Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “There is one more interesting thing about that cistern,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What do you make of these prints?”

  Pirberry studied two photographs.

  “Identical, ma’am, I should say. I’d have to let our experts look at them to make certain, but they seem identical to me.”

  “And to me,” she agreed complacently. “One set were taken by your experts from those superimposed on others upon that empty cistern, and the other set are David Harben’s from his tooth-glass.”

  Pirberry looked at her in perplexity.

  “I can’t make you out, ma’am,” he said. “One minute you believe in his innocence and swear by him, and the next you’re presenting me with direct evidence of his guilt.”

  “I told you I thought David helped to move the old man’s body. It seems fairly certain that he is the Captain Toms referred to by Mr. Williams, and that Hankin and Brent assisted him in carrying the cistern to the river. Of course, I never did think that David and the girl went back to the house as soon as he says they did. For one thing, he would have had to make certain that rigor mortis had passed off before he could get the body into the cistern.”

  “What becomes of your water-gate theory, ma’am?”

  “I don’t know that it was ever a theory, Inspector. And I did not then know Hankin and Brent, nor their sensitiveness to the conversation of the parrot. Incidentally, that is not the only thing. In the interval between the disappearance and reappearance of David, there was an attempt …”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Angels

  Mrs. Bradley pondered long upon Plug Williams and his half truths, upon the self-sacrificing seamen Beetler Hankin and Kidnapper Brent and upon their nervous reactions in taking to their heels at the Cat’s Whisker at the sound of the parrot’s “Muddy beer.”

  She went to St. Giles’-in-the-Fields, pushed open its heavy iron gate, mounted to the plinth before the door, looked at the neatly tilled ground between the bushes, speculated on the possibilities of the old man’s body having been interred there privately by Harben.

  The church, on the Saturday afternoon that she visited it, was locked, and the neighbourhood was almost deserted. Occasionally someone would pass from narrow street into narrower alley, but none seemed to take the slightest notice of her as she loitered on the steps and gazed at the trim church garden.

  “It might be possible,” she thought; but if the body had been there, in whose interest would it have been to draw attention to St. Giles’ by teaching a sentence to the parrot? And who was responsible, anyway, for the parrot’s peculiar répertoire? That was a fundamental point, she felt, if one wanted to solve the mystery of David’s disappearance.

  She decided to return to Helsey Marsh and lay some of her findings, if not perhaps quite all, before the keen minds and hair splitting intelligences of Sister Mary Sebastian and Sister Mary Dominic.

  “We have been quite worried about you,” they said. They asked for news of David, but Mrs. Bradley was obliged to confess her utter failure to obtain any news of him at all.

  “But I want your help and sympathetic counsel,” she said. So, when the hour which they allowed themselves for recreation came, the white-robed sisters took chairs on either side of the hearth in Mrs. Bradley’s cheerful dining-room, settled themselves with their mending—the boys’ shirts and socks, mostly—and listened very attentively to the following sentences, which, read aloud in Mrs. Bradley’s deep and golden voice, sounded considerably more impressive than they were.

  “Holborn means a brook in a hollow,” read Mrs. Bradley.

  “In Oxford, St. Giles’ abuts on to Broad Street; so in London.

  “Soho is thought by some antiquarians to have obtained this curious name because hunting used to be carried on there, a theory suggested also by the ‘Dog and Duck’ Tavern.

  “Dyott Street was originally named Maidenhead Close; later, George Street. It received its present name from a family which flourished in the neighbourhood during the Stuart Period.

  “High Holborn formed part of the route along which condemned criminals passed from Newgate Prison to Tyburn. The great bell of St. Giles’ was tolled when the condemned man was passing.

  “Matilda, the Queen of King Henry I, founded a hospital for lepers near the site of the present church of St. Giles’-in-the-Fields. Later, a manor house stood there, and its grounds included the land across which Denmark Street, Little Denmark Street, and part of Charing Cross Road now run.

  “The poet Dryden died in Gerrard Street, and the essayist de Quincey, when he was seated on a doorstep in Soho Square, was befriended by a street-walker.

  “John Wright, an oilman (shopkeeper) of Compton Street, paid the funeral expenses of the King of Corsica in the early nineteenth century.”

  She laid aside her notebook, looked at the two bent heads, cackled suddenly, and then, as though she were presenting a corollary to her reading, she referred to the curious effect on the sailors of the parrot’s remark; of the fact that the ship mentioned by Williams could not be traced; and referred to the point that every bit of information she had gathered seemed to turn on the sea and on sailors.

  “And now, my dear children, make something reasonable for me out of all that,” she commanded. Sister Mary Sebastian looked up with her usual happy expression.

  “But it’s all such a muddle, dear Mrs. Bradley,” she said. Sister Mary Dominic looked troubled.

  “He would not have caused all this worry and anxiety if he could have helped it,” she said. She folded her work and put it away in the large cardboard box which Mrs. Bradley’s manservant had found for her. She put the box in its corner, ready for next day’s recreation time, folded her hands in her sleeves, and bowed to the two older women. At the door she turned round.

  “I shall think about what you have said. If there is any virtue in it at all, then God will show it,” she said. They could hear her quiet footfalls on the stairs.

  “She will pray. I shall pray,” said Sister Mary Sebastian. “You have done all you can. The rest is with God. We shall find him.”

  Mrs. Bradley, who was not accustomed to regard God as a master detective, was considerably impressed by their attitude. She was not optimistic, however. She thought, as Pirberry thought, that there might be something more which Plug Williams could tell if he would. She also agreed with Pirberry that the chances of his consenting to tell it—at any rate to the police—were indeed slender.

  She went to bed at midnight with no plans for the morrow, and almost immediately slept.

  She was not often troubled by dreams—not, at any rate, sufficiently so to remember the dreams in the morning—but on this particular night she did dream. She dreamt that she was in Norway, and that a cold wind blowing from the mountains brought to her ears the sounds of someone crawling down the mountainside towards her. Suddenly there was a crash, as a great boulder detached itself from a cliff and fell on to a river of ice at the foot of the mountain.

  The noise woke her. She sat up, wide-eyed and alert; not in the least alarmed (for that was not her nature) but aware that the noise, although her dreaming ear had exaggerated it and had transposed it to something with which the dream-sequence could fit in, was a real noise. Her waking brain diagnosed it immediately as the crash of a closing door.

  She reached out for the bed-head switch, but remembered in time that the strong draught blowing from the window might mean that the room was no longer completely blacked out. She reached for her torch, and switched it on. Then she heard the voice of Sister Mary Dominic at the window.

  “It’s all right. I think he’s gone.”

  “Who was it?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. She heard the sound of the window-catch and the twitch of the curtain, reached out for her dressing-gown, and then switched on the light.

  “I’ve closed the window,” said Sister Mary Dominic.

  “Ah, yes! The cold wind from the mountains,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And now, dear child, how do you come to be up and dr
essed at two o’clock in the morning? Come into the dining-room. Perhaps we can stoke up the fire, and then you can tell me what has happened.”

  With the aid of a couple of sticks she stimulated the dining-room fire to a respectable semblance of itself, produced sherry and biscuits, and waved her young guest to a chair. Sister Mary Dominic refused the refreshment, sat upright, smoothed her scapula, folded her hands and proceeded to tell her story.

  “I went into the garden to pray. It was cold, but there were stars. I am accustomed in Lent to make night prayers. I heard the men at the gate. I did not like the sound of their voices. I do not think they saw me because the willow hedge was between us. They moved towards the house. I heard them climbing up. I called out to know who it was. One fell. I think your bedroom door must have been ajar. I heard it slam before the man fell down. I do not think he was hurt. He said nothing and did not cry out, and I heard people running away. I searched, to make sure that he was not injured and lying on the ground. There was nobody. I came to your room as quickly as I could, but I heard you moving, and I knew that you had come to no harm. Then you switched on your torch, and, afterwards, the light.”

  “Well, well, well!” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Do you think you should find out whether you have been robbed?” the nun enquired.

  “I have not been robbed,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I doubt whether robbery was the motive,” she added thoughtfully. “I wonder whether he dropped anything when he fell?”

  As soon as she had finished her sherry she went into the garden with her torch and searched the ground below her window. She found what she sought, but not immediately, for it had fallen into a bush. It was a knife of the kind that seamen use.

  “Very nice,” she said, when, indoors, she had examined it. “Quiet and effective. Now I wonder to whom I owe these kind attentions?”

  She rang up Pirberry in the morning. Later in the day one of the boys came out early from lessons and asked to speak to her.

  “I have Sister’s permission,” said he.

  “Say on, child,” said Mrs. Bradley, giving him her attention.

  “Sister Mary Sebastian sent me into the village this morning for some pencils. I couldn’t get any, but two men stopped me and asked me where I lived. I told them, and they asked me to look for a knife in the garden. They said they would give me five shillings if I found it and gave it to them without letting anyone know.”

  “And did you find it?” Mrs. Bradley enquired, looking into his serious eyes. The boy shook his head.

  “I thought the money was too much just for finding a knife. I did look for the knife, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. I told Sister Mary Dominic about it, and she sent me out of school to tell you.”

  “Well, child,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to look again. It is possible that the knife has sentimental value for those men. One never knows. As soon as lessons are over, search again. Then go into the village, and either tell the men you cannot find the knife, or, if you do find it, you can give it them. What sort of men did they seem?”

  “Just ordinary men.”

  “Tall? Short?”

  “Not to notice. They were just ordinary.”

  “I see. All right, then.”

  “And can I take the five shillings if I do find the knife?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Mrs. Bradley. She spent a pleasant and instructive time examining the knife for finger-prints, took care that she did not leave her own, and then went up to her bedroom. She surveyed the landscape to make certain that she was not observed, then she dropped the knife out of the open window into the bushes again.

  Mr. Pirberry was plaintive when she saw him.

  “But the finger-prints, ma’am! They might have been invaluable to us!”

  “They will be invaluable to us,” she replied. “I have them. You shall develop the photographs yourself.”

  “Couldn’t you have kept the knife, ma’am? Why did you throw it away?”

  “For the sake of the little boy. If he had not been able to find the knife and to tell them exactly where he found it, I don’t think he would have lived so very much longer. They would know that he could describe them, and they would guess that I had the knife with their prints—or the prints of one of them—upon it. As it is, they have no suspicions, I hope, that the knife had ever been found before the boy found it in the bushes.”

  Pirberry accepted this view.

  “Seems to me, what with the lady nun that chased them off, and this boy who has the decency to think more of his obligations than of five shillings, which must seem the deuce of a lot to an orphan lad,” he said slowly, “you needn’t regret having taken ’em into your house, that’s one thing, ma’am.”

  “These things are always bread upon the waters,” said Mrs. Bradley, grinning.

  The Inspector, uncertain whether this was jest or earnest, did not attempt to reply, but asked her whether the boy was able to describe the two men.

  “No. They were ordinary,” she replied.

  “Like all the best criminals,” said Pirberry gloomily. “People with horrible scars, or fiery eyes, always turn out to be harmless. Do you think they were Hankin and Brent?”

  “I happen to know that they were not Hankin and Brent,” said Mrs. Bradley. “They were dressed in blue jerseys, merchant seamen’s caps, and pea-jackets, and so bore a superficial likeness to them, but physically there was not the faintest resemblance.”

  “And did you know those fellows at all? Had you seen them at the Cat’s Whisker, for example?”

  “No, I am certain I have never seen them before.”

  “And yet they tried to knife you?”

  “Unless they thought Mr. Harben was still at The Island, and he was to have been the one attacked.”

  “Oh, yes, much more likely,” said Pirberry.

  “You know, I doubt that,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I think the man who came with that knife knew perfectly well where David was. No, I’m a nuisance in some way or another, I’m pleased to think.”

  “Then you’d better be careful, ma’am. There are plenty of dark alleys in Soho,” said Pirberry sombrely.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Prodigal

  On a wonderful April morning Harben came back to The Island. Sister Mary Dominic saw him first. The time was half-past nine, and Sister Mary Dominic was returning from Mass, which she attended at the Catholic church two and a half miles off in the little town of Helsey, from which the village of Helsey Marsh took its name.

  She walked both ways, and Mrs. Bradley fed her (with a solicitous tenderness which tickled the nuns, who took it in turns to make the pilgrimage), as soon as she returned to the house.

  Harben caught up with her along the towing path, for, although the riverside walk was rather longer than the more direct route along the road, it was, on a fine spring morning, very much more pleasant, and the soft path made easier walking than did the military metal of the road.

  Kingcups in fat green bud and shining yellow were showing on every brookside, where the tiny tributaries were lined with the willows which told their course over miles of flat riverside country. Birds skimmed the blue and silver water, or rose to the April sky. The air, with a tender, nostalgic breeze so faint that it did not stir the sedges, was neither cool nor warm, but seemed, like angels’ breath, of another sphere. The brambles crept greenish sometimes over the path, the little thorn-trees, fairy-planted, grotesque and goblin-shaped, were in brilliant leaf, and even the red-brown mud of the river bank looked like a clean new bed for the waterside plants.

  The grass in the fields was short; there was none of the purple splendour and lush gold-green of the summer. The year was virginal still, and the grass was springing on sleepy ground still sodden from winter bogs. Harben stepped on to it, however, and came up with Sister Mary Dominic before she was aware of his approach. He had taken to calling her Mary, which shocked and amused her; not that she was shocked at
his using a Christian name, nor amused because it was part of her name in religion but not the name by which she had been known in the world before she had joined the Dominicans. She was shocked because his use of the name projected the kind of relationship she had foresworn for ever; she was amused because he seemed to derive satisfaction from what he realized must be her reactions to his thoughts.

  “Good morning, Mary,” he said, and fell into step beside her.

  “Good morning, David,” she answered, giving him a smile which had all of the morning in it. Then she said, but not with surprise, “You’ve come back?”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “We feared you had run into danger. We heard you had been to the house—the house where such dreadful things happen.”

  “They happened to me,” he said. “I was knocked on the head. I did not come to myself until I was far out to sea in an open boat with no food and scarcely any water.”

  He told her all his adventures. They lasted until The Island and its dozen neat neighbours came in view. He was silent then, until they were within thirty yards of the lane by which they could gain admission to the house. Then he said:

  “And how have you all been getting on?”

  “The boys are all well,” she answered. “Sister Mary Sebastian has prayed for you. Mrs. Lestrange Bradley has been all over Soho looking for you—”

  “And you?” he interrupted. “How have you been getting on, Mary?”

  “Just as usual,” she answered. He glanced quizzically at her.

  “You’ll have to go to Confession after that. That’s a black lie,” he said.

  She said, “I have missed you, and I have prayed for you, of course.”

  “A half-truth, but I’ll let you off the rest. Well, here we are, and now to confront the old lady.

  “I don’t see how you deduced that conversation, ma’am,” said Pirberry, very respectfully.

  “Do you not?” said Mrs. Bradley. “It may not be word for word, but as an intelligent reconstruction it isn’t far wrong. Unfortunately, as you know, Mr. Harben’s description of his travels, as confided to Sister Mary Dominic and myself—and I compared notes carefully with her before I gave you the account which you have had—was very little help in solving the mystery of his own disappearance, and the mystery of the old man’s death and the strange removal of the body.”