At length he put the glass away and shook his head hopelessly at the idiotically smiling masterpiece.
‘Except that you’re the last thing on earth that any sane man could look at for more than twenty seconds at a time without being completely overcome by D.T.s,’ he said aloud, ‘I can’t see that there is anything important to be said about you. Good afternoon, madam.’
He saluted it ironically and went away round to the kitchen garden, where he had left Mrs Bradley in earnest conclave with the lugubrious Joseph Herring.
II
As soon as Bloxham had left them together, the little old lady demanded abruptly,
‘Joseph, who killed the two rabbits?’
The Scrounger put down the gardening boot from which he was methodically detaching chunks of earth with the aid of a broken penknife, and regarded her with the stolidity of an old soldier about to tell a thumping good lie.
‘Mam, it was ’Obson,’ said he unanswerably. He picked up the boot again, and spat sidelong into Miss Caddick’s bird-bowl.
‘Hobson?’ said Mrs Bradley ruminatively. ‘Where have I heard that name before?’
Joseph regarded her covertly, and with a trace of not unmerited suspicion.
‘Bloke as was done in in the bleedin’ sunk garding,’ he observed tersely.
‘I thought it was Anthony,’ said Mrs Bradley mildly. ‘What a pretty show the spring onions make, don’t they?’
‘Well, they might,’ replied their guide, philosopher, and friend morosely, ‘if people ’ud only let ’em grow, ’stead of always grubbin’ ’em up and gettin’ ’em down.’
‘Your idiom,’ said Mrs Bradley gently, ‘is picturesque but obscure. Translate.’
‘Eh, mam?’
‘You mean?’
‘Mean? Why, that there Cowes!’
‘Richard Cowes?’
‘Ah! Pulls ’em up and mastigates of ’em like ’e was a Covent Garding buyer, ’e do! And the rhubub! And the lettices! And the little young carrots what you can peel wiv a rub of your thumb! And the reddishes! Eat me, ’e would, if I growed in the late spring and was juicy-like and ’ad a bit of a ’ot flavour to me! It’s somethink crool!’
Mrs Bradley expressed her sympathy in a few well-chosen words, but Joseph refused to be comforted, so she harked back to the previous subject of conversation.
‘Hobson?’ she said. ‘What, both of them?’
A thought struck Herring.
‘’Oo said the two rabbits was killed?’ he demanded aggressively.
‘You did, by implication,’ replied Mrs Bradley, grinning.
‘Eh?’ Joseph looked nonplussed.
Mrs Bradley patiently explained.
‘I asked who killed the two rabbits, Joseph. You replied, without hesitation, that Hobson killed the two rabbits. I did not know, when I asked the question, that the two rabbits had been killed. But now I am certain that they were, and the blood on the two javelins—no, the one javelin, Joseph! I remember that the paper corrected itself next day! —was rabbit’s blood. But I am also certain, first, that Hobson was not the rabbit-killer, and, secondly, that you know who was! Out with it, man. Who killed those two rabbits?’
‘Look ’ere,’ said Joseph hotly, ‘’oo are you callin’ a liar, eh?’
‘You,’ replied Mrs Bradley, with nice effect.
The Scrounger swallowed twice, muttered once, and passed the back of his hand across his lips.
‘Not for two hours yet,’ said Mrs Bradley, glancing at her watch. ‘You’ll drink my health, though, won’t you, when they do?’
And she handed him half a crown.
‘Thanking you kindly, mam,’ said Joseph, with a grateful smirk. He drew a long breath.
‘It was Mr Anthony, mam, I think.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Mrs Bradley, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘It would have been.’
At this interesting juncture the inspector reappeared at the end of the garden, and Mrs Bradley went to meet him.
‘Well, child?’ she said, grinning like a crocodile. ‘What is the verdict of Burlington House?’
Bloxham shook his head hopelessly.
‘Mind, I’m not a critic,’ he said, ‘but I confess I wouldn’t want it in my sunk garden.’
‘Very ably, discreetly, and tactfully expressed,’ said Mrs Bradley with enthusiasm. ‘Just think of the frightful effect it would have on a really sensitive nature, then!’
‘I’ve been thinking over the rope business,’ said Bloxham. ‘What was the gymnasium rope used for, do you think?’
‘Nothing much. Oh, well—as a possible red herring,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘It was cut in the wrong place, for one thing. For another, it was not nearly long enough.’
‘Long enough?’
‘To reach from side to side of the mere by the second pollard willow on this bank,’ Mrs Bradley explained.
‘Oh! The clotheslines were used for putting the body of Hobson into the water, were they?’
‘And the statue of the little mermaid too,’ said Mrs Bradley.
‘It becomes important to discover who used the lengths of rope, then. I’ve discovered they were purloined from the woodshed here.’ And Bloxham knitted his brows. ‘But I can’t see—a bow and arrow, perhaps—?’
‘What about a javelin?’ said Mrs Bradley calmly. ‘One end of the rope tied to the shaft of the javelin, and the implement itself flung from one side of the mere to the other. Come along and let us have another look at the water.’
At the second pollard willow on the home bank they halted.
‘Climb up to the top diving board and toss in a stone to show me the position of the body,’ said Mrs Bradley.
The inspector did this, and soon rejoined her.
‘Can you—oh, it doesn’t matter about that, though. A stone will do equally well. Prise another one out of the bank. That’s right. Now throw it as straight as you can from where you are standing, across the water. Throw fairly high.’
Bloxham obeyed, and the heavy stone struck the trunk of a pollard willow on the opposite bank.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Bradley briskly. ‘Now go and get—oh, never mind. I can show you by a sketch plan, I think. But first: Required: A piece of rope not less than thirty-two yards long, I should say. A javelin. A murderer. An accomplice. A murdered man. A bathchair. The first pale streaks of dawn. A sharp knife or a pair of gardening shears. A good swimmer. An average performer with the javelin.’
‘Good heavens!’ said Bloxham. ‘Carry on, please.’
Mrs Bradley made a hasty sketch and showed it to him.
‘Cut the rope at C,’ she said, ‘and there you are. The theory is that the weight, owing to the force of gravity, will descend the slope of the rope until it gets to the middle. As soon as it reaches point X and the rope is cut, down goes the weight—whatever it is—into the middle of the mere.’
‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Bloxham.
‘The weight was first the statue—to see whether the plan was feasible, I presume,’ Mrs Bradley went on, ‘and then the body followed. Then came like a flash the brilliant notion of binding the two together in order to secure the corpse from drifting. Of course, they had to do the fixing of the rope and the cutting all over again. I’d like to find those bits of rope.’
‘It sounds very ingenious,’ said Bloxham doubtfully, studying the sketch again. ‘I suppose M is the murderer?’
‘And A the accomplice,’ said Mrs Bradley chattily. ‘And B is the bathchair, which you must not forget, O Best Beloved, because it was not the old bathchair, but the one in present use. Oh, and T, which stands for Timon Anthony, killed the two rabbits and dipped the point of the javelin, J, in their blood on two separate, distinct, awful, unlawful occasions!’
She cackled with eldritch glee until the echoes came back over the water.
‘I don’t see T marked on the sketch,’ said Bloxham austerely, conscious that his leg was being pulled.
‘Perhaps you would like t
o rub up your mathematics?’ said Mrs Bradley, happily wiping her eyes.
‘Mathematics?’ said Bloxham, who was beginning to want his tea.
‘Substitution, child,’ said Mrs Bradley, tapping him earnestly on the solar plexus. ‘T stands for M, and all that kind of thing. And, talking of substitution,’ she added, grinning at his flushed face, ‘sweet are the uses of psychology! Look up that story, told by Kost, relating to the night of Hobson’s death. There is an interesting point in it.’
‘What about?’ asked the inspector, casually slipping Mrs Bradley’s sketch between the pages of his notebook and commencing to walk towards the house.
‘Substitution,’ said Mrs Bradley again. ‘Read through the statement made to you by Kost. I kept the cutting from my newspaper, but I haven’t it here. Find out, if you can, who it was he really threw out into the road that night!’
III
‘You see,’ said Bloxham to his wife, ‘these Longer murders are all wrong. It ought to be all to do with the old lady’s money, and it isn’t.’
‘What isn’t, darling?’ said his wife, who was fairly new to her job.
‘It isn’t anything to do with her money, and that gets me west. When an old woman has tons of money and umpteen relations,’ said Bloxham decidedly, ‘one of them murders her for it and there you are, and the police get a fair field and the chance of a bit of credit. But what the deuce anybody can make out of the murder of a drunk by somebody who couldn’t even have known he was coming to the house, and the murder of the young man who ought to have set to and murdered all the other claimants, passes my understanding. If the confounded idiot couldn’t rake up the guts to murder the old lady while her will was still in his favour, he might at least have set about the others! Then I could have got a bit of a move on, and the whole thing would be cleared up by this time.’
‘People are horribly inconsiderate, darling,’ said his wife. She put his food before him and kissed the top of his head.
Chapter Fifteen
Mrs Bradley Listens In
‘I KNEW THAT old woman was a man-eating shark in disguise,’ whispered Richard Cowes to Malpas Yeomond.
‘Yes. Come out in her true colours with a vengeance, hasn’t she?’ murmured Priscilla, gazing with ill-concealed amusement at Mrs Bradley’s mauve and orange woollen jumper, which, worn over a skirt of warm brown and embellished by a tartan tie whose principal checks embodied various shades of green and blue, lent a distinctly festive tone to the rather terrifying proceedings of the morning.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean her getup,’ said Richard, grinning. He bent his head and bit off the top of some young lettuce leaves which he had managed to smuggle past Great-aunt Puddequet’s tigerish gaze by concealing them in the crown of his hat. He raised his head again, and, between Gladstonian mastication of the springtime greenstuff, explained that it was Mrs Bradley’s present position of aide-de-camp to the local police to which he had referred.
‘Yes,’ agreed Malpas. ‘Of course, if it weren’t for the lack of motive, I wouldn’t put it past her to have killed Anthony herself.’
‘Silence, Grandnephew!’ squealed old Mrs Puddequet, from her point of vantage beside the fireplace.
It was an unusual scene. The folding doors between the library and the smaller room next door, which was used by old Mrs Puddequet as her private sitting room, were partly open, and those seated in the library could see occasionally the figures of the inspector or Mrs Bradley, who were moving about in the adjoining room. At the opening of the folding doors the sturdy sergeant from Market Longer and the red-faced, almost apologetic Constable Copple from the village were posted with sinister suggestiveness.
The entire family and every servant in the house had been rounded up by the inspector, and sat now, in three expectant, self-conscious rows, waiting to know what was going to happen. The front row consisted of Great-aunt Puddequet, attended by an almost-expiring Miss Caddick, the Cowes, the Yeomonds, and the Brown-Jenkins. The second row was made up of Mrs Macbrae, grimly, sardonically, majestically patient, and Kost the trainer, who was glad of a chance to sit on a comfortable chair. The third row was occupied by the two housemaids, the parlourmaid, and, at a respectful distance, the kitchenmaid and Joseph Herring. The Scrounger had not shaved, and was uncomfortably aware that his employer had noted the fact. He fingered his stubbly chin with an air of bravado, and glanced surreptitiously to right and left of him. The kitchenmaid, who had made up her mind that she was going to be convicted and hanged for the murder of her young but scarcely beloved master, had given herself up to abandoned weeping until a message sent by Mrs Puddequet via the lips of the parlourmaid had turned her dramatic sobbing into an occasional but excessively irritating sniff.
The inspector put his head round the edge of the folding door and handed the sergeant a piece of paper. There was a flutter of interest from the waiting persons, who were affected much as are the audience at a theatre when the lights begin to go out. The inspector withdrew his head. The sergeant drew himself up and coughed importantly. Then he read:
‘Mrs Jasper Puddequet.’
Old Mrs Puddequet blinked her great cat’s eyes, but said nothing.
‘If you will be good enough, mam,’ said the sergeant, ‘to proceed into this ’ere room through this ’ere aperture’—he indicated the opening between the folding doors—‘the inspector would be glad to have a word with you.’
Old Mrs Puddequet bowed her head, and Miss Caddick pushed the bathchair forward over the carpet.
The others stirred in their seats. The drama had begun.
In a second, Miss Caddick had returned.
‘Just like the Inquisition, my dear,’ she confided in a terrified and impressive whisper to Celia Brown-Jenkins. ‘The inspector seated at a table in the window with sheets upon sheets of clean foolscap paper and white blotting-paper—there is something so nerve-trying in the sight of white blotting-paper, I always think!—and a tray full of pens and sealing wax and paper knives and red tape and paper clips—oh, a most fiendish display! And one police constable standing at his side, and another sitting just that side of the folding doors—’
‘Cheer up, Caddie,’ said Amaris Cowes. ‘Have a cigarette?’
Miss Caddick declined to have a cigarette, and a very few moments later a police constable wheeled out the bathchair. It still contained old Mrs Puddequet. Miss Caddick rose in her place, but the constable shook his head at her very slightly, and, opening the door, himself pushed the bathchair into the passage, and did not reappear for some little time.
Miss Caddick’s own name was the next on the sergeant’s list. When she had been admitted to the inner sanctum, the sergeant observed austerely:
‘And the inspector desires me to tell you that he trusts, ladies and gents, as you will not discuss in this room what takes place in this ’ere room through ’ere until he has completed his round of you all. It will’—he referred hastily to his piece of paper—‘it will greatly assist his case if you will please be courteous enough to accede to ’is request. And I might say I ’ave my orders,’ he added warningly, ‘to put outside anyone so offending. Thank you.’
The inspector had not supposed that old Mrs Puddequet would be able to give him a great deal of information about the events of the night on which it appeared that Timon Anthony must have met his death, and so, after obtaining from her the time of the first disturbance of the family peace—she gave it as seventeen minutes to twelve—he had sent the bathchair and its occupant out in charge of a constable and asked for Miss Caddick.
Miss Caddick was not feeling at all well. To begin with, ever since she had confessed to the clandestine occupation of her employer’s dressing room by Kost on the night of Hobson’s death, she had been exceedingly ill at ease. Suppose the inspector should forget his promise and let out the dreadful information to her irascible and intolerant employer? Suppose—more horrible still!—someone should be arrested for the murder, and the fact that Kost had been smuggled into the ho
use by a maiden lady came out in evidence! She felt inclined to swoon at the thought. What of her spotless reputation? What of the ‘character’—written in old Mrs Puddequet’s crabbed handwriting—which would accompany her application for another post when old Mrs Puddequet had dismissed her from Longer with screeched objurgation and calumnious epithet? What of her expectations, potent yet, although not to the extent of twenty-five thousand pounds?
Secondly, there were the two murders. Long and intimate acquaintance with the works of the more sentimental and romantic novelists of the very late nineteenth and the very early twentieth century had caused Miss Caddick habitually to put herself in the place of the heroine of these soul-stirring day-dreams. She was the hapless prisoner; she was the blushing bride; she was the deserted sweetheart; and she was the tear-compelling martyr, victim of a cruel, crushing, Philistine environment. Suppose, then—the thought must be faced!—suppose that she herself were already marked down as the next victim of the Killer, as she had begun to style this unknown hand of death! Sick with apprehension, she sat on the chair the inspector indicated, twisted her bony fingers tightly together, opened her pale eyes to their widest extent, and waited, stiff with nervous tension, for the inspector’s first question. It was Mrs Bradley, however, who spoke.
‘The prevalence of the bull’s-eye-sucking habit among spinsters of a certain age has interested me more than once,’ said the beaky mouth in the birdlike, darting head. Miss Caddick, considerably affronted by this apparently casual remark, hastily bolted the striped sweetmeat which she had slipped subconsciously into her mouth whilst waiting for the return of Mrs Puddequet’s bathchair from this very room, took a much firmer seat upon the chair, completely forgot her nervousness (which forgetting happened to be the very object of Mrs Bradley’s otherwise tactless remark), and observed frigidly:
The Longer Bodies Page 17