Here Comes a Chopper

by Gladys Mitchell

  When the polite round of clapping had ceased he drew a deep breath, felt slightly faint, and then began.

  ‘Sonnet Sixteen: to Claudia,’ he stated roundly. It was really to the fugitive Marigold, but it had been altered during the past three days. He recited, for a poet, rather well. Even Dorothy, who had been applying to him some of those round adjectives and sturdy nouns kept by modern girls for the description of flighty suitors, began to feel rather proud of him.

  The inspector, on the other hand, was neither pleased nor proud.

  ‘The point is, mam,’ he said in aggrieved tones, waylaying Mrs Bradley before she could leave the auditorium, ‘I’m not here to put up with any jiggery-pokery. What I do say is that we shall get nowhere if we don’t put our cards on the table and let each other see the moves.’

  ‘A statement open to challenge,’ returned Mrs Bradley briskly. ‘But pray continue.’

  ‘Mrs Denbies, mam. She’s gone. And it looks like a put-up job.’

  ‘Gone? I am not surprised. I thought it might take her that way. She thinks you came here to arrest her.’

  ‘Did you tell her so, mam?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Well,’ said the inspector, aggrieved (chiefly, Mrs Bradley rather suspected, at being made to look a fool in front of the sergeant), ‘it’s a kind of a funny thing that when you come in at the door my suspect flies out of the window.’

  ‘Does she really?’ asked Mrs Bradley, interested. ‘I should hardly have thought it possible.’ She transferred a benign, enquiring gaze from the inspector’s brick-red face to the very small and closely-barred aperture opposite them. ‘Of course, I do see that it is wide open.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, in a manner of speaking, of course, mam,’ said the inspector, closing it irritably. ‘What I mean is, she’s vamoosed.’

  ‘But didn’t you have the other entrances watched?’

  ‘Why should I? She wasn’t supposed to know I was anywhere on the premises.’

  ‘Well, she did know. She told me she saw you. I agree it’s very silly of her to have run away like this, but, of course, as I said just now, I can understand it. You had better leave her to me. I’ll undertake to find her for you, and produce her when she’s wanted. You must be satisfied if she turns up all right at the inquest. Have there been any developments since I saw you on the common this morning?’

  ‘I’ll say, mam. As you guessed, I’ve got the valet’s evidence. I got on to Bugle, the butler, and he gave me Sim the chauffeur, who acted as valet to Mr Lingfield while his own man was down with influenza, being as how he’d been his batman and driver in the war.’

  ‘Oh, they’ve known one another some time, then? When was the influenza? Recently, I imagine?’

  ‘I don’t see why you should imagine it, mam, but you happen to be correct. It was in the middle of February. To be absolutely exact, it was between February tenth and twenty-third.’

  ‘There was a good deal of influenza about just then,’ said Mrs Bradley. The inspector shot a suspicious and the sergeant an interested glance at her. She seemed to both of them rather more pleased with the result of her apparently unimportant guess than there was reason for.

  ‘Influenza, yes, mam,’ the inspector repeated. ‘Well, I got on to Sim. to come and identify the body. We drove him to the mortuary—the sergeant here did the driving—and the poor fellow—you know these corn-fed chauffeurs, mam, when they’re driven in a car they don’t know by a driver they don’t trust—well, I’ve never seen a bloke in such a sweat.’ He laughed appreciatively. ‘You might have thought we were taking him along to charge him. If he’d been driven by the corpse itself he couldn’t have been in more of a stew.’

  ‘Proper case of nervous prostration,’ interpolated the sergeant, with a grin.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued the inspector, ‘he identified the body all right, although he was still green about the gills when he came out.’

  ‘He identified the corpse, did he?’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘As Mr Lingfield?’

  The inspector, who had proposed giving this as a startling and significant piece of information, and in a far more dramatic form, swallowed angrily, but answered, like a gentleman:

  ‘That’s it, mam. Mr Lingfield to a dot, he said it was.’

  ‘To a rope, you mean,’ retorted Mrs Bradley. She fixed him with an eye as bright and implacable as that of a robin. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. Claudia Denbies did not kill Harry Lingfield. Of that I am absolutely certain.’

  ‘There’s some pretty conclusive evidence she did,’ observed the inspector.

  ‘There’s some pretty evidence,’ Mrs Bradley retorted. ‘None of it is conclusive. What you need is a major operation, Inspector.’

  ‘Eh, mam?’

  ‘You want your fixed idea removed, and a bump of impartial judgment grafted on.’

  With this rebuke, for her a remarkably severe one, she parted from him and made her way by cab to her Kensington house.

  ‘Is Mrs Denbies here?’ she asked her maid as soon as she arrived.

  ‘But no, madame! Zere is nobody ’ere sauf une jeune fille, Miss Woodcote, whom I place in ze drawing-room, as she is not, I sink, one of ze patients of madame.’

  ‘Quite right. She isn’t.’

  ‘And, dinner, madame?’

  ‘Oh, yes, dinner. Anything Henri can manage.’

  ‘’E manage oysters, a bouillon, turbot——’

  ‘Not a bit of good. Tell him he must manage smoked salmon, Scotch broth and a roast chicken. A young girl will never touch oysters, and all well-brought-up children loathe turbot.’

  ‘It is Easter Saturday, madame.’

  ‘All right. Send out for some jellied eels or something.’

  ‘Bien, madame,’ said Célestine, looking bitter. ‘It will be your Scotch broth and roast chicken, without doubt.’

  ‘I thought perhaps it would be,’ said Mrs Bradley, grinning. She went into the drawing-room to greet Dorothy, but scarcely had they seated themselves, after Dorothy had helped Mrs Bradley off with her coat and the hostess had taken off her hat and pushed her black hair into place, when there was a knock at the front door, and Célestine, all smiles this time, was announcing Mr Roger Hoskyn.

  Upon Roger’s entry into the drawing-room the atmosphere became so tense and strained, not to say atmospheric and electric, that Mrs Bradley, pleading the necessity of seeing about dinner, left the two youngsters together.

  Roger, who had not expected (as was obvious from his manner) to find Dorothy in Kensington—they had parted, Mrs Bradley learned later, on the steps of the concert hall—at first had nothing to say. Dorothy felt a similar constraint. She sat in a big armchair by the cheerful fire while Roger walked over to the window and stared gloomily and Byronically out on to the blameless, respectable square in which Mrs Bradley lived when she was in town.

  Dorothy, who believed in the feminine strategy of making the enemy fire first and so expose himself, sat for ten minutes without so much as a movement except for (but Roger did not see this, and would not have been enlightened if he had) the fidgeting of her small brown fingers with the clasp of her handbag.

  The constraint and the silence were soon more than Roger could bear.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m a swine,’ he suddenly said. This surprising statement caused Dorothy to sit up a little straighter, but she did not even turn her head.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Why should I think you’re a swine?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Roger, baffled. ‘I mean—oh, I don’t know. I say—that awful woman’s at my digs.’

  ‘What awful woman?’

  ‘Claudia Denbies, dash it! I don’t know how to bung her out.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Dorothy, in a colourless, uninterested tone.

  ‘I say—don’t you mind?’ asked Roger anxiously.

  ‘Why should I? It’s nothing to do with me if you take women into your digs. I should think it’s for you
r landlady to object if she doesn’t like them.’

  ‘What do you mean—them? I don’t take women into my digs!’ said Roger, in an anguished howl. ‘You know that as well as I do! I mean—well, you may not know it, but old Bob knows it. Ask him!’

  ‘Why should I? It’s of no interest to me,’ said Dorothy. ‘If you don’t want Mrs Denbies, and can’t get rid of her, I suppose you can sleep at your club?’

  ‘I haven’t got a club, dash it, except P.P.’

  ‘P.P.?’

  ‘Poets’ Pub. We’ve a couple of fairly lousy rooms in Drupe Street. I couldn’t sleep there!’

  ‘Well, I can’t think of anything else. I can’t ask you back to our house because my people are home, and, anyway, you wouldn’t want to come.’

  ‘She says,’ said Roger, coming up to the fire and standing with his long legs wide apart as he warmed his hands, ‘that the police are on her track for murdering Lingfield, and that the last place they’ll think of looking for her is with me. But that’s the very first place they’ll think of, once they discover she isn’t at her own flat or at Whiteledge. Besides, as you pointed out, I’ve got my landlady to consider. You know, Claudia’s marvellous in her way, of course, but she’s apt to be exotic, and—well, you know—caviare to the general where landladies are concerned. And I can’t shift her, dash it! She cried all over me. You’ve no idea what a woman of that age looks like, with furrows all down her make-up!’

  ‘I thought your sonnet went awfully well,’ said Dorothy, with deadly innocence.

  ‘As a sonnet,’ said Roger, turning his back on the fire and pausing to kick the rug, ‘as a sonnet, mind you, it wasn’t bad at all. Not bad at all. In point of fact, rather good. But I don’t want to think of it again. And if I knew of any decent rhymes to “Dorothy”——’

  ‘I didn’t, personally, think “Claudia” rhymed too well with “disorder,” ’ observed the armchair critic dispassionately. ‘Besides, I thought you didn’t go in for rhyme. Isn’t it a new departure? Did it rhyme when it was supposed to be to Marigold?’

  ‘Oh, damn and blast!’ shouted Roger, exploding suddenly.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ enquired Dorothy. ‘It might be a good idea.’ She sniffed the air very delicately, as might a fawn when it lifts its head at evening from drinking by the ferny water-brooks. ‘I think you’re scorching your trousers.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘I bring ye love: What will love do?

  Love will fulfil ye.

  I bring ye Love: What will love do?

  Kiss ye to kill ye.’

  ROBERT HERRICK, Upon Love, by Way of Question and Answer

  IT WAS MRS Bradley who ousted Claudia from her hiding place and took her to the Kensington house.

  ‘It makes a bad impression,’ she insisted, ‘to seem to be running away. They want to ask you more questions, and one very serious obstacle has cropped up. You must be brave enough to face the fact that the chauffeur, Sim, has identified the body as that of Harry Lingfield.’

  ‘But it isn’t Harry! It couldn’t be!’

  ‘Nevertheless, this man Sim says it is.’

  ‘But how could he know? … Oh dear! He used to valet Harry while Misset was down with influenza. They might believe what he says!’

  ‘Exactly. His evidence is at least as good as yours—for legal purposes possibly even better. That is the fact you have to face.’

  ‘But, in that case, they’ll arrest me! I knew that inspector had it in his eye! They’ll believe him, and that means they’ll think I’m lying. If he swears that the dead man is Harry, they’ll say I killed him! It stands to reason! Don’t you see?’

  ‘So clearly,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘that I have come here to advise you that you hide from the police at your peril—possibly even at peril of your life. You have everything to lose by running away from trouble, and nothing at all to gain, because they will find you so easily. How long is it going to take this woman here, Mr Hoskyn’s landlady, to hand you over as soon as she reads your description in the papers or hears it over the wireless later on? Nothing looks worse than trying to skulk in corners! You’re a brave woman, and you must know that!’

  ‘They wouldn’t broadcast for me as though I were a common criminal?’

  ‘Why not? The very fact that your name is known to everyone, and your appearance, too, is an added reason for using the radio to find you. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Claudia, resignedly. ‘I’ll come. Where? To the nearest police station?’

  ‘No. To my house,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I will telephone to the inspector and you can be interviewed in comfort.’

  ‘You will stand by me, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I will. This case, although simple in essence, has what Sherlock Holmes would call some unique features. Tell me,’ she added, when they were in a taxi on their way to her house, ‘what were you doing when you went out late in your car on the night of the crime? You told me, when you asked my advice, that you were going to meet your husband, but, although I did not say so to the inspector, I have never believed that was true.’

  ‘I went to meet Harry, but I can’t tell that to the police. I should be in worse case than before.’

  ‘I don’t think you would, eventually, if that could be proved to be the truth.’

  ‘It couldn’t. Nobody knew.’

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘I’m positive nobody knew. If I’d been going to tell anybody I’d have told you.’

  ‘But I thought you had quarrelled on the ride with Mr Lingfield?’

  ‘Yes, we had. And I knew that Harry wasn’t coming back to dinner as soon as I got his note. He said he should never return to England, but wanted to see me once more before he left. I went—I was always a fool!—but I was scared, too. That’s why I let you know I was going out that night. I felt I wanted someone to know.’

  ‘Did you think he would turn quarrelsome again?’

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t quite know. I was always half afraid of him. He was never violent—at least, not in his actions—but his intensity used to frighten me. I’m rather intense myself, as a matter of fact, and that’s how I know what he was like. He was like a flare of magnesium to a candle compared with me.’

  ‘I don’t think you do yourself justice,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘But if you were really afraid of him, why were you tempted to go?’

  ‘Curiosity. I can’t conquer it. I can’t bear not knowing. I never could.’

  ‘No,’ thought Mrs Bradley, glancing at her companion’s Titian hair, delicious nose and wide, disarming mouth, ‘I can understand that, of course.’

  There was nothing secret there, in the gamine face, the candid eyes, the good, strong bones of the head. There was nothing secret, either, about the splendid body, the milky skin, the muscular arms, the beautiful, sensitive hands. Mrs Bradley, from the first, had felt a good deal of sympathy for Roger, irresistibly attracted, if only for a while, by all this splendour. This woman would be like flame to his sun-starved youth, and not a candle-flame, either, unless one compared him to a moth.

  ‘What do you think I ought to tell the inspector?’ asked Claudia, when they reached Mrs Bradley’s house.

  ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,’ Mrs Bradley replied, ‘but, at present, only so far as will serve to answer his questions. It is the inquest we have to think of, not the inspector.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be the truth to say that the body I saw was Harry Lingfield’s. I know it wasn’t, and nothing will make me alter my opinion.’

  ‘There is no need to alter it, my dear Claudia. The only thing is—don’t embroider. Far more people have found themselves in trouble through over-elaboration than for telling a bald and improbable tale.’

  ‘The inspector won’t believe me.’

  ‘So much the worse for him.’

  ‘For me, surely?’

  ‘No, child, not in the long run. For one thing, even if the inspector doesn�
�t believe you, there are plenty of people who do, and I am one. As a matter of fact, I know most of the truth already.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Oh, yes, child.’

  ‘Well, for my sake, can’t you prove something? Can’t you put the inspector off the track?’

  ‘No, I hardly think I can—particularly as he is not on it at present. My advice is this: You must try not to worry. And don’t prepare conversations in your mind before the inspector questions you. It is most improbable that you will need your careful sentences, and it will confuse you, you’ll find, when the conversation takes a different turn.’

  ‘I suppose he won’t come until the morning? I shall pass a wretched night,’ said Claudia, groaning. The first part of this prophecy proved true; the second, thanks to Mrs Bradley’s witch-brewed sleeping draught (administered to the patient in a glass of egg-flip at bed-time), entirely false. Claudia slept well and came down to breakfast at nine.

  ‘At what time do you think the inspector will come?’ she asked nervously. Mrs Bradley leaned forward and poked the fire.

  ‘I haven’t telephoned him yet,’ she replied. ‘There’s something I ought to ask you to be prepared to tell me before he arrives.’

  ‘I—I don’t think there’s anything at all that I haven’t told you.’

  ‘Except the real cause of your refusal to identify the body as that of Mr Lingfield.’

  ‘But I—but you said you believed me!’

  ‘Yes, I know I did, and so I do. But it would have made things so much easier, after all, if you’d said what everyone expected you to say. I just wondered—’

  ‘You really want me to—come clean?’

  ‘I think it might be better if you did, child.’

  ‘You’re very clever,’ said Claudia Denbies, plucking at one of her ear-rings and taking it off. ‘So clever that you make me nervous.’

  ‘How so, child?’

  ‘Well, you believed me when I told you our quarrel was about music.’

  ‘Yes, I did believe you, but I think it led to something else.’

  ‘Well, yes, we did talk about something else, but—anyway, it wasn’t anything that mattered.’