Printer's Error (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  They described the incident, and then worked backwards to the events of the night.

  “It’s a case for the police all right,” said Bassin. “They can go up there and nab Carn, if only on the excuse that he’s supposed to be dead, and why isn’t he?”

  Mrs. Bradley was so much impressed by this profound argument that, cackling gently, she begged them to excuse her, and rang up the chief constable.

  “As for the little girl at the duck-pond,” she said on her return, “I was able to ascertain, without leading questions, that it was a heavily bearded man who bribed her to point out the wrong direction if anybody asked her which way he had taken with the cash-box, and that he reminded her of Santa Claus, in whom she does not believe.”

  “He had got the cash-box, then?” said Bassin.

  “Did you swim in your beard?” asked Mrs. Bradley, with a little hoot of laughter. Bassin modestly declared that he had retained his beard in the water and added that the paper of directions, inside the box in which Mrs. Bradley had presented it to him, had declared, upon the sworn oath of the manufacturers, that the spirit gum supplied for fixing was waterproof.

  “Actually, it only mentioned one’s bath,” said Bassin, “and seemed to take it for granted that one bathed in public, as it were. So I thought that if the gum would stand up to hot water in a bath, it would stand up to cold water in a lake. Which it did.”

  “He looked quite delicious,” said Carey. “There’s a lot to be said for beards from an aesthetic standpoint. One understands why the ancient Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, and Greeks went to such trouble with theirs, although, of course, one can argue that a beard all little ringlets is definitely a sign of decadence, but then, I think all art is. Look at virile modern Germany, and then take a slant at Surrealism. By the way, the Surrealists have got a show at the Long Street Galleries. It would interest you, Aunt Adela.”

  “But is Surrealism art?” asked Bassin solemnly.

  “No. It’s a kind of camouflage,” replied Carey. “Bless you, bless you, my child,” he added brokenly. The next moment they were locked together on the floor, Carey shrieking loudly and realistically for the chambermaid.

  Mrs. Bradley left the undignified scene, and went in to breakfast, at which the young men, having brushed their clothes and hair and straightened their ties, ate eggs, bacon, kidneys, tomatoes, and sausages as though they had had no food for at least a fortnight.

  • CHAPTER 12 •

  Conclusions of an Expert

  “And as he went, there suddenly met him in the road a dwarf, who struck his horse so violently upon the head with a great staff, that he leaped backwards a spear’s length.”

  •1•

  The police, although they were early upon the scene, did not find Mr. Carn at the Sanctuary, neither was it easy to discover by what route or by what means he had fled. As to the supposed Mr. Senss, the inspector made short work of him. Bassin accompanied the police, and, in his presence, Mr. Smith was requested to remove his beard.

  “But my beard,” said he, outraged, “is my own. I cannot remove him at will.”

  “Come, sir,” said the inspector reasonably, “this gentleman charges you with having fired at him from a revolver on two occasions. If you won’t assist us we shall have to proceed with the charge.”

  “Oh, well, then,” said Mr. Smith, “you will please to give me time. He is false, but he is particularly adhesive, isn’t it?”

  The inspector insisted upon accompanying him to his hut. There he removed the beard by scientific means, and disclosed that he was indeed Senss.

  “I hope my good friend, Mr. Bassin, of Messrs. Bassin, Lillibud and Bassin, is satisfied now that I was not the person who attacked him,” he said, smiling amiably.

  “Oh, rather, quite, of course,” stammered Bassin, this form of reply, with all its implications of his own confusion and Senss, complete innocence, having been agreed upon between himself and the inspector. “It was simply the beard which made matters so confusing.”

  “So many of us here wear false beards,” said Senss, charming and courteous. “It was a very natural mistake, Mr. Bassin, I am sure.”

  He bowed. Bassin bowed. The inspector did not bow, but managed to look as though he was about to bow. The Leader, who had accompanied them, bowed.

  “Still, your chief enemy, Mr. Simplon, is out of action,” said Bassin.

  “So? I knew I had not seen him lately. But you are not right to suppose him my enemy. We enjoy much conversation together, both exiles, you understand?”

  “Oh, yes, I understand. But you seem to have told Mrs. Saxant a different tale.”

  “Ah, the ladies! Who shall understand their hearts? They live for romance, isn’t it? To Mrs. Saxant, it is quite true, I have paint my poor friend a monster. She demands to be interested, so—I interest her. She wishes thrills, so I thrill her with the horror of my poor friend’s circumstances. Which of my stories did she tell you?”

  “The screamingly funny one about your brother,” said Bassin, without moving a muscle of his face except those required for actually speaking the words.

  “My brother? So. She is a beautiful woman,” he added.

  “And terribly silly,” said Bassin.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said the inspector, “but is this getting us anywhere?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Good-bye, Mr. Senss. Please accept my most heartfelt apologies. In fact”—he suddenly shot his arm out—“accept a tomato for luck!”

  The man drew back, with a kind of howl in which anger and apprehension were very prettily blended. The inspector, impressed by this demonstration, put a hand on his arm.

  “Best come along of me, sir. There’s one or two things we’d like to ask you.”

  Senss gave a scream, and tried to wrench himself away, but it was of no use, and the last Bassin saw of him was the back of his head, and that was almost obscured by the shoulders of two large constables who walked one on either side of him.

  “Poor devil,” said Carey. “His nerves must be in rags. He’ll probably be bound over, or something, I should think. They’ll never jug a man in his state, surely.”

  “Why, what do you think his state is?” asked Bassin, interested. “Wonder where Carn’s got to? Why do you suppose he decided we’d rumbled him?”

  “Oh, well, the ears, of course. Naturally he’d guess what we were after. Watch your step would be my advice, and I mean to take it myself. Carn, if what we believe is true, has got two pretty beastly, well-planned murders on his tally-stick already. I suppose the next job for the police will be to turn Mrs. Saxant just about inside out. They’ll threaten to shove her in the dock beside him if she doesn’t come across with all she knows, and, if I’ve sized the lady up rightly, she won’t care how fast she talks.”

  He had done Mrs. Saxant an injustice, however. She admitted to the police that Carn had had his ears pierced, and agreed (thankfully, she said, with considerable spirit) that if the ears sent to her had not been so pierced they could not have been Carn’s ears, but beyond this one solitary admission she refused to say anything more except in the presence of her lawyer. Moreover, she refused to budge from the account she had already given of her pre-arranged meeting with Carn.

  “We drove, and we talked things over, and we both agreed that he couldn’t leave his wife—he was fond of her, you know—and then at about three o’clock he left me, and I drove back here. That’s really all I know.”

  “I’m suggesting,” said the inspector, “that you did not return here immediately, but that you drove round to the other side of the church near Carn’s house, waited for him, and then drove off with him and the missing cash-box.”

  “There’s not a word of truth in it,” she said. “Ask my servants. Ask anybody what time I came in.”

  As the inspector had already done this, he saw no point in doing it again, so he bade her a civil good day and departed, and the police set to work to explore all avenues, as Carey said, in an att
empt to find Carn.

  “Even when they catch him,” Bassin remarked, “they haven’t got much of a case. Wonder when Jonathan Mabb will be released? Whatever the police thought they had against him for the murder of Carn, they can hardly hold on to him now that the corpse turns out to be some bloke quite unknown. Well, we shall have to leave said bloke’s identification to the police; that much is certain.”

  The police investigations succeeded where a merely amateur enquiry such as that carried on by Bassin and Carey Lestrange would have been bound to fail. By the middle of the third week after it had been made clear that Carn was still alive and that the handless, earless body was that of some other unfortunate, the inspector had identified the dead man, had made a dossier of as much of his life as was important for police purposes, and had even discovered where Carn had kept him hidden whilst he was feeding and grooming him preparatory to murdering him. A search which began at Hammersmith led back to Princes Risborough and from there to Oxford, and diligent and painstaking enquiry elicited the fact that Carn had several times seen the man, when both of them were younger, and (injudiciously, although he could not have known that at the time, and had probably forgotten the circumstances later) had commented to an acquaintance upon the likeness the man bore to himself, and had presented the man with five pounds.

  Tramps notoriously stick to their own routes, dosshouses, and even haystacks and ditches, and Carn had had no difficulty in finding this tramp again. The only snag, as Bassin said later, would have been to discover that he was dead of tuberculosis or pneumonia—“regular way for them sort to go,” added the sergeant—but Carn’s victim had been of sound constitution, and, what was as valuable, he had never forgotten the five pounds, so that when his benefactor developed other, more fundamental, but still kindly eccentricities, such as providing him with food, shelter, and clothing, he was already conditioned to the belief that the madman meant him no harm but intended to benefit him.

  Nobody missed the poor tramp except one or two of his cronies who had been accustomed to encounter him at certain seasons of the year at certain dosshouses or in certain casual wards, and those who did miss him never dreamed of mentioning his absence to the police. The police, however, had found the lonely house near Abingdon where the man had lived a whole winter, spring, and early summer at Carn’s expense, and where he had been murdered. Unfortunately for Carn, the tramp had once or twice entertained a couple of cronies there—a fact which Carn never knew, but which ultimately led the police to the house, where a slightly bloodstained pillow, hidden at the bottom of a wardrobe completed the evidence.

  “But why,” said the inspector, addressing Mrs. Saxant once more, “should he murder his wife?”

  She replied that she could not say. The police, in short, were again confronted by what they considered the entirely inadequate motive for the murders. Mrs. Saxant was youngish, pretty—“I suppose you’d call her charming,” the inspector had once observed to Carey, but Carey had replied that personally he should not—and she had what the sergeant, who appeared to be an authority on such matters, described as “plenty of S.A. or It, sir.”

  Yet, confronted with all of these desirable and exciting qualities in the very person of their possessor, the inspector still grunted and stroked his chin, and then, as one who has come to a sudden decision, bade her good-bye again.

  “That’s the rudest man I ever met,” she observed to her husband, later on. Geoffrey Saxant also grunted. He was very much annoyed by the inspector’s visits, and was also feeling extremely worried by the behaviour of his partner Kurt Senss.

  “Kurt has got Mr. Thomas Carn to agree that we shall advertise for Carn to make known his intentions regarding the publication of The Open-Bellied Mountain with a statement to the effect that if we hear nothing from him within the next ten days we shall send out the hundred copies, as agreed, and send Mr. Thomas Carn the bill,” he said.

  “I think,” began Mrs. Saxant. Then she bit her lip, and, without finishing the sentence, went to her bedroom to telephone. She called up the “Lion,” where Mrs. Bradley was still in residence, and asked to speak to Bassin. When she had given him the news, and told him to tell the inspector, she went back to her husband. He seemed particularly disturbed, and blurted out, when he saw her:

  “The whole thing is a most confounded muddle, Kurt Senss is clearly going mad. For some reason of his own he’s crazy to publish Carn’s book, and the thought that he can’t until the experts decide whether Carn’s signature on that letter is genuine, makes him get up and hop round the office, swearing in German and making these ridiculous schemes for getting out the book. It’d be funny if it weren’t so damned perplexing.”

  “I should advertise, darling. That letter can’t mean much now, if Fortinbras is still alive.”

  “Of course it can! Don’t be a fool, my dear! It can mean as much or as little as it did before. Fellow being dead or not being dead has nothing whatever to do with it. And how can we advertise? Fellow can’t possibly risk an answer. The police are after him. Now don’t cry, my good girl. I know you liked the fellow, but the fact remains that he’s a murderer. That’s what we’ve got to face. I’d still like to know what it all means, too, damned and parboiled if I wouldn’t.”

  He went out, and Mrs. Saxant, like the inspector, wondered why Carn had killed his wife and staged this elaborate disappearance (which certainly had not come off as he had intended), when he was welcome to her favours at all times without the bother and expense of having to keep her or live with her. She, again like the inspector, was cynical, and although she and Fortinbras had always found each other good fun, she did not, and never would, believe that he would commit two murders in the name of love.

  “Besides, there’s still poor dear Geoffrey, when all’s said and done,” she thought. “Why didn’t Fortinbras kill him?”

  This point, of course, had also occurred to the inspector.

  “Take Mr. Saxant. Where does he come in?” he demanded oracularly of the sergeant. The sergeant, who did not recognise the nature of the question, treated it as a straightforward interrogation, and replied.

  “Well, sir, to a happily married man, such as yourself might be, that would appear to be quite a point.”

  Perceiving that it was a point, which the sergeant proposed to elucidate, the inspector reached for his hat, said, “Can it!” very abruptly, and nearly knocked over the chief constable, who was coming up the steps of the police station, having just got out of his car.

  “Never mind, never mind, Inspector,” he said, pushing the inspector in the back as a means of persuading him to reenter the police station. “That German fellow whom Beatrice——whom Mrs. Bradley found in the chimney at the ‘Lion’—remember? Well, the doctor says it’s all right to interview him. Think he’ll tell the truth, hey?”

  “Why, yes, sir, I don’t see why he shouldn’t.”

  “Nor do I. Nor do I. Now what do we want to know exactly, eh? Look here, I’ll leave it to you. Got to pop along. Appointment. Late already. You go. Get him to tell you—”

  “Who laid him out, sir, I suppose?”

  “Oh, no! Oh, no! Beatrice says it don’t matter who laid him out. She knows all that. What she’s after is why he was put in the chimney at the ‘Lion.’ Why the chimney? Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the inspector, woodenly.

  “Good-bye, then. Go now. Go now. Dashed clever old girl. Knew my mother, you know. Fine generation. Shan’t see another one like it.”

  He leapt for his car, and drove away. The inspector put on his hat and drove to the County Hospital, which happened to be half a mile off.

  •2•

  The inspector was not Mr. Simplon’s only visitor. By the time that he had been shown the way to the ward and had arrived at the door, Mrs. Bradley was already seated at the bedside of the patient, and was listening to a long, involved, excited tale of his ill-treatment since he had been admitted to the institution. It proved, later, that he thought she w
as the lady almoner, and that he was making what he obviously regarded as a legitimate complaint in the proper quarter.

  Having extended her sympathy to the quivering little man, she led him to talk about his injuries, and within two minutes Mr. Simplon-Bonner was recounting to her a singular history. The inspector, seating himself beside an adjacent bed, whose unfortunate occupant had no other visitor, turned his back on the excited little narrator and took down what he said.

  At the end of three-quarters of an hour he had the whole story. It had begun, apparently, on the day that Mr. Simplon had encountered Bassin on the landing outside Senss’s door. Mr. Simplon had not like Bassin, it appeared. Next, the incredibly stupid young man had attempted to commit suicide under the wheels of Mr. Simplon’s car. After that, the fun, apparently, had become fast and furious. The young man had lured him to Senss’s office by writing a note, purporting to come from Senss himself, requesting a meeting.

  Mr. Simplon and Mr. Senss often played chess together, it seemed, when Mr. Senss was not busy. The game took place always in office hours. They did not meet at one another’s houses.

  The message, however, had not come from Senss at all, but had been written by the young man on notepaper he must have stolen whilst Mr. Senss was interviewing him. He, Mr. Simplon, in his innocence, had gone, by night, to the office, had been locked in, and, whilst he was there, unable to escape, the young man had set fire to the premises.

  He (Mr. Simplon) escaped by leaping from the top of the fire escape to the ground, sustaining injuries. The next thing he knew was that he was in the hospital. And that was all that he did know.

  At that the inspector swung round on him.

  “You won’t mind signing the statement, sir?”

  The effect of those few and simple words from a man whom the patient had tolerantly regarded as a visitor to the hospital was frightful. Mrs. Bradley, afraid that Mr. Simplon might do himself an injury, summoned the sister, and that autocrat soon calmed the little man. Mrs. Bradley and the inspector took their leave, the latter in some haste (he felt that the sister did not like him), Mrs. Bradley sympathetically. But they met in the vestibule.