Faintley Speaking mb-27

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘I suppose a young man can be a trial in other ways, though. Late hours, perhaps one drink too many, staying away the night without letting you know —’

  ‘Not Mr Mandsell,’ said Mrs Deaks decisively. ‘He don’t understand what housework is, and he will climb in through the window instead of coming in at the door – but that’s usually because, being a writer, he’s an absent-minded young gentleman and often forgets his key. But, apart from that, and the money not always being there when it oughter – though I will say it always turns up later, and sometimes, p’raps, a bunch of flowers or some sweets with it as well if he’s kept me waiting more than a couple of weeks – well, I haven’t no complaints. Of course, he do make a proper old mess in the bathroom and no idea of cleaning the bath down after hisself, but I suppose that comes of being a gentleman born.’

  Mrs Bradley could obtain no more precise information and knew better than to fish with too many leading questions. She had gathered what she wanted, however. It seemed unreasonable to suppose that Mandsell had had any previous connexion with Miss Faintley or her murderers.

  He was chronically hard up, kept reasonable hours, and made no uncharted voyages into the world at large. Mentally Mrs Bradley dismissed him from the case.

  Left to herself, she settled down in the stuffy little parlour to wait for him, and then, finding the atmosphere oppressive, she ventured to open the window. Shortly afterwards Mandsell, who once again had forgotten his key, climbed through it to meet her black-eyed, gimlet gaze.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said. ‘Awfully sorry. Didn’t know anyone was here. I usually get in through the kitchen. This one isn’t very often open.’

  He began to retreat towards the door but Mrs Bradley stopped him.

  ‘I represent the Home Office,’ she said. ‘I take it that you are Geoffrey Mandsell. I should very much like a short talk with you, Mr Mandsell.’

  ‘Oh, I say, though! I’ve had the police already! You don’t mean you’re connected with Miss Faintley?’

  ‘In a sense, yes, and I may add that the police know I’m here. There are one or two points, Mr Mandsell, which I think we can resolve right away, if you will co-operate with me.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, you know. The police have cleaned me right out. If you’ve heard what I’ve told them, you’ve heard all.’

  ‘So you suppose. Sit down and answer my questions.’ Mandsell hesitated. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ she added, ‘have you?’

  ‘No, of course, I haven’t – only – well, I did take five pounds off that rat of a little shopkeeper. I was completely broke, and I knew I had money coming to me, so —’

  ‘Where did the money come from? Where had he kept it?’

  ‘Where? Oh, I see. He got it out of the till.’

  ‘Which day of the week was it?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘And the Thursday had been early closing day?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it had.’

  ‘With only half a day’s takings and… at what time did you get to him on the Friday?’

  ‘At about four, I suppose. Before he closed, anyhow.’

  ‘With only half a day on Thursday and between six and seven hours of shopping time on Friday, then, would you really have expected, in a shop of that kind, the man to have been able to take five pounds out of the till?’

  ‘Now you come to put it like that, well, I suppose I wouldn’t have expected it.’

  ‘And now that you realize it was an unusual thing to have happened, are you still certain that there is nothing else you can tell me?’

  ‘I can tell you one thing,’ said Mandsell vigorously. ‘I wish I’d never touched that beastly parcel!’

  ‘It may be very helpful to the police that you did. Tell me, Mr Mandsell, what really induced you to call for that parcel at all?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Inspector wanted me to tell him that. It was just a sudden idea.’

  ‘But why, Mr Mandsell? You must have known it was none of your business.’

  Mandsell looked unhappy.. He racked his brains. This extraordinary old lady obviously was determined to have an answer, and the answer, her black eyes and beaky little mouth suggested, had better be a satisfactory one. She cackled with a suddenness and a harshness that made him start.

  ‘I – I beg your pardon?’ he stammered. She did not answer. In a terrifying way she waited. He was mesmerized into replying to her question. ‘I went because, I suppose, it was something to do. I was a bit at a loose end, that was all.’

  ‘You went, in response to an unexpected summons from an unknown woman, knowing quite well that she had mistaken you for someone else, to a railway station five miles distant from your lodgings, to pick up and deliver a parcel (of whose nature and contents you were unaware) to a seedy little man in a back-street shop in this town? I still ask why you did it, Mr Mandsell.’

  Mandsell felt still more unhappy, and looked so.

  ‘I’ve really no idea,’ he replied. ‘I mean that. I don’t know why I went. It was just one of those things.’

  ‘And as a result of “one of those things” a woman has been murdered.’

  ‘Oh, but I couldn’t possibly have thought that that was going to happen!’

  ‘You didn’t think at all. Come, now, Mr Mandsell, tell me why you did it.’

  This persistence had its effect.

  ‘I was on my beam ends. I was pretty desperate. I’d been turned out of my digs and… well, to tell you the truth… I thought there might be something in it for me, even if it was only a bob to buy some grub.’

  ‘You were as badly off as that?’

  ‘At that moment, yes, I was. Of course, I shall be all right when my book comes out, but meanwhile it’s fairly sticky going. Still, I’ve sold a short story. That’s something.’

  ‘Yes, yes, so it is. Mr Mandsell, you will have gathered that the police and I are extremely interested in these five one-pound notes which shopkeeper Tomson gave you.’

  ‘Oh, Lord! You don’t think they’re dud ones? I’ve paid four of them over to my landlady!’

  ‘Have you any idea what she did with them?’

  ‘Yes, of course. They’re in the teapot.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She won’t put money in the Savings Bank because of the Income Tax, and she won’t buy National Savings Certificates because she thinks they’re a nuisance to cash, and she’s saving up to visit her daughter in Canada.’

  ‘Banking account?’

  ‘Not she. Says the young gents behind the counter look down on the likes of her. I told her that was nonsense. The trouble is, she’s almost illiterate, I think, and it gives her a rather vast sense of inferiority.’

  ‘I should like to see those notes.’

  Mandsell looked dubious.

  ‘You know what those sort of people are like about money.’

  ‘She must either show them to me or take them to the police station. They may be very important evidence against Tomson if he’s been up to anything shady.’

  ‘Well, honestly, I daren’t ask her to produce them! My standing in this house isn’t all that hot, you know, and if Deaks begins thinking that I’ve paid my bill with dud notes…’

  But Mrs Deaks, under the influence of Mrs Bradley’s beautiful voice and tactful handling, was not at all averse to displaying the notes.

  ‘Thing is, dear,’ she said confidentially, ‘as I didn’t want to upset my ’usband nor Mr Mandsell, but it seemed sort of funny to me, if you take my meaning, him being on his beam-ends one minute and flashin’out four pounds the next, so I kep’ ’em separate. Here they is, look, with a rubber band around’em.’

  Mrs Bradley was not an expert in detecting forgeries, but an enthusiastic Scotland Yard officer had once spent an entire morning in pointing out to her the slight errors by which even the cleverest forgers are tripped up. The most minute scrutiny of the four notes through her small but powerful magnifying glass failed to reveal any of the discrepancies she
had been instructed to look for, however. She compared minutely each of the four notes with one from her own purse, but was compelled to conclude either that the forger had been a master of his trade, or else that the four notes were genuine. There was only one interesting feature. On three out of the four notes were traces of some blotchy outlines, and these were particularly clear on one, where they happened to come on the half-crown-sized white circle on the back.

  She took from a small leather case some minute surgical forceps and very gingerly scratched at the marks. Memory, aided by the powerful magnifying glass, began to stir. She saw the darkish walls of the Lateral Passage at Lascaux, its sandy floor and the dust at the foot of its walls. She remembered that here alone, in this spine-chilling underground temple of primitive man with its terrifying suggestion of art come alive through the ‘monstrous power of witchcraft’, could be detected the slight atmosphere of damp sufficient for the growth of a form of prehistoric mould, ‘an archaic fungus,’ says Alan Houghton Brodrick in his Lascaux.

  It was not often that Mrs Bradley felt the tingling excitement in which half Laura Menzies’ young, lusty life was lived, but she felt it now.

  Monsieur Banneestaire! And Monsieur Bannister had been to Lascaux! Was there… could there be… any connexion?

  ‘This is valuable evidence,’ she said impressively. ‘Will you exchange these four notes for four I will give you, or will you take them straight to the police station?’

  ‘I don’t want nothing to do with the police,’ said Mrs Deaks slowly. ‘If so be as you’ll agree to mark the notes you gives me with Deaks’ undelyable pencil, and if so be as you agrees to ’ave Mr Mandsell in as a witness to me giving you up his notes in exchange for yours, well, I don’t mind changing ’em. If yours is duds and those is duds, well, I shan’t be no worse off,’ she concluded with her class’s deep philosophy.

  Mandsell was called into the kitchen, and the notes were marked and exchanged.

  ‘Now for the villainous Tomson,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mandsell, brightening. ‘Yes! I wouldn’t at all mind confronting that bloke. I’ll give him my I.O.U. That ought to settle his hash, one way or the other. I mean, he’ll either have to come clean about the parcel or lose his money.’

  ‘No, no. You must leave the negotiations to me.’

  Upon this understanding they sought out Tomson. He did not seem pleased to see them, and asked them, in surly and unwilling fashion, what he could have the honour of showing them.

  ‘Faintley-coloured materials,’ Mrs Bradley replied.

  ‘Pastel shades, madam? Those on the shelves are all I have in stock. Would anything of that kind suit you?’

  ‘No, no. I require curtains the colour of blood.’

  ‘Blood, madam? I don’t know that I —’

  ‘No? A great pity. Have you never heard of blood-coloured curtains? Faintley-coloured and blood-coloured are quite the rage nowadays, you know. Oh, and my second cousin here believes that he owes you five pounds. Can you remember the transaction, I wonder?’

  ‘What’s your game?’ demanded Tomson, suddenly abandoning any pretence of being the anxious shopkeeper and becoming, with one short question, the anxious petty criminal. ‘You never come here to buy curtains!’

  ‘I wonder how you know that? Can you possibly have a guilty conscience, my poor man? Never mind. We have come to return the five pounds which you so kindly lent to my ward here. May we have a receipt?’

  ‘You can go to hell!’ said Tomson, snarling. ‘Get out of my shop, the pair of you! I don’t know nothing about any five pounds, but I knows the confidence trick when I sees it!’

  Mrs Bradley slowly shook her head and Tomson was suddenly reminded of a cobra he had seen in his youth on a trip to the London Zoo.

  ‘It won’t do at all,’ she said gently. ‘What species of fern did you find in the statue you broke?’

  This question really frightened Tomson.

  ‘I didn’t find nothing in the statue,’ he asserted. ‘And I never broke it! It was broke when it landed up ’ere!’

  ‘I think you found Ophioglossum Vulgatum – in other words, the adder’s-tongue fern,’ she said. ‘And the police think you broke the statue deliberately and have confessed as much.’

  ‘Adder’s-tongue?’ He licked his lips, his apprehension obviously increasing. ‘What do you mean… adder’s-tongue? There wasn’t nothing in it, I tell you! And I ’ave not said I broke the statue, because I never!’

  ‘You have been warned,’ pronounced Mrs Bradley, solemnly. ‘Come, dear fellow,’ she added to Mandsell. ‘This man is determined that nothing I can do shall save him.’

  ‘I say, you scared him all right,’ said Mandsell, when they were out of the shop. ‘What exactly was all that in aid of?’

  ‘Time will show, child. I wonder, however, that Tomson was left in peace when once he had allowed his curiosity to overcome him and had broken that statue. In fact, the only explanation… Yes, I think I see.’

  ‘The thing I got from Hagford wasn’t a statue, you know.’

  ‘I do know, and thereby hangs a useful bit of evidence.’

  ‘As how?’

  ‘As nothing. Children should be seen and not heard, and most of their questions studiously although not unkindly ignored,’ replied Mrs Bradley serenely. ‘However, you leave the court without a stain on your character.’

  ‘But nobody ever does who’s been brought to court, you know.’

  ‘I do know. But never mind. Better a live donkey than a dead lion.’

  ‘I don’t agree at all. I’d willingly die if I could die a lion instead of a donkey.’

  ‘Some are born great, others achieve greatness —’

  ‘I say, I wonder if some day you’d read a bit of my stuff? I mean, I don’t think it’s all that bad.’

  ‘I shall be honoured.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘Which is not my wont. I am unalterably serious-minded. I wonder whether there was a fern in your parcel, too?’

  ‘What makes you think there might have been?’

  ‘The answer to that is only for the police, and I don’t know enough yet to confide in them.’

  They parted at Mrs Deaks’ house and the smooth car pulled up to take Mrs Bradley home. She leered kindly at Mandsell out of the near-side window, and reached Wandles Parva somewhat ahead of Laura, who brought with her the shy Mr Bannister.

  ‘Ah!’ said Mrs Bradley, peering at him as though he were some dubious piece of meat which she suspected of being horse-flesh. ‘What have we here?’

  ‘This is Mr Bannister,’ said Laura. ‘Maths and all that, and took me out to lunch, you know. I phoned you.’

  Mrs Bradley gazed snake-like upon Bannister, a proceeding which did not appear to disconcert him. In fact, her extraordinary appearance, clad as she was in cherry-red and faint purple, gave him confidence. He stretched out a flexible hand.

  ‘This is great,’ he said sincerely. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you.’

  ‘Clever boy!’ said Laura, returning Mrs Bradley’s basilisk gaze with an impudent smile. ‘When do we eat, O Egypt?’

  The meal was a great success. Bannister proved to be an authority upon French cooking and was personally introduced to Henri, who rated him, forthwith, as the enviable possessor of an intelligence unusual and profound, with a knowledge of the French tongue unsurpassed even by Frenchmen.

  ‘He is still English,’ said Henri’s wife Celestine, with a scowl (this in the privacy of the kitchen quarters), ‘and it is well understood that all the English are barbarians.’

  ‘But Madame is English, too!’

  ‘Madame is not of this world,’ said Gelestine austerely. ‘She is of another state of being. One cannot doubt it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, this gentleman understands that I am a cook in a thousand, and has said so in beautiful French. A cook in a thousand! Remember that!’

  ‘Fish-fry in heaven! And who is to pay?’
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  ‘The English Government,’ said Henri, gurgling with laughter. Celestine tossed her head and picked up the tray of coffee. She affected to despise her spouse, but would have died for him. ‘They are here a nation of the Welfare State,’ Henri added. ‘The poor have inherited the earth.’

  ‘Blasphemy!’ said Celestine sourly. She took in the coffee and set it down gently on a table at Mrs Bradley’s right elbow. ‘Madame is served!’

  ‘And, in return, will give you a reliable recipe for poisoning Henri,’ said her employer. Celestine tossed her head, as usual.

  ‘Although a pig and a louse, he is still the husband my good parents found for me,’ she said austerely. ‘The good offices of madame are wasted on such as he!’

  ‘Is she really such a tartar?’ asked Bannister, who found himself at home in the household. Laura laughed.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said. ‘Now, Mrs Croc. let’s pump him.’

  Mrs Bradley regarded Bannister benevolently. She saw a tall, angular, dark-faced man, obviously shy but with honest eyes and a mouth which she thought could be grim.

  ‘I hope you won’t need to pump me,’ he said. ‘What about?’

  ‘About the late Faintley, of course,’ said Laura encouragingly. ‘You can’t tell us too much about her.’

  ‘As for that,’ said Bannister. He stopped, and looked to Mrs Bradley for guidance. ‘As for that,’ he repeated, ‘well, I didn’t really know much about her.’