Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “And Mrs. Norris is a wicked old woman, I suppose?” continued Gillian. The young man agreed that Mrs. Norris must be very wicked, and added that, in his opinion, she was ungrateful, too. His uncle had treated her too well, he said, for her to turn round on him in the end and poison him for the few pounds she would get when the old man died.

  “What it wants,” the young man added, stuffing tobacco into his pipe and getting up, “is for someone who knows a bit about psychology and such things to go along and see into the thing a bit. I’d willingly give up my holiday if I thought I could do any good. As for the police, they’re worse than useless. They couldn’t see a needle in a seam, let alone find one in a haystack. And the whole thing does approximate to a haystack, you must admit.”

  “I know someone,” Gillian began…“I suppose you are the Joshua Devizes of the story?” she broke off.

  “As a matter of fact, no,” the young man confessed. “Joshua is my cousin. But I ought perhaps to explain that I’ve altered the names a bit. Wouldn’t do, in case you knew any of the people, to tell you exactly who was who.”

  Gillian said immediately:

  “Then you are the cousin, Mr. Geoffrey, but I suppose that isn’t your name?”

  He replied that it was, and then added, with a sudden explosion of candour:

  “The house is in Yorkshire—well on the Lincolnshire border. I’ve had the story from Joshua, who was, to some extent, in the thick of it, as you gather. I ran along down there at once, as soon as he told me what had been happening, but the old man refused to see me. Sent down a message by the housekeeper to say he wouldn’t have me in the house. Her name is not Norris, but my uncle’s name really is Lancaster. Anyway, it’s a queer tale. You won’t hear a queerer one. I wish I knew whom to turn to. It wants a psychologist, who is also a private investigator, on the job. I wish I knew someone I could ask. Money would be no object. And the house is only a few miles from the mainline station at Bournley-in-the-Marshes.”

  “Really?” said Gillian, who did not know either Lincolnshire or Yorkshire particularly well, but whose head was full of Mrs. Bradley, to whom she was longing to confide the young man’s tale.

  “I’m not going any farther,” the young man said. “Shall we walk back to Humshaugh together? Or I could say good-bye here, if you like. I hope my uncle’s death won’t be in the morning papers,” he added dejectedly.

  Gillian concurred in this hope, and added that she had to get back to her car, which was not at Humshaugh. She realised, with shock and a feeling of extreme guilt, that she had forgotten Gerald, not only during the telling of the story, but actually after its conclusion. She glanced at her watch.

  “Heavens! I shall never be back to lunch, and I’m awfully hungry,” she said.

  “I say,” the young man observed. “I’m afraid it’s all my fault. That’s the worst of taking for granted that everybody else is bound to be interested in the things that interest oneself. Do you find that, too? Perhaps you are not an egoist?”

  This time-honoured beginning to a conversation between two of the serious-minded young had good results. By the time they reached Gillian’s car, and she had offered the young man a lift—he, too, was bound for Newcastle—Gillian not only felt that they had known one another for a very long time, but had arranged to meet the young man on the following morning for a walk along the Wall from Humshaugh.

  She spent the whole afternoon, which was wet, in writing to Mrs. Bradley. The account she gave of the meeting on the moor and in the guardroom of the keep was a natural and pleasant one, but Gillian’s stilted paraphrase of the young man’s story almost brought tears to Mrs. Bradley’s eyes.

  “Dear Aunt Adela,” Gillian had begun, “I thought you might like to know that I arrived safely and that I like the hotel. I shall probably be here a week, and then I am going on to Carrick and Galloway. Yesterday, on the moors, I met a man who is, like me, lonely and disillusioned. He is twenty-four and we had a long talk, because it rained just as we got to a castle the name of which I don’t know. We talked about all sorts of things coming home, and I am going out with him for a walk along the Roman Wall (weather permitting) tomorrow. There is a dance at his hotel on Thursday. I don’t know whether he likes dancing, as he seems rather serious, and is, anyway, in very great trouble. At least, his relations are. It comes to much the same thing. At any rate, I suppose one ought to think so, and he, apparently, does.

  “But what I really want to ask you, Aunt Adela, is whether you would be prepared to undertake a private investigation. He says it must be a psychologist. I suppose that’s because the whole affair seems such a tangled skein. Well, I’ll tell you the story, as nearly as possible in the way he told it to me, except that I had better tell it in the Third Person—oh, is that blasphemous with capital letters?—in case you get muddled. It all seems terrible. I do hope you can do something to help the poor boy. He seems very depressed, and no wonder. Well, here is the story he told me. I had better tell it more like a story in a book. You will get the idea better.”

  At this point the style of the letter changed.

  “It was New Year’s Day, at half-past two in the morning. The moon shone on snow, and the three pine trees at the end of the garden sparkled with the glitter of a fairy pantomime,” Gillian after some scratchings-out, had committed poetically to paper. Mrs. Bradley, seated in a deck-chair in her garden at Wandles Parva, grinned and read on.

  “In the most luxurious, although not the largest, bedroom in the house, old Mr. Lancaster grunted as he got into bed. His butler and factotum, who valeted him, waited at the bedside until his employer lay still, then he switched off the light near the door—the old gentleman, for reasons known to himself, detested ‘cords dangling over the bedhead’ as he described them—said good night quietly and, as quietly, closed the door. His own room was one floor higher than Mr. Lancaster’s, and as he had already locked up the house, he mounted to the next landing and went to bed.

  “The housekeeper, Mrs. Norris, a woman of sixty-four, had a room on the same floor as that on which her employer slept. That evening, in company with old Mr. Lancaster, his niece, Miss Phyllis, his nephew, Mr. Joshua, and some half a dozen guests, she had seen the New Year in, and had sung Auld Lang Syne. Now, having seen her employer go up with the butler, a man who had been in Mr. Lancaster’s service almost as many years as she herself had, she began to think kindly of her own bed and of what a comfort it would be to get her stays off and her head on the pillow.

  “The household did not keep late hours as a rule, and Mrs. Norris was not used to them. She went to the front door to make certain that it was bolted, went into the drawing-room and put a small fire-guard in front of a still considerable fire, did the same thing in the lounge, picked up a cigarette-end from the polished floor, and mopped up with her handkerchief a tiny pool of spilt whiskey which she noticed on a small table, and ‘rubbed up’ the dull mark it left with the edge of her black silk apron. This was a garment she always insisted upon wearing whenever she was being treated ‘like one of the family.’ It was due to her own self-respect, she thought, as well as to her employer, to make this slight gesture recognising the fact that, however kindly she was treated, she was still, as she said, ‘in service.’ There were rumours that at one time she had tried to hook the old gentleman, but that he had either dodged her or wriggled free.

  “Mr. Joshua and Miss Phyllis, the niece and nephew, had gone to bed at twelve-fifty and one-twenty respectively—as soon, in fact, as the last guest had crawled down the drive in the last car. Phyllis and Joshua had quarrelled during the evening, as everyone except the old gentleman seemed to know, but skilled as she was, by long experience, in the reading of signs and portents, which affected the family peace, Mrs. Norris had not yet discovered the cause of the quarrel.

  “The house was not a particularly large one. It occupied the site of a pre-Elizabethan mansion, but the rooms and even the exterior had been so very much altered that it was difficult to say ho
w much of the original fabric remained. To the eye, there appeared, from the semi-circular gravel drive, a four-story building (counting the attics as a story) with an ornate but not unattractive porch, in the late Elizabethan style, Georgian windows, one Jacobean chimney (the others were of a later date) and an exceptionally ugly length of Victorian building which had been added in 1860 to give a schoolroom and a servants’ hall. Almost adjoining this extra building, and at right angles to it, were the stables, with their clock and water-butt. Nearer the lodge gates there was a tumbling stream, which rushed through the garden into a big lake behind the house.

  “The drive in front of the house separated the building from the semi-circular lawn, and there were two sets of gates, only one of which was in ordinary use. Besides this set of gates (on the right as one faced the house) was the small lodge, but no one lived there. It had fallen out of use in 1909, after three of the lodge-keeper’s four children had died of scarlet fever. The surviving child was now the old gentleman’s groom, and had a room in the servants’ wing.

  “Mrs. Norris had been promoted from the servants’ wing to a bedroom on the first floor some twenty years before the dawn of this particular New Year’s Day. She had, even then, been in her employer’s service for twenty-four years, and had, at one time, been nursemaid to the children, all of whom were now either dead or disinherited.

  “Mrs. Norris, however, was not thinking of dead children, whether killed in the fire at the house, which had broken out one winter night and had been the direct cause for the erection of an iron fire-escape from one of the attics, or dead of scarlet fever in the lodge. She was merely an elderly woman, tired and short of breath, climbing the back staircase to her bedroom after an evening, which had been (even without the distressing evidences of another family quarrel) rather too much for her.

  “She had a good room, and it was only her sense of what was fitting which caused her to approach it by way of the back staircase when the front would have been far more convenient. However—as she had a fondness for explaining—she knew her place, none better, and that place was on the back staircase unless she was supervising maids at work on the front one.

  “She was a sensible if slightly slow-witted person, and was accustomed, she declared, to believe the evidence of her own eyes. She had to go through a swing door to reach the landing from the back staircase; then she had to walk a short way along a corridor, to reach her own door-handle. She reached it, turned it, and was putting her hand round to switch on the electric light, when she perceived, standing perfectly still in the moonlight, a shadowy man.

  “In spite of some evidence to the contrary, it is not really instinctive in women to scream in the face of the unusual. Mrs. Norris’s first thought was ‘Burglars!’ Her second was that Mr. Joshua had come to confide in her. She knew of his quarrel with Miss Phyllis; as a little boy he had been rather a weakling—a cry-baby had been his Amazonian cousin’s explicit and unkind description—and it was not a new idea to Mrs. Norris that he should bring her his troubles.

  “Having given a low croak of dismay upon seeing that a man was in her room, therefore, the housekeeper said, in expostulatory tones:

  “ ‘This time of night, Mr. Joshua? Won’t it wait till the morning?’

  “There was no reply from the intruder, and still he made no movement.

  “ ‘Master Joshua!’ said the housekeeper, reverting to the title he had borne before he reached the age of eighteen.

  “The only reaction the man by the window made to the double appeal was to vanish, entirely, completely and soundlessly, leaving the now stupefied old woman staring at the moonlit pane against which, a moment previously, his dark silhouette had been thrown.

  “The man, as she described him later, had been standing with his left side towards the window, so that she got him in profile. Now, it is an odd but incontrovertible fact that it is the most difficult matter in the world to deduce the full-face appearance of a person merely from having caught a glimpse of his or her profile. The full face, which, mercifully for most of us, camouflages the shape of nose and chin, is far less uncompromising, and, too often, repulsive, in nearly everybody, than the stark, unrelieved and, too often, hideous betrayal of selfishness, weakness and general beastliness of which the gaunt outline of the profile is capable.

  “In short, even if the man was, in actual fact, a person known to the housekeeper, it is not altogether surprising that she failed to identify him, except by the law of probability, as her employer’s nephew. To add to the general uneasiness, which the whole affair had caused her was the bewildering vanishing trick brought off by the voiceless visitant. This had been uncanny and disagreeable in the extreme. There was nowhere—no dressing-room, bathroom, or even large cupboard—into which the intruder could have withdrawn, and yet, in an instant, he was gone.

  “Mrs. Norris stood still for another whole minute; then, very shakily, she began to unbutton her bodice. She was accustomed to kneel and pray before she got into her bed, but, making a lame, incoherent, unspoken excuse to God, she scrambled between the bedcoverings, dragged the sheet and the blankets round her ears, and then spent, in listening and waiting, as terror-stricken an hour as she had passed since early childhood.

  “Next morning the household, so far as it would have appeared to an unprejudiced and non-suggestible observer, conducted itself as usual.

  “Mrs. Norris was the first, apart from the servants, to come into the breakfast-room. Here, as was her invariable custom, she made coffee for the old gentleman in a special percolator.

  “At half-past eight Mr. Joshua, who proposed to spend a morning in overhauling his uncle’s collection of stamps, joined Mrs. Norris in the breakfast-room and observed that she looked pale.

  “ ‘Morning after the night before, Betsy?’ was his query. Mrs. Norris assented to what she privately considered an outrageous suggestion, although, had Mr. Geoffrey (another nephew but one who had not been invited to take part in the New Year festivities) made the same point, Mrs. Norris’s response would have been more cordial and her reaction the satisfactory one of threatening to box his ears.

  (He says, Gillian had interpolated at this point, that the housekeeper had always liked him ever so much better than Joshua.)

  “Nothing more was heard of the Disappearing Man, and things continued as usual for several months. In the summer (that means this summer, Gillian had interpolated) Mr. Joshua came down from London again, and, on the second morning of his stay, Miss Phyllis had breakfast with her uncle, and, a very special mark of the old gentleman’s favour, received two cups of the special coffee made for him by Mrs. Norris. Mr. Joshua had already breakfasted, and was walking round the estate.

  “ ‘Mr. Joshua was talking about the stamps,’ said the housekeeper, in reply to a bark from her employer.

  “ ‘Stamps? Oh, yes, stamps,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I said he could go through them if he liked.’

  “ ‘You’re not going to let Joshua look through your stamp collection, Uncle?’ said Phyllis.

  “ ‘Why not?’

  “ ‘Well, I wouldn’t trust him, especially this morning. I think he’s probably feeling rather bad-tempered.’

  “ ‘Now what do you mean by that?’

  “ ‘Nothing.’

  “ ‘Have you and Joshua quarrelled?’

  “ ‘No, of course not, Uncle. That is to say—’

  “ ‘You’ve not broken off your engagement? Where’s your ring?’

  “He picked up her left hand, sorted out the ring finger, and held it up in front of her somewhat in the manner that the owner of a puppy might adopt to impress some small misdemeanour upon the animal’s mind. Phyllis flushed, but said nothing, except that she did not want to talk about it.

  “ ‘Mulish, eh?’ said her uncle, dropping the hand, his table napkin, and any semblance of interest, all in the same instant. ‘Well, I must go. I’m late.’

  “He still liked to think that he conducted
his business personally. He had never liked motorcars, and used to drive himself to the station, four miles off, in a trap, each morning. The groom who accompanied him brought the trap back, and returned to the station with it in the evening so that his employer could drive himself home. The town in which the old gentleman’s business flourished was about twenty-five miles off.

  “This routine was scarcely ever broken from one year’s end to the next, but after the beginning of Mr. Joshua’s summer visit something occurred each morning to upset it, with the consequence that it was not until some days after the end of that first week that the old gentleman went into the town again at all.

  “The contretemps which started the run of ill-luck was extremely trivial. The old gentleman had a favourite whip—not that he ever used it on the mare—and, on the morning under discussion, when he left a rather pink-faced Miss Phyllis still seated at the table in the breakfast-room, this whip was not to be found.

  “Old Mr. Lancaster cursed the groom, and even went so far, in his exasperation, as to give the man a kick on the behind. It was not a vicious kick nor a heavy one, and, physically, there can be very little doubt that it must have upset the old gentleman, who had some difficulty in regaining his balance, considerably more than it did the recipient, for he clutched at the toe of his boot, after he had staggered backwards and clutched the back of an armchair, and demanded irascibly whether the groom’s one-syllable posterior was made of iron. The groom muttered darkly, and his face (according to the somewhat hysterical evidence given, later on, by the housemaid, who, for reasons best known to herself, was in the yard at the time) was ‘livid with dreadful fury.’

  “He then called his master (according to the same witness, who insisted upon indicating the adjective and substantive by their initial letters only) a b. old f., and told him he had probably swallowed the b. whip and that he wished it had b. well choked him.

  “This speech seems to have calmed Mr. Lancaster, for he gave the man a florin and said that he had, anyway, missed the train, and should not trouble to go into the town that day.