Here Comes a Chopper

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘If you will excuse me, ladies,’ he said.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ said Dorothy involuntarily, the moment the door closed behind him.

  ‘I don’t know. There is worse to come,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘You see, Mr Lingfield isn’t dead.’

  Clare Dunley went red and Eunice Pigdon white. Nobody else looked surprised, much less taken aback, by this pronouncement. Roger felt, now that the statement had been made, that he had known it for a very long time. Dorothy, too, saw it now as a foregone conclusion.

  ‘Then he is the murderer,’ said Roger, ‘and Claudia was right when she said—and stuck to it—that it wasn’t Lingfield’s body that she saw.’

  ‘I never thought it was,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘What about the proofs, though?’ said Bob. ‘Didn’t you say you couldn’t prove it?’

  ‘Well, Mary Leith is prepared to swear that it was Mr Lingfield who shot Captain Ranmore in the leg to keep him out of the summer-house. The point is to find Mr Lingfield. Once we can produce him alive the deed is done. The trouble is that the police can’t find him, and, although Mary Leith is convinced that he is alive, she doesn’t know where he is.’

  ‘But——’ said Bob and Dorothy together. ‘He must surely be off to South America by now,’ concluded Bob, who had filled and lighted his pipe, and was smoking placidly. Roger grunted but did not speak. He had been struck by a brilliant but, he suspected, a foolish idea.

  ‘Well, I’ll say good night,’ said Eunice Pigdon.

  ‘Good night,’ said Clare Dunley, going with her to the door. Roger leapt up to open it for them, but as he got there the inspector turned the handle and came in.

  The three started back, but the inspector waved a large, pale hand and gave an indulgent smile.

  ‘Quite all right, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Just a little spot of bother with Lady Catherine, but the nurse can cope nicely now. All we want to complete the party is Mr Lingfield.’

  ‘You can’t find him?’ exclaimed Mary Leith, appearing in the hall just behind the inspector’s shoulder. ‘What can you prove against him when you do?’

  ‘Nothing at all at present, miss,’ the inspector cheerfully replied. ‘But we would like to ask him why he allowed us to hold an inquest on him, and what he can tell us about the body that wasn’t his!’

  He stood aside, and the two women who were in love with Harry Lingfield went to their beds. Roger saw Clare Dunley take Mary Leith by the arm and compel her upstairs. Eunice Pigdon followed.

  Mrs Bradley looked at Bob, who rose awkwardly, scowled, and said good night. When he had gone, she smiled at Roger and Dorothy and waved a yellow claw.

  ‘The inspector and I want to talk things over,’ she said. ‘“Lovers to bed! ’Tis almost fairy time.” By the way, I found out about Benjamin’s sack. Now we are alone—you won’t mind the inspector, I know!—I can tell you about your mysterious seven and sixpence.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ said Roger.

  ‘It did not come from Bugle and Sim, as you supposed, but was a present from Lady Catherine. I got it out of Bugle, although with some difficulty. He seemed to find her point of view indelicate. I pointed out to him, however, that there is either nothing or everything indelicate about marriage. It depends on the point of view.’

  ‘Marriage?’ said Roger. ‘Good Lord! The price of the licence! I suppose,’ he added, ‘Mary Leith looks careworn because she’s been Lady Catherine’s keeper for so long.’

  ‘And had been doing her best to keep Lady Catherine’s mental condition a secret,’ said the inspector. ‘Yes, sir, you’ve guessed it in one. And she’s now on the verge of a breakdown.’

  ‘There’s another thing I’ve guessed,’ said Roger carelessly. ‘Why don’t you look for Lingfield in London?’

  ‘The Yard have been on to that for weeks, sir. If they don’t find him, we can’t!’

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘See, see, the Sun

  Doth slowly to his azure lodging run;

  Come, sit but here,

  And presently he’ll quit our hemisphere:

  So, still among

  Lovers, time is too short or else too long.’

  JOHN HALL OF DURHAM, The Call

  ‘WE’VE GOT THIS, then, mam,’ said the inspector. ‘As soon as we get hold of Lingfield he’ll have to explain away the inquest. He can’t pretend he doesn’t know of it. It’s been in all the newspapers, and the local papers had a very full account. Then he’s got to explain away the murder of Sim——’

  ‘Can you charge him with the murder of Sim?’ asked Mrs Bradley.

  ‘I reckon we’ve got it pretty well weighed up, mam. Sim blackmailed him all right, I’ll take my oath. I’ve just had word that Mrs Denbies has been released. My bet is that she knows something more than she’s said, although there’s nothing to hold her for if—as the Yard has advised us to do—we accept your view of her innocence. She did go out that night, and she did go to see Vesper. He was only just out of jug, we find—or, rather, the Yard found for us—and it seems to have been his own suggestion that they should meet very secretly, so as not to prejudice her with her public by allowing it to be known she consorted with criminals. We found the letter among her things.’

  ‘Why didn’t she produce it in court?’

  ‘It appears—we’ve confronted her with all this and challenged her to deny it—the sergeant was handy there, him having the grand passion for her—not as that’s very suitable in a police officer, but there it is, and there isn’t any arguing with emotions—it appears that she thought from the first that the letter was phony, and really came from Lingfield. She came across with that, and it’s contributory evidence in support of your tip that Lingfield isn’t dead. We made her—at least, the sergeant did (he don’t want her hanged!)—we made her swear to the date Lingfield tore his trousers, and then put the doctors on to that. The scars on the corpse were years older! The bet is that Lingfield had had the murder planned for years!’

  ‘I see. She’s been shielding Mr Lingfield?’

  ‘As far as she could. There’s no doubt she was in love with him, I should say.’

  ‘And, in his way, no doubt, he was in love with her,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘He committed murder to remove her husband, it appears, and even went to the length of lacerating himself on barbed wire in preparation for the deed. Well, well!’

  ‘It’s a strange thing, in a country like England,’ said the inspector, ‘that love—if you can call it that—is responsible for more murders than any other motive murderers have. It don’t seem to go with a steady and God-fearing nation, somehow, mam. Now take my sergeant, as I say—though, mind you, he’s had his uses! There’s a young fellow as sensible as you could wish in the ordinary way, but what does he go and say, the minute we’ve fixed it all on Lingfield and have only to get him to put him where we want him?’

  ‘He probably said it was a pity,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘His very words, mam! “It seems a pity, don’t it?” he says, looking more like a piece of cheese than any sergeant of mine has a right to look. “After all the poor feller went through to get her, it seems a pity that we should be after him like a couple of condemned bloodhounds.” Told him off I did, good and proper, and finished up by telling him to think of the lady’s good name, and not to be wishing a double murderer on her for a husband. “Besides,” I said, “we haven’t caught him yet.”

  ‘He looks at me as if he could cry. “Think of the lady! I only wish as how I dared think of her!” he says. Now, I ask you, mam, if that’s any way for an ambitious officer to talk. And got brains in his head, mind you, at that. It was him found out that your chauffeur, George, hid the young lady in your garage while Miss Menzies, your secretary, mam, took Mr Hoskyn out of the murderer’s way. They were Sim’s prints on that spanner.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Laura prefers the lively, picturesque method of achieving her effects,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I heard of the pyjama-trouser hunt. My Frenc
h cook, who played a small part, enjoyed that affair immensely.’

  ‘Pretty nearly dished the whole issue, though, not foreseeing as the yokel would have his revenge,’ said the inspector with a chuckle. ‘One thing, thanks to the trip-wires and Mr Hoskyn—I shouldn’t care to meet him on a dark night if he was feeling kind of tough, mam, for all he looks like a minor poet or something——’

  ‘He is a minor poet,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘——well, as I say, mam, be that as it may (and my sergeant writes poetry, too, and at the end of his official notebook at that!) the fact remains that he handled his man a treat, by all accounts, and we ought to be able to find the marks if only we can nab his lordship—I refer to Lingfield—soon enough!’

  ‘The little boy who bit the hand was quite clever, too,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I suppose Mr Hoskyn trained him.’

  ‘We’ve tracked the two cars, mam, and your idea worked out correct again,’ said the inspector, handsomely spoken as usual. ‘It was Lingfield’s own car that had the bloodstains. The wrecked car he bought off a dump-heap just to try and throw dust in our eyes. If he’d had the sense to get some of the blood on it we might have bothered more about it in the first place, when Mr Hoskyn spotted it was in the place of that old burnt-out one. The garage where he bought the wrecked car gave a description that tallied nicely with Sim. Of course, it was the wrecked car—but it wasn’t wrecked then—Lady Catherine saw on the gravel. It’s the same make as Mrs Denbies’.’

  ‘You’ve worked out Sim’s programme on the day and night of the murder, I suppose?’

  ‘Pretty well, thanks to you, mam. But we can’t see when he managed to substitute the wrecked car for the burnt one. There’s witnesses to prove the burnt one was there the day before the murder. Mr Hoskyn saw it, too.’

  ‘Lemons,’ said Mrs Bradley. She explained. ‘It was risky, of course, and Lingfield had to get rid of Mrs Denbies to go and render assistance.’

  ‘The quarrel, mam!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’ve got it all now, mam, I think. Sim took the burnt-out car to bits. He thought Mr Hoskyn had spotted him, I suppose, that day Mr Hoskyn and the young lady stopped there on their, way to Whiteledge. That’s why he laid for young Hoskyn. I see it now. A bit of luck, Mr Hoskyn meeting those two women. I suppose Sim blarneyed them into going for the lemons instead of him.’

  ‘Then Harry Lingfield went along to help with the finishing touches and stow the pieces safely in the holes and behind the bushes of the Common.’

  ‘Then, when Sim was sent to the station with Miss Woodcote and Mr Hoskyn, he made an opportunity to tow the wrecked car into position on the way back to Whiteledge. But, mam, I don’t see why they went to all that trouble to take the burnt-out car to bits so thoroughly.’

  ‘I have the glimmering of a notion,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Have you still got the pieces of the burnt-out car which the holiday-makers found?’

  ‘Oh, yes, mam. They’re up at headquarters.’

  ‘Have you had them looked over for bloodstains?’

  ‘Nothing doing, mam. Not a trace of blood.’

  ‘There’s a bit missing, then. You had better put your people on to finding a piece with a very sharp edge capable of being struck very heavily with a wooden mallet or a stone-breaker’s hammer.’

  ‘You mean, mam——?’

  ‘They’ll find it, but they may have to drag ponds, comb woods and look in hollow trees.’

  ‘Quite a proposition in this county, mam.’

  ‘Yes, but this particular kind of murder could scarcely have been so successful in another type of country, perhaps.’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t put ideas in people’s heads,’ said the inspector.

  ‘By the way,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘there might be another explanation of the murder of Sim besides blackmail.’

  ‘Blackmail wouldn’t appeal to a gentleman of Lingfield’s kidney, mam. He’d soon put a stop to that!’

  ‘I agree. But we don’t know that Sim was blackmailing him. We do know, however, that Harry Lingfield was in love with Mrs Denbies, however violently they quarrelled. It is unlikely, therefore, that he would take kindly to the knowledge that Mrs Denbies had been arrested for the crime which he had committed, although he tried to implicate her at the time.’

  ‘You’ve got something there, mam, I think. You mean he murdered Sim deliberately to take our mind off Mrs Denbies’ being out of the house that night.’

  ‘Yes. It’s only a theory, of course. First catch your hare——’

  ‘I believe you, mam. You think he’ll stay in England?’

  ‘Until Mrs Denbies is safe, yes. Now that you have set her free we shall soon know whether he has a confederate in this house.’

  ‘How so, mam? Oh, yes, I see. One of those you told tonight will tip him the wink she’s free, and then he’ll try to communicate with her, and then we’ve got him!’

  ‘If it works out, yes. But I’m bound to tell you, Inspector, out of the depths of my psychological experience and knowledge, that I am very doubtful whether any of the people who know of Mrs Denbies’ release are in league with Harry Lingfield or have the slightest idea where he is.’

  ‘Mrs Dunley and Miss Pigdon or the little chap are the only likely ones, mam, I take it. But—wouldn’t Lady Catherine know?’

  ‘No. I am quite confident she does not. If she knew, I should have found it out by now owing to the nature of the treatment I have been giving her.’

  ‘Talking of psychology, mam, it strikes me as very queer about that engine-driver, especially as the body could never have been placed on the line.’

  ‘Very odd, and very, very interesting.’

  ‘Can you explain it, mam?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’ll say good night, mam. We must just see what happens, that’s all.’

  Weeks passed. Roger returned to school and the term passed into the limbo of Sports Day and cricket, with the promise of the long vacation to come.

  Early in July, just before school broke up, Roger was sent for by the headmaster, and entered the presence in some trepidation. Matters had been going well with him. Mr Simmonds, his hated rival, had left for a public school post, and Roger had been promoted (temporarily, he presumed) to the sole charge of athletics and cricket, and had been relieved of his most tiresome classes. He was greatly enjoying the change, and got on well with the boys, for he was a good athlete and an enterprising although by no means a first-class batsman.

  With the headmaster was a lady, a handsome woman with a haughty yet adventurous eye. She smiled very sweetly at Roger.

  ‘This is Mr Hoskyn, Princess,’ said the headmaster.

  ‘So you are the man who is responsible for the wonderful improvement in my son!’ said the lady warmly. Roger felt too much embarrassed to catch the headmaster’s eye.

  ‘I—we do what we can,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Mr Hoskyn, Princess,’ said the headmaster unblushingly, ‘is quite the most valuable of my younger men.’

  ‘Well, the endowment is for him,’ said the Princess. She held out a firm white hand. ‘Do kiss it!’ she said. ‘I love having my hands kissed, and hardly anyone does it except foreigners, and really they hardly count. Don’t, of course, if you’d rather not!’

  Roger obligingly rested the hand on his, bowed over it as gracefully as he could, and, pressing the finger-tips slightly, as that seemed to be expected, too, he kissed the smooth knuckles by brushing them slightly with his lips.

  ‘Divine!’ said the lady. ‘I must tell Lousy. He will be so frightfully amused. And his little friend Basil, too. Do you know Basil Kirby, Mr Hoskyn?’

  Light dawned on Roger. He had heard, in casual gossip let fall by Parkinson, that Healy-Lunn’s mother had recently married into exiled but apparently wealthy royalty, and he realized that Healy-Lunn’s gratitude for being saved from expulsion had taken a practical form.

  That night he wrote with careful nonchalance to Dorothy:
>
  ‘A funny thing happened today. One of the mothers rolled up and endowed the school with a new house. Her son and a few selected devils—have I ever mentioned one Kirby?—are to be transferred to it. She’s even got a building priority permit! And the queerest bit is this: I’m to be housemaster! I can’t think what Healy-Lunn could have told his mother. She thinks I have a kind heart and a very nice influence! Let me know what you think about that, will you? Better still, could you meet me and come for that walk again? I somehow feel——Oh, well, it wouldn’t interest you to know what I feel. I seem to have behaved like an ass, but will you come?’

  The day was sunny and fine. The pines smelt pleasantly and the heather was warm to the touch. In place of violets and wood anemones were the long, untidy summer grasses and the hedge flowers—wild rose and bryony, pink convolvulus and the early hops, the trailing clematis and the honeysuckle. The ground was firm underfoot, the clay like stone and the stony paths loose and dry.

  Roger and Dorothy were walking hand in hand—the loose, finger-tip conjunction of mutual friendliness and ease. Along the narrow path to which the woodland walk ascended, the hawthorns had lost their may-blossom and showed thick leaf and small, hard, inconsiderable bunches of berries.

  The cow-byre came in sight. Its odour, less pronounced than in the spring, still greeted the wanderers with a pristine, nostalgic scent, and as they approached the notice-board with its ineffectual, battered and slightly pathetic hand, they saw a man at the cow-byre and called out a greeting as they passed.

  The man, a shaggy fellow, tall, wide-shouldered and thin, hardly looked up at the sound of Roger’s voice. His hat was pulled over his eyes, for the sun was hot, his shirt-sleeves were rolled above the elbows and his trousers were hitched round a slim, taut, horseman’s waist with the remains of an old school tie.

  ‘Now, what do we do?’ asked Dorothy, walking on.

  ‘Do?’ Roger stopped to light his pipe. ‘I thought we’d agreed what to do. Aren’t we going to make the pilgrimage to Whiteledge?’