Printer's Error

by Gladys Mitchell

  Mabb still made no denial (said Bassin, in his letter) of having climbed through the window. He merely challenged the two women’s evidence as to the time. He had been so much annoyed, he said, at the thought that his guillotine had been used by a stranger—never mind what for!—that his first instinct had been to give chase. He had left the building by the window through which, according to the watchman, the wanted man had escaped, because it seemed the obvious way to take if the man were to be run down. The watchman confirmed all this, but, pressed to give the time at which he had told Mabb about the open window, he appeared to become confused, and the police declared that he was shielding his fellow workman.

  The watchman was a slow-witted, slow-moving man who had received a severe reprimand from his employers for having allowed a stranger to be on the premises at all, and he was anxious, not to shield Mabb, but simply to avoid giving his employers any further cause for finding fault with him.

  Nobody who knew Mabb (Bassin concluded) believed that he had had anything to do with the matter, but the local police had been pretty well chivvied from headquarters, and were glad to have made an arrest. The trouble was that Mabb, having sneaked out to meet his girl, could not produce the shadow of an alibi, except her word, which the police could not be induced, in the circumstances, to accept, for the time when his fellows had been over at the canteen—the time during which the hand had been cut off the corpse.

  Why a man of Mabb’s type should decide, having murdered Carn, to cut off his ears and his hand, did not seem to concern the police. As the sergeant said at the time, “That there’s up to the defence, that there is.”

  Carey, although not surprised by the arrest, was seriously perturbed. The police, he felt, must think that they had a good case. On the other hand, as he assured his aunt, the young man they had arrested was certainly innocent.

  He rang up Bassin. It was the day after the finding of the arm, but Carey did not know of this yet.

  “What have the police got to say about Mrs. Carn?” he enquired. Bassin, who had just said good-bye to the inspector, was informed upon this point.

  “They’re not going to bother with Mrs. Carn’s death. They think they’ve got Mabb pretty tight over Carn himself, so they’ll charge him with that alone. Don’t want to queer their own pitch.”

  “Sounds like a dirty business.”

  “It isn’t really. There’s a case against Mabb all right, and he knows it, and, of course, it’ll grow. The police won’t rest until they’ve got more evidence. The only thing is, he didn’t do it. Are you getting Mrs. Bradley on the job?”

  “Sure I am. That is to say, she doesn’t say she’ll take it—not in so many words—but I know she’s going to.”

  “Well, bring her as soon as you can. I’ve found the arm.”

  Upon this exciting news he rang off, grinning wickedly. He badly wanted Carey; even more his famous relative.

  Carey went into the kitchen where Mrs. Ditch, who had remained his housekeeper even after the advent of Jenny, was preparing bacon pudding.

  “Now, then, not too much fat,” said Carey, as a preliminary to conversation.

  “Bacon es as bacon grows,” Mrs. Ditch oracularly replied. “And don’t ee come messen yar, Mr. Carey, for heaven’s sake don’t ee, for I’ve been that put about this momen ee wouldn’t credet.”

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “Tes that there Pumpken,” said Mrs. Ditch, referring to what was, in actual fact, the vegetable of that name, but indicating it with a capital letter as the villain of the piece.

  “Oh, what a curse,” said her employer sympathetically. “But, listen, Mrs. Ditch. This’ll cheer you up. You know the murders near Falshanger, where I was staying?”

  “Ah, well I do. Detch reads it all to me out of the Sunday papers well I be washen up after Sunday breakfast.”

  “Yes, well, Mr. Bassin has found the arm.”

  “Fancy that, now! All by hes own self, too an’ all! Well, I never ded!”

  “Yes. In the horse-trough. You remember I mentioned the horse-trough, Mrs. Ditch. Very dirty and greenish, and deep?”

  “I do call et to mind, now ee ses et. En there? Well, to think of that, now! Well, there, I never ded! But what gev him cause to look for et there, I wonder?”

  “He has these flashes,” said Carey airily. It was the burning question in his own mind. “A very gifted, remarkable chap. I say, not all that sage!”

  “I was maken bacon puddens when ee were in your cradle, Mr. Carey, and sage and onions is as right en bacon puddens as en checken,” said Mrs. Ditch, reviving a perennial argument.

  “But sage and onion stuffing isn’t right in chicken, Mrs. Ditch. I’m always saying so. It’s much too fearfully pungent.”

  “Ah, I knows ee never sees et en London, Mr. Carey,” replied Mrs. Ditch soothingly. “Ee’ll get et en duck there. But et spoils the duck, and dooent coencide, as Detch says, weth apple sauce. Well, not to my way of thenken. No, ee’ll hardly get sage and onion weth checken anywhere else but yerabouts, so do ee make the most of et while ee gets et, es my advice. Checken be very pappy meat without a good flavouren.”

  So saying, the implacable woman powdered more of the dried herb between finger and thumb, cut up more onion into her bacon pudding, tied it in its cloth, and popped it into a saucepan of boiling water. Then she sat down on a Windsor chair and called for Our Walt.

  Her son appeared with a corked earthenware vessel containing home-made sloe gin, and of this palatable and inspiriting beverage the three of them partook while Carey, at the request of Mrs. Ditch, repeated, for Our Walt’s delectation, the report of Bassin’s having found the arm.

  “Then I suppose your auntie well be goen down there, like?” young Walt suggested. At that moment there was a tap at the kitchen door.

  “Tes her. I knows her knock,” said Our Walt, in great excitement, getting up, emptying his glass, and going to the door. “Do ee come en, mam. Tes of ee we be speaken, en et, our mam, just thes very menute.”

  Carey repeated Our Walt’s suggestion, and added Bassin’s very urgent plea, but Mrs. Bradley, grinning her alligator, anticipatory grin, merely nodded like a mandarin and asked whether there was any more news besides the discovery of the arm. Thereupon a pleasant half-hour was enjoyed by all in discussing the murders and libelling the police.

  The next day passed without any message from Bassin. Mrs. Bradley, Carey observed, showed no marked desire to leave the comfortable environs of the pig-farm and the society of Jenny and the baby in order to investigate a couple of murders in which, Carey justly agreed, she could not be expected to have any particular interest, but on the day following, Bassin rang up again.

  “Can’t get on much further by myself,” was the burden of his message. “Wish your aunt could come. Can’t you persuade her? What I am doing at present is getting the handwriting experts to have a look at this letter which Saxant and Senss have received, cancelling the order for the book. I put it to the police that it must have some connection with the murder, but it wouldn’t fit their theory, and they won’t even look on it as evidence. They say that Carn must have written the letter and posted it before his death. Then it went astray, and then got found and sent on.”

  “So that, before he died, he had made up his mind against publishing the thing?” said Carey.

  “It isn’t true, I’m sure. He may have sent the letter, but if he did, he can’t be dead.”

  “No. Well, good luck to the experts.”

  The experts, unfortunately, could not agree upon their findings. One declared that the letter countermanding publication of the book indubitably bore Carn’s signature and certainly had been done on his typewriter. The other, who had been equally busy with measurements and magnifying-glass, asserted that the signature was a clever forgery, and had never been inscribed by Carn. He agreed that Carn’s typewriter had been used, and even to the most inexperienced eye there could be no doubt that such was the case, for there were marked idiosyncr
asies on the typewritten sheet which could be reproduced by anybody using that particular machine.

  “Pity he didn’t write the whole letter instead of typing it,” said Carey. “Anyway, I think old Bassin deserves my support. Can I borrow your car, love? I suppose you won’t come along?”

  “Yes, I will, child,” said Mrs. Bradley, tying a yellow-spotted veil over a small, bright green hat. “But George is to drive,” she added firmly, seizing her nephew’s sleeve in a steel grip as he attempted to climb into the driver’s seat. George saluted, and got in after he had arranged his passengers. Jenny and the baby stood in the porch and waved. Carey yodelled in reply. Mrs. Bradley cackled, the baby began to cry, and a drove of young pigs, who decided to cross the unmade trackway by which the car was leaving the pig-farm, grunted and squealed in a mixture of fear and excitement. The car reached the gate. Carey got out and opened the gate, and George drove slowly through. The big car shaved the gateposts with mathematical exactness, the same small space being left each side between the posts and the wings.

  “Pretty work,” said Carey, getting in again, when he had shut the gate. “Right away, George!”

  By tea-time they were at the “Lion” and Carey was ordering buttered buns. They had the lounge to themselves. It was a lovely afternoon, and such guests as the small inn boasted were seated at tables on the lawn. Bassin was not among them. To Carey’s disappointment he had gone up to Town again.

  “You know, child,” said Mrs. Bradley, “there is something peculiarly retributive about this affair, somewhere. Have you read the case of William Prynne?”

  “Oh, you mean the Puritan bloke in the reign of Charles I. The Scars of Laud, and all that?”

  “Yes. Should you think that Jonathan Mabb has heard of Prynne?”

  “Oh, very likely, I should say. He’s been to school, you know.”

  “Yes. Prynne didn’t lose his hand.”

  “No. Ears, though. And he was branded.”

  “Yes. Very few English murderers deliberately mutilate the corpse except for the purpose of delaying identification of their victim.”

  “You couldn’t—”

  “No. The hands and the ears—at any rate, in this case—appear to offer no special evidence for identification. Besides, no trouble was taken to hide either—rather the reverse, in fact. Therefore, what have we?”

  “Presumably mutilation for mutilation’s sake, or in other words, singular evidence that we are dealing with the type of mentality which is responsible for the horrors of concentration camps and so-called ‘purges.’ Well, what follows from that?”

  “What does follow from it, child?”

  “Well, it seems to lead on to the German element in the thing.”

  “I see your point, child.”

  “But would a German have heard of William Prynne?”

  “Oh, yes, probably. They are, in some respects, a well-informed people. Besides, there is, in this case, a definite connection with the printing trade. Prynne was punished because he was a confirmed, incorrigible, obstinate pamphleteer. In the present case we get a man who was equally incorrigible and obstinate—this time a Jew-hater.”

  “Yes, but both the Germans concerned are also Jew-haters. Senss is an exile from Nazi Germany, but he hates the Jews as much as the Nazis do. He said so. But never mind. Have a bun. I wish old Bassin would come back. You’d get the dope better direct from him.”

  Mrs. Bradley, bright-eyed as a bird, took a bun in her thin, yellow hand and eyed it—it seemed dubiously—before she ate it. Carey, who was in charge of the pot of China tea, refilled her cup.

  “I shall be interested to see what you tackle first,” he said. “How do you propose to begin?”

  “I think we might attempt to obtain possession of a copy, or the corrected proof, of Mr. Carn’s book, child.”

  “Yes. I suppose Saxant and Senss would hand over a copy if we asked for it officially, as it were.”

  “I do not imagine that they would, child. Anyhow, I do not propose to trouble them. Mr. Bassin, representing Mr. Carn’s solicitors, is on firm ground in asking for a copy. We are not.”

  “But we could use Bassin’s copy if they gave him one.”

  “Yes. If they gave him one, child. But it will be better not to wait. It may be as well, in fact, to steal one. They must all be printed by now. The best time would be tonight. Do you come with me, or do I go alone?”

  “But—”

  “Very well.”

  “I’ll come, of course, but—”

  “I know. You have your wife and child to consider,” his aunt said solemnly.

  Carey shouted with laughter, and the waitress came in to ask whether there was anything else they required.

  “Yes,” said Carey, “more tea. You win,” he added to his aunt. “Tonight’s the night, and I hope you get five years for breaking and entering. I shall say you incited me, and when they see me, in my pristine innocence, standing beside you in the dock—Yes, thanks, Ethel, just a little more milk.”

  At nine o’clock that night Mrs. Bradley ostensibly went to bed. At half-past ten Carey went upstairs to his room. At eleven both of them descended the back stairs of the house, made their way out by a door left open by Ethel for her fellow-servant, whose evening off it happened to be, and by midnight or just before they were creeping up the narrow alley between the Methodist chapel and the reading-room. The policeman on his beat had just passed by. The town was in darkness. Carey led the way, his steel-muscled aunt in close attendance.

  The door which opened into the enquiries office seemed an insuperable barrier. The window was closed and fastened. Carey was about to observe that their errand was doomed to fruitlessness when Mrs. Bradley electrified him by lifting the knocker and thundering on the door.

  “What the—?” he said in her ear. She did not answer. Instead, she tugged at his coat to silence him, and appeared to be listening intently. No other sound broke the silence, however, which had settled down again after her vigorous knocking like birds returning after they have flown away from some food.

  “All right,” she murmured, after the lapse of three minutes. She then wound a thick muffler about her hand and broke a pane of glass.

  “In with you,” she whispered to her nephew. Carey, leather-gauntleted, removed the jagged pieces of glass by the light of a miniature torch, put his hand in, found the catch, and in a few seconds was climbing in through the window. A moment later he had unbarred the door, and both of them were inside.

  “Senss’s office,” said Carey, leading the way up the stairs—for Bassin had described closely his interview with Mr. Senss. The office door was closed, but was not locked. They entered, switched on the light, and explored for copies of the book. None could be found. There was the broad mantelpiece, used as a bookshelf, bearing about eighteen volumes of various sizes, but the book by Carn was not among them.

  “Better try Saxant’s office. I don’t know which is his room,” Carey muttered, closing the door behind him. Suddenly he laid a startled hand on Mrs. Bradley’s arm. Down below them, someone was moving about. They could hear dragging sounds.

  The unknown was unaware, it was very soon obvious, that he was not alone in the building. He made no attempt to disguise the noise he was making, and as they listened they could distinguish the bumping of furniture and the flat sound made by books being dropped on the floor.

  Carey sat down and took off his shoes. Then he crept to the door, opened it noiselessly, and crouched at the stairhead, listening. At a sudden cessation of all sound from below, Mrs. Bradley took out her pocket-torch and switched off the electric light with an almost imperceptible click. As it seemed within the bounds of possibility that the other occupant of the house was also searching for a copy of Carn’s book, and might, in fact, be Carn’s murderer, she also took out a knife, which, ostensibly intended for fruit, happened also to be nicely weighted for throwing. Carey, she learned later, had provided himself with a spanner from the motor cycle kit.

/>   They waited at the stairhead for what seemed a very long time. The unknown appeared to be suspicious, but, beyond opening the door of a downstairs room and standing at the crack—it could have been no more, they deduced—as though he were listening, he made no move to come upstairs.

  “Scared,” thought Carey.

  “No more business here than we have,” thought Mrs. Bradley. They shared their theories later.

  Then the unknown began his search again. He seemed to be prosecuting it in a vigorous, not to say hurried and nervous, manner. They heard two chairs fall over, and the sounds of drawers being wrenched open and slammed shut. Once one of the drawers stuck and the searcher made grunting efforts to close it. They strained their ears, hoping to hear him curse, to get a clue in the sound of his voice, but the unknown had too much self-control, not enough spare breath, or too much caution to emit a single voluntary sound.

  At last the drawer gave way, and shot in with a noise like a gunshot. More books fell on the floor, and then there was a different-sounding noise, followed by a split second of dead silence, and then a gasp, as though there had been a major mishap. What it was they were able to deduce the next moment, for the sound of liquid dropping in a steady trickle on to a linoleum-covered floor was audible, and, to Carey, had all the sinister significance of the spattering of blood from a death-wound.

  “Cut himself badly,” was his first thought.

  “Ink,” was Mrs. Bradley’s. She laid a skinny claw on his wrist as he began to move closer to the stairhead. That the searcher below was, at any rate, not seriously wounded soon became apparent, for, having performed the operation of mopping something up, he went on with his feverish investigations.

  Carey began to creep back, away from the stairs. Outside the window of Senss’s room there was an iron fire-escape. From the position of the room below in which the unknown was conducting operations, he deduced that the ladder should end outside those windows. Determination to discover the identity of the intruder caused him to go to the window, feel for the catch, open it, and climb out on to the escape. His intention had been to flash his torch in at the window, and then, having identified the searcher, to climb back again up the escape.