Corpses in Enderby (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

The bundle of old clothes in the bath-chair became agitated, groaned and trembled, and the ancient bulldog face protruding from it grew pathetic with fear.

  “She’s thought fit to get up at the risk of her life and to the grief of her large retinue of fond relations to come all the way here abusing the police and offering large rewards for nothing.”

  “I only wanted to help, Sarah; you can’t say I didn’t …”

  “I’ve told her to pack up and get off back to Melton Mowbray and bed before she takes her death of exhaustion and cold.”

  “I’m going, Sarah. I said I would and I will.”

  Littlejohn realized that he was witnessing a battle royal for the headship of the Bunn clan, like those momentous tussles for the queenship of the herd by proud cows in the Swiss valleys! And Aunt Sarah had, once and for all, established her superiority.

  Mrs. Wilkins made an imperial gesture with her stick, the attendant policeman opened the door, the house-boy heaved and shoved for a minute without success, and finally got the bath-chair in a state of momentum. Aunt Bathsheba was wheeled out to her barouche which, with cats, parrot, tin and wicker receptacles and rubber bed, at once started the return trip to Melton Mowbray, where she still lives, more tenacious of life than ever as she plots the overthrow of her rival, Sarah, and prays three times a day for her speedy death.

  Aunt Sarah lowered her stick, switched off her hearing contraption, marched to the door, and was hoisted in triumph in her shabby taxi-cab.

  As she left the room, she cast upon Cromwell a delighted, arch smile.

  “The reward’s off! I like you, young man, and I won’t have any friend of mine insulted by meddling old busybodies. Reward, indeed! Two thousand pounds of good Bunn money down the drain! What do we pay rates for?”

  Cromwell, perspiring, the colour of a lobster again under the ironic eye of his chief, sat down heavily and flattened out his hat.

  14

  THE MAN IN WHITE SPATS

  THE Browning inquest was short enough. Poor Browning might have been an interloper trying to steal the limelight from the Bunn show. Nevertheless, news having travelled fast in this case, the court was crowded. The tribes of Bunn were absent, with the exception of the Medlicotts and Aunt Sarah. Jubal was called as a witness in case of need. He did not testify, for short of the formalities necessary to allow the victim to be buried, no other evidence was taken and the hearing was adjourned. Aunt Sarah was present and arrived like royalty, causing a lot of commotion, keeping a close eye on Medlicott, who, to her disgust, had brought all his family to bear him up, punctuating the proceedings with interjections, grunts, heavy breathing and thuds of her stick on the wooden floor. Mr. Edgell was there, but arrived late, even later than the Medlicotts, who were well behind time, as usual. Mr. Green was on holiday and his deputy, a young, precise and busy lawyer, had other things to do. The whole business was short and sweet and the audience melted away after it, with disappointed remarks and pointed expressions about the soul-less machinery of the law.

  After lunch, Littlejohn again toiled up the stairs of Whispers to the Medlicotts’ flat. He could almost have cut the noisome fetid air of the staircase. Inside the tenements, sounds of housework, crying children, quarrelling, the inexpert sound of Marlene’s typing in Cuffright’s rooms. A large squad of relatives had arrived to sustain Mrs. Browning. The rumble of their talk in the ground-floor flat rose like a dull chant. They were burying the victim later that afternoon. Men in black suits and bowlers, crowded out from the Brownings’ rooms, strolled in the grounds, like gloomy patients in a sanatorium, muttering among themselves, examining the decrepit buildings and sour gardens, making critical comments about them. The vicar arrived just on Littlejohn’s heels and the mourners slowly filtered indoors.

  Mrs. Medlicott, in the absence of her family, who had gone from the inquest straight to the shop, had just finished a late lunch. The remnants of a small meat pie, tea things, and a few crusts of bread littered the tray which she hastily removed as she let in the Inspector.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you again, Mrs. Medlicott, but I didn’t manage to catch you at the inquest. One or two more points have arisen and I must ask you about them.”

  “Sit down.”

  A slow goods train passed in the cutting under the window. The house shook, the piano clanged, a pall of black smoke from the engine rose and momentarily blotted out the view.

  “On the night Browning died and just before I returned to ask about the telephone, your husband went downstairs and out in the grounds clad in his dressing-gown. That is so, isn’t it, Mrs. Medlicott?” She hesitated.

  “Yes. That is true. None of us said it wasn’t, did we?”

  “No. But nothing was said about it, either. How was your husband dressed when he went out that night?”

  She paused again.

  “You left us just as it was time to go out to my sister’s. My husband took off his jacket, waistcoat, collar and tie. Then, he decided he wanted another word with you. He put on his dressing-gown and went as if to follow and catch you … Instead, he found you at the front door, talking with poor Mr. Browning. He waited till you separated, went down, and came back at once saying you’d got away quickly.”

  “Yet, when I returned, close on his heels, he was putting on a pair of trousers and the dressing-gown was nowhere to be seen. I assumed he hadn’t been out since I left. What did he want to see me for?”

  “He didn’t say. But he seemed uneasy about something.”

  She paused and her jaw began to quiver.

  “You’re not thinking that my husband ran down and murdered Mr. Browning, are you? Jubal wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  She, his principal victim, stood there gallantly defending her good-for-nothing husband as though he were the last man on earth to commit a sin of any kind.

  Below, they were forming-up for the funeral. The hearse had arrived with the body from the morgue and the mourners were packing themselves in the vehicles behind it with the assistance of the undertaker, who, like a sepulchral toast-master, intoned their names in a loud, hollow voice which echoed round the staircase.

  “Mrs. Browning, Mr. and Mrs. Tom Browning, Master John Browning and the Reverend Canon Rumbole, if you please …”

  “Ar … Mr. and Mrs. Golightly, Mr. and Mrs. Cook and Master Cook, Mr. Bernard Shaw …”

  Looking down from the window on the foreshortened view of the cortège, Littlejohn watched the last-called bearer of a great name—a small, red-cheeked man and a representative of the French-Polishers’ Union—nimbly climb in a cab and crack a joke with those inside.… He turned to Mrs. Medlicott who had taken up a heavily-darned pair of man’s socks and was threading a needle with which to add still more darns to them.

  “The other evening when I called, you were mending a pair of spats, Mrs. Medlicott.”

  She seemed surprised.

  “Yes? I do all the mending for the family.”

  “What was wrong with the spats, may I ask?”

  She laid down the socks in bewilderment. This was a funny sort of crime investigator. Surely …

  “I was fastening on the strap which had broken.”

  “Did you finish the job?”

  “No …”

  She stopped.

  “What funny questions you do ask, Inspector. I wouldn’t have thought a pair of spats was important.”

  “It’s very important, indeed, madam. That’s why I’m asking you. Why didn’t you finish?”

  “They were too far gone. The leather of the strap was rotten. It broke more as I stitched it. I’ll show it to you.”

  The pair of bedraggled white spats—Jubal’s finery—were in the workbox at Mrs. Medlicott’s feet. She took them out and held the damaged one up for Littlejohn’s inspection.

  “See?”

  “Yes. I suppose your husband had a spare pair and put them on?”

  “No. That’s why I tried to mend these.”

  At last! Littlejohn felt that glow of exciteme
nt which always filled him when, after a lot of preliminary investigations, he finally struck a trail.

  “So, you were repairing … or trying to repair … that very pair of spats when I called and your husband hasn’t worn them since. Not even on the night I called … not even when he ran downstairs after me in his dressing-gown?”

  “No. He had the broken one off and the other on.”

  Her eyes opened wide and a red spot appeared on each cheek. She felt Littlejohn was making a bit of a fool of her or of Jubal. Jubal and his spats were a local joke!

  “Please bear with me another minute, madam. Your husband hasn’t worn spats—this pair or any others—since he broke those you’re holding now?”

  “No. I think I’ve finally persuaded him to abandon spats. They’ve long been out of fashion, but it was one of his little foibles. Nobody wears them now. He’s the only one in town with them and he seems to think they add a bit of distinction.”

  “He takes sevens in shoes, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  The sock she was darning fell from her hands and she put her fingers to her mouth with a look of horror.

  “Have you found his footprints near one or the other of the scenes of the crimes?”

  “Not his, exactly, but footprints which might be his. Has your husband any enemies, because, I’ll tell you quite candidly, Mrs. Medlicott, I think someone’s trying to make it appear that he killed both your brother and Browning?”

  “But why? Why? Jubal hasn’t any enemies. I’m sure of that. A most friendly and well-liked man … Well-liked by everyone.”

  “Everyone? Including the members of your own family, Mrs. Medlicott? Do they all like him? Don’t they rather regard him with bare tolerance?”

  She was on her feet to the defence of Jubal. Her loyalty in the face of all that he had done to her was amazing, almost maniacal.

  “What do you expect of my family? A lot of cranks and misers. Money means everything to them. Happiness doesn’t count. At least, we’re happy, Jubal and I and the girls …”

  “All the same … forgive me, if I say it … don’t your family regard your husband as having squandered your own little fortune and reduced you to one of the poorer members …?”

  She smiled; she almost looked proud of it.

  “Yes, they do. What is money for but to be spent? Certainly not to be hoarded and left from generation to generation, like the rest of my family do.”

  The gospel according to Jubal, no doubt! Jubal, the penniless spendthrift, the fancy man in white spats, who had reduced his wife to ill-health and penury by his irresponsibility. And yet, here she was, quick to his defence.

  “But I can’t think of any of my family trying to fix a murder on my husband. Or killing my brother, Ned. Why?”

  “Can’t you imagine any member of your family, eager to add to the money he or she already possesses, casting envious eyes on the fortune of Ned Bunn, or more properly, Ned Wood, who was not one of the family at all, really. Bear in mind, part of Ned’s fortune was immobilized Bunn money, funds the family resented his having and wanted back. Suppose someone murdered Ned and cast around for a man on whom to pin the crime. Isn’t it likely your husband would be chosen?”

  “And why Jubal, of all people?”

  “Candidly, Mrs. Medlicott, he’s known to be on the verge of bankruptcy; he’s known to be penniless; he’s known to live here in circumstances far removed from those he or his family are accustomed to, simply because his money and your money have run out and until more comes by way of inheritance, there’s little chance of improvement. In fact, unless something happens very quickly, this place will have to be sold, too, and you’ll all be on the street. Who more likely to commit a crime which will bring a small fortune to you?”

  She sat with her head down and tears fell on the stocking she was darning. As she looked up, another train passed, shook all the ornaments on the sideboard, vibrated the crazy piano, and cast another veil of steam across the window … A train of empty vans … rub-a-dub-dub … and then a vast yawning noise as they entered the tunnel. A dog had been locked up somewhere in one of the flats and you could hear him howling dismally.

  “I admit it all, Inspector. He might have a very good motive. The shop is finished; we can’t make it pay and we owe money everywhere. All my money has gone … we’ve lived on it for years now. My family said when I married Mr. Medlicott that I’d never do any good with him. He was a good-for-nothing and would soon go through my money. Times have been bad … Two wars … Bad trade. We’ve not been extravagant and he’s not been a spendthrift. We’ve had the girls to educate … And all the time the shop has been losing money … we’ve kept sinking what we had in that. Out of pride, I guess, just so that the family could not say, I told you so …”

  That was probably about it. Medlicott didn’t look like a heavy drinker. Otherwise he’d never have swilled down the cooking sherry the way he did. He didn’t seem to smoke either and this place didn’t call for much in the way of upkeep. Unless Jubal ran another woman in an establishment which he was financing, he’d spent all his wife’s money out of pure stupidity and pig-headedness, keeping alive a dead business because the Bunns had said he couldn’t make it pay.

  “Now it will be all right.”

  She said it quietly and nodded her head up and down a time or two, as though reassuring herself.

  “… I shall get my share of Ned’s money … enough to keep us going for quite a long time. My husband can retire … We may sell this place and find a little house away from here … perhaps by the sea … We can live on the capital, because within the next few years surely one or another of our very old relatives will die. Aunt Sarah, Aunt Bathsheba, or Uncle Huxley. Uncle Huxley Bunn has been at death’s door several times. He is in a mental home. He was a dentist who doubted his wife’s fidelity, gave her gas, and extracted all her beautiful teeth.”

  Littlejohn suddenly realized that Mrs. Jubal Medlicott was not quite in her right mind! Loneliness, poverty, two twittering girls and an irresponsible husband … They’d driven her into a world of the past where she must have been happy and now she didn’t quite know whether she was in a world of reality or one of the shades. Added to that, a large percentage of the Bunns weren’t a hundred per cent. mentally. It was probably in the family. Perhaps her confession of murder had some basis in fact, after all. But why frame her husband with it?

  Could it be that she was more cunning than appeared and far from doting on Jubal, she hated him and wished him out of the way?

  “I’m so sorry …”

  The glazed, faraway look faded from her eyes and she inserted the wooden mushroom she was holding into the foot of the sock and began darning again.

  “I’m so sorry. My mind dwells so much in the past. I’m alone most of the day and I live with my memories. Perhaps now, with Ned’s money, we’ll all be together and I won’t be so much by myself.”

  Littlejohn rose to go. There didn’t seem anything more to be said.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you a bit, Mrs. Medlicott, but it was necessary. I want as much background as I can get and you seem to be able to give it. I’ll try not to bother you again.”

  “Please don’t apologize, Inspector. Your visits are most pleasant and you are very kind. I like to talk to someone about the past, too. They were happy days.”

  There she was again! It was like throwing a pebble into water. A bit of commotion and upset and then calm as ever. Already she had put away her sewing and was looking chirpily at the clock, waiting for Jubal and the two girls, as though anticipating a whale of a time when they turned in.

  A train passed behind, a heavy lorry rumbled in front, the house shook to its very foundations and the piano played. Outside, they were coming back from the funeral. They all seemed a bit gay, as though glad it wasn’t any of them they’d left behind at the cemetery. The imprisoned dog howled and scratched for freedom and a blast of fried onions which someone was cooking below
rose up the staircase and met Littlejohn as he turned to go.

  At the door of The Freemasons’ Cromwell met the Inspector. He’d been writing up his notes and looked a bit wild-eyed.

  “Heard the latest, sir?”

  The “latest” met them at the door. A cadaverous, tall man, with red hair, bad teeth, and a Fernandel smile.

  “I’ve had to take charge here. The brewery sent me. No doin’ any good with Blowitt. He’s locked himself in his room and does nothin’ but play the pianner.”

  No need to tell them that. The furious sounds of one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies could be heard all over the market square.

  “His wife’s done a bunk. Run off with a chap who had a bedmakin’ works ’ere in Enderby. Left ’im a note to say as he’d ’ad his fling all these years; now it was ’er turn.”

  The corpse-like man bared his bad teeth and patted them both on the shoulder.

  “But don’t you worry, gents. Everything’ll be O.K., see? That’s wot the brewery sent me ’ere for. I’ll look after yer.”

  He clapped his hands together like the custodian of a seraglio, and two new good-looking waitresses materialized and brought in afternoon tea.

  15

  MISS MANDER EXPLAINS

  IT was nearing six o’clock when Littlejohn started off for Whispers again. The streets were full of workmen and girls returning home and the shops were closing. Night was settling over the dull town, which hadn’t a single thing to claim the attention except that, at present, it was in the headlines because two murders had been committed there. Very soon, when all the fuss was over, the place would sink into obscurity again.

  Littlejohn thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his raincoat, which he was wearing because it was chilly and there was a thin wind blowing. His pipe was between his teeth. He had run out of his own favourite mixture, had bought some other locally, and it was burning his tongue. On the wind, the smell of malt from the brewery down the street.

  There was a light in the hat shop opposite The Freemasons’. As Littlejohn stood at the door of the hotel, he saw Violet Mander reach into the window, take out the two model hats, and pull down the blind.