Death of a Busybody

by George Bellairs

  P.C. Harriwinckle paused, his mouth open, an impaled dumpling half-way en route. His eyes bulged.

  “Wot’s that you sez, mother?” he asked with eager menace.

  “Mrs. Wellings,—one of the Emmanuel’s Witnesses, she be—wuz a-tellin’ of me this mornin’ that Thornbush mentioned it in ’is prayer at the meetin’ last night.”

  The constable flung down his knife and fork, picked up his helmet and, fastening his belt on the way, rushed into the village street.

  “Hey, Sam, Sam! Wot about the treacle-puddin’?” howled his wife after him, but her husband was out of earshot.

  Walter Thornbush was eating his dinner of sandwiches on an overturned box in his wheelwright’s shop when Harriwinckle hastily entered.

  There was fine dust in Walter’s hair and sawdust all over his clothes. He looked to have been rolling in the by-products of his craft.

  “Look ’ere, Thornbush,” said Harriwinckle, without preamble. “Wot’s all this about you a-offering public prayers on account o’ bein’ spared from givin’ evidenks? Now, wot is this evidenks? I demands to know.”

  Thornbush chewed meditatively, cleared his throat and looked the constable impudently in the face.

  “The accused having been arrested, it h’isn’t your business to be cross-h’examining me, Sam Harriwinckle. By divine dispensation, I’ve been spared the ’orror of testifying against my fellow man. For that I proffered ’umble thanks to Gawd at the meetin’ last night. And rightly so, too. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.”

  “That’s enough o’ that, Walter Thornbush. No more texes, if you please. Facts is wot I wants, and facts I’m gon’ to ’ave. Now, wot evidenks have you been withholdin’ from the law, and why, when I called ’ere to see you, didn’t you disclose same to me as you oughter?”

  “Because, I wasn’t goin’ to be having the blood of a fellow man on my ’ands. My principles forbids it, Sam ’arriwinckle.”

  “Unless you tells me wot it is at once, I shall treat you as an excessary arter the fact; as withholding wital information from the police and h’obstructin’ same in the execution of their duties; and I shall see that you’re sub-peenied to give testimony under h’oath in the court and at the same time be treated as an ’ostile witness.”

  Beneath such a load of legality and guilt, Thornbush quailed. He almost fell backwards from his perch and took quite a time to recover his poise and speech.

  “Hostile witness?” he said. “No Emmanuel’s Witness can be hostile.”

  “Oh yes they can, and the law makes it ’ot for them.”

  “Oh, well, if it comes to that, I may as well tell you. The man’s been arrested at h’enny rate. My bit won’t make any difference. I saw him crossing the field behind the smithy about the time o’ Miss Tither’s death. Saw ’im come back, too. He was sneakin’ along, like, and thought I didn’t see him. I was in the darkness of my shop and could see without bein’ seen.”

  Beside himself with excitement, Sam Harriwinckle took down times, dates and a statement from the wheelwright, and went on his way home rejoicing. He telephoned his news to the Evingdon police and then, having jauntily hung up the receiver, sought out his wife, who was washing-up in the kitchen and grumbling loudly to herself at her husband’s lack of consideration for the culinary treats which she was at pains to prepare for him in the shape of treacle-puddings and the like. Seizing her round her ample waist, P.C. Harriwinckle planted a noisy, rousing kiss on her mouth.

  “Ma, blest if yew ain’t a better detective nor the lot of us! Yew’ve given me the crucicle clue of the case,” he said.

  Mrs. Harriwinckle, hot and confused, blushed modestly and almost buried her face in the dishcloth in her confusion.

  “Go on with you, Sam,” she said. “Wot things you do say.”

  Later, at a conference held in the library of Sir Francis Winstanley’s home, Littlejohn was asked by the Chief Constable to give Oldfield and himself a running account of his reconstruction of the crime. As Sir Francis remarked, the Scotland Yard man’s report would be the Crown’s case in Rex v. Jenkinson and, before a formal statement was submitted to the Public Prosecutor, they might as well turn over the details in free-and-easy fashion and make themselves familiar with them.

  With his pipe glowing and a glass of whisky at his elbow, Littlejohn began his story.

  “The death of Miss Tither is really the end of Jenkinson’s, or Lorrimer’s, life of crime. Let’s call him Lorrimer, it seems to fit better. He was a brainy lad and ambitious, but seems to have held himself in check until his head got turned by associating with those outside his class and income in the last war. Then, when he was demobilized, he started his confidence-trickster’s game. From Mortimore, since his arrest, and from the documents impounded at the Home Alliance office, we get a pretty picture of his doings. For the past ten years, he’s carried on this bogus charities racket. As the Rev. Dr. Scarisdale—elusive and non-existent—he posed as a reformer, but never allowed himself to be seen. With the help of Mortimore, he discovered charitable-minded people, mostly elderly and unbusinesslike ladies, with gullible dispositions, and pestered them for contributions to his work, which, as the means of rescuing fallen women, seems specially to appeal to that class of subscribers. They made five thousand a year out of it in sums—many of them substantial—from all over the country. If anyone got curious, there was always Jenkinson—again Lorrimer—with his firm of warranted accountants, of long standing and repute—to sign the balance-sheet and add tone to the accounts.”

  “A very pretty idea,” interposed Sir Francis, “but rather risky. Suppose someone had insisted on seein’ Scarisdale or actual fruits of the labours of the Home Alliance? And suppose it had come out that there was ‘no sich person’ or fruits?”

  “Well, I suppose, sir, that the type of subscriber to such charities, isn’t very curious that way. Provided they get accounts, flattering letters, and plenty of literature on the subject, they don’t ask questions. That’s why Miss Tither came to grief. She was a busybody, who wouldn’t be put off, and put Lorrimer’s little game in danger by threatening—not vindictively, but from curiosity—to have it investigated.”

  Littlejohn drank up his whisky and continued.

  “From what I can gather, Lorrimer took up his residence here to be near his sister, Mrs. Weekes. They were natives of Hilary, remember, but left the place when they were children. Annie, the girl, returned with her father, but Lorrimer stayed in rooms in Trentbridge and grew out of recognition by the natives. Then, having assured himself of an income from his confidence enterprises, he returned here. He and his sister were strangely attached and perhaps, hearing of her misalliance with Weekes and the turn events had taken, he bought Holly Bank to be near her. Probably Weekes himself didn’t know that Lorrimer was his brother-in-law.”

  Sir Francis filled up Littlejohn’s glass and the detective, after re-lighting his dead pipe, took up the tale.

  “Lorrimer hadn’t been in Hilary long, before he chose Miss Tither as a likely one to pluck for his Home Alliance. She was abnormally interested in the sexual wrong-doings of the village. That made her a good one to tackle for subscriptions for fallen women elsewhere. From headquarters in London, therefore, began a steady stream of importunate letters. Miss Tither was gulled into thinking she was supporting a great work, was made a vice-president, and opened her purse liberally. Not only that, she expressed an intention of leaving a legacy to the society. We may take it that Lorrimer soon got to know the extent of the legacy. That was good, but not enough for him. He wanted all he could get, so having discovered that Miss Tither’s next-of-kin, Wynyard, was legatee, he set about discrediting him, by embellishing a tale which Haxley had told him and fobbing it off on Miss Tither with a show of innocent gossip. She fell for the plan and wrote giving Wynyard an opportunity of clearing himself.”

  “But what good was a legacy to L
orrimer?” interposed Oldfield. “If she didn’t die first, he’d have had to kill her to get it. Rather a risky price to pay, eh?”

  “Yes, but he was ready to take it. The impounded books and papers of the Home Alliance showed a huge falling-off in subscriptions, probably owing to the war. The type of people who give to such societies are usually elderly ladies and such like, with fixed incomes. The war’s hit that class hard and charitable subscriptions are the first to feel the axe. Furthermore, Miss Tither wrote a letter, which we found in the files, to the effect that she proposed asking a friend of hers, a stockbroker in the City, to investigate the Home Alliance, in view of the fact that she proposed to leave an increased legacy to it in her Will. Such a step would have been fatal. A thoroughgoing business man, let loose among the Home Alliance accounts would have seen through the swindle right away. Lorrimer and Mortimore, the latter by a personal visit to Hilary, tried to put her off, and succeeded in doing so for a time, but she being of a ferreting, inquisitive nature, couldn’t be quietened for long, and finally insisted. That signed her death-warrant.

  “I don’t know why Miss Tither was in such a pother about making what she called an emergency Will. We can assume, however, that in her conversation with Lorrimer on Sunday, he’d so played on her feelings, that she drew a document herself and executed it before Russell and Thornbush. Perhaps Lorrimer mentioned the risk of Wynyard’s doing her violence on hearing that she proposed to alter her Will and cut him out. On the other hand, she may have mentioned the threatening attitude of the Weekes man and woman and Lorrimer again might have suggested she should make the Alliance legatee for the residue of her estate in what she called the emergency document. In any case, there was the new Will. That gave Lorrimer two motives; the shutting of Miss Tither’s mouth lest the Home Alliance be investigated, and his need for money which the Will would give him, and, under the new document, in large quantities. He was so eager to know the result of her interview with Wynyard and, presumably, whether or not she’d taken his advice and drawn up a new Will, that he hastened to meet her on her way back from Satchell’s café. The news he got from her then, sealed her fate. On the first opportunity, and there were many with a prowling woman of her kind, he would kill her. He left her and returned to Holly Bank. Then, looking from the window at home, he sees something which presents him with the very chance he’d been seeking. Weekes is quarrelling with Miss Tither and finally strikes her to the ground and sheers off. Lorrimer sneaks to the scene of the crime, hoping she’s dead. Instead, he finds her still breathing and with a good chance of recovering consciousness. He is unarmed and wonders how to finish her off. He remembers the cesspool. Hastily, he carries the body there and opens the lid, only to find the place clean and dry. He turns on the tap from the first tank and a slow trickle of water begins to run in. He thrusts the body in the pit, face down, closes the trap and creeps away. If she doesn’t drown, she’ll suffocate.”

  “But what about Weekes?” said Sir Francis. “Surely, Lorrimer would quietly have tried to put the blame on him, if he could. It was known by Russell, for example, that Weekes had threatened Miss Tither. Furthermore, one would think that Lorrimer would have jumped at the chance of freeing his sister from the whisky-sodden husband’s clutches.”

  “For some reason or other, he didn’t, and I’m sure it was at the wish of his sister. Didn’t she say, ‘Vengeance is mine.’ She was killing off Weekes in her own way with the whisky bottle. Had she taken a firm stand with him when first he started drinking, he would probably never have become a drunkard at all. But she despised him. He was beneath her and the longer she lived with him, the more she hated him. When, however, Weekes confessed to me that he had attacked Miss Tither, matters changed. Don’t forget, Weekes had probably seen Lorrimer in the vicinity. He was coming with me to the police station and his wife didn’t know what he’d say once he got there and under fire. To prevent his incriminating her brother, whose means of livelihood, whose double life, and whose association with Miss Tither she was aware of, for brother and sister were in the habit of secretly meeting at Holly Bank, she acted quickly, shooting her husband with the shotgun and making it appear as suicide. She was a cunning one, with a craft born of madness. Her mother died in an asylum and she took after her. Somehow, she must have guessed who committed the crime; perhaps she saw Lorrimer about the place on the morning of the murder. When her brother, hunted by the police, sought refuge at her farm and Harriwinckle, attracted by the smoking of a chimney which wasn’t accustomed to doing so, suspected that someone was lying doggo there and went to enquire, she was quite prepared to use the gun on the policeman, too.”

  “What a queer, even grotesque crime it is,” said Sir Francis. “Hearing of it, one seems to lose a sense of reality. The atmosphere of that strange farm, the couple living there, getting on each other’s nerves, hating and ready to murder. And across the village, another man, nursing crime, wondering how his sister was faring, yet unable to come into the open on her side, lest he disclose his identity.”

  “Yes. How well he preserved it! Mortimore knew him as Jenkinson and knew that he was using his powers as an accountant to commit his swindling, but he didn’t know where his hide-out was, or what name he assumed. All correspondence was accumulated at the office for him. Jenkinson arrived once a week from goodness knows where and, having given Mortimore his instructions and drawn his share of the spoils, vanished into the blue again. Luckily for us, Cromwell got the old photograph from Mr. Titmuss. It was taken long ago, but the features were there, the pointed nose, the queer shaped, almost hydrocephalic head, and that put us on the track. When Jenkinson and Lorrimer turned out to be one and the same, the fog cleared, didn’t it?”

  Sir Francis rose, indicating that the session was at an end. “Well,” he said, “I think we’ve got a good case. Now it’s up to Counsel for the Crown.”

  At his trial, Crispin Lorrimer, alias Theodore Jenkinson, was as cool as a cucumber in the dock. One would have thought, from his bearing, that he was a spectator at some kind of contest which was staged for his pleasure.

  Mr. Claplady, showing signs of emotion at testifying against one who had once been a member of his flock, told of the cesspool, the strange life of the Weekes’s, the occurrences in the village on the morning of the crime. Isaiah Gormley, dressed more picturesquely than ever, figured almost as an expert witness on cesspools and caused the prosecution a lot of trouble, patience and fruitless sarcasm before he ended his tale. Mr. Haxley, after refusing to take the oath, told Prettypenny’s tale of Wynyard’s life in Pandalu, which Wynyard shamefacedly confirmed, and the Crown brought out Lorrimer’s embellishments and his creation of a fictitious bank-manager for his purpose. The accused, at this point, nodded approvingly as though admiring his own fertile imagination.

  Miss Satchell, Hilsborough, Haxley and, finally, Walter Thornbush, who made great play with the oath, fixed the relative positions of Lorrimer and Miss Tither at the time of the crime and Littlejohn gave particulars concerning Weekes’s confession and death. Mortimore, turned King’s Evidence, Cromwell, and a sworn statement from Mr. Titmuss, who was unfit to travel, laid bare all the affairs of the Home Alliance, and Miss Livermore, red-nosed and affronted at being associated with a criminal firm, blew Chitty, Mulliner and Passey wide open to the winds of circumstance and indignantly repeated that Crispin Lorrimer and Theodore Jenkinson were one and the same person. The accused bowed to her from the dock. The relations between Lorrimer and Mrs. Weekes, now hopelessly insane and detained in the County Asylum, were firmly established by history and state records.

  There was nothing between Jenkinson and hanging but the speech of his counsel. Mr. Morton Bagshawe, K.C., did his best. He laughed at the idea of a crime which nobody had witnessed. He scouted the player-piano alibi, in spite of the fact that two maids had sworn that their master went raving mad and ran away from home after discovering that the police had learned that such an instrument was in his possess
ion. “Gentlemen,” he said to the jury, “you’re not going to let two hysterical servant-girls exaggerate a situation into a life-and-death matter, and in their search for notoriety, make a mountain out of a molehill.”

  The verdict was “guilty”, however. It was only when the judge, wearing a strange strip of black stuff atop his wig, pronounced the fatal words, that the accused seemed to realize what was happening. It was then that Jenkinson, “the most cold-blooded and cowardly skunk I’ve ever taken on”—those were Bagshawe’s words sub rosa—it was then that Jenkinson turned ashen, clutched the rails of the dock, howled blasphemies at the judge, and was finally borne away yelling and struggling by his guards. He was hanged after an unsuccessful appeal. When he finally realized that nothing could save him, Jenkinson wrote out a long and boastful confession which he addressed to Littlejohn. This statement bore out to a remarkable degree the story constructed by Littlejohn from the information and clues he and his colleagues had gathered. “I have my doubts as to whether or not he should be in Broadmoor,” commented the prison chaplain as he handed Littlejohn the letter. After he had read it, the detective almost agreed.

  Chapter XVIII

  Repercussions

  Mrs. Weekes never recovered her sanity and is still detained during His Majesty’s pleasure.

  Littlejohn, who made a trip to Evingdon to terminate certain formalities and took the ’bus to Hilary to stay the night with his friend, the landlord of “The Bell”, found the little village quite recovered from the unhappy events of the autumn. It was an early spring day when he arrived, the air was unusually warm, and before he departed to catch his train, Littlejohn enjoyed a stroll round the place. The Rev. Athelstan Wynyard was in residence at Briar Cottage. He had established his rights to Miss Tither’s estate after the exposure of the bogus charity and had forthwith resigned and rested from his labours in the South Seas. Sarah Russell had left the place to marry a farmer in the neighbouring village. Walter Thornbush, more vociferously religious than ever through his matrimonial disappointment, was toiling at his wheels as Littlejohn passed the door of his shop. Walter’s hair and clothes were, as usual, covered in the off-scourings of his craft, and he looked as though he had recently plunged head-first in wood chippings and sawdust.