‘But what motive could either of them have?’ Ferris interrupted. ‘We know they’re planning – at least we suspect they’re planning – arson. But up to the present they’ve clean records. They’ve only got to stop it, and they’re safe as houses; why should they add murder? – It’s not credible.’
‘Not looking at it that way,’ agreed Mitchell, ‘and if they give up their arson idea, supposing they have it, and if they have nothing to do with Mrs Curtis’s murder, well, then they’re all right, both of them, and no concern of ours. But you can’t shut your eyes to the fact that Mrs Curtis had been to Howland Yard, and what’s the explanation if not that she suspected something? And if she went to Leadeane Grange, was it because she suspected something more, and knew Keene and Hunter were meeting there? And was the result some quarrel that ended – well, as quarrels sometimes do? Of course, we’ve got to remember Curtis himself, and his threats, as well as his pistol he says he threw away, but that may be the one that was used for the murder – a jealous-minded man on the drink is capable of anything. And then there’s the unknown motor-cyclist as well.’
‘Yes,’ objected Ferris, ‘but if it was a woman who was driving the car when we saw it pass, where does she come from? No woman in this business that I can see, except Miss Frankland.’
‘How do we know it really was a woman we saw?’ Mitchell asked. ‘We only had a glimpse, remember, as the thing shot by. It would have been easy enough for a man to stick on that hat covering half his face – tie it on with string to make it stick perhaps – and put on the coat with the collar turned up to cover the other half, and all the rest of his body hidden. Good enough flying by at sixty m.p.h. And easy enough to stop for a second, put back the hat and coat on the body lying at the bottom of the car, and shoot the thing full speed over the edge of the cutting. The murderer slips down after it, either sets the car on fire or makes sure it’s burning already, and clears away along the track.’
They both fell silent, in the imagination of both a grisly picture enough of the little Bayard Seven dashing along the road with the murdered woman’s body within and the murderer disguised in her hat and coat seated at the wheel. Then Mitchell said,
‘Somehow we’ve got to know why she went to Leadeane Grange – whether it was only to write it up or whether there was a reason. And then we’ve got to find out what happened there. You and I will go there to-morrow, Ferris, and see what we can find out, and meanwhile you can instruct Owen to go on working on his own.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Among The Sun Bathers
The little village of Leadeane had never been able quite to make up its mind whether to be proud of its sun bathers or to regard them as a crying scandal.
At first it had come down rather heavily on the crying scandal side. There had been much indignant talk, a suggestion of a protest meeting, of an appeal to ‘the authorities’, though what authorities no one seemed to know. Rowdy youngsters of the type always eager to associate a righteous indignation with a display of hooliganism had begun to look forward to a little excitement. One or two windows of Leadeane Grange, the sun bathers’ headquarters, had stones thrown through them; and there was one night when a gang of youths marched up and down before the house, beating tea trays, till they grew tired of that harmless and no doubt enjoyable but somewhat monotonous amusement.
Lately, however, public opinion had distinctly leaned towards taking an amused pride in the establishment. It had been written up once or twice, just lately in the Morning Intelligence, with a large photograph on the back page – inset Mr Esmond Bryan, the director and founder of the establishment and President of the Society of Sun Believers. Originally, by-the-way, this had been the Society of Sun Worshippers, but the last word had been altered on the representation of some of the local clergy, who feared misunderstanding.
After all, not every village in the Thames valley got ‘write-ups’ like that in one of the most popular of the five or six national papers that direct our destinies, instruct our tastes, and dictate to us the opinions we hold with such a depth of passionate conviction. Had not the Morning Intelligence called Leadeane one of the loveliest of our English villages? Had there not been a reference to its alert and intelligent inhabitants? Leadeane, gratified, but not surprised, admitted silently that it owed these not undeserved compliments to Mr Bryan, and was henceforth inclined to view his establishment with a more lenient eye.
After all, why should not a man wear sandals and long hair? Surely each of us has a right to treat his own extremities as he will?
Possibly also, for this is a materialistic age, Leadeane was not altogether uninfluenced by the fact that the sun bathers brought a certain amount of money into the village. The garage proprietor, for instance, found his turnover doubled or trebled. The Leadeane Arms did well with thirsty chauffeurs, waiting about while their employers sunbathed. Then needed supplies were as much as possible bought locally, and there were often odd jobs to be done in the way of small repairs, gardening, and so on.
Nor was there anything in an establishment so well run to which reasonable exception could be taken. Inside the old boundary wall of the extensive grounds and beyond the belt of trees that lined it, there had been erected at considerable expense a wooden fence seven feet high. The sun bathers therefore were too well hidden from passers-by for any possible offence to be given. Even the curious, who, as sometimes happened, scaled the wall and penetrated the wooded belt beyond in order to peep through any chink they could find in the fence, saw little or nothing for their pains, for beyond the fence again was another, wider belt of shrubs, and flower beds, and ornamental trees, that bounded the open, grassy expanse, sloping to the south, where the actual sun bathing took place – that is, when the sun was so kind as to permit it.
On this grassy slope then when the sun was kind the members, their friends, and visitors, disported themselves, though always very strictly obeying the careful regulations laid down by Mr Bryan, whose watchful eye was ever on the alert to see they were properly carried out. Every one on joining, every visitor as well, had to read these regulations aloud, to submit to be questioned about them so that it might be certain they were understood, and to sign a promise to obey them in the letter and the spirit. The exact number of inches below the thigh that had to be covered, the exact amount of back and chest that might be exposed, were precisely laid down, and the weight and thickness of the material of which the body clothing had to be made was specified minutely. Indeed, the regulations were more strict and detailed than probably any seaside town would have dared to enforce on its mixed bathing beach.
For those more advanced, who desired to sun bathe in puris naturalibus, as Mr Esmond Bryan liked to put it, the strictest separation of the sexes was enforced. For the women, the flat roof of the house was reserved. On the ground floor was the general club room and the bar, as Mr Bryan called it, where, of course, no alcoholic beverages were served – still less those sources of all ill, tea and coffee and cocoa. Than those three Mr Bryan would far sooner have served neat alcohol to his patrons, or prussic acid for that matter, holding it less deadly on the whole. But your taste for tomato juice, neat or mixed, for turnip tea, for dandelion, parsley, and nettle tea, for orange juice, for a dozen other strange and presumably innocuous beverages, could be gratified; and as you quaffed your goblet of fresh nettle brew you could satisfy your hunger with nuts, carrots, many kinds of fruits, raw chopped cabbage or lettuce, and other similar foods that must have been delicious, for they all seemed to be devoured with equal gusto. On the first floor were the executive offices, where a couple of girls tapped typewriters all day long, Mr Bryan’s private quarters, the committee room where the managing committee met, and beyond this and leading out of it Mr Bryan’s private office that also communicated on the other side with his sitting-room. The next floor was cut off by a green baize door beyond which none penetrated, save those ladies admitted to the privileges of the roof. The door was fastened by a spring lock, and could be
opened only by a key that never left the possession of the guardian, a stout severe matron, a Mrs Barrett, widow of a police constable, who kept careful watch to see that none passed but those who had the right. On the floor above were the sun-ray lamps with which the bathers had to content themselves when the sun itself was hidden. These operated in a large apartment that had been made by knocking several rooms into one, so that they occupied almost the whole of the floor space except for a row of dressing cubicles. Finally there was the flat roof itself, fitted up with couches and screens and protected by a specially erected parapet, where in the appropriate weather one could lie and roast like any Christmas turkey. And that this sort of cooking was much superior to that to be obtained from the sun-ray lamps, Mr Bryan was never tired of proclaiming.
‘As a substitute, yes,’ he would say, ‘but it’s not violet rays themselves that count, it’s the fresh air as well, the wholeness of the air vibrant with the wholeness of the light of the sun.’
It had to be admitted, though the ribald youth of the neighbourhood were fond of joking about procuring an aeroplane and flying low over the Grange some sunny day, that Mr Bryan and his colleague, Miss James, who had special charge of this department in puris naturalibus, took every possible care that it was all carried out with the most perfect decorum.
For those of the other sex who wished for the same treatment there had been erected an enclosure at the foot of the grounds, cut off from them by the swimming pond formed by the damming up of the Leade, the little stream from which the village took its name and that flowed through this corner of the Grange property. Originally this was meant for a fish pond, but it had been easy to transform it into a first-class swimming pool where Mr Bryan always strongly urged his sun bathers to complete their regime by a dip when season and weather permitted – and even when they didn’t.
‘I don’t know which is the best,’ he would say, ‘sun bathing or open air water bathing, but when you combine the two – perfection.’
And one of his favourite plans, to be carried out when funds permitted, was to add a constant stream of salt to the water the extra benefit of sea bathing might be secured.
Another favourite project of his was to erect two covered swimming baths, one for men and one for women, where sun-ray lamps could be installed, and swimmers could bask in puris naturalibus in an artificial sun all the year round, instead of having to wait on the fitful appearance of that luminary so fickle and doubtful in our northern land. But here again was a project that had to attend upon a doubtful future, when money might be more abundant, for the published accounts of the establishment showed that so far it had been run at an actual loss – that is, the capital employed had not only so far returned no interest but had actually shrunk considerably.
In addition to the open-air enclosure for the masculine devotees of the in puris naturalibus cult, a large barn standing within it had been arranged for their use with two big sun-ray lamps so that they might not be too dependent on the weather. The whole of this part was under the supervision of a Mr Zack Dodd, a huge figure of a man who once had been a heavy-weight professional boxer, who was understood to have invested a good share of his savings in the establishment, and who was notoriously on bad terms with Mr Bryan, with whom he had more than once been heard quarrelling fiercely. Indeed Mr Bryan made no secret of his desire to pay Dodd out, as Dodd made no secret of his ardent wish to get his capital back. The only difficulty in the way apparently was that the money was not available. Not that all that prevented Mr Dodd from being almost as fervent and voluble a believer in the treatment and the virtues of sunshine on the bare skin as Mr Bryan himself.
‘If only I had known before about this here treatment,’ he was fond of saying, ‘a course of it would have made me champion of the world instead of only runner-up.’
In point of fact he had never been even runner-up, but that is a detail.
Miss James, on the other hand, was inclined to be rather cynical about the treatment, though her fine physique, for she was a tall, strong, well-made woman, though a little on the thin side, seemed to suggest that at any rate it did her no harm. She took her sun bathing treatment regularly, however, but it was understood that that was a condition of her employment. As a paid servant, not a partner like Zack Dodd, she had to obey.
Mr Esmond Bryan himself, the director, was a thin, busy little man, very quick and active in his movements, burned almost black from constant exposure to sun rays, natural and artificial, but with a mass of snow-white hair that swept down to his shoulders and of which the whiteness was the only sign that testified to the seventy odd years he admitted. Indeed, he had found people so apt to be incredulous of the age he claimed that finally, in half humorous protest, he had framed a copy of his birth certificate and hung it on the wall in his office.
‘That is what sun and air have done for me,’ he would say as he talked and walked with a vigour and vivacity that would not have disgraced a man who had reached but half the allotted span.
No one had ever seen him except in his present costume of wide shorts, sandals that left the top of his feet bare, a shirt cut low at the neck so as to expose throat and neck, and with sleeves that reached only half-way to the elbows. A single woollen undergarment was all else he wore; and winter and summer his costume was always the same, except that the woollen undergarment might be a little thicker in December than in June. Even when snow was on the ground he could be seen going about in the same dress, his legs bare from the middle of the thighs downwards, the snow melting on the tops of his bare feet of which the sandals protected only the soles. It was thus attired then that he went to meet Mitchell and Ferris when the next morning he was told that the police officers were waiting to interview him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mr Bryan Chats
It was therefore this odd little scarecrow of a man in his sandals and his shirt open at the neck; his shorts flapping about his thin legs from which it seemed perpetual sunshine, natural or artificial, had melted all but skin and bone; his little sharp eyes alight with the fires of fanaticism; whom the two burly police officials saw come out of the house towards where they waited just outside, watching with interested eyes the beautifully kept lawn, whereon already, for though the hour was early it was an exceptionally fine day, various devotees of the sunshine cult were enjoying their little occasional, and chancy, dose of genuine sunshine.
He had already been made acquainted with their errand, and indeed the day before had been visited by another officer, Inspector Gibbons, whose report Mitchell had read over more than once. And to that report it seemed Mr Bryan had nothing fresh to add. Though he remembered Jo Frankland’s visit well enough, since a journalistic visit has always its importance, he was sure no detail of the least interest concerning it had gone unrecorded.
‘Not that I paid any special attention or thought much of it at the time,’ he said; ‘I never dreamed of course such a tragedy was going to happen, and journalists often come here now that our great movement is attracting more and more attention and getting more and more into the papers. One of my projects for the future is to establish a paper devoted solely to our great cause. There’s only one thing now that hampers us in spreading our glorious gospel of sunshine.’
‘The weather?’ suggested Mitchell mildly.
‘The uncertainty of the weather,’ admitted Bryan, shaking his head with an air of gentle reproach, ‘is a difficulty, a great difficulty. But what I meant was money, that’s what we need to carry on the work.’
‘Need money for most things,’ agreed Mitchell, ‘getting born’s about the only thing that doesn’t cost us anything. From what you told Mr Gibbons there’s no chance of your being able to tell us the exact time Miss Frankland got here or exactly when she left.’
Mr Bryan shook his head.
‘I made some inquiries,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think we could get any nearer than I said before – she arrived early in the afternoon and left just before dark. Of course, if we h
ad had any idea of what was going to happen... but in any case we’ve no system of recording when our members come or go. They suit themselves, they’re welcome to stay as long as they please.’
‘Must have been quite a long visit she made,’ Mitchell remarked.
‘I left her free to go where she liked and spend her time just as she liked,’ Bryan explained. ‘Of course, there’s the enclosure reserved for male bathers in puris naturalibus.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Ferris, as Mitchell paused to make an entry in his note-book. ‘Some of these new patent bath salts or what?’
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