The Echoing Strangers (Mrs Bradley)

by Mitchell, Gladys

  ‘I can prevent his being rough with her, I think. We know now why he hated and feared Witt, and the case, after all, has never come to court.’

  ‘Good Lord! You’re not proposing to blackmail Cornish on the strength of that stolen liquor?’

  ‘Certainly not. But there is no harm in making use of information in our possession to protect that miserable little woman.’

  ‘But that would be blackmail!’

  ‘Very well, child. I now become a blackmailer, then. Kindly press that bell.’

  The maidservant answered it.

  ‘I wish to see the manager,’ said Mrs. Bradley grandly. The child fled, consternation in her eyes. Mrs. Bradley cackled. ‘That ought to bring Cornish post-haste. He will conclude that I am going to complain,’ she remarked in satisfied tones.

  Up came the landlord, almost bursting.

  ‘If this house ain’t good enough …’ he began. Mrs. Bradley motioned him to a chair and Gavin gave him a cigarette. These tactics were sufficiently mystifying to calm him. He did not sit down, but he stood there, hulking and sulky, twirling the cigarette between a banana-like thumb and finger.

  ‘Our business is confidential,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘and we should like Mrs. Cornish to help us.’

  ‘Her? Got no more sense than she was born with! … Ah, and if you think you can squeeze anything out of her as’ll get me into trouble with the police, you got another think coming. She never saw nothing, and she don’t know nothing, see?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Gavin, ‘but unfortunately for you, I am in a position to know a good deal, and, from what I know, I could soon learn a great deal more. That little Black Market manipulation of yours in stolen spirits hasn’t disappeared into the place where good dogs go, or anywhere else, you know.’

  ‘We are going to question your wife. I am perfectly willing for you to be present at the interview, but you are not to prompt her,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘And if you behave yourself, your crime …’ she underlined the word boldly, keeping her black eyes fixed on his face … ‘will remain resting in a decent obscurity which is undeserved by you, and which will last for just as long as your wife remains unterrorized and is not browbeaten by you. You’re a marked man, Mr. Cornish, and don’t you forget it.’

  Cornish turned a curious greenish colour. Then he flung the cigarette on the floor, stamped on it, and lurched at Mrs. Bradley like a drunken man. Gavin leapt up, but the little old woman kept him back. She stepped aside, and Cornish crashed heavily, one arm flung over the seat of an armchair, the other trailing on the floor. His head fell forward. His gross body slumped.

  Mrs. Bradley knelt down to find his pulse. She could not. She got up.

  ‘Please help me to turn him over,’ she said, ‘although I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’s dead.’

  Gavin helped her, but his police experience made it inevitable that he should agree with her verdict.

  ‘Heart, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Well, the world won’t be any the worse for his going out of it. Will you tell Mrs. Cornish while I send for the fellow’s own doctor? He’d better see the body. There’ll have to be an inquest, I suppose.’

  This proved unnecessary. The dead man had been under treatment for the past two years for heart attacks.

  ‘Told him he’d go off like this if he couldn’t take things easier,’ said the local doctor, a cheerful man of forty. ‘One thing, it’s saved that wife of his a good many hidings of late. I told him he’d kill himself if he went on knocking her about in the way he did. He was a real brute, you know.’

  Mrs. Cornish took the news of her husband’s death with indifference.

  ‘I hoped he’d go sudden,’ she said. Neither Gavin nor Mrs. Bradley felt inclined to ask her what she meant.

  ‘What will you do now, Mrs. Cornish?’ Gavin asked sympathetically, when the funeral, well-attended by the village, was over and he and Mrs. Bradley were again at the inn. The widow was in black, and looked remarkably well.

  ‘Oh, this place belongs of me, you know,’ she said. ‘I put Cornish in as landlord when we married, thinking folks like a man about the place, but I never made nothing over to him in his name. My poor father worked the ’ouse up and give it a good name and that, and whatever Cornish done to me, I wasn’t going to sign nothing away. My dad would have turned in his grave. He never wanted me to marry ’im in the first place, but Cornish was a fine-looking chap in them days, and I thought I knew best, as gals do.’ She sighed, and then looked round the bar parlour with evident pride. ‘I kep’ it all nice,’ she said wistfully, ‘and it’s all mine now. I wouldn’t wish ’im back.’

  Gavin thought he had never heard so unanswerable an epitaph. They gave her a couple of days, and then decided to ask her for the interview at which they had promised Cornish should be present.

  ‘Look here, Mrs. Cornish,’ said Gavin, ‘you can give us some help, I think.’ She regarded him woodenly. ‘We know all about Mr. Witt and the hold he had over Mr. Cornish, but that’s all washed up now. What we’d like you to tell us, if you will, is of anything you recollect concerning a man called Campbell. No doubt you’ve seen his name in the papers.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I never knew but one man called Campbell,’ she said. ‘Used to come fishing when old Mr. Cornish had the Fisher’s Inn, not so very far from ’ere. Me and Cornish was courting at the time. Mr. Campbell, he was mad on birds and such, and could say the Latting names of every plant you could show ’im. But very ’ard up ’e was, Mr. Campbell was. Used to give ’em ’is fish to ’elp pay ’is bill. Then ’e seemed to be better off. A whole sight better off. Bought ’imself a nice pair of field-glasses, and a microscope thing, and a couple of guns and a new trout-rod … everything.’

  ‘And had you ever any idea of what might have happened to provide him with all this extra money?’

  ‘No. He once mentioned his aunt, but Cornish, when he was in his cups … he used to drink deep as a young man although the doctor often warned him not … he says one day as how if Mr. Campbell had any old aunt it was … well, I won’t repeat what he said, it being unfit for Christian ears … but, anyway, that’s what he said.’

  ‘So you formed your own conclusions as to where the money came from, Mrs. Cornish?’

  ‘I didn’t dream. ’Tweren’t no business o’ mine. But Cornish, ’e did say as ’ow ’e believed Mr. Campbell and Mr. Witt was two of a kind. I’ve learned what ’e meant by that since. At the time I didn’t enquire. I knowed it meant nothing very good.’

  ‘Tell us some more about Campbell.’

  ‘I can’t. Him and Mr. Witt was pretty thick, and that’s all I know.’

  ‘I say,’ said Gavin at a venture, ‘you don’t remember a man called Tavis, I suppose?’ She shook her head. The name obviously meant nothing to her. ‘Or Grandall? A Mr. Grandall? Did he ever come to the Fisher’s Inn, do you know?’

  ‘Not as I ever heard tell on. Of course, as soon as we was married, old Mr. Cornish died and Cornish took on the ’ouse. But he didn’t make no sort of job of it, and when my old dad died and I found I’d been left this ’ouse we moved in ’ere. But.… what did you say the names was?’

  ‘Tavis and Grandall.’

  ‘No, I don’t think they could ’ave come. That’s like Davis and Randall, ain’t it?’

  ‘Like enough, but not quite right. Why, did you know a Davis and a Randall?’

  ‘Oh, no. It just struck me, that’s all.’

  ‘Sometimes I can dimly see why Cornish struck her,’ said Gavin, very sourly, when he and Mrs. Bradley were alone. ‘She’s not exactly helpful to us, is she?’

  ‘She has established a very definite connection between Campbell and Witt.’

  ‘And as they were both murdered it might have been Cornish who did in Campbell. I don’t believe that, you know.’

  ‘Who does? The point is that Witt initiated (or could have initiated) Campbell into the mysteries of the blackmailer’s art, and that is very important. If
we could prove that Campbell blackmailed Francis Caux on the subject of the exchange of identities between the twins, we might be well on the way to finding the motive for both the murders.’

  ‘We’ve got to this point before, but there doesn’t seem to be any proof.’

  ‘This is where I tackle Mr. Darnwell again,’ said Mrs. Bradley serenely. ‘I am now in a much better position to ask him questions than I was when I saw him before.’

  ‘Darnwell?’

  ‘The entertainer of nieces. The joy and the scandal of Wetwode. The expert on Easter Island art. The most interesting man I’ve met since I first met you!’

  Gavin grinned.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘The statements I should be compelled to make are not fit for a young man’s ears. Get you to London and learn what you can of his reputation in the City; of his bank-balance; his acquaintances; his war record (if any); his expectations under wills; his true nationality; the hotels and restaurants he frequents; his flat, his servants, his travels abroad, his ox, his ass, and anything else that is his.’

  ‘In other words … scram,’ said Gavin. ‘All right, then. I’ll leave you to all your devilment unassisted. Let me know how you get on and whom I shall ask to bail you out when you get into serious trouble. I suppose it had better be my Laura. She seems to respect your brains, although heaven knows why.’

  ‘I will wave to you across the court of the Old Bailey, if not before,’ said Mrs. Bradley. Gavin looked at her mistrustfully.

  ‘I still can’t see the wood for the trees,’ he said, ‘but I suppose you’ve got the fox in the bag all right.’

  ‘I wish I supposed so, too,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘but I do think Mr. Darnwell can help us, and I do think that I’m the better person to tackle him. I shall go to-morrow. Meanwhile, I mean what I say. You look up his antecedents, and if you can get on the track of one of his nieces, that might possibly help us.’

  ‘You underrate my powers of imagination,’ said Gavin with a great deal of dignity. ‘You mean that Derek-Francis may have tried to snaffle one of Mr. Darnwell’s young ladies.’ Mrs. Bradley hooted with laughter and made him a fencer’s salute with the poker she picked out of the grate.

  ‘Good luck to your hunting,’ she said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Echo Out of the Wood

  *

  ‘… the primroses and crocuses were hidden under wintry drifts; the larks were silent, the young leaves of the early trees smitten and blackened.’

  Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

  *

  ‘NICE TO SEE you,’ said Darnwell. ‘Meet Sadie. Sadie, a drink for Mrs. Bradley.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mrs. Bradley responded. ‘Your very good health, Mr. Darnwell. So this is niece Sadie. She does the family credit, if I may say so.’

  ‘Oh, gosh, Sam!’ said Sadie, displaying a lovely set of teeth in a good-humoured, slightly embarrassed smile. ‘The lady’s rumbled you.’

  ‘As who would not?’ agreed Mr. Darnwell lightly. ‘Hop it, darling, and give Mrs. Bradley the floor. I think she has come here on business.’

  ‘Trust you!’ said Sadie, treating Mrs. Bradley to an admiring and eloquent glance. ‘If she knows of a shop for a poor girl out of a job …’

  ‘You’re not out of a job,’ said Darnwell. ‘Go away, dear. Little pigs have big ears.’

  ‘And big swine have long snouts … especially if it’s anything to their own advantage,’ retorted the young lady, laughing happily. She went out of the room and Mrs. Bradley saw her go past the window.

  ‘She’s a nice kid,’ said Mr. Darnwell indulgently. ‘One of the very best. I wish I could find her a shop. But you know what it is these days. Farces with five characters and a walking-on part. Musicals at a premium. What did you need to unload? I’m entirely at your service, I need not say.’

  ‘I’ve come for information about the late Mr. Campbell.’

  ‘What, again?’ He registered horror. ‘I thought you were my pal.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I am not,’ Mrs. Bradley sedately observed, ‘but I fancy that you could give me some information which would help me to find Campbell’s murderer.’

  ‘Not sure that I want to find him,’ said Darnwell thoughtfully. ‘Bit of a mess, our Mr. Campbell. You might think I ought not to be calling the saucepan black, so to speak, but I can assure you that my little love-nest here don’t begin to add up to the harm that Campbell did. I don’t have any morals, in the accepted sense of the term, but the gals don’t come to much harm, and they do get three square meals a day and a dollop in the kitty to be going on with until they can find a shop. You’ll not find one of ’em ever to say I gave her a dirty deal.’

  ‘I am convinced that your only concern is to make certain that the indigent are fed, clothed and indulged, and, in any case, your morals are nothing to do with me. I should never dream of concerning myself with them. No, Mr. Darnwell; I am merely going to ask you a direct and simple question: did Campbell ever try to blackmail you?’

  Mr. Darnwell looked amused.

  ‘Sure he did,’ he responded.

  ‘On the subject of your nieces?’

  ‘Sure. I was no taker. I crowned him with Maimie’s tap-dance shoe … it was Maimie I had staying here at the time … and told him to run and tell the police. No bum of that calibre,’ said Mr. Darnwell righteously, ‘tells a gentleman of little leisure but very good taste where he gets off.’

  ‘Admirable,’ said Mrs. Bradley; and meant it. ‘Were there any repercussions?’

  ‘No. He steered clear after that, although he did waylay Sonia one day … it was Sonia was staying with me then … and asked her a couple of questions about me and my ways.’

  ‘And the result?’

  ‘Sonia couldn’t believe her ears. “What?” she said. “You something I won’t repeat! Do you take me for that sort of girl?” ’

  ‘And wasn’t she?’ asked Mrs. Bradley, interested.

  ‘She wasn’t interested in etchings, if that’s what you mean,’ said Mr. Darnwell, grinning, ‘but she was useful at darning and mending. You’d be surprised how domesticated some of these girls are. You see, it’s a bit difficult, having servants here. Now, when I was living on Easter Island while a spot of financial difficulty blew itself out …’

  Mrs. Bradley begged him to keep Easter Island, in which, she said, she was interested to the point of fascination, until there was time for him to do the subject justice. Darnwell begged her pardon, and the conversation reverted to Sonia.

  ‘No, she couldn’t believe her ears,’ said Darnwell emphatically, ‘and when he went on to the next question … holding out a ten-pound note, mark you, the kind of present I never let these girls see as it puts ideas in their heads … she just kicked his shins for all she was worth and fled back here and collapsed. She can act, that girl. I got her a job in films. She’s doing well. I never hear from her now. You know,’ he added solemnly, ‘I’m not all bad. You’d really be surprised.’

  ‘I don’t know that I should,’ Mrs. Bradley politely rejoined. ‘But Campbell?’

  ‘I don’t know any more. He left me alone after that. He was limping for days.’

  ‘You don’t know any more that has to do with you personally, but you know a good deal more than you have said.’

  ‘Maybe. But, look, he was a nasty fellow. Why not leave well alone? You can take it one of his victims got fed up with him. Does it really matter which one?’

  ‘Yes, because I want to prevent another murder.’

  ‘Oh? An innocent victim this time?’

  ‘Do you know, I have given the matter some thought, and I’m not at all sure I believe that there are very many innocent victims of murder. After all, silliness … and some of them have been extremely silly … is hardly innocence, is it?’

  ‘So the proposed victim is very far from innocent, I take it.’

  ‘Very far indeed.’

  ‘Yet y
ou want to save his life? … or is it hers?’

  ‘It is his. It is the life of Sir Adrian Caux.’

  ‘That madman? I’ve seen quite a bit of him since he’s been living so close. Who’s trying to do him in? His precious grandson?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Are you serious? I caught young Francis with Doreen last year … it was Doreen I had staying here then … and he was quite frightening the poor girl. I kicked him well and I kicked him truly. Then I held him by the collar and told him what I thought of him. I didn’t mince my words. He wasn’t deaf and dumb then. He let out a yell you could have heard at Dover, and then, while I talked, he went red to the roots of his hair. If ever a boy’s ears burnt, his did. He understood what I was saying all right.’

  ‘That is more than interesting.’

  ‘Mind you, I kept my weather eye open for the little beauty after that, but he didn’t give any more trouble.’

  ‘No, I imagine not. But could we get back to Campbell? What else do you know about him?’

  ‘Not much, and that’s the truth. It isn’t that I’m holding out on you.’

  ‘Perhaps I could help your memory. I should not think you are a highly suggestible man, so you won’t turn my promptings into leading questions. First, I take it that Campbell was a genuine naturalist.’

  ‘He was until he used his nature study to cover his other little occupation, the one I mentioned.’

  ‘Blackmail. Yes. And yet once a naturalist … it’s a fascinating business, you know.’

  ‘Oh, quite. But, of course, hide-outs built in the woods or in reed-beds can be handy for lots of things, can’t they? Look here, I’ll tell you what. I found one of ’em once. I’ll take you to it if you like.’

  ‘I would like it immensely. Now, at once, please.’

  ‘All right. I’ll just let Sadie know.’ He raised his voice.

  ‘You back, Sadie?’ There was no answer. Darnwell excused himself to Mrs. Bradley, but she, who had had no previous experience of love-nests, followed him out. They went round the bungalow past the windows of the room which they had just left and to the kitchen step at the back. There sat Sadie, surrounded by a dozen pairs of shoes, her own and Darnwell’s. She was singing quietly from the music of Rose-Marie and cleaning the shoes with vigour and great success.