Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “That coincides with the story Mr. Harben told me,” said Mrs. Bradley. The captain bowed.

  “Sit down!” said Mrs. Bradley sharply. “Keep as still as you can with that arm. Give him a cigarette, David.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Preliminaries

  “Well, ma’am,” said Pirberry on the following morning, “all I can say is, nothing seems to hang together anywhere.”

  The raid on the previous night had lasted for the usual number of hours, and both he and Mrs. Bradley felt tired, although his younger, ruddier face showed perhaps more traces of fatigue than her older, yellow one.

  “One thing struck me,” she said, “although there’s probably nothing in it. Why did Bennie Lazarus tell that lie about Plug Williams’ shop coming down?”

  “He was pretty well shocked, you know, ma’am. He may honestly have thought it came down on the night he took shelter in the cellar, or wherever it was.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Again—although it may have nothing to do with the matter we are reviewing—who is it in Little Newport Street who constitutes himself such a danger to the community? Is it really Don Juan, I wonder? Or is it the man the policeman apprehended when I was set on and kicked a knife out of play?”

  “The fellow who attacked you? His name is Sidney Ferruci. He swears he wasn’t intending to attack anybody. His story is that he was going out to buy a bit of fish, and had his knife in his hand to cut off the bit he wanted. As it happens, the fishmonger, another Italian named Callotti, swears that Ferruci was in the habit of doing this, and says he’s as harmless as a dove. What we’re trying to prove, of course, is that he’s the bloke who attacked the two Spaniards, but he swears he doesn’t know them from Adam and certainly they refuse to swear to him, and so does Mr. Harben, who seems mixed up in it all. So there we are.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I did not, at the time, suspect Signor Ferruci of wishing me harm.”

  “As for the Rest Centre business,” Pirberry continued, “I can’t get any further at present. I can’t find any people at the Rest Centre who can completely alibi themselves for the night of the raid when the body seems to have been put down in the area, and, so far, we’ve found five shops who sold, before the war, dressing-gowns like the one on the corpse. They were expensive, it seems, but not uncommon. My chaps are still checking, of course, but it doesn’t seem to get us anywhere, so I doubt whether your identification would do us much good, ma’am.”

  “Are all the shops owned by one firm?”

  “Yes, they are. The dressing-gowns were made to a special order, but all the branches stocked them.”

  “Are all the branches in the West End?”

  “West End or City. Why?”

  “No reason. I suppose the dressing-gowns were all sold over the counter?”

  “Well, in a sense. That is, they were chosen in the shop, but, naturally, most of them were sent. It wasn’t war-time when that dressing-gown was bought.”

  “Could I hazard a guess that one of the gowns was sent to an address in or near Chiswick?”

  Pirberry stared at her.

  “You’re not kidding, ma’am?”

  “No, I am not.”

  “But what made you connect up—?”

  “The pattern of the dressing-gown, as I thought I told you.”

  “Someone was very foolish, ma’am, to bring such a clue to your notice.”

  “Very foolish, or very penitent, Inspector. Or, of course, completely innocent. But, to return to this question of the box containing the body, don’t you think it more than likely that the coffin came to the chapel before the Rest Centre was in being? And, that being agreed on, don’t you think it may have been taken from the roof down into the area for fear of air-raids damaging the roof?”

  “Quite likely, ma’am, but I can’t see how that would help us. It’s still a mystery who brought it to the chapel at all.”

  “I’m going to tell you a story,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Some parts of it you know, but only the least important. It concerns David Harben and these Spaniards, and, to a certain extent, the body.”

  BOOK TWO

  The River God’s Song

  Do not fear to put thy feet

  Naked in the river sweet;

  Think not leech, or newt, or toad,

  Will bite thy foot, when thou hast trod;

  Nor let the water rising high,

  As thou wad’st in, make thee cry

  And sob; but ever live with me,

  And not a wave shall trouble thee!

  Fletcher

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nymph

  She lay well up on the slope of the river gravel, a tub-like structure scarcely worthy of the name of boat. About her, and under her strakes, were the rounded pebbles, the silt of the river bed, and, further away, the spits of firm sand on which glistened thinly the light of the rising moon.

  The shallow river, streaked with oil from petrol launches and fed by sewage from the town, ran between banks diverse as well as opposite. On one side were houses, a concrete path to form their street, three pubs, some hoppers at moorings, a yacht, two motor cruisers, four lamp-posts, and a boat-builder’s yard. There were also six tiny almshouses built sideways on to the river and dedicated since 1788 to Six Old Men of the Parish. David Harben, who lived and worked in the tub all through the spring and summer, knew the six old men and used to give them tobacco whenever he sold a book.

  On the opposite shore was the towing path; were the willows, restless in their leaves; were the sacks of cement put down to strengthen the bank and to stiffen and maintain a too-precarious footway; was the wooden landing-stage for the small squat river-steamers; was the jetty for rowing-boats and canoes; was even the entrance to a fair-ground from which, on this fine Whit Monday late in the month of May, the blaring of the roundabouts had been heard for a mile down the river.

  But all was silent now; and, except for the riverside rats and the young man at work inside the tub, the waterfront seemed deserted. There was no one on board the yacht, and the pubs were closed. Behind curtained windows without one chink to let out a ray of light, the inhabitants were in bed. The six old men slept in their almshouses, and the mallards slept on their nests by the oozy bank. Only in the tub was anyone stirring and awake.

  This David Harben was a novelist. If his hobbies had been listed they would have consisted of the words Small Boat Sailing. He was an authority upon pre-Conquest Norman architecture and was no mean swimmer, but small boats were his great interest, and only lack of means (although he was not, as authors go, a particularly poor man) prevented him from indulging his tastes all the year in all the navigable waters of the world.

  The tub was his concession to this lust. She was old, decrepit, three-parts home-made, and had as many idiosyncrasies as a retired prima donna; nevertheless, she served the double purpose of summer home and all-weather sweetheart to Harben. He did not so much love her as cling to her. She brought him the satisfaction his books never brought, and she comforted him as only his mother, whom he had lost in his boyhood, might have done. She fitted herself to his moods, controlled and modified his habits, accepted his mastery, could be gay, quick, quarrelsome, or downright contrary, and combined in herself all those uncertain, sometimes irritating, but always fascinating qualities which a man has the right to expect in the woman he loves.

  Harben was thirty-two years old, and a bachelor. He lived, during the worst of the winter, in a room above a delicatessen shop in Charing Cross Road from whose windows it was not possible to see the river. Each winter day he walked towards the Strand and thence to the Embankment. Here, unless it were pouring with rain, he would lounge, stroll, lean, ponder, accept odd jobs on river craft, if any such jobs were going, and get himself carried to Millwall Docks, to Tower Bridge Pier, to Tilbury, to Woolwich Ferry, or even up-river to Battersea, Chelsea, or Brentford.

  When February was out, and the rivers everywhere were all in flood for the spring,
he would leave his dingy lodging, his voluble, charming, tri-lingual landlady, and all his friends on river craft large and small, and get back to the tub once more.

  Soho and the Embankment, Leicester Square and Drury Lane, Long Acre, Blackfriars, Shadwell, Blackwall, Deptford, Rotherhithe and the inscrutable Charing Cross Road with its million secrets, were then left out of his life until October ended and the tub was laid up once more.

  One winter, after the death of his greatly-loved father, Harben had tried the experiment of keeping the tub in commission all the winter, but he found her too cold a companion and caught pneumonia. Only by using his judgement and catching it early enough and lightly enough (so he told his friends) had he been able, by the following May, to get on the water again. Even then he had lost twelve weeks of a lovely spring.

  He reckoned to write not more than one book a year. He was lazy, even for a novelist. He had, as most writers have, a will-o’-the-wisp for a guide; the nearer he thought he caught up with his vision of the moment, the more teasingly it seemed to elude him. He was doomed to be perpetually and perennially dissatisfied with his work. He was not a genius. He was a sensitive man of great talent, an artist in the making; unsure of himself; egotistical, self-centred, yet open to impressions; kindly disposed as Abou Ben Adhem; and apt to get into scrapes because of this.

  Upon this particular evening, he was completely absorbed. After weeks of semi-idleness, a fit of nervous irascibility brought on that day by the appalling noise of the roundabouts from the other side of the bridge had supplied him with the energy to work. He was visited, as they say, with inspiration. He saw his book suddenly and clearly, and in consequence—for something outside a man seems to take charge at such times—he might have worked on until dawn but for a surprising interruption. It startled him out of his mood, and when he picked up his pen before morning it was only to check the written pages.

  The interruption was not only unexpected, but came without hint or warning. At one instant there was nothing but the night all round him, kept at bay by the oil-lamp on its bracket at the end of the little cabin. There was nothing to be heard but the almost inaudible sound of the fine pen moving hastily on the paper. The next instant (with no sound of footsteps to give warning that someone approached) came the tapping of fingers on one of the little portholes of the tub.

  The young man, startled, screwed the top on his pen, and turned his head to listen. The tapping came more distinctly. Although it was still very quiet, there was an urgency about it which made his heart thump foolishly. He put the light out before he opened the door.

  “Who is it?” he said. “Who’s there?” It was, of course, a woman. No man would have knocked so quietly, with the certainty that this very quietness would carry its own insistence. “Is anything the matter?” he asked.

  “Yes; I’ve killed him,” she answered. It was like a film, he thought. It was only on the films that one got these startling answers to ordinary, civilized questions. Even the theatre had given up the shock tactics of melodrama, and in life—“real life” as some call it—they could not, surely, have a place, except, perhaps, as incidents in a war.

  He stepped up into the well at the tub’s square stern, and then down on to the stones.

  “You don’t mean you’ve murdered somebody?” he said, a humorous note in his voice. She turned, so that the moonlight showed her pale face and made her disordered hair a nimbus about her head. She might have been a ghost, he thought, a visitant from a shadowy borderland, with her light, thin dress and the effect of unreality produced by the traitor moonlight.

  “No,” she said nervously, as though she did not expect him to believe her. “He—he fell. That’s what I shall say.”

  Harben looked at her doubtfully. He could see that she was terribly afraid. There was something she was keeping back. He wanted to know what it was. He said briefly, “Better come into the cabin and tell me all about it.”

  The tub was deep in the ooze. It took a full tide to float it because it was drawn up so high. It inclined at an angle for which he himself made habitual, unconscious compensation whenever he stepped aboard, but it was not so easy for the girl. He gave her his hand, and by the time he had shut the door, relighted the lamp, and turned round to look, she was leaning against the end of the bunk on which he himself had been seated.

  Then he saw that it was not altogether the awkward slant of the floor which accounted for her attitude. She was not braced against the bunk, but had slithered and slumped herself on to it. He saw in her face the signs of an exhaustion so complete that the spirit could no longer force the body to its will. He said:

  “You’d better lie down.”

  There were two berths. The one on which she was supported he used as a seat for meals and when he was writing; the other was his bed. He stepped across the yard of space between himself and the girl, and lifted her on to his bunk.

  “And now, what is it?” he said. “Isn’t it a doctor you want?—for him, I mean?”

  “There’s nothing to be done,” she answered. “And I don’t really care. He’s dead. There’s nothing to be done.”

  “Well, tell me what happened,” said Harben. “Were you alone in the house?”

  “The others have gone,” she answered. “And he—well, he just tumbled over the stool. I heard the thud, and I got there as soon as I could, but I couldn’t even lift him on to his bed.”

  “But if it was only an accident, what made you say you had killed him?”

  “I left the stool there—I must have done—when I did the room this morning.”

  “Well, that couldn’t be helped. No one could blame you for that. Look, let’s go back there together, as soon as you feel you can, and see what’s doing, shall we?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I can’t. I can’t go in there again.”

  “Well, give me the key, then, and I’ll go.”

  He did not know why he said this. The words were spoken before he had fully realized what he was going to suggest. The girl’s reaction was curious.

  “I knew you would,” she said. He was going to argue that she could not have known anything of the sort, but a glance at her white face, shadowed eyes, and the childishness of her relaxed, thin body warned him that it would be wiser not to argue.

  “The key,” he said. “I can’t get in otherwise, can I?”

  “No,” she answered, “you can’t. She half sat up and fumbled for it. The fingers he touched were cold as he took it from her.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He turned towards the door, but she clutched his sleeve.

  “Put out the light,” she said.

  “Can you see in the dark?” he asked, standing still and putting one hand on the bulkhead to keep his balance on the slant of the sloping floor.

  “Enough for this,” she answered; and, drawing him to her, she took his head between long, thin hands and kissed him. The moonlight, washed on the tide to the sickle-shaped margin of land, etched blandly the hulks of the hoppers, the spars of the yacht, the roofs of the old men’s houses, the willows, the hollows, the black and silver reeds.

  A star blinked, reflecting a mood. Somewhere a dog howled. The river slid by without a sound, and, over the land and the water, the night, with its endless gyrations, danced and swam.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Satyr

  It was more than an hour after this that Harben crossed the streaked river bed and climbed the steps of the bank. The house was the third one along, a white-painted Georgian building, flat-fronted except for its porch. This was upheld on two pillars, and sheltered a broad-panelled door. The lock was smooth-working, and he entered the house with no sound except for the ominous one of the great door closing behind him.

  Once he had begun to mount the stairs, the extraordinary and uncomfortable nature of his adventure came upon him with force, and he wondered what, in the first place, had compelled him to embark on it. The crazy hour which had passed had committed h
im irrevocably, however—or so he thought. He mounted three flights to the attics, and came at last to a carpetless, creaking landing on which one door stood open, showing a yellowish light.

  He hesitated a second, and then went in. The contrast between the electric lighting of the staircase and the little candle burning in the attic was extraordinarily disquieting. It was fitting, however, he supposed, that a candle should illumine the house of death. He closed the door behind him and remained with his back against it to take his first survey of the room.

  It was as the girl had described it—a large room, as attics go, with a sloping roof, a small, square window, and a skylight on to the slates. It contained a single bed. The moonlight showed the bed clearly, and the candle, burnt to within two inches of its socket, showed the old man’s body on the floor.

  Harben was attacked by the same sense of unreality as that with which he had been assailed when the girl had answered his first question. He took up the candle and knelt at the old man’s side.

  He was lying on his back with his eyes open, and the stool over which he must have fallen had been placed against the wall near his head. His dressing-gown was in grotesque and heavy patterns of gold and green, and beneath it long pyjamas, striped white and purple, almost covered his feet. One slipper was on; the other had fallen off when he stumbled over the stool.

  There was nothing Harben could do. He took a quilt from the bed and covered the old man with it, glanced round the shadowy room whose corners were equally blind to the glimmering candle and the moonlight flooding the bed, blew out the light, and went down into the hall, switching off the lights as he descended.

  He had seen the telephone, and went across to it, but, even as his hand went out, he changed his mind, and decided to wait until the morning. A few hours could make no difference, and the coward within him argued that by morning he might be able to take himself out of the business and leave it to those whom it concerned.