Printer's Error (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “The missing link,” said Mrs. Bradley placidly, adding it to her notes.

  “Me, do you mean? Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. It ought to have struck me all of a heap when I heard it, instead of only now, when you’ve already caught me out about the book.”

  “I didn’t mean you, child. And there is no need to reproach yourself any more. The account of Carn’s social experiments which you turned over whilst you were looking for the manuscript and typescripts of The Open-Bellied Mountain could have had no possible significance for you at that time.”

  “But where’s all this leading?”

  “You know, as well as I do.”

  “You mean that it isn’t Simplon who is the Nazi agent. It is Senss.”

  “It begins to look like it, child.”

  “Then I bet Carn is in with him. If he is, then the publication of Carn’s anti-Jewish book would fit in. You know, that’s been nagging at me all the time. He that is not with us is against us. That sort of stuff. Of course, we do know that Senss has been laying for me ever since he realised that he’d given away the Simplon-Bonner stuff, and, come to think of it, the treatment of Simplon, smashing him up and shoving him down the chimney, was more than a bit Nazi. In fact, the things falls into place. But how does it affect the main issue?”

  “That remains to be seen. This much we can be sure of: Carn, whether he’s a murderer or not, must be the victim of a plot. Because we feel that this is so, we can understand and explain that which, otherwise, would be incomprehensible.”

  “Such as?”

  “The foolishness of Carn—using that dagger, for instance, and killing his wife when no one but he could possibly have taken such a risk.”

  “Do you think the affair between Carn and Mrs. Saxant had any bearing at all, then, on the whole business?”

  “Possibly it had. Senss, it seems, was in love with Mrs. Saxant himself. I think this may well have had some bearing on his actions.”

  “So he isn’t a refugee? When did you suspect him?”

  “From the first, because I did not see how he could hope to incriminate Mr. Simplon with the Nazis, if he himself were a candidate for a concentration camp.”

  “If—say that again, please, slowly.”

  “Well, child, it stands to reason. The most important point, in all that we have been able to discover, is that Simplon’s real name is Bonner. That fact superseded all questions of marital jealousy, anti-Semitic literature, anonymous letters, and all the obvious motives for the murders. So I asked myself why the name had so much significance. Mind this: I still don’t know. There are a good many problems to be solved, I think, before the whole explanation of the relationship between Simplon and Senss is vouchsafed to us.”

  “But you think now that Senss never had a brother killed in a concentration camp, and all that?”

  “I think it highly unlikely, child. Consider the facts: Senss is a master printer. He explains that a Nazi agent is watching him all the time. Now a printing press is almost as terrible and powerful a weapon as a broadcasting station, and I am prepared to declare that no political agent of the type which Simplon was supposed to be would have left a violent anti-Nazi in charge of a dangerous weapon for anti-Nazi propaganda if he could have done anything to prevent it.”

  “Senss, as an enemy of the present regime in Germany, therefore, although by no means an impossible conception, was one which I found strangely perturbing, because it did not seem probable. Probability is a great touchstone, child.”

  “But, then, why should Carn, if he murdered Mrs. Carn, have made off with the cash-box? Fingerprints and bloodstains?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He probably wore gloves, anyway, to handle the box. Fingerprints, in any case, are not of significance unless they can be traced to their owner. The whole fingerprint system depends upon the police being able to recognise the fingerprints when they find them.”

  “But are you sure it couldn’t have been Senss who stole the cash-box? The child said a man with a beard. It could equally well have been Senss.”

  “On the other hand, child, there would seem to be no reason why he should steal a proof of which he already had a copy at the press.”

  “No. But we know that was a blind, whichever of them stole it, because the same would apply to Carn. I’d better go down to the place again, I should think, and see what else I can find out.”

  “First,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I will write Mr. Senss a letter. I will tell him that all is known, and that if he kills you he will have to take the consequences because our patience is at an end.”

  “Of course,” said Bassin seriously, “we are only supposing all this about Senss, aren’t we?”

  “Are we? Why should he want to kill you? No, child, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll go and interview Mr. Simplon again, confront him with what I call our knowledge and you call our suppositions, and see what he will tell us.”

  “I don’t like it much. Suppose we really are barking up the wrong tree? We don’t want Simplon wise to us, do we?”

  “The other thing to do is to find Mr. Carn, a task which, up to the present, has proved impossible, even to the police, who are accustomed to finding needles in haystacks.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What do you yourself make of the hand and the ears, child? The motive here is not accounted for yet.”

  “It certainly sounds like Nazi frightfulness. Oh, I don’t know. Personally, I think it’s all too vague, and much too unsatisfactory to proceed on. Why not let the police continue along their lines for a bit, and see what they can dig out? You could give them the information. After all, it’s their job, isn’t it?”

  “Why do you think Mr. Carn remains in hiding, child, instead of making his escape?”

  “Afraid of the police. After all, they are fairly hot on his trail, you know.”

  “Why do you suppose that order (forged signature or not) was given, cancelling the publication of the book?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why have Saxant and Senss resolutely refused to allow you to see a copy of the printed book?”

  “Oh, they give various reasons.”

  “All unsatisfactory. There was only one reason, and that you have not been given.”

  “You mean there’s something in the book—yes, but all the subscribers will see it, and I can borrow a copy. I’ve got a list of their names, and some of them I could get at, I’m perfectly sure.”

  “Has it never struck you, child, that the book was not intended for English readers at all? There are no subscribers, in the ordinary meaning of the word. The copies were to be gifts from Mr. Carn to a small, select, literary circle; to a circle, which so far as I am able to discover, will not regard the subject-matter, but merely the style, as important. The plot against Mr. Carn has been made by a masterly brain, which then failed, for a split second, and, having failed so far, went on, in the recognised Nazi manner, to make some bad mistakes. Look here.”

  She drew her note-book towards her.

  “Just half a second,” said Bassin. He was out of his chair and across the lawn in a flash. Suddenly a shot sounded, and, on the instant Bassin cleared the hedge over which the athletic young vicar had hurdled earlier in the day, there was a shout and a scuffling noise.

  Mrs. Bradley opened her large penknife and, with a fierce grin of anticipation, made for the scene of action at a creditable gallop. Her presence was unnecessary, however. The powerful Bassin was on top of the gunman and was engaged in the pleasing and satisfactory pastime of banging his head against the bole of the nearest tree.

  “Silly fellow,” said Mrs. Bradley softly, looking down indulgently upon the stunned man. “Remain on guard, Justus,” she added, “whilst I get Célestine to bring out the clothes-line, and then, when we have tied him up securely, I can attend to his injuries.”

  “He hasn’t any injuries. Skull like teak,” observed Bassin, pushing his captive’s beard out of the way and then looseni
ng his collar. “But wouldn’t you have thought that one dose of being knocked about would have been enough for him?”

  “Well, I don’t know, child. He probably has a very good motive for risking it again. He told me, at my last visit to him, that he was desperately afraid of Mr. Senss. This may be—”

  The gunman opened his eyes, blinked, as he felt the pain of his battered head, and then cursed his companions fluently and gutterally for a minute and a quarter.

  “He’s all right,” said Bassin, relieved at this volubility. “And now, you silly fathead,” he demanded, “what do you mean by popping off guns at us like that?”

  “You send for the police?” asked the captive, in what sounded like hopeful tones.

  “I should—” Bassin began, but Mrs. Bradley interrupted him.

  “Justus,” she said, “I think you’d better go and search for the bullet. It may be needed.”

  She waved him away before he could say any more, and Bassin, completely mystified but charmingly obedient, took himself off.

  “And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, “what is the meaning of this?”

  She bent over, raised the recumbent man to a sitting posture, arranged him so that the sun was not in his eyes, and then sat back and regarded him with the bright, unemotional eyes of a bird watching a worm.

  “You make the arrest?” said Simplon. “You telephone for the police, isn’t it, and I shall go to prison? You save me again, I think.”

  “Again?”

  “It was you that hid me in the chimney, I think, and made me so that I am taken to the hospital, there guarded from my enemies, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Anyway,” she added briskly, “that is all over now. You must do as I told you. Get away from here. Go back to your own country. In a few day, here, we shall be at war. You don’t want to be interned.”

  “But the book I told you about?”

  “Don’t worry. Our Government and yours know all about the book. The printing press will be seized by force, if necessary. Mr. Saxant won’t fight.”

  “He is not innocent.”

  “I know he isn’t. But he’s been implicated chiefly by accident. No, his partner is our man.”

  “Senss, you mean?”

  “Yes, I mean Senss. When did you discover that the press was a cover for Nazi Secret Service work, and the passing on of information?”

  “Senss and I, we play chess together, as I told you. One night, not so long—two months perhaps—just before that poor lady is murdered—he loses a game, and he says it is bad luck to lose the lead—until then, you must understand, we had been equal, in drawn games and with the games we win. Now I am one in front, and Senss, he does not like that. He is Prussian. He cannot bear it. I am of Saarbruecken. I do not mind.”

  He smiled, and Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “Then I say, to comfort him, that we shall remember to ourselves the games all over again, to make sure it is as he says, and I am ahead, because I say I have lost count, and perhaps he is not, after all, behind in the games. He, like all the Nazis, a child is, and cries when he loses. So then it is the accident, which has happened. Senss a piece of paper from his pocket takes out, and he puts it back quickly, but I have seen. It is a letter he is to post, and it is directed to the Saar, to a village I do not know. And I say, because I am innocent that anything is wrong: ‘Why do you address your letter so? No village of that name in the Saar district is, my good friend.’

  “He then asks me, quite quietly, but I am on my guard, because his voice is dangerous, what I mean. I say I am a native of Saarbruecken, and I know all the villages in that whole district, and that I notice that he his letter has addressed to a place that is not.”

  “Interesting,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Why didn’t you tell our police?”

  “I am still German. I am not naturalised. Senss is naturalised Englishman since Hitler began. Me they will believe much less than him. Later he says I am to keep my mouth shut about the Saar, and that if I write to my relations any more, they will be put into concentration camps.

  “So I do not write, although I wish to know how my brother is getting on, because, although he conforms, he is not a good Nazi, and they know, I think, and I am always wishing to know how it is with him, because the Gestapo, in peace or in war, it is everywhere, and always very wicked and very cruel.

  “But I know that I have found out something that Senss does not wish, and that I have to be very careful. So I am very careful. That is to say, I go and play chess just as often, but I stay in my house at night and I do not mention letters, or anything that might make angry my friend Senss. But also I watch. Then one day Senss he says to me that he is not satisfied. That was the day that your Herr Bassin meets me on the top of the stairs outside Senss’s office. He tells me my step I must carefully watch. There is a book he says, which he shall send to the Gestapo. It has my brother’s name in it, and—the rest you know.”

  Bassin had returned by this time, and had heard the last two or three sentences.

  “Go and ring up the police, Justus,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We are going to give Mr. Simplon in charge. What is your real name, Mr. Simplon?”

  “My name he is Merzigger. Is it Senss who has told you I am Simplon?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are going to have me arrested?”

  “Yes. It will be safest.”

  “My good friend, twice I think you my life save. But here I stay and be interned. I do not go back to Germany, my dear Germany, while she is mad. One day she will be sane again, kind and good. Then I return, and she welcomes me.”

  Justus came back to say that the police were on their way.

  “But you know,” he added, drawing her aside so that Merzigger could not hear, “I couldn’t find that bullet.”

  “There was no bullet fired. Mr. Merzigger would not harm a hair of our heads, I am certain.”

  “Then why should we have him arrested?”

  “It is his best chance of safety until we catch Senss and Carn. Senss, I fancy, should soon be under lock and key himself. Carn, we (or the police) have still to find. I’m afraid I have deceived you, Justus,” she added. “I was responsible for the injuries to Mr. Simplon and for putting him in the chimney. George, and a couple of men he co-opted for the task, made a very good job, I thought. The injuries, although not serious, were obviously genuine, and necessitated the patient’s being removed to a hospital. This time Mr. Simplon-Merzigger has done just enough to get himself arrested. I wonder how long the police will be? I don’t want to keep the poor man tied up like this a minute longer than we can help.”

  “Well, why not send over for Wells, or, better still, bring out Henri armed with a soup ladle or something?”

  “A good idea,” said Mrs. Bradley. She hastened indoors, and soon her chef, sufficiently armed, appeared upon the scene, and stood by whilst Bassin and Mrs. Bradley untied Simplon’s bonds. The period of guard duty, from the point of view of Henri, who had donned a dark blue beret and was armed with his most formidable pastry board, which he carried under his arm, was all too short. The police arrived, the sergeant was taken aside by Mrs. Bradley, and then Simplon was taken in charge, placed beside a constable at the back of a police car, and rushed away to the police station where he was kindly but firmly locked away in a cell.

  “But what on earth is it all about?” demanded Bassin, when the police and their prisoner—the latter bowing in grateful farewell to Mrs. Bradley from beside his escort—had vanished round the bend in the lane.

  “As I have suggested that the Foreign Office should take over the Saxant and Senss printing press, the chances are that the point will soon be cleared up, child. We must interview Mr. Simplon-Merzigger again, however, and find out the significance of his other name being Bonner.”

  “Perhaps,” said Bassin, grinning, “as you seem to be turning all we’ve found out upside down, it would appeal to you if the name turned out, not to be Simplon’s other name, but Senss’s!”


  “Good heavens, child!” said Mrs. Bradley. “Where are those uncorrected proofs?”

  “At the office.”

  “George!” called Mrs. Bradley, in a state of unwonted agitation. “George! George! George!”

  “But, you know,” said Bassin, “I almost could recite that beastly proof by heart. In one place, ‘Donner’ comes in front of the German for ‘in April,’ and in the other place—it’s only mentioned twice—it comes to make the word ‘Thursday’—‘Donnerstag.’”

  “So that possibly, in the printed version, those words will read: ‘Bonner in April’—which might make sense in a Foreign Office document—and ‘Bonner’s day,’ which again might refer to some special date known to the recipient of the message.”

  “Bonner, then, need not be anybody’s name? It could simply be a code message?”

  “It is, of course, a possibility, child, and we must not lose sight of possibilities.”

  “Another thought strikes me,” said Bassin, much encouraged. “How does all this connect up with Lyle’s printing press? Senss, you remember, was one of the people who went over it.”

  “Distribution of the books was perhaps a problem. All Lyle’s overseas deliveries go by way of Liverpool in Lyle’s own lorries. I can see that the Secret Service people—the Nazi ones—could use the lorries. In fact, we know that Carn did use one for transporting the corpse of the tramp, and brought the body back later, using the same method. But I don’t see how Liverpool would help them much in getting a consignment to Germany, unless they allowed the book to go to America first.”

  “It would help them if they were working in with the I.R.A. terrorists,” said Bassin. “Had you thought of that?”

  Mrs. Bradley said that she had, and that there was a good deal in the notion, and that she imagined that as soon as Senss heard that Simplon had been arrested, he would try to escape. Bassin was turning over in his mind the new course, which the investigation had taken, and Mrs. Bradley was wondering how long a start Senss would be able to get, after he had heard the news. There was little conversation on the journey until she said: