Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Oh, don’t they? You ought to live down our road!”

  “My good chap, be sensible. Don’t think about things like that. Just answer my questions. Look here, I want you to tell me about the rows you had with Lillie Fletcher.”

  “Rows? With Lillie? But I never…”

  “Oh, yes, you did. Her girl friends know all about them. No use your stalling. Out with it. What were the rows about?”

  “Because I went out a time or two with somebody else, I suppose.”

  “According to the girl friends, you suppose right. Now, Coffin, at what time was she over here at the Auxiliary Fire Station that night?”

  “She never came.”

  “Steady on, now. Was it her usual time?”

  “I tell you straight, Inspector, she never came!”

  “What was her usual time?”

  “Look here, you can’t tie me down like that. You can’t tie me down! I won’t be! I don’t know what time she generally came, not exactly. And, look here Inspector! I don’t have to answer your questions!”

  “Of course you don’t, you silly chap,” said Stallard with a sigh. He began to put away his notebook.

  “Stop a minute,” said the young man, taken a little aback by this manoeuvre. “I think it was about a quarter to two she generally came over. But I tell you…”

  “That checks with what the girls at the Report Centre thought,” said Stallard. “How long did she stay?”

  “Ten minutes, I should think. Sometimes more. But I’ll tell you why she never came that night. I’d seen her the night before, and, all it was, she came to hand me the frozen mitt—hand me my hat, you know—and I couldn’t argue, and neither could she, not in there, so I said I’d see her in the morning, and perhaps she would meet me for lunch. She said she wouldn’t, and bundled off, and that’s all I know, and I tell you I haven’t seen her since!”

  “Do you know how she was killed? The murderer lay in wait for her and struck her with one of the stones from the rockery—a stone like this.”

  “They didn’t say that at the inquest.”

  “I know. I asked them not to. Anyway, the inquest isn’t finished. The end of it is postponed until the police get more evidence. Now I know pretty well, Coffin, that, so far, you’ve stuck to the truth. Besides, you didn’t want to lose Lillie, did you? You had no motive for killing her? The quarrel didn’t make you want to kill her? No! You’re too sensible a chap.”

  “What do you take me for?”

  “Who else did Lillie quarrel with, besides you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come, now.”

  “No, I don’t know. We didn’t have the same friends. She came a bit classier than me.”

  “There were no finger-prints on the stone, Coffin. That’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”

  “Everybody who’s been to the pictures or read books knows to wipe them off.”

  “Did you wipe them off, by any chance?”

  “I’ve told you all I know. It was somebody, I reckon who knew about me and Lillie Fletcher, and wanted to plant it on me. Looks as though they’ve managed to do it, too, with you keep on asking me questions.”

  “Only routine, you know, Coffin. As a matter of fact, we don’t at all think you did it.”

  “Why don’t we think he did it, sir?” asked the sergeant, as they got on their way. “Looks a likely young thug to me.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He’s a decent lad, I think. Besides, as I told you before, I’m pretty sure that all our three deaths are connected, and, so far as we can establish—and we’ve worked pretty hard on the case, as you’ll bear witness”—the sergeant looked gratified at this—“there’s nothing to connect Lillie Fletcher with Councillor Smith, still less with our unknown suicide.”

  • 3 •

  The barge Tulip proceeded north and a point by west along a waterway which, at the time that is being chronicled, was bordered by a flat wet meadow on one side and the towing path, which ran beside a private estate, on the other. The scenery, which was pretty but undistinguished (as the master of the barge had just observed to his mate, in other words, respecting a girl who had just walked past with a little dog on a lead) went unnoticed by the occupants of the barge; for Mrs. Canopy was peeling potatoes, and Joe, at the tiller, was in conversation with his mate, who was mending a shirt.

  The conversation, except for such deviations from the main theme as that afforded by the girl on the towing path, was based, in essence, upon the information which Inspector Stallard was later to obtain from Mr. Canopy, and ran, more or less, as follows:

  “Mother can say what she likes, but I wrote that letter on purpose to the paper, to clear myself, like, later on.

  “If I’d been living in the place, instead of just passing through, I’d have told the police what I seen, but, only passing through, you see, I never. What I say is, get yourself into trouble, you can, not passing on what you see, and what I see by the island, it was murder, or very like it.”

  “What did you see, then?”

  “See one of ’em pulling the other one out of the river, and one of ’em in trousers, the one that was doing the pulling.”

  “Might have been a woman.”

  “No, it was a man all right, I reckon. Tall and thin, ’e was. Though, come to that,” he added, conceding the point, “these days, when every second woman’s got trousers on, you can’t hardly tell, at a distance. Let me catch my old gal in ’em, that’s all!”

  He spat over the side and shouted at the horse.

  “Indecent, that’s what it is. On the other ’and, might just as well ’ave been a man; in fact, I reckon it was, at that…”

  “And the trousers pulled t’other one out? Sounds more like a rescue than a murder,” prompted the mate.

  “But I’d ’eard the sound of blop just before, I tell you! Blop! Like that. Looked as if they was fighting each other or something, when in goes the skirt, ber-lop! That’s how I figure it out. Ber-lop! she goes, and t’other one gets windy and fishes her out. That’s how I see it happen, but in me mind’s eye, not eye-witness.”

  “But it said in the paper it wasn’t a skirt, but a night-gowned,” the mate objected. “You couldn’t ’ave thought a skirt and a night-gowned was the same.”

  “Ah, but I never see no night-gowned. Night-gowneds is white. This was a darkish kind of skirt, all clinging wet, and the trousers fetching ’er out. No, there wasn’t no night-gowneds in it, I’d swear to that.”

  “Stands to reason it couldn’t be the female, then, as was found in the tank, Joe, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, you can’t ’ardly say that. Ever ’eard of ’iding your tracks?”

  “No.”

  “Concealin’ evidence?”

  “No.”

  “Misleadin’ the police with intent to deceive?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, ’aven’t you, though, Tom Gardner? Oo led the donkey away, so’s he shouldn’t bray and give you away, that time you thought you’d ’ave the ’andlin’ of old Mother Greenacre’s goslin’s?”

  “Does that come under the ’eading?”

  “Search yourself! Ever ’ear of an accessory after the fact?”

  “No.”

  “No, I don’t reckon you ’ave. Comes of being born and brought up among the barges. Now I got my education regular. Well, if I hadn’t a-written that letter to the paper, I might ’ave made myself an accessory after the fact to this ’ere crime, because I’d be going on letting ’em think it was a suicide and she done it herself in the tank, when all the time it was a murder, and she had it done to ’er in the river.”

  “In the river?”

  “Ah! That’s what I said. Other side Littleton Eyot.”

  “But you can’t see the other side from the canal, Joe.”

  “You can as you passes the bridge.”

  “Oh, ah. As you passes the bridge. Freddle my needle for me, Joe, wile I ’olds you the stick. Took me arf hour to freddle ’e
r last time, it did.”

  “And I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Joe, squinting at the needle’s eye as he threaded it with cotton, “if I found a police message waitin’ for me at Manchester, because, although I never see her go in, I ’eard the ber-lop, you see, and see ’im fishin’ ’er out. If it ’ad been a rescue, she wouldn’t ’ave been put in the tank. What you got to say about that?”

  “Different woman,” said the mate.

  Stallard was more puzzled than enlightened by Joe’s evidence. On the evening of the murder of Councillor Smith and the supposed suicide of the unknown woman, the bargee had been, for an instant, eye-witness of what appeared to be an attempt at rescuing a drowning person from the river. The inspector knew the place well, and tested for himself the bargee’s assertion that the place of rescue could be seen from the canal. Mr. Canopy’s almost passionate insistence on the sound of the splash he had heard was discountenanced by the inspector who said to young Sally Lestrange, who had known him since the time he was a schoolboy, that the real problem now before the police was whether it was worth while to conclude that the bargee was right, and that the woman he had seen pulled out of the water was the corpse found in the tank, or whether it was reasonable to conclude that the young woman who had been rescued had not died, but was somebody entirely different.

  “You’d better make sure,” said Sally, who had Lady Selina’s dislike of the mysterious and the unfinished. “Personally, I think all Canopy saw was an accident, the result of larking about on the towing path.”

  Stallard was of the same opinion, and tried his hardest to find someone who had accidentally tumbled or slipped or been pushed into the river and had been pulled out either by a man or by a tall woman in trousers.

  This led him nowhere at all. The second obvious line of approach was the clothing. If, as Mr. Canopy asserted (upon no evidence whatsoever, so far as the inspector could make out), the woman found in the tank had been murdered, the murderer must have removed almost all his victim’s clothes and put on her the night-gown before hiding the body in the cistern.

  “The clothes were marked, I expect,” suggested Sally. “If you could find them, you’d know who the woman was.”

  “I doubt it,” said the inspector morbidly. “Not so easy as that, you know, Sally, old thing.”

  But, all the same, he hunted high and low for the clothes; turned the town inside out and upside down; gave the delirious local paper material for yet two more special editions and the London dailies some more copy. The clothes, however, could not be found—at any rate, not without a search-warrant—and the inspector, without reluctance, came to the conclusion that Joe Canopy’s splash had been a figment of imagination.

  Then his witness came forward: the doctor with his sliver of river-weed. The inspector was much incensed.

  “I only said I took it out of her. I don’t see that you can prove much from it,” said the doctor, on the defensive, but grinning at Stallard’s annoyance. “You popped off so quickly last time, otherwise…”

  “You great, ugly fathead!” shouted Stallard. “Doesn’t it prove murder? Why should anybody plant her in that tank after she’d been in the river, unless he’d murdered her? It’s the only explanation.”

  “And ought to have been offered you before,” said Sally, firmly, when she heard it. “I don’t suppose the doctor wanted to give it up to you, though. I expect it’s one of his specimens.” She had been introduced, some months previously, to ‘Mrs. Moon’s ’Orrors,’ and approved of them. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have his hobby, the same as anybody else.”

  “I do, when it means he’s withheld the evidence for murder. I could make things very awkward for him,” said Stallard.

  “Yes, but, Ronnie, you still can’t prove she drank it out of the river. It might have got into the cistern and she swallowed it drowning herself. After all, you haven’t found those clothes. Until you do, and under suspicious circumstances, you still can’t prove that the dead woman, poor thing, and the woman that bargee saw being pulled up out of the water, are one and the same, can you?”

  “If they aren’t, why doesn’t the rescued woman come forward? I’ve asked for her often enough.”

  “Oh, she probably belongs to the class that doesn’t like to be mixed up in anything. I think it’s perfectly natural no one’s come forward. I should just clock it as suicide, and call it a day, and concentrate on Councillor Smith and Lillie Fletcher.”

  “I’ve got a hunch the three deaths hang together,” said Stallard obstinately. “And, if they do, one may prove another, if you follow.”

  “Oh, well, good luck, old thing. I say, Mother’s absolutely rabid I had to give evidence at the inquest on poor Lillie Fletcher. She says you dare get me in the witness-box at anybody’s trial for murder!”

  • 4 •

  Councillor Mrs. Perk was but one of several of the Willington ladies who were exercised in their minds as to the direction in which duty and interest lay.

  Duty, in a sense, was plain. Self-interest, however, was divided. To go to the police with the tidings that they had been in the company of the late Councillor Smith shortly before he fell dead from arsenical poisoning was to handle fire, they felt.

  “Not that we could possibly be suspected of knowing anything,” was the burden of their songs to their husbands, “but if we don’t say anything, won’t it look, really, rather bad? Not that that nice boy Stallard could possibly think it would make the slightest difference, but…oughtn’t we go to the police?”

  On the other hand, there was the publicity—of a very undesirable sort. News of the three murders, all executed within the same twenty-four hours, had become a ramp with the local paper. The wives of prominent citizens, said the husbands (with one exception), did not want to get their names in that rag in such a connection, surely, did they?

  The editor, whose long residence in the town had given him the feeling of the Willington pulse, realised the danger of the paper’s present policy, but was anxious to keep up the sales.

  “Let it ride,” he said to his reporters, notably the youthful Patricia Mort who had a Fleet Street flair for news. “Let it ride for a while longer, and then we’ll have to draw our horns in. The elite are getting restive. Can’t afford to offend the nobs, you know.”

  On the morning after the first news of the murders had leapt prominently into print, the anxious ladies who attended Councillor Smith’s small party at the “Rat and Cow-catcher”—for reasons strictly civic and charitable, be it mentioned—read every subsequent edition of the local paper to find out whether the party had been reported.

  “If it has,” said Councillor Mrs. Perk to her husband, “I shall have to speak to young Stallard. I can’t have him hunting me out and putting me down in his notebook, or whatever it is that they do.”

  “You thee-a, ducka, I feela it’th the buth’nith of the otherth to maka the firtht mova,” said little fat Mrs. Zacharias to her husband, the thin little Jewish watchmaker in the High Street. “If they lika to tella the p’leetha, of courtha I’ll backa them uppa.”

  “Of course, love,” said Mr. Zacharias, regarding a mainspring with the same pride and fondness as he was accustomed to bestow upon his offspring (seven in number, and all doing well).

  There it was left. Mrs. Zacharias also read the local paper, but her heart neither fluttered with fear nor leapt with relief as days passed and the party at the “Rat and Cow-catcher” did not appear in the news.

  Sooner or later, however, Stallard was bound to light on it, and he did so, two days after the inquest on Lillie Fletcher, by combing the haunts, both reputable and the reverse, of the late Councillor Smith. He had come, very early in the case, to the sensible conclusion that, since he could get no further information about the unknown woman whose body had been found in the tank, and since every line on the death of Lillie Fletcher petered out—she had not even been pregnant, indicated the carefully worded report in the Willington Record—the best thing to do was to
pursue an investigation into the death of Councillor Smith, and hope that that would lead him to fresh evidence in the case of the other two murders as well.

  The “Rat and Cow-catcher” came late on his list of public-houses, for it was a rather disreputable little inn which had received a bad name in the early nineteenth century and had not lived it down.

  Curiously enough, the landlord was a member of the Town Council. It was understood that he worked hard for the Poor Man and secured for him local amenities which other Councillors would not have troubled to acquire. In addition, Councillor Woods had received a military decoration in the Great War, and was the organiser and (some said) the financier of the Old People’s Christmas Dinner at the Town Hall. At any rate, he had not, for sixteen years, lacked votes.

  “Look here, Woods,” began Stallard. Councillor Woods, in the back parlour of the inn, put up a large, clean hand.

  “I know, I know,” he said soothingly, “and I ought to have come forward. But, honestly, now, Inspector, it couldn’t have been one of the ladies.”

  Then the story of the odd little party came out, and, with it, the information which Stallard had been looking for.

  “He sat on, after the ladies had all gorn—Mrs. Zacharias was the last of the party to leave—Smith sat on here a bit—I could show you the table…”

  “Do,” said the inspector.

  “…and then he got up and went outside—I guessed why—and I fully expected to see him come back in here because I was a full ten minutes from closing. Well, I was busy in the public bar, and he, of course, had had his party in the saloon, so I didn’t notice whether he came in again or not.”

  “Would your barmaid know?”

  “Sure she’d know. I never thought of that.”

  The barmaid, found listlessly polishing glasses, was perfectly certain that Mr. Smith (whom she knew, and whom she diagnosed as always ready for his little bit of fun and so fresh that he’d slip off the ice) had not returned that evening.

  “I made sure he had remembered a date, at the time, he went out so quick,” observed the barmaid.