Printer's Error

by Gladys Mitchell

  6. The weakness of the arguments against Carn is the lack of motive. There has appeared no reason why he should kill his wife. I might have a go, in a roundabout way, at that side of it, but the police are sure to have done so.

  7. Even if Carn did kill his wife, and the letters and cash-box business were all so much eyewash, who then turned round and killed Carn?

  8. On above, why should anyone kill Carn? The only obvious answer is that someone in the know didn’t want the book published. But Carn had published plenty of brilliant, dirty stuff. Why boggle at this? Of course, it’s anti-Semitic, but no individual Jew has cropped up in the business at all, so far. Besides, why murder a man who only intends for publication so small a number of copies? Again, does all this anti-Jew stuff really do much harm? Beastly, of course, but isn’t it, in the end, a bit of a boomerang?

  9. Why the fanciful touch of the hand and ears? Sounds more like Carn than anybody else, and yet it’s Carn who is dead. Why Mrs. Saxant as recipient? Could she and Carn have been—

  After the dash, which he put automatically, because he did not need to express, at any rate in note form, what it was that they could have been, he felt a certain amount of satisfaction. The dash might, at any rate, point to a reason for the removal of Mrs. Carn. His father, he remembered, had never liked Carn, and that not from reasons of jealousy, although he was always convinced that Mrs. Carn had made a wrong choice. There was nothing in the fellow, Mr. Bassin senior had been wont to declare, except in his head.

  No guts was the modern and more terse and non-equivocal rendering, as young Justus Bassin had appreciated.

  And yet… From a deceptive and filmy school-boy memory, confused and flattered by the lavish hospitality of that solitary but splendid afternoon, young Bassin had often tried to reassemble a mental picture of Carn, and the result was always the same. He could imagine Carn the conceited, Carn the timorous, Carn the profligate, Carn in debt, gone mad, committing fraud, but he could not image Carn the suicide or Carn the murderer.

  “Although, of course, that goes for absolutely nothing,” he thought, “and is probably because he lushed me up with grub and cider and ices and all that sort of thing when I went to the garden fête. Lots of murderers have apparently been the kindest men until they commenced the careers that made them famous.”

  He went up to the little sitting-room of the inn, which was on the first floor next to the haunted bedroom. There he wrote a letter to Carey, informing him of the arrest of Jonathan Mabb and of his own complete belief in Mabb’s innocence. The letter ended:

  “And I feel completely bogged and rather fed up. Wish you were here. The place is a bit of a morgue without you. I suppose you couldn’t come back and bring your Aunt Bradley?”

  He strolled out to post his letter, continued his walk along the London road, turned off it along a lane bordered by elms, which led past the vicarage and then, by a narrow footpath, to the church, stood a moment, reflectively, beside the churchyard wall, and suddenly saw a car go by on the other side of the churchyard.

  Surprised, because he had had no idea that there was any road nearer than the lane that he had turned off to take the footpath, he dismissed the fact as of very little importance, since he preferred to take his long walks over the hills, avoiding roads even if it meant going miles farther round in order to be able to do so. He continued, by the footpath he was on, past the little girl’s duck-pond and so to the House by the Brook.

  Rose-coloured lights in the room in which Mrs. Carn had been killed showed that the new owners were, at any rate, not subject to vulgar fears nor particularly sensitive to atmosphere, and, had he not known perfectly well that the police had already made the fullest possible investigation into the movements of the younger Mr. Carn and his wife at the times of the two deaths (the time of Carn’s death having been established approximately by the medical witnesses at the inquest), Bassin might have been tempted to suspect that the present owners of the fine old house and Carn’s historic and valuable treasures knew more than they had said about the murders.

  Such suspicions, however, in the light of the police investigations upon that very point, were, he knew, entirely out of place, so he walked on again, past the gates of the little white bridges and back to the school, the horse-trough, and the road.

  At the horse-trough he hesitated, visited by one of those crazy notions which he realised it would be to his professional advantage always to ignore. The moon had risen, and beneath her benign yet indescribably sinister light, the waters of the horse-trough, greenish, sprinkled negligently with grains of com which drinking centaurs had washed from their dark lips, and swaying gently (for no conceivable reason except that the earth, Bassin supposed, was still rotating upon its axis), invited a wild yet furtive exploration.

  Looking cautiously about him, and perceiving nobody, for closing time was still distant one full hour, he turned up the cuff of his jacket and groped in the oily-looking water.

  It was a great deal deeper than it looked. Completely resolved upon idiocy, Bassin pushed his hand to the bottom. His reward for soaking his jacket sleeve past the elbow was almost sickeningly dramatic. Like the young Arthur, heir to King Uther Pendragon, drawing the sword from the stone, or, later, receiving Excalibur from the hand of the Lady of the Lake, Bassin drew, from the slimy depths of the horse-trough, and with the hideous certainty of occurrences in a nightmare, the handless missing arm.

  •2•

  The police rather ungraciously refused to betray excitement over the arm.

  “Oh, yes, sir, thank you. Rather thought she’d turn up about now,” was the most that the inspector could be induced to say. He did not even accuse Bassin of having been an accessory either before or after the fact, and the disgruntled young man returned to the inn and went to bed.

  Next morning he breakfasted and then began another letter to Carey, tore it up upon deciding that Carey might as well write to him first, and then went into the garden with his notes, which he proposed to brood over and continue.

  The discovery of the missing arm so far from Falshanger, where the hand had been removed from it, was not in itself of any particular interest or importance; but that it should have been got rid of so near Carn’s own house was, to say the least of it, odd.

  Bassin, again sitting in the garden, which was a short-clipped lawn with flower-beds, a small arbour scrambled over by roses, trellis here and there, screening a vegetable garden, cucumber frames and a small greenhouse for tomatoes, received a second inspiration, like, yet not like, the one which had caused him to grope in the right place for the missing arm.

  Suppose, he thought wildly, the dead man, identified as Carn, were not Carn at all!

  Suppose Carn were a double murderer!

  Suppose he were planning more murders!

  Carn had been over the printing works.

  Carn was big—yet probably not as big as he had appeared to a callow, sixteen-year-old schoolboy—blond and (Bassin almost sat through the seat of his deck-chair in excitement) bearded.

  A beard could be a wonderful disguise. He remembered himself in amateur theatricals, and other young men of his acquaintance. They had performed a period piece written by one of their number—broad farce, certainly (a lot of it impromptu gagging on the third night), but the beards had made enough difference in the players for them not to be able to recognise one another.

  A beard was a wonderful disguise. Add to it a partly decomposed corpse, a bad smell of corruption, the probably insufficient lighting of the town morgue—once a Baptist chapel, and deconsecrated to its present use in 1908 (when a new chapel had been erected at the expense of a wealthy grocer, a pious and charitable man)—and one had the complete setting for a case of mistaken identity.

  He toyed lovingly with the idea that Carn might still be alive.

  “Beard and all,” he reflected, going to call on the younger Mr. Carn and (probably illegally) challenge him on his recognition of the dead man as his brother.

&nb
sp; He found the younger Carn in the garden. He relinquished, very unwillingly, Bassin thought, his earnest contemplation of a small rockery, for he was a keen amateur gardener, and suggested an adjournment to the house.

  “Oh, no, really, sir,” said Bassin. “I don’t want to take up your time. It’s merely—you’ll appreciate that there’s a certain amount of business still to clear up at our London office—I suppose, sir, you are absolutely positive that it was Mr. Carn’s body you saw? You couldn’t have been mistaken, I suppose?”

  He was surprised to see a hunted, apprehensive look in Mr. Carn’s eyes.

  “Funny you should come and ask that,” he said. “Fact is, funny thing’s happened. Don’t quite know how to take it. Letter, typed thing—but Fortinbras always typed his own letters on the most ghastly old machine—his wife did his books on a newer and better one—”

  “A letter, sir?”

  “Yes, cancelling the order for the book. Fortinbras’s signature, but no date. Saxant got it this morning at his house, and drove straight over here to see me. Only just gone, as a matter of fact. Funny thing. Still, the identification was all right, you know. Can’t make a mistake like that. Brother and so on, you know. Otherwise sounds as though you might be right. Though I must say,” said Mr. Carn’s heir, with a degree of candour which Bassin fully appreciated, “I’m relieved to heaven you can’t be, or I should have to go back to Chelsea—the fifth floor back and fetch the coal from the basement—all that sort of thing, you know.”

  He looked round the garden wistfully, and sighed, then shrugged his shoulders and crouched beside the rock-garden as though he had forgotten that Bassin was there.

  Bassin hesitated and fidgeted a minute, and then walked back to the “Lion.” A new and more feverish excitement now gripped him. He took out his notes again.

  Suppose Carn were innocent, after all?

  Suppose he knew the identity of his wife’s murderer, knew that the anonymous letters were genuine threats, and had faked his own death in order to put the killer off his trail?

  Suppose the killer did not want the book published?

  Suppose there were something in it awkward, even dangerous, for the killer?

  Wouldn’t the killer have forged Carn’s signature on that typewritten letter to Saxant?

  Yes, but, according to the younger Mr. Carn, the letter had been typed on Carn’s own old machine.

  Still, that point could be cleared up later. After all, if the killer could obtain access to Carn’s typewriter, naturally he would have done so. In that case, the younger Mr. Carn was in the plot. More—he had been bribed by his brother to “identify” the body as Carn’s own.

  But—and this thought seemed to Bassin to explode his whole beautiful theory—the body which had been identified as that of Carn was, without doubt, the body of a murdered man; therefore, if the rest of the theory were correct, Carn was a murderer, after all, and a murderer from the rotten desire to save his own skin.

  Bassin dismissed this view of Carn. It did not coincide with grateful schoolboy memories of his generous hospitality.

  Yet the order for the book had been cancelled.

  Of course, if Carn were alive, he could have cancelled the order himself, but supposing that he was a prisoner, he might have cancelled it under compulsion.

  In that case, his enemies, whoever they were, and not Carn himself, might have provided the corpse, and forced Carn to ask his brother to identify it as his. If this were so, where could Carn be? Who could be holding him prisoner, and for what fell and horrible purpose?

  All sorts of atrocity stories flowed into Bassin’s mind. He turned his head towards the inn yard, for he had again chosen to sit in the garden, free from interruption, with his notes. Without realising it, he must have heard the inspector’s footsteps on the gravel, for the hard-working and conscientious police officer had entered the garden by the little wicket gate, which admitted people from the inn yard, and was walking towards him.

  “I thought I’d come and let you know, sir, as the late Mr. Carn’s representative, that the printers have received an order to cancel the output of Mr. Carn’s book,” said the inspector comprehensibly but incorrectly.

  “Oh, yes, thanks. I’ve just heard the same thing from the other Mr. Carn at the House by the Brook.”

  “Bit of a Bolshy, that one,” said the inspector, relaxing from the official tone. “Been checking up on him from the London end. Red as a rag to a bull. Tub-thumper and a bit of an agitator, too. Did a month in the second division for supporting women’s suffrage when he was a young man. Bit hard on him; he was only just nineteen. It’s a gentlemanly age, sir, for some things.”

  “He seemed a nice enough chap,” said Bassin. “I put him down for an artist, myself. He mentioned Chelsea, and so on.”

  “Quite so, sir. And about the arm. Very good of you to think of us, sir, especially so late at night. We’ve been working things out a bit further. We want to be fair to young Mabb, sir. It does seem just a bit queer, to our way of thinking, that he should have thrown it away just there. We haven’t been able to trace any movements he made that night, beyond the evidence of the two women that saw him get out of the window.”

  “Evidence that’ll be chewed up and absolutely washed out at the trial, thank goodness,” said Bassin. The inspector looked slightly apologetic.

  “We’ve done our best, sir. There’s a motive—”

  Bassin snorted and then laughed.

  “The fact is,” he said, “that none of you believe Mabb did it, and you’re still continuing to dig out what you can. That’s about right, isn’t it? And the very first thing that comes up, finding this arm in this village, when you know it must have been in Falshanger that night, or the criminal couldn’t have chopped the hand off it with Mabb’s guillotine, doesn’t fit the case against Mabb at all.”

  “He might have slipped it to somebody, sir, when he got out of the window.”

  “I might slip a cobra to my aunt, hoping it wouldn’t bite her,” responded Bassin. “Don’t talk rot, Inspector. I know young workmen are fools, the risks they’ll run to shield each other—bad as chaps at school—but you don’t seriously intend to tell me that the police think…”

  “All right, sir, all right, all right,” replied the inspector, hastily and with intent to soothe.

  “Come to that,” said Bassin, continuing with some warmth, “why on earth don’t you pull me in, as I believe the expression is, and make me come clear about finding the arm in the horse-trough? Surely the very least that your fatheaded lot believe is that I must have put it there, as I was able to fish it out so opportunely!”

  “As a matter of fact, sir,” said the inspector, with a rich, reminiscent grin, “there was a suggestion of that nature put forward, but Sergeant Withy—you know the sergeant, I think, sir?—said that you might have had the intelligence to put it there, sir, but that, if you had, you’d hardly have had the intelligence to find it there, sir, meaning, I take it, that for the person who put it there to find it there and bring it straight to the station would be a very subtle move, sir, looked at from some points of view.”

  “So the sergeant doesn’t think me subtle, Inspector?”

  “He would regard it as a doobious compliment, sir. He said you were an honest, straightforward young gentleman as would go a very long way in your profession one day. I am only quoting the sergeant, sir,” concluded the inspector, with the great enjoyment of one who is in possession of a ripe but secret joke.

  Bassin offered him beer, thus changing the subject.

  • CHAPTER 6 •

  The Case of William Prynne

  “‘Beware,’ said the first knight, ‘of Merlin, for he knoweth all things, by the devil’s craft.’”

  The arrest of poor Jonathan Mabb had not come as a surprise to Carey. He had been expecting it, he said to his aunt, as soon as he heard that the corpse had been found in the coke-heap.

  The police, with their usual resourcefulness in
such matters, and with the assistance of the nationwide organisation at their command, he announced to Jenny, had traced the corpse’s adventures from the time of death (approximately given by the doctors who, approximately, agreed upon this time) to its discovery by (according to Bassin) a regular bloodhound of a sergeant, some three weeks after the disappearance of Carn.

  It appeared that in Bassin’s view—“and he ought to know,” said Carey—there was a reasonable case against Mabb. It transpired, as Mabb himself admitted, that there had been trouble at the local cricket club—a comparatively democratic institution, which had had Carn as its president and slow bowler—and that Mabb, an outspoken and independent fellow, had had, as captain of the team, several arguments with the president over the order of batting, and the entertainment of visiting teams. These arguments, which had always resolved themselves into victories for Mabb, were insufficient to lend colour to the theory that Mabb was Carn’s murderer, still less that he was also the murderer of Mrs. Carn, but they acted as a pointer. The concealment of the body in the coke-heap, after the heap had already been searched by the police, indicated knowledge of the previous search; the use made of Mabb’s own guillotine (although unprejudiced witnesses pointed out that it would have been more sensible to have used somebody else’s) and the fact that the most likely person to have used it would be an employee in the packing department at Lyle’s, also went against the young man.

  But the most damning evidence was that supplied by the two women who had come forward, at the request of the police, in connection with the escape by way of the store-room window, which overlooked the street. Both, independently of one another, declared that the man who had climbed through the window was Mabb. They had not come forward immediately, they said, the one because she did not like to think that she was responsible for getting anybody into trouble, the other because she had been away for her summer holiday and had not heard that witnesses of the incident were wanted.