to countin’ them in the box and I wondered why. I thought he was feelin’ quite better again. He shouldn’t have left them off.”

  Pakeman opened his eyes and smiled wanly.

  “It was all as you said, Littlejohn. I loved her till I found out what a fiend she was. She only loved her first husband. The rest, she used for her own ends. She was poor and she told me later that Skollick gave her all she wanted.

  There’s nothing you can do for me now. I’m better dead.

  I’ve lost everything. My faith, my love, my reputation.”

  He clutched his chest and was seized by a horrible spasm of pain.

  “My heart has been bad. Took tablets which kept me well and going. It only needed a little overexertion, and then. More ways of killing oneself than by poison. I always had this way out if I needed it. See that whoever takes-over my patients gets my notebook in the middle desk drawer.”

  With a final convulsion, Pakeman died. The old springer spaniel, sunning himself in the garden beneath the bedroom window, suddenly opened his alarmed eyes, whined, and then raising his muzzle in the air, he howled dismally.

  An extract from George Bellairs’

  Death in the Fearful Night

  THE GAMEKEEPER from Huncote Hall was a tall, thin, sad-faced man, dressed in a sports-coat, soiled flannel trousers and gumboots and he had a drooping ragged moustache. He had an aggressive manner, too, as though everyone he spoke to were a trespasser on the estate and ready to argue about being ordered off. His intimates, however, knew that it was his compensation, his answer to the outside world for his inferior position at home, where his domineering wife ruled him without mercy. His name was Woodcock.

  Woodcock was standing in the middle of a crowd of people all of whom he treated with the same lack of concern. The spectators were made up of policemen, journalists, plain-clothes men, and the idle and the curious from miles around. He was telling Superintendent Littlejohn, of Scotland Yard, the story he’d been retailing to everybody else for the last four days.

  “It was like this …”

  It was late autumn and pa
st the harvest. There was a scent of damp air and dead leaves about, but above the trees of the clearing in which they were all standing, the sky was clear and blue.

  “I got up at half-past five and came in this direction from the Hall. The missus wanted some mushrooms …”

  He gave the crowd a searching, sidelong glance, as though expecting his wife to be a part of it and ready to set about him as she often did in public.

  “The best fields for mushrooms lie between here and the town. So I crossed the home farm meadow and took the short cut past Freake’s. You have to be up good and early for mushrooms. Everybody’s after ’em.”

  “What time did you pass Freake’s?”

  The question came from a tall, fresh-complexioned, irritable man in the uniform of a Police Superintendent, Herle, of the Midshire County Constabulary. He was self-conscious and held himself like a soldier on parade.

  The gamekeeper made little spitting noises, as though trying to clear his lips of bits of tobacco.

  “I told you before. It was about half-past six. The clock in the house stood at that as I went in.”

  He glanced across at the shabby building to the right of where they were standing. It was a queer edifice of stone, the back in ruins, the front turned into crude living quarters with deep narrow windows and a tumbledown door. There was a ruined tower, like that of a sham castle, overgrown with ivy, at the far end of the frontage. It had been erected during the Regency to house an eccentric member of a wealthy land-owning family and still carried his name, Freake’s Folly.

  “Go on.”

  “I didn’t pass within sight of the house; I kept in the trees. It didn’t do to let Bracknell see you on his property. I’d no rights there, but, as I said, it was a short cut.”

  He paused for effect. The reporters standing round knew what was coming, but they looked as eager as though they were hearing it for the first time.

  “I wouldn’t ’ave stopped if it hadn’t been for the dog. He was chained-up in the kennel there but, instead of barkin’ his head off, as he usually does if anybody comes within miles of the place, he was howlin’ just like a baby cryin’ …”

  Another pause. Woodcock passed the back of his hand across his mouth this time.

  “I stopped and peeked at him through the trees. He took no notice of me. Jest kept turnin’ up his muzzle to the skies and yowlin’ like he was heartbroke. It was then I see the door was open, too.”

  “The dog were took to the kennels at Fenny Carleton and bit the R.S.P.C.A. man on the way. So savage, he were, they ’ad to put ’im to sleep …”

  A spectator in the front row said it sotto voce to his neighbour. Woodcock turned and fixed him with a stare until he grew silent.

  “I thought to meself perhaps Bracknell might be ill or somethin’ else wrong, so, after a bit of thinkin’, I went to take a look. There wasn’t any sign of him through the windows and in between the dog hollarin’, everything was as silent as the grave…”

  He paused again and the silence seemed to return. It was as if they were all holding their breath waiting for what was coming.

  “… So, I went in. There, in the livin’-room, was Samuel Bracknell, stretched his full length on the floor, with a knife in his back. It turned me up good an’ proper, I can tell you.”

  He surveyed the surrounding faces, as though expecting applause, but none came. He looked disgusted.

  “That was last Saturday. I guess whoever did it’s got far enough away by now.”

  He said it for the benefit of the police, who, he thought, hadn’t appreciated enough his share in the affair. True, he’d pocketed quite a few five-bobs from the newspaper men who had questioned him and another few shillings from the swarms of motorists and cyclists who’d been buzzing round since the day of the crime. But the police hadn’t even thanked him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Woodcock,” said Littlejohn.

  That was better! The Superintendent was even offering him a cigarette from his case and lighting another himself. Woodcock smiled maliciously at P.C. Gullet, with whom he carried on a perpetual feud.

  Gullet shepherded the crowd away, somehow including Woodcock in it, too.

  “Move along, there. Don’t h’impede the investigation.”

  The retreating Woodcock protested, waving the cigarette which Littlejohn had given him in Gullet’s face as though it were a passport.

  “I’m a witness … I’m part of …”

  “Move on.”

  The reporters had been in and around the town of Carleton Unthank for the past two weeks, for the death of Samuel Bracknell was the third in that short time. First, a girl of twenty-three, returning home after choir practice; then, a few days later, a postman’s daughter, aged seventeen. Both had been killed with a knife.

  Now, Bracknell, in just the same way. A man between forty-five and fifty.

  The police had drawn a blank on the first two investigations, but now the newspapers had something fresh to report.

  THE MIDSHIRE MANIAC

  County Police Send for Scotland Yard Superintendent Littlejohn at Carleton Unthank

  Littlejohn and Cromwell had arrived that morning. Carleton Unthank was a pleasant market town, joined to nearby Fenny Carleton by a string of ribbon building, and the whole forming a community of about ten thousand people. The local police headquarters were at Carleton Unthank and Superintendent Herle had been sent there by the county constabulary to take charge of the case.

  Over a cup of tea, Herle had earlier put the two London detectives in the picture.

  “On the night of September 21st, Nancy Tooley, a good-looking girl of twenty-three, a farmer’s daughter and engaged to be married, left the choir practice at Carleton Unthank Church at ten o’clock. She hadn’t far to go and had ridden down on her bicycle. Her fiancé, also a farmer, had been to a meeting of the local agricultural committee, and kept later than usual, so she had gone off home alone. Her friends said she was a bit annoyed when she found her young man wasn’t there to meet her as usual, so she flounced away in a bit of pique. She was found in the small hours, one-thirty to be exact, in the ditch off the by-road leading to her father’s farm. She’d been stabbed in the back with this …”

  Herle opened a drawer and produced the weapon. It consisted of a blade about six inches long, broad at the base where it entered a black hardwood handle into which it was firmly held by brass rivets; the rest worn and tapering down to a fine point at the end of a keen edge. It was like a well-used butcher’s knife.

  “Medical evidence gives the time of Bracknell’s death at between eight and nine o’clock. The method was the same in each; a deep stab in the back. Medico-legal reports say the same knife was used each time, but the wounds indicate that in the case of the women, the murderer seized them from in front, held them to him, and stabbed them. With Bracknell, however, the blow was delivered from behind. In each case the heart was pierced. The knife was withdrawn and carried away in the first two murders; in the last one, it was left in the wound. There was no sexual crime against the women; they hadn’t been interfered with at all and there were no signs of a struggle.”

  Herle had six files on his desk. He turned one over and consulted the next.

  “Then, on the night of September 27th, Marlene Turville, a postman’s daughter at Carleton Unthank, left home at eight o’clock to attend a harvest social in the church school. She was a nice, quiet girl of seventeen, who’d a matter of a quarter of a mile to walk to the social. She was found, murdered, a mile out of Fenny Carleton in the opposite direction from her way to the school. A search-party found her about midnight.”

  He turned to the next file and told the story of the third crime, committed on September 29th, two nights after the second.

  “It might have been that Bracknell, who was a queer, isolated chap, came across someone acting suspiciously, or in the vicinity of one or both of the bodies on the nights in question. He may have spoken about it to them or else accused them outright. The murderer was o
bviously the same in each case. Perhaps a homicidal maniac. He was bound to kill again to shut Bracknell’s mouth. The difference was he left his knife at Bracknell’s place. He may have been scared off by something.”

  “And the rest of the files?” said Littlejohn, finishing his tea and lighting his pipe.

  Herle smiled.

  “The first murder caused a sensation, but the second created panic. The three remaining files are of unsuccessful attempts or false alarms. Two were followed by suspicious characters; the third was actually accosted, but pushed the man aside and ran away. We expect many more. One of the complaints was from a girl who was brought here by her mother, who did all the talking. Another by a girl who had hysterics and had to be given sal volatile and have her face slapped. The other … well … she thoroughly enjoyed it. She was the type. Proud of it, and got an immense thrill out of retailing all the details.”

  “Any clues?”

  “You couldn’t exactly call them clues. Merely events. Nancy Tooley had, as I told you, been to choir practice. She had her music book with her when she left the church. It was rather large and bound in soft morocco leather. She had it in the carrier basket on the front of her bike. In checking her belongings and examining the body and the bicycle, we couldn’t find the tune-book. The murderer seems to have taken it with him.”

  “Any fingerprints?”

  “None. Not a single one, either on the knife or on anything—such as the bicycle—connected with the victims. Marlene Turville carried a handbag, with money and cosmetics in it. That had vanished. Nancy didn’t have a handbag, but kept her lipstick and powder in the pocket of her raincoat. They were still there. It therefore might be that the murderer was out for loot. In other words, handbags. He perhaps mistook the soft-backed tune-book for a handbag. It was dark, remember. In such a case, the attack might have been made to get the girls’ cash and when they resisted or screamed, the murderer just killed them. As for Bracknell, the same motive. The intruder at Freake’s Folly could have been after money …”