Here Comes a Chopper

by Gladys Mitchell

  He then tossed them lightly into their beds, pulled their hair, tucked them up and went out laughing.

  ‘We ought to have had a basin of water, and not that beastly brush,’ said Kirby, accepting reverses, as a good general should, merely as the text-book of the future. ‘He could hardly have drowned us, could he?’

  The smacking had had a soporific effect, and the boys, when the time to break out drew near, would have given a good deal to be out of the business and to have lapsed into comforting slumber. Like older and supposedly wiser persons, however, having committed themselves to the expedition they felt in honour bound to go through with it.

  Roger might have known nothing about it at all had it not been for the entirely fortuitous circumstance that a little boy named Thomason was sick in the night, and had to receive attention from the matron.

  Kirby and Healy-Lunn, as members of the Sixth, were permitted a room for two. Thomason slept next door to them in a dormitory. He was nine years old, and so were the other three children in the room. Roger, having been brought into the affair by a tousle-headed boy in pyjamas who came to the masters’ room at just after half-past nine, went into the two-room to request Kirby or Healy-Lunn to run for the matron who resided in the school sanatorium, distant a stone’s throw from the main buildings.

  He found the two-room empty and the boys’ outdoor clothes gone from their pegs behind the door. Quickly he sent two other thirteen-year-olds for the matron, and then set to work to discover what madness had this time possessed his two blithe spirits.

  He had to be circumspect if the headmaster were not to know what had happened, and he was still too near his undergraduate days to want boys to be expelled for what he felt quite sure was a silly prank. He owed this particular pair a debt of gratitude, moreover, for having saved him from injury, possibly from death, at Gravesend—from his point of view aptly named. He resolved to go after the truants and get them back to their room and say nothing to anyone about it.

  Leaving the capable matron in charge of the sick child, he went out to the shed where the masters kept cycles and motor cycles, and borrowed Parkinson’s machine. The minimum of enquiry had given him a clue. Roger was not a bad psychologist except where girls were concerned.

  The boys, Roger concluded, would have ridden to the theatre on bicycles. A key to the cycle shed hung in the boys’ lobby, and was under the guard of a lobby prefect. It was a simple matter, however, for a boy to abstract it when he came to bed, carry it up to his dormitory, and use it after lights-out: simple, that is to say, in theory. The practical difficulty was that as bicycle lamps were forbidden, cycling at night was a breach of the law as well as of the rules of the school.

  Roger wondered, as he kicked Parkinson’s machine into motion, whether the boys had managed to acquire bicycle lamps, or whether they were running the risk of cycling without lights. Time alone would show.

  It was a dark night, and Parkinson’s head-lamp made the hedges of the school drive look black, strange and solid. It seemed as though the boys would be already at the theatre unless some accident had prevented this or had delayed them, so he felt little need to keep more than a cursory lookout for them on his way. He turned out of the school gate, which the boys had left wide open, and, once upon the road, he opened up the throttle and made speed.

  The trip by day would have been both pleasant and pretty, particularly at that time of the early summer, but in the darkness there was nothing much to look at except the brilliance of the headlight on the road. He roared over a bridge and past a roadhouse, took the straight road into the village, slowed for a town, and then accelerated briskly and was soon touching fifty miles an hour across a common.

  He mistook the way after that, having taken a left-hand fork instead of keeping straight on, and he had come to a railway bridge before he realized what he had done. He knew where he was, however, and decided that to keep straight on would be quicker than turning in his tracks.

  The road he was following was narrower than the one he had intended to take, but the surface was good, and he did not need to slow down except on a very rough couple of miles across a gorse-covered heath where the road became no more than a track and the surface was very uneven.

  He struck a good road after that, and came into another town to find it all very quiet. He stopped to ask a policeman the way to take for the theatre, for he was now some miles out of his way. He was directed, and drove on out of the town towards the village in which the theatre had been made from an ancient tithe-barn.

  Roger had no particular plan of action in his head beyond arriving at the theatre and getting the two boys unostentatiously out of it. That this would be no easy task had not occurred to him. The theatre was up a short lane. He saw the lanterns swinging on either side of the entrance, propped up his motor cycle in the only space he could find which was not already occupied by pedal cycles, other motor cycles and cars, and went up to the entrance of the barn.

  ‘Ticket?’ said a handsome youth in a pink shirt, orange trousers and a black tie.

  Roger said brusquely:

  ‘I’ve got two boys inside. I want to get them home.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Their seat numbers?’ said a blonde girl, joining the youth and talking through her cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know them,’ Roger confessed. ‘Do you mind if I go in?’

  ‘Well, you might go in at the interval,’ said the youth obligingly, ‘but you can’t interrupt just now. We’ve just begun the second act, you know.’

  ‘How long does the second act take?’

  ‘Over in three-quarters of an hour—another forty minutes from now. Not long to wait. Have a gasper, won’t you?’

  ‘But, good Lord!’ said Roger. ‘I can’t wait forty minutes! I’ve got to get back with these kids! They’ve broken out of school!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the blonde, ‘but there it is.’

  She retired with the pink-shirted youth and they conversed learnedly of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, the Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich, the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill, and the Citizen Theatre, Bath, until Roger, in desperation, pushed his way in through a badly-hung door and stood in the auditorium.

  He had a self-congratulatory moment in which he believed he had crossed his last fence, but he found that this was not so. The barn seemed pitch-dark except for the light from the stage, for the box-office from which he had come, although lighted only by the lanterns, had made his eyes already unaccustomed to darkness.

  It was not going to be possible, as he realized almost at once, to locate his two truants without going along all the rows until he found them. He went back to the box-office. Neither the pink shirt nor the blonde hair took the slightest notice of him. They were discussing the Little Theatre, Bournemouth.

  He felt he could not hang about for nearly forty minutes, so he went back to Parkinson’s motor cycle, started it up, and went for a thirty-minute ride.

  At first he went towards Guildford, but suddenly, before he had covered half a mile, he had another and a crazier scheme. He would go back, he thought, to Whiteledge, and have another look at the house in which so many extraordinary incidents had their root.

  He took the road by Merrow Down and Clandon Park through the village of East Glandon and out by way of the two Horsleys as far as Effingham. He turned off, but, realizing very soon that, in the darkness, he was not likely to find the house at all easily, he went past the golf course and as far as White Hill, and then thought it better to return.

  He was in good time, but the interval came at last, and he went in, collared his truants (who were very sleepy, rather bored, and looked extremely frightened when they saw him), gave them a good start on the homeward road, and then went after them.

  All went well; he let them into school with his own latch-key, saw them to their dormitory, and told them to come and see him in the morning. He interviewed them grimly when they appeared.

  ‘Oh, but sir!’ said Master Kirby, at sight of the cane. ‘You can�
�t mean to beat us, sir!’

  ‘Bend over,’ said Roger briefly.

  ‘But you can’t do this to us, sir,’ urged Kirby. ‘Mr Simmonds smacked us only last night, sir. With a whacking great clothes-brush, sir, too.’

  ‘What for?’ said Roger, who did not much like Mr Simmonds.

  ‘Well, nothing, really, sir. I thought I saw one of those things, sir, in Lunn’s hair, and, as he is going home at half-term, I thought it only fair to his people——’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ said Roger, putting away the cane. ‘Shan’t I ever get some of my own back on you two pests!’

  The morning papers were delivered to the masters at breakfast. Roger opened the paper two mornings after his night ride, read the sports page, turned to the news, and had his eye caught by a heading.

  The body of a man identified as Sim, the Whiteledge chauffeur, had been discovered on a common between Effingham and Little Bookham. His head had been cut off and left beside the body, and the features had been so disfigured as to be unrecognizable, but his brother had sworn to the corpse. Roger noted, with quickening interest, that he himself must have passed the spot on Parkinson’s motor cycle, probably within a few minutes of the time of the murder.

  The inspector turned up at school at twelve o’clock, and at twenty minutes past twelve the headmaster sent for Roger.

  ‘When you have had your lunch, Mr Hoskyn,’ he said, ‘you had better accede to this officer’s request that you show him our countryside as a contribution to his work on a case of, I regret to say, murder. He states that he has met you before.’

  ‘Yes, headmaster. We met during the Easter holidays.’

  ‘Very well. You will return, I anticipate, in time to take preparation for Mr Parkinson if he deputises for you in the games field this afternoon.’

  ‘Certainly. But I don’t quite understand——’

  ‘The officer will explain, and would like, I dare say, to take lunch in the dining hall with the boys.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You had better escort him, meanwhile, to the masters’ common room.’

  ‘It would be better, sir, if you’ve no objection,’ put in the inspector, speaking with great respect but firmly, ‘if Mr Hoskyn could accompany me now at once on our tour of the district.’

  ‘He will miss his lunch,’ said the headmaster.

  ‘I shall not keep him long, sir.’

  ‘Very well. You know your own business. Have you any objection, Mr Hoskyn?’

  Roger, who knew that he and the inspector would lunch at a public house and that bread and cheese and beer would be a satisfactory substitute, so far as he was concerned, for the school meal of stewed beef and boiled cabbage, replied demurely that he had no objection at all.

  He and the inspector were to make their round by car, and Roger was at no loss to understand the reason for the jaunt. Somebody must have seen him on the previous Sunday night and reported his movements. He did not feel at all nervous. He knew that, subconsciously, he had expected the inspector to turn up.

  ‘I understand you were on the spot, sir, at the time the murder took place,’ the inspector observed, as they drove away from the school.

  ‘On what spot when what murder took place?’ Roger demanded, his heart thumping most unpleasantly.

  ‘Haven’t you seen the morning paper, sir?’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Roger. ‘You don’t mean——’ But it sounded over-done, and he knew it.

  The car made a grinding noise as the inspector changed up and the speed increased. They travelled for about another half mile, and then the inspector said:

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s what I mean. You were known to be out and about in the neighbourhood just about the time the doctor thinks the man died. The head was cut off a bit later.’

  ‘I saw and heard nothing, I assure you. I can’t help you over this, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s yourself you have to help, sir,’ said the inspector earnestly. ‘I’ve brought you away from the school deliberately, to see if I could persuade you to come across.’

  ‘With what? Speak out, man! I don’t know what the devil you’re getting at!’ cried Roger, hoping that this sounded like the truth, but feeling the rope round his neck.

  ‘Well, sir, the dead man, as you know from the morning paper, was Sim, Mr Lingfield’s chauffeur. We know he had a crack or two at you. Now he’s found dead under very peculiar circumstances, and you were in the immediate neighbourhood at the time of his death. I thought perhaps you’d care to give me, as it were, a friendly account of your movements, sir, that’s all, on the night of the crime.’

  ‘Why, you idiot!’ said Roger, swallowing hard, and wondering why he had thought that he did not feel nervous. ‘You don’t think I murdered the perisher? Although, if I had, it was no more than he deserved, as you said yourself!’

  ‘That’s the point, sir,’ said the inspector, gazing stolidly through the windscreen, ‘and that’s what we’ve got to clear up. If you had, it would have been no more than he deserved. And we’re with you there, sir. You’ve had a lot to put up with since Mr Lingfield’s body was found. Nobody knows that better than the police. Well, sir, there was you in the offing of that murder, and there’s you in the offing of this murder——’

  ‘Look here,’ said Roger, ‘what exactly are you getting at, damn it!’

  ‘This, sir. If it was in self-defence, I’d advise you to say so at once.’

  ‘Get it into your fat head that I know absolutely nothing about Sim’s death except for what I read in the paper this morning! As for the other murder, you know I’ve told you nothing but the truth.’

  ‘I hope you’ll reconsider that statement, sir. All I want——’

  ‘All you’ll get is a thick ear,’ said Roger wrathfully. ‘Hang it all, I was simply chasing two kids who’d broken out at night to go to a show. A dozen men might have been murdered. I still don’t see that you’ve any reason whatever for trying to fasten anything on me.’

  The inspector, who had been driving all this time towards Godstone, did not reply until he had turned in to the courtyard of the fine old sixteenth-century inn of that place.

  ‘Let’s have some lunch, sir,’ he said, ‘and after that we’d better track out your movements on the night in question. Any objection to that programme?’

  ‘None, so long as you don’t keep calling me a murderer.’

  ‘Such was not my intention, sir, as I think you know. But I’d be glad of a full explanation.’

  ‘All right. We’ll call an armistice. I could do with a drink, couldn’t you?’

  They had some beer, and then had steak and kidney pudding, some more beer, and an apple tart.

  ‘And now, sir——’ suggested the inspector, when he had smoked a pipe and Roger a couple of cigarettes.

  ‘Look here,’ said Roger, recalled by this elliptical remark to the exigencies of the situation, ‘perhaps I’d better tell you just what happened.’

  He described in careful detail his night’s work.

  ‘And the boys would support this account, sir?’

  ‘I suppose so, but you’d have to promise to keep it dark from the headmaster.’

  ‘That could no doubt be arranged, sir. And now, as to where you went, and the time you took——’

  ‘So you don’t believe me? All right. Suit yourself. My story is true and I stick to it.’

  ‘Very good, sir, though I don’t know that I’d say very wise. Still, you must please yourself.’

  So the car was driven into Guildford and beyond it, past the half-timbered cottages of East Clandon, past the elms of West Horsley and the fine front of West Horsley Place, past Effingham, and then to where Roger had turned the motor cycle and returned to the theatre and his boys.

  ‘And where exactly was the body found?’ he enquired, feeling that he was entitled to some information in return for that which he was supplying to the inspector.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there, sir,’ the inspector impert
urbably replied. ‘I must congratulate you, sir, on being either a very cool customer or on knowing as little about Sim’s death as you say you know. We have now passed the spot twice, and I noticed very particularly that you never turned a hair.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Roger, unimpressed by this dubious compliment. ‘And what the devil do you want with me now?’

  ‘Particulars of your acquaintance with Mrs Denbies, sir. The whole thing seems to us to hang on that.’

  ‘But I haven’t any acquaintance with Mrs Denbies! You know that as well as I do! I had never set eyes on her until——’

  ‘Maundy Thursday, sir? How came it, then, that you confessed to knowing her, and that in front of witnesses?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you arrived at Whiteledge House, I understand, sir.’

  ‘Well, but—hang it all, Inspector, I expect I said I’d seen photographs of her in the illustrated papers. After all, she is a celebrity, isn’t she?’

  ‘There is that, sir, but your subsequent actions——’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Well, they were remarked upon, sir. Lady Catherine herself——’