Speedy Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Not guilty, my lord,’ responded Mrs Bradley. ‘This is not of my devising. It is the simple truth. Test it in any way you choose, and see how well it all hangs together. There is not a flaw that I can detect.’

  ‘You pointed one out to me only a minute ago,’ said Carstairs dryly. ‘Why didn’t Eleanor give Bertie away?’

  ‘She is in love with him,’ said Mrs Bradley simply; and she recounted to the astonished Carstairs the story Bertie himself had told her; the story which had begun two years before, and which was now moving to its astounding conclusion.

  ‘Well,’ said Carstairs, when she had finished, ‘I should like to think the whole affair out again in the light of what you have told me——’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Mrs Bradley complacently. ‘One increasing purpose runs through the whole of these unhappy but interesting affairs, and the theme is Eleanor’s desire for Bertie Philipson. Forgive me, but I really must go and dress. Who did you say the other bridesmaid was to be?’

  ‘A girl named Pamela Storbin,’ Carstairs answered. ‘A nice girl. Her guardian is a friend of mine, and I have known Pamela since she was three.’

  ‘Is she coming here first?’ asked Mrs Bradley keenly.

  ‘I believe not. The arrangements for the wedding have been fixed up at such very short notice that I fancy Pamela is to meet the others at the church, and will come back here to lunch.’

  ‘I—see,’ said Mrs Bradley, in such a thoughtful tone that Carstairs was moved to ask:

  ‘There is no reason why she shouldn’t, is there?’

  ‘It is almost a pity that Bertie is such a charming squire of dames,’ was Mrs Bradley’s cryptic, and therefore disquieting, reply. ‘And that, by the way, brings us back to the beginning of our conversation. You said you had not noticed how pleased Eleanor is at the news of this wedding.’

  ‘No, I haven’t noticed,’ said Carstairs. ‘But if she is pleased, I understand the significance of her pleasure. The marriage finally separates Bertie and Dorothy, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘And now I really must go and dress. Are you coming too? How very nice.’

  But Carstairs was not to be allowed to dress in peace. He was in his bedroom, attending to a refractory tie, when a sharp knock at the door arrested his attention.

  The detective-inspector stood outside.

  ‘Any inside information for me, sir?’ he asked keenly. ‘I saw you hobnobbing with Mrs Bradley in the summer-house, but the partition was too thick for me to catch much of what you were saying. Still, I heard enough to know that Mrs Bradley was parting with valuable information. So come, sir! Spill me what you know!’

  Carstairs laughed heartily.

  ‘But I don’t know any more than I did an hour ago when we talked together,’ he said. ‘Mrs Bradley was giving me a fanciful, highly coloured reconstruction of the events of the last two or three days so as to include all the known facts and a few which, I think, she has made up out of her own head.’

  The inspector looked disappointed, but was too wily to press the point.

  ‘Not much use in theorizing at this stage, sir. We haven’t collected enough facts to start theorizing about them. And, by the way, sir,’ he broke off, ‘there’s just one snag in the whole affair that I can’t get over anyhow.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Carstairs.

  ‘Well, look here, Mr Carstairs, you know Miss Bing better than I do, so you may be able to explain things to me which I haven’t had a chance to observe for myself. Does she seem to you, sir, the sort of young woman who would climb in at the bathroom window and drown a naked person? Seems to me she’s such a prim sort of young woman she’d hardly like to think about people with no clothes on, never mind coming in where they were and murdering ’em! You see my point, sir, don’t you? It isn’t in the picture, that isn’t. And I’ve learned to beware of things that don’t fit.’

  ‘You knew Everard Mountjoy was masquerading as a man, and that Eleanor Bing was formally engaged to her, didn’t you?’ asked Carstairs.

  ‘Good Lord, sir. Yes, of course! I was losing sight of that fact,’ cried Boring. ‘Well, that gives us a motive at once, as the Chief Constable seemed to think.’

  ‘So Mrs Bradley thought,’ said Carstairs. ‘The idea is that Eleanor found out the truth about her lover, and couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘Wait a minute, sir. Don’t harp on it. Let me get down the facts from a fresh point of view. Can’t have too much light on a dark subject.’

  Out came the note-book and pencil, and the inspector methodically re-tabulated the evidence against Eleanor Bing.

  ‘Of course,’ said Boring, when the note-book was again stored safely away, ‘she didn’t go to the bathroom to kill Mountjoy, but to sort of have it out with her—the bathroom, in these modern times, being one of the very few places where you can reckon on being undisturbed. Then, her feelings in the matter overcoming her judgment, Miss Bing——’

  He made a suggestive movement and Carstairs nodded.

  ‘Easiest thing in the world,’ said the inspector, with serious interest, ‘to drown a person in the bath. I wonder more murderers don’t do it. No incriminating weapon, no marks of violence, nothing but the body, which you don’t even have the trouble of getting rid of, because there’s always a big chance of the coroner’s jury bringing in a verdict of Accidental Death. For that’s usually the bother in a murder, sir,’ he went on, warming to the subject in whole-hearted fashion, ‘what the ’ell to do with the corpse. Look at Crippen! Look at Patrick Mahon! Oh, it’s the very devil to the murderer, the corpse is! Talk about the albatross what hung round that fellow’s neck in the poem we learnt at school! Well, a corpse is that same bird to the murderer, nine times out of ten. They burn ’em up with lime, or set fire to the house where they’ve left ’em, or carve ’em up so that the king’s own butcher would be hard put to it to name the joints, but’—the inspector nodded solemnly—‘we get ’em in the end, sir!’

  He nodded, and passed out.

  Carstairs, with a sigh of relief, returned to his tie, finished dressing, and ran downstairs, to find the rest of the party waiting for him.

  The ceremony was soon over. Eleanor and the brown-haired, youthful Pamela Storbin were the bridesmaids, Bertie Philipson acted as best man, and Dorothy’s father, summoned, with her mother, by telegram, gave the bride away. These casual and modern parents then refused to return with the wedding party to Chaynings, but, having bestowed a kiss and their best wishes on their daughter, and shaken hands with their new son-in-law, they departed for Aix-les-Bains without further delay.

  The second bridesmaid, young Pamela, was very easily prevailed upon to return to Chaynings, and Bertie promised to drive her home, a distance of twenty miles or thereabouts, soon after dinner.

  This well-laid plan, however, fell through owing to a sudden, violent thunder-storm accompanied by a deluge of rain.

  ‘Thought it seemed a bit oppressive this afternoon while we were playing tennis,’ Bertie observed. ‘Never mind. Let’s see what it’s like after dinner, Blue Eyes.’

  But after dinner the storm seemed at its height.

  ‘You can’t go home in this,’ said Garde.

  ‘Of course not! Of course not!’ cried Alastair Bing fussily. ‘Quite impossible!’

  ‘Well,’ said Bertie, wrinkling his brow, ‘if it’s all the same to everybody, I’d just as soon not take my little old bus out in this.’

  ‘I doubt whether you’d get across Handleigh Bottom after all this rain,’ said Dorothy. ‘It will be flooded down there.’

  Pamela glanced at Eleanor, but her hostess, beyond remarking, ‘I must go and see about the rooms, then,’ vouchsafed no wish for her company.

  ‘What’s bitten Eleanor?’ asked Garde, slightly put out by the discourteous lack of hospitable feeling betrayed by his sister.

  ‘Your sister is tired after a long day,’ replied his father, with obvious insincerity, and more for Pamela’s informatio
n than that of his son.

  ‘Well, I hope she’s fixed up our room all right,’ remarked Garde. ‘Come on, Dorothy! Let’s go and see the bridal chamber.’

  ‘I am afraid, Garde is apt to be coarse at times,’ said Eleanor, who happened to catch the tail-end of her brother’s remarks. ‘If you will accompany me, Miss Storbin, I will show you your room.’

  ‘Oh, thanks ever so much,’ said young Pamela, turning away from the window, through which she had been watching the jagged lightning above the trees.

  ‘Shall I come with you, darling?’ said Bertie, in his most fatuous manner.

  A jar of red roses by Eleanor’s elbow crashed to the ground.

  ‘Dear me,’ Mrs Bradley mildly observed, ‘what a disaster!’

  Eleanor irritably pressed a bell for a servant, and, turning her head over her shoulder, said:

  ‘Come along, Miss Storbin, please.’

  Unobtrusively, and almost unnoticed by everybody but Carstairs, Mrs Bradley slipped out after them, and returned in less than ten minutes with Pamela in tow.

  ‘Dorothy dear,’ she said, ‘you might lend this small child a nightdress. I don’t think it has occurred to Eleanor that she’ll need one.’

  ‘Of course!’ cried Dorothy, who, needless to say, had not accepted her husband’s invitation to inspect what he was pleased to call the marriage bed. ‘Come along, Pam! I expect you are put into my old room, aren’t you?’

  This proved to be the case, so, turning out the contents of Dorothy’s charming wardrobe upon the bed, the two girls spent a delightful hour in talking of clothes and their own mutual acquaintances and circle of friends.

  ‘And may I really borrow this one? Isn’t it a duck?’ cried seventeen-year-old Pamela, enraptured with the dainty garment.

  ‘You can keep it if you like,’ said Dorothy good-naturedly. ‘It isn’t one of a set. There’s a boudoir-cap somewhere to go with it. Here you are. Yes, it suits you better than it does me.’

  ‘Dorothy, you’re a perfect angel,’ cried Pamela. ‘Oh, and I do hope you’I! be ever so happy with Garde! Can you cope with him? He looks kind of fierce to me. Now, that angel Bertie Philipson——Oo, Dorothy! What was that?’

  ‘Can’t hear anything through the thunder,’ said Dorothy, turning suddenly very pale; for, although she could not hear, it was easy enough to see, and the ‘that’ of young Pamela’s startled question had been a rustle of clothing and a stifled cough, and, following the direction of Pamela’s eyes, Dorothy had caught sight of the glinting spectacles of Eleanor through the crack of the door.

  ‘Whether you heard anything or not,’ said Pamela, tossing her delightful brown head, ‘I’m going to open the door and find out what it was. Why, Dorothy, you look nearly sick with fright! Is this one of those old ghostly houses? What screaming fun!’

  But Dorothy leapt between her and the door and flung it open. The landing was empty, but somebody was descending the stairs.

  ‘Oh, it was only Eleanor,’ said Dorothy, in what she hoped was a light and casual tone; but Pamela’s eyes were keen, and her ears sympathetic.

  ‘You’re as scared as you can be!’ she cried, putting her arms round Dorothy and giving the older girl a heartening hug. ‘And I’m going right now to tell your fierce husband so, and make him take care of you.’

  ‘No, don’t tell Garde! He’ll think me silly. I’m going to tell Mr Carstairs. Promise you won’t say anything to Garde, Pam!’

  ‘See that wet——’ began Pamela promptly. Arm in arm, they descended the stairs.

  ‘Is Mr Carstairs your nerve specialist, then?’ asked Pamela. ‘We all heard about that fearful motor smash you were in, and I don’t wonder your bearings have all worked loose, you poor kid.’

  Without vouchsafing any other explanation to the child Dorothy sought out Carstairs, who had slipped into the billiard-room for a quiet smoke, and haltingly told him her fears.

  ‘Eleanor hates this kid. I don’t know why. Mr Carstairs, I’m as scared as I can be. You don’t think—I mean, it’s an awful thing to suggest——’

  ‘Then don’t suggest it, my dear,’ said Carstairs, with the special avuncular smile he kept for Dorothy. ‘Make your mind easy. I quite understand, and I promise you that all possible precautions will be taken.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. You are always so—so lovely to me!’ said Dorothy, half-smiling, half-tearful. To Carstairs’ mingled gratification and surprise, she put her arm round his neck and kissed him.

  ‘You couldn’t quietly hint to Mrs Bradley that I’m in here and that it seems quite a nice place for a confidential talk, could you?’ he asked, as she prepared to open the door.

  Seven minutes later, Mrs Bradley, in a magenta-gold-and-green evening frock, which for sheer ugliness could scarcely have been equalled, slid coyly into the billiard-room and softly closed the door.

  ‘I have made all the arrangements,’ she remarked, so softly that even Carstairs’ quick ears could scarcely catch what she said. ‘Listen. I take Pamela into my room, as I did Dorothy. You take Bertie Philipson into Dorothy’s old room where Pamela is supposed to sleep, and, if there are any’—she paused for a suitable word—’any manifestations during the night, you deal with them as you think best. I shall spend the night fully dressed and wide awake, so if you want me you have only to tap three times on my door.’

  ‘Good!’ said Carstairs. He laughed self-consciously. ‘How mad it all seems,’ he said, passing a hand across his brow. ‘I feel as though I am living in a dream.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you are,’ said Mrs Bradley tritely. ‘I beg your pardon. My philosophy is about on a level with that of the lamented Polonius.’

  She smiled sourly.

  ‘I’ll make a wager with you,’ she said. ‘I am willing to bet—let me see—fifty thousand pounds that, while you are keeping your vigil tonight with Bertie, he will tell you the same funny little tale that I told you in the summer-house this morning.’

  ‘I refuse to bet on a certainty. He will do nothing of the kind,’ answered Carstairs. ‘What about candles and our prayers?’

  Dorothy, instructed by Mrs Bradley, whispered to Pamela, as they went up the stairs:

  ‘Eleanor has had to change your room and doesn’t like to tell you, so she asked me to do so. Don’t say anything to her about it, will you? She’s so extraordinarily touchy where things to do with the household arrangements are concerned. You’ll have a room-mate. It is only Mrs Bradley. She probably won’t go to bed all night. Sits up and reads. But don’t let it disturb you. She’s an awfully good sort.’

  Pamela obediently followed Mrs Bradley into the room containing twin beds.

  ‘Sweet dreams, my dear,’ said the old woman.

  Less than twenty minutes later, Pamela lay curled up in bed, fast asleep.

  Mrs Bradley set the bedroom clock right by her watch, drew up the blinds, and watched the moon-drenched sky. The storm had cleared away, except for an occasional rumble and mutter far away to the south, and the night was lovely in its luminous calm.

  Mrs Bradley sighed sentimentally, tiptoed to the door, listened a full two minutes, and then, shaking her head, walked back to the window again.

  Later she switched on an electric reading-lamp, opened a volume of verse, and sat motionless, except for turning the pages, for over an hour. A quarter past twelve chimed from the church steeple; the moon was lower in the sky. Somewhere in the house a mouse scratched and nibbled.

  Mrs Bradley read on. At last she arose, laid down her book, crept across to the dressing-table, opened a drawer, and withdrew from its interior a cup and saucer and a thermos flask. She poured out half a cup of coffee from the flask, drank it, and returned to her book.

  Carstairs and Bertie were the last to go upstairs. When everyone else had disappeared, and even Eleanor had popped her head in at the billiard-room door to bid them good night, Carstairs said casually, replacing his cue:

  ‘I hope you’re not feeling sleepy, because I’ve got a job of work
for you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bertie, stifling a yawn, ‘how dashed annoying of you! I thought all my friends understood that my beauty sleep is indescribably precious to me, and that even the guns of Flanders could scarcely persuade me to forgo it.’

  ‘Flanders?’ said Carstairs, surprised. ‘You’re not as old as that, are you?’

  ‘Thirty last birthday,’ grinned Bertie. ‘But now to the work! What is’t thou would’st have me do?’

  ‘Help me keep watch in Dorothy’s old room, where the young girl Pamela Storbin was to have slept,’ said Carstairs calmly.

  ‘Keep watch—here, I say! What’s the game, sir?’

  The young man looked so startled that Carstairs wondered whether Mrs Bradley’s queer story could possibly be true.

  ‘And if so,’ thought Carstairs humorously, ‘I hope the young beggar won’t want to start trying to murder me!’

  Together they went up the stairs, repaired each to his own room, counted five hundred slowly (this was Carstairs’ idea), and then, in stockinged feet, crept down the flight of stairs which divided their landing from Dorothy’s own.

  ‘Hate going about with only my socks on my feet,’ confessed Bertie. ‘Always feel so bally nervous and helpless without my shoes. I’ve brought them in my hand, though, as you said.’

  ‘You can put them on now,’ said Carstairs, ‘as long as you don’t make too much row. Now, look here. I’ve moved the bed out about another four inches, so that we shall be more comfortable hiding behind the head of it than you were when you hid in here last time.’

  This shot in the dark had immediate effect.

  ‘So you know,’ said Bertie, his fresh-coloured face going white. ‘What do I have to do? Shut your mouth for you, or give myself up to the inspector Johnny for attempted murder?’

  ‘Not much good killing me,’ said Carstairs, smiling disarmingly. ‘Mrs Bradley knows, and I’ve more than a feeling that the inspector has his suspicions.’

  All this he confided in a whisper.

  Bertie followed his example, and replied: ‘Are you two going to give me away?’