“I should think they were in the woodshed. I can’t think where else they could have been.”
“There’s the pigpens.”
“He said he went to one of those when he left Linda.”
“Oh, ah! Well, I’ll back the best I can do is to go back to Roman Enden and talk to the chap again. A rare old dance, this case.”
“And the death of Mr. Fossder is part of it,” Mrs. Bradley added, looking at the inspector to see how he proposed to take this view. He accepted it with a nod.
“Oh, ah! I shouldn’t wonder. Though I can’t see my way through the wood. And then there’s this letter I had from Mester Tombley. It makes me thenk ee ought to let him go, safe or not, like. Something of Habeas Corpus, somehow, about the theng, somewhere, mam, if ee’ll excuse me.”
The letter was an impassioned plea for liberty.
“Let us go to Little House and talk to him again,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Perhaps he’ll tell us where he spent Boxing Night. I confess I should like to know. It was almost certainly not at Roman Ending.”
“We could talk to Linda Detch some time,” amended the inspector. “Better talk to her first. Can you persuade her, mam, do ee thenk?”
“I may be able to frighten her,” said Mrs. Bradley slowly, “but I don’t think it will be necessary. I fancy that she may have thought things over. I can always report my conversation with Priest if she proves recalcitrant.”
“Oh, ah,” agreed the inspector. He took up his cap. “Well, I’m off. Shall I meet ee outside Little House, or where, mam?”
“Let’s go together. Both Linda and Tombley know that we hunt in couples.”
Tombley was indignant when he saw them. “I can’t think why you don’t have me arrested at once! This beastly place! These ghastly meals! The rules! The hours! The beds! My God! It’s enough to turn anyone into a lunatic, that’s what I say!”
“And rightly, child, I feel sure,” said Mrs. Bradley soothingly. Tombley snorted.
“And sending Linda Ditch along to spy on me! What do you mean? She won’t find out anything here! You needn’t worry! I’m not left alone five minutes! There’s even a mealy-mouthed fool of a barber told off to shave me each morning! With a safety razor! You’ve got to let me out! I’m not staying here any longer! I’ll write to my lawyer!”
“Pratt?” asked the inspector suddenly. Tombley glared and gritted his teeth.
“Yes, Pratt! Or are you going to have him arrested, too?”
“Some time, perhaps, some time,” said the inspector soothingly. “This es a very nice place, you know, sir. You might do worse than stop here for another few days.” He looked round the Visitors’ Room approvingly. “A very nice place indeed. I don’t see what ee’ve got to grumble at, blowed ef I do! Stell, if ee want to go back to Roman Enden, no objection on Mrs. Bradley’s part, she tells me, so long as you behave yourself, and none at all on mine.” He winked at Mrs. Bradley.
“It’ll be your own fault if any harm comes to you, child,” said Mrs. Bradley sadly. She eyed him with pensive benevolence. “I thought perhaps you’d stay here just a little longer, whilst I completed my investigations, and the inspector concluded his case. But I understand your impatience. The worst of it is, I still can’t persuade the inspector that you are not guilty. I shall have to ask Fay for that alibi.”
Tombley leapt up. The inspector leaned forward, and, with a huge hand like a forehock, pushed him back into the armchair from which he had risen.
“Now, then; now, then,” he said gently. Tombley glared at Mrs. Bradley, who was toying with the clasp of her handbag.
“Don’t you talk about Fay! Don’t you dare to ask her anything!” he muttered. “I don’t see why you want to bring her into it! It’s nothing to do with her!”
“Where were you both on Christmas Eve, and again on Boxing Night? Were you together?” asked Mrs. Bradley gently.
“No, of course not! Why should we be? You can’t prove anything!” said Tombley with agitation. “I’ve told you already what I did on Christmas Eve! I was the ghost, I tell you. I frightened old Fossder to death. You’d better jug me for it! Oh, it was murder, right enough. No, it wasn’t! You couldn’t call it murder!”
“Be quiet, child! Your noise confuses me,” said Mrs. Bradley placidly. “If you were the ghost, why was Mrs. Ditch agitated? If you were the ghost, why did you send a message to Mr. Fossder to say you couldn’t keep the appointment with him? If you were the ghost, why did somebody damage my car? If you were the ghost, why were you so anxious to find out whether your uncle was at Old Farm that night?”
She stopped, and beamed at him. Tombley, breathing almost as stertorously as a man in apoplexy, stared at her, his small eyes round marbles of horrified amazement. He began to gurgle desperately, and made feeble passes with his hands.
“And now,” she said, leaning forward and speaking briskly, “I want to spend a day at Bampton when the weather gets a bit better. Tell me all about it—where to go, what to do, how to see the church, which public house to patronise, the nicest walks, the most admirable views, the address of the oldest inhabitant—will you?”
“Bampton?” said Tombley. He licked his lower lip, trying to recover his poise. “But—are you serious?”
“Of course, child. I must certainly visit Bampton, and I thought that, as an inhabitant of the place—”
Tombley stared at her.
“Is this a catch? You’re trying to trip me up again,” he said. Mrs. Bradley remained silent, watching him. “You know I was never in Bampton in my life!” he burst out at last. “I was born and brought up in Cowley. As you seem to know so much, I wonder you didn’t know that! It was Uncle Simith who lived at Bampton, not me!”
“Cowley?” said Mrs. Bradley. She nodded, as though well satisfied. “Very well, child. I believe you.”
“You can prove it, you know,” said Tombley, a glint of irritation returning to his eyes. “Old Fossder came from Bampton, too,” he added. “And that’s where Jenny was born. You, who think you know so much, had better find out who Jenny’s father was!”
Mrs. Bradley rose.
“I’ll see the matron and get you your order of release, Geraint, if you really want it,” she said. Tombley blinked at her use of his Christian name. “But I warn you, you’d better stay here,” Mrs. Bradley continued, eyeing him with the maternal anxiety of a boa-constrictor which watches its young attempting to devour their first donkey.
“I believe you mean well,” said Tombley. She waited. He swallowed. Suddenly there came a tap at the door.
“Damn!” said the inspector under his breath. The interruption, he was certain, had nipped a confession in the bud; not necessarily a confession of murder, he thought, but certainly a confession of something. He growled, and stood up awkwardly as the matron came in with a doctor.
“What do ee thenk he was goen to say, mam?” enquired the inspector presently, when they were driving back through Headington. Mrs. Bradley cackled.
“You know,” she said, “I’m rather fond of that child. I shall always remember his chivalrous defence of himself with the pig-bucket when his late uncle was attacking him that afternoon.”
“What afternoon would that have been, mam? Just lately?”
“I suppose it would have been a couple of days before Christmas,” Mrs. Bradley replied. The inspector looked thoughtful.
“Old Mr. Semeth attacked him, did he? Meanen that ef Tombley had made up his mind to the job of murderen him, it would have come en handy to have pleaded self-defence? Is that what you’re getten at, mam? There was plenty of evidence at the inquest about how they used to fight.”
Mrs. Bradley shrugged.
“My chauffeur and I would have made two respectable and creditable witnesses,” she observed. The inspector continued to look thoughtful.
“We ought to check up the young lady, mam, Miss Fay, chance what Mr. Tombley says. I do thenk that.”
“Yes, so do I. If we turned off here, through Cowley, I fancy we should arrive
at the house before Geraint can get a conveyance. I expect he’ll make straight for Iffley to see the girl.”
Fay was in. Confronted with the suggestion that she could give Tombley an alibi for the nights of Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, she nodded. She was a slight, pale, fair-haired creature, anaemically pretty and with a trick of clasping her hands and holding her head on one side. She obliged them with a repetition of it, but the inspector remained respectful, stolid, and businesslike and Mrs. Bradley, fixing the most piercing glance upon the trickster, continued briskly, “Then do so, child, so that the inspector can take something down for you to sign.”
“But I’m not going to sign it! I never sign anything!” bleated Fay. “And Geraint will be so angry! And Maurice, my fiancé, won’t speak to me again.”
“Very well, miss,” said the inspector, replacing his notebook. “I know what to do about you, then.”
“You’re not going to arrest me!” cried Fay. “I—he did—we did! But please don’t tell Maurice, or my aunt! I’ll sign it if you like, but it won’t come up in evidence or anything, will it? Perhaps I ought to tell you that Jenny was to switch my light on, to look as though I was still at Iffley that night!”
“I can’t promise that,” said the inspector. “Where did you spend the nights in question, miss?”
“At Old Farm in Stanton St. John.”
“Ah,” said the inspector. Mrs. Bradley nodded. Neither showed the slightest sign of surprise at the meeting place chosen by the lovers.
“Have you broken your engagement, child?” Mrs. Bradley asked. Fay’s blue eyes opened wide.
“How did you know I was going to?”
“There are signs and portents everywhere,” said Mrs. Bradley, in deep tones of extraordinary relish, “and one of them foretold a broken engagement!” Her voice altered. “Don’t break it yet! You might be very sorry later on.”
Fay’s little nose looked pinched, and the staring pillarbox red of the rouge on her lips was as incongruous and artificial as the paint on a clown.
“What do you mean? What do you mean! Geraint—you can’t prove he killed his uncle! And I know he wasn’t the ghost that killed Uncle Fossder! You don’t know! You can’t prove anything!”
“Can’t I?” asked Mrs. Bradley, gently. “Listen, child. It is better to tell me the truth. Did Geraint Tombley leave you on Christmas Eve?”
“No.”
“Did he leave you on Boxing Night?” She watched the agonised working of the characterless, thin little face.
“Yes,” said Fay, very low, after searching Mrs. Bradley’s eyes with her own.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. Her black eyes bored a little deeper. “When was that?”
Fay drew a breath and let it out again in the ghost of a sigh.
“When the pigs made such a noise. But he came back later.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded.
“Now I know you’re telling the truth,” she said. “How long was he away?”
“I don’t know,” said Fay. She blushed and suddenly giggled. “I went to sleep. I was tired. It was one o’clock in the morning, just about, and I hadn’t been asleep up to then. He was there when I woke up, but that was not until five o’clock by my watch.”
“He didn’t wake you?”
“Not until five. Then he woke me and said we’d better sneak down to the kitchen, and Mrs. Ditch would give us a bit of breakfast, and then we’d better be off. So we lay there for half an hour, and then we got up.” She paused, and then said firmly, “That’s all I know, and if Geraint gets into any sort of trouble because of me, I think I shall kill myself. When are you going to let him out of that beastly asylum? He isn’t ill!”
“No. But he might be dangerous,” Mrs. Bradley responded. Fay looked incredulous.
“You don’t know Geraint. He looks awful—just like Henry VIII—but he wouldn’t hurt a fly, and, somehow, I think you know it.”
Mrs. Bradley tapped the white face with a thin yellow finger—a kindly touch and a reassuring one. “Bless you, my child,” she said and suddenly cackled.
“Now Mrs. Ditch,” said Mrs. Bradley briskly, “cast your mind back (a) to Christmas Eve and (b) to Boxing Night.”
“A pleasure, mam,” said Mrs. Ditch with dignity. Mrs. Bradley chuckled.
“You and your Linda!” she exclaimed. Mrs. Ditch looked down an aggressive nose.
“Somebody ’ad to be helpen on the course of true love,” she observed.
“Yes, well, that’s what I’m trying to do myself, Mrs. Ditch,” said Mrs. Bradley complacently. “That is, if either of us knows, or remembers, what true love is,” she added, her black eyes narrowing in laughter. Mrs. Ditch responded with a deep hoarse crow of amusement, and wagged her head admonishingly.
“To thenk on et!” she said. “Well, mam, do ee take a seat”—she dusted one of the Windsor chairs by the fire—“and I’ll tell ee all I can, ay, so I well, I prarmise ee. Our Walt, do ee get outside, and do ee be feeden they pegs. Them’s squealen.” She waited until Young Walt had shut the door behind his long thin form, and had gone whistling across the yard, before she resumed her remarks. Then she settled herself on the opposite side of the hearth, rested a surprisingly well shod foot on the iron fender, pushed a bag of bullseyes towards her visitor, and observed, without noticeable regret, “Our Lender, she’m a betch.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded.
“A not uncommon occurrence, when one girl has to hold her own in a large family otherwise composed of boys,” she pointed out.
“Ah, I knows all that there argyment,” said Mrs. Ditch, uncontroversially. “But when all’s ben said, mam, she do be’ave somethen terrible. Old Semeth, he were the last she flarted about at. That Tombley, well, I don’t know. Somehow I don’t believe it, say Our Bob what he may. That Tombley’s too tooken up with his own young lady, and purty and sweet she is.”
“I’d sooner have Linda any day,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking a bullseye and sucking it. (“Tes low, I submet, but I orfen envies the gippo women with their pipes,” observed Mrs. Ditch in parenthesis.) Mrs. Bradley, incapacitated for speech at the moment, nodded, and readjusted the bullseye, which was a large one. Then she said, “So you had the two of them here? Does my nephew know?”
“That lamb?” said Mrs. Ditch, with an indulgent smile. “Bless ee, Mr. Carey wouldn’t mind. But I never thought to worry him, that were all. What eye don’t see, belly don’t yearn after,” she added, with a sly and malicious chuckle. “But, ah, they come here sex or seven times altogether. I gev that there Tombley my advice, and the young lady, too an’ all, not wishen harm to come of et, but, bless you, mam, no harm never come of true love, as ever I knows on, so I makes ’em up a bed in the room next yourn, and calls ’em en the mornen, time for ’em both to get back to where they belong, and nothen else to et at all!”
She sat back, sucking a bullseye, and regarded with the blinded eye of charity the Rabelaisian order of her world. Mrs. Bradley sat on, and waited patiently. The kitchen was cosy and bright. A warming pan winked and shone; the fender gleamed in the firelight; the piece rug was freshly shaken up and looked gay; the glass of a picture portraying the Infant Samuel reflected a deep red comfortable glow from the grate.
“Christmas Eve I was all en a fever,” Mrs. Ditch continued, “what with our Lender comen away from Semeth’s the way she ded, and the motorcar all goen wrong at the very last menute, and me afraid for my life—not knowen ee then so well as I do at the present—as ee’d ferret out Tombley’s doens and make a virago, and our dad as innocent as the day he was shortened, and knowen nothen at all, and me not liken to tell him, and certainly not wanten him to be finden all out on his own—and old Semeth roamen goodness alone knows where, and fetchen up and asken after his nevvy, maybe! See how I was fexed, I reckon, and why I was all of a flether!”
Mrs. Bradley nodded, and crunched the remainder of the bullseye.
“Help yourself. Wholesome on the stomach, pepperment is,” said Mrs. Ditch, pushi
ng the bag towards her. Mrs. Bradley took another bullseye. “Course, Chrestmas Eve, there wasn’t no trouble en the end, but get Mr. Hugh off never I thought us should, and perhaps the Old Neck to pay at t’other end! I was en a fever, thinken he might be enquiren after Miss Fay, and her bedded here a’ready with Mr. Tombley! But all went well, it seems, and nothen to say how Fossder came by his death. But Boxen Night! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What weth all the upset about our Lender—thank goodness, I do, she’m married and out of my hands!—trapesen and trollopsen over the country to sleep in them there pegpens and woodsheds and the dear knows what an’ all—and then they pegs, and Mr. Tombley see-en after ’en as well as Mr. Carey, and me with the heart en me mouth for fear they’d meet! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!”
She paused for breath.
“What I really want to know,” said Mrs. Bradley, “is the name of the person, man or woman, who took Hereward to Shotover that night.”
“Ah, I couldn’t tell ee that, I’m sure. I do know as that there Tombley came sneaken down they stairs just after Mr. Carey, because I ’eard him, and I nepped down after Mr. Carey came back, and took the front door off the chain and put back the catch, so as the foolesh feller could get enside the house and up to Mess Fay again.” She took a second bullseye, and the two women sat and stared at the bright red fire. “But when he come back, the dear knows, for I don’t, and so I tell ee.”
“You’re not shielding Tombley, are you?” asked Mrs. Bradley at last.
“I may be shielden him for ought I know,” said Mrs. Ditch with obvious sincerity. “I never heared Tombley come back, as I’m bound to tell ee, but then, I mightn’t, you know, ef he laid low a bet before comen. Went orf to sleep I ded, not thenken nothen. He swere he’d take all the blame ef et ever come out he’d slept en this ’ouse weth Mess Fay. Thought nothen tell I heard old Semeth had ben murdered. Terrible news, that were, as you may guess, and Tombley weth nothen to say for ’isself, nor nothen.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded, and Mrs. Ditch sighed.
“Terrible,” she repeated, shaking her head. “Wecked he were, I’ll back, but dreadful to thenk of him passen out like that there, so sudden and all, en his sens. Like a judgment on him, it were.” She sighed again and reached for another bullseye.
Dead Men's Morris (Mrs. Bradley) Page 18