“I understand,” I assured him. “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.”
“She’d been dead for hours when they found her, under the wreck of the car. One of the Spanish police said, ‘What a waste! Such a beautiful motor!’ Nothing about the lady, but I daresay when they found her she wasn’t so beautiful.”
“What did they think had happened?”
“No one could tell for sure, the car being in the state it was—something gone wrong with the steering, perhaps. Only—she had been proud of that car, had had it completely overhauled only the week before, when they’d left England. Still, there were no witnesses and a car can’t talk. The advantage of coming to a sticky end in a warm foreign climate is you can’t hang about waiting for relatives—”
“You mean, she was buried in Spain?”
“Both wives were buried abroad. Good sense really. The authorities make a lot of hoo-ha about shipping a corpse home—much less trouble and, of course, much more economical to have it buried on the spot. Wonder if the new Mrs. Willy likes to travel.”
“I don’t think she said. Just that she’d met him by way of business. Gone to his shop to buy a book, I suppose.” That surprised me. She looked the sort who would expect to get her reading from the Public Library.
Humbolt shook his head. “They met at her place of business, not his.” “She said she ran some sort of agency with another woman.”
“That’s right. Marriage bureau. Fact, Miss Browne. They’ll tell you there’s one born every minute, and you don’t have to be a policeman to know it’s true. Convenient for chaps like Willy: you get all the statistics about the lady, age, looks—they have to supply a photograph and not one taken twenty years ago at that—financial position—the agency does all your homework for you. It’s my belief if a chimp walked into one of those places they’d match him up with a woman chimp.”
He thought a moment, then went on, “I suppose it occurred to Willy he could hardly do better than to marry the boss. To my way of thinking he’s no matinee idol, but somehow he gets the women. That quality called charm, I suppose. She kept on with her interest in the agency, and he had the shop— got a very good name now, I understand, quite a little gold mine.”
“I thought you were retired,” I remarked maliciously.
“Once a copper always a copper. I’ll retire when they start ringing the church bell for me. Still, as you say, no skin off my nose.”
“It proves one thing,” I said. “Women do always go for the same type.
Willy may not look remotely like Victor, but they’re chips from the same block.”
I saw I’d really got his attention now. “Who’s Victor?”
“Victor Hughes—her first husband.”
“First time I heard she had one before she married Willy. Sure she’s not pulling your leg?”
“After he died—”
“How was that?”
“You could call it a sort of accident.”
“With or without wifely assistance?” The Day of Judgment will hold no shocks for that man.
“Let’s say that she took a chance and it came off.” I told him in detail about her switching the cups. “And if you don’t believe me,” I said, “there’s bound to be a record. I’m not sure where it happened, but somewhere up north.”
He shook his head. “Not me, Miss Browne. You’ve just reminded me, I’m retired and if there wasn’t a trial—or was there?”
“There wasn’t enough evidence to charge her. They never seemed to think of the fourth alternative—that he might have been the one with the murderous impulse.”
“You bet they thought of it, but the police can’t go on feminine intuition, not the way ladies do. No witnesses, no proof she’d ever handled a barbiturate in her life, and, like she said, no motive. Anyway, it wasn’t my manor and the Chief Constable wouldn’t thank me for raking up an old case. I’ve no fresh evidence. You might say it’s a good thing she knows how to take care of herself, seeing who she’s married to now.”
“But you can’t leave it at that,” I exclaimed. “She could be in danger this very minute.”
Humbolt has one of those India-rubber faces that can change under your eyes. Now he looked like a bloodhound—sad, a bit bloodshot, long drooping jowls. “You don’t have to worry about her, Miss Browne, now that Willy knows we’ve met her. Even he ’ud be hard put to it to explain a third tragedy. Of course, if I was to drop dead, or you—but you take it from me, there’ll be no need to search the newspapers for her name this side of Christmas.”
* * *
Only the ex-superintendent was wrong. About four months later I picked up my Morning Argus—the posh papers are no good to writers like me—and there he was on the front page: Well-Known Bookseller Falls to His Death. It was in France—that was true to type, I thought—they’d been staying in one of these big old-fashioned hotels with a balcony and steps leading to a courtyard, a fountain, flowers, that sort of thing.
There was a gate in the trellis you could unbolt if you wanted to go down. The widow said they’d been talking and she went back into the bedroom for a cigarette, and the next minute she heard a scream and a sort of muffled crash and the trellis gate was swinging. It was two stories to the courtyard and Willy never recovered consciousness.
Everyone in the hotel was shocked—such an affectionate couple! Only they changed their tune when some busybody dug up the story of his previous wives. Then they started to talk about the mills of God grinding slowly, Providence seeing to it that he’d fallen into the pit he’d dug—meaning he’d opened the gate intending to give her a fatal shove, and then forgotten he’d opened it.
Her story was they’d been in the courtyard earlier, looking at the fish in the fountain, and he must have forgotten to bolt the gate after them. No, there was no family tomb, and burial on the spot, she was sure, was what he’d have preferred.
* * *
A few weeks ago I happened to be passing the bookshop. It was just about closing time, and Ruth came out with a tall dressy sort of fellow—forty-five or forty-six, I’d say.
When she saw me Ruth said, “Fancy meeting you again! Do you still go to that eye clinic? Do you remember me telling you about Mr. Brett? You did read about Willy, I expect? Wasn’t it terrible? But he was always so absentminded. I don’t know what I’d have done without Malcolm.”
It was easy to see who Malcolm was—easy, too, to realize she probably wasn’t going to have to do without him.
I haven’t seen Mr. Humbolt since—perhaps he doesn’t come to the clinic any more. Of course, I’m only a writer of romantic tales, not works of logic or mystical speculation; but I do sometimes wonder, if there really is a Hereafter, what Victor and Willy are thinking now.
Sequel to Murder
I committed the folly of spending my holidays last year with a cousin at a place called Farmers’ Green, and while I was there an old woman named Mrs. Masters was found dead in her cottage.
It was a tumbledown affair, a relic of the Middle Ages apparently, and Mrs. Masters suited it to perfection. She and her husband had been evacuated to Farmers’ Green from Bermondsey in 1940, and he’d died the following year. There had been a son, but he came to grief early—a little matter of making off with his employer’s office cash. He got four years and died in prison before he could serve out his term. Mrs. Masters was not in the habit of talking about him.
The old woman’s only living relative, as far as anyone knew, was a nephew, a salesman for a firm of chemists, whose business brought him to the neighbourhood once a week. Every Friday he called at the cottage and the old witch gave him a cup of tea. According to local gossip she lived entirely on biscuits and cheese and tea that she made syrupy with sugar.
Local opinion was divided about the nephew—Brewer was his name—some saying that the old woman was a miser and that he was buying his inheritance by instalments, and others that he probably had to contribute to her support, though to judge by her penurious way
of living she could hardly have spent her pension every week.
“A lot of people think she’s a witch as well as a miser,” my cousin told me. “She never speaks to a soul, and hasn’t received a letter in five years. What is even more incredible, she never takes a newspaper, hasn’t even got a radio. About once a month she comes out of the cottage, carrying a brown-paper parcel, and takes the bus into Ellerby. About two hours later she returns with another brown-paper parcel, not having exchanged a single word with her fellow passengers on the bus. She apparently never draws her pension in the village. If it wasn’t for Percy we’d have no way of knowing whether she’s alive or dead.”
Percy was the local redhead who delivered the milk. Every day he left Mrs. Masters a pint—her sole luxury—and collected yesterday’s empty bottle from the front porch. Every Friday he found a sealed envelope on top of the bottle, containing payment for seven pints at fivepence a pint. She hadn’t spoken to him once in five years.
On that particular Friday when Percy called he said, “I can’t understand it at all. For the first time since I’ve known her there’s no bottle on the step and no money.”
We were his next port of call, and we could see the cottage quite clearly from the front garden. By the way, this was Friday, July the twenty-second. The date’s important.
Millie said, “Oh well, this is the nephew’s visiting day. Suppose we let him do the worrying.” But I noticed that when the little black car drew up at the gate she was hanging about in the front garden.
As far as anyone knew, no one but Brewer had ever been admitted to the house. If anyone else rang the bell Mrs. Masters would open the window and shout, “Not at home.” Once she even sent the vicar away with a flea in his ear.
We watched Brewer ring the bell, but nothing happened. Millie said, “I’m going to see what it’s all about,” and I decided to accompany her.
We found Brewer looking a bit apprehensive, and when he saw us he called out, “Do you know if anything’s wrong? I can’t get any reply.”
Millie said, “Why, she hasn’t taken in today’s milk,” and it was obvious that she hadn’t.
Brewer suggested going round to the back, and because he looked really agitated now Millie needed no urging. The back door was locked, but we could see through the kitchen window a tray laid out with two cups and plates. But there was no sign of anything to eat on the kitchen sideboard, or either of the two tables.
“She must be expecting you,” I said.
But Millie was quick to observe that it was very odd indeed that Mrs. Masters should have set out plates and saucers and neglected to take in the milk. Well, the long and short of it was that we had to break down the back door, and then we no longer had to wonder why Mrs. Masters hadn’t answered the bell. She was lying hunched up on a chair in the parlour, stone cold dead.
There was some knitting on the floor beside her, and the instant she saw it Millie exclaimed, “What on earth was she making baby clothes for?”
Then she looked intently at Brewer, but he shook his head and said, “No, Mrs. Brewer wasn’t expecting an heir. She was delicate, and the doctor had warned her not to even think of having children.”
Well, Millie offered to stay while he went to summon help. After he’d gone she remarked to me that the old woman had probably died of starvation. The cottage was bleak, and wretchedly furnished. The chair wouldn’t have fetched a half-crown at an auction, and the carpet was worn threadbare. The rest of the stuff was made out of orange-boxes, and in poor condition at that.
“She must have sold everything after the husband died,” Millie said. “Well, it looks as though the stories about her being a miser did not spring solely from local gossip, malicious or otherwise.”
Then Brewer came back with Dr. Carver, a muddling old gentleman who couldn’t have distinguished a migraine from a fatal meningitis after four in the afternoon. He affirmed at once she’d died of heart failure, probably due to undernourishment and old age, and made haste to add that there would be no need for a post-mortem. Brewer could go ahead with the arrangements for the funeral as soon as he pleased.
Between us we got the dead woman upstairs and into the bedroom, which was as wretched as the parlour. There weren’t even any sheets on the bed.
Almost instantly the eyes of all three of us went to a japanned deed-box that stood on the floor a few feet from the bed’s splintered baseboard. The nephew said his aunt had told him that if she ever passed away suddenly he was to open it. She’d told him where she kept the key, and he asked if we’d stay as witnesses to what it contained.
Of course we needed no urging. But, as might have been expected, the contents were a shock to us all. There was money there all right, but only a few pound notes. Accompanying them was a memorandum in the old woman’s scratchy hand-writing to the effect that they were the property of a Mr. Grant of London. The other papers in the box proved to be receipts, all from the same Mr. Grant.
It turned out he was the man her son had defrauded, and that all these years she’d been starving and scrimping to make good the lad’s criminal indebtedness. That’s why she’d sold the furniture, and the husband’s insurance money had been sacrificed in the same good cause.
I happened to catch Brewer’s expression when we realized this. His jaw had fallen open, and his lips were deathly white. Oh, and we got the explanation of the brown-paper parcels. There was a box full of knitted garments under the bed. It appeared she worked for a shop in Ellerby—worked day and night, to judge by what she earned—and once a month she took the completed work to that retail outlet and came back with new supplies of wool. She’d almost wiped out the debt when death caught up with her.
Of course, the story spread, as such stories will, and down came the reporters by bus and by train, mystery widow makes reparations —you know how inane such headlines can become.
Just as we were leaving I said, “I thought you told me she never read a newspaper. What’s that copy of the Evening Sun doing in the kitchen?”
It was the issue for July the twenty-first—you remember I said the date was important—and my simple observation changed everything. Because, you see, Farmers’ Green is so small it isn’t on most maps, and it doesn’t get its evening papers until the next day. And that delay of twenty-four hours gave us an alternative explanation for the tea-tray. Instead of being made ready for Friday’s visitor, it could just as easily have been washed up after Thursday’s.
Speculation ran riot. The nephew said he couldn’t imagine who the visitor could have been. He would have liked to deny the unknown’s existence, but there was the newspaper to prove beyond dispute that someone had been there. Unfortunately for the village, there had been a fair the previous afternoon, and everyone—barring Mrs. Masters—had turned out. And that meant that anyone could have come and gone unnoticed.
It’s ironic to reflect that if Brewer had simply said, “I came over yesterday because I wasn’t sure I could make it today, and I came again, after all, because I thought she was seriously ill,” he’d probably be alive now. But he denied it so vehemently, and at the same time was so cagey when he was asked as a matter of form where he had spent the afternoon, that the police took a hand and stopped the funeral for a post-mortem.
And then the balloon went up. It appeared that Mrs. Masters hadn’t died of undernourishment or old age, but of a lethal dose of poison, presumably administered in a cup of tea. The drug used was one which could be procured only by doctor’s prescription—and as far as the old lady was concerned, the prescription didn’t exist.
Brewer was asked if he ever took drugs, and he replied heatedly that he didn’t; he further declared that he didn’t approve of them at all, and was always telling his wife what a dangerous habit even the taking of sleeping tablets could become. That, naturally, sent the police post-haste to his home to see Mrs. Brewer.
She was a delicate, trailing sort of woman a few years older than her husband, and she said she did take drugs occasionally.
But her husband had frowned on the practice, and she was co-operating.
“I haven’t touched my last supply,” she said proudly.
And when Inspector Crewe, who was in charge of the inquiry, asked the name of the drug, you won’t be surprised to hear it was the same drug that had killed Mrs. Masters. He then asked her to show him the bottle, and when she opened a drawer he managed to get hold of it before she could, grasping it carefully by the cap.
Mrs. Brewer fluttered around, explaining that there was a fortnight’s supply at the rate of one tablet a day. Two would be dangerous and three quite fatal.
Then Crewe sprang his mine by saying, “Look here, you must have made a mistake about not taking any of these. If you are telling the truth there should be fourteen tablets in the bottle, and there are only eleven.”
Well, she swore she hadn’t taken any, and Crewe carried the phial away and had it tested for fingerprints. Naturally hers were on it, and—as you’ve no doubt by this time suspected—Brewer’s were there as well.
He tried to get out of that by saying he’d removed the bottle from her one evening when she’d wanted to take a tablet, but unfortunately the allegation didn’t square with her evidence. It’s always advisable for husbands and wives to tell the same truth.
The evidence of the newspaper went against him, too. It was established that he always took the Evening Sun home, but, when Crewe inquired, Mrs. Brewer couldn’t find Thursday’s issue anywhere about the house. She aggrievedly affirmed that she must have thrown it away if it wasn’t on the paper rack. But Crewe quickly discovered that the dustbin had gone un-emptied for a week, and, of course, you don’t have fires in July.
Well, she asked, on the verge of tears, was it so important? Most likely her husband had left it somewhere, possibly on a bus. He was so worried these days. About money—she admitted under pressure. They were in debt all over the place. She hoped he hadn’t been betting on the horses—he was such an unlucky chap.
Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries Page 31