The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Mrs. Bradley left the Dithyramb at Stokesby Old Windmill, and returned to Norwich in the car. The deck-chair, handled by the chauffeur’s gloved fingers, was on the back seat.

  “If you want to do me a favour,” she had said before she stepped ashore, “you’ll moor in the staithe which goes close to the inn about half a mile outside Acle.” She pointed it out on the map. “I may need your assistance tomorrow. But if I’m a nuisance, say so, and go off and enjoy your holiday. Oh, and all three keep together as much as you can.”

  The girls, who were in the enviable position of having left no holiday address with their relatives, and so were unaware that their parents were almost frantic with worry to know that they were in a district where two disgusting and terrifying murders had taken place, assured her that they would not miss any of the fun for worlds. Kitty, who found the Broads rather boring, was particularly grateful for Mrs. Bradley’s manoeuvres, and said so. Laura proclaimed an outbreak of detective fever, and the mild Alice, always the quietest of the three, was heard to murmur, “Much more fun,” in convinced and convincing tones.

  “And,” said Laura, when Mrs. Bradley had gone, “if my brother is a man of his word, there ought to be something for us at Acle with which I propose to receive cavalry, if any. So, while you two get supper, I’m going along to the post-office, and we shall see what we shall see. I sent off a sisterly telegram after we found the first corpse.”

  She went ashore at the inn, walked the half-mile or so into Acle along the main road, went in the post-office, and returned to the cruiser with a couple of parcels.

  “Left to be called for,” she said, when the others, who seemed to have been nervous about her, welcomed her back to supper. “Good old Colin. Atta boy!”

  She unwrapped the parcels. One contained three handy pieces of stout rubber tubing filled with lead at one end, and the other proved to be a linen bag full of crushed charcoal.

  “Commando stuff,” said Laura appreciatively, swinging one of the coshes. “If we can’t do a bit of murderer-hunting with these in our good right hands and a smear of charcoal across our innocent mugs, I shall be greatly surprised.”

  Her forethought and enterprise, as usual, left Alice speechless; but that gentle maiden, taking a cosh in a thin but muscular hand, calculated its weight, and her own added reach, with a nice appreciation of their possibilities. Kitty left the third cosh alone, but observed, in admiring tones, “Oh, Dog, you are an ass,” before bringing the supper to the table.

  • CHAPTER 9 •

  “…and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.”

  —From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  “No, ma’am, we never thought twice about that deck-chair,” confessed the Inspector. “You know what people are. Careless. If they’d all sworn on the Book they hadn’t left it at the bottom of the companion-way I don’t know that I should have believed them. Careless. That’s what people are.”

  “But not so much with two active children about,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And painters are often untidy but seldom careless. And clerks are not usually careless. As for mothers—So I thought the chair worth bringing, and when you have compared all the fingerprints on it with those in your possession, I do hope you will find one set which corresponds in every particular with those made on shiny-surfaced cards in my consulting room by our friend Mr. Amos Bleriot.”

  “One up to you, that will be, ma’am, and I’ll be accordingly grateful. Now, how do you reckon they were followed so that the beer could be doped?”

  “I don’t know. But, really, with so many craft on the rivers and Broads, there can’t have been much difficulty. They admit that any number of people could have known where they were going if they chose.”

  Matters were in this interesting but, to Mrs. Bradley, totally unsatisfactory condition, when the news was received that the first body had been identified. Scotland Yard, accustomed to spreading its formidable dragnet over the ramifications of the London police district, had brought to the surface the fact that one Maudie Sitter, a drab, had been missing from her usual haunts for a fortnight, and the body had been identified by two men, a woman, and two constables, all brought from the Shaftesbury Avenue district for the purpose. It was established that the woman came from the East End, but had a “pitch” just off Gerrard Street.

  The evidence was so positive that the witnesses were also shown the second body, and the two constables thought that they recognised it as being that of another streetwalker named Duke. This assumption was checked, and the woman proved to have been in prison twice. This last fact took Mrs. Bradley’s mind back three whole years to the murder of Minnie Baum. She also had been in prison twice. She made a mental note of the coincidence, and a tiny question mark at the back of her conscious thought about the case became an exciting note of exclamation. For no very good reason, she was no longer working in the dark.

  There was further information to be had concerning both women, the inspector reported with lugubrious triumph. Both Sitter and Duke had been employed for some time during the previous year at a questionable West End club. That again evoked memories of Baum and her murderer Bone.

  “In what sense questionable?” Mrs. Bradley wanted to know.

  “Well, ma’am.…” The inspector produced a drawing. “Would that convey anything to your mind?”

  Mrs. Bradley accepted the crude sketch with considerable interest. It was the drawing of a roughly shaped pentagram. Above it there was a star. Surrounding it were two circles, and between them came some ill-formed Greek characters and what looked like part of the Runic alphabet.

  Mrs. Bradley studied all this thoughtfully. Then she handed it back.

  “Have you ever heard of Satanists?” she enquired. The inspector permitted himself to smile.

  “Devil-worshippers, ma’am, do you mean?”

  “In quite a literal sense, yes. Satanists believe that the fullness of the earth is not the Lord’s, but belongs by right to the fallen archangel Lucifer. Him they worship, believing that to ascribe to him the power and the glory will assist him in obtaining them. They are, in fact, of the opinion of Joe the Tinker, but usually choose to express their theory more elaborately and in much less charming form.”

  “Joe the Tinker, ma’am?” said the inspector.

  “Yes. Don’t you remember his conversation with Raffy? Unfortunately,” she added, “whereas Joe considered that Lucifer was a ‘fine angel wid all his talents gone astray on him,’ and asked, ‘Isn’t he wan of God’s sons, the second and prodigal son?’ the Satanists have another thought on the subject. They worship him as though he were God Himself, and their faith is rooted in the belief that he can be made the god of the earth, and that the earth should be his patrimony.”

  The inspector looked serious.

  “Blasphemy, ma’am, you mean?”

  “Coupled with various horrid practices,” rejoined Mrs. Bradley, with equal solemnity.

  “And you think these women were mixed up in something of the sort, ma’am? I should hardly think they would be.…Oh, not that I mean they’d be above it normally, ma’am. Just that they wouldn’t have those kind of ideas. It’s only educated people go in for that sort of muck.”

  “But the educated people need as much assistance in carrying out the Black Mass, as it is, I believe, popularly called, as ever a priest does in carrying out the true service. They have their acolytes, for instance, their consecrated wafer used to unconsecrated ends, their apostate priest, and, in some cases, their sacrificial victim.”

  “Meaning these women were victims, ma’am?”

  “No, not in the sense you imply.”

  “Well, there seem deep waters to me, ma’am. But I take it that if we could lay hands on these Satanists we’d have laid hands on the murderers. Is that so?”

  “I think so. Were they known to the police?”

  “Unfortunately, no, ma�
��am. The opinion at the Yard is that somebody probably quite respectable was at the head of it all; perhaps somebody trying experiments, like these spiritualists do. They certainly don’t think it’s anybody who’s ever been in trouble.”

  “Did they ever raid this particular club?”

  “Only for liquor, ma’am. It was later they got wind of the goings-on, it seems, but nothing was ever proved, and the only person they interviewed was the so-called manager, a bloke named Larry the Dukes, an ex-pug. Nothing against him, so far as they knew; no liquor on the premises, no proof of drinking out of hours; they had to give it up. They kept an eye on the place, and it closed within a month. Larry the Dukes said it didn’t pay, and that was all they could get. And, anyway, as I say, it was about a year ago.”

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Ah, well! We must get on with what we’ve got, I suppose, but I’ll telephone Detective Inspector Pirberry about this club. It might be very important. The card on which Amos Bleriot drew that seven-pointed star could be connected, without doubt, with such a place.”

  The murderer Bone had belonged to a similar club, she remembered. She returned to her hotel and telephoned her nephew, Jonathan Bradley. She had received a letter from him suggesting that he would like to spend a holiday on the Broads after all, and would be glad to join her. Her reply was an enthusiastic acceptance of his offer. Then she rang up Scotland Yard, and, within reasonable time, was connected to Detective Inspector Pirberry.

  The conversation was not particularly illuminating, but one thing pleased her. This was that Pirberry himself expected, sooner or later, to be sent to Norfolk to assist in elucidating the mystery of the deaths of the two drabs.

  “Nothing in Satanism about murdering such women, ma’am, is there?” he enquired, when they discussed the Satanist sketches and the club, which the Norwich inspector had mentioned. “And in any case, the women haven’t been there for nearly a year.”

  “Quite,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And, of course, as you say, murder is not a part of the usual Satanist ritual, which consists largely in such puerilities as the Black Mass and the crucifixion of toads.”

  “Quite,” said Pirberry, in his turn. Mrs. Bradley rang off, and returned to her notes of the two cases for purposes of study and comparison. Two minds, she decided, possibly with but a single thought, but most certainly guiding two different dexterities, had carried out the murders.

  The bungalow body, as they had decided, for convenience, to call it, had been stabbed through the heart. Unless it had been merely a lucky chance—and the odds were enormous against that—nothing but years of practice and a pretty complete knowledge of anatomy could have made such a shrewd blow possible. She thought of the “hex-murders” referred to in the case of Bone, and reflected that “hex-suicides” were not uncommon, either. Granted the establishment of a moral ascendancy over the mentality of the victim, suggestion could do the rest. She was not altogether convinced, in spite of the presence of the worsted viper in the wound, that Maudie Sitter had not been alone when that knife had penetrated her heart. There were those tiny puncture marks.

  Witchcraft was still a term of sinister significance, even though its power derived more from psychology than from materialisation of Satan and his ministers. The exploitation of subconscious fears in a victim could be devilment itself.

  Her mind switched to a consideration of the body found on the houseboat, the throat cut from one ear to the other. This had been a particularly messy murder. She tried to imagine—for she had seen this second body too—the position of the head when the murder had been carried out, if, again, murder it had been. Suicide by throat-cutting was not uncommon.

  But, assuming (on the evidence of the vipers) that both women had indeed been murdered, it was reasonable, she thought, to assume that two murderers might have been at work. This ruled out the possibility (so lovingly envisaged by the inspector, it seemed) that the murders were those of an homicidal maniac.

  Apart from the fact that murderers are far more apt to repeat their effects than to kill by two different methods, there was also the fact (for the police had made a number of practical experiments) that it was very difficult for one man to carry a body onto the houseboat and into the cabin in the dark, quietly enough not to have roused the people on board the other craft which were lying near the houseboat’s moorings. These holiday visitors had been questioned closely by the police, and had been able to affirm that they had heard nothing untoward on the night of the murder.

  It was considered likely by the police that the body had been conveyed to the houseboat by water, for it was certain, as Whitstable had noted, that the woman’s assailant or assailants had already killed her before she had been taken on board. But what puzzled Mrs. Bradley was the fact that they should have taken such risk of discovery, for, apart from the fact that the Calpurnia was moored less than fifteen yards from craft on either side of her, the time-limit to which the murderer or murderers had had to work must have been extremely small.

  At that time of year it was not really dark until well after ten o’clock, and Mr. Ferrier and Mr. Whitstable had been doped comparatively early in the afternoon—so early that it was a nice point whether they might not have recovered sufficiently to bring their motorboat back an hour or so earlier than they did, in which case they would have been on board before dark and the murderer might not have found it possible to dump the body on their houseboat.

  She had a theory (which she did not disclose to the police, since it was incapable of proof) that the time-limit had been so short that if Ferrier and Whitstable had put their wives and children on board Calpurnia before they returned the motorboat to the yard instead of afterwards, they might have caught the murderer in the act of leaving the houseboat.

  Her theory, indeed, had expanded into a quaint conception that the doping had not been done by the murderer or murderers at all, since it had obviously been done so much too early. On the other hand, there was the point that it might have been done at the only possible time because that time presented the only possible opportunity.

  The risk involved in dumping the body was so great, however, that she was inclined to set considerable store by her theory. A point, too, which could not be overlooked, and which had been put by the inspector, was that the hiring of the houseboat during that odd fortnight might have complicated matters for the murderer. He should have been able (by all the customs of letting such craft during the summer months) to count upon the fact that since the Calpurnia had not been let for the whole of the month, she would not have been let at all. It would have been easy enough to get a list of all houseboats which had not been let for the period under review, and the sudden change of front on the part of the owner might have been against all the murderer’s calculations.

  In that case, Mrs. Bradley thought, it would have been simpler to scrap the plan of using Calpurnia as a dumping-ground for the body, and the fact that this had not been done suggested either extraordinary stupidity on the part of the murderers, or (as she was far more inclined to believe—for, although she thought the murderers reckless, she was far from thinking them stupid) an absolute determination to place the body where it had been found.

  Following out this idea, one salient fact emerged. For a considerable area around each spot where a body had been found, no craft were mooring at nights. The murderer, or, as she had convinced herself, the murderers, had contrived to clear a considerable length of waterway all night long. Craft cruised and moored in the neighbourhood during daybreak, but sheered off at night to safer parking-places.

  It occurred to Mrs. Bradley, not for the first time, that, in this land of waters, what she needed was a cruiser of her own with someone conversant with the countryside to pilot it for her. It seemed a shame to spoil the students’ holiday by getting them to ferry her about the Broads, keen though the girls might be on detective work. Besides, she had her own reasons for wishing them well out of the affair. She disliked the sulphur-stink of Satanism, which
seemed to hang over the business. If her nephew would join her, his partnership would be ideal from her point of view. He was a keen yachtsman, but had not the yachtsman’s slight contempt for power-craft.

  She decided to meet the girls early next morning and tell them that it would be more convenient if she had her own boat to run about in. Knowing them well, she was determined not to enlarge upon the possible dangers of remaining in the neighbourhood, but she would reiterate her previous plea that all three should keep together as far as possible.

  She returned to her researches. The more she thought about both the murders, the more certain she became that the murderers, far from wishing to hide the bodies, had gone out of their way to place them where they would be discovered almost immediately.

  This was obvious, of course, in the case of the houseboat body; it had been rather more subtly worked in the case of the bungalow body, where the natural curiosity of the students had been cleverly allowed for and exploited, but there was little doubt in her mind, when at last she packed away her notes and references, that, whatever their purpose in taking so much risk, the murderers were deliberately flirting with fate for some reason which she could not guess. It intrigued her curiosity intensely. It was as though the murderers were issuing a challenge to the police.

  During the night she woke with the thought in her conscious mind that the challenge was not only to the police—was perhaps not primarily to the police. Possibly the selection of the students as the discoverers of the first body had not been fortuitous, but was part of the plot.

  She was, in spite of an international reputation and an uncanny skill in hitting the nail on the head, a modest person. She therefore felt inclined to chide herself for the conceit which could assume that it might be herself who was being challenged; that her students had been singled out because through them she could be most easily involved; but the idea persisted. The two anonymous letters she had received gave some sort of colour to what seemed at first a wild and extraordinary idea. “But, of course,” she argued with herself, “this business of involving me through the students makes sense only if they really do want the bodies to be found without delay.”