“Well,” said Laura, bluntly, “when we get him I shouldn’t think that he will be flourishing, either.”
“Too true,” agreed Jonathan, eyeing the low green shore. “But his law-breaking still has to be proved. You will not find it easy to make out a case against him.”
“Who killed Elias Bennett?” asked Mrs. Bradley. Jonathan looked slightly astonished.
“You don’t expect to prove Os did that?” he enquired.
Mrs. Bradley shook her head.
“I don’t. But Mr. Pirberry may be able to,” she answered, “particularly as he will have the enthusiastic assistance of the superintendent and the badly bamboozled Chief Constable. But I do expect to be able to prove that he helped to murder the woman who was represented to be Romance Copley.”
“But I thought it was fairly certain that Copley himself murdered that woman.”
“Mr. Os had guilty knowledge of the affair, at any rate,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There is one curious little point about that murder. You see, before witnesses—a stupid slip, but murderers do make stupid slips—Mr. Os reported the death of Romance Copley—or rather, of her deputy—before that death occurred. I pointed this out to Mr. Pirberry at the time, and we agreed that it was the most extraordinary case of second sight we had ever known.” She cackled harshly.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Jonathan. “Something went wrong with their time-scheme, I suppose?”
“Another odd thing,” Mrs. Bradley went on, “was in connection with that deck-chair which I took from the houseboat. When Mr. Pirberry, at my request, got an expert from Scotland Yard to go over it for fingerprints, he made the extraordinary discovery that there were none on it.”
“But—” exclaimed Jonathan and Deborah together.
“I know. There should have been those of the houseboat people themselves, mine, those of my chauffeur George, and possibly there were others. All had been cleaned off the wooden frame.”
“Including those of the murderer,” said Laura.
“Well,” said Mrs. Bradley, “the inference is that Mr. Os had left his own prints on that deck-chair when they brought the body on board—or thought he might have done—and that it was too dangerous to leave them on, since other and innocent prints had been superimposed on his when the chair was, through my officiousness, brought to the police station.”
“Pardon me for butting in,” said Jonathan, “but do I see aright?” He jerked his head towards the second entrance of the Broad, by which a small yacht, with the light breeze on its port quarter, was making its way towards them.
What he did see was that this question was unnecessary. Mrs. Bradley grinned at him like a hungry pike, and for one startled second he felt sorry for Mr. Os. Then he said:
“What’s the programme? I suppose he’s got a gun? What about Laura and Deb? Do we batten them down under hatches?”
Mrs. Bradley did not give a direct reply to her nephew’s questions.
“Down below, Laura,” she said. “Tell Deborah not to come up until she gets word.”
“But it isn’t Mr. Os,” said Laura. However, she slid obediently down the ladder into the galley where Deborah was making lemonade. She gave Mrs. Bradley’s message, and then went into the cabin and began to take off her clothes.
O’Reilly swung a little at anchor and was head-on to the intruders when Laura slipped over the stern and entered the water. Hidden from the yacht by the cruiser’s hull, she swam to land and soon was among the trees.
On deck Jonathan shaded his eyes.
“It’s Copley, and he’s got a gun,” he said.
“Keep in cover behind the cabin top,” said his aunt. “I have the impression that he is not the only person on board.”
Suddenly Copley hailed them.
“You have five minutes,” he said. Mrs. Bradley cackled and said that she would allow him the same amount of grace. But almost as soon as she had spoken, over the stern of his yacht swarmed a naked figure. It rose behind Copley and smote him on the base of the skull. He did not even cry out, but slithered in a heap to the side, over which vengeful Aphrodite, in the person of Laura Menzies, thrust him in a stevedore fashion which his temporarily inanimate body could not resist.
He was not, however, born to be drowned. Poising herself for a second against the dip and curtsey of the yacht, Laura dived in after him just as Mr. Os came up out of the cabin. Mrs. Bradley picked the revolver out of the hand of Mr. Os with her first shot, and his weapon fell overboard. Then Laura appeared, with the still unconscious Edgar Copley, and needed no assistance until Jonathan leant over the side to grab her victim’s collar to allow her to scramble aboard.
“Lost my cosh in the water. Bet it’s gone into the mud,” she said regretfully. Jonathan started up the cruiser as soon as they could lift anchor, to close in on the yacht and take Mr. Os.
The light breeze, which had served the yacht so well in bringing her onto the Broad now died away, as though the winds themselves were for once on the side of the angels. But then was observed a strange thing, for Mr. Os was seen to stand squarely on deck and invoke the breathless heavens with his cap, turning it for the wind which would take the yacht out of the Broad by way of the second staithe.
“Shades of King Erik of Sweden!” cried Mrs. Bradley.* “He’s setting his cap for a wind!”
“More witchcraft?” asked Jonathan, and even as he spoke there sprang up an astonishing freak wind, which bent the trees on shore and bellied the sails of the yacht and filled the quiet Broad with sound.
Off went Os with the wind right aft, and gybed to bring the yacht round for the only way of escape. The yacht’s boom swung across, for he could not wait for a lull, and then the affronted powers of light were avenged on the representative of darkness, for the sudden change was too much for the yacht’s equilibrium and in a second she had capsized, and her sails were flat on the water.
As suddenly as it had risen the freakish wind died down. They got Mr. Os at last, but he was dead. His cap floated by and came to the side of the cruiser. Mrs. Bradley dropped into it the worsted viper she had made, and then took the boathook, and thrust the cap of darkness under the water.
* * *
*“King Erik of Sweden was in his time held second to none in the magical arts; and he was so familiar with the evil spirits whom he worshipped, that what way so ever he turned his cap, the wind would presently blow that way.”—Olaus Magnus
About the Author
Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, Oxford, in April 1901. She was educated at the Rothschild School in Brentford, the Green School in Isleworth, and at Goldsmiths and University Colleges in London. For many years Miss Mitchell taught history and English, swimming, and games. She retired from this work in 1950 but became so bored without the constant stimulus and irritation of teaching that she accepted a post at the Matthew Arnold School in Staines, where she taught English and History, wrote the annual school play, and coached hurdling. She was a member of the Detection Club, the PEN, the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. Her father’s family are Scots, and a Scottish influence has appeared in some of her books.
The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley) Page 25