Corpses in Enderby (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

  Littlejohn thrust back the heavy, rusty wrought-iron gate and made his way along the forlorn gravel drive between overgrown bushes and shabby trees. The house itself was of dirty brick, square in shape, with rotting stone ornaments and decaying woodwork. The front door was scarred from the kicks and blows of tenants and was reached by three worn steps, flanked by tall, unused gas-lamp standards, survivals of the days when the Bunns entertained local bigwigs to dinner and processions of carriages came and went along the drive. Neglected lawns and sour flower-beds fronted the house and on a patch of weeds and unkempt rose-bushes stood a plaster statue of a nymph without a head. On her outstretched hands were hanging a bowler hat and a cloth cap.

  The owners of the headgear, a small man in a green baize apron and a fat one like a superannuated boxer, in his shirt sleeves, were busy moving furniture from the bottom front flat and stowing it in a van. Kosy Homes. Furnishers of Taste. Credit terms arranged.

  The bottom flat had missed paying two instalments and Cap and Bowler had arrived to take away the Kosy sideboard, armchairs, bedroom suite and dining table.

  “Next week it’ll be the other bedroom.”

  The deprived owner, a little pasty-faced man in crooked specs and old plus-fours, alternately pleaded, threatened, argued and sized-up the two Kosy men, wondering whether or not to try force or irrevocably give in. At the window, his wife and three small children watched his futile tactics with open mouths. The smallest child kept raising bewildered eyes to her mother’s face and then pointing to the furniture which the pugilist handled with ease and stowed in the van with mechanical skill.

  Browning, Mander, Cuffright, Pouter, Medlicott… The names of the tenants were plastered on bits of sticky paper spread on the panel of the door. Littlejohn entered and started to climb the wide stairs with a strip of thin oilcloth down the middle.

  Layer on layer of homes with the tenants all back for the day, for it was past six. Sounds of quarrelling, housework, asthmatic coughing, bumping and banging, and the hammering of the man in the third flat, Pouter, who made galleons for a hobby and sold them to make ends meet. Wireless blaring from three or four stations at once. Smells of cooking, stale food, washing, drains, and sweating humanity. The railway ran behind, entered a short tunnel, and the engines whistled as they neared the town station. A train roared past, seemed to hit the house and crawl up it, over the top, and down the other side … From the flat where the Kosy men had now finished their foreclosing, came strange cries and noises of strife.

  The staircase was dingy and the walls soiled. Outside one flat, somebody had written a message on the wall in pencil. Leave milk at flat opposite. A man in his shirt and trousers and with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, emerged from the communal bathroom leaving behind the loud noise of gurgling water. He eyed Littlejohn insolently and disappeared into one of the flats. At once, the door opposite opened and a woman in a loose wrapper scuttered to take his place.

  The Medlicotts’ flat had been the attics. Littlejohn knocked at the door, which bore the name of the owner on a card in a brass frame. Inside, there had been noises of twittering and giggling as Jubal Medlicott and his two girls did the washing-up. When Littlejohn tapped, all grew silent. He could imagine the occupants waiting anxiously to see who was there. Dolly and Polly opened the door between them and stood goggling at the Inspector, round-eyed, shining globular foreheads, pink noses, figures like little bolsters tied up in the middle. They both wore small lace aprons and in the background could be seen Mr. Jubal Medlicott taking off an apron and rolling down his shirt sleeves. He put on his coat, a wilting chrysanthemum still hanging dismally from the buttonhole.

  “Come in, Inspector. Come in.”

  Mr. Medlicott was hearty. It might have been a social call. Dolly and Polly stood aside, grinning, exchanging glances.

  This was the living-room and it looked full of the furniture Jerry Bunn had left behind long ago. Heavy plush curtains at the windows, faded holland covers on the chairs, a large table covered with a plush tablecloth, an aspidistra in a pot, old armchairs in front of an ancient gas-fire, a moth-eaten turkey-red carpet, a lot of little bits of china on the mantelpiece and large ugly sideboard. In one corner an ancient piano with a faded silk front and a cover over the top, which made Littlejohn think of a horse draped in a blanket. The inside of the piano must have been loose, for with every step of the occupants, every reverberation from the trains outside or the tenants indoors, the wires clanged, jingled and gave a blurred aeolian melody.

  Mrs. Medlicott was sitting in one of the fireside chairs, a workbox on the floor, fixing the strap on one of her husband’s white spats. He was still wearing the other. She looked frail and tired in her old shapeless dress, with wisps of grey hair hanging across her face. She stroked back her hair and looked apprehensively at the Inspector. Medlicott and his two girls bared their teeth in smiles. They didn’t seem capable of taking anything seriously.

  “Well, Inspector … And to what do we owe this honour? Not going to arrest us, I hope.”

  The girls giggled and whooped at the joke.

  Jubal Medlicott rubbed his hands together, looked down at the flower in his coat, tore it out, and threw it in the fireplace.

  “Sit down … Take the armchair … A drink?”

  He produced a half-empty bottle of pale sherry, eyed it apprehensively, and seemed relieved when Littlejohn refused.

  “I’m sorry to intrude, sir, but I’m just checking the movements of all those concerned on the night Mr. Edwin Bunn died.”

  There was a hush and Mrs. Medlicott’s hands fell limp in her lap. Her husband spoke. He seemed to be the first to pull himself together. The two girls stood motionless, like a couple of ventriloquist’s dummies.

  “Sit down, Dolly and Polly … Don’t stand gawking there.”

  The twins seemed thunderstruck. Jubal Medlicott didn’t as a rule address them so; he must have been rattled. They looked ready to rush from the room for a good cry, but they sat down instead on the rickety dining chairs.

  “We were all at home, Inspector.”

  Littlejohn had expected it! Every one of the Enderby Bunns had told the same tale! ’Ome-lovers, that’s what we are, Jasper Bunn had said.

  Littlejohn glanced from one to the other of the group. The two goggling girls, Medlicott, the tired mother busy repairing her husband’s finery. They all nodded, the two girls very vigorously with arch looks, half-afraid, half-cocksure. As though they’d already been through it all before.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certainly, Inspector. Why should I say so … if..?”

  Mr. Medlicott looked a bit hurt. The girls merely nodded their heads vigorously up and down.

  “When did you last see Mr. Edwin Bunn?”

  They all looked at one another and then left it to the spokesman.

  “To speak to? Last Sunday at church.”

  “Last Sunday at church … oh, yes, last Sunday”

  Polly and Dolly were eager to support Jubal.

  “But we saw him on the morning of his death. He was putting something in the shop window as we passed. He just nodded.”

  “Nodded,” came the echo.

  They were all seated except Medlicott, who kept walking about the room, rubbing his beard, jingling keys and money in his pocket, parading around in his one spat, tapping his false teeth with a black propelling pencil.

  “Sit down, Jubal.”

  Mrs. Medlicott sounded nervous, troubled by her husband’s restlessness. He obeyed with an astonished look, as though he weren’t used to being ordered around.

  “Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill Mr. Bunn?”

  Another silence. Everybody seemed turned to stone. Polly and Dolly, more than ever like two dummies; Medlicott, a monument of whiskery amazement, and Mrs. Medlicott immobile and ashen-looking, like one on whom death had come in the middle of her task.

  “No!”

  Jubal bellowed it in a tenor voice and th
en:

  “Certainly not!”

  All his family thereupon woke up and corroborated his statement like mad.

  An obstinate look crossed the face of Mr. Medlicott and the atmosphere grew strained. Littlejohn felt more than ever like an interloper who had spoiled a scene of domestic bliss. Like a broker’s man or a rate collector.

  Jubal crossed the room accompanied by the ghostly strumming of the ancient piano wires, took out the sherry bottle again and raised it aloft.

  “Sure you won’t, Inspector?”

  “No, thanks, sir.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  And, to the horror of his whole family, he filled a tumbler with the thin fluid and drank it off. His face was expressionless as the sherry spread itself inside him, then contorted as it entered his stomach.

  “Good heavens!” he said, and sat down without another word.

  No use prolonging the talk.

  “Very kind of you to receive me so courteously.”

  Littlejohn said it to them all, and they all smiled as though an ordeal were passed.

  “A pleasure … A great pleasure indeed … Hic, pardon me.”

  Mr. Medlicott hiccupped from the cooking sherry.

  In the room below, someone turned on the wireless.

  Because I love you,

  I’ve tried so hard but can’t forget,

  Because I love you …

  On the stairs voices were raised:

  “Keep that cat out of my flat, or I’ll …”

  A door slammed. The Medlicotts exchanged shamefaced looks. Mrs. Medlicott took it all with bowed head, still sewing away at the white spat.

  And this was the way things had ended for Anne Bunn! The clever girl of the family who might have married Edgell, the lawyer, and become somebody in the town. Instead she fell in love with the natty little, bearded tailor, who’d run through her comfortable fortune and fathered two giggling, half-witted girls on her. She looked ill, too, as if some fatal disease were gnawing at her. Her grey complexion, her thin, almost transparent hands, the wasted frame, the wilting look …

  “We were all brought-up here.”

  Suddenly Mrs. Medlicott spoke, apropos of nothing particular, but as though trying, somehow, to excuse their present condition.

  “… Yes, we were all born here … Except Ned, of course, who was born before … before my parents came to live here. It was very large then and so trim and tidy and we had such a lot of visitors. Dinners … And horse-carriages would come up the drive and the lamps outside the door would be lit. We children were supposed to be in bed, but we used to creep up to this very room and look through the windows and watch them all arriving … the men in their top hats and tail coats and the women … jewels and such lovely gowns … Things were all so different then.”

  She started and looked around, like some Cinderella who finds, on the stroke of twelve, the splendour suddenly changed to squalor.

  “You really can’t keep up these huge houses nowadays, can you, Mr. Littlejohn? Gardeners and servants are so hard to get and they want so much payment for so little work … It was better to retreat to our little attics and make a home there and let the rest of the house to other people who would do the work we couldn’t afford to have done.”

  She looked pleadingly at Littlejohn, waiting for him to agree and perhaps ease her mind.

  Littlejohn was sorry for her.

  “Of course you can’t, Mrs. Medlicott. Times have changed since houses like this were built. If one can’t get help to run them, it’s best to divide them up and share the work.”

  The tired woman looked grateful.

  “We had happy times here as children … Unhappy ones, too. Things I could never mention … Horrible things.”

  Mrs. Medlicott was talking to herself. Her husband and the two girls stared at her in astonishment.

  “… I like it best up here in the attics. Down below I could not bear to live … It reminds me of some poetry by Robert Bridges:

  On such a night, when Air has loosed

  Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

  Old terrors then of god or ghost

  Creep from their caves to life again …”

  “Mother!!” Polly and Dolly screeched it out together.

  “This house isn’t haunted, is it?”

  From down below, the answer came from the radio:

  And though you left a tear

  As a souvenir,

  It doesn’t matter, dear,

  Because … I … love … you …

  Mrs. Medlicott looked round.

  “I’m so sorry. I expect it’s remembering about this place again. You must forgive me, Inspector.”

  The twins were looking at the clock.

  “I hope I’m not keeping you,” said Littlejohn.

  “Well … There’s a family gathering at Aunt Fearns’ to-night. You see, Aunt Sarah … that is great-aunt Sarah … is staying there and we are all going to see her … All the family …”

  Polly and Dolly got it out between them. Another family gathering of the Bunns! Littlejohn wished he could be among them. Old terrors creeping from their caves, as Mrs. Medlicott had said.

  They all saw him to the door and the piano strummed a ghostly accompaniment as their joint weight made the floor tremble.

  The stairs were illuminated by small electric lights; just a glimmer to prevent accidents. Littlejohn could make out the peeling wallpaper and the ornamental mouldings of the dusty ceilings. He passed along the corridors and down the stairs. The door of the Medlicotts’ flat slammed. He could imagine them all scuttering round, putting on their best clothes to visit Aunt Sarah.

  Littlejohn’s footsteps echoed on the hollow stairs. All the noises were still going on; the radios, the coughing, the man hammering, tap-tap-tap-tiddity-tap … And as he neared the ground floor, the smell of stone, of large underground spaces, of cellars, rose among the odours of humanity like that of a crypt.

  Outside the entrance to his flat, just behind the front door, the little man whose furniture had earlier been confiscated, was standing. He was still in his shirt-sleeves and plus-fours and there was a fag-end in the corner of his mouth. His sandy hair was plastered on his skull and he squinted in the gloom through his crooked spectacles, trying to make out who was descending the stairs.

  “Evenin’, Inspector.”

  Littlejohn was just turning the door-knob.

  “Good evening.”

  “Don’t look so surprised, sir. I saw yer picture in this mornin’s local paper … Saw you comin’ in, too, to see the Medlicotts, but I was a bit too occupied to speak to yer then … Had a bit of bother with the furniture people. But I’ll make ’em sit up for it. I’ve money owin’ to me and when I pay outright for the things they took away, I’ll see somebody gets the sack for what they’ve done.”

  He peered into Littlejohn’s face to see how the Inspector was taking it. Then he took out a full packet of cigarettes, offered one to Littlejohn and, when the Inspector refused, took one himself. Behind the door at the little man’s back, the sounds of children crying and their mother trying to pacify them …

  “It’s not good enough to take the kids’ beds. Proper upset they are. And wouldn’t you be, sir, if somebody took your bed? I’ve just come out here for a breather. Can’t stand to ’ear their ’owlin’. Breaks yer heart …”

  His hands were long and bony with long dirty nails and he kept playing with his cheeks and mouth as he spoke. Littlejohn’s hand went to the door-knob again.

  “When my money comes along, we shan’t stay here … Can’t stand them Medlicotts. She’s all right, but the old chap … Screwball Medlicott, I call ’im, and them two pin-up daughters of ’is … think they’re too good for a family like mine. And wot for? They’ve no money. Can’t even pay for repairs to this tumbledown place and always on the doorstep prompt for the rent. They’ll ’ave to wait for mine till the money comes along.”

  So that was it! The little man—Mr. Bro
wning, according to the ticket on the door—had been having trouble about his rent and had taken it amiss.

  On the landing above, a door partly opened, letting out a streak of bright light and the woman in the wrapper Littlejohn had previously seen entering the bathroom, looked out. A man behind her saw Littlejohn and Browning and hastily bobbed back and closed the door. Browning sniggered.

  “See wot I mean? This ain’t the place to bring up respectable kids … As soon as my money comes … Just a minute …”

  Littlejohn turned again. The crooked specs. were focussed on him; the eyes behind them pale, pouched, malevolent.

  “You been after alibis for the night Ned Bunn died? You been asking Medlicott where ’e was?”

  “What of it? Does it concern you, sir?”

  Littlejohn was getting fed up with it.

  “I was only trying to help. If Medlicott said he was in here at the time, he’s not tellin’ the truth. ’E was out. I saw ’im go about nine-thirty … I was just out for a breather, this time on the front lawn … if you can call that dump sich … and out comes Screwball, quiet like, thinkin’ nobody saw ’im. It was dark and he didn’t see me … I think if he’s said ’e was indoors, you oughter ask ’im again.”

  Browning nodded his head vigorously, contentedly, like one who has done his duty.

  Littlejohn looked hard at the shifty eyes, the cockeyed spectacles with a twist of wool over the nose where they bit into the skin.

  “This is no place to discuss such matters, Mr. Browning. I’d like you to come along to the police station and make a statement. If what you say is true, it’s very serious.”

  “Of course it’s true … But I don’t see why I should come with you. I’ve told you, ’aven’t I? No need to believe me if you don’t want …”

  “All the same, we can talk better there. Get your coat on and come along. I’ll wait for you at the front gate.”