Here Comes a Chopper

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘I congratulate you. But—well, never mind, Mr MacIver. Go on with your story.’

  ‘Aye. Well, we would have been running up the gradient before ye win to the level crossing we ca’ Stump’s Gallows, and I was thinking I could see a body across the line. So I put on the brakes and pulled up, and then I was thinking the body had nae heid on him. It was an awfu’ thing, that. Man, man, but that was a gey awfu’ thing! I will have seen it several times in the war, and I dinna wish to see it again. Guid sakes, but I couldna thole it!’

  ‘You had a bad shock?’

  ‘I did, so. But I needna hae fashed mysel’ at that, for there was naething across the line at a’.’

  ‘You believe that?’ asked the coroner, very sharply. ‘You did not believe it at the time! Do you really believe it now?’

  ‘Och, aye.’ The childlike gaze was rested on his. ‘Och, aye. Why for should I not be believing it? Isn’t it myself has the gift, bad luck to it for a mournful thing and a black handicap to a man’s peace, so it is, so it is!’

  ‘The gift?’

  ‘Och, aye. Hae ye never heard tell of the gift?’

  ‘You mean, I take it, that you suffered from a—from a hallucination?’

  ‘Ye may ca’ it that!’

  ‘But haven’t you ever been medically treated?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, what did the doctor say to you?’

  ‘He said, “Ye’re fine. Dinna do it ony mair, ye gowk!” ’

  ‘He said——?’

  ‘I had drink taken, ye ken,’ explained Mr MacIver with the flicker of a smile. ‘Hooch. I was very ba-ad. Very ba-ad, so I was, indeed. That was in Germany I was, I was so ba-ad.’

  There was a rustle. The coroner quelled it with a glare which he then switched on to the witness, only to find its fierceness rendered impotent. Mr MacIver clearly expected sympathy and not censure. The coroner gave in.

  ‘The—this experience left you, no doubt, with some—er—after-effects, Mr MacIver?’ he suggested, abandoning his attempt to discredit the witness’s sanity.

  ‘I dinna ken,’ replied MacIver, very gravely.

  ‘Did you know the dead man, this Mr Lingfield?’

  ‘Sir,’ said the witness mildly, ‘I put it to ye with a’ possible respect, but ye should pay mair attention to the leddy.’

  ‘To the——?’

  ‘To Mrs Denbies,’ said MacIver quietly. ‘She tellt ye ye’re chasing after the wrong deer, and ye dinna care to heed her. It’s an awfu’ mistake. Och, aye!’

  ‘Answer the question!’ said the coroner wrathfully. ‘You are not here to direct me what to do.’

  ‘I kent Mr Lingfield verra well, och, but verra well. A’ that I am after telling ye the now is that the leddy is right, and Mr Lingfield, in my opinion, isna deid.’

  ‘Oh, you think that, do you?’ said the coroner. ‘Well, I don’t think we need that opinion. You had better stand down. Call Mr Hoskyn again.’

  Roger, looking bored and feeling empty, went back to the chair which served as a seat for the witness giving evidence.

  ‘Now,’ said the coroner, ‘take your time, Mr Hoskyn. On the day of the deceased’s death you saw him alive at some time during the afternoon.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But I understand from the report that you saw him!’

  ‘I don’t know, really. You see, I’ve never met Mr Lingfield, so I don’t know whether the man I saw——’

  ‘Oh, you did see somebody? Who was with him?’

  ‘The word is “were”,’ said Roger. ‘The man I saw was accompanied by Mrs Denbies and by a boy, George Merrow, Mr Lingfield’s nephew, I believe.’

  ‘The man was Mr Lingfield,’ said Claudia’s solicitor. ‘There is no argument against that, sir. My client admits that she was with him. She even admits she quarrelled with him.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr MacAdam,’ said the coroner. ‘No more of your shuffling, young man!’ he added, addressing Roger ill-temperedly. ‘Now then! You saw these three people together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Half-past five, I should say.’

  ‘Then you saw one of them alone?’

  ‘Yes, the boy, George Merrow.’

  ‘What did you conclude from that?’

  Roger involuntarily grinned.

  ‘Oh, that they’d managed to get rid of the kid,’ he answered, ‘and go off riding by themselves.’

  ‘After you had seen this boy ride past, it appears that you went to Whiteledge, the dead man’s home. What made you think of going there?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t think of it at all. The house happened to be a sort of outpost of civilization, and we’d lost our way, so we went and knocked to see whether they could tell us where we’d got to.’

  ‘And in this house you saw Mrs Denbies and the boy, but not the man you had seen with them on the common. Did that not strike you as odd?’

  ‘No. And even if it had, it needn’t have. It was all explained very soon.’

  ‘I should think so, too,’ said Lady Catherine, who was tired of being ignored. ‘Thirteen at table, of all unconscionable things! That’s what Harry had done for George’s party! But Harry never did have the very slightest thought for other people! I have often told him so myself. I was never afraid of Harry, no matter what people have told you!’

  ‘Ah, yes, Lady Catherine,’ said the coroner. ‘You were responsible for inviting Mr Hoskyn and his fiancée to your—to this house. Now, if I might just finish first with Mr Hoskyn——’

  ‘I don’t know any Mr Hoskyn,’ protested Lady Catherine. ‘There would never have been any question of Mr Hoskyn but for Harry’s ridiculous behaviour. And it’s all nonsense for Claudia to tell you that he rode away and left her like that. They couldn’t have quarrelled! I don’t believe a word of it! They were head over heels in love, and who can blame them? Do you blame them? You may not look intelligent, but I cannot think you would blame them. I did not.’

  ‘In just a minute, please, Lady Catherine!’

  ‘Nonsense! It doesn’t need swearing on a Bible that Claudia met him after midnight. Everyone knows that she did. Bugle knows, Sim knows, I know. Even Mrs Bradley knows, although I swear on the Bible I did not tell her.’

  ‘Oh, hell!’ said Roger, under his breath. There was another stir in the courtroom, and the reporter in the back corner scribbled vigorously, his tongue at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Really, Lady Catherine, you must not interrupt me or the witness,’ said the coroner, very severely. ‘Now, Mr Hoskyn, please attend to me closely. You were in the train, I understand, driven by the witness MacIver on the night of Thursday, March 29th, when the train was stopped near—er—he consulted his notes—near the level crossing at Stumps Gallows. Is that so?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Roger. ‘I was on the train all right.’

  ‘Do you identify the driver?’

  ‘Yes. Mr MacIver drove the train.’

  ‘Do you identify anyone else who was on the train?’

  ‘Yes. I can see the guard and the fireman—I don’t know their names, but there they are. There was also my companion, Miss Woodcote.’

  ‘Will you describe what happened?’

  ‘Nothing much. It only took about ten minutes. The train stopped and I got out. The driver thought he had seen a body on the line, and we—that is, the guard, the fireman and myself—looked about, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘No body, no head, no blood. Nothing that one would expect from such an accident. We looked all the way along the train and back along two hundred yards of the track.’

  ‘To what did you attribute the driver’s strange aberration?’

  ‘I thought at first he must be tight.’

  ‘I protest,’ said the railway company’s solicitor. ‘You must not say that an employee of the Company was drunk in charge of a train.’

>   ‘And you, sir,’ said the coroner with spirit, ‘must not presume to give orders in my court.’

  ‘Then let me urge, sir,’ said the solicitor, ‘that you suggest to the witness to alter the form of his answer.’

  ‘As to that,’ said Roger, ‘I was going on to say—well, anyhow, I knew the man wasn’t drunk. He knew what I thought and he told me to smell his breath. I did, and he hadn’t had a drop. Well, then I was told he was worried about his wife, so I just thought it must be a sign of nervous strain, this headless body on the line. I mean to say——’

  ‘Havers!’ said Mr MacIver. ‘I hae the gift, I tell ye. It’s no a thing to boast about, and I wouldna be confessing to it if I wasna very sure that it is true.’

  ‘Yes, I understand now,’ said Roger, ‘but at the time, you see——’

  ‘You ascertained to your own satisfaction, then, that there had been no fatality,’ said the coroner: ‘All right. And now, Lady Catherine …’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said a rich and beautiful voice, ‘but Lady Catherine Leith is not in a fit condition to give evidence in this or any other court. It is only fair that you should know that before you begin to question her.’

  ‘Madam?’ said the coroner, amazed.

  ‘I support that contention,’ said a stout man of vaguely Jewish aspect, rising from his place in the middle of the room, and speaking in a thin and unconvincing voice. ‘I am Doctor Beni Yusman of Santiago.’

  ‘Well, really, this is most disconcerting!’ said the coroner. ‘I had been counting upon Lady Catherine’s evidence to throw some light on the matter——’

  ‘I should think so, indeed,’ said Lady Catherine good-humouredly. ‘Mad I may be, and poor Mary, too, but that’s no reason why he should be kept out of his grave like this. It’s quite disgraceful, and nobody knows what they suffer. Lucidly, then, she went out in her car in the very early morning, and only Sim knows when she came back because her car was left out on the gravel. I only know that because I am a Boy Scout and look at tyres.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Lady Catherine,’ said the coroner hastily. ‘I don’t think we need go into all that. Now, Mrs Denbies——’

  ‘No!’ said Claudia’s lawyer, speaking violently. ‘My client admits nothing more! This witness is quite mischievous, as you have just heard from the two distinguished alienists who are present. No account whatever can be taken of anything that Lady Catherine says.’

  ‘But I admit the truth of what she says,’ said Claudia calmly. ‘And I thought the alienists were for Mary Leith, not Lady Catherine. I would like to make a further statement if I may.’

  ‘Come up here,’ said the coroner.

  ‘I did leave the house that night—or, rather, very early next morning,’ stated Claudia, disregarding the expression of helplessness and dismay on the countenance of Mr MacAdam. ‘But I did not go to meet Harry—Harry Lingfield. I went to meet my husband, Vassily Vesper. I know now that it was a hoax, and that I was never intended to see him, but—I went.’

  ‘No, no!’ moaned Mr MacAdam, almost wringing his hands in his distress.

  ‘I can’t have Lady Catherine called a liar and a madwoman in public when she isn’t either,’ went on Claudia, throwing up her splendid head. ‘I prefer to offer this voluntary statement.’

  ‘Go on!’ said Roger, sotto voce, but scarlet in the face with resumed love and dreadful anguish. ‘Go on! Go the whole hog, you beautiful, adorable fool! Tell him you took your bow and arrows!’

  ‘You admit, then,’ said the coroner, ‘that you met a certain gentleman at this rendezvous, and you assert on oath that it was not the deceased but another man of whom the court has never heard, that you went to see?’

  ‘If you please, sir,’ said the inspector, very drily. ‘Things are beginning to come out, sir, which will hardly serve the work of the police, and may even hinder them in the execution of their duty if gone into closely at this early stage of the proceedings.’

  The coroner, by this time nearly as red in the face as Roger, looked with some hatred at the inspector and proceeded to read, at a fast gabble, more or less what everybody had said. Condensed, there could be but one conclusion to draw from it. That he did not draw this conclusion was unforeseen but a great relief to everybody.

  ‘I find,’ he said, ‘that Harry Lingfield, deceased, was murdered, by a person or persons unknown and by decapitation or other means, on the early morning of Good Friday last, March 30th, and I should like to add——’

  ‘These damned riders,’ said Mr MacAdam loudly to Mrs Bradley. Mrs Bradley cackled. The coroner abruptly swept his papers together.

  ‘You don’t suppose Lady Catherine did it, do you?’ asked Roger, struck by a not unpleasant thought, as he and Dorothy strolled out into the sunlit garden and went and stood idly by the pond.

  ‘She did her best to put it on Mrs Denbies. Of course, it’s the transport question, and the head being missing,’ said Dorothy, ‘that make the whole thing such a puzzle. It’s all horribly mad, and yet horribly sane, too, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘None better. I’ve tried to work it out until my skull feels like splitting with sheer frustration. How did the head get cut off? It couldn’t have been a train, could it? I mean, for that, the body must have been placed right across the line as MacIver said. The neck must have rested on one rail. The driver couldn’t help but know he’d run over it, I should say. After all, there’s no black-out now, and wouldn’t one feel the bump?’

  ‘They’ll try to find a driver who did know, and who hasn’t said anything,’ said Dorothy, shivering. ‘Fancy knowing you’d done a thing like that! I think I’d come forward at once, if only to get the weight off my mind. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And then there’s the head. Where is it? Of course, there was that fellow in the play who carried one about with him in a hat-box.’

  ‘There are the clothes, too. It isn’t easy to get rid of clothes.’

  ‘Perhaps the murderer wears them. Or, of course, there’s always the black market. I shouldn’t think they ask many questions.’

  ‘Well, I hope the police soon clear it all up, because, unless they do, there is only one thing that can happen.’

  ‘You mean—Claudia Denbies?’

  ‘I don’t see anything else. And the coroner thinks so, too. I wonder, really, how many lies she told?’

  ‘Do you think she went to meet Lingfield? Or do you believe that yarn about her husband?’

  ‘Goodness knows. Anyway, who else is missing except Lingfield? That’s the point.’

  ‘That might be a thing that only the murderer knows. I suppose it couldn’t be the husband?’

  ‘You know, I can imagine, with anybody like Mrs Denbies, a husband might possibly be a nuisance. Could she and Mr Lingfield be concerned in it together?’

  ‘Thompson and Bywaters, you mean? That’s always possible. Crimes of passion—I prefer that description to anything which actually suggests sex, don’t you——?’

  ‘Infinitely. Passion is a tactful sort of Victorian, anti-macassarish word, isn’t it?’

  ‘So different from lust, lewdness, fornication and adultery, you mean?’

  ‘Roger, what is a crime of passion? Are there really such crimes? It doesn’t seem as though antimacassars ought to lead to murder. They don’t go together a bit.’

  ‘Don’t they, though? What about Adelaide Bartlett? What about the Seddons? What about——’

  ‘But I don’t know anything about any of them.’

  ‘Oh, well! Anyway, that was a very odd line for Claudia—Mrs Denbies—to take, although particularly noble, I thought. You know, refusing to shelter behind the fact that Lady Catherine is cuckoo.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dorothy, frowning a little. ‘It may have been noble, but, at the same time, if you see what I mean——’

  ‘Well, come on! Out with it!’

  ‘Well, I like her, of course, but—she’s rather too intelligent, don’t you think, to put a rope
round her neck when there were Mrs Bradley and that man able and willing to say that no notice need be taken of Lady Catherine?’

  ‘Talking of that, what an eye-opener! I can’t say I’d have spotted it. Would you?’

  ‘Yes. But, look, stick to the point.’

  ‘Don’t know that I want to,’ said Roger, with a slightly shame-faced grin. ‘No, hang it, you’re perfectly right. One ought to face the facts. And I do see what you mean. At least, I think I do.’

  ‘Yes. I mean that for some reason Mrs Denbies didn’t want Lady Catherine to be discredited. The point is—what is the reason? Do you think she’d have liked to take it back when Lady Catherine mentioned the car being left out?’

  ‘I don’t know. It would account, though, as I was going to say just now, for all that business of thirteen at table when there were only twelve.’

  ‘What would?’

  ‘Her being—well, not quite right in the head.’

  ‘Oh, she may not be very good at counting up.’

  ‘I think personally that she was unconsciously counting Lingfield all the time.’

  ‘What do you suppose will happen next? Do you think the inspector will arrest Mrs Denbies at once?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt about it.’ Roger kicked the stone basin moodily. ‘Somebody will be arrested, and, unless something startling turns up, it’s almost bound to be Claudia. I should say she dished herself completely by that last statement she made. Besides, that lawyer of hers is scared stiff. He knew that if he let her open her mouth she’d put her foot in it. Bit of a fool, I should imagine. That fellow, I mean. He might have known that a woman—especially a red-haired woman—won’t put up with having somebody jump down her throat every time she wants to say a few words.’

  ‘You mean, then, that although you’re determined to think she’s innocent, you really believe that she’s guilty.’

  ‘Well,’ said Roger, dislodging a piece of gravel with the toe of his shoe and kicking it viciously on to the well-kept lawn, ‘you might put it like that, I suppose. But, if she’s guilty, what did she do with the head? And who changed the burnt-out car for the wrecked one? And if the wrecked car was used to carry the body from the railway to the copse, why weren’t there bloodstains inside it?’