Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “But he didn’t, Aunt Adela. Not until after the beginning of the performance, and you mean earlier than that, I suppose.”

  “I do mean earlier than that. I mean at about eight o’clock.”

  “We were eating quail at eight o’clock.”

  “A repulsive gesture,” said Mrs. Bradley absently. “Why quail?”

  Gillian might have retorted, upon classic authority, “Why not,” but instead, she said:

  “Why, what’s the hitch at eight o’clock?”

  “At about that time, child, or a little after, Mr. Geoffrey and Mr. Joshua were together in the advance booking office at the music hall, demanding to be allowed to book the seat I had just acquired for myself. The booking office recognised my description of Geoffrey. That’s all.”

  “But it couldn’t have been Geoffrey, Aunt Adela,” said Gillian firmly. “I am ready to declare—upon oath, if necessary,” she added histrionically—“that Geoffrey was with me from the time we left the hotel until just after nine o’clock, inclusive.”

  “He didn’t leave the dining table at all?”

  “No, of course he didn’t.”

  “Perhaps, then, you did, child?”

  “Of course I didn’t. One doesn’t, unless one is going to be sick or something. It’s bad manners to leave the dining table in the middle of a meal. I should have thought you would have known that.”

  “Be quiet, child. This is serious; serious, and extraordinarily interesting. By the way, you say the police have informed you that you will be called upon to identify the body?”

  “Oh, yes. But, Aunt Adela! I can’t! You’ve got to get me out of it. I can’t go near the beastly body! I couldn’t stand it.”

  Mrs. Bradley, looking at her, decided that this was very probably true; and yet the tempting theory of impersonation which, against her better judgment, was rapidly forming in her mind, required unbiased testimony.

  “If they make me, of course,” the girl continued, “I suppose I’ll have to do it. Will they let you come in with me?”

  “Yes, I think so, child.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t mind so much, then. But I’m sure the dead man isn’t Geoffrey, you know, any more than your box-office impersonator. Ask me, there’s more in this than meets the eye.”

  Mrs. Bradley thought so, too.

  The mortuary was, like all mortuaries, cold and unattractive. Gillian shuddered as soon as the door was opened for them, and, without knowing that she was doing so, kept a tight, childish clutch of Mrs. Bradley’s yellow claw.

  The police inspector was, in the Northern manner, kindly. He led the way past a sheeted suicide to the resting-place of the stabbed man, and drew back the covering from the face.

  “Now, lassie,” he said encouragingly. Gillian shut her eyes tight, gave, unconsciously, a very faint moan, opened her eyes, looked, looked again, and then, gazing candidly at the inspector, said, clearing her throat, and avoiding Mrs. Bradley’s compelling and basilisk eye:

  “But this—this isn’t Geoffrey.”

  “You don’t identify the body, then, lassie?”

  “No. I’ve never seen this man before.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “Yes, quite, quite sure. This—this isn’t the gentleman I thought it might be. It’s something like him—in fact, it’s very much like him, but Geoffrey was longer-faced and had more chin, and, anyway, he wasn’t dressed like this. He had a heather-mixture suit on, not dark blue. And—was there anything funny about this man’s hands? Because Geoffrey had lost a finger. Anyway, I’m absolutely positive I don’t know this man at all. I have never seen him before.”

  “But the really odd thing, you know,” she continued to Mrs. Bradley, as they made their way back to the hotel, “is what has happened to Geoffrey. You don’t think he could have killed this man, Aunt Adela?”

  “Are your bags packed, child?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “I’ve only got a suitcase. I can pack it in half a jiff.”

  “As soon as we get in, child, I want you to run up and pack it.”

  “But I don’t want to go home now! I want to know what has happened. Of course I didn’t go and bother round the body last night while the doctors were busy, and then they took it away as soon as the police had done their stuff, and it looked like Geoffrey, and everybody said it was Geoffrey—I was scared and upset, I suppose—I took it for granted, until I thought it over, and realised that the clothes were wrong, you know.”

  “It looked like Geoffrey from the side of the room where you were sitting?”

  “Exactly like him, and I didn’t think at first about the suit. But if it isn’t Geoffrey—and it must be some relation—who is it? And if Geoffrey isn’t killed, where is he? Anyway, it was jolly rude to bung ho like that without a word, and all on the excuse of cigarettes, especially as I had some in my bag, which he’s always accepted before.”

  “ ‘Now, husband, thou hast nicked the matter,’ ” quoted Mrs. Bradley solemnly. “ ‘To have him impeach’d and hang’d at the next Sessions is the only thing that will ever make me forgive her.’ What did you mean about the hands?”

  “Only one hand, Aunt Adela. Geoffrey’s lost the index finger on his left hand. A monkey bit it off when he was two.”

  “I don’t see, ma’am,” said the inspector, a little ponderously, “how the young lady came not to recognise last night that it was the wrong lad, all the same.”

  “Oh, but I do, Inspector,” Mrs. Bradley responded. “And I take it that she will no longer be required to attend the inquest?”

  “Well, it doesna appear that she kens any more than the rest of the public, ma’am. All the same, maybe she should have waited a bit before making off the way she has. But doubtless ye were both in a swirl.”

  “Well, she’s better out of it,” Mrs. Bradley said pacifically. “And I don’t see how you could have called her. What about the young man who has disappeared?”

  “Not a bleat about him, ma’am, from anywhere. We were speiring about him, naturally, as you’ll understand, seeing that the dead man was so readily taken for him at first by the young lady, but he seems to have disappeared from the city, and I’ve no authority, I need not remind you, to look for him. We can’t prove that he had anything at all to do with the other lad’s death. They’ve not been seen together, so far as we can hear tell. No. No. But I’ll need to get this poor lad identified before we can proceed, and then, ten to one, it’ll be suicide, the knife in the wound and all, you ken.”

  “Yes. Fingerprints?”

  “Not one. The hilt of the knife—it was a sharp, wee thing, the kind they call in the Highlands a sgian dubh—they’ll wear it in the stocking—had been wiped, I would say, and then had been handled with gloves.”

  “And the dead man was wearing gloves?”

  “Aye. He had one gloved hand—the right hand—and the position of the knife in the wound would accord pretty well with the suicide theory if the man was right-handed, and most people are, thank the Lord. A perfectly new glove it was—we’ve had it identified—bought yesterday here in the city. The description would fit the fellow himself pretty well—”

  “Or the missing Geoffrey Devizes,” interpolated Mrs. Bradley. The inspector glanced at her sharply, then smiled, and observed that she had anticipated his next remark. Mrs. Bradley grinned in response, and said that she could not see why a suicide should trouble whether he left his fingerprints on the knife or not.

  The inspector wagged his head, remarked that all suicides were fey, and, in the Scots manner, embarked upon religious controversy.

  Mrs. Bradley feared that they were in for a theological discussion of some magnitude, but she could not bear to abandon it in its interesting preliminary stages, and so she observed, after that the inspector had laid it down that St. Peter was a right-handed man:

  “You draw that deduction, no doubt, from the incident of the left ear of the High Priest’s servant. I agree. A right-handed man would tend to
cut off the left ear of a person standing opposite to him. But, Inspector, you surely were born on the further side of the Border.”

  “Aye,” the inspector admitted. “I’m from Kelso. There’s a town for you,” he continued enthusiastically, abandoning theology in favour of local patriotism. “Have you seen Kelso?”

  Mrs. Bradley admitted that she had, and they discoursed lyrically and almost in chorus upon the beauties of the town; its bridge over the Tweed; its Abbey ruins; its associations with Sir Walter Scott; the tale of his ancestors who had been buried in the Abbey aisle.

  “It is a small point,” said Mrs. Bradley (for, although a theological discussion, even with a Scotsman, can sometimes be warded off by those with their wits about them, it is a different matter altogether to cut short a man who is praising his native town), “but, I think, and interesting one, which of the great abbeys is referred to in the old ballad of The Queen’s Marie. You remember?:

  “The King is to the abbey gone,

  To pull the Abbey tree,

  To scale the babe frae Mary’s heart;

  But the thing it wadna be.”

  The inspector admitted that he was not conversant with the balled, but suggested that the Abbey, no doubt, would be Melrose.

  “Not Kelso?”

  Not Kelso, the inspector thought; nor Dryburgh. Melrose would be the place. It had been called Holy Melrose from time immemorial.

  Mrs. Bradley then mentioned Glastonbury, and back they soon came to Kelso, and from there parted firm friends.

  The identity of the dead man remained a mystery, and the inquest ended in a verdict of suicide while the balance of his mind was affected. The police, however, continued their search for clues to the reason of the death, and waited for relatives or friends to turn up and give a name to the dead man.

  It was just over a week before anybody came forward, and then it was not a relation or a friend, but a landlady. She had little that was good to relate concerning the young man. He had left, she said, owing her money, and it seemed as though he must have sneaked back under cover of night and rifled the house, particularly his own bedroom. She gave details of pillage and damage. She herself had been “from home that night,” she said.

  “What gave her the idea that the dead man might have been her lodger?” Mrs. Bradley wanted to know.

  “Well, she thought she recognised the police description, which was broadcast, you remember, and then, when, two nights afterwards, her house was turned upside down, she seems to have had some odd notion that the young man was a criminal, and had brought his old associates to the house to help him burgle it. Now, however, she believes they killed him and were helping themselves to what they thought was his property. She has some idea, too, that he’s been a schoolmaster at some time, but since he came to her he seems to have been out of employment. Often he would be away a couple of nights, but she doesna ken where he went.”

  “Where does the woman live?”

  “In Edinburgh.”

  “Will you give me her address?”

  “You’re interested in her, then?”

  “Yes, of course. After all, you must remember, the young man for whom this dead youth was mistaken has not been traced yet.”

  “We’ve no authority to trace him, unless he’s concerned with the death. That much I told you.”

  “Yes, I know. But doesn’t it seem odd to you, Inspector, that a young man dies and another one disappears, and they are sufficiently alike in appearance to be mistaken, from a short distance, for one another?”

  “It’s just coincidence, so far as we know at present,” the inspector soothingly answered. “And you’ll mind that the young lady was suffering from shock, when she wished to impress on us how much alike they were.”

  “I wish I had a description of the man who sat in the next seat but one to her at the music-hall, and first interested her in the matter. He is responsible, and, I should say, deliberately so, for her having made the mistake.”

  “Did she no confide to you the description?”

  “Well, she was, naturally, vague. And it doesn’t do to be vague about such things if the description is going to be helpful.”

  “Dod, no,” said the inspector. “But, ma’am, we are doing all we can. We’ll need to know a deal more before we can make another move.”

  “I entirely agree,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Oh, and the woman doctor who is supposed to have fired that shot across the body—?”

  “That business we have in hand. You’ll need to hear more of that later. There is an explanation due to you there, I agree—or to Doctor Abrams. Have you any enemies, ma’am?”

  “Not homicidal ones, at any rate. Had Doctor Abrams enemies?”

  “Not that he kens; but all Hebrews have enemies nowadays.”

  With this retort upon our civilisation, he took his leave, and Mrs. Bradley went back to the hotel and packed a bag.

  “We’re leaving for Edinburgh at once, George,” she said to her chauffeur.

  “Very good, madam,” said George.

  • CHAPTER 5 •

  “ ‘The only boon, my father dear,

  That I do crave of thee,

  Is, gin I die in southern lands,

  In Scotland to bury me.’ ”

  The road, which ran by way of Otterburn, Jedburgh, and Galashiels, passed Melrose, and they parked the car and went across to the Abbey. Almost no trace of the Norman buildings remain, but the fourteenth-century eastern end of the nave and some parts of the choir and transepts give glory to, and are glorified by, the beautiful, fine red sandstone of which the medieval church was made.

  The presbytery, with its fine window, the magnificent decorated window of the south transept, and the delicate, traceried pillars were so beautiful that they spent more time at the Abbey than they had anticipated, for George, to Mrs. Bradley’s secret enjoyment, had recently become a keen student of ecclesiastical architecture as a result of a series of University Extension lectures he had attended during the winter.

  Glancing at her watch, she perceived that she was unlikely to reach Edinburgh until the late afternoon. This did not matter, she decided, and they continued the exploration of the ruins.

  There was a fine view through the high and empty windows. Wooded hillsides, yellowish-green in the sunshine, with blue-massed shadows where the trees grew thick and deep, rose against a delicate sky. Birds flew past; there were flowers on the ground where the feet of the monks had trodden. The heart of Robert Bruce was buried at Melrose, George, who had been seeking information, returned and told her. Mrs. Bradley countered this educational attack by giving him a short lecture on the turbulent house of Douglas.

  There was one other visitor to the ruins that afternoon—a Scotswoman, gentle in manner, and with the deceptive appearance of frailty, which is apt to startle and confuse the peoples of lesser nations when they discover how tough, resilient and unconquerably enduring is the stuff and spirit of this race. In answer to a question from Mrs. Bradley, on George’s behalf, this lady entered into conversation about the place, and pointed out, among other things, the spot where the fabulous wizard sleeps under the aisle of the south transept. She talked also of the families who were buried there, and described the arms and crests of these families.

  “Unicorns?” said Mrs. Bradley. “Very interesting indeed. And have you heard of the old belief, I wonder, that the horns of these creatures are antidote to poison?”

  The Scotswoman said that she had heard of this belief, and twenty minutes (during which the two ladies seated themselves, and George strolled off to smoke a cigarette and, Mrs. Bradley suspected, make notes upon what he had learned) passed very pleasantly in a discussion of witches and warlocks, the water-kelpie, Hern the Hunter, raising the wind (in the magic, not the financial, sense), and other wives’ tales.

  Mrs. Bradley, like most English people who know and love the royal city, had her favourite hotel in Edinburgh, and to this George drove immediately. A Scots tea, of enor
mous proportions, fortified her against her quest of the young man’s lodgings, but before she could depart in search of them—in fact, whilst she was still flanked by scones and apple jelly—a young, female, and to Mrs. Bradley, who had expected some such manifestation, dreaded voice, exclaimed:

  “I thought you’d arrive about now. Are you staying here again, Aunt Adela?”

  “But you’re in London, Gillian,” said Mrs. Bradley distastefully. “I saw you off the train.”

  “Yes, darling, I did start for London. But if you think I’m going to stick about London with Mother while you’re getting yourself shot at across dead bodies, you’ve got another think coming. And don’t argue, because I’m going to stick around. Besides, I need some excitement, and I must know what happened to Geoffrey.”

  One thing was certain, Mrs. Bradley concluded, looking up at the girl. The broken heart, however occasioned, was now a thing of the past. If there were a spiritual scrap heap for broken hearts, Gillian had cast hers on it. She looked alert, healthy, and energetic or, as others had expressed it, and as she herself proceeded to do as soon as Mrs. Bradley commented upon her changed appearance, bloody, bold, and resolute.

  “In fact, what I really feel like,” she announced, “is Up, Guards, and at ’em.”

  Mrs. Bradley was reminded, in this chivalrous gesture of the girl’s return, of Sir Giles de Argentine, who, having escorted Edward II from the field of Bannockburn, turned about with the immortal rebuke: “It is not my custom to fly.”

  Gillian seated herself, spread a scone until it dripped apple jelly, wolfed it with mannerless hunger, and then looked wide-eyed at Mrs. Bradley, whose experience of the psychology of persons aged twenty caused her to know better than to send the girl away again. She said, therefore, formally:

  “And what does your mother have to say?”

  “Mother dithered a bit, when she had heard all, and wished Lesley was with us to keep me from being bored at home, but grandmother said I ought to be ashamed of myself to leave one of her generation to face the pop-guns while I came back to London to laze, dance, and tipple.”