Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  • CHAPTER 2 •

  “ ‘What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randall, my son?

  What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?’—

  ‘O they swell’d and they died; mother, make my bed soon,

  For I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain would lie down.’ ”

  Curiosity, Mrs. Bradley reflected, as, gazing at herself in the mirror of a first-class compartment, she straightened her veil before getting out at the station, is said to have killed the cat. Nothing but curiosity had brought her on this tedious journey, or had caused her to embark upon an enterprise, which her judgment persuaded her was foolish.

  She had dismissed Gillian’s appeal in a letter, by return of post, which consisted chiefly of soothing words, no promises, and a prescription; all the same, she had sent immediately to the library with some explicit instructions, and had set to work to make a précis of Gillian’s version of Mr. Geoffrey’s long and elaborate story.

  The headings she used might have interested and startled the young man could he have read them. They were as follows:

  (1) Facts from the East Bierley murder of 1910.

  (2) Interpolations from other true stories.

  (3) New material, i.e., facts whose origin I cannot, at present, trace. (It was surprising how many of these there were, when she came to analyse the story.)

  Under the first heading she wrote a concise account of the true story of the death by strychnine poisoning of a certain Yorkshire manufacturer named Mr. Joe Scott, who had purchased a shooting estate, and a residence called Copley House. On February 9th, 1910, (Poison Mysteries Unsolved by C. J. S. Thompson M.B.E. Ph.D., published Hutchinson & Co, 1937.) this gentleman had died suddenly, and in very great agony, on his way to business. An inquest had been ordered, the police had made some enquiries, and one of the most important witnesses at the inquest was the housekeeper who had made the coffee.

  There were a groom, a housemaid, a niece, and a gamekeeper in the East Bierley story. All of these gave evidence at the inquest. The mystery of Mr. Scott’s death was never solved. The verdict was worded: Death by strychnine poisoning. The jury had added that there was not sufficient evidence to show who had administered the dose.

  A good deal of the evidence was contradictory, and some of the witnesses were illiterate. Difficulty was caused by the fact that there seemed to be no motive for the crime, and yet there was nothing to suggest suicide. Mrs. Bradley, in a neat, indecipherable hand, noted these facts and compared them with Gillian’s version of Mr. Geoffrey’s tale.

  “Poor fellow,” she said aloud, ringing the bell. To the smart and very pretty maid who responded, she indicated that the books might be returned. Rather less than twenty-four hours after the pitying ejaculation had come tartly off her tongue, she was stepping from her railway compartment onto the platform of a small country station in one of the marshier portions of England, and was directing a porter to place her luggage on a taxi. After a good deal of work upon maps, she had decided that perhaps the border between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire was not the only part of our island which fitted the story. Rude comment from Scotland Yard did not dispel this theory.

  The round-faced boy declared that there was nowhere to go in a taxi.

  “I want the inn,” said Mrs. Bradley firmly.

  “What, the ‘Rising Sun,’ like?”

  “Is that the only inn?”

  The youth admitted that it was not the only inn, but added that it was the only inn at which a lady could stay if she were going to stay at all.

  “How far is the ‘Rising Sun’ from here?” Mrs. Bradley then demanded.

  The youth first shaded his eyes to watch the departing train.

  “Eh?” he said, swivelling round again, as though he had lost the thread of the conversation. He then informed her that it was “over the way,” and that he was prepared to take her baggage across to it himself, so long as the man in the signal-box did not want him to take over the signals while he had his bit of dinner.

  He raised his voice in a kind of yodel. A similar call came floating down from the signal-box.

  Mrs. Bradley, unversed in the local dialect, could interpret neither the question nor the reply, but apparently the latter was satisfactory, for the porter picked up the suitcases and made for the small dim booking-hall. The road outside the station was little more than a lane. Half a mile away was the village, straggling between two streams. Set back from the road on the opposite side, and about sixty yards from the station, was a respectable public house. The porter set the bags down in the side entrance to the garden, wiped his palms down his trousers, and suggested that perhaps Mrs. Bradley had a railway ticket. He said this diffidently, as though he half suspected—and was prepared to accept the fact—that she had travelled as a stowaway on the train. Mrs. Bradley produced a ticket and a tip, and the youth, with a grin and a country courtesy, shambled across the road in a long slant, and was gone perhaps seven or eight minutes.

  He returned, observed:

  “Her never answer, but her’ll have thee, that I do know,” and then picked up the bags again, and set them down outside the door of the inn.

  Mrs. Bradley had not followed him, but now she advanced, pushed open the garden gate, walked up to the door, and knocked. A head popped out of a window. The youth, with a grin, disappeared.

  “Not till Hours, I tell thee! No good thee worritin’ theer!” said a plaintive voice with mild but motherly firmness.

  The window, which had been flung up, closed down again. The house resumed its tranquillity. Mrs. Bradley, who had not lost hers, went over and rapped, with some sharpness, upon the glass. The window was flung up. The same head, that of a middle-aged woman, shot out again, but, confronted, this time, by Mrs. Bradley’s yellow face and sharp black eyes, it enquired, in a civil tone:

  “I’m sorry I can’t serve thee, but that want ten minutes, and they do get so airy impatient.”

  Anxious as she was to know the exact local meaning attached to the adverb “airy,” Mrs. Bradley adhered to the point at issue, and observed:

  “I am sorry to have disturbed you, too, but can you let me have a room here? I do not require, at the moment, to be served with anything to drink.”

  “Room? Hast thee luggage, my dear?”

  Mrs. Bradley meekly displayed her suitcases.

  “And brass?”

  Mrs. Bradley, noting the Yorkshire substantive although she was not in Yorkshire, meekly produced her notecase and a chequebook, displayed a jewelled watch, and indicated a diamond brooch and her rings.

  “Happen thee’s all right,” admitted the woman, nodding, “but, with all this I.R.A., ’tis foolish taking any chances. I’ll come down and let thee come in. That do get real tiring, riding on they old trains.”

  Mrs. Bradley restored her notecase and chequebook to her handbag, and, by the time she had fastened it, the side door was open, and the woman, with a smile, was holding it back against the wall.

  “Happen thee’s had they tucker?” she suggested.

  Mrs. Bradley agreed that she had had some food on the train.

  The inn was old and interesting. Part of it, Mrs. Bradley thought, could not have been built much later than 1340. Exploring it, she demanded a bedroom in this part of the house.

  “Thee might as well sleep in the barn,” protested the hostess, who, by suppertime, had taken a fancy to the guest.

  Crop-haired children and a shy and clumsy boy, the son of the house, stared at her solemnly as she ate, and by lunchtime the next day Mrs. Bradley had made several discreet and tactful enquiries, and was in possession of certain facts which she found interesting. The name of the owner of the second biggest house was Frere. He was, in every village sense of the word, a Dark Gentleman; that is, he was of mixed blood, was credited with Satanic attributes, and was, in most of his utterances, tastes, and dealings, a mystery to his neighbours.

  About five miles across the marshes, in the Big House, lived
old Mr. Lancaster. He had a niece and a nephew, who had stayed at the house at Christmas, and there was another nephew, it was thought. The house was said to be haunted…

  “But, then,” said her chief informant, the landlady’s son, “happen so be every third or fourth big house in these parts. ’Tis in the nature of the place.”

  With this Mrs. Bradley could agree. The country was flat and marshy. Slow rivers, in parts almost silted up, pushed sluggishly between soft banks overgrown in summer with reeds. There were few trees, and the views extended for miles—or, rather, would do so, Mrs. Bradley surmised, when the heavy mist, which lay like a blanket on the land, should lift with the approach of sunny weather, for the sky was overcast with heavy cloud. The prospect was desolate without being dreary, and in walking the long miles over causeways beside the brownish sedge and the crawling water she found a peaceful pleasure. It amused her to think that, in persuading Gillian to take a holiday, she had also secured one for herself.

  Mr. Lancaster’s house, which she went to see on her fourth day, lay back, forty yards or less, from the road, and corresponded, so far as she could tell, to the description Mr. Geoffrey had given of it to Gillian. She soon realised, however, that there had been one detail, at least, in his story, which did not tally with fact. He had mentioned that the drive to the station was uphill. She had the words in Gillian’s letter, which she consulted as she stood before the gates.

  “…for Polly,” the groom was reported to have said, “would kick the trap to bits sooner than look at it, and Rollo had no force in him for the hill…”

  Mrs. Bradley nodded. She could not imagine that Gillian had invented the remark. But, because she was methodical and painstaking, she walked the long miles to the station. The road, assisted by culverts, shorings-up of stones, little bridges, and the ancient foundation of a causeway built up on the marshy soil, went in a series of shallow loops (finding the easiest way across the rivers and avoiding a dangerous bog), to where the little station stood almost opposite the inn of the ‘Rising Sun’ where she was lodging.

  “No hill,” said Mrs. Bradley, shaking her head. The landlady’s son, who overheard her, grinned and asked:

  “What would thee want with hills, like?”

  “Nothing, child. Hills—even one hill—would make the landscape so uninteresting that I should go north tomorrow.”

  “But there’s mountainy hills in the north,” the boy protested. “Thee want to see a long way, on the flat, like, come along here.”

  “Tom,” said Mrs. Bradley, “if you knew that someone was in great danger hereabouts—”

  “Oh,” said the boy, “if thee mean old Mr. Lancaster, make thy mind easy on that. That been giving out these five or six years—ever since he retired from business, like—as somebody was trying to murder him for his brass. Cut all the nieces and nevvies out of his will, so they do say, to give them no cause to poison him. Thee don’t want to take notice of poor old fool like that. Daft, that do be, daft.”

  “Oh?” said Mrs. Bradley, thoughtfully. She gazed upon the boy, and then suddenly: “Tom, do you go to church?”

  “Parson do be temperance,” said Tom. “Preached upon, Mother have been, like.”

  “Unreasonable,” Mrs. Bradley agreed.

  “And us do be foreigners here,” the lad continued. “But if thee want to go, like, there do be a church over by old Mr. Lancaster’s, near by where thee took thyself this morning.”

  Slightly startled to learn that her movements had been such a source of interest that the boy had followed them, Mrs. Bradley said, grinning:

  “Your mother’s cause shall be mine while I stay in her house. But I want to speak to the vicar, so I shall get there after the service.”

  “Name of Dodd. And Mr. Lancaster’s housekeeper’s name be Bertram,” Tom volunteered.

  “Bless you for an intelligent boy,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And now, come and lean on the pump-handle while I wash.”

  The evening meal at the ‘Rising Sun’ was supper, not dinner. Mrs. Bradley ate cold beef, pickles, cheese, a salad, tipsy-cake, and stewed raspberries, and perfected a plan of action for getting into the house of old Mr. Lancaster.

  The simplest method of achieving the main object of her visit was to make friends with the church-going housekeeper, she thought, so on the following Sunday evening she waited until Evensong was concluded and then walked into the church.

  True to the story, an elderly, but not old, woman was restoring hassocks to their little brass hooks. The church was a fine, large, perpendicular building, with a nave almost as high as that of a small cathedral and an immense square tower, probably built by the friars.

  Mrs. Bradley walked up and down the nave admiring the impressive architecture of the building, and then waited beside the font until the woman had finished her task.

  “I believe,” she said, “that I am addressing Mr. Lancaster’s housekeeper?”

  The woman, a short, stout, round-faced person in about the middle sixties, white-haired, black-clad, and not, Mrs. Bradley deduced, deficient in brains, smiled shyly and admitted that she was.

  “And if you’ve come to take Annie’s house,” she added, “I’m sorry to say I let it on Monday afternoon. Come a mort of people after it, once the advertisement was in.”

  Mrs. Bradley said that she supposed so, and that it was not for herself that she wanted a house, but a friend had asked her to take a look at it.

  “Take a look at it you can, with pleasure,” said the housekeeper, “and until Mr. Geoffrey suggested advertising, I thought I should have it on my hands till the day of my death, really and truly I did, and little Malcolm to educate, too. I’m really grateful to Mr. Geoffrey, I can tell you, although them I could mention don’t like him. And he paid for the advertisement, too, like a thorough gentleman.”

  “Very handsome. I almost feel I know Mr. Geoffrey,” said Mrs. Bradley. She added: “A young friend of mine met him on holiday.”

  “Did he so?”

  Mrs. Bradley did not alter the impression that her young friend was a boy, not a girl, and they came out of the church and walked side by side across the churchyard to a curious gate with a stile.

  “Used to be a right of way across here,” explained the housekeeper. “Then Mr. Bracknell, back in 1860, he thought courting couples shouldn’t carry on under God’s windows, so blocked up path, and carried church gate to other corner. Then Mr. Griscott, he thought shame to take any village privilege, and told us all God loved lovers, and had stile put for they young folks to sit on. Not as they ever do.”

  “Why not?” enquired Mrs. Bradley, greatly intrigued by this insight into the psychological reactions of vicars to love and the rights of the people.

  “Too public. High road runs by, you see, since they took off the toll-gate back to Leverbottom.”

  Unable to follow this divergence into local history, Mrs. Bradley reluctantly abandoned the conversational bypath, and asked where the house was situated.

  “I’m taking thee right to where it is,” the housekeeper assured her. “’Tisn’t far, and not too mucky for thy Sunday shoes.”

  The house was really two cottages knocked into one. It was pretty, and Mrs. Bradley expressed regret that she had not been able to get there in time to secure it. They discussed its possibilities, and then the housekeeper suggested that Mrs. Bradley might care to come back to the house for a cup of cocoa and a biscuit before beginning her long walk back to the ‘Rising Sun.’

  On the way—perhaps half a mile—to Mr. Lancaster’s house, Mrs. Bradley touched on the subject of ghosts. To her surprise, the housekeeper immediately repeated the story of her own visitations, much as Gillian had had them from Mr. Geoffrey.

  “But such happenings are supposed to foretell disaster, are they not?” Mrs. Bradley suggested.

  “Disaster enough!” exclaimed the housekeeper. “Why, not so long after, we thought Mr. Lancaster was gone from us for good and all.”

  “I heard he was just
a little…” Mrs. Bradley began.

  “Oh, he isn’t quite right in the head, if that’s what you mean,” said the housekeeper, with startling—in fact, incredible—candour. “But you can’t get past poisoning by strychnine. And in his coffee, too, the poor old gentleman.”

  “But I understand,” Mrs. Bradley said, persevering, “that he was given to making wild statements about his relations, and that for years he had said he expected one of them to murder him.”

  “Not that I know of,” said the housekeeper. “But some people will say anything,”

  She led the way in through a small gate beside the lodge, and, to Mrs. Bradley’s surprise, they went to the housekeeper’s room by way of the great front door. As it opened, carved Tudor banisters met the eye, and the grand staircase, short and broad on its first flight, rose to a coloured window in the landing.

  At what would have been the picture-rail level in a modern house were various small coats of arms with quarterings, and on either side of the entrance hall were dark, wide doors. The housekeeper opened the one to the right and led the way, through what seemed to be the dining room, to the servants’ part of the house.

  Here the rooms were small, ugly, and mid-Victorian in fittings and furniture. The housekeeper’s own room was next to the kitchen. It contained one comfortable chair, three Windsor chairs (one with arms), a footstool, two engravings of Canterbury Cathedral, a lithograph of a stag at bay, and the usual picture of the Infant Samuel in a nightgown. The housekeeper indicated the comfortable chair, and invited Mrs. Bradley to sit down. Then she removed her black hat, gloves, and scarf, and rang a bell. A sharp-eyed girl in a green-striped dress appeared.

  “Where’s your cap, Ethel?” said the housekeeper. “Put on the milk for the cocoa. And mind you don’t water it this time. Is there any milk?”

  “Oh yes, Mrs. Bertram. And I’ve only just got back from Chapel,” said the girl, half cheeky and half on the defensive. The housekeeper went to a small mahogany cabinet, brought out two large, rose-decorated cups, one of them a moustache cup, and placed them on a small black lacquered tray. She then placed granulated sugar and a biscuit tin beside them. The tin had pictures of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee on it, and was the kind which can be used as a tea-caddy when it is not required for biscuits or when its first cargo of biscuits has been eaten.