by T E Kinsey
‘It’s over,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Come with us into the waiting room.’
They meekly allowed us to lead them into the waiting room, where we secured them with handcuffs supplied by the boys from Camsfield. We returned to our post.
Next to breeze confidently into the ticket office were Aaron Orum and Euphemia Selwood. They were similarly acquiescent once they realized the game was up and followed just as obediently.
That left only the two men who had played the role of mortuary men all week. We didn’t have long to wait. In truth, we didn’t have long enough.
We were on our way back to our position by the platform entrance when they strolled in through the door, deep in conversation. Dr Gosling panicked and let out a loud ‘Oh!’, which attracted their attention at once. The older of the two knew they had reached the end of the line and held up his hands to indicate his surrender.
Clever Trevor wasn’t nearly so eager to give in. Previous experience notwithstanding, he appeared to fancy his chances. He charged towards me.
Trevor wasn’t one of Nature’s fighters. He seemed to imagine that his earlier humiliation at my hands had been a fluke, or that I had somehow cheated and taken him by surprise. If he were to use his masculine strength and charge at me head-on, surely I would be flattened and he would be free.
I spent many hours on our trek across China in the company of a monk named Chen Ping Bo. He taught me the fighting arts of his order and as a result I know many interesting methods of attack and defence. One of the most important things he taught me was to allow my opponent to do all the work wherever possible.
Clever Trevor first began to wonder if his own optimism might be misplaced when, instead of fleeing from his terrifying charge, I took a step towards him. Further realization dawned when I grabbed the lapels of his jacket and began to fall backwards. Now completely off balance, he had the briefest moment of hope as he tumbled forwards and imagined that I had made a mistake. Surely he was about to land on me and pin me down.
Poor chap. Still rolling, I landed on my back and got my feet under his hips, flipping him over my head. Once his centre of mass was safely past the midpoint I let go of his jacket and jumped to my feet. I turned to face him just as he thudded on to his back and let out a mighty ‘Oof!’
He lay motionless for a few moments, and then snarled some abuse as he tried to struggle upright.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘I’ve put you down twice already without really trying. Are you really going to have another go?’
After a few more choice oaths, the fight left him and he flopped back down on to his back. The police constable fitted him with his very own pair of handcuffs.
We waited in silence while the sergeant went out to fetch the mortuary van from its hiding place in the town. When he returned, the prisoners were loaded aboard for transport to the local police station. We assured them that they would be collected by the Bristol force in the morning, and set off for home.
Chapter Seventeen
I was the first to wake on Saturday. I thought I had done well to be up so early after the previous night’s escapades, but by the time I stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen, Edna and Miss Jones were already hard at work.
‘Good morning, ladies,’ I said. ‘Are you early or am I terribly late?’
‘It’s a quarter to nine, miss,’ said Miss Jones, pointing at the kitchen clock.
‘Gracious,’ I said. ‘We’ll be three for breakfast. It was late by the time we got back so we offered Dr Gosling a room for the night. Zelda and Mr Cheetham are in chokey.’
‘But they’s both dead,’ said Miss Jones. ‘I was at the Guy Fawkes party last night. I saw them. They hasn’t been . . . ?’
‘Haven’t been what?’ I said with a smile.
‘You know . . . raised from the grave. Like that Dracula fella.’
‘I think we’re safe from vampires,’ I said. ‘It was all just a bit of fakery and humbug.’
‘Well I never,’ said Edna. ‘We was all so shocked. They cancelled the fireworks. We had to go to the pub to settle our nerves.’
‘Basil Newhouse and Euphemia Selwood are in the gaol with them. And Aaron Orum,’ I said.
‘But . . .’ said Miss Jones. ‘I saw . . .’
‘We all did,’ I said. ‘But we were all the victims of an extravagantly elaborate hoax. I’m sure Lady Hardcastle will explain everything in due course, but we’ll have to tell Inspector Sunderland first.’
The telephone rang and I excused myself to answer it.
‘Chipping Bevington two-three,’ I said. ‘Hello.’
‘Good morning, Miss Armstrong,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Sunderland here.’
‘Good morning to you, too, Inspector,’ I said. ‘I was just talking about you. Would you like to speak to Lady Hardcastle?’
‘Nothing too defamatory, I hope,’ he said. ‘I’m always happy to speak to Lady Hardcastle but you’re just as much a part of this. I gather I have you two to thank for filling the cells with dead people.’
‘Dead-ish,’ I said. ‘Although, to paraphrase Mr Twain, I think the reports of their deaths were an exaggeration.’
‘So it would appear. Might I trouble the two of you to come down to Bridewell Lane and make a statement?’
‘I’m sure that’s already part of the plan,’ I said. ‘She’s really rather pleased with herself so I think that trying to stop her from making a full statement might be the challenge.’
His familiar chuckle crackled through the earpiece. ‘And do you know the whereabouts of our police surgeon?’ he said. ‘We seem to have misplaced him.’
‘He’s here with us,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid he got caught up in some unpleasantness.’
‘Good lord. Is he all right? Are you?’
‘We’re all fine,’ I reassured him. ‘It was all in a day’s work for us, but I think it took Dr Gosling a little by surprise. We thought he ought to stay here for the night rather than drive home.’
‘I await your full report with interest,’ he said. ‘When do you imagine you might be able to get into town?’
‘I’m not sure, sir. There are still . . . one or two things to arrange.’
‘They’re not up yet, are they?’
‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ I said. ‘I’ve not been back upstairs yet and we have no male servants to check Dr Gosling’s room. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be willing to contradict you. I’ll make every effort to ensure that we’re there by midday, though. Does that suit you?’
‘Under the circumstances, I’m more than happy to accommodate whatever you propose. I’m sure a couple of additional hours in the cells will do our recently undeceased residents a bit of good.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘We’ll be as quick as we can.’
Breakfast was a lively affair. Lady Hardcastle was still full of herself, and still infuriatingly refusing to fill in the missing details. Long experience had taught me not to fuel the fire and to ignore her until she was ready, but she had a new person to torture. Dr Gosling naively fired questions at her, becoming visibly more and more frustrated by her refusal to answer. I let it run on for a few minutes – I felt I owed her that since I refused to play along any more – before I interrupted Dr Gosling.
‘You know that she gets a cruel pleasure from seeing our frustration, don’t you?’ I said.
‘I was beginning to suspect as much,’ he replied. ‘I’d forgotten how infuriating she can be.’
‘I find the best thing is to keep mum,’ I said. ‘She’s dying to tell us, really, so in the end she’ll have to give in before she bursts.’
‘You’re a rotten spoilsport, Florence Armstrong,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I was enjoying myself.’
‘I’m glad I provided some small entertainment,’ said Dr Gosling. ‘I feel I’ve given you a little something in return for your generous hospitality.’
‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘Now, then. We should get togged up for a drive into town.
’
‘You’re not coming in my motor?’ he said.
‘No, I think we ought to bring the Rover,’ she said. ‘That way we can make our own way home when our civic duties have been discharged.’
‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘In that case I might push off now so I can pick up a clean shirt from my flat. See you at the station later?’
‘Where all will be revealed,’ she said.
Not long later, Dr Gosling, Lady Hardcastle, Inspector Sunderland, and I were sitting in an interview room in the Bristol Police headquarters on Bridewell Lane. A uniformed constable had brought us a pot of tea and four scratched enamel mugs of the sort we had found in the cottage.
‘I believe this is yours, my lady,’ said Inspector Sunderland as he handed the Browning to Lady Hardcastle. ‘We found it in the mortuary van and one of the recently un-deceased mentioned that it belonged to you.’
‘Thank you, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d seen the last of it once Orum had picked it up.’
‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘But other than their names and addresses, it was the only piece of information we managed to get out of any of them.’
‘Then it’s a good thing we’re here. I think we can supply enough of the missing pieces to enable you to complete the picture.’
‘About time, too,’ said Dr Gosling.
‘You didn’t ask her to tell you before she’d wrung the greatest possible entertainment from keeping you on tenterhooks, did you, Gosling?’ said the inspector.
‘I stopped him before he’d suffered too much,’ I said. ‘But he was beginning to turn purple with the frustration of it. I feared for his health.’
‘Schoolboy error,’ said the inspector. ‘You’ll know better next time.’
‘When you’ve quite finished besmirching my character,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘perhaps I could continue?’
‘Please,’ said the inspector, ‘do go on.’ He opened his notebook to a fresh page.
‘I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long to put it all together,’ she said. ‘We had the bare bones of the solution all along: no matter how many other possibilities presented themselves, we kept coming back to the idea that Cheetham was killing the cast of his picture to generate sensational publicity.’
‘Why would he go to such lengths to promote his picture?’ asked Dr Gosling. ‘Why not simply place advertisements in the newspapers?’
‘That would be fine if there weren’t so much riding on its success. But Cheetham and his company were stony-broke. Flo’s friend Daisy Spratt had lent Flo a magazine that contained an article about Cheetham. We knew the gist – that Cheetham’s star was on the wane and that The Witch’s Downfall was important for the company’s future – but until I read the article for myself, I didn’t realize how serious things were. According to the author of the piece, this was very much his last roll of the dice. Creditors were snapping at his heels.’
‘Then why not sell off all his assets and come to some arrangement with them?’ said Dr Gosling. ‘I’d bet his cameras and whatnot would raise a good few bob.’
‘They would, but then how would he continue to make moving pictures? Even a bankrupt is allowed a bed, a suit of clothes, and the tools of his trade.’
‘Then why not allow himself to be declared bankrupt?’
‘Reputation,’ she said. ‘Social standing. Cheetham had come from the humblest of beginnings and was very proud to be so highly regarded as a moving picture producer. He could never have coped with the ignominy of bankruptcy.’
‘You’re right, though,’ said Inspector Sunderland. ‘We did keep coming back to Cheetham during the investigation.’
‘We did, indeed,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But we were always pulled up short by the callousness of killing one’s friends to promote a moving picture. Not to mention the impracticality of killing one’s artistic collaborators – that seemed as self-defeating as flogging the cameras. And so we were stuck. It wasn’t until Flo and I happened upon a mechanical dummy and a humidor in the cottage hideout that I began to have an inkling that we might have been simultaneously right and wrong.’
‘I made a note to ask you about the cottage,’ said the inspector. ‘When my lads got there this morning, they found it locked and secure. And yet you’re saying you saw it from the inside. Is this something I need to leave out of the official record?’
‘There might have been a certain amount of breaking and entering,’ she said. ‘We were very professional about it.’
‘I don’t doubt it. I don’t think we need to mention it, though.’
‘As you wish,’ she said with a smile.
‘But I interrupted you. We were right and wrong, you say.’
‘We were, yes. We had the right man, the right motive, and entirely the wrong crime. As you’ve seen, the “victims” weren’t dead at all.’
‘That much we know,’ said the inspector. ‘I’m somewhat in the dark as to how two experienced policemen, a police surgeon, and two ladies such as yourselves came to assert so confidently that five perfectly healthy people were dead.’
‘I think I ought to lay out my hypotheses on the apparent “crimes”,’ she said. ‘First there was Basil Newhouse. We’ve not managed to speak to any witnesses who saw him leave the Dog and Duck on Tuesday night, but we know from Daisy and her mother that he was still there at two o’clock on Wednesday morning. His body was discovered in the churchyard by Constable Hancock at around five. When we examined the body, we agreed with the village policemen that he had no pulse, and there was no sign of breathing. Flo and Simeon subsequently worked out why.’
‘My word,’ said Dr Gosling. ‘We did, didn’t we? You mean the powder Armstrong asked me about, don’t you? Of course.’
‘We seem to have skipped a few steps in the reasoning here,’ said the inspector. ‘What powder?’
‘When we weren’t upstairs in the cottage after not breaking in by expertly picking the lock,’ I said, ‘I came upon a glass jar labelled “Madame Thibodeaux’s Pufferfish Powder”. Cheetham must have picked it up in America. He did say something about meeting people from New Orleans when he was extolling the virtues of Fort Lee, New Jersey. When I asked Dr Gosling about it, he told me that some people believe it’s possible to use it to fake death in voodoo rituals.’
‘Like the apothecary’s potion in Romeo and Juliet?’ said the inspector.
‘Just like that,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Cheetham and Zelda Drayton even mentioned that play when we were chatting to them. I should have made the connection then.’
‘I twice overheard Euphemia Selwood telling them that someone was going to get hurt and that it was too dangerous. At the time I wondered if they were threats, but I think she was having second thoughts about the safety of the drug.’
‘Quite so,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Who wouldn’t? I don’t think they knew too much about how it worked, either. We were always puzzled by the fact that Basil Newhouse wasn’t wearing his overcoat on such a cold night, but my guess is that they gave him the powder back at our house, expecting him to have time to get to the churchyard and help them set up the scene before it took effect. When he conked out almost immediately, they had to carry him down there. In all the panic and struggle, none of them thought about the overcoat. Once they’d got him there, they arranged him by the rowan tree while they set up the fake blood stains and dropped the witch’s doll where we could find it.’
‘You say the powder was at the cottage, though.’
‘Yes. They couldn’t risk storing all their props at our house, so they used the abandoned cottage. They were always going to need somewhere for the “corpses” to hide out. Do you remember when we were interviewing Aaron Orum in the pub and he described going outside for a walk? He hesitated as he was saying that he fell over a bicycle, as though he suddenly realized he shouldn’t mention it. I think Cheetham was cycling back and forth to the cottage with anything incriminating that needed to be hidden away.’
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br /> ‘And how did they know we’d not discover that the victim wasn’t dead?’ asked the inspector.
‘I’ve been puzzling over this one all night,’ said Dr Gosling. ‘But it’s quite simple, really: that’s why they had two of their chaps playing mortuary men. They took the bodies back to the cottage instead of to my mortuary. As long as the paperwork was up to date, no one would double check that the bodies were actually present. I’ll bet we find that the real men were paid handsomely to stay at home for the week and not answer the door.’
‘It was a gamble,’ said the inspector.
‘Not really,’ said Dr Gosling. ‘There’s always a bit of a backlog at mortuaries. They’d have been on safe ground in assuming that no one would get round to cutting anyone open until they’d had time to burn the place down and conceal the fact that the bodies had never been there in the first place.’
‘That makes sense,’ said the inspector.
‘Who were the “mortuary men”?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been assuming they were members of the company but other than finding out that one was called Trevor, we’ve learned nothing new.’
The inspector flicked back a few pages in his notebook. ‘They were members of the company, yes,’ he said. ‘Your man Trevor is Trevor Preston, a former music hall acrobat who fancies himself an actor and appeared as the lovelorn George in Cheetham’s kinematograph. The van driver rejoices in the name of Léon McDuff, though I strongly suspect that to be his “stage name”.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Although we should have recognized “George”. I suppose we weren’t expecting to see him again, and he was an eminently forgettable character.’
‘You’d be surprised by how often witnesses forget what people look like,’ he replied. ‘Now, then. Euphemia Selwood was the next “victim”.’
‘She was,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘That one was even easier. They just gave her the powder, posed her with an apple that they’d injected with cyanide and let us do the rest of the work. Cheetham must have planned to hide everything at the cottage and get back before we were up.’