Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  She then stepped into the punt and pushed it off, only to moor it again on the further side of the willow from where, she hoped, it was not conspicuous from the house. She stepped ashore, waddled, in the muddy boots, which she had discovered in the kitchen and into which she had thrust her smaller, narrower shoes, back to the house with sufficiently masculine strides, replaced the boots, and herself went up to the attic to make sure that no tell-tale trace had been left behind by herself, the doctor, and the caretaker.

  She found nothing, descended to the ground floor, went up six steps and across to the long and two-storied servants’ wing, and there took up her position behind lace curtains to keep what she hoped would not be a fruitless vigil.

  She took out a nondescript piece of sorry-looking knitting, and, keeping her eyes on the iron gates by the lodge, commenced to knit, quickly and badly.

  She was there for an hour and a quarter before there was any sign of Mr. Joshua and his party. She was glad to see him, glad to see, too, a tall man, black-avised, who was sufficiently like the Mr. Lancaster to whom she had already been introduced to give her the hopeful impression that here was the cataleptic in person. Accompanying them was one man. She supposed him to be the groom or, rather, the man who had taken that part in Mr. Joshua’s baroque, over-decorated re-staging of the East Bierley mystery.

  The small cavalcade approached the front porch, and, after a short colloquy, Mr. Joshua took out a key and opened the door. This was a piece of good luck, which Mrs. Bradley had scarcely expected. It disposed of her fear that he would discover, before he had a chance of entering the house, that the caretaker was not available either as servant or fellow-conspirator.

  • CHAPTER 13 •

  “ ‘Where be ye gaun, ye hunters keen?’

  Quo false Sakelde, ‘come tell to me.’—

  ‘We goe to hunt an English stag,

  Has trespass’d on the Scots countrie.’ ”

  In the entrance hall the three men halted, and then Mr. Joshua’s voice could be heard calling for Johnson. Obtaining no reply, he called again. After this Mrs. Bradley could hear nothing further, and so, moving like a cat, she crossed the small room and opened the door. Holding it ajar, she listened again.

  The servants’ wing, that Victorian addition to the house, joined the main building by means of a short corridor, which ran behind the smaller ground-floor room, which faced the drive, and came out almost at the end of the passage, which joined the entrance hall to the kitchen.

  It was now possible for her to hear the rest of Mr. Joshua’s remarks as he went through into the kitchen to rouse up the caretaker. They were principally of an objurgatory character, particularly when he found that the man was not to be seen.

  “He’ll be down at the ‘Rising Sun,’ ” suggested another voice, which, from the tone, Mrs. Bradley took to be that of the groom. “And if he is,” he added, taking, it seemed, some sort of lugubrious pleasure in putting the worst of the matter in front of Mr. Joshua, who was not likely, Mrs. Bradley thought, to be a favourite with subordinates, “he’ll be there till they shut, if I know him.”

  “It’s turned two,” said Mr. Joshua. “You ought to know him, if anybody does,” he added savagely. “The mess the two of you made of getting hold of that boy last night.”

  “Forget it,” returned the groom. “We can get him any time. Ten to one, he don’t know the value of what he knows.”

  “You bet he knows the value, with that confoundedly ugly old woman putting him up to it,” Mr. Joshua replied. “She can put two and two together, if he can’t. Shut your mouth and find Johnson. Search the house first, and then the outside. And then you can try the pub, but make that the last place, see?”

  Grumbling, the man went off, and after he had opened and shut half a dozen doors on the ground floor, and had bellowed Johnson’s name in tones of varying pitch, loudness, and annoyance, he began to mount the stairs.

  Since it was clear that, whatever else they were going to do, Mr. Joshua and Mr. Frere did not propose to search the grounds, Mrs. Bradley followed the groom upstairs, and, waylaying him at the door of one of the attics, thrust her gun at his waist and invited him to stand still and not to shout.

  The man, in paralysed fashion, obeyed. Mrs. Bradley then suggested that he should accompany her, and took him down the stairs until they came to the passage, which led to the bedrooms of the servants’ wing. Along this passage they went.

  “In here,” said Mrs. Bradley, at last. It was the end room of the wing and was so far away from the main part of the house that Mrs. Bradley did not believe that any amount or degree of shouting could be heard by Mr. Joshua and his satellite.

  She locked the man in, therefore, cautioned him through the keyhole about trying to leap out of the window, beneath which stood a large water-butt open at the top, and left him.

  When she got back to the main building, Mr. Joshua and Mr. Frere were still talking. She located the room from which the voices were coming, went out into the garden at the back, and, re-entering the house by the French windows of what had been the library before some previous owner had sold or removed all the books, she made her way to the ante-chamber of the room in which they were conversing.

  “I tell you,” Mr. Frere was saying, “if we don’t do it soon we’ll never do it. That boy must have recognised me, and, you see, we didn’t get him. That’s enough to dish us. The other job will have to be done tomorrow, at the latest, and even then I don’t see how we’re going to pull off the rest of the doings.”

  “Why not?” said Mr. Joshua sourly. “Do you mean to tell me that I can be kept from my own inheritance? I tell you, they can’t trace me in this business. I’ve completely hidden my tracks.”

  “Oh, yes? What about the motor cycle?” enquired the other. “And what’s the good of an inheritance, if you don’t even know where it is? You don’t know where the deeds are. You don’t bloomin’ well know anything. I’m getting sick of it.”

  “All we want to find will be in the house, you’ll see,” Mr. Joshua answered. “And, before he dies, I’ll see I get it out of Uncle David.”

  “Well, you’ll have to get it tomorrow,” Mr. Frere persisted. “They’re on my neck, and I can’t hold them off much longer.”

  “You’ll have to keep to the arrangements,” said Mr. Joshua. “I can’t help your troubles. You’ve been a good friend. I wouldn’t wish for better; but…I’m the boss. Just get that into your head. You take your orders from me.”

  “Less of that,” said the other, speaking sharply, and on a menacing note. “Don’t you forget, my cock, I know enough to stretch your neck.”

  “Oh?” said Mr. Joshua. And the monosyllable was a good deal more threatening than the other man’s threatening remark. He said no more at all, and the other, giving a short laugh, said gently:

  “No need for us to fall out. We’ve got on well enough so far. But debts are debts, and a debt is a debt.”

  “I get you all right,” said Mr. Joshua. “You’ll get enough from me to pay off old Father Abraham himself when this is over. Now, the stuff we want is in Johnson’s hut in the woods. Where is the cursed fellow! Surely Sudall must have found him by now!”

  He went out into the hall, and Mrs. Bradley could hear him calling Sudall and Johnson both. His voice echoed in the old house, and then grew quieter, as his footsteps, and those of his companion, died away.

  Mrs. Bradley darted through the library and out at the French doors again. At an amazing pace for an elderly lady she made her way through the trees to the gamekeeper’s hut.

  The door was shut and locked. She was so certain of what she would find there that she tore pages out of her notebook, lighted them, and tossed them on to the thatch. Waiting only until she saw that the thatch had caught fire, she turned and tore for the drive.

  As she reached the gates the doctor’s car came in sight. Blessing him for a most fortuitous but valuable piece of timing; she waved vigorously, hopped in, shut the door, and s
aid, breathing rather quickly:

  “Drive on. Direction doesn’t matter. But get away from the house.”

  He obeyed none too soon. Scarcely had they covered half a mile when the blast of a loud explosion rocked the car on the road.

  Lunch, at the “Rising Sun,” was cold beef, bread, cheese, stewed apples, fresh cream, and beer. Mrs. Bradley, presided over by young Tom’s mother, ate well, and described the morning’s adventure.

  Far from wishing her away, and her son at home again, the hostess took great interest in all these doings, and had, of course, heard the explosion. So had the police, she reported, but beyond the fact that the gamekeeper’s cottage had been lifted and scattered, and that a few trees had suffered, they had discovered nothing helpful, and had been on the telephone (so the stationmaster had said) to the chief constable.

  Of Mr. Frere and Mr. Joshua there was no word, so at half-past four Mrs. Bradley went on foot to the house in the marshes to set free the prisoners and to assess the amount of the damage.

  As the gamekeeper-caretaker was no longer in the boat, she assumed that Mr. Joshua had found and released him. She did not fear to find either of them still on the premises, for she felt certain that neither would wish to explain to the police the presence of the dynamite, and she had no hope at all that they might have been killed in the explosion. That the devil looks after his own was a truth she had often seen exemplified. A solitary policeman had been left on guard—for what reason it was not easy to determine—over the scorched woodland where once the hut had stood, but she found it quite easy to avoid him, and, the French windows remaining unfastened, since neither Mr. Joshua nor Mr. Frere had used them as entrance or exit, she got into the house and crossed to the servants’ wing.

  She contented herself here by unlocking the door of the room in which she had imprisoned the groom, and then by waiting for him to come out.

  When he did, he faced her revolver, and was marched out to the gates and along the road. Here Providence, in the homely combination of her own car and George driving it, took a welcome hand in the proceedings, and the prisoner was conveyed at the rate of fifty miles an hour to the inspector, and to him handed over for safe keeping.

  “I can’t hold him long on nothing but suspicion,” said the inspector.

  “You won’t need to. You’ll be able to hold him upon being accessory to the fact of murder as soon as be begins to tell you all that is in his heart,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “The murderers themselves are probably on their way to the Border by now. I propose to follow them. One is your precious corpse, the ‘late’ Mr. Lancaster, so if the Home Office come along to exhume him, you won’t be surprised. I advise you to find his housekeeper and the girl who acted as housemaid. They should be valuable witnesses. You still want to know what happened to the former owner of the house, you know, whom Mr. Frere, for the past three years (more or less), has impersonated. The housekeeper should know a good deal. Do your best with her.”

  She was gone, at that, leaving the inspector with one hand stretched towards the telephone, the other scratching his head. George, looking so like a waxwork model of the perfect chauffeur that Mrs. Bradley knew that he expected and was inviting reprimand, sat at the wheel until she came down the steps from the police station. He then came round and opened the door of the car, still looking like a cross (as Mrs. Bradley pointed out later) between Casablanca and the Admirable Crichton, but was disappointed, for she found no fault with him.

  “Newcastle, George,” she said. She had taken her leave already at the “Rising Sun,” with a promise of news by telegram of young Tom immediately she got in touch with him.

  “Very good, madam,” said George.

  “And why, George,” went on his employer mildly, opening the glass screen between her part of the vehicle and his own, “did you leave my poor Mr. Ker to all the assaults of his enemies, and come down here like this?”

  “I found an efficient substitute, madam,” replied George, “a man named James Alexander Musgrave, an old soldier, whom Mr. Ker, at the man’s own suggestion, provided with a sawn-off shot-gun.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Well, George,” she added handsomely, “I’m uncommonly pleased to see you.”

  “Thank you, madam,” said George, in a disgruntled tone. He was the most skilled debater at the club of which he was a member, and it was his continually thwarted ambition to contrive a passage of arms with his employer in which he should be able to give play, courteously, of course, to his gift.

  Mrs. Bradley sank back in a corner of the car, smiled gently, closed her eyes, and slept lightly until the slowing motion of the car woke her up again.

  “We’ve got this much,” said the inspector at Newcastle. “The dead man, Graeme or Ker—he gave the first name, which looks suspicious if it really wasn’t his own—bought a third return weekend ticket from Edinburgh the day before he was found stabbed. That looks as though he didn’t intend staying here for very long. He stayed at a common lodging-house, which looks as though he hadn’t very much money—”

  “Or wished to avoid meeting people who might have recognised him,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “He had no luggage with him except what he was carrying in his pockets, but that doesn’t do anything to alter the fact that he might easily have been carrying the dagger tucked into his sock or hidden away somewhere else,” continued the inspector.

  “But, still, there’s the business of the gloves.” Mrs. Bradley nodded. “Not conclusive. I was afraid it would turn out like that.”

  “The absence of any letters and papers on the body wouldn’t necessary mean anything but suicide, either, you ken,” the inspector added sadly. He shook his head. “It isna that I don’t believe what you say, ma’am. I believe you are right, and the man was murdered by his cousin. But, beyond this daft-like stuff about buried treasure—” he looked apologetically at her as he voiced this opinion of the Ker inheritance, but Mrs. Bradley merely waved her hand and cackled—“there isna a shadow of motive anywhere for the death. And that’s where the murderer has us beaten.”

  He looked compassionately at her. Mrs. Bradley observed, with calmness, that she felt she owed gratitude to Mr. Joshua for giving her an interesting time.

  “I am still in the dark,” the inspector continued, “as to why he called you in to help him prevent the murder of his uncle.”

  “Oh, I think I’ve solved that,” said Mrs. Bradley. “His cousin and accomplice, the late Mr. Geoffrey, involved him with Gillian, and Gillian brought me into it and mentioned to Geoffrey that she had. Mr. Joshua then decided to use me.”

  “Ah, I see. Aye, that would be it. He couldna be held on a charge of poisoning his uncle, because no poison was to be used—not, at any rate, on that uncle. It was clever, in its way.”

  “Yes,” agreed Mrs. Bradley. “It was not clever, all the same, to send his real uncle, David Ker, the caviar which contained strychnine.”

  “Did he do that?”

  “Again, there’s no proof, but the Lanark police have the matter in hand for investigation. I think we are bound to get him. He has not used his accomplices well. His difficulty is going to be to keep them loyal to him. You see, at present he can’t pay them.”

  “It’s an interesting thing, that,” remarked the inspector. “You’d suppose, if there was land, with coal under, in the family, that the family would ken where it was.”

  “There’s a freakish strain in the Kers,” Mrs. Bradley observed, “and it is more than possible that Mr. Joshua’s great-uncle, who bought the land, left some hint, and nothing more, in his will, of this part of his property. He may have thought that his descendants would want to resell it if it proved to be valuable, and he may not have wanted it resold.”

  “He could have put that in the will,” the inspector pointed out. “It might be a good idea to get hold of a copy of the will and see what the great-uncle did say,” he continued, “although that would hardly come within my province.”

  “I
have seen a copy of the will,” Mrs. Bradley assured him. “David Ker had a copy. There is nothing in the will, which might lead one to suspect the existence of the missing property except a couple of doggerel verses, interesting in their way, but somewhat in need of footnotes for the average reader. Mr. Joshua, so far, has proved no more than an average reader.”

  “And the verses?” said the inspector. Mrs. Bradley repeated them, and added the explanation she had already given to David.

  “Fanciful,” said the inspector.

  “Too fanciful for any one of the Kers except our Mr. Joshua, who, although footnote-less, is thoroughly fanciful himself,” said Mrs. Bradley. “After all, Great-Uncle Ker must have had a reason for including the doggerel in his will. I still think,” she added, “that a stricter search might give us the title deeds themselves, but, of course, I can’t be sure.”

  The inspector grunted. He was too courteous to tell her what he thought, but his expression, and the grunt, were eloquent.

  Mrs. Bradley strongly approved of James Alexander Musgrave the moment she saw him. He was a tall, thin, muscular Borderer with an intelligent face, grey eyes, and the carriage and long legs of a man accustomed to miles of hilly walking. He and his sawn-off shot-gun were on duty in the drive when her car drove up, and she and George were halted and inspected with military firmness before, their identity established and approved, they were permitted to proceed.

  “Has anybody been seen about?” Mrs. Bradley enquired, as soon as she gained the house.

  “Not a soul, barring ourselves, and a man from Biggar with the whiskey,” David Ker, now restored to health, replied confidently. “What’s the news with you?”

  “Not good, and not bad,” Mrs. Bradley answered. She told him about the dynamite. “I don’t think they are very likely to have, or to be able to procure any more,” she added, “but we may expect them at any moment, full of fresh devilry, no doubt.”