Serpents in Paradise

by Martin Edwards

  ***

  “My first important case?” said Sergeant Beef. “Yes, I can tell you about that. I shouldn’t hardly call it a who-done-it, though, because everybody knew that if old Miss Crackliss had been murdered, there was only one person it could be. All the same, it was an interesting case. What you’d call mackayber …”

  “Mack …?”

  “You know, gruesome,” explained Beef impatiently.

  “Oh, macabre.”

  “That’s it.”

  I knew better than to underrate Sergeant Beef because of a little eccentricity in pronunciation. Large, crimson of cheek, a hearty eater and a good public bar man whose ginger moustache had refreshed itself in many a pint glass, he looked what he once had been, a village policeman. But his insight and common sense had enabled him to solve a number of murder cases, and now he had retired from the Force he was gaining a reputation as a private investigator.

  The case he described to me happened twenty years ago or more, when Sergeant Beef was a constable stationed in a small village called Long Cotterell, in one of the home counties. His passions were gardening and darts; when it was too dark to continue the one he settled down nightly to the other. Then old Miss Crackliss, who lived at the Mill House, died suddenly.

  He knew Miss Crackliss well. In fact, he confessed, he used to put in a few hours at the week-end helping her gardener.

  “Pay wasn’t so plentiful in those days,” he explained, “and I wanted a bit extra to get married on. Besides, she let me put odds and ends in her greenhouse, and that was handy, too.”

  Miss Crackliss was in her sixties, a frail and shrunken old lady, who suffered from heart trouble. To look at her, Beef said, “you wouldn’t have thought she’d have taken much murdering.” She was reputed to be excessively rich.

  Her nephew lived with her, and in the eyes of the village here was a ready-made suspect. Ripton Crackliss was the least popular resident of Long Cotterell, a tall, gloomy man in his thirties, powerful and slow-moving; he had a way of ignoring the greetings of others.

  It was understood that Ripton Crackliss would inherit everything on his aunt’s death.

  The Mill House stood well away from the village, a pleasant red-brick house with a walled garden beside it, in which were two large greenhouses. It was in this garden that Beef was working on the last occasion on which he saw Miss Crackliss alive, a Saturday afternoon in May.

  “I was off duty,” he explained, “and I’d come up to do a bit of planting out for her. Besides, I had a couple of boxes of mustard and cress in the conservatory and I wanted to see how they were doing.

  “I went in to look at my boxes and found the seedlings coming through nicely, then I went over to get on with her work.

  “Presently the old lady came out to settle down in her garden chair for the afternoon.

  “She had one of those metal-framed chairs with canvas seats and backs to them, because she liked sitting upright and not stretching out as you would in a deck-chair. I went and said good afternoon to her.

  “She was all wrapped round with rugs because, although there was sunshine, it was none too warm. She seemed quite cheerful, sitting there with her book and looking up to see what I was doing. Her own gardener finished midday Saturdays. The next day I heard she was dead.”

  At first there seemed nothing unnatural about this, for the local doctor, a great friend of Beef’s, had long been prepared for a fatal heart attack. He was a keen, conscientious man, this Doctor Ryder-Boyce, and he was upset by the event because he liked old Miss Crackliss.

  It appeared that when tea-time came she had not returned to the house and the housekeeper, a stern Scotswoman called Mrs Craig, had gone up to the room which Ripton called his study and told him that his aunt was still outside.

  Ripton had got up and said he would go across to the walled garden and bring her in to tea.

  There was nothing unusual in this. The old lady loved her garden and was apt to stay far too long in it when the weather was not really warm enough. Besides, she frequently dozed off to sleep. So Mrs Craig made the tea. Then Ripton Crackliss came hurrying into the house.

  “You must go to her at once,” he said. “She’s had one of her attacks, I think. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  Mrs Craig set out for the walled garden while Ripton telephoned for the doctor. She found Miss Crackliss dead, sitting in her chair with the blankets round her. There was a look almost of horror in the dead eyes and the features seemed somehow twisted as though with fear.

  “Poor thing,” thought Mrs Craig. “She must have died in pain after all. One of those terrible attacks of hers.”

  But she noticed something else. The dead face was flushed as she had rarely seen it.

  The doctor arrived and ordered Miss Crackliss to be carried up to her bedroom. He made his examination and asked both Mrs Craig and Ripton Crackliss a number of questions. She had said nothing to lead either of them to suppose she was unwell. She had lunched with them. As Mrs Craig said, there could be nothing to upset her in anything she had eaten or drunk because all three of them had had the same.

  The doctor went home, but later that afternoon he telephoned to Beef and suggested that he should come round.

  Beef found the doctor silent and abstracted.

  “Know what they’re saying in the village?” he asked. “They think Ripton Crackliss did for his aunt this afternoon.”

  “What makes them think that?” asked the doctor.

  “Well, you know what gossip is. They don’t like the fellow and they know he gets her money. Besides, he was up at the house all the afternoon. Think there’s anything in it?”

  “I don’t see how there can be,” said the doctor. “I’ve examined the old lady and she certainly died as a result of her heart trouble. It might have come at any time, as you know. The fact that she seemed well to-day means nothing.”

  “Then what are you so worried about?” asked Beef.

  “I simply can’t say. Yet there is something I don’t like about it. She looked strange, for one thing. As though she’d had a shock—from the outside, I mean. And there were a couple of points …”

  “Go on,” said Beef.

  “They may mean nothing at all. Probably they don’t. But I’m not quite happy.”

  “What were these points?”

  “Just above her upper lip was a tiny smudge. At first I thought it was dirt, but it was sticky. Only a very small smudge. But she never ate sweets.”

  “And the other one?”

  “When the three of us went out to carry her in, Ripton Crackliss got there first and seemed to be trying to drag her to her feet. He’d got hold of her forearms and was pulling quite hard. When I examined her later I found that he had been so violent that it had left marks on the skin. It seemed such an extraordinary thing to do when we were all on our way to carry her properly.”

  “Yes,” said Beef. “There were no signs of violence?”

  “None at all. Not even an abrasion anywhere.”

  “And she could not have been poisoned?”

  “That, of course, we shall find out if I’m not satisfied. But I see no signs of it at all.”

  “I think I’ll go and have a look round that garden, though,” said Beef. “It won’t be dark for another couple of hours yet.”

  Beef cycled off to the Mill House. Putting his cycle into the hedge, he went straight to the walled garden. The chair in which Miss Crackliss had sat that afternoon was still there, and he examined it carefully. Then he made a minute inspection of the rough stone paving on which it had stood.

  “There was nothing,” he said, telling me the story. “Nothing at all in the way of a clue. I decided to pack up and wait for the postmortem, if there was going to be one.”

  Before he started for home he thought he would go and have a look at his mustard and cress, and sw
itched the light on in the greenhouse. This brought Ripton Crackliss over from the house at a run, and he asked Beef what the hell he was doing. Beef remained calm.

  “I’m just having a look at my seedlings,” he said. “Come on wonderfully, haven’t they?”

  Ripton Crackliss seemed to control his anger.

  “I understand that you had permission from my aunt to use this place,” he said. “But my aunt died this afternoon. In future, if you want to come here please call at the house first and see if it’s convenient.”

  “Very well, sir,” said Beef, and followed him out.

  He went straight back to the doctor’s house and the two talked seriously for half an hour. Then they got into the doctor’s car and drove off to the nearby town. Here they went to the police station and another conference took place. Within forty-eight hours a warrant was out for the arrest of Ripton Crackliss on a charge of murdering his aunt.

  “Caused quite a sensation at the time,” said Beef, “and I won’t say it didn’t do me a bit of good in the Force. ‘Murder in the Garden’, the papers called it, but that was wrong, because the murder hadn’t taken place in the garden at all.”

  “No?”

  “No. It was in the greenhouse. You know what that fellow had done? He’d waited till his aunt was in her chair, tucked up tight in her rugs so that she couldn’t move in a hurry, then he’d come out to her.

  “Must have been about two o’clock that Sunday afternoon when Mrs Craig was having her nap and nobody would have seen him going across from the house. All of a sudden he’d put a piece of plaster, like they use for bandages, over her mouth and held her arms to the chair.

  “What could she do? She was a frail little thing and couldn’t even struggle enough to leave any traces. Then he’d tied her arms to the framework of the chair and she was powerless.

  “Of course, it needed more than that. Doesn’t matter how weak and old people are, they don’t die easily. He lifted the chair with her on it and took it across to the greenhouse. He had the furnace stoked up and the heat in there was the maximum.

  “That’s what killed her. With her heart she was dead an hour later—or sooner, let’s hope.”

  “Good Lord,” I couldn’t help exclaiming.

  “I told you it was gruesome. But ingenious, too. She really had died of a heart attack and there might have been no evidence of anything else.

  “He’d thought about the marks of where her arms were tied and covered that up by pretending to try to pull her out of her chair when we went across with the doctor.

  “We got quite a lot of evidence, but I doubt even then whether he would have been hanged if he hadn’t confessed.

  “There was the mark of the sticking plaster, and the fact that a whole sack of coke had been used after the gardener left on Saturday. And he was the only one on the spot. But he might have got off for lack of medical evidence. You see, the way he had chosen left no trace at all. Murder by heat, you might call it.”

  “But what gave you the idea?” I asked him. “What really led you to see what had happened?”

  He smiled slowly.

  “It was that mustard and cress of mine,” he said. “I told you I said to Ripton Crackliss that it had come on wonderfully. Well, it had. It had shot up. And there had been no sun that day.

  “As soon as I saw those long, thin stalks I knew there was something wrong. That was my only clue.”

  Our Pageant

  Gladys Mitchell

  Gladys Mitchell (1901–1983), for many years a pillar of the Detection Club, was a schoolteacher who published Speedy Death, an extraordinary first novel featuring the formidable Mrs Bradley, in 1929. The last Mrs Bradley novel, The Crozier Pharaohs, appeared 55 years later—her career was, therefore, astonishingly long, even by the standards of fictional detectives.

  Like many of Mitchell’s short stories, “Our Pageant” originally appeared in the Evening Standard, which for a few years in the 1950s was an excellent market for crime writers capable of fashioning short tales with a twist. This story, from which Mrs Bradley is absent, reflects an enthusiasm for British customs which is reflected in many of Mitchell’s novels.

  ***

  You remember our pageant, of course—the Roman Legions supplied by the Youth Clubs, the rather remote Saxon saints portrayed by the Girl Guides, the Normans led by William the Conqueror (our Town Clerk distressed because his nose-piece pressed more heavily than the Pageant Master had intended), King John and his barons all signing Magna Charta like mad whenever they got any applause, and all the rest of it.

  And did you notice the Morris Dancers? There were just the six of them. They could do Bean-Setting, Trunkies (not very well—the Capers are the difficulty there), Blue-Eyed Stranger and Laudnum Bunches. Teddy Pratt could do a Morris jig, too, rather nicely, but, unfortunately, so could Cyril Clark.

  •••

  Women did not enter into this—rather, they should not have done, but you know how it is. Five good men and true do not make six good men and true, and so our stout-hearted Miss Galley from the Bank had to be pressed into service, and a certain Miss Johnson was to act as Jack in the Green.

  Jack in the Green comes down to us from the Middle Ages. You don’t have to be able to dance, you just play the fool and collect the money. It is a man’s job, but we hadn’t got a man to do it.

  If you’ve ever taken part in a village pageant, you’ll remember that rehearsals begin at least a month too soon.

  It is not too soon, considering the amount of practice involved, and it is not too soon when one considers that scarcely ever is it possible to obtain a full rehearsal until about a week before the day. There are always unavoidable gaps because of people who’ve got something else important to do just when the Pageant Master needs them most. But it is too soon because of all the quarrels that begin.

  •••

  We had the usual crop, but the most obstinate one was that between Teddy Pratt and Cyril Clark. It was a cut-throat rivalry over which of them should dance a Morris jig.

  Well, week followed week, and both fellows practised for all they were worth, but still there was really nothing to choose between them.

  Then a new factor entered into the situation. Pratt and Clark fell out about Miss Johnson. The girl was to impersonate Jack in the Green and go with the Morris dancers, so it mattered all the more to the two men which of them should be chosen to perform the Morris jig.

  As the great day came nearer, bets were being laid at six to five on Clark for the Morris jig, eight to three that Parson St. George would fall off his horse, and ten to one that the financial result would show a deficit. (We were taking a silver collection from the crowd to defray expenses.)

  Those that had betted on Clark lost their money, for the Pageant Master, having to make up his mind at last, picked Pratt. Clark, he thought, was rather small, being no bigger than Miss Johnson, the Jack in the Green.

  The first intimation we had of something amiss was when a message came from the Pageant Master to say that Clark had withdrawn altogether from the Morris dancing. This put everybody concerned in a stew, because, Morris jig or not, it was a plain impossibility for five men—that is to say, four men and one woman—to perform dances intended for six.

  Well, much against our feeling of civic pride—if the word civic can be applied to a village—we had to ask a fellow called Fathing from Peascod to come in and dance sixth man.

  Meanwhile the expected had happened. The rehearsals had gone on for so long that before the pageant, and before he withdrew from the dancing, Clark had had the banns cried three times and had wedded the Jack in the Green right under Pratt’s nose, as you might say.

  The great day came at last. The band came first, and then the procession followed. The Romans led, and the cavalcade from the Hall followed the Morris dancers, because we could not think of anything much to p
ut in between.

  It was at the end of the dance called Bean-Setting that the tragedy happened, and it happened right in the middle of the village green, just before the big tableau was due to move into place. There was a lot of noise during the All In and Call, and a bit of horseplay with Jack in the Green in the middle of it, and suddenly Pratt fell down dead, so we had no Morris jig after all.

  Nobody could believe it at first, and then the police took over—not just Nimmett, but the real police from Hurstminster. Pratt had been stabbed to the heart, and the weapon had been about five inches long.

  •••

  That was all we knew for a long time, and then they got a London chap on to it from Scotland Yard. He didn’t know any of us, and that was a good thing really, because he could not be biased, although we could have told him of the bad blood between Pratt and Clark.

  Suspicion would naturally have fallen on Clark if he had been one of the dancers, but, of course, he had taken himself out of it. Nevertheless, the Scotland Yard man got really inquisitive, because when he compared the prints he had got on the Morris sticks, not one of the sets fitted with prints he’d found on the weapon.

  Then the Scotland Yard man noticed something else. On the end of the weapon was a loop so that it could be hitched on to a belt. He examined all the Morris-men’s belts, but none of them had a hook to have taken the loop on the sword-stick.

  •••

  The chap was very bright. He put two and two together all right. He asked Clark’s wife if she had any objection to being measured round the waist. She had to say no, and a woman police officer was brought along to measure her. Then Clark was measured, and the Scotland Yard man knew he had solved his problem.

  “You took her place as Jack in the Green,” he said to Clark. “You’re much the same height, but her waist is much smaller than yours. How comes it, then, that two distinctly different tag-holes have been used? See?” He showed Clark the rubbings on the belt where, some distance apart, it was obvious that the belt had been fastened in two entirely different places. There was a hook on it, too, where the lethal weapon had been hung. Easy to hide it, with all that greenery about him.