Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Yes. Tom thinks that Burt will run him close in the diving. They haven’t got the programme printed yet, otherwise I could have found out Burt’s other name. I’d rather like to know who he is, because Tom dives simply beautifully. What time is the gala, Mother?”

  “I have promised to be there at two,” said Lady Selina.

  • CHAPTER 12 •

  St. Catherine disputing with the heathen philosophers.

  A window in Clavering Church, Essex.

  Mr. Burt had learned to swim in the canal, and he was standing contemplating this element when Mrs. Bradley visited him next morning at a quarter-past nine.

  “Eddie?” his mother had said. “He’s watching the water, down by the canal.”

  “Mr. Burt,” said Mrs. Bradley, coming directly to the object of her researches, “what made you propose at the Programme Meeting of the Swimming Club that those three little boys should perform?”

  “Oh, that,” said Mr. Burt. He was a long, thin youth—deceptively thin, thought Mrs. Bradley, looking at his shiny-seamed suit which seemed to sprout wrists and ankles at the corners. “Oh, that? Well, what I say is—why not? Can’t see their objection, myself. But then, what I always say is, give me a few old cats to put a spike in anybody’s guns.”

  Mrs. Bradley, very cautiously, agreed. Then she said: “Where do they live, by the way?”

  Mr. Burt shook his head. “It’s no good. You can’t sign ’em up for anything. If Mrs. Blinking Platt in this town says nah-pooh, nah-pooh it is.”

  “You are swimming, though, I take it?”

  “Me? Oh, yes.”

  “Diving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Water-polo?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of a game is water-polo?”

  “Well,” said Mr. Burt, with some show of animation, “you can foul at it more and better than anything else, except, perhaps…”

  He cast about in his mind for a suitable conclusion, but Mrs. Bradley, much as she would have liked to know the comparison he proposed to make, forestalled him by observing:

  “I was wondering whether anybody had been drowned in this canal recently.”

  This apparently pointless remark obviously gave Mr. Burt an acute shock. He took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, spat a shred of tobacco towards the muddy-looking water, and observed, with a preliminary glance over his shoulder:

  “Talking of that, what about that there corpse them kids fell in on?”

  “Yes?” said Mrs. Bradley; and added candidly, “I was wondering about that, too. But where was she drowned?”

  “I could show you the place, if I liked,” was Mr. Burt’s illuminating reply. For answer Mrs. Bradley took him firmly by the elbow and allowed him, after his first startled exclamation and attempt to withdraw his arm, to lead her southwards along the towing-path.

  The canal was bordered on either side by flat fields darkened at intervals by small copses. When they had covered about a hundred yards, however, a stream branching off to the left, and flowing under a small bridge, over which the two of them passed, began to wind its way past sedge and small creeping brambles in a manner very different from the broadly-flowing, lock-controlled level of the canal.

  “And what have we here?” Mrs. Bradley enquired, halting, and gazing with benign interest upon the scene.

  “Bit of the river out of which they cut the canal,” Mr. Burt succinctly and lucidly explained. They walked on, along a path ten inches wide, until they came to one of the small copses which bordered the water. The path dipped down a twelve-foot slope at an angle of about thirty degrees. It was wet and blackly muddy at the bottom, and the dip was the receptacle for old tins, an ancient hat, and a small collection of the cast-off garments of tramps.

  “A doss-place,” Mrs. Bradley’s involuntary conductor observed. The two of them climbed the opposite slope and almost immediately plunged downwards again, into another dip. This brought them on to the river-level once more, but here the path was considerably wider, and was shaded—or would be in spring and summer—by two or three tall young trees. The path sloped gently up again, and then down, and brought them to the water-level once more, where a clump of thick bushes screened a dangerous, short, sharp bend. Here the soil, at some time, had fallen away, making a little precipice, a trap for anybody plunging onwards through the bushes.

  Mr. Burt disclosed the danger by parting the bushes in front of Mrs. Bradley.

  “You have to watch out,” he said. “It’s none too safe, I can tell you.”

  Mrs. Bradley surveyed the spot.

  “What, apart from its natural dangers…?” she enquired.

  “Stands to reason,” said Mr. Burt morosely, “this is where she fell in, I reckon, and there’s where I fetched of her out.” Side by side, they regarded the abysmal scene.

  Mrs. Bradley stepped a yard nearer to the edge. She had hoped, when she had heard of Mr. Burt, that, swimmer as he was, and actually resident in the neighbourhood of the crime, he might be able to help her; but her fondest hopes had not envisaged him as the saver of the body from the canal. She began to wonder why he had chosen that particular day for watching the little boys at play near the A.R.P. tank.

  On the opposite bank of the river was an island, artificially created by the junction, at both its ends, of the canal with the river. Mrs. Bradley turned and walked briskly back to safety, descended to water level, and led the way towards a little bridge which she could see about sixty yards on. Mr. Burt, spitting with boredom, turned to follow her.

  “How deep is the water?” she enquired, almost throwing him off his balance by swinging round on him to ask the question.

  “Five feet in the middle and under that there bank we stopped at, six,” Mr. Burt replied. He understood Mrs. Bradley to say “Ah!” Then both walked on again.

  Mrs. Bradley did not linger long upon the bridge. A small path on the further side of it led on to the wooded island, and at the head of this path, where it branched off from the towing-path of the canal, she halted and said:

  “Mr. Burt, Mr. Burt, do you see anybody coming?”

  “Yes. A barge horse belonging of Tanners, and his Betsy Jane,” Mr. Burt answered, with a mistrustful glance at her out of his sloe-black eyes. Mrs. Bradley observed the gangster look.

  “Is Betsy Jane his wife, and is she on board?” she enquired.

  “Barge. Wife of the same name. Couldn’t say if she’s on board, but they generally are, trust them,” Mr. Burt replied.

  “Well, do you mind remaining here, greeting Mr. and Mrs. Tanner, family and collaterals, and shouting ‘Whoopee!’ or some innocuous remark, as soon as they get to the lock that I see in the distance?” proposed Mrs. Bradley.

  “Say, what do you think I am?” Mr. Burt complained, preparing, nevertheless, to do as he was asked.

  “A good citizen, and, I hope, a winning member of the Swimming Club,” said Mrs. Bradley cheerfully, disappearing rapidly down the path. Once out of his sight she moved with even greater celerity. It was surprising with what speed she galloped along and crashed through the bushes to hasten to a point opposite that at which they had paused above the little precipice on the other bank of the stream.

  Here she worked over the ground, but, beyond the fact that somebody, before the heavy rains, had been sick in the vicinity, she made no discoveries.

  She did hear, however, faint but masterfully clear, Mr. Burt’s cry as the barge reached the lock. She rejoined him with the same haste as she had left him. She found him seated dejectedly upon the railing of the little bridge, moving his jaws automatically on a piece of chewing-gum. He did not get up when he saw her but, moving the chewing-gum slightly to the side of his mouth, pronounced with considerable gloom:

  “Could have collared a ride off him as far as the High Street. Got to get a towel for to-night. Baths laundry isn’t working since the war.”

  “Ah, yes, the High Street,” said Mrs. Bradley carelessly. “How far would that be fr
om where those little boys live?”

  “No good you to harp on them kids,” Mr. Burt austerely reiterated.

  “Mr. Burt,” said Mrs. Bradley, “how long would it take you to swim across the river?”

  “How long?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “From here.” She took him by the arm, and so conveyed the suggestion that he should rise to his feet. He followed her, but very unwillingly, down the little path, and through the jungle of trees and bushes.

  “From here,” said Mrs. Bradley, “across to our point of danger on the opposite bank.”

  Mr. Burt surveyed the stream distastefully.

  “I wouldn’t like to bet on it,” he said.

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that you never swim in the river in the winter except with the laudable object of saving life.”

  “Me? Why should I?”

  “For the purpose of earning a pound,” said Mrs. Bradley. She dived into the capacious pocket of her skirt and produced a formidable housekeeping purse, which bulged, however, in a heartening and optimistic manner.

  Mr. Burt was quick, but the owner of the purse much quicker. From the moment that his sinewy hand closed, as he thought, on the booty, to the moment when he found himself falling down the riverbank, he lost count of time, and was in the dirty water, well in, before he realised what had happened.

  Mrs. Bradley, still firmly on the bank, her black eyes snapping with amusement, waved a pound note in the air and cried out urgently:

  “Now, Mr. Burt, right across!”

  Mr. Burt had Cockney, not country, ancestry. With some humour he waved his hand, then laid his flat face on the water and threshed his way over. He could not haul himself out. “So it wasn’t just there?” thought Mrs. Bradley. She called out, loudly and clearly:

  “Where did you pull her out?”

  Mr. Burt, clinging on to a tree-root, pointed upstream.

  “Swim to the place, and get out.”

  She watched him paddle upstream. There seemed little current. In any case, he was a powerful swimmer. She hoped he would not take cold, for she was the very last person on earth to grudge him his attempt upon her purse. She held, with Shakespeare, that its contents were so much trash; she differed, however, from the Swan by appreciating, in the modern fashion, that her good name also would ultimately matter very little.

  Mr. Burt, looking longer and thinner than ever in his wet suit, pulled himself out. He did not attempt to rejoin her, but sullenly remained where he was, and began to squeeze the water out of his threadbare suit and from his thick black hair.

  “My dear Mr. Burt,” said Mrs. Bradley, when she had caught up with him, “you must come home immediately and change your clothes, and then I want to ask you some more questions about that unfortunate woman.”

  “Change my clothes!” said Mr. Burt. “Who do you think I am? Lord Nuffield?”

  “But you’ve got another suit, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley persuasively. “What about the one you wear when you take out your fiancee?”

  “My girl?”

  “Your girl!”

  “Huh!” said Mr. Burt, with such depths of feeling that Mrs. Bradley was both sympathetic and deeply impressed.

  “Well come along, anyway,” she said gently, “and as we go you shall tell me all about her.”

  To his own immense surprise, as they walked rapidly up the slope and down the other side of it, and up again, and alongside the river-loop to the canal, and so along the towing path to Mr. Burt’s rather dingy little house, he found himself doing exactly as she suggested.

  “But,” said she, when he had finished, “why on earth didn’t you assert yourself immediately the film was over? That was the moment. Any goop could see that.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Burt bitterly. “Funny thing about me. You won’t believe me, after what I tried to pull on you—” he looked sheepishly at her and then on the path again—“but I lack my nerve.”

  “I am sure you do,” said Mrs. Bradley agreeably. “What is your fancy for this afternoon’s gala?”

  “Me, I’m going to get the two hundred yards breast-stroke.”

  “Breast-stroke?” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Breast-stroke. And no butterfly style, neither.”

  “But, my dear Mr. Burt, I had no idea, no idea whatever, that you were a breast-stroke swimmer.”

  “Aren’t I, though?” said Mr. Burt, regaining about thirty-five per cent of his original self-possession, and perking up like a newly-watered flower. “If I don’t take three-fifths of a second off of the existing Club record, don’t blame me.”

  “Really?” said Mrs. Bradley. “Now tell me, Mr. Burt. how much longer, or shorter, would that swim of yours have taken, supposing that you had employed the breast-stroke, at your best speed, instead of that very attractive and workmanlike crawl?”

  “You ought to write for the papers,” said Mr. Burt.

  “Granted. And so I do. But…?”

  “Wouldn’t a-made all that difference. See what I mean? Time I took a racing dive, say, I’d be across that bit, pretty well, seeing I know where to come up with me head, not to shove it in the mud the other side, and, of course, it not being the black-out, but only just about sunset.”

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Bradley. They had left the canal bank by this time, and were walking up his home street, which sloped at an angle of one in forty-four from the towing path at the bottom. “But, tell me, Mr. Burt, suppose that you were pushing a—let us say—a dead body—across the stream—”

  “Here!” said Mr. Burt loudly. “Who are you talking to! I may have took a snatch at your purse. Don’t say I didn’t, and sorry I did, being the first time, as I dare say you rubbered, you being fly to time it, like.”

  “You bungled it badly, if that is anything to go by,” said Mrs. Bradley placidly. “And if the loan of five pounds, as between friends, and covered by the usual informalities of a gentleman’s agreement, would be of the slightest assistance to you…?”

  Mr. Burt waved it aside.

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t take money from ladies.”

  Mrs. Bradley was so much enthralled by this remark that she almost asked him to repeat it, but, for the sake of the matter in hand, decided not to do so. Instead she said:

  “Well, you must please yourself. The offer remains open if you care to reconsider it at any time. Now, reverting to this question of a body…”

  “Here, half a mo! I want to know what you’re getting at.”

  “Murder, Mr. Burt.”

  “Her in the tank?”

  “Presumably.”

  “But…”

  “No, no. Answer the question.”

  “I’ll be damned if I do.”

  “Very well. You must expect me to draw my own conclusions.”

  “But I don’t want to be mixed up in anything.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t. You could have identified the dead woman, I take it?”

  “I might have, if I’d remembered what she looked like after I shoved her up the bank, but, then, I don’t remember. Besides, she wasn’t dressed the same. It was in her clothes, I see her.”

  “Yes, I admit that. Mr. Burt, assuming, for the sake of argument, that the woman you rescued and the body the little boys found in the tank were one and the same person, how could anybody have removed the body from where you laid it, without your being aware of the fact?”

  “How? Easy! Because as soon as I see she was dead, I done a bunk for home, that’s why.”

  He seemed pleased with this reply. Mrs. Bradley said no more until they reached his home. His mother was still leaning on the gate in the attitude in which Mrs. Bradley had left her. She regarded her dejected-looking son and his wet clothes with neither curiosity nor the slightest flicker of interest, but replied sedately to Mrs. Bradley’s greeting and then she and Burt went indoors. Mrs. Bradley, left alone, except for a cat and two small boys who were dragging a
n iron-wheeled truck untiringly up and down in front of the same three houses, made off towards the top of the street. Trolley-buses ran along the top, and she hoped to ride in one as far as the centre of town.

  She had not reached the end of the row of houses, however, when the sound of running footsteps made her turn round. The runner was evidently unaccustomed to the exercise, and Mrs. Bradley, recognising Mr. Burt’s mother, went part of the way back to meet her.

  “Says he’s sorry he spoke saucy, and always glad to oblige you. Nothing to do with him, the cistern, but had gone to get the doctor, not to bunk ’ome, and there she was, gone, when Ted got back. Never intended no harm, and is a good boy, only son I got, a widow seventeen years, was wearing a costoom, brown ’e fancies, but couldn’t swear to it, and a berry ’at when found. Never set eyes on her in all his born, and don’t know whether the one in the tank was her or not.”

  She gave out this rich spate of information in a series of loud grunts, and with other symptoms of a severely taxed respiratory system, and then turned and walked towards her house.

  Mrs. Bradley hastened after her, and asked, when she caught her up:

  “Is your son a special constable?”

  “Ted? No, but he got a tin hat from his firm before he got the sack. Fire-fighting, that’s what he volunteered for, and he got the tin hat for that.”

  Mrs. Bradley thanked her, and took her leave again. It was fairly certain, she thought, that the girl Burt had pulled out of the river and the body found in the cistern were one and the same but the connection could be proved later on. Mr. Burt’s determination to avoid identifying the body must be accounted for, Mrs. Bradley supposed, by the fact that he had rifled the handbag, or otherwise robbed the body, when he found that the rescued woman was dead. It was certain, she thought, that he had not gone to fetch a doctor. That had been an obvious afterthought.

  She thought that she might profitably follow up the history of the handbag. There was the scarcely less interesting subject of the clothing to investigate. Full of thought, Mrs. Bradley reached the top of the road, and travelled in great state on the front left-hand seat of a silent-moving trolley-bus to the offices of the Record.