The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Thanks,’ said Aubrey gratefully. ‘I’ve got all that down in shorthand. Stafford Major called me a bug-hunting stinker last term!’

  ‘Wright,’ went on Mrs Bradley, relinquishing her platform voice for something a little less forceful, ‘is just the sort of person who would think it funny to hang human joints on hooks. He is certainly capable of murder. He could have stolen the skull from his own studio most convincingly, and he could have substituted the coconut for it. He is capable of thinking out that clever touch of inserting a tiny living plant in the skull’s jaws to make it appear that it had been buried in the cliff far longer than was actually the case, and he would have had the forethought to plant the big clump of thrift over it to conceal the spot. He is stupid enough to have picked out the largest and most attractive clump of thrift he could find, too.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Aubrey, who had finished transcribing Mrs Bradley’s remarks about artists into long-hand and now felt that he possessed sufficient verbal ammunition to account for three or four Staffords Major at the beginning of the next school term.

  ‘He picked out a clump of flowering plant which immediately attracted the attention of those young people who came to camp on the shore,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Shortsighted, that. He should have picked out a less noticeable clump of thrift.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was shortsighted, wasn’t it? Still, jolly difficult to see how old Wright could have done the actual murder,’ said Aubrey, weighing it up. ‘He had a pretty sound alibi, you see.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Mrs Bradley’s voice was sharper than usual.

  ‘Church until a quarter to eight.’

  ‘Granted and proved.’ Mrs Bradley nodded.

  ‘Met Margery Barnes at a quarter to nine.’

  ‘Who told you that, child? I thought nobody knew that he was the man she met in the woods! She told me, of course, but –’

  ‘Well, she told me too. Only yesterday, though. Said she’d told you, and so she supposed it didn’t matter about telling other people. Made me swear to keep mum when the doctor was about, though.’

  ‘The doctor?’

  ‘Yes. Margery’s pater. I say, I suppose he wasn’t Jack the Ripper?’

  ‘Jack the – ?’

  ‘The jolly old murderer, you know.’

  ‘I was coming to him. Doctors have been known to commit these crimes. There was Dr Crippen.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Old Cora asked for it, though, didn’t she?’

  ‘I dare say Rupert Sethleigh asked for it, too,’ said Mrs Bradley tartly. ‘That is the worst of a crime like murder. One’s sympathies are so often with the murderer. One can see so many reasons why the murdered person was – well, murdered. The chief fault I have to find with most murderers is that they lack a sense of humour.’

  ‘But you just said that Cleaver Wright –’

  ‘I know, child. I know. And it almost, but not quite, persuades me to leave him out of the list of suspects. He has a sense of humour – morbid, perhaps, but real. I almost think I must acquit him.’

  ‘But what has a sense of humour to do with it?’ Aubrey asked, lying back in his chair again.

  ‘Everything, child. Lack of humour means lack of balance. Lack of balance implies mental instability. Mental instability is, logically, madness. All murders are committed by lunatics. I am referring to premeditated murders, of course.’

  ‘Really? Do you mean all murderers are mad?’

  ‘Except me. And my outrageous sanity is in itself a kind of mental defect, I sometimes think.’

  She chuckled. Aubrey grinned lazily.

  ‘But you haven’t told me yet about moving the skull,’ he said.

  ‘You remember playing a little game at my house?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We all played it, didn’t we? Go on.’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Think it out, child.’

  ‘We all wrote down where we thought the skull was hidden,’ said Aubrey slowly. ‘And – I’ve got it! Think so, anyway! Somebody who played that game thought you were getting a bit too hot on the subject of the skull, so they moved it. Idiots! Much better have left it alone.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Mrs Bradley, frowning thoughtfully. ‘It wasn’t the murderer who played this game of Hunt the Thimble with the skull, you see.’

  ‘Oh, you know who – you know – I mean, how do you know that? Do you know who the murderer is?’

  ‘I know that the man who moved that skull from Culminster to Bossbury was a man in a panic,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘and that the murderer is not in a panic. He feels perfectly secure. And upon my word,’ she concluded vigorously, ‘if I didn’t feel certain that the police will sooner or later make out a case against some innocent person, I would leave him in peace. Rupert Sethleigh –’ She stopped. After all, this charming, serious boy was related to the murdered man.

  Aubrey nodded.

  ‘Asked for it,’ he continued. ‘Yes, he did, didn’t he? “Rupert Sethleigh – Bounder” ought to be on his tombstone.’

  ‘Still, I fancy that when we come to the end of these complicated affairs we may discover that it was a case of diamond cut diamond,’ amended Mrs Bradley, completely serious for once.

  CHAPTER XX

  The Story of a Crime

  ‘THE policy of laissez faire, exemplified by some of our leading statesmen during the eighteenth century,’ observed Mrs Bradley, fixing a beady, bird-like, sharp black eye upon the Vicar of Wandles Parva, who, absent-minded as usual, was endeavouring to insert a small but valuable silver vase, happily empty of water, into the right-hand pocket of his best alpaca jacket, ‘has its application even at the present day.’

  ‘My dear man!’ exclaimed Mrs Bryce Harringay in horror, grasping the charming little receptacle very hastily and rising to restore it to its former position on Mrs Bradley’s drawing-room mantelpiece. ‘It can’t be kleptomania in a gentleman of his profession,’ she confided in a sibilant aside to the owner of the vase, ‘so it must be pure absent-mindedness.’

  ‘Not kleptomania, no,’ replied Mrs Bradley composedly, but turning suddenly and terrifyingly serious. ‘That has become a mere police-court term to account for the astonishing vagaries of the idle rich.’ Her mirthless cackle added ironic corollary to the theorem.

  ‘I believe the young people have concluded their game,’ said Mrs Bryce Harringay. ‘It sounds like it.’

  ‘Then I expect they would like some tea,’ said the hostess, rising to ring the bell. ‘Shall we go into the garden?’

  The young people, consisting of Felicity Broome, Margery Barnes, Aubrey, and Jim, had been playing croquet on the lawn. It was a beautiful lawn, admirably kept, but none of the four cared for playing croquet upon any lawn whatsoever. However, their hostess, with a determined frown upon her forehead and a vinegary grin upon her lips, had insisted upon pressing mallets and balls upon them, and herself had placed the hoops ready for play. It was impossible to refuse to fall in with the arrangements. Mrs Bryce Harringay beamed approval.

  ‘A most delightful pastime, most!’ she observed largely, waving her plump white hands in a kind of careless benediction upon the incensed Aubrey, the embarrassed James, the giggling Margery, and the shrugging philosophical Miss Broome. ‘So good for the manners! So suitable for a summer day! A most attractive game, most!’

  ‘There,’ said Mrs Bradley to Aubrey, who promptly smacked his ball through the open gate into the road, where it trickled merrily downhill for a hundred yards or more, ‘now you can squabble and fight and lose your tempers and accuse each other of cheating for at least an hour, while we old, decrepit persons engage one another in gentle conversation punctuated by snatches of sleep.’

  She waved a skinny claw at them, watched Aubrey stalk moodily off to recover his ball, and then she went into the house.

  At tea the conversation turned inevitably upon the murder. ‘I wonder who on earth it can be? The inspector is getting absolute wind-up. I should think the police will be c
ompelled to make some sort of a move soon, with all the newspapers shouting at them like this,’ said Aubrey to Mrs Bradley.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘I wonder they don’t pay more attention to Mr Savile,’ said Felicity. ‘He can’t show an alibi for the evening of June 22nd. He attempted to kill you in the Manor Woods –’

  Mrs Bradley chuckled.

  ‘Aubrey here told the inspector so,’ she said, ‘and there is no doubt that Sethleigh used to meet Lulu Hirst in the Cottage and also in the Manor Woods. And Mr Wright did some curious things on the night of the murder. So did Mr Broome,’ she added, grinning.

  ‘Attempted to kill you?’ exclaimed Mrs Bryce Harringay. ‘Good gracious! When was this?’

  ‘Aubrey will remember, I dare say,’ replied Mrs Bradley comfortably. She selected a piece of cake with careful discrimination. ‘He was with me at the time, as I said. We were in the Manor Woods, and I was attempting to reconstruct the crime from the data which we had at our disposal at that time. I imagine that I was speaking in a loud voice. Suddenly an arrow – a cloth-yard, goose-feathered, Battle of Agincourt affair with a great iron barb and a most professionally Robin Hood flight, came whizzing past my ear and stuck in the trunk of a tree on the farther side of the clearing. The police theory seems to agree with Aubrey’s idea that the arrow was shot with the deliberate intention of putting an end to my quiet and harmless existence. All the same. Savile came forward immediately and apologized quite nicely for his carelessness.’

  The vicar laughed.

  ‘Depends what meaning you attach to the word “carelessness”,’ said Jim Redsey. ‘He probably meant he was sorry he’d made such a boss-eyed shot.’

  Mrs Bradley shook her head, and Felicity Broome broke in.

  ‘I should think he would have run away if he really attempted your life,’ she said. ‘I mean, he wouldn’t have wanted to advertise his presence exactly, would he?’

  ‘Intent to deceive,’ said Aubrey, eating raspberries and cream with aplomb. He scooped up a delicious spoonful.

  ‘Greedy pig,’ said Margery Barnes indulgently. ‘Pass the cream.’

  ‘No, honestly,’ continued Aubrey, passing it, ‘I expect he thought somebody might have seen the shot, and wanted to lull their suspicions – and Mrs Bradley’s, too.’

  ‘Well, I certainly accepted his apology in the spirit which appeared to inspire it,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘I wonder someone doesn’t confess to the murder and have done with it,’ said Margery. ‘I mean, if I had committed a murder I should be in such a funk that I should throw in my hand and get the hanging over, I think.’ And she shivered at the thought.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know why one should confess,’ protested the vicar, passing his cup for more tea. Mrs Bradley took the cup from his hand, and he began to drum on the table with his long fingers. ‘After all, there is no need for a fellow to queer his own pitch, is there? It’s up to the police to prove he did it.’

  ‘You know,’ said Felicity, when the servants had cleared away the remains of the meal, and all were lounging comfortably in garden chairs, ‘I can’t quite see anybody doing all that.’

  ‘All what?’ Margery Barnes looked across at her.

  ‘Well, all the horrid part. I mean, well, take Mr Savile, for instance. He always seemed to me such a feeble specimen, somehow.’

  ‘Psychologically it would be possible for such a man to commit such a murder,’ pronounced Mrs Bradley, ‘and I told the inspector so! Not that it seemed to carry much weight, I must say. He could have done it; so could Cleaver Wright, I think. Dr Barnes would be capable of dismembering the body, owing, of course, to his training as a surgeon rather than, let us say, to his natural gifts!’

  ‘The police don’t worry about psychology,’ said Jim, grinning lazily, ‘and yet they seem to catch a good many murderers.’

  ‘And hang ’em, too,’ said the vicar, puffing contentedly at his pipe as he applied a match to the bowl.

  Mrs Bradley sat up, and looked from one to the other of them.

  ‘Is that a challenge?’ she asked. Out from between her two rows of small, even teeth came a little red tongue. She passed it very slowly over her top lip. Her smile did not alter very much while she did it, and yet Jim Redsey wriggled uneasily in the long, well-cushioned, comfortable chair, and averted his eyes. The vicar was busily applying another match to his pipe, so that he saw neither the smile nor the tiny movement of the tongue, both so suggestive of a cruel beast of prey in lazy contemplation of a meal he is in no hungry haste to devour. . . .

  Mrs Bradley lay back again.

  ‘The police are usually guided by what is known as circumstantial evidence,’ she said. ‘After all, there can seldom be any eye-witness of a crime like murder, and therefore direct evidence of guilt is difficult to obtain. Circumstantial evidence is the next best thing. That is about all which can be said for it. Sometimes it leads the police aright, and sometimes it leads them entirely wrong. Take this murder of Rupert Sethleigh. Let us work it out this way:

  ‘At seven fifty-five on the evening of Sunday, June 22nd, Rupert Sethleigh and his cousin, James Redsey, went into the Manor Woods to continue an argument which had degenerated into a bitter quarrel.

  ‘They had not been in the woods very long – put it that they walked to the Stone of Sacrifice, probably by devious ways, and that it took them ten minutes – when, in that rather sinister place, the quarrel became so bitter that Redsey turned upon Sethleigh and knocked him down. As he fell, Sethleigh struck his head, probably pretty hard. At any rate, his cousin firmly believed that he had killed him. He was panic-stricken at what he thought he had done, and, instead of going for assistance or doing any of the sensible, level-headed, humane things which ought to have suggested themselves to his mind under the circumstances, he took fright, hid what he supposed was the dead body of Sethleigh in a hazel copse, and made for the “Queen’s Head”, where he intended to perform for himself the double service of proving as plausible an alibi as the circumstances would permit, and of drinking himself into incoherence, helplessness, and forgetfulness.’

  Jim writhed. Felicity gazed at him reproachfully, and Margery giggled nervously.

  ‘Well, it was not a very plausible alibi, because, unluckily for Redsey, it was known to Mrs Bryce Harringay that he had accompanied his cousin into the Manor Woods, and no one could be found who would swear to having seen Sethleigh alive after the woodland had swallowed them both up.

  ‘Now it seems practically certain from the police point of view that Sethleigh was not dead when Redsey fled from the woods to the public house. They think he was stunned. The evidence offered in support of this contention is that Redsey would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to dismember the body. He could prove satisfactorily where he was all that Sunday night, and that he was in and about the Manor House all day Monday, and it seems certain that he could not have transported the body into Bossbury, introduced it into Binks’s shop, and dismembered it between the hours of eight a.m., when the market opened, and nine-thirty a.m., when Binks and his assistant entered the shop on Tuesday morning. For these reasons the police assumed that he was not the murderer, unless he had an accomplice who performed the more gruesome part of the task for him. As no such accomplice could be traced, the police assumed, as I say, that Redsey’s blow had stunned his cousin, and had not caused his death.

  ‘That disposes of Redsey’s part in the matter. That he spent part of the Monday night in digging a grave in the woods for the reception of the body, and searched, without success, in the bushes near the clearing for the corpse which had disappeared, is further evidence in support of the theory that he had nothing to do with dismembering the body.

  ‘Now I come to a peculiar circumstance which has been allowed to waste its full significance upon the desert air until this moment. An axiom among historians and great detectives is to beware of the bit of evidence which refuses to fit. These little awkward facts are keys to m
ysteries. Now, in this case, we have such an awkward fact in a remark made by Margery Barnes to –’

  Margery sat up with a jerk, consternation written all over her ingenuous countenance.

  ‘Me?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, but I’m sure –’

  ‘To Felicity Broome, in my presence,’ continued Mrs Bradley, proceeding serenely with her argument. ‘The remark was to the effect that at about nine o’clock or just after, on that fateful Sunday evening, being in the Manor Woods for a purpose which had nothing to do with us or with the murder of Sethleigh, she saw a man come crawling out of some bushes behind the circle of pines which mark the clearing. Now, rather naturally, I think, considering the circumstances, afterwards she assumed that this crawling man must have been Rupert Sethleigh, and that, through having seen him alive after nine o’clock, she was in a position to prove positively that James Redsey could not have killed him at about five minutes past eight.

  ‘Now, I refused to have anything to do with that part of Margery’s tale for two reasons. First, she did not actually recognize the man as Sethleigh; she merely assumed, after she had heard that James Redsey might be accused of the murder, that a man crawling out of the bushes in the Manor Woods on the evening of Sunday, June 22nd, must necessarily have been the man James Redsey knocked down and whose body he hid. The second point is a good deal more important because, after all, although the idea that this man must have been Sethleigh was mere auto-suggestion on Margery’s part, yet the notion was far from improbable. It might very well have been Sethleigh whom she saw, except for one strikingly important fact.

  ‘The human eye, in moments of terror, acts like the snapshot attachment of a camera. There is no long exposure, as, to speak fancifully, we get when we calmly admire a fine view. No! The mind clicks a shutter – down and up! I am terrified! I cry out! I run! And one distinct impression of the thing which terrified me remains upon my mind. Margery retained such an impression. When you were telling us the tale, your words, Margery, my dear, were these: “And a man came slowly crawling out of the bushes like a great black slugh!