Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Of course, she wants something to live for, if I do cure her,” she said, “otherwise she’ll lapse into melancholia. She’s better as she is than that.”

  “Yours is a responsible job,” said the young inspector, sombrely. “What are you going to do with her now you’ve found her?”

  “She’ll have to go back to Doctor Lecky for a time. Although she is getting no treatment there, she is not ill-used or unhappy. She ran away not, I think, with any idea of escaping from the nursing home but in imitation of what she saw me do when I left the house. And, of course, paranoiacs do wander. They go in search of the old, happy, safe days, when they were children, perhaps, or when they were snug in the womb. In other words they want their mothers.” The red-haired woman was ambling aimlessly towards the grey stone building. “We will go for a ride in the car. You are so hungry,” she added compassionately.

  Tears came to the madwoman’s eyes at the mention that she was hungry. Like most mentally deranged persons she had a perpetual lust for food, finding mental compensation of some sort in attempting to satisfy a carnal appetite. Suddenly her expression changed. She dropped the flowers she had gathered, picked up three with thin stems, and, looking craftily at Mrs. Bradley as though she were doing something secret and sinful, she began to plait them together.

  “You like your work?” asked the young inspector, when they had left the house.

  “Oh, yes, I like it,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “Plaiting. That was the movement she was making the other day, then. How could her night-gown have clothed the body of the woman you found in the A.R.P. tank?” she suddenly demanded.

  “But…no one has ever suggested that her night-gown was on that corpse!”

  “Mr. Dewey, the fishmonger, was willing to place his special knowledge at the disposal of the police,” said Mrs. Bradley gravely; but the young inspector, who had understood from Sally that her aunt was a wag, merely chuckled in what he hoped was a sufficiently appreciative manner. He was in awe of the small, brisk woman with her bright and basilisk eye.

  “You remember the night-gown in the case of Constance Kent?” she enquired, with apparent seriousness.

  “But it isn’t a night-gown we’re looking for. We’ve got the night-gown. We merely want it identified.”

  Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “I thought you had interviewed Mrs. Murdon of Dale End?”

  “Yes, but that all peters out. Whether it was Mrs. Murdon’s night-gown or not—and, mind you, I don’t blame her for refusing to identify it—there’s nothing whatever to connect her with the murders. In fact, she’s got the best of all possible alibis. She was having a baby at the time.”

  • CHAPTER 11 •

  Goldfish.

  Title of a painting by Paul Klee.

  • 1 •

  “The thing is,” said Sally, “that all this night-gown stuff, although awfully interesting, is nothing to do with my murder.”

  “Inspector Stallard thinks that all three deaths are connected,” Mrs. Bradley reminded her. Extraordinary how cheerful Sally had become, she reflected, since that morning in the newspaper office.

  “Oh, Ronald! We’ve argued dozen of times. How could they be connected? The first one—a Town Councillor; the second one—an unknown woman, probably a…”

  “Sally!” said Lady Selina.

  “The third one,” continued her daughter, who, like a saucy barrister, had made her point, whatever the judge had to say about it afterwards, “an absolutely harmless telephone operator doing a spot of A.R.P. How can there be a connection? I thought Ronald had got hold of a brain-wave at first, but, the more you think about it, the more you realise…”

  “How right he may be,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Then there must be a Ripper about,” retorted her niece.

  “Sally!” said Lady Selina.

  “All right, Mother. But what else can you think?”

  “Things that are true and lovely and of good report,” said Ferdinand, coming in from the garden. “What is the argument, anyway? Oh, Mother, there you are! Look here, what do you make of that decision against Rubrick in…”

  He carried his mother off, talking urgently but quietly in the beautiful voice which was the only thing he had inherited from her except his brains.

  “There!” said Sally, gazing after them. “He would come and interrupt, just as I was beginning to get at something!” She went to the telephone and rang up Pat at the office of the local paper.

  “On an assignment,” said a voice from the other end.

  “Where?”

  “Preparing to report on the reopening of the Public Baths, which were to have been used…”

  The voice tailed off into inaudibility.

  “Speak up,” said Sally encouragingly. But she obtained no response, so she gave up the telephone, put on a coat, and, behaving extremely cautiously until she had stalked and located her mother, stepped on to the grass border of the lawn and so made her way to the garage.

  “Is there any petrol, Sims?” she asked.

  “I could manage a couple of gallons for the small two-seater, Miss.”

  “Shove it in and look slippy. Mother’s about.”

  She let in the clutch carefully, and by the time the sound of the car had brought a scandalised Lady Selina to the window, she was driving out of the park gates on to the road to the town.

  • 2 •

  “Oh, that?” said Pat, when Sally had lied and wormed her way into the building, “Well, the fact is that these Baths were to have been used as a mortuary. Shrouds and coffins have been delivered in hundreds since the beginning of the war. But now they think they’ll use the Methodist Sunday School Hall, so that people can go swimming again if they want to. So the two Swimming Clubs have staged a sort of Grand Opening Night, and I’ve been told off to report it, so I thought I’d better come along this morning and find out the lie of the land and get a copy of the programme.”

  The Baths presented a familiar sight of greenish-blue, gently undulating water, clean tiles, high diving boards, and spring boards covered with matting, and gave the rather sinister impression, so Sally thought, that along the edges of the tiled pool, a snake (really a line of coloured bricks to mark the water level) was writhing its way around the bath. Its tail in its mouth, like Jormungand, it achieved an unbroken line of dark blue and black which wavered and swayed with the gently lapping water.

  “Only just filled it,” said Pat, leaning over the edge. “I should soon fall in if I watched the water swaying about like that. Isn’t it lovely, though. Now where’s Tom Talby? He promised that he’d be here to shoot me the stuff. I’ve got to annotate my programme—when I get one!”

  A chunky, almost nude young man with a deep chest, skin improbably hairless and smooth, and short, thick, bright-pink legs, came out of one of the dressing boxes and waved.

  He began by approaching them from the shallow end, and the opposite side of the bath, but, seeming to change his mind, he suddenly made a swift half-turn to the right, elevated his body in a surprising arc, straightened his legs, and dropped, with almost excessive neatness, head first into the water. His head came up; he shook it, plunged it in again and swam across to them. Then he hitched himself out of the water by means of the handrail, on which he swung like a gymnast, and emerged, dripping water in streams from his elbows. He used both hands to push back his chlorinated hair. He blinked and wiped water from his nose.

  “How that beastly stuff hurts your eyes,” he said.

  “Oh, Tom,” said Pat, “don’t drip on us. Sally, this is Tom Talby. Tom, meet Sally Lestrange.”

  “Shan’t shake,” said Mr. Talby, lifting one knee and pushing water off his thigh with two muscular hands. “Take the will for the deed. Well, Pat, what dope do you want? And you see that you spell old Wankelow’s name right, this time. He was pretty fed up after our last gala, I might tell you.”

  They plunged into the business of the programme of which, it appeared, there was not yet a
printed copy.

  “Bakeley was to have seen about the printing now Charles has joined up,” said Mr. Talby. “But, of course, the fool forgot to have old Mother Commy-Platt’s name put among the donors of prizes, and as she’s good for five quid, it wouldn’t do to offend her, curse her. Thank goodness she doesn’t want to judge this year. Said she got very nervous leaning over the edge of the bath to take the names of the winners, and that there was a draught from the door at the shallow end. Old cuckoo. Still, Bakeley ought to have remembered. However, the printer has promised them faithfully for one o’clock to-day. I went to see him myself.”

  “You ought to give us your printing,” Pat observed. “Our rates are quite reasonable, and we never make mistakes once you’ve passed the proofs.”

  Sally sat back on the white-painted bench at the side of the bath and watched three small boys in the shallow end, one on a red rubber tyre, the others without adventitious aid, struggling splashingly with an overarm stroke. Their display of energy and the fact that there were three of them, caused Mr. Talby to break off in his description of the programme and his forecast of possible starters and probable winners, to report, with a kind of gloomy amusement, upon an entry he had received from a sporting gentleman named Burt, who lived, it appeared, in the more squalid part of town.

  “What do you think that lout proposed at the last programme meeting we had?” he demanded suddenly.

  The reporter, scribbling busily, said that she did not know.

  “Well, you know those three little London kids who are billeted in Queen Lane, and found that dead woman in that A.R.P. tank near the school? Suggested we should run a special gala item with them in it! Said it would ‘draw the people.’ Silly idiot!”

  “Why?” asked Pat. “Wouldn’t it draw the people?”

  “Yes, but look at public opinion, besides the effect on the kids.”

  “I shouldn’t think it would affect them. Of course, Mrs. Platt wouldn’t like it.”

  He ignored the jibing tone and went on:

  “In any case, we don’t want to draw the people all that much. The police won’t allow us to have more than a hundred and fifty spectators and fifty swimmers, anyway, because of A.R.P. It took me the best part of a week to get the Baths Committee to say that we could have the gala at all. A nice fool I should look, getting told off by the Council for having an item like that!”

  “Any more items?” asked Pat.

  “Yes, the usual general stuff, but nothing you need get ready. Then there’s the Senior Diving and the Water Polo match. We wanted to begin the diving with flights, rather like the Highgate Club display I saw at Wembley last year. Personally, I’d prepared a one and a half reverse, a two and a half with pike, and a forward cut through Isander, but no go. We’ve lost our best divers to the Army. So it’s to be a competition on ordinary lines, and Burt will run me close, if he doesn’t win.”

  “It’s awfully funny, how people love to see diving,” said Pat, looking up at the boards. “I say! That top board isn’t right! It’s not even straight.”

  “Oh, rot,” said Tom. “You’re cross-eyed. Still, perhaps I’d better go up.”

  He walked to the diving-boards, climbed to the top, stood poised for a moment, and then took off in a faultless swallow dive.

  “Not many Baths have a board high enough to show off that dive,” said Sally. “I love to see that spread of the arms, like wings, and then that lovely dip and curve and speed in approaching the water. I’d like to ask him exactly how it’s done. I’ve never been able to time it properly myself.”

  “Carry on, then,” said Pat, “I’ve got to speak to the Baths’ superintendent a minute about our camera-man.”

  Sally, however, did not mention swallow-diving. She asked for Mr. Burt’s address. Mr. Talby, slightly surprised, supplied it, and then, with a magnificent sea-lion flop, appeared to fall into the water, only to straighten his thick, pink legs at the very last moment to turn the apparently ungainly movement into a clean, precise dive.

  “He seems a jolly good swimmer,” Sally remarked as they made their way towards the door. She watched him plough his way on a powerful crawl stroke three times up and down the bath.

  “Yes, Tom’s good,” agreed Pat. “He lives for swimming. He’s only nineteen, although I think he looks older. I suppose they’ll call him up, like everybody else. We shall want three Press seats at the gala,” she added. “I’d better go back and tell him, in case he only keeps one. He ought to know, but I bet he’ll go and forget.”

  “Oh, don’t go now,” said Sally, “I want you to come and help me match some wool. I’d ask Aunt Adela, but she’s got the same sense of colour as a sheep.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought a sheep had a sense of colour,” Pat observed.

  “You’ve said it,” Sally cryptically replied. “Bless her magenta garters!” she added irreverently.

  • 3 •

  Meanwhile her aunt had taken a bus to the lower end of the town and had found the postman’s office and the A.R.P. tank.

  She had also located Lionel, Billy, and Bosso. The eight-year-old was in school, his half-day having been altered from afternoon to morning to fit in with the latest scheme for educating the children who had been received in Willington.

  It was Bosso who saw her first and reported her presence to the leader. Lionel had so far recovered from his fright at having landed on the corpse at the bottom of the tank that his reaction had been to patrol the vicinity daily (both in school-time and out, it is regrettable to mention) in the hopes of catching the murderer. The doctor’s piece of river-weed had disposed of the suicide theory, and the boys had heard the case talked over fully at their new homes.

  “Hi!” said Bosso. “There’s some old woman. She wants us.”

  “Perhaps she’s the murderer,” said Billy hopefully. “I reckon we ought to surround her.”

  “Can’t do that. It’s wrongful arrest,” said Lionel. “Let’s go and see what she wants. Bosso, you stop here on guard. Billy and me will go.”

  “I saw her first,” said Bosso.

  “All right. Billy, you stay.”

  Billy, however, abandoned his post as Mrs. Bradley came nearer, and strolled up to hear her remarks.

  “Mr. Lionel Percy?” she enquired. Bosso guffawed. Lionel gave him a punch, and modestly answered:

  “That’s me.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley, regarding him benignly. “The boy who discovered the body.”

  “Yes, that’s me,” said Lionel again. “I jumped right in on it,” he added. He pointed to the cistern. “In there, it was; at the bottom; and I jumped right in on it.”

  “Excellent,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Was anybody with you at the time?”

  “Yes. Them.” He indicated with a thumb his lieutenants. “They dared me to swim in it, and I jumped right in. And then my foot got on her—on her face, I think—and then…”

  “He didn’t half holler,” Billy observed, “and we helped him out, and shoved his shirt on him, and up comes a copper, but not the one as seen us before, and nabs hold of Lionel and then blew his whistle, and old Mother Dobkin at Number Thirteen she thought it was an air raid warning”—the other little boys hooted shrilly at the disclosure—“and she chucked all her money out into the street, and put on her gas-mask and came running out the front door, and asked the policeman how many aeroplanes, and the policeman said, “You go back to bed,” because everybody knows her, and she never gets up till about two or three o’clock…”

  “Poor old soul,” said Mrs. Bradley, cutting ruthlessly into the story. “Now what other policeman?”

  “Well,” said Lionel, unwilling to let Billy steal the limelight, “when we first started mucking about round this tank a Special watched us, and we bunked, and when we come back he wasn’t there. But we’ve tracked him down now, and we know where he lives, and his name’s Burt, and he come up to us and asked us if we’d like to get a prize for swimming, and we all recognised him, and Billy a
sked him if he was a Special, and he said he was a special Special, and we mustn’t let on we’d found out he was one at all, and he give us frippence.”

  “Might have got him into trouble,” said Billy, “because he didn’t stop us, and as we know who he was, his sergeant might not like it, and he might get into trouble, so he told us keep our mouth shut, and we could play round the tank when we liked.”

  “And where does Mr. Burt live?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  • 4 •

  “I have been invited,” said Lady Selina at lunch, “to give the prizes at the Swimming Gala. And while I am not at all sure that I am in agreement with the principle of awarding prizes in war-time, when other uses, one would suppose, might well be found for the money, still, I think healthy recreation should be encouraged.”

  “You ought to go, Aunt Adela, with Mother,” said Sally. “You’d enjoy it. We saw a boy named Tom something dive from the top board this morning. It was jolly good. The board is a fearful height. Pat says it was built especially for an International they had there once, and hardly anybody ever goes off it. She said Tom only went off to show off, and she doesn’t think he’ll go off it in the Gala. She thought it wasn’t safe, and Tom went off to prove that it was. He seems that kind of a boy.”

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley. “No, not any more potato, thank you, Selina.”

  “Oh, and what do you think?” continued Sally. “A boy called Burt, who lives in some low part of the town down by the tank where the body was found—I’ll give you the address, Aunt Adela, if it’s any good—wanted to have the three little boys who found it in a swimming item in the Gala.”

  “Disgraceful!” said Lady Selina.

  “That’s what Tom said. All the same, this boy Burt will be in the gala, and apparently he is a very good diver, too.”

  “Oh, is he?” said Mrs. Bradley. “How well your people do spinach, Selina,” she added.