Our Jubilee is Death

by Leo Bruce

  Babs seemed strangely tense and thoughtful during these questions.

  “I believe she had the other day. But…”

  “Which day?”

  “I think it was the day before yesterday. But it was nothing extraordinary. Just Alice Pink getting excited. None of us thought of taking it seriously.”

  Carolus remained silent for a moment. Then, looking at Babs, he asked if he might have a word with Mrs Plum.

  “We’ve had to get rid of her,” said Babs. “She was really too much. She got such a kick out of all this that she became unbearable. She would run about the house staring at one and having what she called the creeps or the shudders at everything. We decided we would rather do the work ourselves.”

  Carolus nodded. The explanation was reasonable.

  “I think,” he said, “I’ll leave you before the police get here. Fay, would you drive the car back? I want to go by the footpath over the cliffs.”

  It was a cloudy morning with a damp breeze, and as he began to climb up the fairly steep hillside Carolus saw very few holiday-makers. The ‘footpath’ was about six feet wide and was of asphalt. There was a certain amount of litter visible in spite of the receptacles placed for it.

  But the benevolent Borough Council which had made this little footpath an extension of the town promenade had not yet gone to the expense of lighting it, so that no ugly light-standards marred the hillside.

  A tall figure advanced towards him, and he recognized Graveston.

  “I’ve just come from the house,” Carolus told him. “I heard that I should meet you.”

  “Yes. I have been as far as the shelter to which Miss Pink usually went….”

  “Usually?”

  For the first time Graveston was clearly discomforted.

  “That is … she is known to have gone….”

  “How is she known to have gone?” snapped Carolus, at last finding a gap in defences.

  “I myself have seen her …”

  “How often?”

  “I could not say. On several occasions. She went up there in the evening.”

  “You followed her?”

  “I found my way was hers. I had meetings to attend in Blessington.”

  “And this morning?”

  “The ladies of the house instructed me to come and see if… if there were any sign of Miss Pink.”

  “Was there?”

  “None that I could see. She was certainly not in the shelter.”

  “You have found nothing at all to make you think she came this way?”

  “Nothing.”

  With a curt nod Carolus walked on. He found the climb quite a stiff one, and was not surprised that there had been difficulty in wheeling a bath-chair here containing the heavy frame of Lillianne Bomberger.

  From the crest he could see the shelter and half a mile farther on the Coast Guards’ station, which looked from here almost on the outskirts of Blessington. He walked fast, not bothering to examine oddments of litter in his way. It took him about eight minutes to reach the shelter, and here he stopped.

  It was built of metal, with glass divisions, the same structure as one finds in any coastal town in England, but it looked rather forlorn alone here on the hill. It stood perhaps fifty yards from the edge of the cliff on ground which sloped slightly downwards towards the sea.

  Carolus made a careful examination of its interior, but found no object to appropriate and apparently nothing to occupy his particular attention. Then he started walking very slowly, his eyes downcast, towards the cliff’s edge.

  The grass was short and dry and there were dried rabbit and sheep droppings, but nothing which made Carolus pause long. When he drew near to the cliff’s edge he stopped and looked about him.

  At first he thought that there was no one in sight. Then back in the direction of Trumbles he saw a tall, dark figure standing. He recognized, or believed that he recognized, Graveston. He was at least half a mile away and there was no one nearer.

  Now Carolus faced an inward combat which had gone on in him at intervals all his life and particularly during his years in a parachute regiment during the war. He feared heights. It was in order to gain the victory in that fearful internal struggle that he had joined a parachute regiment, and no one had ever suspected that he was fighting against himself in doing so.

  He knew from his observation from the sands below that the cliff here was at its highest. It was not a sheer and clean-cut cliff like that of Beachy Head but a broken drop with ledges and even some vegetation on its surface. To go over its edge would almost certainly mean to reach the foot of it. The fall might be broken, but there was little chance of any object being caught on the way down.

  Now Carolus lay flat on the ground and slowly crawled towards the edge. In this way he could avoid any danger from vertigo, from which at heights, and increasingly since the war, he suffered.

  When he reached the edge and peered over he saw what by now he almost expected to see. About half-way down the cliff, on a jagged shelf of rock, was all that remained of Alice Pink. Carolus did not wait to observe the gruesome details, but he saw enough to know, without any doubt at all, that she was dead.

  He drew back from the edge, crawled backward like a snake and lay for a moment quite still looking down at the clean green turf. Then he vomited.

  It was ten minutes before Carolus was back on the asphalt path and on his way to Blessington. He recovered quickly in the fresh, breezy air.

  It took him half an hour to reach his temporary home, and he was by no means pleased to find Priggley waiting for him. He was about to dismiss him when Priggley said, “Where on earth have you been? I’ve got a message for you. I came here at the crack of dawn, but you had already gone out.”

  “What’s the message?” said Carolus curtly.

  “It’s from Alice Pink, the secretary. She rang up yesterday evening, thinking you were still at the hotel.”

  “Why didn’t you come and tell me at once?”

  “I came round, but you weren’t in. If you will live in a place without a telephone! And anyway it didn’t seem urgent. She wants you to see her today—not out at Trumbles, but here in the town. She’s coming in at three o’clock this afternoon, when her absence there won’t be noticed. She has decided to tell you everything. She will wait for you in the Lounge of the Royal Hydro.”

  “She won’t,” said Carolus. “She’s dead.”

  14

  CAROLUS went straight to the police station and explained to the desk sergeant that he wanted to see the CID officer in charge of the Bomberger case.

  The desk sergeant, like many English policemen, had been as long in the military as in the civil police and had the same unsure, overbearing manner as a CMP corporal who has detected an officer in an offence.

  “Why? Have you got some information to give?” he asked sharply.

  “I shouldn’t have come here to pass the time of day,” said Carolus.

  “If you have any information it’s your duty …”

  “I asked if the officer in charge of the case was in,” said Carolus quietly. He saw the approach of one of those wearisome arguments with which policemen everywhere bolster up their self-importance. “Would you be kind enough to tell me?”

  There was an exchange of hostile looks, after which the desk sergeant said, “No. He’s not back yet.”

  “You’re expecting him?”

  “He should be here.”

  “Then I’ll wait.”

  Carolus opened a newspaper and the desk sergeant turned his attention to his papers, and five minutes passed in silence. Then someone entered behind Carolus and went to an inner door. The desk sergeant nodded to a policeman, who followed the man in and came back to invite Carolus to the CID office.

  Detective Inspector Whibley was a big, jovial man, rather consciously in what is called the prime of life. His smile was too ready, his handshake too forceful, his manner altogether too friendly for Carolus in his present mood.

&nbs
p; “Sit down, Mr Deene. I know all about you, and I’m glad you’ve come to see me. I heard you were interesting yourself in the Bomberger case and expected we should meet sooner or later.”

  “I have something to report,” said Carolus.

  “Oh yes? Have a cigarette, will you? It’s an interesting case, as I expect you’ve found. What have you to report, Mr Deene?”

  “A corpse,” said Carolus.

  “Oh, ho!” smiled the Inspector. “A corpse, eh? Do you know whose?”

  “Yes. Alice Pink’s.”

  The detective seemed for the first time to take something seriously.

  “Her disappearance was reported this morning,” he said.

  “You’ll find her lying about half-way down the cliffs between here and Trumbles Bay. If you go as far as the shelter and look down the cliff in front of that you can see what’s left of her.”

  “Badly disfigured?”

  “Disfigured? Oh hell! You go and see for yourself.”

  “I will, Mr Deene. How did you come to discover this?”

  “Reasoning, more or less.”

  “You don’t mean you anticipated it?”

  “No. Not that. But I saw the possibility. When she disappeared I asked what her recent habits were, and found one of them was to walk up to that shelter in the evening. There was a certain amount of accidental or deliberate lying about that, by the way, Babs Stayer saying that Graveston had seen her there once, Graveston saying it was on a number of occasions. Anyway, I knew she went there, so I walked up this morning, looked over the edge and saw her body.”

  “Do you think it was suicide, Mr Deene?”

  “I have no opinion.”

  “You don’t wish to say any more?”

  “If you are open to a suggestion, Detective Inspector…”

  “Certainly, Mr Deene. Cer-tainly. We’re always open to suggestions. We’re not the hidebound fools you private investigators seem to think.”

  “Then I suggest that when you have recovered the body of Alice Pink you have an autopsy in …”

  “Of course we shall. But in these cases it’s seldom much use. How can any doctor say whether a wound was received before the fall or during it? The limbs will be damaged, anyway.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the limbs, so much as the intestines.”

  “Good gracious, Mr Deene. You surprise me. From what you say I shouldn’t have thought we had to look farther for the cause of death than the fall down the cliff-side.”

  “It is merely a suggestion.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind, Mr Deene, and should there be any result I will see that you hear of it. After all”—the Detective Inspector beamed—“after all, we owe you our prompt discovery of the cadaver, don’t we?”

  “Perhaps you feel like throwing me a few more bits of information.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, never mind.” Carolus knew that he would hear nothing which the police regarded as important.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said the detective, with a confiding smile. “One thing that you may not know, that is. Bomberger was in the town at the time of his wife’s death.”

  Carolus said, “I had suspected it, but I’m grateful to you for telling me. Where can he be found?”

  “Lives in Brighton. You can find him at a pub called the Green Star.”

  “Under his own name?”

  “No. White.”

  He knew from the detective’s seeming generosity that not the slightest suspicion, in the police mind, attached to Bomberger.

  “I’d better tell you something, too,” he said. “Though if you don’t know this you ought to. You have better means of discovering it than I have. There is inherited lunacy in the Cribb family.”

  “I didn’t know that, Mr Deene. But I do not think it very significant, since the only members of the family with whom we have to deal are certainly sane people.”

  “That is so.”

  “Now I must go out and find this unfortunate woman’s corpse. Still recognizable, I suppose?”

  “Just,” said Carolus and left.

  He managed to eat a quick lunch which Mrs Stick had ready for him, but he was restless and did not mean to remain more than a few minutes in the stuffy, crowded atmosphere of Wee Hoosie. Stick, using the carpenter’s tools which he dearly loved, had managed to unscrew the windows and let in a little air, but an age of unventilated living had made the house a tomb. Or so it seemed to Carolus that afternoon.

  He was going out of the door when he saw approaching a fine, masterful woman with unnaturally auburn hair and a determined chin.

  “Mr Deene? My name is Ethel Pink.”

  “But…”

  “There is nothing miraculous in my appearance,” she admitted in a firm voice. “Miss Stayer told me of your telegram. It has crossed me, as it were. I was coming to see Alice in any case. At her urgent request. Fortunately the school holidays made possible my absence from St Mervyn’s.”

  “Come in,” said Carolus. “Miss Stayer sent you to me?”

  “She suggested that you might be able to tell me something about my sister’s sudden disappearance.”

  “Unhappily I can, Miss Pink. Your sister is dead.”

  The Matron of St Mervyn’s looked at Carolus steadily, and it was impossible to guess her emotions.

  “Murdered?” she said at last.

  “Possibly.”

  “It can’t have been suicide.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where was she found?”

  “Half-way down the highest cliffs near here.”

  “Pushed over?”

  “The body hasn’t yet been recovered. The police have that in hand.”

  “Bound to be publicity, I suppose? Name Pink and that?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Bad for the school.”

  Carolus looked rather bitterly at Ethel Pink.

  “You should meet Mr Gorringer,” he said. “You two would get on wonderfully well. Now I should like to ask you a few questions, if I may. Had your sister any tendency to suicide?”

  “None. As a girl she was more frivolous than I, but later learnt a sense of responsibility. I have no doubt she was an excellent secretary.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “A year ago. We spent a week together in London. Three theatres and the Academy.”

  “Did she discuss her employer then?”

  “Frequently. She wished to leave Mrs Bomberger.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  “A mystery. When it came to it she wouldn’t. A complete mystery.”

  “She was well paid?”

  “I believe so. That was not the reason, however. Alice had means of her own,” said Ethel Pink surprisingly.

  “Then why?”

  “I never knew the late Mrs Bomberger, but I gather she had considerable force of character. Alice had none. None.”

  “I see.”

  “All our lives she has had to lean on me. Fortunately my character and constitution have enabled me to supply the necessary drive.”

  Carolus nodded in complete agreement.

  “You think she stayed with Mrs Bomberger because she was too weak to leave her?”

  “Exactly. She was putty, Mr Deene. Putty. Which makes her death the more extraordinary. My sister would not have had the courage for suicide. Quite out of the question.”

  “You may well be right.”

  “She was certainly murdered. No doubt of it. I can supply the explanation.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. She knew too much. That’s what caused her to be liquidated. She knew too much”

  “What evidence have you for that?”

  “Her last letter. Received two days ago. Leaves not a doubt of it.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Of course. I have no secrets. Except one,” she added as a grim afterthought.

  “That?” asked Carolus, fascinated.

  “Ho
w to deal with the staff at St Mervyn’s. Believe me, that’s a secret I’ve had to learn. It’s a case of the survival of the fittest at St Mervyn’s.”

  “It must be a very interesting school.”

  “It is. Here’s the letter. Read it for yourself. You’ll see that it leaves no room for doubt.”

  Carolus read:

  Dear Ethel,

  I am writing this under a great stress and I hope you will appreciate the seriousness of it, as I badly need your advice and if possible your presence here. Do you think you could manage to come as soon as possible? It would be a great relief to me if you could. Of course I realize that your responsibilities and obligations at St Mervyn’s are paramount, but this is a case of life and death.

  You have read in the paper, I expect, of the death of Mrs Bomberger and how her body was found buried in the sand. Unfortunately I know something of the circumstances which I cannot repeat, for reasons which I will explain to you when you come (as I hope you will). The police have questioned me rigorously, and that is a very disagreeable experience. Also a private detective named Carolus Deene. I am sorely tempted to tell him what I know and have done with it, but there are reasons why this would be a foolish step to take.

  I think you will realize the seriousness of my position when I say that it was I who gave Mrs Bomberger her sleeping-pills that night. I really do not know what to do for the best and have recently come near to the sin of self-destruction.

  If we could only have a good talk about it, as we used to talk in our bedroom at Basingstoke (remember?), I should feel better and perhaps you might see a way out of this difficult situation. But you have so often said that St Mervyn’s comes first that I wonder whether you will be able to come in answer to this urgent appeal.

  I will write no more now, only hoping that you will come.

  Your affectionate sister,

  Alice.

  “I don’t quite see how this letter is evidence that your sister knew too much, as you put it. It seems to me to involve only herself.”

  Ethel Pink looked at Carolus in a manner usually reserved for members of the staff at St Mervyn’s who had encroached on her province.

  “You don’t? My dear man, it’s obvious. ‘I know something of the circumstances which I cannot repeat’, she says.”